As 2000 Mile Wide Severe Winter Blizzards Engulf America, How Long Before The Climate Crisis Fanatics Claim: 'It's Global Warming'?
It can’t be long. They never miss a trick these people. An almost ‘unprecedented’ winter storm of this magnitude will be too hard to resist; a near perfect example of extreme weather affecting hundreds of millions of people; Americans and Canadians trying to celebrate Christmas, no less. No matter that it involves extreme cold temperatures; the climate crisis fanatics have their pseudoscientific theories to explain why exceptionally cold air can find its way south because of so called Arctic Amplification (accelerated warming of the Arctic regions) affecting the configuration of the Jet Stream in mid-latitudes. I’m almost certain that they will invoke those theories very soon and add to them by claiming that global warming was responsible for the ‘unprecedented’ scale and ferocity of this particular winter storm. No hint of it yet from the BBC or Guardian, but just wait.
Some 200 million Americans are feeling the icy grip of a massive winter storm that has been linked to at least 12 deaths ahead of the holiday weekend.
More than 1.5 million people lost power and thousands of flights were cancelled on Friday.
The vast storm extends more than 2,000 miles (3,200km) from Texas to Quebec.
A bomb cyclone, when atmospheric pressure plummets, has brought blizzard conditions to the Great Lakes on the US-Canada border.
In Canada, Ontario and Quebec were bearing the brunt of the Arctic blast, with power cut to hundreds of thousands.
Much of the rest of the country, from British Columbia to Newfoundland, was under extreme cold and winter storm warnings.
The US National Weather Service (NWS) said its Friday map "depicts one of the greatest extents of winter weather warnings and advisories ever".
Even the usually milder southern states of Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Georgia were experiencing hard-freeze warnings.
The NWS says more than 100 daily cold temperature records could be tied or broken over the next few days. Decades-old records have already been matched:
I expect something like ‘Bomb Cyclones Becoming More Deadly Due To Global Warming’, or similar very soon.
Here’s what the Graun is saying:
Forecasters had said the scale of the weather pattern was nearly unprecedented in its scope, exposing than 200 million people – about 60% of the US population – to some sort of winter advisory or warning. The weather service’s map “depicts one of the greatest extents of winter weather warnings and advisories ever,” forecasters said.
Temperatures in Colorado on Thursday dipped to a record-breaking low of -9F (-22.7C) from 42F (5.5C), while Cheyenne, Wyoming, recorded its greatest one-hour temperature drop, plunging from 43F to 3F in the space of 30 minutes.
New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul , declared an emergency, saying the threat of flooding and ice jams blocking rivers would “wreak a lot of havoc in our community”. The Ohio governor, Mike DeWine, called it “a unique and dangerous situation”.
More than half of the so-called lower 48 states, from Washington state to Florida, are under winter weather alerts, including wind chill advisories affecting about 135 million people, said Ashton Robinson Cook of the weather service’s prediction centre.
The NWS has described the storm as “once in a generation” weather event, saying more than 100 daily cold temperature records could be equalled or broken over the coming days. Florida is projected to experience its coldest Christmas in 30 years.
Apocalyptic. They can’t be seen to be declaring plain old winter weather emergencies without simultaneously declaring a climate emergency, they just can’t. They won’t miss this opportunity, believe me.
Thought you might be interested if you haven't seen this already: the YT algo directed me to this podcast by L D den Boer in which he subjects the IPCC claims to actual physics and draws some comforting conclusions. The science bit starts at around 22 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJOazhVmf9w&list=PLIKu5WM35J2qiunR0M_MODYNF_iz05YTR
The bit at the end is less comforting but may fit in with recent observations suggesting the earth's temperature has stopped rising. Enjoy!
Here we go. Right on cue. This is in the WaPo - date stamped Dec 23rd, so they were at it even before I wrote this article it would seem. Premature ejaculation of climate change BS from the spinmeisters at the MSM:
Research suggests that climate change is altering the jet stream, pushing frigid air down to southern climes more frequently. But the scientific jury is still out.
