An MIT climate researcher is claiming that global warming is leading to a shift in winter weather going forward. Judah Cohen, the director of seasonal forecasting at AER (Atmospheric and Environmental Research) and a visiting professor at MIT believes that, due to global warming, February might replace January as the coldest of the winter months.
This could mean that the world may expect more events like the great Texas Freeze of February 2021, when renewable energy sources failed, leading to the death of nearly 250 people.
Cohen explained his theory to Newsweek in December.
“When the polar vortex is in its normal or strong state, there is a strong ribbon or river of air that flows rapidly from west to east … that acts like a barrier that separates cold air to the north over the Arctic and milder air to the south across the mid-latitudes,” he said.
According to Cohen, so-called climate change is leading to warming in early winter and cooling in the later winter months such as February.
“December has certainly been warming if you look at the U.S.,” the climatologist said. “February, going back to 1979 — so quite a few years now — we’re actually seeing in the center of the U.S. a very distinctive cooling trend.”
“We tend to get more severe winter weather when the polar vortex is weak and more milder rainy weather when the polar vortex is strong, and we’ve seen a decrease in the strong state of the polar vortex and an increase and the weak state of the polar vortex,” Cohen explained to videographer Peter Sinclair.
Cohen contributed to a study on the effect, published in September of 2021.
Cohen and his team analyzed recent trends and attempted “to show that a lesser-known stratospheric polar vortex (SPV) disruption that involves wave reflection and stretching of the SPV is linked with extreme cold across parts of Asia and North America, including the recent February 2021 Texas cold wave, and has been increasing over the satellite era. We then use numerical modeling experiments forced with trends in autumn snow cover and Arctic sea ice to establish a physical link between Arctic change and SPV stretching and related surface impacts.”
Cohen is not the only climatologist who is claiming that the worst of winter appears to be switching to February. Nebraska’s state climatologist Martha Shulski also claims to see a trend toward colder late winters.
“One thing that we have seen is that we’re warming during the early winter and then really cooling down in the last 30 years during February,” Shulski has said. “We have a tendency to be getting more Arctic air, more polar air outbreaks for this part of the country during February, during late winter.”
Cohen’s work seems to parallel the work of Marlene Kretschmer and her team at the Potsdam Climate Institute. In 2018, Kretschmer published a study that stated, “Despite global warming, recent winters in the northeastern United States, Europe, and especially Asia were anomalously cold. Some midlatitude regions like central Asia and eastern Siberia even show a downward temperature trend in winter over past decades.”
But in 2021, in the midst of the Texas freeze, Kretschmer admitted that the alleged trend wasn’t understood. “[B]ottom line: we need a better understanding of the different mechanisms (and associated risks) of how further Arctic changes (which are unfortunately certain in a warming climate) might affect our weather and climate.”
Needless to say, the trope that global warming is leading to more cold has been met with skepticism, even among some climate alarmists.
Climate alarmist hero Kevin Trenberth told the Daily Caller, “Frankly, it’s a stretch to make that link…. There is always cold air over the Arctic in the polar night and the question is whether it sits there, or it breaks out.”
“So, all this is in the realm of weather. Not climate,” Trenberth concluded.
“Weather, not climate,” was a refrain that climate hysterics used to use when climate realists attacked their positions on global warming with anecdotes about cold weather. Now, scientists such as Cohen are attempting to blur those lines even further in an attempt to blame cold weather on global warming. In the climate alarmist’s mind, any extreme weather event, be it cold or hot or wet or dry, is due to man-made climate change and some scientist somewhere will say so. So, stop asking questions.
