We all talk about the weather, and there has been more weather to talk about.

Millions of people check with "The Weather Underground" for the latest. They want the color charts, maps, satellite photos, - and - the big picture from Dr. Jeff Masters.

As a Meteorologist, Jeff was a "Hurricane Hunter", flying with the National Oceans and Atmospheric Administration planes out of Miami. He flew right into the big ones, like Gilbert, and finally Hurricane Hugo. In 1995, Masters co-founded a web site, to make real-time sense of raw data pouring out of the National Weather Service.

This week, "The Weather Underground" was number 57 for traffic, out of all the Internet sites in the world. It's huge.

Now we need some answers, about the mega-rains, strange hot Summers, and blustery Northern winters. It's a treat to have Dr. Jeff Masters join us on Radio Ecoshock.

Of course, everyone wants to know how the Northern Hemisphere got so much cold and snow, after one of the hottest years on record. Before we talk about that, we quickly skip to another kind of emergency, on the other side of the Planet: the epic floods in Queensland, Australia,

Then we get to the blizzards in the U.S., record cold in Britain, and heavy snow throughout Northern Europe - is it just normal Winter, or something else?

Part of the problem is the media lens. One reason 911 was so over-powering: it happened in New York, an American news hub, with live cameras. The latest surprising winter weather is hitting New York, London, Berlin, Moscow, and Beijing - all the biggest news centers.

We don't hear about extra heat in South America. Crops in Argentina are threatened, yet another way that climate change will cause hyper-inflation in world food prices, and gaps in availability (read mass starvation) in the future.

Even in my own country, Canada, the major newspapers did not report wild heat in the Canadian Arctic and Greenland, up to 15 degrees above normal. Or buried little human interest stories in the back pages, how aboriginal people couldn't keep their ice cubes outdoors anymore, in January, because they melted. That is serious where people use the normally frigid outside as their refrigerators.

"South Baffin Swelters in Winter Heat Wave"
 http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/stories/article/98789_south_baffin_swelters_in_winter_heat_wave/

Reading the mass media, I could think the whole world is cooling. But it is heating. Jeff explains.

South America hit by heat wave
 http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ipad-application/south-america-hit-by-heat-wave/story-fn6s850w-1225979062525

It makes me wonder how long TV weathermen and women can keep reporting these extraordinary events without ever mentioning the words "climate change". It's kind of a joke around our house. We watch a long string of horrible weather records, and it's all just captioned "weird weather", - a strange string of accidents, with no cause. Any predictions on when the mass media will let people in on the secret?

Jeff compares the situation to CFC's (chlorofluorocarbons) used in refrigeration. There were warnings in the 1970's and early 1980's these could cause damage to the Earth's protective ozone layer. But governments did not meet to act until after a huge hole was found in the ozone layer, over Antarctica. With climate, it may take something like a complete melting of all the Arctic ice in Summer, to bring real action?

The relative heat wave in Canada's Eastern Arctic was unknown even to Canadians, until more populated cities started to melt recently. In the far North, there are few people, few weather stations, and no cameras, to record December temperatures up to 15 degrees Celsius above normal.

Every time the U.S. or the U.K. gets a big snow storm, the global warming deniers start chanting the mantra of "global cooling." More mocking videos, some of them from TV weather personalities, go up on You tube. In Jeff's blog, at wunderground.com, he suggest extra snow might be linked to climate change.

Here is the most relevant part from that blog posting.


From blog post by Jeff Masters, December 28, 2010:


"The remarkable Post-Christmas blizzard of 2010 has ended for the United States, as the storm has trekked northeastward into Canada. The blizzard dropped epic amounts of snow during its rampage up the U.S. Northeast coast Sunday and Monday, with an incredible 32" falling in Rahway, New Jersey, about 15 miles southwest of New York City. The highest populated areas of New Jersey received over two feet of snow, including the Newark Airport, which received 24.1". Snowfall amounts were slightly lower across New York City. The blizzard of 2010 dumped 20.0" inches on New York City's Central Park, making it the 6th largest snowstorm for the city in recorded history, and the second top-ten snowstorm this year. Remarkably, New York City has had four of its top-ten snowfalls in the past decade ..."

