[spenrose]

"What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/201...

“Sea surface temperatures off the coast of New England right now are at record levels, 11.5C (21F) warmer than normal in some locations,” says Penn State climate researcher Michael Mann. “There is [a] direct relationship between the surface warmth of the ocean and the amount of moisture in the air. What that means is that this storm will be feeding off these very warm seas, producing very large amounts of snow as spiraling winds of the storm squeeze that moisture out of the air, cool, it, and deposit it as snow inland.”

[jessaustin]

This link seems to imply that the record snowfall was caused by global warming. That wasn't the question. The question was, how could the writer of TFA have changed his analysis of snowfall records to "account" in some fashion for global warming? E.g., should old, theoretically pre-warming, records be scaled down, or scaled up, or is there some other adjustment to be made?

[tjradcliffe]

Nobody knows. The climate is intensely non-linear, and as such can only be predicted by models that are comparable in complexity to those for turbulent flow.

This is not to say that anthropogenic climate change is not real--there is plenty of evidence for it--but that climate models in their current state, and in almost any plausible state to come, are not up to the task of addressing these sorts of relatively short-term variations.

Even saying things that are probably true, like "Climate change will result in more extreme weather events because the heat engine of the climate will have more power behind it and it is being progressively pushed out of the mid-20th-century near-equilibrium" doesn't tell us anything about specific <em>types</em> of climate events. Maybe it'll result in more and heavier snowfall. Maybe it'll result in more severe hurricanes. A hundred years from now we'll have the data to look at the distributions so we can tell. Today, we are largely in the dark.

Someone here quoted Michael Mann saying that high sea-surface temperatures were responsible for more moisture in the air resulting in higher snowfall. Well and good, but if New England experienced a series of unusually dry winters we'd be pointing to high sea-surface temperatures changing wind patterns resulting in drier air over the region, and so on. Almost any weather event is capable of a nice linear-sounding "explanation", but weather prediction is still terrible, which tells you how seriously those "explanations" should be taken.

[masklinn]

One thing's for certain, we're going to live in interesting time (the bad kind). A prediction a few decades ago was that if the Gulf Stream stopped, European weather would look much more like America's.

Latitude-wise, Boston is about halfway between Rome and Florence, very slightly south of Dubrovnik (which is used as the sets for Game of Thrones' King's Landing and Qarth), Liverpool is a dead ringer for Edmonton.