Climate Change
Evelyn Browning-Garriss
December 2012
This transcript has been provided to you
courtesy of Mauldin Economics
Evelyn Browning-Garriss: As always, I’ll begin by introducing my conclusions first.
My first conclusion is that there have been some long-term trends that will change the oceans
for the next fifteen to twenty years. The Atlantic will trend warmer and the North Pacific will
trend cooler.
Now, there are some consequences, and that brings me to my second conclusion. In North
America, the warmer Atlantic trend causes hotter summers, more active hurricane seasons,
and it causes stormier winters in the Northeast, Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic states. It also
raises the risks of Gulf hurricanes and droughts in Georgia, Texas, and the Southern and
Central Plains up to around Kansas.
Conclusion three is in Europe, the warmer Atlantic trend causes hotter/drier summers in
Southern Europe and wetter summers in the UK and Central Europe. Northern and Eastern
Europe tend to have colder/drier winters.
My fourth conclusion is the change phase of the Pacific PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation),
which is what’s changed the Northern Pacific, is strengthening the impact of cold La Niñas,
but is weakening the impact of El Niños.
Now, El Niños in the past provided warmer winters to the northern tier of states and helped
protect the East Coast during hurricane seasons. So by having weaker El Niños, this means a
prolonged period without this protection.
Finally, one of the big issues is, “what is the impact man is having?” Manmade warming and
pollution is adding to the impact of this warming phase of the AMO (Atlantic Multidecadal
Oscillation).
Essentially Europe and the East Coast are being hit by two different things causing warming
and the pollution from the eastern megalopolis – all those cities – adds to the intensity of
coastal storms; and I’ll be showing you how this works.
The two hurricanes occurring in two years that have done tremendous damage to the East
Coast – and particularly to the urban East Coast – [and to] the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic
States, which are not used to this type of storm. People are finally beginning to question if we
are beginning to see the impact of manmade global warming.
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This questioning has political repercussions. Last year we had Hurricane Irene. It entered
through North Carolina, but some of the greatest damage it did was actually in New England.
Tremendous damage occurred in Vermont, for example. Its path ranged from the Caribbean
to Canada, and it inflicted $16.6 billion worth of damage, $15.6 [billion] just in the US. Parts
of New York and the Northeast had five-hundred-year floods, one-hundred-year floods…
experiences that they neither expected nor were prepared for. However, this was dismissed
as a five-hundred-year flood or a one-hundred-year flood.
People were equally unprepared for Hurricane Sandy the following year. Hurricane Sandy
was the biggest Atlantic hurricane on record – eleven hundred miles in diameter. What
made it so dangerous was not only that it was huge, but that it was late enough in the season
to combine with a cold front. All together it hit twenty-four states; and while they’re still
counting the damage, they are saying it will probably average about $50 billion in damage
in the US alone. A hundred and ninety-nine people have been killed, and 18.2 million homes
and businesses were left without power.
It also hit right during high tide, so it caused storm surges that did tremendous damage.
Since so much of the damage was in the New York area, it was well covered by the news.
It is finally getting to the point – as you can see from Businessweek’s headline, It’s Global
Warming, Stupid – that hurricanes are being blamed on manmade climate change.
The IPCC (International Panel of Climate Change ) stated that it was likely that future
tropical cyclones would become more intense, with higher wind speed and heavier
precipitation. They, however, did not give any numbers. One of the reasons this statement
was accepted was because it was just a broad general statement with no speculation on how
much the increase would be. Being that vague was the only way they could get it past all of
the members of the panel. But now a number of people are grabbing the idea that global
warming is causing these storms. This is entering the political conversation even more.
Climate is determined by three things:
First, how much solar radiation the earth receives, because the energy from the sun is the
energy that is utilized by the global weather system.
Second, what are the patterns where that radiation falls? If you have a large volcano, it can
put up enough debris that it will reflect back incoming sunlight. When Tambora went off in
1815, it put 35 cubic miles of material up to 75 miles high. The following year was known as
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“the year without a summer.” Clouds can block out incoming sunlight. They’ve spent millions
of dollars to prove that when there is a cloud overhead, it gets shadier and cooler. Duh.
