From: frank theriault
On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 10:36 AM, John Sessoms <[email protected]> wrote:
> The way I understand it, global warming causes greater variability in
> weather patterns ... you get the same kinds of weather you always got, but
> going more towards the extremes.
>
> We got worse drought in the southeast for several years, now we're getting
> more bad winter weather - more frequent snows.
>
> Look for summers to get wetter with heavier rains for a while - then it'll
> cycle back to drought again.
>
> Global warming means there's more energy pumped into the weather cycles.
> It's like hitting a spinning top with a ball peen hammer. The top continues
> to spin, but it gets a whole lot wobblier.
>
> The mathematical model can tell you if you smack it hard enough it will fall
> over. Just can't tell you where it's going to land.
Not that I want to get into YAGWFW (yet another global warming flame
war), it's all about global averages, isn't it? Local weather may be
colder or more snowy than usual, but Virginia's snowstorms may be
balanced out by the fact that Toronto's winters have been much milder
of late than in the past (last year being an exception to that trend).
We've had a pretty mild winter this year, with lots of rain and almost
not snow. Thirty years ago it would have been much colder and
snowier.
And that is what I understand to be consistent with the mathematical
models as they've been explained to me. I'm a little weak in math, so I
have to get stuff like that translated into hillbilly English before I
can understand it.
Some years Toronto has mild winters, some years Toronto has bad winters.
As the effects of "global warming" accumulate, the extremes of that
variability will increase - the mild winters will be milder, the bad
winters will be snowier. Over the long term there will be some bias
towards greater numbers of mild winters, but the main effect the models
predict is greater variability.
And if the effects of milder winters spreads far enough north and south,
and are sustained for long enough a lot of water that's currently locked
up in glaciers could get let loose into the seas, which would affect sea
levels, salinity, ocean currents ... a lot of complex systems that we
don't quite yet understand.
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