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Warming planet can mean more winter snow

FEB 15, 2010
Physics Today

NPR : Although climate-change skeptics have been arguing that the recent snow storms blanketing the East Coast show that climate change isn’t happening, climate scientists express a different view."The fact that the oceans are warmer now than they were, say, 30 years ago means there’s about on average 4 percent more water vapor lurking around over the oceans than there was, say, in the 1970s,” says Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.Warmer water means more water vapor rises up into the air, and what goes up must come down."So one of the consequences of a warming ocean near a coastline like the East Coast and Washington, DC, for instance, is that you can get dumped on with more snow partly as a consequence of global warming,” he says.

Related Link Climate-change debate is heating up in deep freeze New York Times

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