The Snow.

Starting in mid-November most of Britain, northern Europe and now north America experienced early, rapid and heavy snowfall.

Co-inciding with the start of the Cancun COP16 Summit this was perhaps not the best weather to underline the need for global action on climate change. Although during the same period 42 Israeli's were killed by wild fires in region that has been blighted by drought, Australia's monsoon rains and Colombia's lethal flooding meant that the globes weather was more wet and cold then dry and warm. However these extreme weather patterns are actually fit perfectly in line with current, accepted global warming theory.

Since the early to mid-1980's global temperature's have risen. This warming has caused ice caps, glaciers and other so called ice masses to melt and become water. Once melted this water becomes part of the hydrological cycle and gets circulated between the seas and oceans, the atmosphere and the land. In recent years this global warming has made sure that this water remains as water meaning that when it falls from the atmosphere back to the land it does so as rain rather then snow. However in 2008 a solar cycle ended dramatically reducing the amount of heat emitted from the sun causing global temperatures to drop sharply. This caused increased snowfall in 2009 because generally speaking sea water is better at retaining heat then the land so when rain clouds moved from the warm sea onto the cold land they froze meaning that the water fell out of them as snow rather then rain.

In 2010 there was the added problem that a stream of air, commonly know as the jet stream moved. This meant that the warm air that normally flows across the eastern United States, the Atlantic ocean and western Europe was diverted south across the Mediterranean and on to the middle east. This then created a vacuum into which very cold Arctic air flowed further cooling the land and turning all that rain into snow.

So while it might be hard to believe all these blizzards and record low temperatures within the Ferrel cell* are actually pretty conclusive proof of global warming. Regardless of what some fools at the University of East Anglia might say the increased amount of rain and snow demonstrate that global ice masses have actually melted. Assuming that we've ruled out magic as a cause this melting proves that global temperatures have increased.

With the fact of global warming conclusively proved the only debate left is what to do about it. If you believe that global warming is the product of human greenhouse gas emissions then we obviously need to find some way to cut those emissions. However if you believe that global warming is solely caused by unpredictable solar cycles then you also believe that these harsh winters are going to become the normal over the next decade and governments and companies need to invest heavily in infrastructure to cope with them.








*Trying to use national borders to explain the behaviour of weather patterns is damn near impossible. Therefore in modern thought the northern and southern hemispheres are both divided into three cells; the Hadley Cell (approx 0-30 latitude), the Ferrel Cell (approx 30-60 latitude) and the Polar Cell (approx 60-90 latitude). Europe and north America (including Canada) are all parts of the Ferrel Cell.