While we freeze down here in the lower 48, it helps to remember we live on a big round planet with lots of places on it.
Those red places had a warm 2014. Notice that almost everyone in the world lives there. Averaged together all of us people had a few of the hottest months on record and we will probably also have the hottest single year ever. Not everyone, though. Some populations actually have colder weather thanks to the weird effects that warming has on patterns in the atmosphere. One group, a small number, live in central Siberia. The other population is more notable in that the cold spot on the left covers a bunch of the most important group of people in the world for fixing the climate problem. Dropping that one spot of cold over the central and northeastern United States strikes me as a remarkably perverse joke on the part of whoever the spaghetti monster delegated to weather control.
I explained this odd feature of global circulation last year with a fun series about the beautiful moderate winter they had in northern Alaska. Well, it turns out the far north would prefer if they could have their cold winters back.
[Brage Hansen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim] and his co-authors focused on the rainy warm spell that brought record-high temperatures and prolonged rain to Svalbard over 2 weeks in January and February 2012. Temperatures during that period were routinely 20°C higher than normal, and on one day, the study notes, a Svalbard weather station recorded a daily average temperature of 4°C, which was “higher than at any weather station in mainland Norway on that day.” Another Svalbard station recorded 272 mm of rain during the 2 weeks; that station’s average for the whole year is 385 mm.The water created thick pools of slush and melted snow, kept cold by the frozen ground, known as permafrost. Then temperatures dropped and everything froze, leaving Svalbard’s fjords and towns coated in thick ice, terrorizing its roughly 2000 inhabitants and decimating the most abundant animals on the archipelago—wild reindeer. Scientists measured ground ice between 10 and 20 cm thick in 200 test sites, and more than half of the ground area they monitored was still covered in the ice 5 months later.
The ice forced road closures in Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s largest settlement, and caused a so-called slush avalanche—consisting of snow, ice, and slush—that destroyed a pedestrian bridge. The town’s central antenna was disabled, halting radio transmissions, and an icy runway meant that flights to and from the archipelago were canceled for days. “Furthermore, snow-mobile driving, dog-sledding and hiking were nearly impossible during the weather event” and for months after, notes the paper, published today in Environmental Research Letters.
The impact on Svalbard’s reindeer was severe, as ice prevented the animals from digging through the snow to eat plants. In the summer of 2012, scientists found high numbers of carcasses in all seven of Svalbard’s monitored populations, and a record number in one of them.
[…] A series of climate models the scientists used to predict local warming in the high Arctic estimated that warming temperatures will continue for years. Hansen says if those predictions bear out, some winters by 2050 could have periods with a mean temperature above freezing. More ice would then follow, which could mean “a completely different” climate on Svalbard, Hansen says, with the 2012 event an icy preview.
First reaction: one whole winter of Todd sitting around with the snowmobile under a tarp and Sarah will cut documentaries for Greenpeace. But on reflection, oy. A thick ice crust that locks out herbivores for a whole season will make Alaska a much quieter place. And if the native populations cannot travel, use the roads or hack through the thick ice to pretty much do anything, and the radio doesn’t work, and the large animals they hunt for food are all dead, that could make the whole area a bit tougher for supporting human life.
greenergood
Same thing’s happened in Tibet in the past few years – thaw, freeeze-over – and thousands of dead yaks and impoverished Tibetan herders.
Walker
Also if the permafrost in Alaska thaws, a whole lot of buildings are going to fall down.
Arclite
BJ Mobile on my Android using the default browser isn’t working. It half loads the page, then immediately directs me to a Content Not Found error. Anyone else seeing the same issue?
Tim F.
@Walker: Pipelines.
Kryptik, A Man Without A Country
But Buffalo got buried this week, so clearly global warming is a lie.
It really just is amazing how many people literally treat weather as climate. And most of them are the politicians who actually determine our plan of (in)action.
Villago Delenda Est
Rush Limbaugh is in a blue zone, therefore Global Warming is a hoax.
You read it here first.
daveNYC
@Kryptik, A Man Without A Country: Just don’t tell anyone that they’re expecting 60 degree weather and rain this week.
So now they’re worried about flooding and collapsing roofs.
Villago Delenda Est
@Kryptik, A Man Without A Country: People who SHOULD know better (like the guy who founded the Weather Channel) assert this.
The stupid, it’s going to kill us all.
cmm
@Villago Delenda Est:
And the way we have been going, we’ll deserve it.
chopper
next year’s gonna be even warmer. for the globe, at least.
MCA1
I’ve always maintained, and it proves itself to be more and more true with each passing season of extreme variation and increased prevalence of large-scale unusual weather “events,” that the greatest rhetorical mistake the env’l movement ever made was coining the term “global warming.” Should have been “global climate change” from the beginning, but once the “warming” ship sailed, it was inevitable that every time it snowed or we saw a polar vortex every unbeliever would feel empowered to speak their ignorance by asserting that weather = climate.
chopper
@MCA1:
Yeah, but the problem is it’s the warming that’s causing the climate to change. The warming is in fact the big problem.
mr_gravity
OK I get that Global Climate Change is a hoax. And all of the scientists from around the world are working in cahoots to deceive the masses for their own financial gain. And conservatives, who most assuredly “are not scientists”, are the only ones who can save us from this dastardly plot to wreck the world economy. Luckily we have true patriots like James Inhofe and Louie Gohmert to shine a light through the darkness. A white, hot, incandescent, fossil-fuel powered light burning 24/7…..
What I don’t understand is, What did we do to piss off all of those scientists?
Omnes Omnibus
@mr_gravity:
Made fun of them in high school.
gene108
@MCA1:
The problem as not what it was called.
