How Global Warming Causes Snowstorms and Frigid Weather

It sounds like a huge contradiction. Global warming should mean that the weather gets warmer, not colder. If the planet was really warming up then wouldn't we be seeing 70° winter days instead of snowstorms down south? Already opponents of the global warming theory are saying this is more proof that the Earth is not warming up. Well, that would be a good point if air masses did not move. If there was no such thing as a warm front moving in from the South or cold front moving in from the North, if there was no such thing as the jet stream, if there were no storms, then you would just get the air that hovered above your city. In that case you would get warmer winters and hotter summers due to global warming. But lets look at the facts. Global warming is only a few degrees of warmth, not the 40° it would take to make winters warm.

But what the extra heat does do is have plenty of effect on the weather itself. What moves air masses around is the heat energy caused by the sun. Greenhouse gasses such as carbon absorb sunlight better than oxygen. The more carbon then the more of the sunlight's heat is trapped in the atmosphere. You would need a hell of a lot of carbon in the air to bring 70° winters in the North. What scientists are worried about at the moment is the effects of turning up the world's average temperature just a few degrees. Think of the weather as a machine, and the air temperature as it's fuel. The more fuel you add the faster the gears in the machine move. In this case the gears of the Earth's weather are storms and the jet stream. This would not only mean that higher temperatures would create stronger storms but that the jet stream would move more air around, dragging far more polar air down from the arctic than usual. In other words the winters in areas where the average temperature is 32° could see a lot of days below 20°. And now with a stronger jet stream arctic air is dragged further south turning places like Florida cold.

As for the snow, what creates it is a combination of two factors, moisture in the clouds and cold air. Most clouds come from down south and move north. The more heat in the south the more water evaporates creating more moisture in the clouds which in turn head north to where they run into a cold air mass. Usually in winter there are plenty of cold days with no snow at all, and when storm clouds finally show up they are behind a warm front which brings in warm air causing rain. More heat down south means more evaporation which means more and thicker clouds which means more snow from those clouds and more of a chance for areas that only occasionally have a cold day to have snow on those days.

For those people hoping that global warming would do away with winter and are too lazy to move to parts of the globe that do get 70° weather that time of year, there is still a good chance that may happen. The only reason why California gets warm winters while New York does not is that the jet stream usually dips north over the east coast and south over the east coast. If the jet stream gets enough energy it could change its pattern then it would be California that gets cold winters and New York getting the warm weather. There is also the gulf stream, that mass of water that flows from south to north. What makes the stream move is the water evaporating causing it to be more salty than the surrounding water and causing the tail end to sink. Global warming could speed up this process, making it move faster and bringing more warm water up the east coast causing warmer winters. Sure, New York City could get Florida weather. But don't go investing in beachfront property just yet. For that much change to happen would also result in the melting of polar ice caps, snow covered mountain tops, glaciers, and every other place where snow was trapped as ice for thousands of years. This would cause the sea level to rise about ten feet flooding all shore front property and submerging the beaches. Overall global warming adds heat to the Earth. How weather distributes that extra heat is another story.