Wanna bet?

[pyesetz]

After two solid months of below-average temperatures, the forecast now calls for two weeks of warmth -- most of it actually above freezing!  My dog "Walnut" will be so happy that the days of -20°C wind-chills will soon be over.  Happy days are here again!

Anyone wanna bet that a "Colorado low" or a "quick-forming storm over Texas" will invalidate this forecast and give us another two weeks of snow-every-day?

* * * * *

I'm not sure how this relates to Global Warming.  Apparently the melting in the Arctic is causing overheated weather in Russia this year, while Canada (and much of the USA) gets Russia's usual weather due to a 90° shift in the usual Arctic wind patterns.  La Niña is in "neutral" this year, while the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is in a medium-term "cool" phase which is covering up some of the long-term Global Warming effects.  When will I be able to plant a palm tree in my back yard?

Comments

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

La Niña is in "neutral" this year

I'm sorry, but I am going to have to be picky and correct you on that.
For most of this year (2008), there has in fact been a rather strong La Niña. This was a strong contributor to the fact that 2008 has been the coldest year of the current decade so far. (though still warmer globally than the average of the previous decade, the 1990's, or of any other decade since the last interglacial)
However, for the past two months (Nov.+Dec.), the ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation) has been in neutral. It is predicted to remain as such for the next few months.

[pyesetz]

Sorry about my offensive lack of proper fact-checking.  I should have said "La Niña is in neutral this winter".  How does the PDO figure into things?  I first heard about it last year as an explanation for why Winter '07-'08 was so wet.

Globally, 2008 was the ninth warmest year on record, with all eight warmer ones being in the last decade or so.  How was 2008 locally here in Southern Ontario?  I've heard that Summer '08 was one of the wettest ever, followed by Fall '08 which was the wettest since 1951.  Where do folks find these statistics?

As expected, the extended melt-back has been cancelled.  So much for "happy days are here again".  Actually, the temperature doesn't seem so bad (when I was a pup in Metro Boston, -3°C was a "typical" winter temp), but I'm wondering whether next spring we should replant the same things that did well this year and expect a repeat of the bumper crop we harvested—or was that due to the anomalously-wet conditions and 2009 will be totally different?

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

In Hamilton, we are supposed to have a rainy weekend this weekend with temperatures +10C and up (that's the forecast morning low each day). That can pretty much melt anything, and is 17 degrees above the normal overnight low of -7C.

17 degrees is... a lot! :-o