The data is clear: Rising global temperatures mean winters are getting milder, on average, and the sort of record-setting cold that spanned the country Friday is becoming rarer. But at the same time, global warming may be altering atmospheric patterns and pushing harsh outbreaks of polar air to normally moderate climates, according to scientists who are actively debating the link.
Drastic changes in the Arctic, which is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, are at the center of the discussion. Shifts in Arctic ice and snow cover are triggering atmospheric patterns that allow polar air to spread southward more often, according to recent research.
“We’ve seen the same situation basically the last three years in a row,” said Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts. “Here we go again.”
But understanding any link between planetary warming and extreme cold remains a work in progress. Many climate scientists still emphasize that even if frigid air escapes the Arctic more often, that air will nonetheless become milder over time.
More than a million without power as frigid air overtakes eastern U.S.
The debate started with a research paper Francis co-authored in 2012. It gets revived whenever an extreme-cold event creates headlines, such as in 2021, when Texas’s energy grid was overwhelmed by a storm that killed 246 people.
Francis’s research hypothesized that Arctic warming was reducing the contrast between polar and tropical temperatures, weakening the jet stream, a band of strong winds in the upper atmosphere that helps guide weather patterns. A weaker jet stream would allow weather systems to more easily swing from the Arctic down into mid-latitude regions that typically have temperate climates.
Since then, observations of jet stream patterns have not confirmed the hypothesis, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. But the research inspired a flurry of follow-up studies that Swain expects will eventually clarify a link between climate change and cold-weather outbreaks.
“We’re 10 years into this conversation and there’s still a lot of mixed feelings in the scientific community, though there is some tantalizing evidence that there is some ‘there’ there,” said Swain, who works at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.
A 2021 study published in the journal Science is one new point of debate. The research explains what author Judah Cohen called “a physical foundation” linking Arctic warming and changes in atmospheric patterns.
It focuses on the polar vortex, an area of low pressure typically parked over the North Pole and surrounded by a band of fast-flowing air. Cohen likens it to a spinning top — when the polar vortex is strong, that band of air spins in a tight circle.
Look out for falling iguanas as temperatures drop
Increasingly often, Cohen found, the polar vortex weakens like a wobbling top. That gives the circulating air a more oblong, extended shape and encourages bursts of Arctic air to spread southward.
While the polar vortex took on that stretched shape for about 10 days a year in 1980, in recent years, it has been occurring more than twice as often, said Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research.
The research links that to changes in the climate around the Arctic: In the Barents and Kara seas north of Russia and Scandinavia, the waters have warmed and ice has melted, whereas in Siberia, there’s been a cooling trend from increases in snowfall induced by climate change.
Some scientists say that a longer and more thorough record of data is needed to back up Cohen’s research and that there isn’t enough evidence to blame Arctic warming for cold outbreaks at lower latitudes.
The surprising reasons parts of Earth are warming more slowly
Swain predicted that scientists will make sense of the atmospheric dynamics but that it could take years.
“It’s one of the most complicated topics in climate science,” Swain said.
In the meantime, researchers are confident that cold extremes will follow larger global trends and gradually get warmer, though they still will have significant impacts on places unaccustomed to the cold.
“We’re going to break a lot of records this week, for sure,” Francis said. “The likelihood of breaking cold records is decreasing, and we see that in the data.”
And Cohen said data suggests that relief from the cold across the United States is near: Weather models agree that the polar vortex is going to snap back from its oblong shape by early January, trapping the most frigid air around the North Pole once again.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/12/23/climate-change-impact-cold-weather/
How long before we get a rapid extreme weather attribution from the 'experts' at World Weather Attribution or the Met Office I wonder, which the press will amplify with headlines like, 'US Christmas Storm Made 10 Times More Likely By Climate Change'? God, these dummies are so predictable.