Actually, the global warming proponents have it correct in the sense that the *average* temperatures are increasing around the planet. But let's face it, their usual speeches about global warming hold little sway at this particular time of year. Just a snippet of weather information I found on the internet for January, and you'd be forgiven for thinking we're in a global cooling period!
From today's China Daily
-- Two power plants in Southwest China's Sichuan province stopped supplying power on Wednesday due to the harsh weather. This caused the abortive transmission of 2.5 million kilowatts of electricity, China National Radio (CNR) reported on Thursday.
-- Ice caused a 5,000-square- meter workshop in a cement plant in Chongqing municipality to collapse on Wednesday, resulting in losses of more than 1.5 million yuan ($226,339), local broadcaster CQTV reported
-- A cold snap since New Year's Day has left parts of Guizhou province covered in ice. Though most expressways in the province reopened to traffic on Thursday, police warned it is still risky to drive on the icy roads as sleet continues to fall and the temperature remains below freezing point.
-- China's National Meteorological Center continued its forecast for freezing rain, which quickly turns into ice on the ground, for parts of South and Southwest China over the next 10 days. Icy rain and freezing temperatures caused chaos in 18 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions in January 2008, resulting in traffic deadlocks and power blackouts.
How fitting they compare this winter with that of 3 years ago, the 'snow crisis' that disrupted travel for millions during Spring Festival. This year, we are seeing similar arctic flow conditions that caused this mess, but the moisture is thankfully lacking in most parts of China. Let's hope it remains dry and cold, as opposed to wet and cold.
Now let's look at the North America forecast. From Accuweather
http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/news/story/44036/brutal-cold-makes-a-comeback-i.asp
In short, they are predicting the coldest winter since 1985 to cause a coast-to-coast chill. The main reason, if you view the link, is that the jetstream has formed a very unusual U-shaped pattern. Ordinaily, the jet stream dips up and down as it meanders across the continent, but this time it is staying locked into a U-shape. This means that arctic air is going to flow over the entire continent and stay there for about 3 weeks.
Incidentally, it is the same jetstream pattern over China right now which explains why the entire country is in this cold snap, including the southwest regions (as mentioned above) and the southeast regions (which affects here)
So the global warming proponents lose a lot of credibility during these kinds of winters. In fact, every winter I can remember for the last 10 years it has been abnormally cold like this, at least in some specific region for some specific time period.
But where they regain their credibility is during the summer when, similarly, we have seen abnormally hot summers for the last 10 years or more. The record hot summers last longer than the record cold winters, so they act to average things out above normal for the year. That being said, there are always exceptions here and there, which has become the new normal.
In short, it's best to think of climate change as producing more and more extreme weather events, or to consider it more as 'global weather gone wild' as opposed to simply 'global warming'
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