Posted on 02/20/2021 7:02:49 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
For many, especially folks who live in the South, the arctic outbreak that has gripped the nation's heartland for the past week is the kind of cold that only happens once in a century. Countless record cold temperatures were set. Conditions overwhelmed the Texas power grid, cutting off electricity to millions and bursting water pipes, creating a humanitarian crisis.
But with climate change making for generally warmer winters and causing heat records to outnumber cold records by 2 to 1 globally over the past decade, this historic cold snap may seem counterintuitive. It's not. In fact, paradoxically, a warmer climate may have actually contributed to the extreme cold.
The science of meteorology has come a long way in the past few decades, so much so that meteorologists saw this extreme winter weather coming many weeks in advance. That's because this extreme pattern was initiated by a large and recognizable phenomenon which unfolded in the Arctic at the beginning of the year called Sudden Stratospheric Warming, or SSW.
A number of climate scientists think that climate change may not only be making sudden stratospheric warming more likely, but that climate change itself may have a similar effect in the Arctic, because it is also causing significant warming. Due to human-caused climate change, the Arctic is warming at three times the pace of the global average.
For those tired of cold and snow, good news: it seems the extreme pattern has about run its course. The globe is about to return to a more normal pattern. That does not preclude cold air outbreaks and snowstorms for the U.S. as we head into spring, but it should allow the weather to return to some degree of normalcy.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
It’s called the jet stream, high and low pressure systems you doinks. I doesn’t have a damn thing to do with my truck or guns.
Unfalsifiable rubbish, as always.
Once in a century huh? So what greenhouse gases existed, say in the eighteenth century, that caused record cold for a few days back then?
Uh, polar bear farts? Again, for the climageddon folks out there:
1. Define the “correct” temperature range for the planet.
2. Define the “correct” humidity range for the planet.
3. Define the “correct” mean sea level for the planet.
4. Define the “correct” amount of precipitation for the planet.
5. Define the “correct” makeup of the atmosphere.
6. Define the “correct” amount of sea ice at the N/S poles.
7. Define/explain past glaciation and subsequent warming without any input from humans.
We’ll wait.........................
The fact that the same thing happened 132 years ago tells me that Mother Nature is just doing her thing again. Except in 1889, many folks likely had fireplaces, wood stoves and wells.
“...it should allow the weather to return to some degree of normalcy.”
What?
Normal?
I thought we are in an existential climate emergency requiring everyone to stay home and freeze and starve.
Yeah sure, once a century. I remember several of these kinds of storms in Texas in recent decades. But yeah sure, once in a century.
Maybe the Ice Age from 50 years ago is coming back from all the pollution from our automobiles and factories??
The political propaganda of meteorology has advanced much faster than the science of meteorology can debunk it.
Must John Kerry PERSONALLY fly his private jet over to your home to teach you a valuable lesson about compliance? Apparently so, my FRiend!
Re: Climate change and record cold: What’s behind the arctic extremes in Texas
It’s actually very simple. Global warming leads to global cooling, which in turn leads back to global warming, and the cycle repeats indefinitely, or at least until the global governance lefties achieve their long-sough Marxist utopia.
(C)BS
CBS = Continual Bull $hit.
In many of the recent records it is admitted they are records last seen one hundred or more years ago. Well, more than one hundred years ago fossil fuel use was just getting started and not then causing “global warming”.
What the “global warming” alarmists do not admit to, or identify, is one hundred and more years ago (a) just what was it that caused similar cold extremes we are seeing now, and (b) why are those extremes not now caused by the same conditions as existed one hundred and more years ago, and not “global warming”.
Similar weather in the 1890s.....
Guess all those cars back then caused .......Uh...no.....
Ah, the old SSW.
There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production– with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self- sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather.
The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth's climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic.
"A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale," warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, "because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century."
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras – and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the "little ice age" conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. "Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data," concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. "Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."
Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases – all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.
"The world's food-producing system," warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA's Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, "is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago." Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
The sunspot minimum causing the intense cold weather will probably last until 2053. The real scientific experts are Professors Valentina Zharkova of Northumberland University and Henrik Svensmark of the Danish Space Institute. I joked in an email to Professor Zharkova that she and Svensmark would get their Nobel Prize in Physics the same year as Donald Trump gets his Nobel Peace Prize.
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