5 degrees C in the mountains of british columbia should i blame global warming

[jimmer]

going to Fernie  canada snowboarding in three weeks time and there's hardly any snow. its +5 c and raining. is global warming to blame?

 

jim

[Loosehead]

It is very fashionable to blame every weather anomoly on glabal warming, the fact is there is only enough meteorological data for the last 200 years, the planet is billions of years old. Much too small a sample to say anything meaningful. The planet has natural cycles of climate, mankind clearly has some level of pollutant effect but overall the planet get's on with it's own thing, as we where recently reminded in SE asia. 

[jake-the-peg]

Global warming is a large scale event, Ice sheets are melting in Greenland and in the Antartic an amazing rate.

The five hottest years on record all have occurred since 1997, and the 10 hottest since 1990. It's been 221 months since the world recorded a colder-than-normal month.

Does this mean that a small-scale event like a bad month's snow is due to global warming? - probably not directly - there are fluctuations in any trend.

But if you think that global warming is just "trendy" you could do worse than take a read of NASA's website and they're pretty conservative people.

[jimmer]

you may say its a small scale event but there's mud where there should be snow. gadmannit man, its a disaster.

[Backdrifter]

The global warming issue is far too complex to encompass in a few lines, and for myself I haven't been able to decide what I think about it, other than that I remain to be fully convinced, even by the stats jake-the-peg mentioned. I'm not saying I'm dismissing it, I'm saying I can't be certain. But some stats from the last few years are nowhere near enough to be anything approaching convincing.

 

jimmer, if the no-snow phenomenon starts occurring on a regular basis each year, you'd have more of a reason to suggest it's possibly due to some widespread climate effect.