[Not just weather?]: BBC News - US heatwave raises climate complexity
In the last couple of Northern Hemisphere winters, with temperatures plummeting across tracts of North America and western Europe, "belief" in man-made global warming - it was widely reported - took a bit of a dip.
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The inference that any day's weather is related to the slow progress of global warming is one of the things that scientists find most frustrating - although comedian Bill Maher probably expresses that frustration more pithily than most scientists, commenting that not believing in climate change because it's snowing "is like saying the Sun might not be real because last night it got dark".
This is why columnist Thomas Friedman advocates the term "global weirding" rather than "global warming", because it includes the apparently contrary impacts that can result from an overall increase in global temperatures, such as cold snaps.
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Which basically leaves the US more and more dependent on coal for the electricity it is going to need in greater and greater quantities as the economy recovers and the population increases.
Throw in the potential for additional demand from more frequent heatwaves or cold snaps or both, and you have one of several human-mediated positive feedback loops for the climate.
1 comment:
I hear La Nina can do the same thing.
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