What is your opinion of the Climate Change occurring in the Northeast US?

Question

Is this an affect of AGW or natural?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080114/ap_on_re_us/northeast_milder_winters

Answer 1

What is happening is just Winter. AGW is effecting the weather patterns that can make the storms more severe. The climate change is in the form of wild fluctuations in the temps., and an increase in precipitation amounts.  When weather records are broken more rapidly,and with wider parameters,that's how it shows up.. Ever widening parameters in the flucuations will bring about more damage and deaths. Hotter high temps ,colder cold temps,stronger storms,unpredictable growing seasons. The effects come on slowly and unevenly around the world. The N.E. is in a unique situation weather wise.  You very well could get a blizzard with 10 ft of snow,followed by extremely warm temps and rain.

Answer 2

Man is too insignificant to cause any impact on the climate.  

CO2 has gone up from 280ppm to 360ppm, or just 80ppm or 0.008%.  This is not enough to cause any change in the climate.

Here is a scientist who has done the research and discovered the Sun is the source for all warming on Earth.

"Global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy - almost throughout the last century - growth in its intensity," Abdusamatov told RIA Novosti in an interview.

"It is no secret that when they go up, temperatures in the world's oceans trigger the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations."

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20070115/590789...

Now let's hear from NASA:

"Variability in the amount of energy from the sun has caused climate changes in the past. It is now accepted that the global cooling during Ice Ages is the result of changes in the distribution and amount of sunlight that reaches Earth. During the last Ice Age, the globally averaged temperature of Earth was about 6°C colder than it is today.

Even the climate changes of the 20th century may have a significant solar component. Figure 3 shows comparisons of globally averaged temperature and solar activity. Many scientists find that these correlations are convincing evidence that the sun has contributed to the global warming of the 20th century."

http://www.research.noaa.gov/spotlite/ar...

Look at the chart ploting sunspots with global temps:

http://www.research.noaa.gov/spotlite/ar...

Answer 3

Let's see what that research concludes:

A study of weather station data from across the Northeast from 1965 through 2005 found December-March temperatures increased by 2.5 degrees. Snowfall totals dropped by an average of 8.8 inches across the region over the same period, and the number of days with at least 1 inch of snow on the ground decreased by nine days on average.

"Winter is warming greater than any other season," said Elizabeth Burakowski, who analyzed data from dozens of stations for her master's thesis in collaboration with Cameron Wake, a professor at the University of New Hampshire's Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space.

That echoes the warming trends measured in Aspen Colorado and Lake Tahoe, California, as well as the global trends:

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2...

You'll still get people firmly clinging to denial, perhaps saying that 40 years is not enough data or that 2.5 degrees is no big deal, but as that change accelerates over the next few decades, the people of Boston who thought that bussing children was an issue in the 1960s will gain a whole new perspective as their water supplies dwindle.

I'm glad I don't live within a few days walking distance of there.

Boston’s Groundwater Crisis:

Seeking Sound Water Policies in an Unnatural Watershed

http://www.bostongroundwater.org/snow.ht...

Answer 4

"Likely" (80% probability) AGW.   It's long term change, but a pretty small area.

But similar things are happening all over the world.  The glaciers in Montana's Glacier National Park, and ski resorts in the Alps also show the same pattern.  Taken as a whole it's "very likely" (90+%) that the changes in winters we're seeing around the world are caused by global warming.

Even Antarctica, which had been something of a holdout, is now melting:

http://poligazette.com/2008/01/14/antarc...

By the way, some very old work and one guy with strange ideas are quoted above to claim changes in the Sun are responsible.  That theory has been decisively refuted by recent data:

"Recent oppositely directed trends in solar

climate forcings and the global mean surface

air temperature", Lockwood and Frolich (2007), Proc. R. Soc. A

doi:10.1098/rspa.2007.1880

http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/pro...

News article at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6290228.st...

Even Foxnews has acknowledged this:

"While evidence suggests fluctuations in solar activity can affect climate on Earth, and that it has done so in the past, the majority of climate scientists and astrophysicists agree that the sun is not to blame for the current and historically sudden uptick in global temperatures on Earth, which seems to be mostly a mess created by our own species."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,2583...