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Scientist: Climate change to intensify winter weather
This weekend’s massive blizzard in the Northeast has fueled the fire of climate skepticism that's pervasive in many parts of the United States. If we’re still getting major winter storms, skeptics say, how can the planet be warming?
E2 Wire put that question to Tom Peterson, chief scientist at the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration’s National Climatic Data Center.
As the planet warms, “frequency of storms will stay the same, but the intensity will increase,” he said.
“Multiple peer-review papers indicate that strong storms are likely to increase. So the climate change is changing the probability of a strong storm occurring,” he said.
Peterson warned that you cannot determine whether climate change is occurring based on an individual weather event. Instead, scientists study climate trends over the course of thousands of years.
“Weather events are pixels in the climate picture. Some are indicative of changes we are experiencing; some simply reflect the variability of weather and climate. As the world continues to warm, heat waves are an example of the former,” he said, while adding that extreme winter weather events are “examples of the latter.”
Peterson also said it’s important to distinguish between weather and climate.
“Weather is one individual event and how that plays out, and climate is the interconnection of those events,” he said.
But, Peterson concluded, “People will use individual events to justify whatever opinion they have on the matter.”
