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Climate Change Factoid – Upside Down Weather – (#19 of a series)

It’s winter and the weather seems unusually cold, there’s mountains of snow piling up across the midwestern and eastern states and every one wants to know – how come this is happening if the planet is supposed to be warming due to climate change. It’s a good question and there may also be a good answer.

In 2005 I came across a world map from the NOAA, the federal weather people in Washington, called “temperature anomalies.” I have a copy of it but ezine wont let me tell you where it is (you can figure it out). The map of the world is covered with dots of 5 sizes and two colors, red for a heat anomaly and blue for cold. The 5 sizes show the extent of the anomaly in 1 degree celsius increments, the largest being 5 degrees C greater than normal (which is what an anomaly is – a difference from normal). Almost all of the big red dots (5 degrees C hotter than normal) on the map appeared in a circle at approximately where the Arctic Circle is and then several more appear near Antarctica. There are almost no big dots anywhere else. It seemed very strange that all of the heat buildup was taking place in the coldest regions of the planet. Then I thought on it for awhile.

Several things seemed to bear on the mystery. One is, if you look at a map of the world you will see that two thirds of the world’s land mass is in the Northern Hemisphere. Land mass retains more of the sun’s heat than other surfaces. Another consideration would be the Second Law of Thermodynamics, an important rule of the natural world, which says in part that heat will seek out cold – never the other way around. So, all of that heat building up in the Northern Hemisphere – it’s not going to head south because it bumps into the even hotter equatorial zone. It could stay where it is but the Arctic region to the north is much colder and the 2nd Law is quite clear – go towards the cold. So it does and that could explain the ring of big red dots surrounding the Arctic. 

As the hot air arrives at the Arctic, the ice begins to absorb the heat it contains by melting ice. When a new blasts of hot air arrive looking for ice to cool it the colder air already thee has to make room. As you know you can only go south from the Arctic so this cold air is pushed southward. It is also possible, that since hot air rises and cold air falls that the warmer air is not just pushing the colder air south but it is also pushing it down closer to earth’s surface. If this phenomenon were to be more or less continuous it would not be difficult for all of that cold air to get as far south as the temperate zone where we live. That could also mean that the greater the amount of additional heat being retained in the atmosphere by the extra CO2 we have added the colder it would get down where we live. Now that’s really upside down.

 

(Peer reviewed research, supporting the claims made in this Factoid, can be found at the website shown below)

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