A Real Blue Meanie

[poliphilo]

We watched the weather forecast. A great, amorphous, blue bulge of severe stuff- a real blue meanie-  was burgeoning up from the South West. It swelled as far as Brummagem- where it was met by winds from Scandanavia- a hail of chunky, little arrows- which bounced against it and started pushing it back . Phew!  We northerners will be spared the worst. Nevertheless it snowed again last night.

They say this is the harshest winter for 18 years. 

And the planet is warming up?

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

And the planet is warming up?

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.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's true- we've had some ridiculously mild winters. This is more like it was in my childhood.

I'm a bit of a sceptic about global warming- mainly because I'm a contrarian. If everyone is lining up to tell me that such and such a thing is true I start wanting to look for the flaws in their argument.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

My husband started as a sceptic, but after all the weather recording he did for his PhD, he is now convinced that the climate is changing.

Whether that's due to the activity of human beings or whether it's just due to us still warming up after the last ice age is a separate and much more complicated question.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't suppose we can actually answer that question. What annoys me is that the Al Gore faction have assumed the moral high ground without- actually- having proved their case.

[chochiyo-sama.livejournal.com]

Yes, this was what I was going to say. With global warming comes more extreme weather. I believe I heard that there were tornadoes in England last year--and that is almost unheard of.

When i was a child, we had snow up to the roof of our chicken house. the last several years, we've only had puling 4 or 5 inch snowfalls.

The ocean currents get screwed up, and hten all the weather goes bonkers as well.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, we've been getting tornadoes- but only little ones. I don't think anyone has been killed by a British tornado yet.

It does seem as if global weather is becoming more extreme.