Could All the Freezing Weather Lately Have Anything to Do With Climate Change?

Climate change is an issue of literal and figurative polar extremes. As the planet inexorably warms, deniers mix in assertions of global cooling with their usual Al Gore insults and political assaults like the recent so-called Climategate snafu.

So far this year, icy temperatures have frozen parts of England, the eastern United States, and even Florida, where iguanas have fallen out of the trees, lured into hibernation by low temperatures.

Meanwhile, untoward heat has gripped the West Coast of the U.S. broken up only by a recent Pacificstorm event that has summarily soaked its fire-ravaged mountains. In the course of one week this January, America learned that December 2009 was wetter and colder than average, while its first decade of the new millennium was the hottest on record.

No wonder, then, that people around the globe are dizzy with confusion. Careening between these extremes, they are easily manipulated by seeming opposites, environmental, political and otherwise. All of this, in the end, is complicated by the lack of consensus from gun-shy scientists, who are lately more busy fending off (or feeding off of, depending on the scientist) ludicrous sideshows like Climategate than they are confidently extrapolating the destabilizing scenarios to come, a move that might give all their number-crunching some real-world meaning.

Like, for example, the possibility of a shutdown in thermohaline circulation, the oceanic conveyor belt that circulates warm weather and water poleward, which could plunge some landmasses of the North Atlantic into a scenario reminiscent of the Little Ice Age. That's a period of cooling that, you guessed it, occurred after extensive warming called the Medieval Warm Period. Talk about your vertigo of information.

"One of the things is that there are gaps in what we scientists understand, because of gaps in technology," Sharon LeDuc, chief of staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climatic Data Center, explained by phone to AlterNet. "A lot of looking forward depends on the modeling and simulations we do, and they don't always agree.

"What they do agree upon is, predictably enough, extremes. Extremes that are further empowered by what little consensus their modeling can cobble together. There are certain things they agree on, such as the hydrological cycle," LeDuc added. "There will be drying in the subtropical regions but precipitation in higher latitudes. The smaller scales are where the uncertainty lies. The resolution of these models is very coarse."

Unfortunately for the rest of us, we live, work and die in those smaller scales LeDuc spoke of. And we need to be able to connect dots from the macro-environmental changes taking place to the micro-environmental situation in our own cities.

Sure, the planet was the hottest it's ever been on record in the '00s, but what does that have to do with frozen iguanas falling into Floridian truck beds? So far, it's getting mostly noise from scientists, some of whom explain that the dots can't be connected.

The overall warming of the globe and the volatile temperature fluctuations you're experiencing? No comment.

"Be very careful here," Gavin Schmidt, climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and contributor to the blog RealClimate, told AlterNet. "There is some evidence for more intense precipitation occurring with climate change, but claiming that volatile temperature fluctuations are related is not supported at all. There is no evidence whatsoever that the cold temperatures at the beginning of the year were related to climate change."

That's probably news to China's Beijing Meteorological Bureau, whose Guo Hu explicitly linked the two in a statement to Beijing News. "In the context of global warming," Guo said, "extreme atmospheric flows are causing extreme climate incidents to appear more frequently, such as the summer's rainstorms and last year's ice storm disaster in southern China."