In , The Daring Dufas wrote:
This is supposed to be "The South", it's 15° F at 7:00 am
in Birmingham, AL. There are some valleys in the area that
I know are a lot colder. Darn Canadian imports, y'all just
had to stick that cold tongue out at us. I've heard it called
The Alberta Express. BRRRRRRRR!
Birmingham sometimes gets cold. A few times a decade, maybe every
other year the Orlando area gets down to freezing.
Miami got snow flurries in January 1977.
Birmingham (or at least parts of its immediate metro area) even got
10 inches of snow from the Blizzard of 1993.
Stuff like this sometimes happens.
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We are in the temperate zone. The word "temperate" works like the word
"flammable". "Flammable" means "inflammable". "Temperate" means
"intemperate" if that word exists, otherwise "intemperant". The
"temperate zone" is where the weather has a temper.
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Birmingham AL is in the part of USA that gets wacky weather - namely the
part east of the Pacific Ocean.
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The Southern tier of USA is normally on the chilly side during an El
Nino winter (which we have).
We also have the Arctic Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation
(not the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation) being low - favoring central
and eastern part of USA being cold.
This looks like a "triple whammy" that sometimes happens.
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Latest monthly global temperature, by the least-warming of the 5 major
global temperature change indixes (V. 5.2 of UAH determination of lower
troposphere temperature from MSU/AMSU satellite data), for December 2009,
is .28 degree C warmer than its baseline of 1979-1998 average. The year
2009 has average of its 12 months for this index .27 degree C warmer than
that baseline.
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
Note that Dr. Roy Spencer is one of the two PhD professors at UAH in
charge of this major global temperature trend index. It appears to me
that he is skeptical of existence of anthropogenic global warming.
- Don Klipstein )