Cold Snap: Yes, It’s Global Warming

Richard Elen — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:00:51 +0000

There were two main reasons why we started calling Global Warming by the euphemism “Climate Change”. One was that the Bush (Senior) administration’s team at the UN Climate Talks in the run-up to Kyoto didn’t like to use such frightening terms. The other is that plain and simple “warming” doesn’t quite cover it.

Yes, average global temperatures are rising steadily, as we all know - there is no scientific disagreement about that. But what is going on underneath the obvious is that there is a lot more energy in the climate system. That means that the weather is wilder and more unpredictable than before - and getting more so every year. It was a good decade or more ago that the IPCC warned us that one result of climate change was that extreme weather events would become as likely as smaller ones. More energy means more instability and unpredictability.

>>See also: What to Learn from Bad Weather

The strength of hurricanes, the length of droughts, the temperature of heatwaves, the frequency of floods: these are all going up. The insurance business noticed it first (of more or less any industry), and they were warning us at the UNFCCC meetings from early on (along with AOSIS members concerned about sea-level rise). But what is less well-recognised is that it is just as likely that we’ll have extreme blizzard or low temperatures because of changing weather patterns due to climate change.

Polar Bears Take to the Thames in London [video]

Timothy B. Hurst — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:42:11 +0000

Yesterday at Planetsave, I wrote about a sculpture of two polar bears floating down London’s River Thames to bring attention to climate change and a new natural history television channel in the UK. Here’s a video of the bears in action:

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Cold Snap: Yes, It’s Global Warming

Polar Bears Take to the Thames in London [video]