14 DAY TRIAL // New England is currently doing its best to overcome the hardships brought about by a massive snowstorm nicknamed the Nemo blizzard.
Meanwhile, the environmentalists working with Greenpeace are busy maintaining that climate change and global warming must be held accountable for the severity of this natural phenomenon.
The organization takes things one step further and argues that “Omen” would have been a more befitting name for this blizzard, meaning that climate change and global warning stand to spawn ever more frequent such extreme weather manifestations.
As was to be expected, said organization compares the Nemo blizzard to hurricane Sandy, and argues that, despite their being otherwise run-off-the-mill weather manifestations, the aggressive nature of such phenomena can only be accounted for should one agree to also take climate change and global warming into consideration.
Working on the assumption that humans' habit of toying with the environment ultimately translates into altered weather patterns, Greenpeace argues as follows:
“[...] like all storms nowadays, the environment in which Nemo formed has been affected by climate change so, whilst there are many factors implicated in the creation of this storm, human induced climate change is one of them.”
In order to back up its claims, the organization quotes specialist Kevin Trenberth, who recently made a case of how, “In the past temperatures at this time of year would have been a lot below freezing but the ability to hold moisture in the atmosphere goes down by 7% per degree C (4% per deg F), and so in the past we would have had a snow storm but not these amounts.”
“The moisture flow into the storm is also important and that is enhanced by higher than normal sea surface temperatures (SSTs). These are higher by about 1 deg C [almost 2°F] than a normal (pre-1980) due to global warming and so that adds about 10% to the potential for a big snow,” Kevin Trenberth went on to add.
By the looks of it, the Nemo blizzard has killed a total of 9 people, left 700,000 homes and businesses without access to electricity and forced airports to cancel roughly 5,800 flights in and from New England.