Third, where is the heat from the solar radiation stored? Since 70% of the earth’s surface is
ocean, most of it is stored in oceans; and the oceans, as a liquid, carry this heat elsewhere.
To understand climate, you have to follow the energy from the sun through the skies to the
surface of the earth and the oceans. Man, however, has a role in this. His biggest role is that
third point: where is the heat from solar radiation stored?
Most of my clients are very familiar with the whole greenhouse effect of manmade global
warming. Some of the CO2 and other greenhouse gases that are produced trap the heat in
the atmosphere so it doesn’t escape as much. This increases global warming. But what most
people ask is “how much of this heating is manmade versus natural?” I am leaving that for
the scientific community to argue and scream and figure out.
At this point, one of the things that I have found unanimous agreement on is that the storage
of heat is not uniform around the globe. We specifically store a huge percentage of the heat in
our urban areas.
Human construction, pollution, and energy use raises the heat in central cities. There is a
seven-degree, on average, difference between how hot it is in the central cities and in the
rural areas. Or if you’re talking centigrade, that’s about four to five degrees. So, what we’re
seeing is warming, but there is intense warming in central cities. I think anybody who has
driven from the countryside into the middle of the city in the summertime has experienced
this.
Another effect is not only are we concentrating the heat in these cities, but we are also
changing the patterns of precipitations.
A paper published by NASA says it was one to ten degrees Fahrenheit warmer in cities than
the surrounding country areas. What they are doing is talking about how far into the cities
you get.
What we’ve seen is hot air pollution rises above the cities and forms rain clouds that are filled
with micro droplets. These tiny aerosols of pollution collect water and form clouds. Literally
on hot summer days, satellites can show you where the cities are just by showing you where
the clouds are collecting; they collect over the cities.
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Because the heat island is so hot, it delays the rain. So the prevailing winds blow these clouds
away, and when it finally rains, it tends to be very stormy. The prevailing weather pattern
here in North America is westerly, so it tends to blow the pollution and the heavier rains to
the east. When they’ve studied it, what they’ve discovered is you can actually see this effect.
The monthly rainfall area 18-36 miles downwind from cities is 28% greater. In some cities,
it is as much as 51% greater. We see this in North America; we see this in Europe. It is to the
point that insurance companies actually charge higher rates for the areas east because they
tend to have more storm damage. A lot of this is about manmade pollution, which causes
precipitation downwind from cities.
There is a problem for the East Coast cities, since they are by the ocean. The marine winds
trap the pollution overhead so when it finally gets to the point of rain, we are getting heavier,
stormier rainfalls over our eastern belt of cities. This is just normal rainfalls. There has been
some speculation that we are seeing this with hurricanes and tropical storms, but at this
point that is only a hypothesis. Scientists come up with models, but they don’t always come
up with any way to test them; they just sort of throw the model out in the air for us to listen
to.
So when I talk about these changes, they sound fairly small, but let’s get some perspective on
this. Historical records show that if you cool the globe one degree Fahrenheit, it changes the
freeze zone 300 miles. What we’ve found is that 1,000 years ago, rural temperatures were
as warm or warmer than they are today. Greenland, for example, had pasturelands, and the
Vikings were able to have much bigger herds of cattle and with a lot less protection than they
can have in Greenland today. That’s how warm it was. England had vineyards throughout,
then it cooled down to the Little Ice Age, where the temperatures got so cold that people were
able to dance on the frozen Thames.
To go from the warmth to the cold is only one degree centigrade. If you change temperatures
– cool the globe one degree centigrade – you will move the freeze zone 1,000 kilometers
south. Therefore, when they say that the globe has warmed, since around 1800 it has warmed
0.8 degree centigrade. This is significant; this is moving the freeze zone at least 500 miles
north.
