many deniers of anthropogenic global warming and the climate change it brings don't seem to be able to understand how some place on Earth might be experiencing a record cold spell yet scientists insist global warming continues apace.
okay, understanding the interaction between weather and climate probably isn't their forte.
i've tried to explain how it is important to log what is actually happening rather than impose one's misinformed opinion about what they think ought be happening. This never goes down too well. Deniers always seem to avoid reality if they can.
late January a savage winter storm dumped heavy snow along the US Gulf coast..
US-based meteorologist Bob Henson wrote an insightful piece published Saturday by Yale Climate Connections about possible causes of the snow storm. Below is a usefl discussion from Henson's paper.
YALE CLIMATE CONNECTIONS:
"In a 2024 paper, Russell Blackport and John Fyfe, both at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, emphasized why North Americans in particular shouldn’t get too sanguine about winter: Winter temperatures over North America in the current climate have the highest variance and are some of the most strongly negatively skewed on Earth.
"This means that extreme deviations below the mean are expected to continue to occur in the future, even with rising global temperatures. However, because of the increasing mean temperatures, combined with the changes in temperature variability, cold extremes over North America will occur less frequently, and when they do occur, they will be less intense.
"The World Weather Attribution project, which analyzes how much climate change might or might not have influenced recent weather extremes and disasters, tends to focus on extreme floods, heat waves, and other disasters that have clear-cut links to a warming planet.
"Among its few studies of cold events, one analyzed a sharp cold wave over far northern Europe in January 2024. The group estimated that human-induced climate change likely made such an event five times less frequent.
"But they stressed that complacency might have its own risks:Climate change does not mean that cold waves will no longer happen.
"In fact, less severe and less frequent cold waves may be more impactful than past ones if risk perception and preparedness decrease due to the less frequent event occurrences."
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