I realise that to many of you around the world, this is nothing, but it has brought with it a significant amount of snow which is making transport difficult. I know, that other parts of the world experience far worse conditions than this, but we're not used to it here as these are unusual events. The impact of an event is inversely proportional to its frequency, remember: we don't have vast amounts of grit or a fleet of snowploughs.
Anyway, what's causing it? Climate change? The usual order of things here is that we receive westerly winds (from the west), which are warmed by the Gulf Stream. It comes straight over from America.
So what's happening now? There's currently a high pressure system sitting over the North Atlantic. It's barely moving, and it's causing the normal winds to move around it. This sort of high pressure system is called a "blocking high".
You can clearly see the fast moving westerly winds being diverted around Europe. (Red is fast, blue is slow)
This blocking high means that cold air is being brought down from the north east: Scandinavia and the Arctic. Put another way: this is what our climate would be like without the Gulf Stream, the warming effects of which are being partially removed temporarily by this high pressure system.
So, is this climate change? No. We can't say that any isolated weather events are caused by climate change unless we notice that they happen more and more frequently year after year for example. This is just weather.
What we can say is that if the Gulf Stream weakens, as some have theorised with melting ice caps causing a reduction in salinity of the oceans, then we can expect more of this kind of weather with climate change.
Note: I am no expert on ocean salinity, and I'm not claiming that the Gulf Stream is likely to shut down with climate change. I'm merely going with what could happen if that particular claim is true.
Update: The BBC recently released this picture on their news channel and website, which I think is "pretty cool"!
