Very Strange Weather in Canada and U.S.

 

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by Bill McKibben for TomDispatch, part of the Guardian Comment Network
If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet – as we shall see – it's unfortunately largely invisible to us.
In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology. Last month, for instance, Nasa updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization's gallery: "Blue Marble", originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on 4 January, a good day for snapping photos because there weren't many clouds.
It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web's most widely read meteorologist, explains:

"The US and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the western US is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s."

In fact, it's likely that the week that photo was taken will prove "the driest first week in recorded US history". Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history – 56% of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since "climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier." Indeed, the nation suffered 14 weather disasters, each causing $1bn or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: "Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids."
In the face of such data – statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet – you'd think we'd already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we're witnessing an all-out effort to … deny there's a problem. end quote from:
http://ecopolitology.org/2012/02/08/why-the-energy-industry-is-so-invested-in-climate-change-denial/

To requote above: "It was the driest first week (of any year) in recorded US history". And then if you add to this the opposite disaster of Below Zero weather from Siberia down into Europe and stretching to North Africa you have the opposite side of the coin. Add to that 16 feet of snow in many places in Europe combined with below zero temperatures which means snow tends not to melt at temperatures this low. However, it is possible that in the end the fires that the drought might cause and the lack of water might cause to animals and people alike could be the most damaging in the long run to North America. However, we will have to see what kinds of precipitation February to June brings to North America.  So, though many deaths and hardships and frostbites and avalanches are occurring in many places in Europe the precipitation likely in the end might be good for Europe but not the Below zero temperatures.