Posted by
BLOGASSAULT on Saturday, June 04, 2011 9:55:52 AM
Some in the climate science world seem to think that
climate change is cooling California. With huge amounts of rain, snow still in the mountains, and tornados in the Sacramento Valley, it all seems a little unusual.
The Golden State's weather has gone haywire.
And it's not over yet: Sacramento can expect as much as another 1.4 inches of rain this weekend and temperatures 20 degrees below normal, with more mountain snow.
"It's what I call global weirding," said Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. "This has been a very strange year all over the planet."
There's that saying again; Global Weirding. I posted on this new phrase a few weeks back. It would seen that they are looking for a new punch-line that isn't so serious, but still focused on something that makes people think about climate.
The odd thing about the article is that it goes into great detail to explain the cause of the the unusual weather.
What's going on?
First of all, this spring's weather is not unprecedented, just uncommon. California has had wet, cold spring weather before, notably in 1983, a year that produced record Sierra snows.
This year, the blame falls on a complex interaction between La Niña and another phenomenon called a negative Arctic oscillation, Patzert and others said.
La Niña is marked by a cooling of equatorial waters in the Pacific – the opposite of El Niño. In the past, this pattern means an equal chance of wet or dry weather.
What made this year so wet was the negative Arctic oscillation.
Typical conditions make the Arctic colder than the mid-latitudes, which include the United States and Europe. This is a positive oscillation.
Negative conditions flip this around, making the Arctic warmer than usual and pushing cold air and a vigorous jet stream down into the United States and Europe.
Okay, souonds reasonable. But then it changes:
One theory gaining traction is that climate change, in fact, may be to blame.
The theory was developed in several published papers by Judah Cohen, an atmospheric scientist in Massachusetts.
Cohen argues that ice melt in the Arctic has produced more snowfall across Siberia. All that snow creates a giant cold air mass that diverts the jet stream, contributing to the negative Arctic oscillation.
Cohen successfully predicted this winter's colder temperatures across the northern United States, but said the phenomenon influences weather on the East Coast more than the West.
Colder and snowier winters caused by global warming? It may be one of the counterintuitive consequences of climate change, he said.
"We don't understand everything, and we don't understand how the different feedbacks affect different parts of the climate system," said Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, a private firm in Lexington, Mass. "It's very complicated. So we should expect the unexpected.
They don't understand everything, but we should expect the unexpected?
There is nothing unexpected about this line of thinking. Even as they explained what is clearly known and understood in the world of climate science, they still can't let go of the fact that, somehow or another, humans are affecting the climate and they are detemined to get us to buy it.