Good Question

Good Question: Is Global Warming Really Happening?

(WCCO) There's no question, this Minnesota winter has been several degrees colder than normal. And this spring sure doesn't feel like spring, considering we haven't even hit 80 degrees yet.

That got Mark Besser of Minneapolis wondering, "Is global warming really real?"

"It sure seems this year that, in Minnesota at least, we seem to be having global cooling," he added in a video e-mail.

It's a question state climatologist Jim Zandlo gets all the time at his office with Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources waters division.

"The coldness is an event, a roll of the dice," said Zandlo. "But in Minnesota we are warmer than when our grandparents were here."

Zandlo said when people first started talking about global warming in the 1980s, he didn't see it. He looked at charts and saw a minor uptick in average temperatures that seemed in line with the historical data.

"I was shrugging my shoulders," he said. But now he says, he's a believer that the climate in Minnesota is warming.

"Two or three degrees over 30 years means maybe eight or nine degrees per century. That's pretty rapid rate of change, and those are hard measurements," said Zandlo.

Zandlo said he's aware that there are scientists out there who question whether global warming is happening, but he said he doesn't get into the politics of the issue. He simply looks at the data set.

"We actually see something that is occurring that matches what people were saying was going to occur," he said.

Although many people don't pay much attention to it, there is a difference between weather and climate.

"Climatology is what you expect, weather is what you get," said Zandlo.

With warming, "the cold winters are not going to go away, it's a matter of how often they occur," he added.

If, on average, Minnesota gets one extremely cold winter every five years, we may end up having one extremely cold winter every 50 years.

At least that's what the data is suggesting now.

"One cold winter doesn't disprove that global warming is occurring. But if you started having them fairly frequently that would more and more chip away at the idea that, wow, there's something going on," he said.

 

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