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Snow Falls On the Most Arid Desert On Earth
crackspackle writes "The Atacama desert region, a vast expanse of land stretching 600 miles along the Pacific coast of South America from Peru to Chile, is known as the driest region on earth, receiving only .04 inches (1mm) of rain per year. Many weather stations located in the region have no recorded precipitation during their existence. Sterile from the lack of rainfall, sparsely inhabited, and virtually free from electromagnetic interference, the desert hosts several major astronomical observatories. This other-worldly location is also popular among sci-fi film makers, and is a prominent test site for NASA's planned Mars mission. This week, the Atacama received 32 inches of snow, stranding motorists along the Pan-American highway and other roads, prompting numerous rescues. Footage of the snow is available on the BBC."
So, there was a worse snowfall recorded there 20 years ago? And the story here is that snowfalls happen every 20 years there?
Did I miss something in the story?
When you add more energy to a large system, you don't just get even warming. Things get mixed. It's like heating up an ice-cream cake. Some parts that were warm will get colder than they were, as other parts melt into them.
It's why the term has changed to climate change instead of just global warming.
It's global warming's fault!
Yes, and for most of its history, uninhabited by humans; perhaps due to the climate.
They had rain a few years ago in Iquique, another town in North Chile that hardly ever gets rain. It caused quite a disruption because many poorer people have cardboard roofs on their houses, which ,obviously, do not work particularly well when it rains.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/21/tiny-drizzle-wreaks-havoc_n_242057.html
Even the driest of the dry spots in Antarctica average a few inches of precipitation yearly. Not sure about the percipitation, however...you might be correct on that one.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
Since you find snow mundane, I'll send you all of our snow fall in exchange for consistent, non-flood inducing, rain fall during the year. The only problem is that the insect population would probably explode.
This clearly means global warming is a fraud, and it's over!
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'd love to see Canadians deal with 20 years of almost no rainfall.
hominids have been around for 7 million years, the average global temperature has been much higher than now even as recent as 100,000 years ago. also, the primates seem to like the hot zones, hotter than global average
the Antarctica the driest place on earth?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'll try to keep up with the spinmeisters from now on.
If it dumps 80 cm of snow overnight, even locales prepared for snow and snow removal shut down all but basic services.
I don't care if it's Fort Nelson, Whitehorse, Toronto, Ottawa, or Edmonton.
Only places that always get that much snow year round, like Valdez Alaska, are prepared for giant dumping snow falls.
Valdez averages 10 meters a year, so even .8m is a large one time snow fall for them.
nice you you to overlook the fact that when natural trends happen that cause drops in temperature 1000 years ago are happening again, and yet the temperature hasn't dropped to those levels. at BEST it level out .
We har high peaks during the pleistoicene, but not a higher trend.
Yuo would need to go bak millions of years to see a trend of higher temperatures.
Now you go into the Holocene, there is what maybe be the climate optimum for humans. And we are temperatures are stating to arise beyond that, even though non man made forces would dictate a cooling trend.
Man made Climate Change is real, and it's a fact.
You do bring up a good point in that article summaries like these can not be used in and of themselves as proof for or against Climate Change.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But the climate alarmists like to take advantage of people's limited memory and lack of knowledge of history.
Nice! My turn:
Whereas those who want so badly to believe climate change isn't happening prefer to take advantage of people's inability to understand complicated things.
"You mean all those coal power plants and gas guzzlers might be having unintended consequences? Oh no, I'm starting to feel guilty! Wait wait wait... no, it has to be natural because it's happened like this before. If it were unnatural, this thing would have NEVER happened before. Alright, time to start bugging my congressman to spend taxes to make gas cheaper through subsidies."
Isn't it so much fun to paint those on the other side of a disagreement as being stupid and/or evil!?! Ad homenim attacks are -so- much simpler than trying to grapple with tough issues like "is climate change actually occurring." [/sarcasm]
People like you do nothing to help bolster the argument of man made climate change.
See any time something happens on a weather level that would seem to be against global warming, like an extra cold winter, if they were related shouts of "Climate is not weather! You can't take something that happened with the weather and apply it to climate!" come up in a hurry.
However when something perceived to be out of the ordinary (or something bad) happens then people like you come and say "See! Look! Strange weather, climate change must be real and it must be people causing it!"
This trying to have it both ways is something that makes the argument look flimsy because it is precisely what people like religious zealots do. When something supports their views, they point to it as evidence. When something doesn't, they claim that sort of thing doesn't matter, even if it is the same sort of thing as they were talking about earlier.
So you can't go and shout down weather as not being climate only to then point at weather when it suits your needs.
Also it shows rather profound ignorance of the Earth's climate and weather systems to think that a rare event must somehow be an indication of something wrong.
Please note, none of this is aimed at trying to disprove or prove man made climate change. It is simply pointing out that this is a stupid argument and doesn't help your position at all.
The problem is that too many weird climate events have been happening in quick succession.
Are you sure? Or in fact is that it's much easier to find out about them now?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Fuck, imagine having to replace all that cardboard.
The losses must have been huge!
No worry, each of them ordered a $0.79 pen from Amazon, who shipped it loose in a refrigerator box.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
the climate has been changing since the earth had an atmosphere. It has been hotter and colder and wetter and drier
The 'climate alarmists' (your term) aren't concerned with the climate changing. As you rightly point out, that has been happening for millennia. The concern is with the *rate* of change, and the ability of the ecosystems to adapt to the change at the pace at which it is happening. The concerns are also around the impacts to human society as economic structures change and break down due to climate change - For example, more frequent hurricanes and tornadoes, impacts to food supply etc. These impacts may happen more rapidly than the systems can manage.
