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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.'"
If only we had some sort of theory that could explain this inexplicable change in weather patterns.
Finally all of those CFC's I've been spraying have paid off. Its too bitter cold in Chicago anyway.
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.
Well, the scientific consensus is that global warming is happening and that man is contributing toward it.
Not all theories and consequent predictions are correct and complete - in most areas of science this is accepted calmly and rationally, but in this one it's suddenly proof that the whole premise is wrong. Kinda like saying evolution is a crock of shit just because one piece of fossil evidence isn't fully explained by a previous assumption. Not that I've ever seen global-warming deniers as any more rational than evolution-deniers, but they tend to find it hard to see themselves that way.
quick, find a butterfly to offset the effect.
Read carefully, only once in 140 years ( the period such records have been kept in Chicago ), has there been a run of as many days in the 80's in April, as we have had this March. Never, in the records, have we had a run like this before in March.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
And in the southern Hemisphere, We've had one of the coldest and wettest summers on record in New Zealand.
But you only hear about climate change when people are hot.....
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you can all blame the ring leader of the Weather Underground, Punxsutawney Phil, for spreading propaganda that would deceive you into thinking winter was staying another 6 weeks. it's eco-psycho-terrorism! in our soil!
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
It's effing cold in Seattle. Snowing every other day it seems. I want to be warm and dry.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Back in October, I was writing 'HAPPY HALLOWEEN!' in the snow, having a chuckle. I stopped laughing when a storm blew in so fierce, so heavy, that it took out the entire Western MA. area's electricity. We were without power for a week, almost exactly. The snow was already heavy, but the fact that trees still had leaves on their branches added to the weight. Entire limbs--or just entire trees were everywhere. It was a spooky time, and it's only getting spookier. I should NOT be sweltering at work while wearing shorts, which is how it went yesterday. Anyone saying "so what, it's a heatwave" doesn't come from New England. We're used to crazy-assed weather, but this has got us all stumped.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
Sorry. Hot chicks trump cold Kiwis any day of the year.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
It's only warm in the eastern half. In California it's freakin' cold!
In October we had snow in the east, which was one of he earliest snows ever. And LAST winter we set records for cold & snowfall amounts! So it is not really global warming; it's just month-to-month/year-to-year variation.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I found one but accidentally stepped on it. What do I do now? Also, did anyone hear thunder?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
And yet last year saw some of the coldest temperatures we've had in a very long time. But I didn't see people screaming OMG GLOBAL FREEZING!!1!!1! back then.
That's because the people who understand global warming are smart enough to know that a single season doesn't mean anything on its own. It's the deniers who, every goddamned winter, come out of the woodwork with their childlike taunts: "If the Earth's getting warmer, then why is it currently cold outside!?"
Isn't it funny that this winter they all seem to understand that one point doesn't make a line? Sadly, I'm sure that by next year they will have forgotten all about this, and will point to the first snowflake as proof that the Earth is unchanged.
I was surprised, for a minute, to see all these Slashdotters sarcastically pretending this is proof of global climate change, or forgoing the sarcasm and outright denying it entirely. Then I remembered that, despite Slashdot readers being generally accepting of, and, in many cases, even excited about science, they also tend to be generally libertarian in their politics, which means denying ideas widely held by entire scientific and academic communities if it might lead to more gub'mint.
It's only warm in the eastern half. In California it's freakin' cold!
Yup, high 50s and rain over here. Freakin' cold.
Weather and climate are not the same words.
Think
G
If Slashdot covering a weather story isn't a climate-scale outlier, I don't know what is.
Here's another strange fact: on March 18 the low temperature in Rochester MN exceeded the previous record high for that date.
I'm working on an essay linking this event to anthropogenic climate change ("global warming") which will appear on Planet3.0.
(For what it's worth I might as well submit a Slashdot story when it's up. Hose my host - see if I care.)
mt
Knowing my luck, it will be right before my planned trip out of town and will bring a record 3 foot snowfall that keeps all planes grounded for a week.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
So it is not really global warming; it's just month-to-month/year-to-year variation.
Not global warming, maybe, but definitely global climate change. Though it is an el nino year, it's much too early in the year for it to be affecting the weather this much. In Ottawa, ON (described as the world capital with the most extreme weather... coldest winters + hottest summers), we got over 85 degrees fahrenheit today, when it should be closer to 40 degrees. Today was June/July weather, not March weather.
Things are changing. And while countries like Canada and Greenland stand to benefit from a longer planting season, it's really hurting countries like Kenya (in the middle of one of the worst droughts ever).
