AFP
‘Global warming means more snowstorms’
Planes waiting in line to take off from O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, Illinois. Photo: AFP
Climate change is not only making the planet warmer, it is also making snowstorms stronger and more frequent, US scientists said last Tuesday.
“Heavy snowstorms are not inconsistent with a warming planet,” said scientist Jeff Masters, as part of a conference call with reporters and colleagues convened by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“In fact, as the Earth gets warmer and more moisture gets absorbed into the atmosphere, we are steadily loading the dice in favour of more extreme storms in all seasons, capable of causing greater impacts on society.”
Masters said that the northeastern US has been coated in heavy snowfall from major Category Three storms or larger three times in each of the past two winters, storms that are unparalleled since the winter of 1960-61.
“If the climate continues to warm, we should expect an increase in heavy snow events for a few decades, until the climate grows so warm that we pass the point where it’s too warm for it to snow heavily.”
Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado, said less sea ice in the Artic translates to more moisture in the atmosphere, and could also cause an atmospheric circulation pattern in polar regions known as ‘arctic oscillation’.
“It’s still cutting-edge research and there’s no smoking gun, but there’s evidence that with less sea ice, you put a lot of heat from the ocean into the atmosphere, and the circulation of the atmosphere responds to that,” Serreze said.
“We’ve seen a tendency for autumns with low sea ice cover to be followed by a negative Arctic Oscillation.”
Even though spring in North America is just around the corner, Masters said more snow is on the way this week in the upper Midwest, and the melting snow pack could spark record floods in Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota this spring.
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Mr H. Azzopardi
Apr 28th 2011, 00:53
Every climatic condition imaginable is now considered Global Warming.
Stop this voodoo science immediately and stop wasting our money.
Alex Ellul
Mar 6th 2011, 16:10
What were these same scientists saying 10 years ago? Let me quote what they predicted:
2Due to global warming our children will not know what snow is. Snow will be something so rare.............................."
Now, those 10 years have passed and the global warming chickens have come home to roost, in a winter covered with record snows and low temperture all over the northern hemisphere. So what tdo these scientist do to over their a....? They keep on feeding us scientific b.s.
They were totally wrong whne they predicted that we would not have snow any more, that our children would not know what snow is and that it would be something so rare. So what makes their present theory right/ It is based on a wrong prediction. All esle is false.
Fact is that global warming predictions have failed dismally becuase the thoery is wrong. The planet is cooling that is why we have snow winters, full stop.
victor rodenas
Mar 6th 2011, 10:14
All this has been going on for millions of years when Man did not even exist.Man cannot stop Nature`s ways ,they will happen.We can only retard it`s happening but eventually Nature wins.