It also affects precipitation. Droughts were more common when it was warm, and there
was more rainfall when it was cool. We started to see warming, an end of the Little Ice Age,
around 1800 before mankind made any major changes in climate. Whatever man has done
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has made it more extreme, but what we are seeing is a combination of natural warming and
manmade warming; it is not one thing alone.
It not only affects temperatures and where the freeze zone is, but it will also affect rainfall
patterns. As the western United States gets warmer, we can expect – as they had in the past –
more problems with prolonged drought. It’s pretty confusing for the layman because you are
hearing so many different reports. You’ve seen the hockey stick, which is rather controversial,
saying that temperatures used to be level and now they’ve just soared up. You’ve heard that
the Met Office in 2012 released a report saying that global warming stopped sixteen years
ago.
I’ve looked over the scientific community, and here are some of the things I can say about
human impacts on climate change that everybody seems to agree on:
The earth did begin to warm up naturally from the Little Ice Age, changing temperature and
precipitation patterns.
Human carbon emissions and pollutions have added to this climate change. This warming is
most extreme in the urban heat islands. For example, New York City is 14 degrees Fahrenheit
warmer than the surrounding countryside. When you have a heat wave in New York State,
you have a tropical-feeling heat wave in New York City.
Finally, precipitation patterns have changed, and urban pollution has made some of these
events more extreme.
I’ve been talking about manmade climate change, and this is a trend that doesn’t seem to
be reducing that much, so this is the basis we’re working with. Now let’s look at the natural
climate change.
The Atlantic Ocean has a 60-70-year cycle of the flow of the Gulf Stream. Sometimes it flows
faster, and sometimes it flows slower. When it flows faster, the North Atlantic gets warmer. It
turned in 1995 and has been flowing faster ever since.
We’ve been going back through history, and we’ve discovered that this is a normal cycle. We
measure with more consistent satellite measurements now, but since the 1880s the British
Navy have been taking scattered measurements. We have seen a pattern of about 70 years,
where it tends to be about 30 years cool and 40 years warm.
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We have longer records of fishing from the Scandinavians who have kept track of herring
catches – which are very important to their economy, or at least used to be. Since the 1500s,
they found a pattern of herring – which are warm-water fish – going further north for about
40 years and then retreating further south for about 30 years. So we have this pattern;
and in 1995, the Gulf Stream started flowing faster, and we started seeing warmer Atlantic
temperatures.
History says to us that if the current trend is like the past, we should have at least 20 more
years of the Gulf Stream flowing faster and the Atlantic being warmer. This has some real
consequences on the weather. Notice, it is a trend. Around the middle of the 1940s, you can
have a warm period with a small cold spell in the middle of it. Or around 1990, you can have
a cool period with a warm spike in it. This is a trend. Whenever you talk about the ocean, you
talk about an ebb and flow.
This year was intensely warm. We saw temperatures in May in the Gulf that we normally only
see in July. We have seen the impact of a very hot year. What are the consequences of a hot
Atlantic? Well, from an insurance point of view and from an eastern settlement point of view,
you can see that the warm phase of the AMO doubles the number of hurricanes. Notice – and
this is just intense hurricanes – many more cyclones are able to generate in the hotter water.
During the cold period in the AMO, the number of hurricanes drops. This is both Atlantic
hurricanes and Gulf hurricanes.
Since 1995 with the hotter waters, we have the East Coast and the Gulf Coast exposed to
more danger from hurricanes. Part of the problem is that during the cool period – which
started in the 1960s, went through the 1970s, 1980s, and most the 1990s – the ocean was
cool, and we did not have that much hurricane activity. The damage to riverside and coastal
property was very low. During this period, we saw almost half the US population move to
within fifty miles of a shoreline, which made sense back then, but nobody was asking why the
property value was so low.
Essentially, what happened during the cool-water decades was people moved into areas
which are now high-risk areas. Also, when you look at the cool Atlantic period of the 1940s,
1950s, and the early 1960s, we did a lot of investment in protection from rivers, on levies,
and on coastal protection. We have let those systems go without repair. We’ve settled in highrisk areas, and people have had insurance to encourage them to move there.
