(UPDATED*) NYTimes: As the US’s great holiday snowstorm brewed, it ran exactly the right op-ed essay
Weather Channel graphic
On Saturday, Dec. 25, the NYTimes got a little bit lucky just as the Atlantic seaboard was about to get whited out by the strongest blizzard in memory, especially so early in winter. One Judah Cohen, id’d only as a forecaster at an atmospheric and environmental research firm, opined on the weather lately under the bold hed: Bundle Up, It’s Global Warming.
So now, a day and a half later I’m watching the Weather Channel, NBC and MSNBC morning shows basically explaining why our son’s return to NY flight, scheduled for Sunday evening, was cancelled 24 hours in advance. That’s one ginormous blizzard and the airline obviously knew it was about to get shut down before it even set in. And Cohen’s words I’d read Saturday started to cohere. He talks about the ability of the atmosphere to hold moisture (as things warm overall) going up, the heavier snows that follow when days go short and temperatures go down, and the rising frequency of continental-scale snow cover in northern mid-latitudes such as all across Siberia. It’s just one man’s hypothesis, but Cohen avers that intensified domes of cold air in Asia where whitened plains run up against high country like the Himalayas and Tien Shan (akin to the Greenland “blocking high” reports posted on last week here at ksjtracker?) are rerouting jet streams. It makes them, so he says, wander way more sinuously than usual, hauling cold air down to great distance from the pole (and filling the gap behind by freighting chunks of warmer southern atmosphere into the suddenly more hyperborean far north).
Once science reporters and editors come off holiday break and get their acts together one expects to read more such conjectures on why, if the stats say global warming is the real deal, it feels in so many big northern cities like an ice age is brewing. This snow cover, albedo, and corkscrewing jet stream notion feels like one believable agent constructing a confounding new Northern Hemisphere winter regime.
By the way, the NYTimes doesn’t even i.d. the company Dr. Cohen works for. It’s easy to chase that down. It’s Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc., with hq outside Boston. That’s an outfit I don’t recall encountering before. It appears to be among the heavier-weight weather and climate analysis and forecasting companies in America. Cohen’s been there 12 years, is now the top seasonal forecaster, was at MIT, went to good schools and has his PhD. Although the name rings no bell with me he’s a regular as a news source. The company’s clients, its site says, include the Pentagon, American Petroleum Institute, NASA, the EPA, DuPont, and the DOE. I bet its private-client newsletters are pricey.
Cohen cites absolutely no authority for his authoritative-sounding guess at an intuitive solution to the weather paradox. But he does seem to be the sort of guy, at a cocktail party if you know his credentials, you’d lean in closer to hear when he’s asked if you’re so smart what’s going on with this crazy winter?
And just so US readers know, the two-pronged march of severe snowy, cold weather on the left and right sides of the Atlantic hasn’t gone away. In today’s Guardian, Andrew McCorkell (among many saying about the same) reports that a fresh round of bitter cold and heavy snow is returning to the UK an expected reprise of last week’s pummeling of it and much of Europe.
LATE ADDITION:
Just noticed that Andy Revkin, Times opinion man and science writer, at his Dot Earth blog provides additional remarks and background on Cohen’s thesis. He also provides a fine YouTube video on the draconian consequences to any lummox who has by now still failed to heed official declarations that weather and climate are not the same and thus and ergo continue to make lame jokes about global warming.
More important, Revkin elicited and shares reactions by a few top climatologists to Cohen’s thesis. They are fairly kind – which is not the same as persuaded.
*UPDATE: Revkin in another post pursues Cohen further, and relays nifty graphics outlining his ideas and why Cohen thinks he’s on to something. The post, with material straight from Cohen, provides formal literature references that were not even hinted at in his Op-Ed on links between Siberian snow and winter weather elsewhere.
- Charlie Petit
