I often field questions here in the weather center about climate change, and its impacts on our daily weather. In this article from the Daily Mail Online, our recent rash of global extreme weather is discussed in the context of global climate change.
We here on the CNY Central team of meteorologists generally don’t get too involved in this topic since it is, to say the least, highly political. To be honest, we’d prefer to focus our efforts on the next few days, something remarkably less speculative in nature.
With that being said, I of course took some interest in what the article had to say. For example, while Pakistan has endured terrible flooding, other regions of the world, such as Russia, have had intense heat waves. On a recent edition of “Weekend Today in CNY”, my co-anchor Laura Hand and I showed our viewers video from Russia of roads actually melting due to the intense heat!
According to the article, this fits experts’ predictions regarding the changes global warming will bring to our weather on a day to day basis. Peter Stott of the UK Met Office (the United Kingdom’s equivalent of our National Weather Service, is quoted as saying: 'What we have observed generally is a tendency for more heavy rain fall, a tendency towards a greater risk of flooding and also a greater risk of drought as well.
'These are consistent with what we know about climate change,' he said.
Others disagree, saying that these are more closely related to seasonal changes or even items such as La Nina or El Nino.
The fact of the matter is this: the field of meteorology studying climate change is still in its infancy. While day to day weather patterns have been observed for literally thousands of years, the supercomputers needed to predict long-range weather conditions are a relatively recent invention.
It will be very exciting, though, to see where this particular field of meteorology takes us over the course of the next decade or so.
