It seems to me that one of the implications of destabilizing the weather using fossil fuels is the Arctic weather is drifting around where it should not be.
Conditions in the Arctic have gone crazy. In late February, for example, temperatures in some locations spiked more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. More than a dozen major climate records have been broken in just the past three years: high winter temperatures, low winter and summer sea ice, extensive thawing of permafrost, and so on. But unlike in Las Vegas, what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. For almost a decade, scientists have been predicting that rapid Arctic warming may disrupt atmospheric circulation patterns, including the infamous polar vortex, that control winter weather all around the northern hemisphere, including the U.S., northern and central Europe, and northern Asia.
Jennifer Francis, an Arctic and weather specialist at Rutgers University, was one of the first scientists to connect these dots. At an American Geophysical Union conference way back in 2011, she presented a hypothesis and preliminary data analysis indicates that the warming Arctic and related climate changes could conspire to alter the jet stream and extreme weather. She explains the phenomenon nicely in an article that Scientific American released today.
No comments:
Post a Comment