How so? We had a system stall over us it's not all that common. Keep thinking that it was global warming though because Al Gore who is super cerial and can't win his home state think it's a big deal now.
First of all, it wasn't a system that "stalled" over IL. It was the remnants of an inland hurricane. The same inland hurricane that caused massive flooding in Oklahoma just a few days before. Once the storm made landfall in TX it moved into west TX and was carried back NE over OK which had plenty of heat and moisture in the atmosphere to cause the storm to re-intensify into a Cat I hurricane. After it dumped 10+ inches of rain in OK it continue to move NE, carried along by the upperlevel jet stream, into the Great Lakes Region.
Secondly, global warming and its effects on the climate have absolutely nothing to do with Al Gore or his politics. Nice ad hominem there though.
Global warming actually causes global cooling over most of the planet, with the exception of the tropics. As the polar icecaps melt, they dump millions of metric tons of freshwater into the oceans, which are saltwater. This causes a major disruption in the thermohaline conveyors of the world's oceans as well as disrupting the Hadley cell.
These conveyors are what drives the globe's climate and move air masses from place to place. Specifically in the Atlantic, the Great Atlantic Conveyor brings warm air north from the tropics, which brings heat and moisture to places like Europe and the eastern seaboard of the United States. Without this warm, moist air two things happen. One, temperatures plummet. Two, it becomes more difficult for storms to form since they are lacking both heat and moisture to work with. Also, it causes hurricanes to more intense in the northern hemisphere because all that warm water, and consequently warm/moist air, is stuck in the tropics. Hurricanes feed off warm/moist air. The more they have to work with, the strong they will be and the longer will last.
Also, as the icecaps melt, the amount of radiation from the sun that is reflected back into space decreases significantly, causing the global warming process to speed up. This dramatically affects the climate of each hemisphere since cold air masses form near the poles, above the respective ice packs, and are carried to the continents by the jet stream. No ice cap means no polar are masses. Without these "cold fronts," you can't have boundaries (areas where cold air runs into warmer air). This is especially crucial to the central United States since the vast majority of storms, and therefore sources of rainfall, form along boundaries.
So yes, global warming DOES affect the local weather. In all reality, "local weather" is a misnomer since the weather in a place half way around the globe affects the weather somewhere else.
