Is global warming causing harsher winters?

The Daily Star, AFP, Richard Ingham, Claire Snegaroff, March 28, 2013

A man uses a shovel to clear snow from his car in Llangollen, north Wales,
March 25, 2013. REUTERS/Phil Noble

                              

PARIS: Millions of people in northern Europe are still battling snow and ice, wondering why they are being punished with bitter cold when -- officially -- spring has arrived and Earth is in the grip of global warming.

Yet some scientists, eyeing the fourth year in a row of exceptionally harsh late-winter weather in parts of Europe and North America, suggest warming is precisely the problem.

In a complex tango between ocean and atmosphere, warming is causing icy polar air to be displaced southwards, they contend.

"The linkage is becoming clearer and clearer, I think, although the science has not yet been settled," said Dim Coumou of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) near Berlin.

The theory derives from a long-studied Arctic phenomenon called a positive feedback -- in plain words, a vicious circle.

Rising temperatures are melting the Arctic's floating cap of sea ice, especially in summer.

In 1979, when satellite measurements began, summer ice covered some seven million square kilometres (2.7 million square miles), roughly equivalent to 90 percent the area of Australia.

In September 2012, summer ice hit its lowest extent on record, at just 3.4 million sq. kms (1.31 million sq. miles).

Take away reflective ice, and you have a dark sea that absorbs solar radiation, which in turn reinforces the melting, and so on.

But the theory suggests the added heat, stored over a vast area of surface water, is also gradually released into the atmosphere during the Arctic autumn.

It increases air pressure and moisture in the Arctic, reducing the temperature differential with lower latitudes.

Here's what happens next: The polar vortex, a powerful circular wind that essentially pens Arctic air to the roof of the world, begins to weaken.

Finding itself released, a mass of moist cold air spills southward, bringing snow and chill down into North America and Europe.

And it tends to stay there, because of what happens to the jet stream.

Instead of encircling the northern hemisphere in a sturdy and predictable fashion, this high-altitude wind takes a lazy looping path, zigzagging over the United States, the Atlantic and Europe. The southern parts of the loops get a bout of cold weather that becomes stalled in place.

"Heat that is stored in the (Arctic) ocean can rapidly transfer to the atmosphere, and this affects the dynamics" of northern hemisphere weather patterns, said Coumou in a phone interview.

"We've had a couple of winters (in Europe) where you've had rather shorter-term cold spells, of a duration of maybe 10, 20, 30 days... It's been the same in the continental US and Canada where they've seen similar quite bizarre cold spells but of a relatively shorter period."

Charles Greene, director of the Ocean Resources and Ecosystems Program at Cornell University in New York, said Arctic warming added a joker or two to the climate pack.

"With the changes in sea ice, we set up a situation where we stack the deck, increasing the probability of these invasions of cold Arctic air," he said.

"But what's less predictable is which regions in the mid-latitudes will get hit. We're not sure yet how it will interact with other parts of the climate system in any given year, for instance how it will interact with El Nino and La Nina."

Greene also postulates that Superstorm Sandy last October wreaked its havoc because of a high-pressure zone over Greenland, possibly strengthened by changes triggered by sea-ice loss in the Arctic.

Like a barrier closing off a street, this mass of air forced Sandy to turn sharply west so that it slammed into the US East Coast. Normally, late-season hurricanes follow a northeastern track and peter out at sea.

The warming-and-winter scenario is far from unanimous in climatology. Other experts call for more evidence, especially from longer-term data.

"Looking at what's happening right now, in early spring, it's too early to say whether it is due in part to a temporary climatic swing," said David Salas-y-Melia of Meteo France, the French meteorological agency.

Jeff Knight of Britain's Met Office pointed to a natural climate variation called the North Atlantic Oscillation, whose phases tend to span 30-40 years.

Several decades of relatively harsher winters alternate with relatively milder ones -- but there can also be years within these phases that buck the trend.

"In Europe, the effect of climate variability is quite large," said Knight. "There are possible links to explain why sea ice might influence atmospheric circulation, but the jury is very much still out at the moment."