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I had one client in 1996 call me and say, “Look, I have had three hurricanes come near my
house; what is happening?” My reply was, “Why do you think where you live is called Cape
Fear? Why do you think the Native Americans didn’t historically live there?” We have a real
problem. We have invested some of our most modern and valuable property in areas that,
with the change of the water temperatures in the Atlantic, are now at higher risk.
Also, the warmer the phase gets, the stronger the trade winds tend to get. This has some real
consequences. Where does tropical moisture fall? When the Atlantic is cool, the trade winds
are weak, and with the spinning force of the earth you tend to have the winds veer north,
carrying the Gulf moisture deep into the plains. You get more rainfall in the Great Plains,
the Midwest, and even in the Prairie Provinces. The hotter the Atlantic gets, the more the
trade winds carry the moisture. The stronger the trade winds get and the more they carry the
moisture straight into Central America and México and less of that moisture goes into the
interior US. Unfortunately, the heat still hits the interior US.
For example, this year we had strong enough trade winds that the moisture did not
flow inland, but the heat did. We had what was called a “flash drought.” There was not
a tremendously lower amount of rain, but there was a tremendously higher amount of
evaporation. Now, I don’t expect to see this intensity again. This was an unusually hot year.
If you went by the old Scandinavian records, the herring arrived six weeks early. We had
summer temperatures in mid spring. We had an unusually intense year, but as an overall
trend, you need to understand that the hotter waters create drier conditions in the interior,
and they create more hurricanes.
We had the waters so hot that in October, tropical storm Sandy was able to go far enough
north that it was being hit by some of the northern winds – the shearing winds. When I first
talked to the people in NOAA, they said they thought that the hurricane would probably
die off when it left the Caribbean because these winds were so strong and so shearing. But
instead, what happened was the waters were so hot that they kept the storm alive. Its top got
sheared off so it never grew stronger than Category 1, but with that much heat in the water it
kept growing till it was enormous in size. Also, when you have these late season storms and
the waters are warm enough to bring them north, they combine with the fronts.
There was Hurricane Sandy, there was the cold front, there were the shearing winds that
pushed Sandy toward the west so that it became “Frankenstorm.” You end up first with an
energized hurricane, then with an energized cold front. We’re going to see, to a lesser extent,
this phenomenon in early winter and late winter where the unusually hot Atlantic waters
energize any cold front that reaches the coast.
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We call these types of storms “nor’easter,” and when you have a hot Atlantic you have more
nor’easters. So you not only have a stormier hurricane season, but you tend to have, not
necessarily a colder, but a stormier late fall, winter, and early spring. The pattern is called a
“North Atlantic Oscillation.”
This is the type of winter that you typically get when you change the temperatures of the
Atlantic. A colder Atlantic coupled with the arctic jet stream tends to carry the storms
straight west. They stream rapidly out of North America into the Atlantic, gather moisture
and warmth from the Atlantic, and spread the warmth and the moisture throughout Europe.
This is excellent for European crops. However, what we have is a hot Atlantic.
What this means is it is like the Arctic. When [the Arctic] expands south, it can’t expand as
far south over the hot Atlantic. Instead, it plunges deeper into the two continental masses on
either side, bringing more cold and deeper-dipping jet streams into North America and in
Europe. In North America, you get a blocking so the cold air enters deep into the continent.
The cold fronts then get trapped, and they linger and are slower to leave. So you get colder,
stormier, and longer-lasting storms.
We’ve done a lot of studies on what AMOs do to North America, and I’ve seen the first good
study of what they do to Europe. A long-term study by Sutton and Dong have shown that
when the Atlantic is warm, as it is now, this is very bad news for Southern Europe. You tend
to see more heat; you tend to see drier weather. Ironically when winter comes, you can get
these flash floods, but the heat and the dryness in summer more than compensates for any
additional moisture you get in the winter.
In the fifteen years since the Atlantic has changed, Portugal, for example, has lost to forest
fires over one-fourth of all its forests. This year, you saw a drought through Southern Europe
that had a terrible impact on Southern Europe’s crop production. This pattern of hotter, drier
weather in Southern Europe is not a one-off. This is a trend that comes with a long-term
trend in the Atlantic, and it has another twenty years to run.
