Cold Snap: Yes, It’s Global Warming

There were two main reasons why we started calling Global Warming by the euphemism “Climate Change”. One was that the Bush (Senior) administration’s team at the UN Climate Talks in the run-up to Kyoto didn’t like to use such frightening terms. The other is that plain and simple “warming” doesn’t quite cover it.

Yes, average global temperatures are rising steadily, as we all know - there is no scientific disagreement about that. But what is going on underneath the obvious is that there is a lot more energy in the climate system. That means that the weather is wilder and more unpredictable than before - and getting more so every year. It was a good decade or more ago that the IPCC warned us that one result of climate change was that extreme weather events would become as likely as smaller ones. More energy means more instability and unpredictability.

>>See also: What to Learn from Bad Weather

The strength of hurricanes, the length of droughts, the temperature of heatwaves, the frequency of floods: these are all going up. The insurance business noticed it first (of more or less any industry), and they were warning us at the UNFCCC meetings from early on (along with AOSIS members concerned about sea-level rise). But what is less well-recognised is that it is just as likely that we’ll have extreme blizzard or low temperatures because of changing weather patterns due to climate change.

You get a little, local cold snap (which is what we are getting here in the UK as cold winds blow across from Siberia - unusually, as most of our weather comes from the West) and up pop all these people claiming that there’s no such thing as global warming. Don’t you believe it! We are unlikely to see any more “Frost Fairs” on the Thames any time soon.

The last Frost Fair was held on the Thames nearly 200 years ago, in February 1814, and lasted four days. It wasn’t just the milder climate that put an end to the so-called “little ice age” that lasted from the mid-14th to the 19th centuries; it was also due to the fact that the new London Bridge provided much less of an obstacle to the water flow – this and the progressive building of embankments during the 19th century increased the speed of the water so that icing up was a great deal less likely.

Instead of expecting frost fairs, you might well want to enjoy the snow. We will see less and less of it over the coming years.

Image: The Frozen Thames, 1677. Wikimedia.

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