Coldest Winter Ever: Climate or Weather?

Posted February 26, 2008

Four research keep track of global warming and other climate changes: the UK’s Hadley Centre and Royal Statistical Society along with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the University of Alabama at Huntsville. All four centers recently updated their data, which confirms that we just had the largest 12 month change in weather that ever recorded.

All agree that during the past year our planet grew significantly …. colder.

Over
the past year, China experienced its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad saw its first snow in recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile
– you get the idea.

Here is a compiled list of all the sources, which note that the cooling
ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C. This may seem small and yes, it is weather not climate. The Daily Tech asserted that "it wipes out nearly all
the warming recorded over the past 100 years".

Anthony Watts, the scientist who compiled the data, disputed this characterization noting that "There has been no erasure. This is an anomaly with a large
magnitude, and it coincides with other anecdotal weather evidence. It
is curious, it is unusual, it is large, it is unexpected, but it does
not “erase” anything."

Scientists quoted by the Daily Tech
link the cooling to reduced solar activity. This, they conclude, is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The
dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out.
While the data do not disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to
warm the planet, they do demonstrate that powerful factors are cooling it — at least for the moment.

Adds the Daily Tech

"This is not especially good news, since cold is more damaging than heat.
The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans — and
most of the crops and animals we depend on — prefer a temperature
closer to 70.

Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum
were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as
the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news."

The New York Times has a good report here. They close with a scientist who notes that "There is this desire to explain everything that we see in terms of
something you think you understand, whether that’s the next ice age
coming or global warming." He might add that there remain plenty of sound economic and political reasons to reduce greenhouse gas emissions via efficiency improvements and alternative fuels.