I’ve talked about the Atlantic; let’s look over at the Pacific.
The Pacific doesn’t have much effect on Europe, but it has a great effect on the US. The
Pacific has a long-term cycle called the PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation). We used to have
warmer temperatures; the tropics were warmer than average, and the warmer waters were
along North America and South America. This meant that these warm waters generated
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warm air; warm air held warm moisture, and the prevailing westerly winds carried that
moisture inland and Argentina, Canada, and the US were breadbaskets for the world.
Starting in 1998, this trend changed, and by 2006 we saw colder waters. The trend now is
for the cooler waters to be along the west coast of the Americas. One of the effects of this is
that it tends to create drier conditions along the West Coast and inland. Rather than tell you
which areas will get warmer than colder, I’ll give you the winners and losers. Which areas,
when the Pacific changes, tend to get more precipitation? Here in the US, it’s frequently good
for Midwestern states, but California and the Southwestern US, including Texas, tend to have
less precipitation.
This is worldwide; the Pacific is huge. When it changes, so do precipitation patterns around
the world, and this has an impact on agriculture. When the Pacific was cool, food prices were
fairly stable. When they changed to warm and the precipitation patterns changed, it became
harder for societies – particularly agricultural societies – to produce food. The prices went
up, and they never returned all the way back down, whether you’re talking corn, wheat, or
soybeans. Soybeans are so sensitive that they started to change even before the tipping fully
occurred – just as soon as it started.
Those peaks tend to be when there is a hot PDO and a hot El Niño. In 2006, it tipped
negative; and once we get massive changes in rainfall around the world, food prices are
impacted. Agriculture became, particularly for traditional societies, much more difficult.
We saw once again a rise in food prices, and we haven’t seen the prices go down to the fairly
stable levels they were at in the early part of the 2000s. They are in a warm Atlantic. Prices
go up and by the end of the cycle only up slightly when you had an El Niño.
So a positive PDO – which is hot – and a hot El Niño created a slight rise in prices. Now we
have a cold PDO, and the increase in food prices is greater when you have a cold La Niña.
When the Pacific changes, it makes the impact of the extreme weather created by La Niñas
even more extreme. We’ve also discovered – or we seem to be discovering – that it is making
the impact of warm El Niños smaller, and this is not good news.
If you have a cold Pacific creating weak El Niños, this means that when El Niños come you
don’t get the relief from a cold winter in the northern tier of states that you normally used to
when the Pacific was hot. When the Pacific was hot, we used to have an El Niño about once
every four years. Come once every four years, consumers in the northern tier of states didn’t
have to spend as much on heating. Now that we have a cool Pacific cooling down and muting
the impact of El Niño, this will no longer be the case.
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Also notice, when you have an El Niño, it means warmer and drier conditions for the
southwest. That is not good news for the millions of people depending on the Colorado River
system, including Southern California. We have a long-term study by the US Geological
Survey which shows what happens when you change the Atlantic and the Pacific. Through
most of the 1970s through the late 1990s, we had a cool Atlantic and the Pacific tended to
be warm. We had abundant moisture through the breadbaskets of the United States. This,
according to the US Geological Survey, when the Atlantic warmed and the Pacific cooled
drought is more likely. They say that about one out of every five years has drier weather.
The precipitation patterns have really changed, and areas that used to be totally dependable
now have a less reliable water survey. That brings us back to our conclusions.
For the next 15-20 years, the Atlantic and the Northern Pacific will trend cooler. The PDO is a
30-year cycle and it changed in 2006, so we have another 20 years to run. The Atlantic warm
phase is a 40-year cycle and we changed in 1995, and we have another 20 years.
What we are seeing are hotter summers, more active hurricane seasons, and stormier
winters in the Northeast, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic. If you want to have a feel for what the
situation will be like, look at the 1950s. Some of the conditions that we have seen this year
are conditions that we saw in the 1950s, including some of the storm damage that we’ve seen.
