Letter to the Editor

On November 23 you published a Letter to the Editor which stated that, in view of our recent cold weather, no one was talking about global warming anymore. On the contrary, the unusual early winter weather can be directly attributed to global warming.

The proximate cause of the cold snap that started here November 12 was Pacific Super Typhoon Nun surviving all the way into the Bering Sea, where it disrupted Arctic weather, pushing large masses of freezing air down into North America. Stronger and longer-lived hurricanes and typhoons are a direct consequence of global warming.

And when the remnants of this freezing air encountered unusually large amounts of water vapor evaporated from an unusually warm Lake Erie, the result was the extreme snow event which has paralyzed Buffalo.

Weather is a heat distribution engine. More heat, in the form of global warming, turns up the "volume knob" on weather - and this is all kinds of weather, including wintry weather.

I have been looking at weather maps daily for over 40 years, and I have never seen one like that of November 12. In the coming years, we will be seeing more and more weather patterns unlike any seen before in our lifetimes. It will be fascinating to watch - or would be, if not for the millions of lives and trillions of dollars that will be lost as a result of weather becoming ever more violent and unpredictable as the planet warms.