News blog

It’s cold up north…

snowman#.JPGMuch of the northern hemisphere is feeling the impact of some seriously cold weather at the moment.

Andrew Revkin has a nice post on the Dot Earth blog explaining how much of the cold weather is down to a pattern of atmospheric pressure called the Arctic Oscillation, which is similar to the El Nino / La Nina cycle in the Pacific. This year, he says, there has been an “an extraordinary negative plunge” in the ocsilation’s index “taking it below any such reading since at least 1950”.

As Revkin points out, many commentators are trying to link the weather to climate change, with little in the way of evidence to back them up.

The question has even appeared in the UK’s parliament, with Labour politician Ed Miliband asked by Conservative John Redwood, who is not entirely convinced by the science, which climate model had predicted the current very cold winter. Miliband responded, “I can hardly believe that question … The weather fluctuates, as anyone knows, and the notion that a cold spell in Britain disproves the science of climate change is something that I believe not even [Redwood] believes.”

Leo Hickman and George Monbiot are also taking climate change sceptics to task over their reporting of the weather, asking “why is there a national outpouring of idiocy [in the UK] every time some snow falls?”

Finally, the Times has a nice photo of a boy walking his yak in the snow in India.

Image: a snowman near Barnsley recently / K. Sanderson

Comments

Comments are closed.