Where's Winter?
Science: Global heat is on
IF YOU THINK IT’S BEEN UNSEASONABLY warm lately-it as 62 in Buffalo last week and 63 in Detroit — the government thinks so, too. Last week the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that 1994 was one of the warmest years on record.
Predictably, that brought out the Cassandras, warning that the long-heralded greenhouse effect, in which pollutants such as carbon dioxide gas trap heat in the atmosphere, had arrived. A warm 1994 does not a theory confirm. But the fine points of the recent warming match the theory’s predictions awfully closely, says climatologic James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and even the usually skeptical NOAA called temperature patterns consistent with the theory of greenhouse warming.
The world had not been heating up much since the huge 1991 explosion of the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo volcano threw millions of tons of debris into the air, reflecting sunlight away from earth. Now the dust is settling, perhaps taking the lid off the greenhouse effect. But is global warming responsible for California’s torrential rains? Those storms were triggered when the jet stream shifted into Canada, a migration usually caused by warm seas off South America. But more northerly jet streams are also a sign of a greenhouse world.
Source : News Week, January 23 1995
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