Warm Air Aloft

Strange climes, strange times

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
1/7/07
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp

It was chilly this morning.

Thirteen above, call it minus ten Celsius. But then, it’s BEEN cooler than is usual in these parts pretty much steadily since mid November. As a result, the wood pile is going faster than normal, and we’ve been getting winter conditions we don’t often see: whiteouts, white ice, snow tornadoes traipsing down the boulevard.

For all of that, it’s a dry winter. We only have about 60% of the snowpack we would normally have. A “normal” winter features lots of big fat snowflakes falling straight down at thirty degree temperatures.

The Sacramento Bee is warning residents to prepare for possible snow Wednesday night. It’s snowed exactly once in Sacramento since 1942. If Sac gets snow, what’ll happen up here? We’re prepared for wet heavy snow, the type that turns to cement the next day. Powder snow has entirely different properties.

It’s been an usually cold winter.

I looked at the weather for central Alaska – another place that has been colder than normal this winter – and it looks like another big blast of cold air is forming, preparing to move south.

This will probably astonish the folks back east and up north, who have been facing an entirely different set of circumstances this year. It was 72 in New York City the other day, and there was a striking picture of the Polar Bear club, looking unimpressive in their bathing suits under the warm sun, staging a protest against the un-winter-like weather. When I looked at the weather for NYC last night at midnight their time, it was 62 degrees. On January 6th. In Ottawa, which normally resembles Ice Station Zebra about now, it is raining, there is no snow on the ground, and the Rideau Canal – billed as the world’s longest ice rink – remains unfrozen. City authorities are contemplating alternatives for the city’s annual Winterlude and Ice Sculpture if things don’t get more seasonable. Cherry trees are blossoming in Washington, and even in Iqaluit, far up in Baffin Island, it rained the other day. It rains in Baffin Island in January somewhat less frequently than it snows in Sacramento.

The eastern half of North America isn’t the only place affected. Ski resorts are closed across much of Europe, and the Svalvard Islands, which saw their annual mean temperature rise from -2C in 1915 to 0 in 1977, now have an annual mean of plus 4C. They are well above the Arctic Circle.

Along with ski resorts and winter apparel stores, the two other losers back east are the maple syrup and pear industries, both of whom have crops that depend on cold winters in order to produce well in the spring.

Environment Canada forecasts that this pattern will stay in place until March. Privately-run prognostication outfits, however, predict that the sine wave that is the jet stream over North America will swap amplitudes, bringing warmth to the west and dropping the east into the deep freeze on January 14th. The National Weather Service, always anxious to meet any equivocation with strong obfuscation, decided that the short-term climate fields “don’t look particularly ENSO-ish”. Thanks for that update, fellows.

You pays yo’ money, you takes yo’ chances.

Maybe it’ll warm up here and cool off there, and maybe it won’t. Forecast is for rain unless it don’t. Hot unless it’s cold, sunny unless it’s night.

Much of this is caused by ENSO. ENSO, for those who were wondering and just to afflict those who were not, stands for “El Niño - Southern Oscillation,” which is a bolus of warm water that sloshes back and forth in the Pacific like waves in a bathtub. When it isn’t sloshing in any particular direction, conditions are normal, such as that is. When it sloshes eastward, we have an El Niño, which is Spanish for “Shitstorm” and causes crazy weather throughout much of the world. If it sloshes westward, we have a “La Niña,” which is a shitstorm with breasts. It also causes crazy weather throughout much of the world, but usually in reverse patterns to those encountered in an El Niño. Wet instead of dry, hot instead of cold, and vice versa.

Nobody knows why it does this, just that it does.

The paid apologists for Exxon have been quick to point out that El Niño existed before global warming and that all the odd weather we’re getting is a result of that. All fine and good, except that this is a fairly mild El Niño. BIG oscillations wreak incredible havoc on the west coast and parch Australia, and that hasn’t happened here. Tropical fish aren’t showing up in the waters off Los Angeles, and Peru isn’t getting 40 inches of rain in a bunch. This is a smallish oscillation. The climate fields just don't look particularly ENSO-ish.

It can’t account for longer-range things, like the fact that the polar bears, with a month less time to hunt on the ice, are starving to death, or why the North Pole had open water last August. It can’t explain why in Greenland, they are now raising strawberries where none grew before, and they have a small herd of cattle. Grizzlies and polar bears are starting to intrude into one another’s territory. Vast areas of Siberia are melting, an area bigger than France and Germany combined. Ominously, the thawing of the permafrost is releasing millions of tons of methane, another greenhouse gas. The ice cap on Ellesmere Island is breaking in two, a scary presage to what might happen soon to Greenland and possibly Antarctica.

David de Rothschild of the Top of the World Expedition said, “You can call it whatever makes you feel comfortable, climate change, global warming, a cyclical trend, green nonsense, solar flare, wobbly axis – whichever side of the fence you sit on, there is no denying something is amiss, when for the last two days the temperature here has only got down to -6 C.”

The “here” de Rothschild is referring to was the North Pole. He was complaining about the number of expeditions to the pole in recent years that have been cancelled due to snow and ice melting.

This is a mild El Niño. Big ones will occur, and sooner rather than later. We’re overdue for a big one.

In the meantime, the background climate continues to change, and that change is rapidly accelerating.

What happens when that big El Niño comes, and its effects are amplified by global warming?

How can we prepare for that?