Oregonian Today!

[5-Cents]

Did any of you read this story in the Oregonian today?

These may be the good ole days right now I guess :depressed:

[Buster747]

I'm with Thumper, cooling is a much bigger threat. After all, we are still emerging from the last ice age, so of course, the enviroment will be warming. We should not think that the present weather and temp of the planet is the "natural" condition. Think about the 10's of thousands of years of ice age where glaciers were covering much of North America 1,000's of feet thick in just recent history. We could easily be in just a bump in the road (present warmer weather) and cooling could return over night. Do a google search for the "little ice age", only about 1,000 years ago. Much colder and wiped out much of population of Greenland and Iceland.
Also, look into glacier melting stopping the warm ocean currents on the East coast in the Atlantic. Very interesting.

[GOT2FISH]

I would be interested in seeing what changes have taken place since 1954 and what impact it has on our lives today. Only Weather

[Thumper]

GOT2FISH --- In 1995 Brad Coleman of the Seattle National Weather Service Forecast Office presented results of a long-term climate analysis for the Northwest. Historical data collected in and around the Seattle area, including precipitation, temperature, snowfall, and pressure data, showed very definite cyclical patterns, with a pronounced 18-year time period evident in the data.

The Oregon Climate Service then analyzed Oregon data in similar ways and found cyclical trends, although areas in different parts of the state operated on different cycles.

As might be expected, Portland exhibits historic trends which are similar to those in Seattle. Distinct wet and dry periods, and warm and cool periods, can be seen in the records. Causal mechanisms include shifts in large scale circulation patterns and sea surface temperature changes.

Coleman's thesis was that weather patterns in the Pacific Northwest seem to follow an 18-year cycle.

More recently weather scientists have observed what they term the "Pacific Decadal Oscillation" (PDO), a term first coined by a fisheries scientist, Steven Hare, at the University of Washington in 1996. While researching the relationship between the Alaskan salmon population and the Pacific climate, he discovered that there were long-lived El Niño/La Niña-type warm and cool periods in the north Pacific that last for 20 to 30 years. Typical El Niños and La Niñas last from six to 18 months.

PDO comes in two flavors, a "positive" phase and a "negative" phase. During a positive PDO, the waters in the central north Pacific are cool, and the waters along the west coast of North America are warm. The converse is true with the negative phase. During the past century, PDO was in its negative phase from 1890 to 1924, 1947 to 1976 and 1998 to the present. Positive phases ran from 1925 to 1946 and again from 1977 to 1997.

All available information indicates that we are again in a "negative" phase (locally cooler ocean waters).

Apparently all this is good for our local ocean fish and for snowpack in our mountains, which spells adequate water flows in our rivers. Yahoo!

(Googled from several sources.)

[ 02-14-2004, 06:20 PM: Message edited by: Thumper ]

[Straydog]

Good information Thumper.

[Thumper]

In 1975 the world was in a panic about global cooling ---

http://www.globalclimate.org/Newsweek.htm

And some are even now concerned that we are really entering a period of global cooling ---

http://www.intellicast.com/DrDewpoint/Library/1395/

While some are fearful that global warming will cause global cooling ---

http://www.dinosauria.com/jdp/news/freeze.html

And others point out that one good volcano can accelerate global cooling even more, thereby screwing up all the predictions ---

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/servic...ci/volcano.htm

Take your pick.

[ 02-14-2004, 12:22 PM: Message edited by: Thumper ]