Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Does polar vortex prove global warming a hoax?

Today's weather report                       (c) dailymail.co.uk
Today has been unusually cold in much of the United States.  Colder than it's been in decades.  So cold that the mountains are freezing in Florida.  Montana feels as low as -62°F, reports Daily Mail; and in New York City, Central Park was 5F on Tuesday, the coldest January 7 since 1896.
Cold is normal during the winter but many say it's a pretty long time they felt it this cold.

Is this a proof that global warming is a hoax.  Many climate change doubters have already taken to the twitter and other media platforms to say so.  Finally they now have 'an evidence' to justify their doubts. One of those doubters, of course, is billionaire businessman Donald Trump.  Here are two of his tweets during the week:



FoxNews has dubbed the present weather condition 'global cooling', insisting we should "forget global this warming." But does the present cold prove that the science of global warming is flawed?  Not so. If anything researchers say the deep freeze could represent how global warming is changing dynamics in the Arctic.
It further lends credence to the fact that our climate is changing.  Here is how BusinessWeek explains it:
"The Arctic is heating faster than the rest of the world, hurried along by the disappearance of polar sea ice. Bright white ice reflects energy back into space; dark blue water absorbs it. Arctic temperatures are about 2 degrees Celsius warmer there than they were in the mid-1960s. (The average temperature increase for the Earth’s atmosphere overall is about 0.7 degree C, since 1900.)
In other words, the temperature difference between the Arctic and North America is shrinking. That’s one factor causing wobbliness in the jet stream, the west-east current that circles the Northern Hemisphere, according to Jennifer Francis, research professor at Rutgers University. Normally, that river of air keeps low-pressure cold air contained above the Arctic and holds higher-pressure warm air above the temperate regions, where most people live."
The polar vortex in no way disproves climate change.
"Arctic warming is altering the heat balance between the North Pole and the equator, which is what drives the strong current of upper level winds in the northern hemisphere commonly known as the jet stream. Some studies show that if that balance is altered then some types of extreme weather events become more likely to occur," writes The Guardian.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's Christmas for global warming deniers. The problem is that they don't want to understand the science of climate change.