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Historic Heat In North America Turns Winter To Summer
An anonymous reader writes "A huge, lingering ridge of high pressure over the eastern half of the United States brought summer-like temperatures to North America in March 2012. The warm weather shattered records across the central and eastern United States and much of Canada. From the article: 'Records are not only being broken across the country, they're being broken in unusual ways. Chicago, for example, saw temperatures above 26.6Celsius (80Fahrenheit) every day between March 14-18, breaking records on all five days. For context, the National Weather Service noted that Chicago typically averages only one day in the eighties each in April. And only once in 140 years of weather observations has April produced as many 80Fahrenheit days as this March.'"
The headline is a bit sensational for what was essentially a heat wave.
Yeah it might be newsworthy that there were record highs, but the seasons haven't suddenly reversed themselves.
What bothers me is wondering what sort of changes in the weather can be expected during the rest of the year after such an unusually warm winter. As mentioned, there is very little data, perhaps nothing at all, or perhaps even more bizarre weather will follow. As a layman, I have no idea, but I imagine that having strange weather for a full season will have residual effects somewhere.
It's only warm in the eastern half. In California it's freakin' cold!
Yup, high 50s and rain over here. Freakin' cold.
ah but those on both side of global warming think 100 years of data most of it not very accurate is enough to plot trends.
What i want to know is not what the the records are but how the rest of the year faired. If 1910 and 1945 were close were their summers hotter or colder than normal? dry or wet? past behaviour isn't a prediction of the future but you do need data points to start with.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Not summer: spring. 80F is spring weather. Summer weather is 90-103F.
What people in my area, Pennsylvania, don't get is we get a lot of our water from melting snow. We had three days of snow, period, all winter. It all melted within a day or so. North America is going to be heading for drastic droughts. We have communities drilling wells for new water sources as is. We also have communities with water supplies either contaminated by Marcellus drilling or natural gas migration. Doesn't matter which at the moment, water is becoming scarce.
This is why I am fuming at Republicans not getting the problem with the Keystone Pipeline. The U.S.'s bread basket is watered through a giant underground aquifer. The bread basket will survive the coming drought. If the K.P. goes through, as planned, and has a B.P. style incident? There goes the country's capability to feed ourselves. We'll be trading exporting food/importing oil for importing oil from Canada/importing food if we have more years like we had this year in our future.
This warm weather is scarring me for the coming year, climate change or fluke event.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
La Nina does not affect the Great Lakes region. It is a west coast phenomenon, and corresponds to a LOWER than usual ocean temperature at a distance pretty far south from the US coast.
During a period of La Niña, the sea surface temperature across the equatorial Eastern Central Pacific Ocean will be lower than normal by 3–5 C. ... In the United States, an episode of La Niña is defined as a period of at least 5 months of La Niña conditions.
As for Global Warming, I think statistics and physics have proven quite nicely much of these climate change theories are on the right track. The planet is getting warmer overall - it's a fact. That's not to say the ice caps will melt and New York will be underwater next week, or the movie 2012 will come to pass. It just means the atmosphere surrounding the planet earth is getting hotter. Make of this what you will.
You can call others deniers, but to deny proven scientific fact and then tell someone else they're denying the truth is just silly.
I don't, however, believe there is anything we can do about it at this point. Might as well hang on and invest in a good air conditioner...and then heater when we inevitably dip back into an ice age.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
I'm not sure if you're quite aware, but the pro-science side has data much longer than 100 years (actually, both sides have access to all that data, but one side tends to ignore it). Besides, when the physics does a very good job of explaining the current climate change/global warming (and many of the past climate changes), you don't need even 100 years of data. If you turn the oven on and it warms up, do you really need 100 years of data to understand what's happening?
Oh come on. Nobody argues with climate change. The debate is over MAN-MADE climate change. The climate has changed dozens of times through heating and cooling periods throughout history. This isn't even questioned.. except by some young-earther's. :\
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
The story is a little out of date. There have been five more record-shattering days in a row of 85 F or greater since this story came out. Records not only broken, but broken by more than 10 degrees.
So the five days in a row, for which there was a least something close happening in recorded history, there's nothing even close to ten days in a row of temperatures more than 25 degrees hotter than normal.
It may still be nothing on a "geological time scale" but it's now worth noting at least, and as a Chicagoan who walked down to the beach on the last day of Winter yesterday, and strolled along with my feet in the water, I can tell you that it's weird as hell.
