Categories: Environment, Science & Technology

Baby, it’s awful outside

From the Maritimes to Australia, wild weather is wreaking havoc

by Jason Kirby on Thursday, January 20, 2011 2:54pm - 4 Comments

Daniel Munoz/Reuters

Being a billionaire mayor in a city like New York means never having to say you’re sorry. That is, until your snow plows leave millions of residents stranded and they have to strap on skis to navigate the streets of Manhattan. And so it was that three days after a raging, thundering snowstorm dumped half a metre on the Big Apple over Christmas—the heaviest snowfall in decades—Mayor Michael Bloomberg fessed up that the city had botched the cleanup job.

It didn’t help that this was the second December in a row the city, along with the U.S. Northeast, has been hammered by wild weather. But the region was far from alone. The same massive storm system plunged 50,000 homes in Atlantic Canada into darkness as snow, wind and floods devastated beaches, parks and tourist sites. The deluge followed a series of brutal storms and Atlantic hurricanes over the past few months that have already heaped misery on residents in the region.

Mother Nature’s fury was felt everywhere. The United Kingdom is suffering the coldest winter since 1683, which along with snowstorms in New York and Moscow forced the cancellation of 6,000 flights. In California a barrage of winter storms caused flash floods and mudslides, while Los Angeles has been buffeted by hurricane-strength winds. Queensland, Australia, is drowning beneath the worst floods in half a century.

The full tab for all this wild weather will be enormous, say experts. Delayed flights in the U.S. Northeast alone cost the airlines US$150 million, while analysts estimate American retailers lost out on US$1 billion in sales as some shoppers were forced to stay home. In New Brunswick the cleanup costs could reach $50 million, while in Australia flooding has caused at least $1 billion in damage.

With winter far from over, expect more storms and more debate over whether we’re seeing the first effects of climate change.

Tags: Australia, new york, Queensland, weather

More by Jason Kirby

klem

Bad weather or a change in climate? Don't overextend your reach here. Right now the alarmista are claiming the floods in Australia are due to climate change. If the floods had happened in uninhabited areas, as they do every year all over the world, they would have nothing to say. It always amazes me how people can build homes and indeed cities on floodplains and still be devastated when they get flooding. They are called floodplains for a reason. It’s like building a city on the San Andreas Fault as San Francisco is, and they too will be devastated when their city is destroyed when the BIG ONE happens. Oh btw, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are all caused by ACC, everything is caused by ACC. Lol!
BernardP

If it is warmer, it is global warming. If it is colder, it is climate change. The alarmist are always right.

There are simply more and more people everywhere on Earth, and more and more technology available to more and more media outlets to report every weather event and inflate it into a catastrophe.
Mac

Climate isn't the day-to-day weather. It is the long-term patterns in these conditions. Warmer atmospheric temperatures mean the air can hold more moisture, which increases the amount of precipitation. There have also been links found to more extreme weather events caused by human-induced increases in greenhouse gases in the Northern Hemisphere.
MrsAlGore

The relationship between natural disasters, short-term weather patterns, and climate change is tenuous at best. It is very difficult to definitively answer the debate the author talks about in the last sentence, and it is also difficult to talk about natural disasters in terms of being caused by climate change. Measuring the intensity and frequency of natural disasters over time is a possible way to examine the relationship between climate change and natural disasters, but there are many factors that must be taken into account in order to understand this relationship. For example, simply by noticing an increase in the amount of Atlantic storms over the past decade is not indicative of climate change. There are many other factors that must be taken into account, including whether this is part of a greater climate or long-term weather trend that extends beyond the scope of human-cased climate change. An illogical causation between a big winter storm and climate change is an easy connection to make. For example – you walk outside into a winter storm in late March, and assume it is because of climate change. It works in the other direction as well, for example, if there is a cold spell in July, people assume that global warming is a sham, because of the short term and unusual cold temperatures. These kind of causations are misleading and false, as short-term weather patterns are always unpredictable. The weather never follows a precise pattern of schedule, and it never will. We need to examine long-term trends, and long term patterns of natural disasters and unusual weather, in order to fully understand what is actually occurring in the relationship between climate change and natural disasters.