Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
If polar temperatures are increasing more than equatorial, that should reduce the number or severity of storms because it's that temperature differential that drives the air currents to converge.
A warmer polar climate would also increase moisture carrying capacity, which again should help to close the heat differential between equator and poles.
I'm pretty confident my hypothesis is flawed, but I haven't read the IPCC report yet on this subject.
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* It's the Equatorial sea surface temperatures and evaporation which drive the rapid-intensification and total available energy for the cyclones. You may have seen where a tropical system turned north from the Yucatan Peninsula, and by the time it reached the Gulf Coast, had become a CAT-4, or on the verge of a CAT-5. The 'cold' you're thinking about is above the 'cap,' perhaps at 35,000-feet altitude, on up. It doesn't relay on polar 'cold.'
* In the Arctic, there's less snow and more rain. Powder snow insulates the ice below it, and has the highest index of solar reflectivity, further protecting the ice below it, which is actually much darker.
* When the snow goes, the darker ice melts faster.
* The ancient ice is going away.
* Ice 'extent' is confused with ice 'volume.'
* New ice is thin, it doesn't last.
* It doesn't matter how much 'extent' the new ice attains if it's all melted by September.
* Exposed water, aside from rock, has the worst albedo, as far as solar heating is concerned. Accelerating the warming, freshwater dilution, and thermal expansion of the seas / oceans.
* You could have water-skied the North Pole this year.
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* The warming Arctic is affecting the polar vortex, which determines where the jet stream goes. This is where the hard freezes, blizzards, drought, wild fires, heat waves, atmospheric rivers, floods, hail, tornadoes, etc. come from.
* The Sierra Nevada might get a decent snowpack, only to lose it all in an early melt, shutting down the Colorado River, and Hoover Dam.
FUBAR!