We also blew away the record for airborne pollen by like 15%, which has caused my poor wife to have really red eyes and sound like the comic book store guy on the Simpsons, except with an Eastern European accent. I actually had to turn on the air conditioner so she could breathe a little bit. And if you know Chicago at all, you'll know that having to turn on the air conditioner on the last day of Winter is fucking strange as hell.
The good news is it looks like super short-shorts are going to be in style again this summer. Yay!
You are welcome on my lawn.
Watch for a rise in insects and vermin that the winter would normally have killed off. Any wildlife got a pass this winter as well. Where I live the ticks are bad, and this will not have helped. Ticks need a deep freeze for a long time to kill them. They are all over the deer and the deer are now coming into town because idiots feed them. We are going to have a deer tick disease epidemic I'm afraid, as these ticks drop off in yards, get on people and pets and pass along their diseases.
I predict lots of violent storms ahead for us, with more F5 tornadoes than we have ever seen. Look for an insanely hot Summer, resulting in massive humidity that will erupt into violent storms when a cold front of any sort approaches. That's if we are lucky. If not, we will just cooking in our juices this summer under broiling heat, and high humidity.
Of course I could be wrong...lol..it's the weather.
Take the Red Pill.
Don't be silly, it won't be 200F in July.
If it was as much above normal in July, as it is currently in March here in Chicago, the daily high would be 127, with an overnight low of 94.
Fun stuff, isn't it?
Britain's just had two exceptionally cold winters in a row, this one has been quite warm and the south of England is in drought conditions.
What the climate change theories predict is an increase in energy of the whole system, which means more extreme weather events; more hurricanes, greater air pressure gradients and bigger temperature swings, at least until it settles down into a new stable (hotter) state.
Of course, one weather event does not a theory prove, we need as much data as possible, and I'm not enough of a statistician to know if we're seeing climate change. It's all the right symptoms though.
Oh, and climate change has as much to with geological timescales as a mayfly does with the span of human history.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
On the contrary; perhaps it is global warming, since adding energy to the system increases its volatility. Think of it this way: global warming creates unusual high temperatures and low temperatures in different areas simultaneously in the same way that shaking a glass of water creates waves.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
One thing you can be sure of, if you read books and stories from different time periods, is people are always saying how unusual the weather is. I take this to mean that the natural variation of weather is greater than the average human memory.
Either that or people's lives are boring.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yes, but that doesn't mean that we don't know why many of those earlier events occurred or that we don't know why the current climate change/global warming is occurring. The causes of climate change aren't that varied. The big players are the sun, the earth's orbit around the sun, and the ability of the earth to radiate away the energy it gets from the sun. We know the sun isn't causing the current climate change/global warming because, if anything, the long term output from the sun has decreased slightly. We know the orbit isn't causing the change because it should actually be cooling the earth slightly. We can measure the increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and know that is primarily caused by man. We can also measure the reduction in outgoing IR radiation due to that increase in CO2. Sure, it's possible that climate science is missing something (that's always possible in every field of science), but when the science explains so much of what's currently going on and what went on in the past, and when the current science is able to make very good projections about what will happen, at some point you have to say, "Yeah, that's probably right." Since there are no current alternate hypotheses (or, rather, no good ones) and since the data clearly supports the basic theories that make up climate science, there's no good reason to be doubting the science.
you mean the *fact* of La Nina and arctic oscillation on top of each other, which has happened many, many times in history? This isn't global warming/climate change, sorry pal
One of the predictions of man made climate change is that Europe will get colder because the Gulf Stream will weaken: http://www.bbc.co.uk/climate/impact/gulf_stream.shtml I think it's clear we have some man made climate change going on here however I don't believe its possible to pin any specific weather event on it. How much is man made is up for debate and I really don't have any confidence that we have the individual or political will to make significant changes until and unless undeniable writing is on the wall that there is NO other course of action. People cling to what they want to believe if it fits there world view, especially if its in their short term economic interest. I guess getting older has made me a cynic :(
The oceans are absorbing most of the excess heat, over 90% of it I think. The top 2.5 meters of the oceans hold as much heat as the entire atmosphere above it. The heat it takes to raise a mixing layer of 25 meters in the ocean 1 C would raise the atmospheric temperature by 10 C. Heat gets moved around by ocean currents. Thus Western Europe is much warmer than the same latitudes in North America. It also moves from the equator toward the poles in the atmosphere. Thus the Arctic has warmed more than the areas south of it. Nevertheless there aren't many areas around the world that haven't warmed over the last several decades. One thing to keep in mind, it takes 17 years of temperature records to distinguish the global warming signal from the noise of natural variation.