NYT : Global Warming Causing Increasing Snow Cover Which Is Making It Cold

Last week they said that snow cover was decreasing ….. Every day it becomes more apparent that climatologists can’t even describe the present, much less forecast the future.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26cohen.html?src=twrhp

Bundle Up, It’s Global Warming
By JUDAH COHEN
Published: December 25, 2010

THE earth continues to get warmer, yet it’s feeling a lot colder outside. Over the past few weeks, subzero temperatures in Poland claimed 66 lives; snow arrived in Seattle well before the winter solstice, and fell heavily enough in Minneapolis to make the roof of the Metrodome collapse; and last week blizzards closed Europe’s busiest airports in London and Frankfurt for days, stranding holiday travelers. The snow and record cold have invaded the Eastern United States, with more bad weather predicted.

All of this cold was met with perfect comic timing by the release of a World Meteorological Organization report showing that 2010 will probably be among the three warmest years on record, and 2001 through 2010 the warmest decade on record.

How can we reconcile this? The not-so-obvious short answer is that the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes. Last winter, too, was exceptionally snowy and cold across the Eastern United States and Eurasia, as were seven of the previous nine winters.

For a more detailed explanation, we must turn our attention to the snow in Siberia.

Annual cycles like El Niño/Southern Oscillation, solar variability and global ocean currents cannot account for recent winter cooling. And though it is well documented that the earth’s frozen areas are in retreat, evidence of thinning Arctic sea ice does not explain why the world’s major cities are having colder winters.

But one phenomenon that may be significant is the way in which seasonal snow cover has continued to increase even as other frozen areas are shrinking. In the past two decades, snow cover has expanded across the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Siberia, just north of a series of exceptionally high mountain ranges, including the Himalayas, the Tien Shan and the Altai.

The high topography of Asia influences the atmosphere in profound ways. The jet stream, a river of fast-flowing air five to seven miles above sea level, bends around Asia’s mountains in a wavelike pattern, much as water in a stream flows around a rock or boulder. The energy from these atmospheric waves, like the energy from a sound wave, propagates both horizontally and vertically.

As global temperatures have warmed and as Arctic sea ice has melted over the past two and a half decades, more moisture has become available to fall as snow over the continents. So the snow cover across Siberia in the fall has steadily increased.

The sun’s energy reflects off the bright white snow and escapes back out to space. As a result, the temperature cools. When snow cover is more abundant in Siberia, it creates an unusually large dome of cold air next to the mountains, and this amplifies the standing waves in the atmosphere, just as a bigger rock in a stream increases the size of the waves of water flowing by.

The increased wave energy in the air spreads both horizontally, around the Northern Hemisphere, and vertically, up into the stratosphere and down toward the earth’s surface. In response, the jet stream, instead of flowing predominantly west to east as usual, meanders more north and south. In winter, this change in flow sends warm air north from the subtropical oceans into Alaska and Greenland, but it also pushes cold air south from the Arctic on the east side of the Rockies. Meanwhile, across Eurasia, cold air from Siberia spills south into East Asia and even southwestward into Europe.

That is why the Eastern United States, Northern Europe and East Asia have experienced extraordinarily snowy and cold winters since the turn of this century. Most forecasts have failed to predict these colder winters, however, because the primary drivers in their models are the oceans, which have been warming even as winters have grown chillier. They have ignored the snow in Siberia.

Last week, the British government asked its chief science adviser for an explanation. My advice to him is to look to the east.

It’s all a snow job by nature. The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it.

About Tony Heller

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17 Responses to NYT : Global Warming Causing Increasing Snow Cover Which Is Making It Cold

  1. grayman says:

    I smell BULLSHIT

  2. Dave N says:

    I’ll bite.. What caused extreme cold and snow before the turn of the century, like in the mid 70’s? We didn’t have glo-bull warming then..

  3. If it gets hot enough the whole world will be covered with snow, and it will be year round. I’m dreaming of a white 4th of July.

  4. PJB says:

    The inference being that if this gentleman has deduced such an “obvious” relationship then the great minds behind the GCMs must surely have included such information so that they would easily predict these effects…..ohhh, that’s right, they had no clue up to the arrival of snow and cold, in winter.

  5. maguro says:

    They’re just describing a negative feedback loop. In other words, we’re not doomed after all.

  6. Was this article peer reviewed before publication? If not global warming believers better speak up.

  7. John Edmondson says:

    That seems a bit thin to me. Snowcover is available at :-

    http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/files/wkcov.nhland.txt

    Snow cover takes off around week 40-44 in the year (for NH). The problem is the sun is getting lower and lower in the sky at the same time.

    This is another argument that doesn’t hold water, similar the the Kara/Barents Sea ice anomoly high pressure causes cold winetrs in Europe.

    Much more likely the cause is the sun, and the lack of activity. Henrik Svensmark has this theory which accounts for this.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1qGOUIRac0

    There are a few of these videos, well worth watching.

    There is also an experiment running at CERN which will hopefully confirm Henrik’s theory.

    http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/1635/2010/acp-10-1635-2010.pdf

    The bottom line is the sun controls the climate on Earth, indirectly via the propogation of cloud nucleation points in the Earth’s atmosphere. More clouds when the sun is magnetically weak, as it is now. More clouds mean more sunlight is reflected into space, which means the earth is colder.

  8. Paul H says:

    So why did we have mild winters upto 2007 when most of the ice loss at the Arctic actually occurred?

  9. MrCannucistan says:

    I was just thinking the same thing maguro. If more snow cover reflects more energy back into space, there is less energy in the system, not more. Sounds like a negative feedback to me also.

    And this dome of air next to the mountains sounds more like a Venturi effect than anything else. That would be consistent with an increase in ‘concentration’ of energy, but once the energy spreads out the levels would once again return to normal.

    So where is all the extra energy coming from again?

    MrC

  10. A C Osborn says:

    This is Real CLIMATE CHANGE, not the man made global warming kind LOL.

  11. Andy Weiss says:

    Why didn’t they tell us this when we were all being told that we were going to fry? Shows you they know absolutely nothing, or the unintended consequences of their policies.

  12. Bruce says:

    Alan Caruba has written a response to Judah Cohen’s NYC column. (via Tom Nelson)

    Get your popcorn out, its a fine read indeed!

  13. Brian G Valentine says:

    There must be a market for this slop, or they wouldn’t be peddling it. I must say, global warmers have thick skins.

    With most people, there would be a limit to the intelligence insulting garbage they could take – before they couldn’t tolerate being taken for an idiot any longer.

    There seems to be no lower limit here

  14. Lester says:

    The term is Climate Change…not Global Warming.

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