In their frenzy to blame every bit of unusual weather on climate change (which used to be called global warming), climate alarmists have more than once claimed that the warming Earth can also cause hideous cold weather. Now, the horrendous wintry weather that’s been downing power lines and freezing windmills in Texas is being blamed on — you guessed it — global warming.
Today’s example of counterintuitive weather phenomenon comes from MIT climatologist Judah Cohen, who has been quick to attach the wintry weather in the southern United States to global warming. “The current conditions in Texas are historical, certainly generational,” said Cohen, who is also the director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research. “But this can’t be hand-waved away as if it’s entirely natural. This is happening not in spite of climate change, it’s in part due to climate change.”
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Cohen was one of a slew of authors of a 2019 article linking a phenomenon known as Polar Amplification to extreme winter weather events. Polar Amplification — known in the northern hemisphere as Arctic Amplification — suggests that the polar areas of Earth are warming far quicker than mid-latitude and equatorial regions due to several reasons, a key one being the reported loss of sea ice, as open water reflects sunlight less than sea ice.
In a nutshell, the “out-of-control” warming of the polar regions supposedly causes big swings in the jet stream and also may weaken the so-called polar vortex, which allows extremely cold weather to escape further southward than usual. “The energy escaping from the jet stream bangs into the polar vortex so it starts to wobble and move all over the place,” Cohen said. “Where the polar vortex goes, so goes the cold air.”
As the article referenced explains: “The rapid warming of the Arctic coupled with cooling or lack of warming in the midlatitudes has resulted in the diverging of Arctic and midlatitude temperature trends. The pattern of a warm Arctic and cold continents/Eurasia is the strongest observational evidence that some unaccounted for mechanism has been offsetting greenhouse-gas-forced warming over the Northern Hemisphere midlatitudes.” (Emphasis added.)
Translation: Global warming is happening in the polar regions where no one but penguins and polar bears will ever feel it, but not so much where we all currently live.
Also, remember that those “warmest years on record” climate alarmists are always yammering about are mainly due to temperature readings of the polar regions where almost no one lives.
The “global warming equals extreme cold” narrative has been around for a few years now. In 2019, another polar vortex made its way south and caused extreme cold over much of the United States. The same group of scientists were pushing the same line then that they are now.
Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at Woods Hole Research Center — who is also listed as an author on the 2019 article referenced above — said at the time: “This symptom of global warming is counterintuitive for those in the cross-hairs of these extreme cold spells … but these events provide an excellent opportunity to help the public understand some of the ‘interesting’ ways that climate change will unfold.”
Dr. Marlene Kretschmer of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research — also listed as an author of 2019 article referenced above — also believes that global warming in the Arctic is having a cooling effect on the mid-latitudes. But, at least Dr. Kretschmer and her co-authors concede that the relationship between the warmer Arctic and colder mid-latitudes is murky. In a study looking at the phenomenon, Kretschmer and her co-authors admitted as much.
“Previous studies showed that a weak stratospheric polar vortex can lead to cold-air outbreaks in the midlatitudes, but the exact relationships and mechanisms are unclear. Particularly, it is unclear whether stratospheric variability has contributed to the observed anomalous cooling trends in midlatitude Eurasia.”
One thing that Dr. Francis said back in 2019 rings true. “It’s a complicated story that involves a hefty dose of chaos and an interplay among multiple influences, so extracting a clear signal of the Arctic’s role is challenging.”
Making such claims also involves ignoring weather history: Spacecityweather.com — which reports on Houston’s weather — notes that brutal cold snaps have also happened in 1989, 1983, 1978, 1951, 1940, 1930, 1899, and 1895. Since human-caused global warming was supposed to have begun in the early 1980s (after the global-cooling scare of the 1970s), one wonders how global warming managed to effect the weather before that time.
As a species, we are not anywhere close to fully understanding the Earth’s incredibly complex climate system — or the extent of the role we humans play in it. And we certainly are not at a place where we need to scrap the efficient fossil-fuel energies that we know work in favor of “green energy” technologies that are not currently up to the task.
Unfortunately, Texas is currently finding that out the hard way.