And yet last year saw some of the coldest temperatures we've had in a very long time. But I didn't see people screaming OMG GLOBAL FREEZING!!1!!1! back then.
Several years ago, when the changes were starting to get wide attention, people realized that it was extreme weather on both ends and changed the description from "warming" to "climate change". We've had several unusual winters, it's obvious that the phenomenon is not limited to higher temperatures.
And last year I do remember news stories on the unusual winter where people questioned if the global climate change was responsible.
The root of the problem is that global average temperatures are increasing, but since that also contributes to unusual cold snaps then it doesn't help the discussion to call it global warming if every idiot who gets cold uses that as evidence that global warming is not happening. Extreme weather changes on both ends are both symptoms of global warming. You only need to look at a graph of global average temperature over a long period to figure out that it is currently spiking.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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?
You Maniac! You stepped on it! Ah, damn you! God damn you to hell!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
Means extreme weather patterns become more likely. This includes more extreme temp fluctuations while the global overall mean just inches by a fraction of a degree per year.
All well established and advertised for the last twenty years. People pointing to super cold, wet winter in NZ are just emphasizing this, while kidding themselves into thinking it somehow contradicts the climate change trend.
I'm quite certain that once the future history of global warming will be written it'll emphasize that it shows humanity at it's smartest and most stupid at the same time.
Bursar, stop jumping on those ants this instant!
By definition, this is "weather", not "climate", it only lasts a week.
Climate change is defined by decades at a very minimum. Climate change is this:
http://www.ec.gc.ca/adsc-cmda/default.asp?lang=en&n=8C03D32A-1
Environment Canada takes readings every day, in hundreds of locations outside urban heat islands, and averages them across a whole season to get an average temperature. And then it graphs that number for every year since 1945. While even that graph swings wildly up and down from year to year and even has warmer and colder decades, the regression across almost 70 years shows a steady upward trend. It's most dramatic for our winter (2.8C) but all the seasons have shown statistically significant increases.
I was a huge skeptic until about 2004, but this and several papers I managed to puzzle my way through, plus the book "The Ice Chronicles", finally brought me around by about 2006.
Yes, there are Snowmaggedons. And there are these. And when you add them all up, the warmer spells are getting a little more frequent and the colder spells a little less so. Over decades. That's climate.
Several years ago, when the changes were starting to get wide attention, people realized that it was extreme weather on both ends and changed the description from "warming" to "climate change".
While I agree with most of your points, I thought I'd point out that this is a common misconception. In fact, both terms came into usage at about the same time (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate_by_any_other_name.html ). Climate change refers to all effects of the changing climate (ocean acidification, droughts, floods, changes in short term weather events, long term temperature changes, etc.). Global warming only refers to the general trend in surface temperature. So global warming is, and always has been, just a subset of climate change.
In the cage match between the laws of physics and money, physics wins.... but money buys itself a huge victory party and claims physics is a fraud. And a large segment of the population who resent the snooty superiority of laws of physics eagerly believe physics has been defeated.
Therefore, you can expect to hear that this same kind of weather anomaly has happened numerous times before, and a lot of people will believe it.
If the K.P. goes through, as planned, and has a B.P. style incident?
How on earth could that happen? It's a pipeline, not a well; you just shut the nearest valves and voila, it's done. Not only that, pipelines are buried just below the frost line, which even up there is maybe six feet down. It's not that hard to avoid the areas where the Ogallala runs very close to the surface. It's nothing like a well of oil under pressure that's over 4000 feet below sea level.
Europe had a record setting winter, where they shattered many records for both snow and cold, and 112 people died, but it still rather a rather minor rate of change compared to what the world saw in the 1500's.
I really think that people have begun to freak out lately, just because we keep such careful records today. When they had abnormally warm or cold days in the U.S. in the 1800's, no one knew for sure how abnormal they were. Now we have data to compare, and we've become hypochondriacs.
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The Butterfly Effect is named for the well-known fact that Chuck Norris kicking a butterfly in Asia will cause a whirlwind of pain in North America.
1.Netcraft confirms:In Soviet Russia all your base welcomes a beowolf cluster of CowboyNeal overlords. 2.? 3.Profit!!1!
That's a sheep shot, you insensitive clod!
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."
Take a good look at this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Enso-global-temp-anomalies.png Look at the 1960s, look at the long term trend. A few hot years or some unbroken records are just a blip. albeit of some significance. But it's the GLOBAL trend, not periodic local extremes that are of deepening concern. Meterologist Stu Ostro stopped being a skeptic - here's his (very long) take on what changed his mind: http://i.imwx.com/web/multimedia/images/blog/StuOstro_GWweather_latestupdate.pdf
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
If the K.P. goes through, as planned, and has a B.P. style incident? There goes the country's capability to feed ourselves.
