Scottish Winters Warming 0.3C Per Decade - Snow Cover Vanishing

[hatrack]

"Winter in Scotland could once be relied upon to produce snow-capped mountains for months and draw in hundreds of thousands of skiers and climbers to enjoy the seasonal challenge. Even in the lowlands, heavy snowfalls would lie on the ground, often for weeks. But new research by scientists is revealing that long, harsh winters are becoming a thing of the past, and that winter temperatures are rising at a faster rate than at any time since the last ice age.

A report compiled by Scottish Natural Heritage and the Royal Botanical Garden of Edinburgh shows average January and February temperatures have been rising by 0.3 degrees Centigrade every 10 years for the past three decades. One effect is that flowers are now budding 19 days earlier as spring moves forwards.

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Highland scientists are also reporting dramatic changes in snow cover that reveal average temperatures are gradually rising. This year, snow cover on even the highest peaks of the Cairngorm mountain range disappeared completely for only the fourth time since 1860. Two of those occasions have been in the past seven years.

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The Scottish ski industry, based at Cairngorm, Glenshee, The Lecht, Glen Coe and Aonach Mor, near Ben Nevis, is already having to cope with diminishing snow cover and a dramatic fall in visitor numbers. The numbers skiing have dropped by two-thirds over the past 15 years. This year, all resorts were shut by the beginning of April, whereas in previous years skiing was often available well into May."

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http://www.news.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=1180412003

[GreenGreenLimaBean]

1. Once the Gulf Stream stops, the skiing will be awesome.

<http://mikehammer.tripod.com/warming3.html>

We may see the melting of the ice caps, the flooding of all port cities and Florida and Louisiana, catastrophic droughts, floods, and storms. Through cooling the lower stratosphere and isolating the poles, global warming could damage the ozone layer and unleash cancer-causing ultraviolet. But the worst possibility, the worst thing that could happen from global warming... might be...... another Ice Age. Do WHAT???

It makes a certain sense. 90% of the last 250,000 years (and more like 2 1/2 mil) have been Ice Age with a 2 mile thick sheet of ice covering Europe and North America down to Chicago and New York City: only about 25,000 years have been warm, habitable- like now. The last warm period lasted only 13,000 years, ours has lasted about 14,000. To accumulate that much ice, very high rates of precipitation are needed, which requires alot of heat. The true arctic will remain cold, and once the ice sheets accumulate and start moving, nothing will stop them.