Wild Winter Storm in the East, Flooding in the UK: Weather in 'Schizoid Mode'

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As a ‘significant winter storm’ continues to batter the eastern part of the nation with snow and ice, leaving at least 14 dead and cutting off power for half a million people, experts are urging people to see the event as part of climate change and a reminder of the need to ditch fossil fuels.

“The remarkable thing about this storm,” meteorologist Jeff Masters told Democracy Now! Thursday morning, “is it occurs at the tail end of a very long period of intense winter that we’ve seen over the eastern U.S., but at the same time, the western U.S. has been struggling with record drought and all-time high temperatures in January.”

“So, the weather has been in kind of this schizoid mode, where it’s unusually cold over the eastern half of the U.S. and unusually warm over the western half,” Masters said.

Evan Weber, co-author of the report “The Plan: How the U.S. Can Help Stabilize the Climate and Create a Clean Energy Future,” points to these extremes of drought and intense winter as well, noting that they have taxed the “nation’s aging infrastructure,” causing both power outages and water shortages. “As climate change makes these types of extreme weather events more severe, energy security will also worsen — unless we change course,” he said.

Linking the storm hitting the eastern states now to climate change, Masters added that

Weber says that severe weather like this storm should be a call to action to strengthen the country’s infrastructure as well as to shift to renewable energy.

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“Clean renewable energy not only uses half the water as dirty 20th Century oil, gas, and coal,” stated Weber, “but it also doesn’t contribute to the climate change that fuels these types of debilitating weather events.”

As the United States deals with both drought and snow, the UK has been hit by catastrophic flooding and winds, causing what has been called “almost unparalleled natural crisis.”

While a new report from the UK’s national weather service, the Met Office, said that “As yet, there is no definitive answer on the possible contribution of climate change to the recent storminess,” the body’s chief scientist, Julia Slingo, said, “But all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change.”

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