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Extreme Winter Weather In the US Linked To a Warming Arctic (theverge.com)
A new study shows how global climate change can have ripple effects at the local level. According to the research, extreme winter weather is two to four times more likely in the eastern U.S. when the Arctic is unusually warm. The Verge reports: Researchers analyzed a variety of atmospheric data in the Arctic, as well as how severe winter weather was in 12 cities across the U.S. from 1950 to 2016. Since 1990, as the Arctic has been warming up and losing ice, extreme cold snaps and heavy snow in the winter have been two to four times more frequent in the eastern U.S. and the Midwest, while in the western U.S., their frequency has decreased, according to a study published today in Nature Communications. The study, however, only shows there might be a correlation -- not a direct causal link -- between the warming Arctic and severe winters in the U.S. And it doesn't show how exactly the two are connected, so it doesn't really add much to what scientists already knew, according to several experts.
Today's study focuses on the Arctic as the main culprit for the extreme winter weather. Previous research has suggested that the warming Arctic may disrupt the polar vortex, a ring of swirling cold air circling the North Pole. Think of the polar vortex as a river, says study co-author Judah Cohen, a climatologist and director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research. The fast flow of this river locks up the cold air over the Arctic. But as the Arctic warms -- especially in some areas like the Barents-Kara seas north of Europe and Russia -- a boulder springs up in this river, disrupting the polar vortex and allowing the freezing Arctic air to flow south, Cohen says.
Today's study focuses on the Arctic as the main culprit for the extreme winter weather. Previous research has suggested that the warming Arctic may disrupt the polar vortex, a ring of swirling cold air circling the North Pole. Think of the polar vortex as a river, says study co-author Judah Cohen, a climatologist and director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research. The fast flow of this river locks up the cold air over the Arctic. But as the Arctic warms -- especially in some areas like the Barents-Kara seas north of Europe and Russia -- a boulder springs up in this river, disrupting the polar vortex and allowing the freezing Arctic air to flow south, Cohen says.
I would be curious to know how "extreme" is defined. Granted, I'm in the northeast US so my personal experiences have been limited to that area, but I don't feel like the weather has been extreme at all. Perhaps people may look at the events of the past few weeks and say "OMG, we've gotten several nor'easters in a row...the end of the world is coming." But if you look back over a couple of years, the winters haven't been particularly harsh on average.
I'd be interested in seeing the actual data.
In any event, the article title is very misleading when the source material is actually saying:
"The study, however, only shows there might be a correlation -- not a direct causal link -- between the warming Arctic and severe winters in the U.S. And it doesn't show how exactly the two are connected."
Hard to say if this is the usual tree hugger bias here or just sloppy reporting (or likely both...it is slashdot after all).
And people said that showed a contradiction to global warming - they were mocked and pooh-poohed by the political scientists who said that a one month aberration in the season meant nothing.
Then it kept happening so the political scientists said that it's not global warming - it's "climate change" and see we're still right and you're still peons.
So now we have a longer winter with snow fall in march (an aberration and not like that has never happened before - oh wait, it HAS) and that's now hard proof of global warming... er... climate change.
This isn't science. This is BULLSHIT.
Captcha: aromas... yeah... smells like it too...
One simply has to compare the suggested mitigation approaches for Climate Change with the long standing agenda of the radical Left Wing Environmentalists.
* Restrictions
* Higher Taxes
* More regulations
* Less choice
* Criminalization of normal activities.
While coincidences do happen, this is far too much of a coincidence, especially when you see the primary advocates of the Global Warming hypothesis making scads of money.
You sound like someone who doesn't know how little of the ozone layer problem was caused by refrigerant leakage. At the time, companies were using CFCs as propellant in hair spray and other similar products. Nearly all of the CFCs that we emitted came from those sources, not from incidental leakage of refrigerant over the course of years. They could have skipped the regulations on refrigerant entirely, and the ozone layer would have recovered almost as quickly.
Also, you sound like someone who doesn't understand geography. The ozone layer hole was over the south pole. There weren't (and still aren't) hundreds of thousands of people living under the area that the ozone layer hole covered. Given that there were only about 4,000 people living within the affected region, even if the ozone hole had caused the skin cancer fatality rate to increase by a factor of ten, only about one extra person per year in Antarctica would have died from it, and that's assuming the age range of the Antarctic population is much more diverse than it actually is, and that people there are outside much more than they actually are. In reality, it's probably more on the order of one extra death every thousand years.
Don't get me wrong, preventing the ozone layer from further depletion was a laudable goal. But the ends did not justify the means. Banning CFC use in hair spray was good, because it provided a huge benefit with almost no real impact on anybody. Banning CFC use for refrigeration was bad because it had significant negative impact for almost no benefit.
BTW, the reason that the heat exchangers are so much larger is that they are less efficient. So everyone in America is also using more power for their air conditioning, refrigerators, etc. than they were before the refrigerant change. So for that negligible change to CFC loss, we dramatically increased our country's CO2 output. It wasn't just a stupid decision from an impact-on-people perspective. It was also a net loss for the environment, too.
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