What a week it has been for weather across the country.

Central Plains: Just when residents of the Central Plains thought spring was starting, they were in for a rude awakening. Last week temperatures were above average for the entire region, some places reaching 60º (15º above average). That warm feeling and the belief spring was coming left faster than you can say sublimation. Beginning Monday morning, a strong system delivered late season blizzard conditions, dumping between 6 inches and a staggering 37 inches across Wyoming. To make matters even worse, now the residents are dealing with some of the worst flooding in recent memory. The National Weather Service issued a Civil Emergency Message saying

As of Wednesday afternoon, the Elm River at Westport has reached all time record levels. As a result, the Elm River has begun to flow into the northern portion of Moccasin Creek.

This is not a good situation for those folks and it will continue to get worse. There are reports of bridges collapsing and entire interstate highways completely closed.

South: As I go for the award for “Worst Transition Ever”, those same snow storms previously mentioned spawned tornadoes across Texas and Arkansas. This phenomenon isn’t as rare as you’d think. About once a year, a strong low pressure system moves in from the west, bringing a grab bag of weather to any state in its path. On the southern end of this storm, you will many times find severe thunderstorms. These thunderstorm soaked southern locations with up to 6 inches of rain.

Alaska: As you may or may not have heard, there is a volcano erupting to the southeast of Anchorage. In fact, I’d be willing to but that if Sarah Palin looked out her back door, she could see volcanic ash rising into the sky. On a serious note, the melting of glaciers caused by the eruption has in turn caused seriously flooding concerns for Alaskan officials. Rivers are up as much as 25 feet above normal heights with the dirty as mixing with the water.

The week isn’t over yet, and the east coast will have some rain showers all day tomorrow. At least there isn’t 2 feet of snow or a volcano right?

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/03/02/global-warming-pause.html

The article is a bit dated (March 2nd, 2009) but I just found it…

“For those who have endured this winter’s frigid temperatures and today’s heavy snowstorm in the Northeast, the concept of global warming may seem, well, almost wishful.”

To the general public that may be true, but climate scientists and really any scientist in general knows that a single storm or strong winter season is hardly indicative of Global climate change. In fact, several years of strong winters is not indicative of some long term, human induced or natural Global Climate change.  There are many potential paramaters that need to be analyzed. Changes in solar output, Changes in Walker circulation flows, etc. We are all familiar with El Nino and La Nina events. El Nino cause a small increase in temperature and La Ninas cause a small decrease in global temperatures.

“But climate is known to be variable — a cold winter, or a few strung together doesn’t mean the planet is cooling. Still, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades.”

Climate is not variable in the near term IMHO. It is variable on the long term. We know of cooling and warming episodes in our past. In fact, each time we have an ice age we experience Global Cooling and they have occurred many times throughout Earth’s history. Weather changes from day to day and year to year, but climate should remain relatively stationary over many years. Of course this depends on how fine of a scale we are using to measure it.

“Earth’s climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat.

“This is nothing like anything we’ve seen since 1950,” Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said. “Cooling events since then had firm causes, like eruptions or large-magnitude La Ninas. This current cooling doesn’t have one.”"

Last year had a strong La Nina IIRC and we are in one now as well so some cooling is expected. I had first heard about the current halt in warming in discussions on Eastern Weather Board. Global temperatures seem to be no longer rising as proponents of human induced global warming said they should. The computer models predict very significant increases in Global temperatures due to human activity by the end of this century. 

“Instead, Swanson and colleague Anastasios Tsonis think a series of climate processes have aligned, conspiring to chill the climate. In 1997 and 1998, the tropical Pacific Ocean warmed rapidly in what Swanson called a “super El Nino event.” It sent a shock wave through the oceans and atmosphere, jarring their circulation patterns into unison.

How does this square with temperature records from 2005-2007, by some measurements among the warmest years on record? When added up with the other four years since 2001, Swanson said the overall trend is flat, even though temperatures should have gone up by 0.2 degrees Centigrade (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) during that time.

The discrepancy gets to the heart of one of the toughest problems in climate science — identifying the difference between natural variability (like the occasional March snowstorm) from human-induced change.”

I think there might be a natural reason for the flatline. We are entering an ice age –>

We should be entering a period of drastic global cooling. Of course the increase in atmospheric CO2 due to human activities has offset this natural cycle but what this shows is that there is a natural means of absorbing atmospheric Co2 concentrations and that global temperatures should begin to cool.

This latest flatline in warming does not mean that human induced warming has not occurred or is not a problem. If we put a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere it is going to get warmer. There is absolutely no question about that. The actual extent of the warming induced by humans is not certain to me, however. 

But I expect a long period of global cooling to begin if it hasn’t started already. Have we pumped so much Co2 into the air that it is going to offset the natural cycle delineated in the picture above? If we have, good for us. We averted an ice age but now would be a good time to go green and slow down our emissions. If we do start seeing strong cooling in the upcoming years I’d recommend pumping more Co02 into the air. Leave your cars running…

Vincent Sapone

http://www.livescience.com/environment/090309-co2-rock-map.html

Without getting too much into the issue of Global Warming, Geologists are trying to discover a way to store greenhouse gases inside of rocks. This process is known as carbonization and is generally slow, taking thousands of years. Scientists have found 6,000 miles of potential ultramafic rocks at or near the surface capable of storing excess greenhouse gases. Scientists are attempting to speed up the process by experimenting with the idea of dissolving carbon dioxide in water and injecting it into the rocks.

If we do have a global warming epidemic on our hands, we can feel safe in knowing that scientists are hard at work in trying to figure out a solution. I just hope they don’t accidentally accelerate us into the next ice age!

Ice ages and carbon dioxide

This picture shows that our past ice ages and warming trends were certainly related to carbon dioxide concentrations and it is true that we have increased the concentration significantly in ppm since the onset of the industrial revolution. Yet, the ice core data shows that we should entering into a period of cooling now as well since another ice age should be in the process of occurring.

If the Global Warming proponents are correct, at least future generations will know how to avert the next ice age!

Vinnie