Saturday 22 November 2014

Snowmageddon

'You global warming advocates look kinda silly now that we are getting record snow fall' said one lady to me during the week as New York received a years worth of snow in just 3 days.
Of course climate-change sceptics are always groping for anything to embrace as evidence that global warming doesn't exist but a quick look at the science behind these catastrophic storms suggests that they do not occur despite global warming, but in fact because of it.
The basic science behind snow and its relationship to climate change is fairly straightforward as warmer temperatures cause more water to evaporate into the atmosphere and warmer air holds more water than cooler air. The warming results in air that becomes supersaturated with water, often bringing drenching rainfall, followed by flooding or, if it is cold enough, heavy and intense snowfall.
A study of 20th century snowstorms by the Northern Illinois University department of geography found that most major snowstorms in the United States occurred during warmer-than-normal years and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Centre predict that a warmer future climate will generate more winter storms.
So more water in the atmosphere and when you mix in a blast of unseasonably frigid conditions courtesy of the jet stream delivering Arctic air down into the United States because of the warmed Arctic region, you get a massive dumping of snow.
It doesn't help that the ice coverage on the Great Lakes has dropped with the warming climate, creating conditions favourable to more evaporation as the temperature difference between the lake and the air is greater creating heavier snowstorms.
Rather than looking silly, it confirms that the warmer atmosphere is holding more water vapour and so there is more of that water vapour available for precipitation and as long as it's cold enough for that precipitation to be snow you will get larger snowfalls.
It really isn't that difficult to grasp unless you are grasping incorrectly to try and prove your point which is based on ignorance.

10 comments:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
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Lucy said...

Usual argument from the sceptics...nothing at all.

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
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Lucy said...

The 300,000+ people who die because of it each year may beg to differ.

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
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Lucy said...

I'm not God, not quite anyway.

For the 5,268th time this year, climate change makes the existing more powerful, it doesn't create it.

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
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Lucy said...

No proof? You talking about the God thing?

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
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Lucy said...

And since when have we started to take climate change deniers seriously? We have long since moved on from that point.