Thursday, March 22, 2018

As Snow Pounds the Northeast, Scientists Explore Possible Links to Climate Change


By Andrew Herrera

There was an infamous episode in Congress in which Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe brought fresh snow into the chamber to question the scientific certainty of global warming. To the many American skeptics of climate change, his simplistic demonstration raised a good point. How could it snow so much when the Earth is supposed to be warming?

But the reality of climate change is more complicated, as a new report from the journal Nature suggests. A study led by faculty from Rutgers, MIT, and a Massachusetts research firm implies a link between the warming of the Arctic Ocean and colder, wetter temperatures for the northeastern United States. Looking at a variety of climatic factors, their research indicates that when the Arctic begins to heat up more rapidly, it has historically preceded colder winters for the mid-Atlantic and New England. This trend has run counter to earlier predictions that as the Arctic warmed, it would cause milder winters for North America, which would have been a social benefit for many American communities. It is an argument critics continue to make now, that climate change may not negatively impact society as much as scientists predict.

Yet this new research argues otherwise. Of course, the authors caution that the exact cause behind the relationship is unknown. It would be hasty to assume that a warming Arctic most definitely causes colder, snowier winters for the eastern United States. As the authors note, the trend could be caused by other phenomena, such as an especially long cold spell for the region. Other theories explaining the winter chill remain controversial because of differences in how they presume weather currents form and move. And, more simply than that, they remind readers that correlation does not equal causation, as they are only observing a trend, not discovering a cause-and-effect relationship. Lastly, the researchers also remind readers that in the long term, as the Arctic continues to warm, winters will eventually grow milder. The current effect could be temporary.

The important takeaway here is that the effects of climate change on the weather can be complex and difficult to understand. It isn’t so simple as saying that everything is going to start getting warmer immediately. This is a problem of communication that both climate change advocates and climate deniers perhaps share. Properly conveying the scope and process of climate change is essential to reaching a skeptical public. People who already have a hard time believing in climate change may have an even harder time buying the possibility that global warming is going to create temporary cooling. It’s another part of the task that lies ahead for our country.

We need to get people talking about climate change again in the news and in schools. It’s likely that scientists will continue to revise their understanding of climate science, and we will need to have conversations about new discoveries of weather patterns and climate trends. What scientists and concerned citizens cannot allow is for skeptics to use new scientific discoveries as license to question whether climate change is happening at all. We may not know everything about climate change or its consequences, but the vast majority of scientists do not need to debate whether or not it’s happening, or whether or not it’s caused by humans. That conversation needs to move on to talking about what’s happening with our weather.

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