NY Times: Bundle Up, It’s Global Warming

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snow4In the following article published in the NY Times, Judah Cohen claims that recent cold weather is actually being caused by global warming. Read on and scratch your head:

The earth continues to get warmer, yet it’s feeling a lot colder outside. Over the past few weeks, subzero temperatures in Poland claimed 66 lives; snow arrived in Seattle well before the winter solstice, and fell heavily enough in Minneapolis to make the roof of the Metrodome collapse; and last week blizzards closed Europe’s busiest airports in London and Frankfurt for days, stranding holiday travelers. The snow and record cold have invaded the Eastern United States, with more bad weather predicted.

All of this cold was met with perfect comic timing by the release of a World Meteorological Organization report showing that 2010 will probably be among the three warmest years on record, and 2001 through 2010 the warmest decade on record.

How can we reconcile this? The not-so-obvious short answer is that the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes. Last winter, too, was exceptionally snowy and cold across the Eastern United States and Eurasia, as were seven of the previous nine winters.

For a more detailed explanation, we must turn our attention to the snow in Siberia.

Annual cycles like El Niño/Southern Oscillation, solar variability and global ocean currents cannot account for recent winter cooling. And though it is well documented that the earth’s frozen areas are in retreat, evidence of thinning Arctic sea ice does not explain why the world’s major cities are having colder winters.

But one phenomenon that may be significant is the way in which seasonal snow cover has continued to increase even as other frozen areas are shrinking. In the past two decades, snow cover has expanded across the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Siberia, just north of a series of exceptionally high mountain ranges, including the Himalayas, the Tien Shan and the Altai.

The high topography of Asia influences the atmosphere in profound ways. The jet stream, a river of fast-flowing air five to seven miles above sea level, bends around Asia’s mountains in a wavelike pattern, much as water in a stream flows around a rock or boulder. The energy from these atmospheric waves, like the energy from a sound wave, propagates both horizontally and vertically.

As global temperatures have warmed and as Arctic sea ice has melted over the past two and a half decades, more moisture has become available to fall as snow over the continents. So the snow cover across Siberia in the fall has steadily increased.

The sun’s energy reflects off the bright white snow and escapes back out to space. As a result, the temperature cools. When snow cover is more abundant in Siberia, it creates an unusually large dome of cold air next to the mountains, and this amplifies the standing waves in the atmosphere, just as a bigger rock in a stream increases the size of the waves of water flowing by.

The increased wave energy in the air spreads both horizontally, around the Northern Hemisphere, and vertically, up into the stratosphere and down toward the earth’s surface. In response, the jet stream, instead of flowing predominantly west to east as usual, meanders more north and south. In winter, this change in flow sends warm air north from the subtropical oceans into Alaska and Greenland, but it also pushes cold air south from the Arctic on the east side of the Rockies. Meanwhile, across Eurasia, cold air from Siberia spills south into East Asia and even southwestward into Europe.

That is why the Eastern United States, Northern Europe and East Asia have experienced extraordinarily snowy and cold winters since the turn of this century. Most forecasts have failed to predict these colder winters, however, because the primary drivers in their models are the oceans, which have been warming even as winters have grown chillier. They have ignored the snow in Siberia.

Last week, the British government asked its chief science adviser for an explanation. My advice to him is to look to the east.

It’s all a snow job. The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it.

Judah Cohen is the director of seasonal forecasting at an atmospheric and environmental research firm.

{NY Times}

{Matzav.com}


13 COMMENTS

  1. What’s to scratch your head about? The author of the article explains pretty clearly why it makes sense that overall “global warming” can lead to colder winters in some places. And this isn’t even ground-breaking. Much of the literature on “global warming” states that some places will get cooler and that we’ll see an increase in extreme weather, which has thus far proven true with the number of typhoons, hurricanes and tornados. Hashem is unhappy with how His people are acting and we, as frum Yidden, need to better understand that the consequences of our bad actions are having ramifications.

  2. I dont know what this guy is saying. But I can offer some advice. Whatever they are doing in the big cities, they should be doing by the artic sea. It seems like what we are doing is only making global cooling. maybe we should let out green house gasses in the artic sea, and that will help prevent the melting.

  3. seems pretty clear to me. What I dont understand is how people who agree that they have trouble understanding can still mock it, any explanations?

  4. #7 its simple all you have to do is explain why why the data indicates a continuos and steady decline in tempuratures ever since records have been kept. It isnt based on simply walking outside and saying look it is cold global warming is fake only to change your mind the next day when tempertures are record high.

  5. 1. Common sense says that all actions have consequences: When we put change the environment (and the change is measurable in CO2 counts), the earth is going to react. It has to–why should the overall condition of the atmosphere stay the same when we change the air itself?

    2. The biggest mistake the scientists made was calling it Global Warming instead of global climate change. That single fact has cost the support of many well-meaning people. But the fact remains that the climate has been and is becoming out of whack with local averages, as well as global norms.

    3. God gave us this world, and only once. We need to start keeping that in mind. The planet is not something to play around with.

  6. 4. Comment from der eibeshter fier di velt
    Time December 27, 2010 at 9:33 AM

    I am not concerned because Hashem created this world and He is in charge.

    Good answer that is why i do not go to a doctor

  7. 7. Comment from skeptic
    Time December 27, 2010 at 1:02 PM

    I just wonder what has to happen to make them give up on this global warning hoax.

    hello, that is not the issue the issue is if our behavior is increasing it more than it would on its own.

    And if people would just do a little search they will see that global warming will cause colder temperatures in certain parts of the planet

  8. #4, if you really believed that, why bother posting your opinion, if Hashem wanted us to know what you had to say, we’d know it without you telling us wouldnt we?

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