Weather Channel’s Senior Meteorologist, Stu Ostro, Changes His Mind On Climate Change
This video is a year old, but it features an interview with Stu Ostro, Senior Meteorologist at the Weather Channel. He discusses why the science convinced him that the weather extremes we are experiencing around the world can only be explained by factoring in a warming atmosphere:
*via Peter Sinclair’s Climate Denial Crock of the Week*
This week, Ostro blogged about how El Nino and La Nina are not the only effects that are responsible for this year’s wild winter:
It doesn’t work like that. La Nina and El Nino are important influences upon the atmosphere, directly in areas near the equatorial Pacific and indirectly in some other regions. However, they aren’t the only game in town, especially as one gets farther from the source and in areas where other weather/climate factors are just as if not more important.
This winter some of those other factors at times overwhelmed the influence of La Nina, which historically on average has resulted in below-average snowfall from Oklahoma to New Jersey and above-average temperatures in the Southeast.
Ostro goes on to make the point that global warming and extreme snowfall are not mutually exclusive:
In fact, as I have been documenting for years, there is evidence that the former is playing a role in the latter (and in unusual cold events), by way of those ridges of high pressure.
Also, the recent extraordinary extremes in precipitation are consistent with there being increased moisture in a warmer global atmosphere. Yet, more moisture alone is not enough to explain the details of what’s happening in the day-to-day weather outcomes; that’s where the atmospheric circulation (those ridges etc.) comes into play along with changes in stability, as processes are required to focus and lift the water vapor and turn it into historic amounts of precipitation that have been frequently occurring lately, in the form of both rainfall and snowfall, such as has happened yet again in recent days (this time snow in South Korea).
Read Ostro’s full article on The Weather Channel.
More links:
High Pressure Pushed Wacky Weather Over U.S.
Interesting. Several times this winter there were comment made on the Weather Network about El Nino and La Nina as if they were the only factors in the unusual precipitation in various parts of the world; while global warming was rarely mentioned.
Yes, it makes one wonder – is it a deliberate omission, or just an editorial decision that it’s too complicated for the average viewer? I think that if climate science hadn’t become the highly polarized, politicized issue that it is in the U.S., we would be hearing more about it in our weather forecasts.