Just got back to the heartland after travel from Philadelphia to southern NY state. Today, the second blizzard in a week continues in the western plains. But, east of there the warmth is fairly remarkable. We flew through Chicago where there is no snow, no ice, and the lawns are partly green. In Philadelphia and 30 km north of NY City conditions were good for golf. We stayed in a hotel in NY next to a golf course and the course was very green. We then went 100 km north and it was about 12 deg F above normal and that was a big cool off from the week before..our friend went canoeing there on the local river (we went for a hike at elevation and it did freeze overnight there. A couple of the biggest ski areas in the Catskills (southern NY, but at elevation) and Poconos (NE PA) are open, but barely...a couple of trails only. I expect that smaller areas must be closed during this holiday week. I just did a google search to try and find the latest on what it is doing in Europe including the Alps in late December and pretty much just found articles on the astounding warmth of November and early December, so not sure what is up now. The article that an ice shelf in the Canadian artic broke off in 2005 and was reported the other day may be misleading in that healthy ice shelves like the biggest one...Ross Ice shelf...advance 1 km/year (in that case) so break off 30 km wide (100s of km long) chunks every couple of decades, and have done that for a long time. But, the (near) total disappearance of ice shelves farther from the poles, in the Canadian artic and in the Antarctic peninsula, may be a different thing.
Anyhow, blizzards and exceptional warmth at the same time in the same country are a bit like evaluating earthquake predictions...it generally has to be done systematically...although things are getting so obvious with climate, and matching predictions from climate models of a decade or more ago so well that there should not be much debate about the reality of the problem. Many of you live in California and it is possible that at least parts of California will be an exception from the trend...what with the cold California Current moderating things...upwelling along the west coast is drawing from an awfully large pool of cold deep water...at least unless the current system is disrupted...don't know whether or not this is predicted for the California current but is predicted for others...
Chris