Posted on 01/20/2006 5:30:08 PM PST by blam
Weather gets even weirder
By Philip Eden
(Filed: 21/01/2006)
On the face of it, the catalogue of extraordinary weather events culled from around the world during the last year suggests that the global climate is in turmoil. But do a clutch of catastrophes and a ragbag of records represent anything unusual?
Moscow: A man ventures out as temperatures reach minus 30
Climatologists look for evidence of underlying change and are particularly interested in events which are clearly outside previous experience.
We should remember that we live in a world where natural disasters can be brought to our television screens as they happen. Even 25 years ago it might have taken weeks for footage of a flood in China or a drought in East Africa to reach our living rooms.
From the scientist's viewpoint, most of the newsworthy meteorological events of the last year fall into the category of "normal extremes".
Local records may be broken, but such events fall well within the envelope of previous experience and similar disasters happen in most years. Even Katrina, the nemesis of New Orleans, was a not-very-unusual hurricane which produced a catastrophe because of a very particular set of geographical and political circumstances.
Several of the winter phenomena of the last two months can be blamed on a single meteorological feature: the cold waves in northern parts of India and Pakistan, the snowfalls in Japan, Korea, and north-eastern China, and the deep freeze in European Russia stem from an intense Siberian anticyclone (area of high pressure). This is a feature of the northern hemisphere climate every winter. This year's has been more extreme than any since the mid-1980s.
The events which have caught the eye of the climatologists include the frequency and longevity of hurricanes in the Atlantic/Caribbean during 2005-06 rather than the character of individual storms, the long-lasting warmth in Australia rather than the recent Sydney heatwave, and the unprecedented retreat of the Arctic ice during the late-summer and autumn of 2005 rather than the Eurasian cold waves of the last few months.
The experts are particularly interested at the moment in the absence of ice north of Spitsbergen, in the Norwegian Arctic, where clear water extends to within 500 miles of the North Pole.
Experts agree that there are long-term shifts in the world's climate, but you have to look beyond the sensational weather events to see them.
Well I didn't think it being cold in Russia in winter was actually unusual.
This is one of the weirder winters I remember in Buffalo. We haven't had a lot of snow, and this afternoon, I was able to go running in a sweatshirt and shorts. You shouldn't be able to do that in January in Buffalo.
Yeah, I spent a night in the train station at Homewood Illinois (Chicago) when it got down to 20 below once. All the switches were frozen and they couldn't move the trains. We had a bunch of beer and had a jolly good time but we were starting to feel like refugees the next day when a train finally got there and we had to beg, plead, and cajole to get on. We weren't really drunk anymore by then but we were all rather surly.
Finally I reached my destination, an 8 hour train ride, 24 hours after I had been dropped at the station. Then as the cab dropped me at my dorm, it started to snow and didn't stop for like a day and a half.
That was the Great Blizzard of 1978. If it can happen in Chicago, it sure as he11 can happen in Moscow.
Same here in Virginia. It was 63 today and the same for tomorrow.
Hmmm. We had snow here yesterday in Colorado. Must be the beginning of a new ice age.
"This is one of the weirder winters I remember in Buffalo. We haven't had a lot of snow, and this afternoon, I was able to go running in a sweatshirt and shorts."
And your complaining???!!!! I live in New Hamphsire and it has been warm ... Its just the January thaw. I will be cold again next week, just you wait.
53 degrees F in northern Indiana in January is unheard of in my short lifetime. Won't complain, though. February has always been bitter. April is the cruelest. Let's see what happens this year.
71 degress here in Mobile, quite pleasant.
All together now.....Bush's Fault! (said it first!)
Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it (that we know of!)
Same here in Toronto- I'm glad I didn't pack down the motorbike because I've been able to ride at least once a week since November.
We had one Jan. here in Syracuse where it didn't snow at all for the whole month, until the 29th when a noreaster blew in, Dang! I'm from Buffalo originally. I remember the Blizzard of '77.
Philly headed for the eighth warmest January on record - too bad for the global warmingists that the first and second warmest were back in the 1930's......
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