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Paul Beckwith is a part-time professor and PhD student of abrupt climate change in the Department of Geography at the University of Ottawa. He recently wrote this paragraph in response to a shift of 40 degrees Celsius in two days in Ottawa:
Not a typical January in Ottawa. 10 degrees C for several days one week; -30 the next; followed by 10 the one after that. Why?
Normally the high altitude jet streams that circle the planet are predominantly from west to east with little waviness. Weather is cold and dry northward of the jets (Arctic air sourced) and warm and wet southward (moist tropics and ocean sourced). Now, and moving forward, the jets are extremely wavy and as the crests and troughs of the waves sweep by us each week we experience the massive swings in temperature. The extreme jet waviness is due to a very large reduction in the equator-to-Arctic temperature gradient caused by an exponentially declining Arctic reflectivity from sea-ice and snow cover collapses (which causes great amplification of Arctic temperatures). Additional amplification is occurring due to rapidly rising methane concentrations sourced from sea-floor sediments and terrestrial permafrost.
Observed changes will accelerate as late summer sea-ice completely vanishes from Arctic within a few years. Largest human impacts will be food supply shortages and increases in severity, frequency, and duration of extreme weather events.
Here Professor Beckwith explains it in one minute and thirteen seconds:
[youtube=http://youtu.be/MPbP-myvpLY]
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More links:
Paul Beckwith’s Blog : Time To Leave Fantasy Island: Climate 2.0 Is Here
Well, Mr. Harper? Well, Mr. Kent? Gonna wake up from your Big Oil-induced stupor?
Thanks for this, Christine
🙂
Nice blog .. and I love that CCL Red Lake is partnering with CCL Ottawa – we are becoming too connected to fail …
Great post and one that I would love to reblog on Learning from Dogs.
Paul, you have my blanket permission to reblog anything you find on 350orbust, on LearningFromDogs (just a link somewhere to the original post is fine!).
Any chance I can get I similar “blanket permissions”? I’ve been wanting to talk about the “wavy jetstream for a couple of weeks, and now I’ve got a source!
This is kind of a sidetrack, but: I never bother asking permission to reblog. Life’s too short; data wants to be free: if a meme deserves to live, it should be fed.
Here in Prince Edward Island, the week of January 21st was incredibly cold (like in most of the country. However, January 30th and 31st broke heat records. On the 31st, temperatures in Charlottetown (provincial capital) reached a record 11,2 degrees Celsius.
No mention of climate change in the news.
Wow – the weather is getting weirder, and the media is getting quieter.
And most certainly, JP, you have blanket permission, too. I’m honoured when my posts get reblogged.
Thanks!
Yeah, this whole media silence when it comes to climate change is starting to p*ss me off.
Except for the Financial Post, which has had a frenzy of anti-science climate deniers publishing crap in the last week or two.
On the upside, CCL Canada published 6 letters in the National Post/Financial Post in the last week.
THANK YOU CCL!!!
From your Christine’s link to Paul Beckwith’s post Time to leave Fantasy Island; Climate 2.0 is here:
The temperature gradients between the pole and equator are decreasing at an astonishing rate – and that’s really scary news.
Scary. News. And yet, as you point out, the ‘experts’ in the field aren’t saying much, if anything, about it.
Here in the UK, I’m thinking that since the BBC is — in theory at least — answerable to the public for its content, it should be possible to put pressure on them to do something, like, I dunno, um, follow each and every regular weather forecast on TV and radio with a ‘climate forecast’. So as to do what they’re supposed to be doing (informing people!).
But I guess that’s like asking the oil-loving morans running Canada to change their spots…
LOL – oil-loving morans is right!
That’s where the tactics of Citizens Climate Lobby come in, P – organizing citizens to become engaged in democracy again, and along with lobbying MPs also write letters to the editor, Op Eds, and organize meetings with editorial boards of newspapers and other media organizations.
Let me know if you want to start the first CCL chapter in the UK.