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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.'"
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?
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?
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.