Weird winter weather from coast to coast

Emma Epstein Life Editor

Julie Mahoney ’07 found herself stuck at Vassar when, four days before Christmas, the Denver Colo. airport grounded planes due to severe winter weather. Fortunately, Mahoney lives in an off-campus apartment and was able to remain in her home until booking a flight home late Christmas Eve. Max Fagin ’10 was not so lucky, and had to stay with an uncle on Long Island until he was able to fly into Denver on the last night of Hanukkah. Once home, both students each faced a city still digging itself out of the blizzard’s aftermath. Mahoney noted a stranded passenger’s makeshift bed made from airline blankets in the Denver airport and Fagin remembered passing many automobile accidents on the way home.

Meanwhile, on the East Coast, record-high temperatures left the region without its usual snow accumulation. Although Poughkeepsie temperatures over the last week have fallen below January’s monthly average, the city has experienced an unusually balmy winter with a record high of 70 degrees on Jan. 6 and over an inch less than the average precipitation during the month of December.

Ski Team co-president Sarah Nickel ’08 received worried e-mails about the lack of snow before the team’s Jan. 14-Jan. 19 trip to Sugarbush Resort in Vermont. “We got really lucky this year,” Nickel said. “As soon as we got there, there was a small snowstorm. We heard that the day before we got there that the ground was brown.”

Dramatic winter weather across the United States, coinciding with an increasing awareness about global warming, has intensified debate over the theory.

Associate Professor of Geology Kristen Menking attributes recent weather extremes to both El Niño and global warming. “It’s kind of funny because if you watch the news, you’ll see meteorologists saying that the warm weather is because of El Niño, but if you ask a climatologist, they’ll say that indeed El Niño is significant, but there’s also been this shifting baseline upon which this is being superimposed,” said Menking.

Menking explained that global warming does not only involve increasing global temperature, but also increasing fluctuation of temperatures all over the planet. “Some places may get colder, some places will get hotter,” she said. “What we think will happen will be that there will be much more climate variability.”

Fagin said he thinks that the recent attribution of dramatic weather changes to global warming is simply an overreaction to increasing publicity of the theory. “We as humans tend to make snap judgments and tend to ignore what we’ve seen before,” he said. “This could seem like extremely unusual weather. It’s not something that happens every year, but it’s happened before.”

In reaction to conservative opposition to the theory in his hometown of Colorado Springs, Colo., Fagin read various materials about global warming and ended up doubting the theory he originally sought to defend. “I looked into the science to prove them wrong,” he said. “They’re going about it all wrong, but they’re right. The science is really there to counter it.”

Menking disagreed, saying that a large majority of the scientific community has accepted the global warming theory. “If anything, there’s been underexposure over the years,” she said. “The media has done a bad job of talking about global warming in a way. They present it as a debate with two sides. Something like 97 percent of the scientific community believe that global warming is happening and yet they present it as one of these fifty-fifty debates.”

As for proving the link between recent climate variability and global warming, Menking said it is really too early to tell. “With climatology, you only know after three years of measurements or so what the actual cause of all this was.”