Scientists: Global warming to blame for big U.S. snowstorms

[azmouse]

Quote:What caused the colossal snowfalls that buried much of the USA this winter, setting snow records in New York City and Chicago? One group of scientists blames... global warming.

Counterintuitive though it may be, "heavy snowstorms are not inconsistent with a warming planet," says Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Weather Underground, a private weather service.

The announcement was made at a news conference on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit environmental group. It was not published in a peer-reviewed study in an academic journal.

Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/...csp=34news

We may not get snow in the Phoenix area but we did have two blasts of unusually cold air that did a lot of damage to trees and plants that aren't used to winter weather. We had the terrible hail storm last October that damaged many trees and plants followed by the cold snaps. My poor citrus trees look like they've been chewed on and spit out, and many other plants are dried up and brown from the cold. Just very odd weather for this area.

[Peacetrain]

(03-02-2011 11:40 AM)azmouse Wrote:  

Quote:What caused the colossal snowfalls that buried much of the USA this winter, setting snow records in New York City and Chicago? One group of scientists blames... global warming.

Counterintuitive though it may be, "heavy snowstorms are not inconsistent with a warming planet," says Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Weather Underground, a private weather service.

The announcement was made at a news conference on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit environmental group. It was not published in a peer-reviewed study in an academic journal.

Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/...csp=34news

We may not get snow in the Phoenix area but we did have two blasts of unusually cold air that did a lot of damage to trees and plants that aren't used to winter weather. We had the terrible hail storm last October that damaged many trees and plants followed by the cold snaps. My poor citrus trees look like they've been chewed on and spit out, and many other plants are dried up and brown from the cold. Just very odd weather for this area.

In the 80's when global climate change really started to be discussed more seriously.. that was the scenario. Why the term global warming got attached to it, I will never know...but global climate change included horrid winters as well as soaring temps in the summer.

[RoyGBiv]

(03-02-2011 11:43 AM)Lucy in the Sky Wrote:  Why the term global warming got attached to it, I will never know...but global climate change included horrid winters as well as soaring temps in the summer.

I've been wondering this myself for a long time.

From what research I've been able to accomplish, the term was a lazily used one by scientists who were not speaking through public relations experts. Scientists of all varieties have this problem. They know what they're talking about, but they have trouble communicating it in a way those who have not been subsumed in the issue for decades can understand as clearly.

They used the term "global warming" because it was a precise explanation of what was occurring in the immediate term, particularly early in this research before many things were understood. That the real, long term effects would have consequences that do not on the surface seem to be suggest to a lay person by the term "warming" never really entered their thinking. It was obvious to them, and initially they were only talking to each other.

News outlets then began taking up the matter, in part as a result of the newly emerging 24/7 news cycle and the need of something to talk about. They latched on to the scientific articles, boiled them down to the essentials for public consumption, and used the phrase the scientists were using with each other but without explaining anything about what it meant beyond the denotative meaning of the words.