Is there any weather condition that cannot be blamed on anthropogenic global warming (AGW)? No, it seems, judging by the reaction in the US liberal press to the snowstorm that has engulfed much of the US over the past few days.
According to Bloomberg, it is all down to a loopier-than-normal jet stream, “the kind of event that could become more common as climate change accelerates.”
A similar claim was made by Eric Mack, a correspondent on Forbes, who wrote this week that the poles are warming disproportionately and that, “studies [he didn’t say which ones] have shown that all this unusual and rapid warming in the north affects the jet stream in new and sometimes weird ways.”
This week’s storm, he asserted, would soon come to be seen not as a once-in-a-generation event but as normal winter weather.
The New York Times has made a similar claim, as has Britain’s Guardian – the latter of which subtly reversed its recently acquired habit of using the term ‘global heating’ and went back to good old ‘climate change’ for the occasion.
Is global warming causing the temperature to plunge to minus 40 Celsius?
No one should dismiss something out of hand merely on the grounds that it seems counterintuitive – the climate could, theoretically, throw up more intense cold weather spells at the same time as observing a general warming trend.
It is just that there is compelling evidence to the contrary.
For example, the IPCC’s sixth assessment report, published in 2021, cited a number of analyses showing that “cold spells have undergone a reduction in magnitude and intensity in all regions of North America.”
In other words, the reality is not counterintuitive at all. Generally, rising global temperatures have led to a lessening of cold extremes in North America; it is just that this week’s weather was an extreme, random event that occurred in spite of the general climatic trend.
As for the theory that AGW is causing disturbances in the jet stream – a powerful flow of air several miles up in the atmosphere that divides polar air from tropical air – or in the ‘polar vortex’ (a disturbance higher up, in the stratosphere), which was debunked by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) after the last blast of extreme cold weather to strike the central US in February 2021.
It is not easy to establish long-term trends in phenomena that have only been studied since the 1950s, NOAA pointed out, but even in that short time, the polar vortex has trended in entirely opposite directions.
During the early-to-mid 1990s, the polar vortex was very strong, which made for a non-loopy jet stream. Come the late 1990s, however, the polar vortex began to weaken again, giving us a more wandering jet stream.
Yet that trend has not been sustained, either.
If the polar vortex and jet stream really were being strongly influenced by rising global temperatures you would at least expect a trend to continue year after year as the global temperatures continued to increase.
In other words, this week’s weather in the US is just that: weather. But that will never do when you are trying to tell a morality tale about humans fouling their own nest through their own arrogance and stupidity: every adverse weather event must be blamed.
By the way, the last time the US Midwest saw such low temperatures in 1977, it was interpreted by some as a sign of a coming ice age.
I have a popular book of the time, Earthshock, written by a volcanologist from Imperial College and a geologist from Birkbeck College, claiming that a prolonged freeze like that of 1977 could be exactly what provoked a sudden dive into the next ice age.
Now it is apparently a sign that we are all about to fry.
There is a third possibility: that the US Midwest has a climate that is prone to occasional blasts of polar conditions. But that doesn’t sound nearly so exciting.
Image of an icy Niagra Falls by peltierclem via Pixabay
Read more at Spectator UK
Providing that back in the 1970’s it was Global Cooling and a New Ice age was coming he very same liberal rags like Time and Newsweek was giving it top coverage and 1978 Episode of In Search Of has one about it and the winter of 76/77 in Buffalo jus like it did recently
“Is there any weather condition that cannot be blamed on anthropogenic global warming (AGW)?”
Yes. If the weather on a certain day is the same every year, we cannot blame AGW. Then weather and climate are stable. But then…. how do handle leap years? Can someone model this?
May I suggest an alternative hypothesis for the current unusual weather patterns around the world. The Tongan Volcano in early 2022 pumped huge amounts of water and water vapour into the atmosphere including into the mesosphere, which is unusual for volcanoes. The floods in the middle of the Central Australian desert were highly unusual and occurred 2/3 days after the explosion. Volcanoes have a history of causing unusual weather patterns such as Pinataubo in 1991 which cooled the earth by 0.5° C for 3 years and Krakatoa in 1883 which had major impacts on the weather around the world.
Where are the climate scientists gathering real data rather than just sitting behind their models?
As a kid growing up in the 1960s in Saskatchewan, Canada, it was normal to experience periods of 40°C below zero every winter. Sometimes for days. Sometimes for weeks. Our farm is in a pretty little glacial meltwater valley with walls up to 700 ft. high at some locations. It has a creek that normally dries up by autumn. This valley was carved when ice sheets thousands of feet thick melted during the cyclical warming from glacial to interglacial temperatures. More CO2 has nothing to do with causing the climate to change. Rather CO2 rises and falls in the atmosphere because CO2 solubility is temperature variable. From glacial 180ppm to interglacial 280ppm. All life dies without CO2. And we are far too close to the beginning of the death of all things from TOO LITTLE CO2. Life was born in life luxuriant concentrations more than twenty times today’s levels. And it has been dangerously and inexorably declining ever since. Today’s normal CO2 concentrations are dangerously low. Because life is entirely made of little carbon sacks of water we call cells. More CO2 has everything to do with a greener, stronger, more drought-tolerant, and bountiful environment and significantly more productive food production. Because life is literally made of CO2. More of it is always better. Greenhouse growers normally add up to 1600ppm CO2 to their operations because it makes plants bloom and grow. Yet our modern media remains dangerously unaware of the century-old science of CO2 biology of our carbon-based life on earth. And completely unaware of the normal, natural temperature cycles of climate. Climate cycles naturally 12°C up and down over a one hundred thousand year cycle. That is so great a natural temperature variation that ice sheets advance from their current interglacial polar latitudes to ice thousands of feet thick as far south as NYC, for example. And yet the media, uneducated in the sciences of climate and the environment, speculates that a fertile 0.012% increase in carbon dioxide is catastrophic. Ridiculous. A fake hockey stick study funded by a US government agency, manipulated irresponsibly a nonexistent static temperature with temperature rises coinciding with the past few decade’s normal, natural rise in temperature. This study used multiple scales of temperature to falsely create a graph of a static climate until today’s small increase in the past few decades. I’m not sure if this study was even peer reviewed. Then this fake study was spread widely through grade school education to falsely indoctrinate a generation that more CO2 was going to cut their lives short. Disgusting. And willfully ignorant.
Qu’appelle valley? I was there 3 years ago. Locals told me that it is popular with snowmobilers, they could ride there when there was no snow elsewhere. The deep valley harbours cold air.