In a warming world, why do some winters still seem unusually severe?

In a warming world, why do some winters still seem unusually severe? 

Climate Change and Cold Winters

 The world’s leading scientists and governments have concluded, “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and a “settled fact,”. 

Yet anyone who lives in the East Coast of the United States or in various sections of Europe knows that winters seem as severe as ever. 

We still have record-setting snowstorms and still set records for cold temperatures in different places. There are several reasons why this occurs in a warming world. 

Abnormal Weather

First, many people, especially in the northern latitudes, view massive snowstorms or blizzards as iconic indicators of a severe winter. 

CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL

In addition, because global warming means more water vapour in the atmosphere available for precipitation, climate science actually projects that most extreme snowstorms are going to get worse in a great many northern locations for the perceivable future. 

That may seem counterintuitive, but that is one goal of science, to keep our intuition from leading us astray. 

What is the difference between Climate Change and Global Warming

Second, the world has warmed approximately 1.4°F since 1950. That does not mean the end of winter or the end of record daily low temperatures. It is still going to be much, much colder on average in January than July. 

As for daily temperature fluctuations, they are so large at the local level that we will be seeing daily cold records—lowest daily minimum temperature and lowest daily maximum temperature—for a long, long time. 

That is why climatologists prefer to look at the statistical aggregation across the country over an extended period of time because it gets us beyond the oft-repeated point that you cannot pin any one single, local temperature record on global warming. 

Temperature Fluctuation

In 2009, the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research explained, “Record High Temperatures Far Outpace Record Lows Across U.S.”: Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.

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The NCAR study looked at millions of daily high and low- temperature readings are taken over 60 years at some 1,800 U.S. weather stations. It pointed out “If temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and lows being set each year would be approximately even.” 

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, there were actually “slightly more record daily lows than highs.” However, in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, “record highs have increasingly predominated, with the ratio now about two-to-one for the 48 states as a whole.” 

Climate Change and Cold Waves

Since that study, the ratio has increased further. Therefore, we can expect that for the foreseeable future, locations in the United States and around the world will still routinely see daily low-temperature records set; however, overall, there will be many more high-temperature records set. 

Third, our perception of a cold winter is relative. As the globe warms, we will tend to think of mild winters as the norm. When we do get a cool winter, it will, relative to recent experience, seem unusually cold. This is sometimes called the phenomenon of “shifting baselines.” Readers who are younger than 30 years old have never lived through a single month in which the planet’s average surface temperature was below average.

Climate Change and Oceans