Europe’s Extreme Frost Gives Climate Deniers False Hope
Frozen Lufthansa Boeing 737
Until this week, Europeans had been enjoying an unusually mild winter with spring-like temperatures in many cities. Scientists say a string of freezing European winters, scattered over the last decade, has been driven in large part by global warming.
The recent week-long cold wave, with temperatures plunging as low as minus 32 degrees Celsius, has claimed hundreds of lives so far. Snow has stranded travelers across the continent with roads blocked, airplanes grounded, and trains unable to move. The snow is forecast to intensify before easing on Saturday, February 4, 2012
Meteorologists blame the weather on a strong high pressure system that has pushed cold Siberian air across the continent. According to a new study Arctic’s receding surface ice, which at current rates of decline, could disappear entirely during summer months by century’s end – tripling the chances that future winters in Europe and north Asia will be just as bad as this year.
Bitterly cold weather across Europe in the winter months of 2005-2006, dumped snow in southern Spain and plunged eastern Europe and Russia into an unusually, and deadly, deep freeze.
Another long cold streak in 2009-2010, gave Britain its coldest winter in 14 years, and caused transportation delays across the continent – much like this week.
Climate deniers who question the gravity of global warming say these bitter winters are at odds with the standard climate change scenarios in which Earth’s temperature steadily rises, possibly by as much as five or six degrees Celsius (9.0 to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.
However, scientists caution that these extreme winters mistakenly bring together the long-term patterns of climate with the short-term vagaries of weather, and ignore regional variation in climate change impacts.
New research shows that global warming has actually contributed to Europe’s winter frost.
Scientists explain that the rising Arctic temperatures that have reduced floating ice cover by 20 percent over the last three decades, and the sun’s rays that are now absorbed by dark-blue sea rather than being bounced back into space by reflective ice and snow, together with extreme heat, has created a strong high-pressure system that has brought the cold polar air into Europe this week.
Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Gremany said, “Say the ocean is at zero degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit), that is a lot warmer than the overlying air in the polar area in winter, so you get a major heat flow heating up the atmosphere from below which you don’t have when it is covered by ice. That’s a massive change.”
The result, according to a modeling study published earlier this month in the Journal of Geophysical Research, is a strong high-pressure system over the newly exposed sea which brings cold polar air, swirling counter-clockwise, into Europe.
“Recent severe winters like last year’s or the one of 2005-2006 do not conflict with the global warming picture, but rather supplement it,” explained Vladimir Petoukhov, lead author of the study and a physicist at the Potsdam Institute.
“These anomalies could triple the probability of cold winter extremes in Europe and north Asia,” he said.
Colder European winters do not indicate a slowing of global warming trends, only an uneven distribution, researchers say.
Theodora Filis is an accomplished journalist, editor, writer, and blogger. Theodora's articles on Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking), Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), Nuclear Fallout's, Poisonous Chemicals and Ground Water Pollutants have appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. Theodora has been a guest speaker on several radio shows, is a college instructor, and the Contributing Editor for UK Progressive Magazine, Moderator for LinkedIn Climate sub-group, and the Publisher & Editor of The Gaia Reports. You can view Theodora's blog "The Gaia Reports" here: http://thegaiareports.weebly.com/#/
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Is anybody listening to the climate alarmists any more? The world hasn’t warmed. The climate models are rubbish. Even the lowest lying island nation hasn’t flooded, and we’re supposed to carry on believing in this nonsense?
I love when journalists exhibit selective amnesia and forget that the public was warned in the 1990s that children wouldn’t know what snow was in 10 years. You will not be able to find one single scientists predicting these cold spells 15 years ago. People are starting to view global warming like 3 card monte, a rigged designed to take people’s money. The Troposphere over the Tropics was supposed to warm rapidly as a result of O2 accumulation and there has been little warming there since satellites have been tracking Troposheric temperatures for 32 years. There is the 8 years of little ocean heat content rise.
In the mean time the solar physics community are concerned that solar cycle 25 is extremely weak and that we are entering a solar weakening similar to the Dalton Minimum. We have plenty of more time to ascertain if assumed modelled warming feedbacks, which have been diverging from cooler satellite and ocean buoy temperature readings, are accurate. It would make no sense to base policy on faulty models of future warming. People really need to demand independent verifaction of model accuracy before committing trillions of dollars to mitigate warming or spend on adaptation.
Check out current satellite temperatures at NASA. Does anybody see a trend at all for past 30 years? We are now a average global temps of -0.09C so how could global warming be affecting cold temps in Europe when its NOT WARMING! ITS BELOW ANOMALY!
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_January_2012.png
The entire AGW postulation is predicated on man made CO2 causing runaway global warming. Now, that the Arctic Oscillation has swung back into the negative, cold winter and winds have shifted south – that does not mean the Arctic sea is ‘warming’, far from it. Using 30years of ice data and drawing irrelevant conclusions is just the same as making the MMCO2 = warming correlation. Here is the sea ice anomaly and it shows little change:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
The northern winters are just returning to a pattern of frigid cold, something we have luckily avoided for a number of years, now that the sun is entering a particularly quiessent period and with it the PDO is in cooling phase amongst other factors. Most important to the earth is the Solar influence and yes, there will now be long term shifts in the climate and it is nothing to do with MMCO2.
All predictors, point to cooling trend rather than warming, we should be preparing for a significant cooling of the planet and all the enormous logistical problems that that will entail.
It would greatly help the world if some warmists wised up and cut out the MMCO2 ‘rhetoric of warming’ guff, the world has moved on and it’s getting cold out there.
The extremes that fanatics will go to to justify their faith, after the fact, is always enlightening. Global climate change happens, and has with regular periodicity for billions of years. This wonderful warm trend that we’ve all enjoyed for the last few millennia fits into the paleo record perfectly, and has been great for our suntans. Energy efficiency efforts are spot on target, but not for the reason many believe. It is the millions of years of cold that we are on the precipice of entering that will really test our cleverness. So, improve energy efficiency for what ever reason makes you happy; In 50 or 100 years, we will be hearing cries to throw that saved carbon back on the fire to warm things up.