No, Global Warming Doesn’t Lead to More Snow in Boston

No, Global Warming Doesn’t Lead to More Snow in Boston

http://www.cato.org/blog/no-global-warming-doesnt-lead-more-snow-boston

Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.” — As the snow keeps piling up in Boston, so does the climate change nonsense. Never letting a good weather story go to waste, our nation’s scribes are in high dudgeon that global warming is causing the serial burial of Boston. We discussed the illogic (or at least the selective reasoning) behind the global-warming-made-this-snowstorm-worse excuses forwarded during the first big nor’easter to wallop the area (back on January 27th), and now, after the third big event (with likely more to come!) the din is deafening. Just today there are major stories in USA Today and the Washington Post strongly suggesting that global warming enhances snowfall in New England. Perhaps we can test this hypothesis, glibly hiding as a fact. Back in the late 1990s, we were involved in a research project investigating the relationship between winter temperature and winter snowfall across Canada. Our results were published in the peer-reviewed Journal Geophysical Research back in 1999. We weren’t investigating the meteorology of any one specific storm, but rather the climatology (i.e., the general relationship) of temperature and snowfall, looking to see if there were really places that were “too cold to snow” and whether a warming climate might result in more snowfall, or precisely what is being presented as fact today. Here is the context of our investigations: If one accepts the projections of most climate models that future temperatures will increase in winter in the middle and high latitudes [Houghton et al., 1996], the higher temperatures could have two different impacts on the liquid water equivalent of snowfall: (1) Total snowfall could increase with increasing air temperature since the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship dictates that saturation vapor pressure increases exponentially as a function of temperature, thereby allowing for the possibility of a more moist atmosphere, or (2) total snowfall could decrease with increasing air temperature as warmer conditions would increase the amount of precipitation that falls as rain (or mixed precipitation) relative to snow. Note that the global warming press as of late only focuses on possibility number 1. Except during …