Record cold temperatures have been recorded across the country this week. The most extreme weather is hitting western New York, where at least seven people have died. At least six feet of snow has already fallen on parts of Buffalo, and another two to three feet is expected today. Tuesday was the coldest November morning in the country since 1976. Temperatures dropped below freezing in every state including parts of Hawaii on Tuesday and Wednesday. This comes just days after NASA reported last month was the warmest October on record.
Eric Holthaus talking:
the science says that this is another example of extreme weather and how climate change is affecting it. In this case, the Great Lakes are, since I think the year—since the 1970s, have decreased their ice cover by about 70 percent. So, all that extra open water in the wintertime is giving more chance for things like lake-effect snow to form.
lake-effect snow is a very intense, narrow band that forms off the lake. If you get a persistent wind over warm water with cold air above, that makes it an extremely unstable atmosphere. And what happens is it turns into basically a thunderstorm of snow, and it falls right over that same area for hours and hours on end. And that’s what happened this week.
climate change is boosting the amount of energy that’s available in the atmosphere, in general, by heating the atmosphere, retrapping the sun’s incoming energy, and then that kind of gives an extra boost into these kind of weather systems. when you’re talking about drought or extreme precipitation, in general, what climate change will do will make the wet days wetter, and it will make the dry periods more dry. So, again, this lake-effect snow is one example of that.
I think the real only reason to deny the changes that are happening in the atmosphere right now because of humans is political at this point. So, people are motivated by a worldview that doesn’t allow for things like humans changing the weather. So, that’s how I explain it, personally.
I think the football team, the Buffalo Bills, called for volunteers yesterday to scoop out the stadium, because I think one of my fellow meteorologists calculated that it would be something like eight-person years of time that it would take to scoop out that snow, like 200,000 tons of snow or something, that fell in that stadium.
We have—six of the last 10 months have been the warmest such month on record. I’m going back to the late 1800s, so—but we have evidence from tree rings and from ice cores going back several thousand years that show that it’s been—this is the warmest year in that entire stretch of time. So, just because we have a snowstorm here, it does not—definitely does not mean that climate change is somehow not happening.
On the East Coast, in New York, in New York City, was almost peak fall time this weekend, and we had a tornado outbreak in the Southeast, as that snowstorm moved to the Northeast. And on the West Coast, we’re having a Santa Ana wind event, which it tends to boost the chances of wildfire. And in southern Florida, there were record highs at the same time record lows were being felt in the Midwest. So, it was definitely quite an extreme week this week as far as weather.
you have to remember that we’re just one patch of land on this huge planet. So, even though the United States is cold right now, actually, on Tuesday, the same day that all 50 states hit a freezing temperature, the Northern Hemisphere as a whole was about almost a full degree Celsius above normal. So, just because the cold pattern is happening here doesn’t mean it’s happening everywhere.
the only reason not to talk about climate change anymore is, I think, political. So, to be true to the science, we can find a link for extreme weather events almost all around the country or around the world right now. The amount that it’s measurable is somewhat up for debate. So, for example, for this lake-effect snow, snow seasons in western New York are pretty variable, so it’s really hard to pull out that pattern or that signal of global warming. But the science has shown that it’s there. So, I think to talk about the science in a way that reflects how climate change is affecting weather patterns, I think that’s the honest
— source democracynow.org
Eric Holthaus, meteorologist who writes about weather and climate for Slate. His most recent article is “Global Warming Is Probably Boosting Lake-Effect Snows.”