Steve Marsh, Geography and the Environment department head, spoke to local radio recently about our warm winter weather:
Warm weather unusual but not abnormal: expert
Steven Marsh explains this winter can’t, by itself, be taken as proof of global warming
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – It’s Mid-February and you can almost leave the jacket at home as you go look at the cherry blossoms around the Lower Mainland.
This winter hasn’t exactly been the whitest in the world, with no snow falling at all in Metro Vancouver for 2015.
But University of the Fraser Valley geography professor Steven Marsh says while the weather has been unusual, it’s not abnormal. “If you go in and look at the weather maps the jet stream moves quite far north over BC and then dips down quite far south into the United States so the US East Coast is getting very cold weather, we are getting very warm weather. This type of pattern often does set up and quite often will last longer.”
Marsh says this winter can’t, by itself, be taken as proof of global warming. “You have to have a number of events before you could ever make that type of claim and you would have to prove it statistically. In our lifetimes, we really can’t prove global warming. It is happening because we are looking at paleo records going back a millennia we do see a warmer trend.”
He says at this point the weather system is too chaotic to predict whether we will get any really cold weather between now and the end of winter.
Marsh thinks people have short memories when they say they’ve never seen a winter this warm, because it has happened several times before.