Well, yes. It's the harshest winter for 18 years, which means we've had nearly 20 years of warm winters. If you go back to the 60s, winters were much colder and we could guarantee snow every winter. (At least as far as I recall.) Besides, it's certainly warming up in Australia. If only we had some kind of heat exchange system between the northern and southern hemispheres!
Global warming is actually terribly complicated, but one effect is that climate becomes more extreme. The type of storm that used to strike once every 50 years will now appear once every 7-10 years. There's just more energy in the weather system, and as it's a chaotic system that doesn't follow simple rules, everything is going to get harder to predict.
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Date: 2009-02-09 11:46 am (UTC)Well, yes. It's the harshest winter for 18 years, which means we've had nearly 20 years of warm winters. If you go back to the 60s, winters were much colder and we could guarantee snow every winter. (At least as far as I recall.) Besides, it's certainly warming up in Australia. If only we had some kind of heat exchange system between the northern and southern hemispheres!
Global warming is actually terribly complicated, but one effect is that climate becomes more extreme. The type of storm that used to strike once every 50 years will now appear once every 7-10 years. There's just more energy in the weather system, and as it's a chaotic system that doesn't follow simple rules, everything is going to get harder to predict.