It’s a cliche that a picture tells a story better than a thousand words, and it’s really true in the case of this extraordinary map of weather modelling of northern hemisphere temperature anomalies (variations from the expected values based on climate records) for 29 January 2014. Its shows swathes of North America and northern Eurasia with winter temperatures up to 20 degrees Celcius (20C) below the average for this time of the year (deep purple), whilst much of the Arctic is up to 20C warmer than usual (bright red)…Professor Jennifer Francis, of Rutgers Institute of Coastal and Marine Sciences, says the Arctic-driven changes to the Jet Stream allows “the cold air from the Arctic to plunge much further south. The pattern can be slow to change because the [southern] wave of the jet stream is getting bigger…so whatever weather you have now is going to stick around.”
Arctic melt hits food security in bitter taste of life on a hotter planet
A wet summer and autumn, followed by a cold winter and spring, in the UK and Ireland have hit wheat and potato production and cattle feed, a foretaste of how climate change can affect food security, even in the developed economies. And the culprit in t…