"Wacky Weather" here to stay

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Jordan Nichols

The amount of additional heat that entered the Arctic Ocean during the the summer of 2012 due to the decrease in sea ice was approximately enough to power the United States for about 26 years.  The trillion-dollar question is: how will this affect the weather?  Is our warming planet the driving force behind the unusual weather patterns witnessed recently all around the United States?  A webinar ("Our Wacky Weather and Disappearing Sea Ice: Are They Connected?") hosted by the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment & Policy attempted to analyze this challenging question, with a focus on weather in Alaska.
Jennifer Francis, a Research Professor at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at the Rutgers University, was the keynote speaker on this issue, providing her expertise on weather and the atmosphere.
According to Mark Twain, “climate lasts all the time, weather lasts only a few days.”  If Mark Twain could differentiate between weather and climate all those years ago, why do individuals continually get it wrong today?
People, mostly those who deny climate change in the first place, have always exploited cold weather events to argue that global warming doesn’t exist and isn’t a problem worth addressing.  This sort of fallacious reasoning is what makes weather and climate change so difficult for many people to connect.  A warming climate affects the weather, but we must consider long-term trends, not just one particular cold spell in Florida over the winter.  This logic also applies to the flip side of the coin; no one particularly warm weather event can be attributed solely to climate change.  Credible climate scientists use trend lines of weather over long periods of time in projecting where the climate is headed.
“The Arctic is warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the Northern Hemisphere," according to Francis.  "In 2011 alone there were 3000 maximum temperature records broken in the United States -- 3000 of them.  And 2012 is already on track to be the hottest year ever recorded in the United States.”
The melting of Arctic sea ice is another measurement that can be attributed to climate change:  “This past summer the sea ice was half as big as it should be and this change has only happened in the last 30 years.  And the volume [of the Arctic sea ice] has absolutely decreased by about 80 perent in just the last 30 years, which is really quite remarkable.”