A “polar vortex” event is breaking record-low temperature readings across the Great Plains and Midwest, and many in the media are rushing to blame the deep freeze on global warming.
The New York Times, for example, filled the top of its website with coverage of the Midwest’s polar plunge, including one prominent article that claims record heat in Australia and record cold in the U.S. were two sides of the global warming coin.
“Also, broadly speaking, scientists say, a hotter planet makes extreme weather more frequent and more intense,” reads the Times article, warning we live in the “Age of Weather Extremes.”
The Chicago Times, Axios, The Washington Post, and others echoed the theory that global warming was weakening the jet stream, allowing the “polar vortex” to meander south and bring record cold.
Many experts don’t think this is correct and say it’s media climate-hype. In fact, weather events that used to be considered, well, weather are now attributed to global warming that’s supposed to play out over decades and measured in trends, not short-term weather variability.
“‘Climate change’ once referred to outcomes measured via statistics (‘detection’) tracked over decades,” University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke Jr. noted Wednesday on Twitter.
“Today ‘climate change’ is most often used as a causal factor in attributing events over hours, days or weeks,” Pielke said. “We’ve become dumber.”
Winter weather often provokes a flurry of articles on why cold weather doesn’t disprove global warming, but now the cold invariably brings out scientists, activists, and pundits who claim warming is behind the cold. Even Greenpeace activists joined in.
Make sense? Of course, it doesn’t, and many scientists have pointed it out.
“Frankly, it is a stretch to make that link,” Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Tuesday.
“There is always cold air over the Arctic in the polar night and the question is whether it sits there or breaks out,” Trenberth said. “So all this is in the realm of weather. Not climate.” (SEE ALSO: Physicist: The ‘Global Warming Causes Colder Temps’ Is A ‘Pseudoscientific Scam’)
Several studies have claimed a correlation, and even link, between Arctic warming and mid-latitude weather, including one published in 2018 that found cold snaps are more likely when the Arctic is abnormally warm.
But that study suffered from serious flaws, namely, it did not test any hypothesis nor did it try to establish causality between global warming and cold snaps. Government datasets also point to fewer cold outbreaks, not more.
Read more at Daily Caller
Like UFO’s, if you accept that extreme cold is caused by global warming, then you WANT to believe.
If you accepted that the science was settled years ago, you should be disillusioned by now.
Just like when they blamed Witches and the Jews for the Black Death that hit parts of Europe in the 1500’s the Eco-Wackos and Nature Freaks want to blame Trump and Americans for the weather one just has to listen to them ranting on about everything from Soda Straws to SUV’s to realize their clean out of their minds
I would agree that we do live in an age of weather extremes, but then we always have. Nothing has changed.
If I extend the idiotic logic about extreme cold being the result of global warming, then I will make the case for ceasing to clean my bathroom . . . it will become so filthy that it will actually become clean.
Find the Scotese-Berner Co2/temps graph. Then find 14 day trend Toronto on Weather Channel. You will see over whatever time scale you want EXTREMES in weather, climate etc. Violent and UNPREDICTABLE CHANGE PATTERNS.
They teach all this GO GREEN Malarkey in the schools they tell the kids their parents and destroying the earth because their not going vegan still drive to their jobs and to the store instead of using a bicycle PETA and Ingrid Newkirk tells kids their parents kill Animals and all sorts of lies in fact a few years ago they came out with this Kids Book BROTHER EAGLE SISTER SKY A MESSAGE FROM CHIEF SEATTLE which was mostly all Lies and Fake word they put in Seattle’s mouth he never ever said