Renewable Revolution

 




Mihai Andrei March 29, 2017

As if global warming wasn’t wreaking enough havoc on the world, researchers have found that it is in fact doing even more harm than we thought.    



Turning up the heat

The effects of climate change are so deep and far-reaching it would take far too long to discuss them here — you can read detailed articles on NASA, the EPA, or WWF. Some of the most noticeable effects include amplifying drought and flooding, which were discussed in this study.

Climate and weather shouldn’t be mistaken for one another, but climate does affect the weather, sometimes with disastrous effects. What this study does is show another mechanism through which it does that, uncovering “a clear fingerprint of human activity.”

“Our work shows that climate change isn’t just leading to more extreme weather through the usual mechanisms,” said lead author Michael Mann, a professor at Penn State University in the United States.

Basically, what Mann and his collaborators found is that climate change affects jet stream in a way that “favours more extreme and persistent weather anomalies.”

Jet streams are fast flowing, narrow, meandering air currents found in the atmosphere. They are westerly winds, flying from west to east, and form as a result between the atmospheric heating by solar radiation and the Coriolis force that acts on those streams (the Coriolis force is caused by the planet’s rotation around its own axis). Driven by the contrast between hotter and colder air, jet streams can reach speeds greater than 100 miles per hour (160 km/h) — which is why sometimes faster to travel from Los Angeles to New York than the other way around. But that’s not all jet streams do.

“Relatively small changes to the jet stream can have a large effect on weather and extreme weather,” co-author Dim Coumou, a professor at the Institute for Environment Studies and VU University Amsterdam, told AFP.

http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate/climate-change-wrecks-29032017