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 It’s been odd, destructive and
deadly, but climate experts say you can’t blame the brutal weather that
has slammed New England on your neighbor’s SUV.
“We can’t link it with global warming,” said Kerry Emanuel,
professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. “One of the robust predictions of global warming is that
rainfall comes in heavier, but less frequent events. This hasn’t been
less frequent. I don’t think you can blame the stuff we’ve seen this
summer on global warming. It looks like were locked into a weather
pattern.”
Beth Hall, the former climatologist for the state of New Hampshire,
who just took a teaching job at Towson University in Maryland, agreed
with her MIT colleague.
“You can actually go back to the pre-global warming frenzy,” she
said. “There were just as bad floods back in the ’30s. We’re finding
there are cases of this equally bad weather in the last 100 years. It
kind of happens intermittently. We just went through a drought in the
late ’90s and everyone wanted to say it was global warming, but the
droughts in the ’30s and the ’60s were more extreme than what we saw.
Climatologists are seeing these much larger cyclical patterns to these
events than just the increase in carbon dioxide is able to explain.”
Emanuel said the weather sometimes gets locked in a certain pattern
over a certain region. He said climatologists call these blocks. He
said they can last anywhere from six weeks to three months. It appears
the block of frequent, heavy rain we’re experiencing started near the
beginning of June, but if the block theory is correct, there’s an end
in sight.
“The one we got locked into, it’s been very rainy in the east and
dry in the west,” he said. “I don’t know how much longer it can go on .
. . They can stay locked for a few months. Three months is on the long
end, more typically it’s six weeks.” Source
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