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I told you I was ill
The British Isles is on the same latitude as Labrador, and is further North than Newfoundland, but it experiences winters which are much milder than either of those places. As I write Hopedale Newfoundland has a temperature of -14°C, but in London England it is a balmy 9°C. The reason for this temperature differential between places on the same latitude is the Gulf Stream and the jet stream.
These famous ocean and air oscillations warm the western part of Europe and provide warmer winters than the latitude would normally dictate. The jet stream seems to have started meandering, rather than moving in its traditional course.
Both the Gulf Stream and the jet stream depend on cold arctic conditions but the Arctic has been getting warmer and this means a reduction in temperature differentials between warm air and cold air leading to a slower jet stream leading to weather conditions such as flood, heavy snowfall, drought and rain in different places lasting longer than they usually last, so or the scientists think. They are not sure because little in science is certain.
Even established science depends on assumptions that are not provable; there will always be anomalies which support differing views when looking for cause and effect, and the whole client change argument is one of cause and effect. Frequently the argument is distilled into the level of sound bites and political gimmicks that are a feature of today’s politics. The way in which the once corpulent Nigel Lawson of the self styled Global Warming Policy Foundation is an expert and picking anomalies and misquoting statistics in a way which attempts to turn a scientific enquiry into a political debate in which points are scored. Whoever appears to score the most points in politics wins the debate, but winning a debate is not the same as being right in an argument.
Spike Milligan’s headstone bears “duirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite” which is Gaelic for “I told you I was ill.” Perhaps one day the planet’s headstone, if it has one, will bear a similar epitaph.
Filed under: climate change, global warming Tagged: climate change, extreme weather events, global warming, Gulf Stream, Hopedale Newfoundland, jet stream, Labrador, latitude, meandering, nigel lawson, spike milligan, temperature, winning the argument 
Source: http://robertkyriakides.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/i-told-you-i-was-ill/
