Jetstreams, Climate Change, and Rubbish Weather

How the Jetstream is created

Recently I've been trying to find out if climate change could have any effect on the jet stream (a high altitude, high speed wind that circles the planet and has a strong influence on UK and US weather).

I had this thought that, since the jet stream has been causing this long run of bad weather we've been having lately in the UK, would climate change actually make this happen more often in years to come.

Last week, the New Scientist magazine (dated 07/07/2012) had an article that covered this exact subject ("Running Wild" by Steve Battersby).

The science (described by Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, New Jersey) goes like this: Because the polar regions are warming up faster than any other part of the world, the temperature difference between the poles and the tropics is reducing. This has the effect of slowing the jet stream down and making it meander about more. These meanders can 'lock-in' a certain pattern of weather for a region for weeks or even months on end. Hence the unseasonably, cool, windy, and wet weather Britain has been experiencing this Spring/Summer.

So we could be in for a lot more of the same in future. The flip side of this is that the same mechanism can also lock-in extremely hot weather, like the Summer of 2003 which killed at least 15,000 in France.

It's not a particularly nice prospect either way. And this is just the start of it.