Global Warming Linked to Increasingly Warmer and Wetter Winters in Europe and Western North America

© 1999 by Linda Moulton Howe

June 4, 1999  New York City -This week in the journal Nature (June 3, 1999), the first well-documented link between global warming and much warmer and wetter winters in western North America and Europe has been published. Atmospheric physicist, Drew Shindell, at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Columbia University in New York City confirms that over the past thirty years winter temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere have warmed up a full ten time more than the global average increase of .9 degree Fahrenheit. That means that the west coast of the U. S., Canada and Europe now have winters a full ten degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they were in the 1960's. For the first time, Dr. Shindell has been able to show with confidence that this chronic warming is a result of greenhouse gas emissions.