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"Recalibration of Knowledge" – Jan 14, 2012 (Kryon channelled by Lee Carroll) - (Subjects: Channelling, God-Creator, Benevolent Design, New Energy, Shift of Human Consciousness, (Old) Souls, Reincarnation, Gaia, Old Energies (Africa,Terrorists, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela ... ), Weather, Rejuvenation, Akash, Nicolas Tesla / Einstein, Cold Fusion, Magnetics, Lemuria, Atomic Structure (Electrons, Particles, Polarity, Self Balancing, Magnetism, Higgs Boson), Entanglement, "Life is necessary for a Universe to exist and not the other way around", DNA, Humans (Baby getting ready, First Breath, Stem Cells, Embryonic Stem Cells, Rejuvenation), Global Unity, ... etc.) - (Text Version) 

"...The Weather... Again

My partner has been "against the grain" in the past years, giving you what I have channelled about the weather. Is it global warming? No. Is it going to get better? No. This is a two-generation cycle. There will continue to be earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, and storms. This is a recalibration of life in the ocean, and humanity must go through this in any way they can. This is a cycle, a known and expected one, but since you haven't gone through it in modern times, it's not well understood yet. ..."

“2011 and Beyond” - What you are seeing, and why - Jan 16, 2010 (Kryon channeled by Lee Carroll) (Text version)

“… So now we've refreshed that which we have said before, a review. You are in the middle of a cycle that will bring cooling to the planet. It is not a heat cycle, but rather a cooling cycle. But it always starts with a short heat cycle. It has been here before. It will come again. It is a long cycle - one generation plus five years. That's how long it's going to last. It starts with the melting of the ice caps, which is far more than any of you have seen in your lifetime or those of your ancestors. It is a cycle whose repetition is thousands of years long, but one that has not yet been recorded to the books of Human record. But it's definitely been recorded in the cores of the ice and in the rings of the trees.

Thousands of years old, it is, and it happens in a cyclical way. It's about water. It starts with that which is the melting of the ice caps to a particular degree, which has a profound effect on the planet in all ways. You can't have that happen without seeing life change as well as Gaia change and you've seeing it already. What happens when you take that which is heavy on the poles [ice] and you melt it? It then becomes cold water added to that which is a very, very gentle and finite balance of temperature in the seas of the planet (1). The first thing that happens is a redistribution of the weight of water on the thin crust of the earth from ice at the poles to new water in the seas. The results become earthquakes and volcanoes, and you're seeing them, aren't you? You are having earthquakes in places that are not supposed to have earthquakes. Volcanoes are coming to life in a way that you've not seen before on a regular basis. There will be more. Expect them.

Is it too much to ask of a Human Being that if you live by a volcano that you know might erupt, maybe you ought to move? Yet there will be those who say, "It hasn't erupted in my lifetime or my parents' lifetime or my grandparents' lifetime; therefore, it won't." You may have a surprise, for all things are changing. That is what is happening to Gaia. ….“

THE RELATIONSHIP TO GAIA - April 2010 (Kryon channelled by Lee Carroll)

New Mini Ice Age

"The weather you have today, and all the alarming attributes of it, is a scenario of what was scheduled to happen on Earth anyway. I review again that the weather changes you are seeing prophesied by myself, 21 years ago, are not a surprise. The changes are not caused by the pollutants you put in the air. You call it global warming and that's a nice phrase, and perhaps that will get you to put less pollutants in the air – a very good thing. But what you are seeing in the weather shift today was not caused by Humans putting things into the air. It would have happened anyway in about 300 years."

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"In the days of the Lemurians, the water level of the Pacific Ocean was almost 400 feet lower, and that's only 50,000 years ago. [Kryon invites science to check this out – the water level at that time.] That was a water cycle working, and the reason it was lower was due to so much of the water being stored as ice. Today you're going through another water cycle that will eventually lead to cooling. The last one was in the 1400s."

"Science sees that at about 1650. As mentioned, they are so slow there is no remembrance that a Human has of them except in past writings and in the rings of the trees. The time span of the changes is so great that environmental record keeping does not exist in the form that it does today. But you can still look at the rings of the trees and at the striations of the rocks and can generally figure out that a few hundred years ago, you had a mini-ice age. Now you're going to have another one."