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| Image source: Slate.com - Bad Astronomy |
I'm grateful for the many who called or text messaged to see how my wife and I were doing. We've learned from Texas to New York the fine art of "hunkering down," whether tornado or winter storm.
I'm loathe to express every weather event as climate change. However, the point of making a fuss about it - climate scientists, the Department of Defense et al - is the time to engage is not when the Earth has become the Sahara Desert: the next step at that point is illustrated quite well by Venus.
The following is a Scientific American article written in future tense for the then pending storm. Thankfully, it didn't quite impact upstate New York like it did say, Yonkers. The full term technical is Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, meaning don't expect to get what you've grown used to.
In case you haven’t heard, Washington, D.C., and other parts of the Mid-Atlantic region, are about to get walloped by a major storm that could bury the city in a record-breaking amount of snow.
The storm is expected to bring snows that could top 2 feet in the D.C. area and has already resulted in thousands of cancelled flights. While snows may not be quite as impressive further north, the storm’s fierce winds could whip up significant coastal flooding.
Part of the reason this Snowzilla storm is expected to dump so much snow is because it is pulling abundant moisture. As the planet warms because of excess heat trapped by human-emitted greenhouse gases, the atmosphere can hold more moisture. Scientists already expect heavy downpours to increase because of that. But there’s been little research into what that means for “epic blizzards” like this one.
Scientific American: The Future of Epic Blizzards in a Warming World
Andrea Thompson
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