| Page 2 of 2 < |
March in January! Or Is It Mayday?
Sandals and shorts have won out over boots and long underwear outside this restaurant in Adams Morgan. "I think it's a bit scary. It's too warm," said one Bethesda resident.
(By Melina Mara -- The Washington Post)
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
Listen: Scary quotes from experts.
"Is it really a broadly based area that's seeing particular change? The answer is yes," says Ted Scambos, a glaciologist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. "From Europe, the East Coast, north to the Arctic and across to Siberia, there's a very large swath of the Northern Hemisphere for the months of September, October and November that [were] exceedingly warm . . . "
So it's bad. Except for one thing. What you might call, at the moment, the Denver factor.
Denver got four feet of snow in December. The third big storm blew in Friday. Snowdrifts of 10 feet! An automobile-snuffing avalanche in a mountain pass west of town! In Denver, January is still January.
Because what we are experiencing and what Denver is experiencing are both part of a thing called weather, not climate. Climate change is real, but it's a background phenomenon, the cicada-song white noise on the horror-movie soundtrack, distinct from the thuds and screams and moans of specific weather events.
"It's very dangerous to blame climate for weather," says Richard Alley, a professor of geosciences at Penn State University.
But he doesn't let climate change off the hook when discussing our warm winter.
"No, we didn't cause it, but we made it more likely," he concludes. It's like rolling loaded dice in a craps game.
But Dennis Feltgen, a National Weather Service meteorologist, says climate change isn't the culprit. It's El Niño. Warm water in the tropical Pacific, changed wind patterns, lots of balmy air blowing our way from the southern United States.
"We're in an El Niño, which has absolutely nothing to do with global warming," Feltgen says. "It keeps a lot of the cold air locked up in Canada, and makes the West Coast of the United States stormy, which we've seen, and makes the southern one-third of the country wetter than normal."
And for some, El Niño is dandy.
"Keeps the hurricanes away and the cold winter away. I'm all for it," said Colin Offner, golfing happily at Hains Point.
Bulletin: Cooler weather is imminent. The weather will be almost normal, briefly, before all hell breaks loose again.
