Weather It Is (The Climate in the News)

Good Afternoon:

The drought continues to deepen, and is being mirrored by an even worse drought in California (which is being referenced as the worst drought in 500 years).  Here, we have to go back 150 years to find a year as dry as this one.

The cause of the drought is a sharp change in the wave pattern of the polar jet, which is unusually far southward in some areas (where it is very cold) and correspondingly far north in others (where it is drier).  The unusual web pattern is being attributed to arctic sea ice melting that is itself most likely a consequence of elevated carbon dioxide levels (often associated with global warming).

There are those who say that all of this has nothing to do with global warming; they say that the global average temperatures did not really warm last decade -- ignoring the fact that last decade is the warmest overall and that 6 or 7 of the last 10 years have been the warmest on average of any years in the temperature record.  Also to grasp at the last 10 years of the record (from NASS GISS, below: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A.gif) one has to really be able to argue that we're going to head back down to where we were 40 years ago.  There is no evidence for this.

Further support for a changing climate is found in the maximum/minimum temperature records. While there have been many low temperature records set this January (in the US), the number of high temperature records now exceeds the number of cold temperature records by 2:1.
See this reference:http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/01/climate-temperature-records-leon-cold.

So, where does that leave us: hoping for rain.  However, the next few days should see an upward trend in temperatures.  We can hope that the end of the week will see a more substantial rain, and indeed rain does look likely.  We'll have to wait and see if we trend towards a small event or a large event; right now the scale of the rainfall is unclear.  The larger the rainfall, the colder the temperatures and this might make for more interesting weather.

Barry Lynn