Cold in the USA: That’s got to be climate change, right?
By Die kalte Sonne
(German text translated/edited in the English by P Gosselin)
“Climate communicators” always have the same “right” interpretation for every weather event: It’s climate change! A warm, especially dry summer in Germany? Climate change! We reported on this just recently.
Polar vortex frequency declining
Now comes a cold air blast from the Arctic deep into the south of the USA, and that’s climate change too. Here one TV station quoted a press agency report of the German DPA. Professor Stefan Rahmstorf provided an explanation. Who could be better at it? To check up on it, we first looked at the NOAA, which maybe should know the best. They report the polar vortex often weakens during the winter and the term “vortex” was in fact used in the USA back in 1853. But Rahmstorf now claims this is happening more and more often:
“ …this has happened multiple times more often over the past decade, according to a data evaluation by the PIK.“
We wanted to check up on this, and came across a statistic from Roy Spencer and John Christy of the University of Huntsville in Alabama:
Fig. 1: The frequency of “vortex” events in the USA. Source.
No increase, and also no significant decrease. The linear trend in Fig. 1 is rather an expression of randomness. We find no confirmation of the “PIK data evaluation”.
January, 2019 Arctic not warm
What does Rahmstorf explain to us further?
Several studies suggest that this has to do with the dwindling sea ice cover on the Arctic Ocean, especially on the Barents-Kara Sea.”
Rahmstorf is not changing the scene unnoticed: What he means is a suspected phenomenon: a warmer Arctic with less ice in winter produces colder temperatures over the northern continents.
But that was certainly not the case in January 2019:
Fig. 2: Temperatures at the core of the Arctic north above 80°N for January, 2019 (red) and the long-term mean (green). Completely normal! Source here.
Another evaluation for the entire Arctic in the period in question finds: Temperature deviation for 66-90°N is 0.0. So it turns out Rahmstorf has no reliable climate explanation for the event between 20 and 29 January 2019. What he has to offer us are controversial studies that detect a change in circulation due to a warmer Arctic with less ice, with the result that it tends to become cooler over the continents in winter. There are papers that suspect this, and there are papers that reject it and which go unmentioned by Rahmstorf, of course.
“Made up” explanation
Under no circumstances is the state of research suitable for attributing the current “vortex” in the USA, or anywhere else, to climate change. It has always happened, and it isn’t becoming more frequent. That’s weather. Aa a result one meteorologist reacted rather harshly:
Thus the PIK has definitely gone off base among the scientific community and is only cherry picking. Freely made up that there would be an increase in frequency of weak polar vortices. This has always happened almost every winter.”
Prominent Swiss meteorologist Jörg Kachelmann is quite annoyed by the nonsense. So are we. And we ask ourselves why is so much unproven and controversial material used to explain every current event in the world? Are real arguments like global warming at a rate of about 0.125 ° C / decade since 1950 (as to Cowtan & Way) too weak?
Huge PR campaign can’t sell it
Is climate change something that requires a high advertising effort to sell?
These PR campaigns, however, turn out to be baseless: every advertisement that runs too often only ends up annoying the consumer. The background is not science, as the consumer is supposed to believe. Instead, political ambitions are playing the main role. This is truly thin ice!
Okay, that’s a weird chart (the first one). What I notice is that years with hard winters have fewer “cold waves”. Could it be because when the whole winter is extremely bloody cold, you don’t have “cold waves” to notice and chart??
This all would be really hilarious if it wasn’t so damned sad. Just three weeks before the dreaded polar vortex descended on us the US and European weather models were forecasting warmer than average temperatures for the 7 day period the event occurred for most of the Midwest, Great Lakes, and Eastern US regions.
Now they wish to pretend they knew it was coming all along and what caused it. What a load of pure horse manure.
Seems to me that during the decline of a solar cycle as one approaches the minimum the zonal flow is more likely to be disrupted and turn more meridional. It also seems that there is more snow volume and extent during those times.
https://phys.org/news/2011-10-link-solar-winter-weather-revealed.html
https://justinweather.com/2018/10/29/sun-spot-cycle-solar-minimum-often-means-more-winter-snow/
But apparently neither weather or climate models take these factors into account?
To put this year’s winter cold into perspective, there is an informative article by Jon Erdman at weather.com America’s Coldest Outbreaks January 17 2018 My synopsis adds images and notes CO2 concentrations at the referenced dates.
The historical review shows that CO2 neither causes nor prevents outbreaks of arctic cold invading North America. Concerning ourselves with GHGs is no substitute for ensuring reliable, affordable energy and robust infrastructure.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2019/02/02/cold-waves-and-co2/
The opposite (sort of) an Arctic or Polar outbreak is called “The January Thaw” insofar as the area of interest is the northern tier of US states. It then moves east toward Pennsylvania and the coastal states.
Early settlers in the Canadian Prairies and adjacent US wrote of The January Thaw.
Now, instead of just writing and talking about the weather some have been fighting over it. They should read more and fight less.
If Joe Bastardi has it right, and I would bet he does. The bit of warm weather we’re getting now in the eastern half of the US will last about a week and then colder than average temps will descend upon us again and last right through Feb. and well into March.
BTW Joe’s Saturday Summary this week is pure gold as he explains why they forecasted the brutal cold and how the analogs of the MJO always were in the same zones during polar vortexes during times of similar SSTs and pressures in the Pacific.
Yes, I saw it. Polar Vortex blast across US has nothing to do with “warm Arctic”. Joe even predicted it all weeks ago.
Nice video posted at Jo Nova’s sight explaining what is known and not known about the polar vortex. Found it worth the less than 9 minutes it takes to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1sw5qLpuSU
According to Tony Heller, the Midwest USA is actually cooling down slowly, which may actually portend yet more cold spells.
https://realclimatescience.com/2019/02/1936-coldest-winter-and-hottest-summer-in-the-midwest/
Time will tell. In any case, it’s difficult to parse out a Human GHG Signal.
There is a change in climate.
Shorter winters. Spring comes earlier.
Can this also depend on the real change in global sunshine due to solar Brightening?
I’m not a Scientist or a meteorologist. I am, however, scientifically literate and can reason critically.
Here is my question on this “vortex” nonsense. If… as is surmised, we grant the AGW proponents the fact that warming of the atmosphere has “destabilized” the jet stream and allowed Arctic air to move down onto North America… and IF that air is from the Arctic and is BITTERLY COLD reflecting temperatures well below zero…. then how can we have a melting problem in the Arctic? Or am I just a simpleton?
Off topic–
I noticed in Professor Harde’s introduction to the Salby lecture he noted the presence of Professor Vahrenholt in the room. Has he written any analysis of the Salby lecture? Does he agree with the Salby- Harde assertion that our emissions are almost not detectable in the growth of atmospheric CO2? To me this is the most important point in the climate change discussion as it precludes our effecting climate change no matter how much we curtail our use of fossil fuels.
I was just thinking that the last time such cold winters were in evidence in the USA, songs like this were becoming hits across the globe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdWGp3HQVjU
Even back then the young generation’s angst was loud and strident, mostly about how everyone will perish real soon, how the older generation didn’t understand, and about the apparent the political inertia. What many youngsters back then didn’t understand was that the whole reason why they had ‘organized’ protests was to be used and lied to by the political left.
Then, like now, the young do not understand they are being manipulated by the political left. And just like then the youth react with what appears to be lots of earnest bravado, reciting scripted lines, but probably not with a sock strategically stuffed into their pants (like Mr. McGuire). 🙂
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