Watch the weather


Global warming produces record snow?
Here's a reasonably unbiased article that talks about natural weather cycles bringing about weather changes.

Yes, I know it is from TCS Daily and that "disqualifies" it in the eyes of some of the global warming crowd. However, if you look to the facts and figures, you might find out that there is something more to weather then human action.

Snowfall here in the Northeast and across much of the Hemisphere relate to decadal scale cycles in the Atlantic and Arctic. Two atmospheric oscillations which generally operate in tandem -- the North Atlantic and Arctic Oscillations -- have significant control over the weather pattern including storm tracks and temperatures in both Europe and the eastern United States.

Since the middle 1990s, these oscillations have tended to be often in the phase that favored cold and snow (the negative or 'cold' phases) in both Europe and the eastern United States. The NAO and AO tend to be predominantly in one mode or the other for decades at a time. This relates to ocean temperatures in the Atlantic which exhibit decadal behavior.

Over the last decade the behavior of the NAO/AO has been similar to the 1930s and 1940s (Taylor, 2005) when the NAO moved from a positive to increasingly negative state. Interestingly, that was the last time the Polar Regions were this warm and the summer polar ice this thin and reduced in coverage (Polyakov et al, 2004). Unlike Antarctica where the ice sits on land, in the arctic it is floating on water and the water from one ocean (the Atlantic) can readily flow beneath the ice and if unusually warm, melt more of the ice from beneath.

Despite all the claims that global warming is happening right now and that human activity (especially in the Western world) is mostly responsible, no one has managed to show just how much influence humanity has on the weather and climate. Meanwhile, natural cycles of everything from sunspot activity to air circulation continue as they have since before this planet was much more than a cloud of dust.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - June 2, 2006 at 03:48 PM  Tag


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