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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.
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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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
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).
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
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.
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!
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."
Most Slashdotters know very little about moisture down under.
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