Sunday, February 05, 2012

The Climes They Are A-Changin

The weather is fine.  Creepy fine.  Our North Coast rainy season so far has amounted to about a week, instead of 3 months.  Sunday in Arcata was as warm as it "normally" gets in summer, but sunnier. 

It's been like that elsewhere in the U.S., where winter hasn't happened.

Meanwhile in Europe it's unusually and in some cases catastrophically cold.  Italy is colder than "normal," the UK got a sudden big snowstorm, but the worst is central Europe.  The Ukraine has seen temps dip to 33 below, and more than 130 resulting deaths have so far been counted.

Some folks, even some in the media, have noticed that climate scientists predicted this kind of thing as a result of global heating. Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States,” says Gerald Meehl, the lead author and a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting.”

But I'll bet some are also wondering what I'm wondering: if it's this warm in February, what's it going to be like in July?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

what WILL it be like?? Last year May was a rain out here in the rust belt north. The warm rain filled our reservoirs. When this warm water was released in dry August it stressed by beloved trout so I didn't get a fly in the water. One more micro event of climate change. most people are going around with a happy face obout no snow not so cold. Me.. I'm not happy.
Lemuel