The 1950s was when Hurricane Hazel managed to actually hit and kill people in Toronto,
Canada, of all places.
Also, we have more risk of Gulf hurricanes and droughts specifically in Georgia, Texas, and
the Southern and Central Plains. Farmers in Canada are giving up on a lot of crops like corn
and having to go to more drought-resistant crops.
In Europe, the Western Atlantic trend causes hotter, drier summers in Southern Europe and
wetter summers in the UK and Central Europe. With the NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation),
Northern and Eastern Europe have cooler, drier winters. This has a significant impact on
winter wheat – the crop depends on snow cover. Russia grows winter wheat, and this year it
had a terrible crop because it had a colder, drier winter. We can expect winter-wheat crops to
be at higher risk from this type of weather.
The change phase of the Pacific PDO is strengthening La Niñas and is weakening the
warming impact of El Niños. That results in less protection during the hurricane seasons and
stormier winters.
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Finally, man may be making the warming more extreme. The quickest rise in temperatures is
where we are seeing the Atlantic flow so fast, people getting in urban areas and general global
warming. That tends to be here in our East Coast and in Western Europe. The pollution from
Eastern megalopolis adds to the intensity of coastal storms.
Are there any questions? Please feel free to ask any.
Janice Stillman: This is Janice Stillman with the Old Farmer’s Almanac. Evelyn, that’s
terrific; thank you very much. I don’t mean to pick on you, because I feel like this is what this
might be, but regarding the hurricane patterns, you said there were fewer during cool spells–
Evelyn: Yes.
Janice: Given that the cool spell was a while ago, would the hurricane count be affected by
the fact that they seem to be naming more of the storms now?
Evelyn: I’ve been asking about that, and not particularly. There is more of a rise since
they’ve named them, but the period of the greatest activity we saw was in the 1940s.
Janice: Yeah, that’s true.
Evelyn: So I would regard the activity in the 1950s as equivalent to the activities in the
1940s, and we can see a dramatic drop. Also, we didn’t start naming the subtropical storms
until, I think, around 2003. With 1995, the storms started popping up immediately. So there
are more storms counted now, but the impact of the warm and cold seems to resist that bias
of the data.
Janice: Yes, thank you.
Evelyn: And I heard somebody else had a question?
Richard Turnison: Yes, Evelyn? This is Richard Turnison. Thank you for the presentation;
it’s great. I have a question on the impact that the Greenland ice melt will have, or might
have, on the Gulf Stream, the deep water, and the weather in Europe.
Evelyn: What you are talking about is exactly the mechanisms that seem to run this 6070-year cycle. What happens is the Gulf Stream is hot tropical water, and as it flows north,
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it reaches an area where the water is more diluted because of melting ice. This hot tropical
water is saltier and denser, and at some point it flows far enough north that it is so dense it
sinks. That is called the sea air/heat transfer area. It tends to sink around Greenland.
The way the cycle tends to work – according to the theories people have been telling me – is
that the water melts ice until so much ice has melted that it actually dilutes the Gulf Stream.
That slows down the sinking of the Gulf Stream, which slows down the flow of the Gulf
Stream, which means less hot water is carried. So you have a slower Gulf Stream, less heat
is carried, and this allows the ocean to start re-cooling again. When it cools enough that the
water is not so diluted, then you start seeing the Gulf Stream sink faster and things heat up
again.
They say it tends to be about 30 years of a slow flow, and the ice freezes up enough that the
Gulf Stream is saltier, denser, and starts sinking faster. It takes about 40 years for it to slow
down. Very frequently, when you have an extreme melting, the next year it will have melted
enough that it is diluting the Gulf Stream, and the Gulf Stream doesn’t sink quite as fast. It’s
not enough to slow down the whole cycle, but it slows it down the next year.
We saw an example of this in 2005; it was a very hot year. The Atlantic was cooler in 2006.
So we had 2004, 2005 where it was hot, and after two years the Atlantic had melted enough
ice that the North Atlantic got diluted, the Gulf Stream got diluted, and it slowed down the
flow. We have seen two years of a fast flow; last year and this year have been incredible.
