Personal Note: Ready For Spring
Spring, according to my calendar, is supposed to have officially sprung. The weather in California apparently didn't get the memo yet, however, as all day long the power has gone off and on while the rain continues to pound down with winds blowing up to 80 miles per hour. This has been the wettest winter I have ever experienced here since I first moved to California back in the 1980s.
I know, I know... my complaints will get little sympathy. Those who live outside of California sneer at our "winter," and with good reason. Any place that experiences actual winter -- complete with frozen water regularly falling out of the sky -- wouldn't think much of what we've experienced, even with all the flooding and trees down and landslides. The concept of "cold" is one that coastal Californians never actually experience in any sort of meaningful way. I realize all this -- I am not a California native, therefore I have experienced real winter and know people elsewhere are right to scoff at what happens here.
To people who live within California, my complaints break a major Golden State taboo, since it is never acceptable to complain about the rain. "We need the rain" is the preferred mantra, instead. But you know what? We really don't, at this point. We've got all the water we need for the rest of the year. Reservoirs are filling up or full and the snowpack is twice normal. There won't be a drought for at least another year, to put this another way.
So can it please stop raining now? Can we revert to the normal sunny skies and pleasant temperatures? Or at the very least can the power stop going out every half hour?
(Sigh.)
Regular columns will resume tomorrow. Weather permitting, of course.
-- Chris Weigant
Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant
Well, Chris ... better get used to the new normal, as they say. Extreme weather is what we all better get used to. Unless, of course, you live in sunny southern Ontario, Canada - probably the last place on the planet to really feel the effects of the "dawning climate apocalypse".
People who live in a desert (damn near the entire western half of the U.S., to some degree) never have any justification complaining about precip in any form. If you happen to be washing away currently, just suck it up and rejoice.
Those who've been blaiming the recent 15-20 year drought on global warming now have a problem, but theyll be too dumb to admit it. They'll say "climate change", as if global warming could cause warming AND cooling, drought AND floods, etc. etc.
They'll say "climate change", as if global warming could cause warming AND cooling, drought AND floods, etc. etc.
Ah, sigh ... actually, it can.
C. R. Stucki
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Those who've been blaiming the recent 15-20 year drought on global warming now have a problem, but theyll be too dumb to admit it. They'll say "climate change", as if global warming could cause warming AND cooling, drought AND floods, etc. etc.
Perhaps you're just "too dumb" to understand simple science. Since it's no great mystery how warmer climates can cause droughts, I'll cut to the chase and explain how it also causes cooling and extreme weather events.
The warmer land temperatures in northern North America -- blame Canada ;) -- and northern Eurasia cause greater amounts of heat to be transported up/into the Arctic stratosphere. The Earth's warmer climate today causes sudden stratospheric warming events on a more frequent basis, and those more frequent warming events then cause destabilization of the polar vortex which brings the frigid cooler air from the North Pole down into the mid-latitudes and causes extreme weather.
Yes, there's obviously more to it, but that's the basics.
Many people misunderstand the "global" part of global warming. It refers to the overall heat retained by the globe, not an increase in heat everywhere all at once. Because a large percentage of the overall heat increase is retained by the Earth's oceans, the effects aren't as simple as weather patterns in any one place.
However, there is zero doubt that the combined effects are getting increasingly dramatic, and that the phenomenon was caused by humans.
Another example of warming leading to local cooling is the Gulf Stream, which essentially runs on the temperature differential between the Arctic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Should that differential decrease enough as the Arctic warms and ice melts, the Gulf Stream may cease and countries like Ireland and the UK could get a lot colder. (Salt concentrations are another factor affected by melting ice, but I can't remember how that works at this hour.)
Greater amounts of moisture in the air will change many local climates as well--the Nino cycles are a specific example of this.
Yo, I’m not complaining down here in Green Valley Lake, Countri-Cali. I find it unusual and exciting and it’s simply postcard perfect after 3 or 4 meters of snow in the last ten days.
And yup, abundant precipitation is okely dokely with this Detroit transplant.
Er, UP here at roughly 7000 feet. I moved up to these San Bernardino Mountains full-time exactly nine months after I left the Army in 1985. Haven’t been counting snowfall ALall as life energy and brain function is devoted to digging at least half way down the stairs from my upstairs flat.
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Yes the last El Niño I enjoyed was 1997-98 in Big Bear. Thirty feet? Whatever, it was as beautiful as Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario over the holidays. We Nordic skied 30 km a day! Just add quality Canuck beer and a pool, jacuzzi, sauna and run outside and jump in a snowbank, rince and repeat.
OK, so if all you guys are right about the versatility of global warming (can cause every sort of weather phenomena), please tell me what weather phenomena you would anticipate if it turned out that what is actually going on is "Global Cooling", which was what was predicted all thru the 60's and the 70's???
Stucki-
Exactly who was predicting global cooling in the 60's and 70's? Which scientific papers? And was that the predominate theory among scientists? (hint it's wasn't...)
Basically from the end of WWII to the late 70's there was a flat line/minor decrease in temperatures. The science of the time were more concerned with how the cooling trend would effect the recent increasingly convincing evidence that greenhouse gasses would likely have a global effect. There were some papers theorizing that an ice age was coming, and that made for great headlines and speculative stories, but was a minority in the actual scientific community.
But to answer your question: general cooling, general settling of local weather and the worlds glaciers doing the exact opposite of they have been doing for the last quarter century.
C. R. Stucki
9
OK, so if all you guys are right about the versatility of global warming (can cause every sort of weather phenomena), please tell me what weather phenomena you would anticipate if it turned out that what is actually going on is "Global Cooling", which was what was predicted all thru the 60's and the 70's???
It wasn't the 60s, Stucki, it was the mid 70s, and right wingnuts like Limbaugh, Hannity, George Will, et alia, have been trotting out a ridiculous article from Newsweek 1975 as some kind of "proof positive" that disproves climate change/global warming.
Newsweek's 'Global Cooling' Article From April 28, 1975
George Will even wrote a stupid incorrect opinion referring to it as a "cover story" when it was nothing more than a 9-paragraph article on page 64 of the April 28, 1975 issue.
If you're interested in learning about it, the best source of knowledge would be from another article written in 2014 almost four decades later by the author of the original article from Newsweek and definitely NOT from the right wingnuts and climate deniers using that 9-paragraph article to advance their political propaganda.
*
Live and learn, I always say. I also say the right wingnuts have an agenda that isn't indicative of imparting actual facts to their audience, whom they obviously believe are incredibly ignorant.
So, to recap: Earth 2 is a dystopian hellscape where climate change/global warming is presented as a hoax and Donald Trump is presented as the only man who can save us. *laughs*
I recommend living on Earth. :)
BB [10]
Re "what the world's glaciers have been doing for the last quarter century."
When I visited Glacier N.P. in the 50's, all the Parkservice info signs at the tourist overlook spots explained that the park glaciers had been receding every year since the first European explorers ever saw them, and that would have been a hundred years before humans began to burn huge amounts of fossil fuels.
wow, i was in my mom's belly when that story came out. scientists have learned a lot in 48 years.