“Thus we have a potential climate change paradox. Rather than a general warming everywhere, the loss of sea ice and a warmer Arctic can increase the impact of the Arctic on lower latitudes, bringing colder weather to southern locations.” — National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Arctic Report Card: Update for 2010.
NOAA, formed by an amalgamation of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey (1807); the U.S. Weather Bureau (1870); and the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries (1871) is saying that the abysmally cold winter weather bouts that we’ve gotten this year and last year are from the effects of an ongoing warming trend in the Arctic during the previous summers.
The summer warming reduces both the area and thickness of ice, allowing the darker ocean to absorb warmth from the sun.
Then, in the fall, the excess heat rises, disrupting the normal wind patterns, which have historically tended to swirl around the Arctic and keep the cold where it belongs.
A video of the phenomenon can be seen a www.wwfblogs.org/climate/content/arctic-report-card-oct2010.
On the NOAA site, there are some excellent graphics, showing the recent tendencies for temperatures to be warmer than the historical average in the north and colder than the historical average further south: http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/atmosphere.html
One of the new hotspots up north seems to be Baffin Island and the west coast of Greenland.
Out of curiosity, I went to the Environment Canada weather data website to see what sort of temperatures they were getting when Red Deer was nudging towards –40 degrees C on Nov. 23-24.
Lo and behold, Iqaluit barely dipped below the freezing mark. And by 9 a.m. on Nov. 24, it had gotten up to a balmy 3.1 C.
Remember, Iqaluit is about as far north of us as California is south of us, and normally in November, its average daily temperatures range from highs of –9C to lows –17C.
It’s worthwhile to check their weather occasionally.
As I write this on Nov. 27, it has been raining — yes, raining — most of the day up there.
The oil companies are rubbing their hands with glee, since this means that they will be able to drill up there without having to dodge as many icebergs.
And the climate science deniers are also happy, since it’s all hidden from the general consciousness down south.
Throw in a few extra blizzards here (see my March 10th column) and a few more deep freezes there, and it’s enough to convince the folks who failed high school science that the world is cooling, not warming. But all is not rosy.
The estimated 100 billion barrels of oil up in the Arctic will only keep our global appetite sated for another three years or so.
And when the mega-drought really starts hitting the American south-west, like it did during the Medieval warm period (see my Feb. 24 column), there will be an exodus that will make the biblical one look like an average morning commute. It will be an exodus towards cooler climes, so they will likely be thumbing a lift to the land of beavers and maple syrup. Ominously, some of them will start to look for scapegoats.
And since their powers of reasoning have been largely honed on celebrity “news” shows, reality TV, and pro sports, they might easily ascribe the cause of the problem to wrathful deities or bad Fung Shui.
And they might just as easily see the solution as being cheap beach front property on Baffin Island.
Sound far-fetched? Sound like a bad dream? I’ve got news for you. We already live in a dream world where a very significant portion of the population automatically distrusts any inconvenient science coming from an esteemed organization like NOAA.
Evan Bedford is a local environmentalist. Direct comments, questions and suggestions to wyddfa23@telus.net. Visit the Energy and Ecology website at www.evanbedford.com