I think you may be simply referring to the Greenland ice melting. You may be familiar with
a statistic that they reported at one point this year. Normally, only 20% of the surface of
Greenland gets warm enough where it has a sheen of melting on top, this year 97% of the
Greenland ice got hot enough that the top portions of it started to melt. We saw the winds
blow a lot of arctic ice out and into the Atlantic, and it melted. I would not be surprised if
next year the Atlantic is cooler. There is always an ebb and flow pattern, but when you are
talking about the melting of the ice, that seems to be what controls the speed of the flow. In
fact, a lot of scientists call this a current. Instead of calling it the Gulf Stream, they call the
entire thing the “thermal heat haline salt current.”
I would expect that it would be slower next year, just because there has been such a massive
amount of melting of arctic ice this year. We even had one point where an ice dam in Canada
gave way, it was in the St. Lawrence Seaway, and it allowed a huge amount from the Great
Lakes to flow into the Atlantic. It diluted the water so much that it will cause a slowing of the
Gulf Stream flow for almost a thousand years. Does that answer your question?
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Richard: It does, thank you. In another sense, will this affect or have an effect on your
projected climate for Europe at all in terms of the colder, drier winters?
Evelyn: Last year, winter was extremely warm. I expect this winter to be colder, but I
wouldn’t be surprised if the winter after that is less extreme. When we did get a cold spell
in Europe last year, it was towards the end of winter, and I remember the Europeans called
it the “Beast from the East.” It was this dramatic Siberian cold that reached all the way to
England and did enormous damage not only to the Russian crops because it was so cold and
dry, but also to the Baltic crops as well. The poor Balkans, they’ve gotten hit by both the cold
dry from the east and the hot dry in late summer.
I would expect that this year we will be seeing more negative NAOs, and I would expect we’ll
be seeing more of this pattern this winter, but I would not be surprised if the following winter
is more benign. We’re already seeing the jet stream going through Southern Europe with the
warm and the wet. I regard Venice as the canary in the coalmine for Southern Europe. Venice
now has 70% of the city being flooded. And I am sorry if anybody is in England. I’ve had my
English clients tell me what a wet, wet year this has been, and it looks like it is going to be a
wet winter as well. Are there any more questions?
Matt Coleman: This is Matt Coleman here. My question was, with the conclusions that you
listed with different regions being either warmer, cooler, wetter, or drier, what is the period
of climatological baseline that that is relative to when you say something is hotter or colder?
Evelyn: It would be the average at 2010. They tend to take a 30-year average and then
compare the next 10 years to that. The average they have at 2012 includes climate they have
from the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade of this millennium.
Matt: Okay, so your definition of normal here would be a 30-year normal?
Evelyn: Thirty-year normal.
Matt: Okay, got it. Thank you.
Evelyn: I think there is time for one more.
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Janice: I will sneak one if it’s available. This is Janice Stillman again with the Old Farmer’s
Almanac. I was wondering if the blocking system that was in place that caused Hurricane
Sandy to veer sharply west is going to be in place for a longer period? Was that a short-term
thing? What can we expect from that?
Evelyn: What you can expect is it to reappear more often. The North Atlantic Oscillation’s
highs tend to flow eastward. What you tend to have is it is stalling more when the North
Atlantic Oscillation is extremely negative. It is not that it is going to last for long, long periods
of time, but it will be frequently reoccurring and lingering for a week or so. Just having a
week or so of that blocking action, stalling a cold front, can cause some real problems.
Overall, I expect the cold fronts to be moving slower this year. You are getting a cold front
colliding with the previous cold front and neither one of them able to cross into the Atlantic.
In particular, I expect this to happen more in early winter and late winter. The Pacific is
trying to build up an El Niño. There may be some El Niño conditions that allow a little bit of
warming in the Northeast in the peak of winter, but in the five most similar years, I saw a lot
of nor’easter activity in early and late winters as storm fronts got blocked.
Janice: Thank you.
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