Montreal Gazette Common Sense : The Arctic Is Melting At -30C Causing Winter Cold In Florida

Probably the most seductive form of climate-change denial has to be the snowstorm in Florida argument. It goes like this: If the climate is warming how come I’m f-in freezing?
We had another weird winter in North America and it’s not over yet: snow on palm trees, snowpocalypse in Chicago, Snowmaggedon in Washington. On Jan. 11, every state in the U.S. had snow except for Florida. However, Florida itself has had unusual cold snaps and snow this year. In December, there was a snowstorm in Israel that dropped two metres of snow

Counterintuitive though it may be, “heavy snowstorms are not inconsistent with a warming planet,” Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Weather Underground, the private weather monitoring agency, stated in a press release from the aptly named Union of Concerned Scientists.

“In fact, as the Earth gets warmer and more moisture gets absorbed into the atmosphere,” he said. “We are steadily loading the dice in favour of more extreme storms in all seasons, capable of causing greater impacts on society.”

To me, the simple common-sense explanation actually goes further. According to many studies across scientific disciplines, the Arctic is melting due to climate change. Now, if you’re close to something big that is melting, you are probably going to feel wet and cold, not hot. If you got on a warm bus and sat down next to a large melting block of ice, you would feel cold and even wet.

Because the Arctic ice cap is melting and we’re closer to it, we feel its effects. Our weather often comes from the north. The atmosphere is heating up. It can hold and drop more moisture, more rain and more intense storms of all kinds, a trend that is being borne out around the planet.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/

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