"Expect the unexpected"; Researcher says climate change may be cooling California
""It's what I call global weirding," said Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. "This has been a very strange year all over the planet."
What's going on?
First of all, this spring's weather is not unprecedented, just uncommon. California has had wet, cold spring weather before, notably in 1983, a year that produced record Sierra snows.
This year, the blame falls on a complex interaction between La Niña and another phenomenon called a negative Arctic oscillation, Patzert and others said.
...
One theory gaining traction is that climate change, in fact, may be to blame.
The theory was developed in several published papers by Judah Cohen, an atmospheric scientist in Massachusetts.
Cohen argues that ice melt in the Arctic has produced more snowfall across Siberia. All that snow creates a giant cold air mass that diverts the jet stream, contributing to the negative Arctic oscillation.
...
Colder and snowier winters caused by global warming? It may be one of the counterintuitive consequences of climate change, he said.
"We don't understand everything, and we don't understand how the different feedbacks affect different parts of the climate system," said Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, a private firm in Lexington, Mass. "It's very complicated. So we should expect the unexpected."
No comments:
Post a Comment
Welcome, and thanks for caring enough to donate your time and thoughts toward greater collective wisdom...
Terms of engagement:
* Please be civil.
* * * * Please do not post anonymously * * * (I'd remove this choice if I could, and I may remove your comment if you do) - instead, do this:
Click on the 'Name/URL' radiobutton, then enter your real name (if you're brave) or a pseudonym (if you're not). (You can leave the "URL" field blank.)
Or go ahead and click "Anonymous", but put your name in your comment.
* The Management reserves the right to delete comments (Moderation Certificate can be found here). You can always post it on a blog of your own.
If you run into technical difficulties, please a) accept my apologies, then b) email your comment to aherror2011 at gmail.com with "Comment for [name of this blog]" in the Subject line.
New policy re climate contrarianism comments as of 11/11/2009:
Comments questioning the climate science community's understanding of climate change (97% of active climatologists now believe that the earth is currently warming and that it's human-caused - link) will be deleted unless the commenter:
a) is local
b) uses his real name
c) provides link(s) to substantiate his claim(s)/inference(s)
d) is willing to collaborate on constructing an argument tree, to get us past the usual sterile point-counterpoint-countercounterpoint.
(For people who can't read the above, a summary:
1) Be civil;
2) Don't post w/o giving at least a pseudonym;
3) Don't espouse climate-denial crankery unless you're local and willing to stand behind it.)
Caveats:
1. Comments could be delayed: they are being moderated, and I'm sometimes away from the computer for a day or more.
2. : Perfectly legitimate comments are sometimes miscategorized (by the blogging platform) as spam, & not published. If this happens to yours, please notify me, else I might not notice for a day or two.