Recent extreme weather events and climate change/global warming

I have been seriously questioning whether my son will ever really know winter. We did finally get a snowstorm and cold snap worth something in Chicago, but even during this "cold snap" it's still ten to twenty degrees warmer than I recall most winters around this time as a little kid, and sometimes more; and it's supposed to start warming up in two weeks or so.

And I am reading these occasional pieces I see in the news about huge glacier calvings, softening of permafrost in Alaska and Greenland and Siberia, receding and disappearance of tundra in Arctic areas, and a bunch of pretty screwed polar bears; and I just feel a sense of unutterable horror about what we've done to this amazing planet already. Not even getting to what's going to happen when all this ice melt really hits the oceans.....

Incredible stories like this one, about NASA's proposed FTL drive, make me wonder if at some point, the most reasonable response to how much we've fucked this planet will be to go find another one....

 

But Levite it was just 4 years ago that we had a 'real' winter. I'm on the south end of Lake Michigan, we had huge snow. It will happen. Again and again and again.

 

I hope you are right, my friend. I really do.

 

The thing with Global Warming is that the average global temperature will go up, but local weather in temperate areas may become more erratic. Your son could grow up to see frequent catastrophic winter storms and summer droughts punctuated by severe rainstorms. That said, we can only make very general forecasts that far out with our current technology.

On the subject of weather forecasting, NOAA has released mPING, which is available through a web page and as a smartphone app, which allows individuals to report local weather conditions to help improve the accuracy of forecasts and weather radar. New smart phone app lets public report rain, hail, sleet and snow to NOAA Even if you only submit a few reports and get bored of it after two days, every data point helps.