The Herald has an article summarising New Zealand’s year of ‘weird weather’: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10617504
We basked through the warmest winter in 150 years and shivered through the coldest spring in decades – all during a year of weird weather.
Globally, this year was the fifth warmest in the past 130 years, and capped off New Zealand’s hottest decade on record.
But that would have been little comfort to those stuck in record snowstorms during the coldest October in six decades.
MetService weather ambassador Bob McDavitt said three months stood out as the “weirdest weather”. A chilly May was countered by an unseasonably warm August, before temperatures plunged to record lows in October.
McDavitt said the icy spring weather was caused by troughs stalled over New Zealand because of large anticyclones over Australia – coating Sydney with dust storms while Kiwis shivered in late snowfalls.
The hottest temperature was 38C, recorded in Culverden in Canterbury on February 8.
At the moment all the Climate Change Deniers are carrying on about the massive snow falls as being proof that the world is not warming. However the point is not about a few isolated snow storms (yes the top of the USA and Europe are isolated in the size of the world), they completely missing the point claiming this. While the overall temperture of the world may be increasing becuase of this it will unsettle the weather patterns around the world and we are clearly seeing the affects of this in NZ. Instead of Winter being cold and Summer being hot we are getting dramatically changing weather patterns throughout the seasons and the year. Take a look at Winter this year – May and June coldest in decades – we even had ice and -4c in northern Albany! And then the traditional coldest month of August was warmest on recored. And lets not even start on October.
It is simple. The world’s climate is changing and I find it hard to believe that all this changes in the weather patterns are anything but caused by humans and their direct actions.
