26-01-2014, 04:00 PM
(This post was last modified: 27-01-2014, 03:10 PM by Dawn Meredith.)
I sent this article to my old friend Joel who works at NOAA for his comments:
Hi Dawn -
Just a quick reply. Been fighting exhaustion so just got to your
email. Haven't had any opportunity to research the topic in depth, or
to look up the Jennifer Francis papers, but, it turns out that about a
week ago I did speak to the program manager who oversees our Arctic
Research Program in my office to ask her about the very same topic.
What she told me, as I recall it, was more or less the following.
Yes, there is a good deal of thinking that our current cold weather
reflects Arctic warming. It's a well-known fact that the Arctic is
warming at an alarming rate (causing, for example, melting sea ice). As
a consequence of the fact that the Arctic is warming faster than other
places, the temperature gradient, which is the difference between the
temperatures at polar and mid-latitudes (e.g., between the Arctic and
the continental US) has become smaller. Some people think that
temperature gradient helps confine the polar vortex to the Arctic, but
that the lessening of the temperature gradient leads the polar vortex to
wobble or wander about; in other words, because of global warming the
polar vortex is no longer kept in place above the pole. When it wanders
the jet stream moves with it, and that is what is causing all that
frigid air to be rerouted south at the moment. I'm not a meteorologist,
so I hope I'm grasping and repeating this correctly. Perhaps this is
what Jennifer Francis is writing about.
I just googled Jennifer Francis and found this rather nice video; maybe
this will help:
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/climate...nd-climate
It's distressing that some people think that a cold winter casts doubts
on climate change or global warming, and even more distressing that some
people feel that this "debunks" the thousands of research papers written
by scientists worldwide about the alarming rate of warming of the earth
... as if all those scientists are too dumb or too dishonest to take
into account occasional cold spells in coming to the conclusion that the
planet is warming. All I can say is that the earth's climate is a
complicated system, filled with variability. Think of it as a giant
"slinky" walking down a staircase; things oscillate and fluctuate, and
sometimes some of the springs in the slinky seem to go backwards ...
even while the slinky in bulk is going down the stairs. It seems to me
that claiming that a cold winter debunks global warming is akin to
claiming that just because some individual stays healthy after smoking
two packs of cigarettes a day for thirty years debunks the fact that in
general smoking is terrible for people's health. But for that matter,
while the insane right wing accuses all the world's scientists of
participating in a giant conspiracy to ... do what? ... drive capitalism
out of business ...? ... (really? do they really believe that that is
why scientists get out of bed in the morning ...?) ... I wonder that
they don't also accuse all the scientists who claim that smoking is bad
for the health of participating in a conspiracy to drive tobacco
companies out of business ....
Anyway, I don't recall anybody attacking my views ... but then again,
maybe as a climate professional I hear so many off the wall attacks on
climate science that I just ignore them ... :-)
Gotta go to sleep. Hope all is well. Thanks for allowing me to comment
on the article, which I think is really quite interesting. Cheers -
-- Joel
Hi Dawn -
Just a quick reply. Been fighting exhaustion so just got to your
email. Haven't had any opportunity to research the topic in depth, or
to look up the Jennifer Francis papers, but, it turns out that about a
week ago I did speak to the program manager who oversees our Arctic
Research Program in my office to ask her about the very same topic.
What she told me, as I recall it, was more or less the following.
Yes, there is a good deal of thinking that our current cold weather
reflects Arctic warming. It's a well-known fact that the Arctic is
warming at an alarming rate (causing, for example, melting sea ice). As
a consequence of the fact that the Arctic is warming faster than other
places, the temperature gradient, which is the difference between the
temperatures at polar and mid-latitudes (e.g., between the Arctic and
the continental US) has become smaller. Some people think that
temperature gradient helps confine the polar vortex to the Arctic, but
that the lessening of the temperature gradient leads the polar vortex to
wobble or wander about; in other words, because of global warming the
polar vortex is no longer kept in place above the pole. When it wanders
the jet stream moves with it, and that is what is causing all that
frigid air to be rerouted south at the moment. I'm not a meteorologist,
so I hope I'm grasping and repeating this correctly. Perhaps this is
what Jennifer Francis is writing about.
I just googled Jennifer Francis and found this rather nice video; maybe
this will help:
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/climate...nd-climate
It's distressing that some people think that a cold winter casts doubts
on climate change or global warming, and even more distressing that some
people feel that this "debunks" the thousands of research papers written
by scientists worldwide about the alarming rate of warming of the earth
... as if all those scientists are too dumb or too dishonest to take
into account occasional cold spells in coming to the conclusion that the
planet is warming. All I can say is that the earth's climate is a
complicated system, filled with variability. Think of it as a giant
"slinky" walking down a staircase; things oscillate and fluctuate, and
sometimes some of the springs in the slinky seem to go backwards ...
even while the slinky in bulk is going down the stairs. It seems to me
that claiming that a cold winter debunks global warming is akin to
claiming that just because some individual stays healthy after smoking
two packs of cigarettes a day for thirty years debunks the fact that in
general smoking is terrible for people's health. But for that matter,
while the insane right wing accuses all the world's scientists of
participating in a giant conspiracy to ... do what? ... drive capitalism
out of business ...? ... (really? do they really believe that that is
why scientists get out of bed in the morning ...?) ... I wonder that
they don't also accuse all the scientists who claim that smoking is bad
for the health of participating in a conspiracy to drive tobacco
companies out of business ....
Anyway, I don't recall anybody attacking my views ... but then again,
maybe as a climate professional I hear so many off the wall attacks on
climate science that I just ignore them ... :-)
Gotta go to sleep. Hope all is well. Thanks for allowing me to comment
on the article, which I think is really quite interesting. Cheers -
-- Joel