The initial problem came, when the projections of the late 1980’s about global temperature change did not play out in the 1990’s, because folks did not grok how much CO2 we pumped into the atmosphere that the oceans could sequester and keep from reaching the atmosphere, thus tamping down Global Warming a bit.
The second great problem was the appointment of George Bush, Jr. into the White House over Al Gore. The Clinton Administration had signed off on the Kyoto Protocols, but the Republican controlled Senate refused to ratify it.
Gore, a politician noted for his concern over the environment, would probably have taken up much more of a leadership roll in making Global Warming a priority.
Bush, Jr. basically sold out any concern on carbon emissions to whatever the oil companies wanted.
The damage Bush, Jr. wrought to this country and this planet will be felt by decades, though it may be reduced if John Roberts gets hit by a bus in the next couple of weeks.
chopper
@gene108:
Not just CO2 – about 90% of the added heat energy from the enhanced greenhouse effect has been absorbed by the upper and middle layers of the world’s oceans.
Citizen Alan
@mr_gravity: Nothing. They’re all atheists and are just evil for the lulz,
chopper
It’s okay, white Christians will set you straight.
Doug r
Here in the North West we’ve been cursed with the pine beetle. Used to be winter freeze kill them off But now they just keep going and spreading. Of course planting massive tracts of genetically identical trees didn’t help either.
C.V. Danes
@MCA1: The problem is that scientists tend to be, you know, scientific, so they did not consider that using language that accurately and scientifically labeled the problem would crash against the hard wall of stupidity that unfortunately appears to be the zeitgeist of our age.
C.V. Danes
@mr_gravity:
It’s retribution for when they got beat up in high school by all the cool kids.
C.V. Danes
@gene108:
I think you’re off by an order or two of magnitude…
MCA1
@chopper: and @gene108: I get these things, but you’re talking about facts. I’m talking about branding/rhetoric/framing. “General warming on a planetwide basis, which is going have a huge impact on local climate at some indeterminate but probably near point in the future” doesn’t cut it in the political arena. Thus, labeling the problem – climate change – by naming the cause – warming, was a mistake, I think. Slogans, and the term “global warming” has become a slogan, in the world of rhetoric, are more likely interpreted by the audience as result oriented than cause oriented, because rallying against the effect is the standard. One doesn’t carry protest signs saying “Down with misogyny.” Your sign says “Stop violence against women.”
Anyway, I think the proof in the pudding is the number of times we’ve all heard the stupid, snide comments from morons along the lines of “Where’s your global warming now?” every time it snows. It’s possible, but I doubt, that they’d be saying “Where’s that global climate change, hunh?” every time it was 80 degrees and sunny in July.
C.V. Danes
@chopper:
The fact is that the radical changes in atmospheric chemistry like we have been inflicting on the planet are are almost unheard of in the geologic record, and so we really have no idea how this will play out. About all we know is that it will be bad, very bad, or extremely bad depending on how much longer we continue with this experiment.
C.V. Danes
@MCA1:
What other language to scientists speak in, other than facts? I’m quite sure that branding never even entered their thought process.
Omnes Omnibus
@C.V. Danes: I don’t think that MCA1 is faulting the scientists for what they did – just saying that it has led to problems with rhetoric as time has gone by.
C.V. Danes
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes, but any language they would have used would have been turned against them. The scientists are not the problem. The problem is the well funded propaganda machine that targeted them.
Roger Moore
In your part of the lower 48, perhaps, but not the whole of it. Those of us on the Left Coast, for instance, have had an unusually warm and dry year. One more example of the destructiveness of East Coast media bias.
Trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
It’s all fun and games until we double what they pay for their wine. Take that, librul elites!
Attended a drought workshop a couple weeks ago and the climatologist showed how the current historical three-year dry period coincides with the hottest three-year period. Now, most folks would respond “duh” but we can also have a very wet, very hot year too. In fact, climate models indicate that might well be our future normal, as compared to hot and dry (the one constant is “hot”).Hot-and-wet doesn’t “work” though, since we rely on snow for water storage and there simply is no way to capture all that runoff if it just rains instead.
chopper
@MCA1:
I know what you mean. My problem is that ‘climate change’ is the effect of the main cause. It’s like talking about the flu in terms of the symptoms rather than the flu itself. Whether or not it works better in terms of ‘branding’, scientifically it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Then again it wouldn’t be the first time branding is more effective than facts.
MCA1
@chopper: Can’t disagree with your last statement. Good analogy re: the flu, as well. We agree to agree!
C.V. Danes – I wasn’t trying to assess blame for the current situation (and certainly not put it on scientists), just wondering if things might have turned out somewhat differently, in terms of pre-educating the public before the carbon emissions industry got their hysterical denial machine in full gear, had there been a lobbying firm behind the first publishings coming out of the scientific community on the matter.
Tenar Darell
I swear to dog we could be living in the MaddAddam Trilogy. What are people doing, using the series as a blueprint? (Sometimes fiction seems to almost conjure reality, even if it was already inspired by that same reality).
chopper
@MCA1:
The problem is that it’s not like we haven’t had bad heat waves or droughts before. Or floods. But we’re seeing them more often; I wish there was a nifty two-word phrase to describe that effect, that may have a better zing to it. The ‘change’ in ‘climate change’ is slow enough that many people shrug it off. But showing them that in their town 500-year floods now happen every 50 years may make them take notice. I dunno, I have a hard time imagining what it’s like to be someone who doesn’t take the issue very seriously.
EthylEster
@chopper gave a link to WaPo:
I want to know God’s role in NFL touchdowns/interceptions/etc.
Do these moronic athletes really think God spends his Day of Rest watching American football, every second of every game?
Ruckus
@EthylEster:
Well he is everywhere and knows everything. Or is that Santa Claus? I get those two mixed up.