Posted 2017-February-08, 15:05
Here in the Pacific Northwest, in (usually) sunny Victoria we are having our 3rd consecutive day of snowfall: some areas had as much as 17 inches Monday. We had snow in December, January and now February. My golf course has been open for, I believe, a total of 4 days since December 4th, and is so snow covered now that I doubt that it will open for at least another week, even if we get the promised increase in temperature (and rain) forecast to start tomorrow.
In addition, the temperatures have been consistently low throughout. I haven't seen statistics but this has been, in my view, easily the coldest winter in the 31 years I have been here, and I cannot recall any winter in which we had snow on three separate occasions. We did have a once-in-a-century snowfall in 1996, over Xmas and New Years, and this isn't that bad in total but is far worse in duration.
Why?
The meteorologists I have heard speak of it say that this is due to global warming, and it makes sense to me even tho it sounds paradoxical. This is the sort of thing that gets climate deniers all worked up, because they see unseasonably cold measurements as evidence against global warming. But the explanation at least in part seems to be that historically there is a wind system that circles the northern areas, which system is known as the polar vortex. It has the effect of trapping cold artic air in the artic. However, the vortex (I can't help but think of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy whenever I say or write 'vortex') has been weakened by the effects of global warming, so the cold air gets out far more readily than it used to. While we see lower temperatures, the artic is seeing, relatively, a higher increase in temperature than we are seeing a decrease. On balance, then, the artic is warming more than we are cooling.
Which is one reason the isolated measurements that al likes to post on occasion are, even when real, irrelevant and misleading.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari