It's The Jet Stream Stupid: A First Look At "The Most Extreme Heatwave In European History"

You may remember just over a month ago, an enormous area of high pressure was sitting over Russia and western Europe, funnelling Arctic air across the continent, causing temperatures to plummet well below zero and 10-25C below normal in some parts of Russia. You need to remember, because search engines are rapidly erasing this recent event from their search results, in favour of similar cold spells which occurred a few years ago. Why is that you may wonder? I suggest it is because they want the world to focus on the recent heatwave which has affected southern and eastern Europe. The battle is on for your mind. They want to control the way you think and how you see the world and that necessarily means you must habitually develop the attention span of a gnat. My advice: be like an elephant, not a gnat.

Here is what the Guardian was saying at the end of November:

A large area of high pressure covering the whole of eastern Europe is bringing severely low temperatures across Siberia. In a part of the world where temperatures are often below freezing at this time of year, the mercury has been 20C to 25C below average in areas over the weekend, with central and eastern Russia experiencing temperatures widely of -25C to -45C.

Over the next couple of days, westerly winds will result in temperatures rising above average in northern Russia but temperatures will remain 10C to 20C below normal in southern Russia. The orientation of the high-pressure system will allow northerly winds to send the cold air southwards across central and eastern Asia over the next few days. Temperatures will fall widely below average here too, with northern and eastern parts of China and Mongolia particularly affected. Temperatures here will fall 10C to 20C below normal by midweek as the same area of high pressure builds in and traps the cold air with temperatures struggling to rise above freezing by day.

Incredibly, by Wednesday, the huge area of high pressure affecting Russia and China will stretch all the way into the UK with an easterly wind sweeping cold air westwards across Europe. Away from Russia, there will also be a lot of cloud within this easterly flow across much of Europe. While demand for energy will increase because of the low temperatures, the low amounts of sunshine, below average wind and reduced precipitation mean that energy produced by renewable sources will be well below normal.

The ‘cold snap’ lasted well into mid December as high pressure and freezing Arctic air dominated. Then the British weather returned to normal just in time for Christmas - wet and windy! Let’s not also forget the even more extreme cold weather which gripped almost the entire US over Christmas, which the fanatics at the Guardian and elsewhere were telling us was due to global warming!

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Then, come the New Year, southern and eastern Europe fell under the influence of yet another huge stationary area of high pressure and this time, rather than bringing severe cold, it brought extraordinary heat. With January high temperature records being broken in several countries, of course the global warming fanatics lost no time whatsoever in ascribing the unusual weather to the man-made ‘climate crisis’:

European winter heatwave prompts calls for action on climate change

Record-high winter temperatures have swept across parts of Europe over the new year, prompting calls from activists for faster action on climate change while offering short-term respite to governments struggling with high gas prices.

Hundreds of sites have seen temperature records smashed from Switzerland to Poland to Hungary, which registered its warmest Christmas Eve in Budapest and saw temperatures climb to 18.9 degrees Celsius on January 1.

In France, where the night of December 30-31 was the warmest since records began, temperatures climbed to nearly 25C in the south-west on New Year's Day.

Normally bustling European ski resorts were deserted due to a lack of snow.

The weather service in Germany, where temperatures of over 20C were recorded, said such a mild turn of the year had not been observed in the country since records began in 1881.

You can always rely upon British tourists abroad to provide critical and incisive analysis of the weather:

French tourist Joana Host said: "It's like nice weather for biking but we know it's like the planet is burning".

"So we're enjoying it but at the same time we're scared," she said.

The ‘experts’ haven’t crunched the numbers yet, but you can be sure they will and the answer will be: “IT WAS CLIMATE CHANGE WOT DUNNIT”, loudly proclaimed throughout the mainstream media. Wonder Woman is already on the case:

"The record-breaking heat across Europe over the new year was made more likely to happen by human-caused climate change, just as climate change is now making every heatwave more likely and hotter," Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, said.

Blimey, that was a rapid extreme weather attribution! Fredi already knows what the conclusion of her probably soon to be published ‘scientific’ attribution study is going to be, which no doubt she is at this very moment working feverishly upon. World Weather Attribution will find the grubby fingerprints of the ‘climate crisis’ all over this event; it’s a certainty. Makes you wonder why they even bother crunching the numbers.

Grist has more ‘experts’ prematurely ejaculating their ‘expert’ opinions:

“This is exactly the kind of very abnormal event that is progressively rewriting global climatology,” Nahel Belgherze, a meteorologist in France, said in a tweet. Other experts based in Europe said the heat wave was unprecedented and alarming. Climatologist Maximiliano Herrera told CNN it’s “the most extreme heat wave in European history.” 