And in that blog entry, Jeff Masters begins to list off the top 10 snow-falls of Central Park, which range from 1888 to two in 2010.

 http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1717

Later, he continues, under this headline, quote:

"An unusual number of top-ten snowstorms for the Northeast in recent years

The Northeast has seen an inordinate number of top-ten snowstorms in the past ten years, raising the question of whether this is due to random chance or a change in the climate. A study by Houston and Changnon (2009) on the top ten heaviest snows on record for each of 121 major U.S. cities showed no upward or downward trend in these very heaviest snowstorms during the period 1948 - 2001. It would be interesting to see if they repeated their study using data from the past decade if the answer would change. As I stated in my blog post, The United States of Snow in February, bigger snowstorms are not an indication that global warming is not occurring. The old adage, "it's too cold to snow", has some truth to it, and there is research supporting the idea that the average climate in the U.S. is colder than optimal to support the heaviest snowstorms. For example, Changnon et al. (2006) found that for the contiguous U.S. between 1900 - 2001, 61% - 80% of all heavy snowstorms of 6+ inches occurred during winters with above normal temperatures. The authors also found that 61% - 85% of all heavy snowstorms of 6+ inches occurred during winters that were wetter than average. The authors conclude, "a future with wetter and warmer winters, which is one outcome expected (National Assessment Synthesis Team 2001), will bring more heavy snowstorms of 6+ inches than in 1901 - 2000." The authors found that over the U.S. as a whole, there had been a slight but significant increase in heavy snowstorms of 6+ inches than in 1901 - 2000. If the climate continues to warm, we should expect an increase in heavy snow events for a few decades, until the climate grows so warm that we pass the point where winter temperatures are at the optimum for heavy snow events."

That's the kind of compact facts and analysis that keeps wunderblog.com in the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. Plus all the snappy graphs and satellite shots we can't show you on radio.

Scientists have been predicting increased droughts in dry areas, and floods in wet areas, for a long time. But most of us thought it would happen in 2100, or maybe 2040. I never thought I'd see such climate instability, so soon. Is climate disruption coming sooner than we thought, and if so, what does that mean?

In our November 19, 2010 Radio Ecoshock show, Dr. Tim Garrett from the University of Utah said climate change is really a long-term natural disaster. He suggests weather extremes produce, quote "an ever increasing environmental pressure on civilization, that continually acts as an ever stronger force, that eats away at what we have produced in the past."

[Tim Garrett interview 24 min Lo-Fi]
 http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/climate2010/ES_Garrett_101119_LoFi.mp3

[Tim Garrett interview transcript]
 http://www.ecoshock.org/transcripts/ES_Garrett_Transcript.htm

When I heard that, I thought of storm-drains overwhelmed in England, levees breaking in the United States, the unhealed scars of massive flooding in Pakistan, crops burned out in Russia. Jeff Masters, is it possible extreme weather events, driven by climate change, could slowly cripple the global economy?

We agree that will happen.

It looks like the world climate has been destabilized, to some extent. Our science is now in catch-up mode, trying to understand how sensitive the whole Earth system is. Is it possible we might have a few relatively quiet years, in terms of storms, floods, and heat? If the climate moves in uneven steps, instead of a steady progression, the public and the politicians might lose focus.

Jeff agrees this is a major concern. Climate change can be step-like, rather than a steady curve upwards. He ominously expects a new and fairly permanent change to our climate, sometime in the next decade. No one knows when, but it is coming. But if we have a few quiet years, the climate deniers might persuade the public (who are only too happy to keep on with fossil fuelled life) that no action is necessary. Global warming has "stopped" these deniers would say. But the carbon continues to build up, and the physics of what happens is well known.

While most mainstream weather reporters dodge the connections to climate change, millions of people bail out to get the straight news from Jeff Masters and his co-conspirators at the Weather Underground.

The truth will get out.

I'm Alex Smith, and this is Radio Ecoshock.