A soon-to-be published study has found that the rise of blizzards are a result of man-made global warming. While this assertion seems counterintuitive—how can global warming cause more blizzards?—there’s substance to the findings.
“The answer lies in atmospheric physics,” writes The Huffington Post. “A warmer atmosphere can hold, and dump, more moisture, snow experts say.”
The Huffington Post shares evidence of the rise in blizzards:
— The United States has been walloped by twice as many of the most extreme snowstorms in the past 50 years than in the previous 60 years, according to an upcoming study on extreme weather by leading federal and university climate scientists. This also fits with a dramatic upward trend in extreme winter precipitation — both rain and snow — in the Northeastern U.S. charted by the National Climatic Data Center.
— Yet the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University says that spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has shrunk on average by 1 million square miles in the last 45 years.
— And an upcoming study in the Journal of Climate says computer models predict annual global snowfall to shrink by more than a foot in the next 50 years. The study’s author said most people live in parts of the United States that are likely to see annual snowfall drop between 30 and 70 percent by the end of the century.
“Shorter snow season, less snow overall, but the occasional knockout punch,” Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said to The Huffington Post. “That’s the new world we live in.”
Climate scientists agree that less snow and more blizzards is not far fetched, and actually makes sense. The warming caused by global warming decreases the amount of snow that falls each year and shrinks the snow season, but when the snow hits, it will hit hard.
“Strong snowstorms thrive on the ragged edge of temperature — warm enough for the air to hold lots of moisture, meaning lots of precipitation, but just cold enough for it to fall as snow,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center to The Huffington Post. “Increasingly, it seems that we’re on that ragged edge.”
The Huffington Post shares:
The world is warming so precipitation that would normally fall as snow in the future will likely fall as rain once it gets above the freezing point, said Princeton researcher Sarah Kapnick.
Her study used new computer models to simulate the climate in 60 to 100 years as carbon dioxide levels soar. She found large reductions in snowfall throughout much of the world, especially parts of Canada and the Andes Mountains. In the United States, her models predict about a 50 percent or more drop in annual snowfall amounts along a giant swath of the nation from Maine to Texas and the Pacific Northwest and California’s Sierra Nevada mountains.
This is especially important out West where large snowcaps are natural reservoirs for a region’s water supply, Kapnick said. And already in the Cascades of the Pacific Northwest and in much of California, the amount of snow still around on April 1 has been declining so that it’s down about 20 percent compared to 80 years ago, said Philip Mote, who heads a climate change institute at Oregon State University.
Kapnick says it is snowing about as much as ever in the heart of winter, such as February. But the snow season is getting much shorter, especially in spring and in the northernmost areas, said Rutgers’ David Robinson, a co-author of the study on extreme weather that will be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
*Occupywallstreet does not even mention CO2 in its list of demands because of the bank-funded carbon trading stock markets run by corporations.