Global Warming

[MikeValletta]

Does anyone know how gloabl warming is in fact targeting Mt. Washington directly and if so what conditions have changed?

[Bill O]

Its hard to pinpoint individual events to global warming. A cold and snowy winter should not be directly related to global cooling, nor should a warm and rainy winter be associated with global warming.

Increasing soil temperatures and rising tree line might be better indicators of global warming since the response time is much longer. Or you could argue that Mount Washington is still recovering from the last ice age and the tree line has been advancing for 10,000 years.

[JimS]

The research department, the amc, and unh are all looking into this problem. Currently they are conducting a study on the effects of a warming climate on the alpine zone, intense work that will continue this summer.

As for the actual occurance...there are so many feedbacks that go into how effects might be seen over a short time in a complex and anomalous microclimate, it would be tough to determine what can be attributed or not. However, when looking at the long term, patterns do emerge.

Here is the abstract from one such long term paper, published about the temperature record over about 70 years...
http://airmap.unh.edu/publications/G...pJClim2005.pdf

The full paper goes on to state that winter and spring season 'overnight' low temperatures are seeing the most dramatic trends over the span...while 'daytime' high temperatures are responding little to climatic shifts. Day and night are in quotes, as Mount Washington rarely sees a truly diurnal temperature pattern...

[JimS]

For a more regional assessment, I'd check out this page by UNH...

http://inhale.unh.edu/Climate/index.html

I find the most interesting data to be the ice in/ice out data...which in my mind cooresponds well to the warming winter overnight data seen at MWO.

[Steve M]

I just received this in an email yesterday and thought I would share it and see what you all think.

http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=64734

[Bill O]

I'm just waiting for Al Gore to blame the China earthquake on global warming. He's said crazier things.

[bclark]

I recently posted a blog entry on my AccuWeather blog about climate change and Mount Washington, specifically referring to Andrea Grant's paper that Jim mentions. You can find that entry here:


Climate Change Entry

There have been quite a few comments made on that entry(a new feature of AccuWeather blogs by the way) that it looks like I will have to address very soon.

[mtruman]

I just received this in an email yesterday and thought I would share it and see what you all think.

http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=64734

While there may be way too many things blamed on global warming (by Al Gore and many others) it is truly hard to believe that over 30,000 scientists would in fact sign this petition. Not only are they saying that global warming isn't happening, they say that limiting greenhouse gas production would in fact harm the environment. This is a bit hard to swallow.

[Bill O]

Sorry, I couldn't resist. Found this quote in a Wall Street Journal piece this morning in reference to global warming:

nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God

[Brad]

Hmmm, "nonfalsifiable hypothesis". Is this an oxymoron?