For Your "Skeptic" Friends: Each 1C Increase In Temperatures Boosts Air's Ability To Hold Water 7%

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"Climate change contrarians and deniers love to cherry-pick individual events to argue that they are somehow inconsistent with global warming, when they are not," said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. "As long as it's cold enough to snow – which it will be in the winter – you potentially will get greater snowfalls." The reality is that such snowstorms often don't occur despite global warming, but because of it. "It's basic physics, and it's irrefutable," Mann said.

The science behind this is clear: Warmer temperatures cause more water to evaporate into the atmosphere, and warmer air holds more water than cooler air. The air's "water-holding capacity," in fact, rises about 7 percent with each Celsius degree of warming. This results in air that becomes super-saturated with water, often bringing drenching rainfall followed by flooding or – if it is cold enough – heavy and intense snowfall.

A study of 20th century snowstorms, published in the August 2006 Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology – before the big storms of recent years – found that most major snowstorms in the United States occurred during warmer-than-normal years. The authors predicted that "a warmer future climate will generate more winter storms."

True, warming temperatures are bringing us milder and shorter winters in most areas, including a later start to winter and earlier onset of spring. But we still are experiencing big snowstorms, especially in the northern part of the country. Climatologists predict that the coming decades will bring more of the same, meaning unusually warm winters, as well as potentially record-breaking blizzards.

http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2013/02/blizzard-climate-connection