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Cold Spring Linked To Dramatic Sea Ice Loss
hrvatska writes "An article at Weather Underground reports that researchers have linked large snowstorms and cold spring weather across Britain and large parts of Europe and North America to the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice. It is thought that the Arctic ice loss adds heat to the ocean and atmosphere, which shifts the position of the jet stream, allowing cold air from the Arctic to plunge much further south. Researchers expect that a warming Arctic ocean will drive more extreme weather in North America and Europe (abstract)."
Yep. Global warming is freezing our asses off...
Fundamentally, a stable climate is an illusion of the "short now". We think there's such a thing as "normal" temps because we just don't live very long, compared to a planet.
Even on a larger scale, the past 10,000 years have been an amazing anomaly, with a relatively stable climate not seen anywhere else in the data (and it's probably no coincidence that mankind happened to emerge technologically during this rare stable-ish window).
The simple truth about all this Climate Change debate? You don't have an informed opinion either way until you've really looked at the Vostok ice core data. Study the raw data for the past several 100k years yourself - you're intuition is no guide at all for how the climate normally behaves over time.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Science has an amazing way of reinforcing crazy stupid by presenting contradicting, independently verifiable facts
I suppose you mean seemingly contradictory, when viewed on a superficial level without real understanding of the matter?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Of course, large-scale climactic changes over tens or hundreds of thousands of years are a red herring when evaluating the impact of hundred-year rapid timescale changes on human societies that need much longer to adapt without horrific violence and misery. We live in very different places/cities from where we did 10,000 or 100,000 years ago --- but pretty much in the same cities we had 100 years ago. Expecting the populations of entire nations and continents to just up-and-move over a few decades because habitable ranges have shifted (collapsing food and water supplies in once-fertile regions) doesn't play out so well in current geopolitics. As soon as you're ready to welcome a billion refugee immigrants, dislocated by famine, war, and poverty, into your own country, we can get complacent about compressing multi-thousand-year climactic cycles into human-scale time intervals.
Indeed. "Climate change" is an effective propaganda technique for enabling observation bias. Have any weird weather? It's climate change and all due to the evil humans and their fossil fuel based industrial societies.
As you might have guessed from my sarcasm, I don't buy at all that the phrase, "climate change" is somehow more accurate than anthropogenic global warming. Climate would change even if nothing particular was going on, just due to orbital dynamics of Earth around the Sun, volcanoes, and the subtle effects of continental drift.
not over the water you can't
Exactly. There is no water between Brooklyn and Queens (they are both on Long Island). I LOLed.
This is just the latest in a series of published work finding that weakening ocean and land temperature contrasts between high and mid northern latitudes is having a profound effect on the Jet Stream. Search for jet stream and arctic on Google Scholar and they'll pop up. They all show that the poles live and die by the circumpolar winds that 'lock' the cold air in those high latitudes (Antarctica included by the way!). If those circumpolar winds diminish, then the cold can effectively 'escape'. In the Northern Hemisphere, it results in the jet stream becoming extremely contorted, sets up 'blocking' and we get these long periods of abnormal weather (extra cold in late winter/early spring, extra heat in late summer/early fall?) The weather channel has a great rundown of the jet stream *today*. Illustrates it perfectly. http://www.weather.com/video/forecast-for-your-spring-35814 Lets just thank our lucky stars that Antarctica is a continent surrounded by ocean, and not an ocean surrounded by continents, like the Arctic. This fundamental difference means the southern circumpolar winds have a huge contrast to work from with the gigantic ice fields of the continent versus the far away lands of Southern America, Oceania, and Africa. Ironically, the ozone hole actually makes the Antarctic colder and the circumpolar winds stronger... so as it fixes itself as human CFC emissions dimish, those winds will start to weaken and warming will be able to creep in there as well. But at least that buys us time. Were the Arctic and Antarctic equal, global warming would have likely been much more immediate. Though who knows, maybe that would have spurred us to action before today (which is still never?) The world and science that attempts to explain it is wonderful and terrifying all at the same time. Lets hope we can get our acts together and change our course before we cause so much change to our atmosphere and oceans that we are unable to avoid the clear and present dangers now on tap.
I find it really bizarre that Slashdot, a website that usually has intelligent discussion, is filled with climate change naysayers.
Is this real life?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record
The 9 warmest years on record happened this century. The Earth is heating up, and rapidly.
Who the fuck are you people?
According to the most recent SST anomaly map found here, much of the Gulf Stream is anomalously warmer than expected.