Spring Delayed, Europe Shivers

LONDON — “When will this winter ever end?”
Thursday’s Plaintive headline in Britain’s Daily Telegraph was prompted by forecasts that the big freeze gripping much of Europe is likely to last well into April.
From Ireland to Romania, unseasonable snowfalls have caused travel chaos, power outages and serious losses to livestock farmers during the coldest March in almost half a century.

Sun-starved Germans have endured their gloomiest winter in at least 43 years, while Northern France is shivering in near-freezing temperatures more than a week after the official arrival of spring.
The cold weather phenomenon, which has also affected the parts of the United States, is being blamed on a slowing of the Atlantic jet stream that scientists say is paradoxically linked to global warming.
This time last year, northern Europe and the eastern United States were basking in a mini-heat wave that brought the warmest March on record in some areas.

It was one of the many examples of climate phenomena that made 2012 a record year for extreme weather events in some regions, as my colleague Christopher F. Schuetze reported in January.
Last year saw the start of an unusually harsh winter in China, record-breaking temperatures in Australia, summer floods in Britain, drought in the American Midwest, and a storm that devastated parts of New Jersey and New York in late October.

As my colleague Sarah Lyall has written, quoting Omar Baddour of the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, extreme weather events are increasing in intensity as well as frequency.
They are signs that climate change is not just about rising temperatures, but also about intense, anomalous weather events of all kinds, according to Mr. Baddour.

Europe’s freezing spring, far from reinforcing the arguments of climate change skeptics, is actually one of the consequences of man-made global warming, according to climate experts.

Scientists in the United States and elsewhere have explained that the loss of Arctic sea ice as a result of global warming is disrupting the course and strength of the westerly jet stream, resulting in longer winters in some years.

“The sea ice is going rapidly. It’s 80 percent less than it was just 30 years ago,” Jennifer Francis, a research professor with the Rutgers Institute of Coastal and Marine Science, Told the Guardian. “This is a symptom of global warming and it contributes to enhanced warming of the Arctic.”
Ms. Francis warned back in September that the phenomenon might bring a harsh winter to northern Europe.


http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/spring-delayed-europe-shivers/?ref=weather