Climate researchers say the science linking climate change to record-setting heat waves is indisputable. Analyses of more than 100 hot spells over the past decade have shown that modern-day global warming, the majority of which has been brought about by the burning of fossil fuels, made nearly all of them more likely or severe. For example, an unusually hot summer in Texas in 2011 and a summertime European heat wave in 2017 were made 10 and four times more likely by climate change, respectively. 

It’s a done deal. Grist also tells us:

Europe broke heat records last year, and 2023 is shaping up to be no different. A winter heat dome descended on the continent right just in time for New Year’s Day, crushing thousands of standing high-temperature records. Eight countries — Belarus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Poland — set new all-time records for warmest January weather on the first of the month. The heat wave caused temperatures to rise up to 36 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) above average for this time of year. 

Wait? What? In November, across southern Russia - an area at least as large as the area of Europe currently affected by very mild winter temperatures - they were recording temperatures 20-25C below normal. Moreover, those extreme cold temperatures were caused by the same meteorological phenomenon: a huge stationary area of high pressure. But the Russian and European cold wave was largely ascribed to weather (with a few notable, half-arsed attempts to link it to climate change). As soon as the mercury rises though, the cultists are falling over themselves to climb on the climate change bandwagon because like, the world is burning up like, innit? Ask any cycling tourist. But yeah, the world is burning up, except when it ain’t burning up, except when it’s f***ing freezing, as in Russia and Europe in November, as in most of North America over Christmas. But let’s not let inconvenient bloody facts get in the way of a good story shall we. Talking of inconvenient facts, the Indian lame stream media provides us with a few, whilst still attempting to make the link with climate change:

According to The Washington Post report, the continent is experiencing an extreme warm spell because of the formation of a heat dome over the region. The Indian Express looks at what it is and how it is formed.

What is a Heat Dome?

A heat dome occurs when an area of high-pressure traps warm air over a region, just like a lid on a pot, for an extended period of time. The longer that air remains trapped, the more the sun works to heat the air, producing warmer conditions with every passing day. Heat domes generally stay for a few days but sometimes they can extend up to weeks, which might cause deadly heat waves.

Scientists suggest that any region of high pressure, whether a heat dome or not, forces air to sink and once it reaches the ground, it gets compressed and becomes even warmer [Note: this is obviously not always the case because more often than not, high pressure in winter can trap cold dry air, as it did in November and December]. Moreover, when air sinks, it gets drier and further raises the temperature of the area.

What is the relationship between heat domes and the jet stream?

The heat dome’s formation is related to the behaviour of the jet stream — an area of fast-moving air high in the atmosphere. The jet stream is believed to have a wave-like pattern that keeps moving from north to south and then north again. When these waves get bigger and elongated, they move slowly and sometimes can become stationary. This is when a high-pressure system gets stuck and leads to the occurrence of a heat dome.

Although heat domes are likely to have always existed, researchers say that climate change may be making them more intense and longer. They suggest with the rising temperatures, it is expected that the jet stream will become more wavy and will have larger deviations, causing more frequent extreme heat events.

Oh no! The ‘climate change causes a wavier jet stream’ theory comes back from the dead for the umpteenth time. I swear, this theory has more lives than a cat! But there you are; the proximate cause of the New Year heatwave in Europe was the Jet Stream generating a large area of stationary high pressure due to its rather unusual current accentuated meandering configuration.

The proximate cause of almost all weather events is to be found in an examination of atmospheric dynamics, not in an alleged human-caused long term global warming trend, which has resulted in global average surface temperatures increasing by approximately 1.2C since 1850. With extreme weather events, atmospheric dynamics almost invariably trumps thermodynamics. But the global warming cultists always want to have their cake and eat it, so they either ignore dynamics or they attribute those processes also to thermodynamics (the global warming causes a wavier jet stream theory).

Let’s not kid ourselves: something is happening with regard to extreme weather events - hot and cold, dry and wet (to a lesser extent) - but is it man-made emissions from fossil fuels which is causing these notable and significant perturbations to ‘normal’ weather, or is it something else? That is the question. That is the debate. But don’t expect reasoned debate from the global warming cultists - they know it’s fossil fuel burning which is causing unusual weather, cos Science:

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Soon, we will all be told that ‘science’ proves that climate change caused the brief and extraordinary winter heatwave in Europe (even as it gets cold again, probably!). Climate Change Wonder Woman and the X-Men team at WWA are on it right now.