There is an important difference between the BP well and a pipeline: a pipeline can be shut down. Pipelines have multiple pumping stations to keep pushing the oil along, and those pumping stations can be shut down; pipelines have leak detectors. Not only do the oil companies not want to waste valuable oil and incur financial penalties for pollution, but additionally governmental regulations require them to have leak detectors and safety shutdowns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_transport#Leak_detection_systems
Wikipedia says the Keystone XL pipeline has a planned maximum capacity of 510000 barrels of oil per day. If I am not mistaken, that's about 354 barrels of oil per minute. Wikipedia says that one state (Washington) imposes a requirement to be able to detect and pinpoint the location of leakage of 8% of maximum flow within 15 minutes. Using this standard, if we assume the Keystone XL leaks 8% for 15 minutes and is then shut down, that would seem to work out to about 23 barrels of oil leaked before shutdown. I'm not an engineer, but I should think it would be easier to detect more significant flows and shut down.
On the other hand, what if we assume some catastrophic event completely breaks the pipeline at some point? Wikipedia says that industry practice is to place "block valve stations":
If we assume that a catastophe completely breaks the pipeline and all the crude oil in an entire 48 km segment drains out, and use the Wikipedia pipe diameter of 910mm, then if I have done my sums correctly that would be a spill on the order of 25000 tonnes of oil. Checking the Wikpedia List of oil spills page, we find that the Deepwater Horizon leak in the Gulf was at least 492000 tonnes. If we assume that most segments of the pipeline are not completely flat, then it seems likely that less than the maximum oil will leak out.
Also, according to press releases from TransCanada, there is at least one route available that takes the pipeline completely around the aquifers, and other routes were studied that shortened the pipe runs by putting some sections in aquifer areas. One possible solution is to insist that the pipeline simply not go through the aquifer areas. I'm not an expert on pipeline risk assessment so I won't take a position on the tradeoffs involved.
Also, I wonder just how much crude oil will soak through the ground and into an aquifer, and what the consequences would be; whether crude oil ever naturally leaks into aquifers, and if so how serious it is when it happens. I haven't found a sober assessment of the situation; I have mostly found breathless and fact-free assertions that the pipeline would instantly destroy "the heartbeat of America" and such.
While pipeline disasters suck, the level of disaster that worries you should not be possible.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Yeah, all you need to do is turn the oil off, huh?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pipeline_accidents
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
If you paid attention to the Arctic you'd know that there is lots of open water in the Barents and Kara Sea's north of Europe where it's been extraordinarily warm. That open water and the (relative) warmth it releases forces the jet stream to dip south into Europe carrying frigid Arctic air with it.
(I live in the Chicago area, and have for 16 years)
We already barely had a winter- there were plenty of days in the 40s and 50s, temperatures never dipped below 0, and then to end it we get weeks of 60s and then 80s, when normally we would be getting highs in the 40s right now. If it was just a heat wave out of nowhere, I would agree with you, but unusual warmth has been the trend for months (while until now we hadn't been setting day-to-day temperature records, we have consistently been well above average). While nominally the explanation is the Arctic Oscillation plus La Nina, this "winter" does seem unprecedented (I have to wonder how much global warming is affecting the strength of these effects).
If you want more information about records set, you can poke around here. We have been setting a variety of records related to continued high temperatures.
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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 :(
This past winter's average temperature was 32.8 degrees, 6.4 degrees above the current winter average of 26.4. It is unusual for a Chicago winter to average above freezing, occurring in just 13 of 142 Chicago winters dating to 1870-71, less than 10 percent of the time.
Adding to that trend of warm temperatures, the average temperature this March through the 18th was 50.4, over a typical average of 34.3, and well exceeding the previous record of 47.5. As the records have continued, we may well set a record for most consecutive record highs, in addition to hitting 85 sooner than ever recorded, and getting more days in the 80s in March than has ever been recorded in April.
Source.
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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.
Most Slashdotters know very little about moisture down under.
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All the weather reporting I've seen has said this has nothing to do with global climate change, but rather a funky set of events involving the jet stream that's keeping a high pressure system stuck in place. It's the same reason we don't blame climate change when a low pressure system brings arctic air down and we get 60 degree days in July (I'm in Michigan).
I stand behind the science of climate change, but everything I've seen has said this is just a natural occurrence, albeit rare.