What the hell are you talking about? We have lake effect snow here in Ontario in excess of 150cm in a day. There's places where 300cm for a weekend snow fall can happen. You know what happens? Life goes on, basic services continue, and people get around doing stuff they still have to do.
In my home town, if we see 100cm overnight, major core streets will be cleared by the following afternoon, and side streets will be clear by the following day, if not sooner. The only time I've things come to a complete standstill here is when the snow is falling so heavily that clearing equipment can't remove it safely. Or someone in Toronto thinks that 25cm of snow is a reason to call out the army. Actually I laughed pretty hard when europeans were whining over 10 or 20cm of snow. That's like a light dusting where I live.
Maybe Canadians are just hardier people. Or maybe it's that we've always lived with this "extreme" weather.
Om, nomnomnom...
*Hint* When someone changes their initial theory from something that can be quantified (ie. "global temperature will increase because of man-made greenhouse gases") to something that can't be quantified ("ie. global temperature will get both hotter and colder in different parts of the world") it means they have realized their initial theory was incorrect and they are scrambling to find another theory.
no one has revoked or re-written the initial theory.
The average global temperature will increase.
Part of this theory includes the idea that local weather will be more extreme. But that is ancillary and not exclusive of the main theory.
Nice
Why the long and predictable diatribe if you're going to arrive at the obvious conclusion in the end anyway?
Well, it happened now, and 20 years ago... and then 400 years back in time before anything even resembling water (frozen or otherwise) falling from the sky.
It's a pretty dry place.
Why the arrogant belief that all things are the same, and the obvious conclusion wasn't at the end. I'll wait for you to figure it out.
Om, nomnomnom...
I can vouch for your statement from down here in the US...
Salt Lake City (at least when I lived there) often got 'ordinary' 26-40cm deep storms that rumbled through during the winter. Sometimes, it combined with lake-effect snow (yes it's a desert... now look for that ginormous patch of blue on the map, immediately to the North and West of town) to give you 60-70cm snow with drifts that got damned impressive, especially on the 'benches'. All that said, the main roads were usually cleared by 7am, and the side streets were mostly clear by 8am. The morning routine always included driveway+snow blower, and afternoons meant the occasional tromp up to the roof to dump off any excess snow, so your roof didn't over-stress from the weight.
Contrast that with Portland, OR. The town gets a mere 20cm of snow in late 2008, and suddenly the entire Universe is paralyzed for a week.
(To be fair, up here in PDX it's all about rainfall and the occasional ice storm, so snowplows are a rare item... and not a single human being up here knows how to drive in it. Kinda fun to watch, but lousy to drive amongst).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Man made Climate Change is real, and it's a fact.
Even if it is, so what? It's not the end of the world. Some cities get flooded...people relocate...farmlands dry up...others are created....political/economic power changes. Change is constantly happening. It's not new.
Also, what about the animals that don't like the "hot zones" as much as us primates do?
It's called extinction.
At least you're consistent.
The parts of the Atacama that get less than a millimeter are by the ocean. Counterintuitively, the closer you get to the sea, the drier it is. This snowfall happened in the Dry Andes of Bolivia and Chile, which are very dry, but do receive more regular precip. For example, there are glaciers above 6000m (it basically never gets above freezing there, so it's sublimation balancing precip).
This is a big snowfall, but it's not that bizarre of an event. AGW is happening, but it would be disingenuous to attribute this to climate change.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
You should add, all that snow fell during June and early July!
So, where's that global "warming" when we have snow falling in summer!
Not only that, both Australia and New Zealand have had temperatures below freezing, with heavy snow in some areas these days.
Antarctica gets heaps of solid precipitation, to the point where any structure built on the ice will be buried in a few decades. But very little liquid rain.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You've made a valid point that contradicts what I believe
Out of curiosity, what vaild point do you see in the aforementioned "anti-intellectual bullshit"?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
So tell me then, how do you find out how much sulphur is in the coal that has never been examined for sulphur and is being burned in and mined in quantities that not even the Chinese government knows about? Were you asleep when those reports about Chinese miners being trapped underground in "unlicenced coal mines" came out? Did you wonder what "unlicenced" meant? It means the government doesn't know anything about it - really because they don't care. By now you should have understood that some things just have to be guessed at.
If I had points I'd mod you up but I would change "more frequent" to "more powerful" hurricanes and tornadoes.
Even if it is, so what? It's not the end of the world.
Precisely. The world will still be here no matter how drastically the climate changes.
The only question is how badly are we gonna fuck ourselves in the process.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Is this a trick question? Obviously none, because it was hidden.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think you will find the snowfall didn't cover all 40,000+ square miles of the Atacama Desert and many places there may still hold their records of no recorded precipitation.
It will be interesting to see what, if anything, will spring up when the snow thaws ? -- given that it is considered sterile.
TFA said 30+ inches. BBC video said 30+ cm
So, which was it? That video didn't look like 2 1/2 feet of snow to me ...
Habitat removal is a *far* bigger problem for most species. If you want to care for the environment, you would do less AGW debating and more conservation. Its like worrying about ocean acidification, there aren't going to be any fish left by then.
Believe it or not, we have bigger fish to fry that CO2 and some snow in a desert.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
It was obviously a schadenfreudian slip...
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Indeed, in the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica it never rains, only snows..
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Best part of reading this story was watching the video and discovering that the iPlayer volume goes to 11.
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=bbc+iplayer+volume+goes+to+11
It's all over the place.
For "climate change" the standard answer is DUH! of course the climate changes. It's been changing for as long as Earth had a climate.
We were told that was because of global warming, and that it would get worse.
Then next hurricane season, quite mild.