Run For Your Life! It’s El Nino!

Speaking of El Nino, have you heard that we as a whole have been experiencing weather conditions directly associated from the warming of water in the eastern Pacific Ocean?

Let’s see, so far we’ve been seeing:

• More rain & mudslides in southern California than normal.

• Less snowfall in Vancouver (fresh snow would be nice for the Winter Olympics) than normal.

• Less winter precipitation in the Ohio Valley / upper Midwest than normal.

• Colder temperatures in the southern and southeastern part of the country than normal.

• More rain and flooding in southern Florida than normal.

Are all of those the result of the “global warming” and “climate change” we keep hearing about in the news?

Guess again.

The correct answer is “El Nino,” a global climate pattern that takes place about every four or five years on average and causes just such of abnormal weather conditions throughout the U.S.

Perhaps the big mystery is why the news media have (as a collective) been silent on this periodical climate phenomena.  Back in the mid to late 1990s, El Nino was a hot topic and people were blaming it every time it rained outside.  But fast forward to today, and the talk about El Nino is surprisingly silent.

My own personal theory as to the silence from the media is that talking about El Nino might educate and give people a clue that perhaps, just perhaps, large climate events might be seasonal, whether (har! har!) they occur every year or once every four or five years.  This leads to the very large scale heating and cooling of the planet over the period of hundreds of thousands of years, and no matter what, this will still happen in the future.

But that kind of talk throws facts and logic against the so-called war on “climate change,” and we just can’t have that, can we?  The eco-wackos hate that kind of talk.  I’m sure that it’s just a coincidence that “global warming” is rarely talked about during the Winter, especially when major snow storms wreck havoc in the Upper Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions.  They could use a little bit of “global warming” as they freeze up in Boston or to melt the feet of snow covering Washington, D.C.

As for the 2009-2010 El Nino event, it appears that the eastern Pacific Ocean is cooling again and our weather should be returning to normal sometime later this Spring.

sea surface temps - Nov 2009 - Feb 2010

three month U.S. temperature outlook

three month U.S. precipitation outlook

According to the NOAA, “For the contiguous United States, potential El Niño impacts include above-average precipitation for the southern tier of the country, with below-average precipitation in the Pacific Northwest and Ohio Valley. Below-average snowfall and above-average temperatures are most likely across the northern tier of states (excluding New England), while below-average temperatures are favored for the south-central and southeastern states.”

Back in 1993 we were experiencing El Nino conditions.  That same Spring we had the “Storm of the Century,” complete with several inches of snow down here in Atlanta, GA.  Here’s hoping that we still see some additional snow & ice before the arrival of Spring.