Global Warming Doesn’t Necessarily Mean It Gets Warmer Everywhere All The Time
March 10, 2008 · Print This Article
One of Matt Drudge’s favorite things to do with Global Warming headlines is to set them up against cold weather headlines. One headline will be about a Global Warming protest or meeting, the headline below will shout that it was super snowy somewhere, implying that Global Warming can’t possibly be real if it’s snowing hard in Iowa.
I’ve heard the same arguments thrown out about what’s turned into the snowiest winter in New England’s recorded history. “Global Warming must be BS, we just got 13 inches of snow again”.
To a simpleton that argument makes perfect sense. After all, the second word in “Global Warming” is “Warming”. Doesn’t that mean that every place on the planet should be warm now?
No, actually it doesn’t. Weather and long term cooling and warming trends are extremely complex systems. As the earth warms up due to our love affair with releasing CO2 into the air, the temperature and weather patterns in different places on the globe will fluctuate. It could be a colder winter in one country, a vastly warmer one in another. The overall temperature trend remains going up, but the local weather conditions vary from place to place.
The answer to Maine and New Hampshire’s extra snowy winter turns out to be North Europe, which is coming out of one of the warmest winters on record. Treehugger has it:
Tourism favorites like dog sleds have been “on ice” this year, euphemistically rather than literally. With temperatures breaking records across northern Europe, there is literally no ice for the popular winter tours. Mid-December to mid-January there was only hiking. Recent snows have re-employed the idle huskies, but the weatherman is not as optimistic as the sled owners: February 2008 was the second warmest on record since 1900. Other indicators demonstrate the unusual warm streak throughout the region.
The ice on the Baltic is so thin that ferries running between Tallinn, Estonia and Helsinki, Finnland have been in operation non-stop; no need for the usual pause in services between December and April. The German daily Der Spiegel references Jürgen Holfort of Germany’s Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency predicting that this winter will have the least ice in the Baltic Sea since 1720.
Link [Treehugger]
Photo credit: Flickr user BigMcGuire
Related Posts:
Grist Explains How to Smack Down Global Warming Deniers, Point by Point45 Scientists on list of ‘500 with Documented Doubts’ Say F-You to Global Warming Deniers [Updated!]
Q & A with Mr. Cranky Green: Snowy Winter = Global Warming Called Off? and Adventures in Wind Credits
This article is absolutely right, of course, which is why I’ve gone from using the phrase “global warming” to “global climate change.” Ignorant folk have an easier time making sense of the latter when they experience or hear of the latest extreme weather event.