The other night a meteorologist on a local TV channel remarked that “April is the new March” in our area. Considering all the talk about global warming, I thought this was a rather strange statement for a weather expert to make, but then I remembered what occurred in April last year …a major snowstorm hammered us, bringing down trees, limbs and powerlines. Hmm, maybe there’s some basis of truth to his statement, at least the past couple of years.
Already we’ve had a March that was very un-March-like, with little snow and fairly mild temperatures. Now this week has seen cold and snow much more representative of March than April. Even several of the far southern states were shivering with below-freezing temperatures. Not very good conditions for many of the springtime outdoor activities people look forward to. So is this recent weather flip-flop typical or atypical? To be honest, no one really knows.
In Chenango County and elsewhere, we’ve grown so accustomed to anticipating our weather according to calendar dates that we forget how volatile weather patterns can be. Trout fishing begins on April 1, vegetable gardeners often plant their early stuff around Good Friday, and then spring turkey season opens on May 1. Even the scheduled opening of baseball season goes by the calendar and not the possible conditions. But all these dates are based on weather averages amassed over many years. Realistically, it’s better to let the actual weather conditions at the time determine our activities. Who in their right mind would be shoveling snow off their garden so they could plant peas & onions just because it was Good Friday?
Is it really possible to accurately forecast long-term climate. Heck, even with all the sophisticated weather satellites and computer models, meteorologists have trouble accurately forecasting beyond a few days. And despite the warming trends that support global warming beliefs, consider that a 1974 CIA report concluded there was “growing consensus among leading climatologists that the world is undergoing a cooling trend.”
Yes, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased through the twentieth century. And during that time, global average temperatures rose until about 1940, but then fell until about 1975, rose again until 1998, and have since dropped again. Why?
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change first projected a global warming rate of 0.03°C per year in 1992. The errors of the IPCC projection over the years 1992 to 2008 were little different from the errors from the no-change model, which many climatologists use, when compared to actual measured temperature changes. But when the IPCC’s warming rate is applied to a historical period of exponential CO2 growth, from 1851 to 1975, the errors are more than seven times greater than errors from the no-change model. The no-change model still predicts that overall global average temperatures in each of the next 100 years will be the same as the previous year’s (average) temperature. Note that word “average” again. A hundred years? That’s just a quick blink in our planet’s history.
The levels of CO2 at the end of the Cretaceous period (age of the dinosaurs) may have been as high as 35 percent, as opposed to our current levels of 21 percent. Increased CO2, temperature and humidity will increase bioproductivity and plant mass but that in turn will actually lower the atmospheric CO2 level and create cooling. A popular theory of this phenomena that often accompanies the asteroid one is that the Earth just gradually changed in climate over a long time period, ushering in an ice age, and the surviving dinosaurs after the huge asteroid strike were unable to adapt to the colder, dryer climate.
