Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research claims that global warming is the root cause of recent spate of cold winters in the Eastern United States. But don’t worry – as temperatures rise, the warming effect of global warming will overcome the cooling effect of global warming.
The abstract of the study;
Recent amplification of the North American winter temperature dipole
Deepti Singh,
Daniel L. Swain,
Justin S. Mankin,
Daniel E. Horton,
Leif N. Thomas,
Bala Rajaratnam,
Noah S. Diffenbaugh
During the winters of 2013–2014 and 2014–2015, anomalously warm temperatures in western North America and anomalously cool temperatures in eastern North America resulted in substantial human and environmental impacts. Motivated by the impacts of these concurrent temperature extremes and the intrinsic atmospheric linkage between weather conditions in the western and eastern United States, we investigate the occurrence of concurrent “warm-West/cool-East” surface temperature anomalies, which we call the “North American winter temperature dipole.” We find that, historically, warm-West/cool-East dipole conditions have been associated with anomalous mid-tropospheric ridging over western North America and downstream troughing over eastern North America. We also find that the occurrence and severity of warm-West/cool-East events have increased significantly between 1980 and 2015, driven largely by an increase in the frequency with which high-amplitude “ridge-trough” wave patterns result in simultaneous severe temperature conditions in both the West and East. Using a large single-model ensemble of climate simulations, we show that the observed positive trend in the warm-West/cool-East events is attributable to historical anthropogenic emissions including greenhouse gases, but that the co-occurrence of extreme western warmth and eastern cold will likely decrease in the future as winter temperatures warm dramatically across the continent, thereby reducing the occurrence of severely cold conditions in the East. Although our analysis is focused on one particular region, our analysis framework is generally transferable to the physical conditions shaping different types of extreme events around the globe.
Read more: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016JD025116/full
What can I say – climate models seem to be much better at “explaining” climate events which have occurred, than predicting climate events which will occur.
Real science is not an immovable object when face with an ideological irresistible force. We are all doomed but not from Global Warming, doomed from totalitarian control.
They are looking like Ptolemy trying to rationalize a geocentric solar system with all the observed celestial events. Deferent, epicycles, equant, etc., whatever was needed to keep the earth at the center. And, of course, it became ingrained in religion.
It’s almost amusing to watch them torture their models until they match observations. Now, how will they blame future global cooling on manmade warming?
It would be funny if it weren’t costing me so much in taxes and utility bills.
It’s amazing that they can get models to, after the fact, track unusual weather patterns. Before, though, the same models showed no such thing. Versatile models, heh?
It the theory fails to fit the data, the modern approach is to ‘adjust’ the data.
This kind of weather pattern also took place during the decade of the 1930’s when atmospheric CO2 was *not* an issue.
Here are a few newspaper headlines from the time to illustrate:
1935: “50 Dust Storms In 104 Days
1935: ‘Black Dusters’ Strike Again In The Texas Dust Bowl {the U.S. and the NH had been under a severe heatwave for the entire decade of the 1930’s, up to this time.}
1936: “Niagara Falls Freezes Into One Giant Icicle” {notice, East Coast}
1936: February Was Coldest In U.S. History
1936: Violent Tornadoes Pummel The {U.S.} South – 300 Dead
1936: Dust, Snow & Wind Storm Hit Kansas Region In Same Day
1936: 780 Canadians Die From Heat Wave
1936: Iowa Heat Wave Has 12 Days of Temperatures Over 100 Degrees
1936: Heat Wave Deaths In Just One Small U.S. City: 50 Die In
Springfield, IL
1936: Missouri Heat Wave: 118 Degrees & 311 Deaths
1936: Ontario, Canada Suffers 106 Degree Temps During Heat Wave
1936: Alaska’s 10-Day Heat Wave Tops Out At 108 Degrees
As you can see, it can be extremely hot and extremely cold in the U.S. in the same time period.
The reason this happens is a high pressure system is centered over the western third of the U.S., and this keeps the western and central parts of the U.S. super hot, but the jetstream is able to come down into the U.S. along the eastern edge of this high pressure system, bringing cold arctic air with it into the eastern U.S. So we have record hot and cold temperatures during the same period, the difference being one section of the country is underneath a high pressure system and another section is not.
CO2 has nothing to do with it. This has been going on longer than human-caused atmospheric CO2.
I saw a NOAA blurb not long ago that said a high pressure system had been sitting over California for the last five years. And California has experienced decades-long droughts in the past, which would be caused by high pressure systems, so California seems to attract this type of weather system.
Is something like “The blob” the cause of persistent high pressure systems in this area? Something is causing them.
“warm-West/cool-East dipole ”
since this hypothesis was derived from North American temperature data 1980-2015 it cannot be verified by North American temperature data from 1980-2015 or any sub-sample therefrom. This kind of circular reasoning is surprisingly common in published research. Professor Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University has been waging a one-man war against this kind of scientific mischief for decades.
If I turn on my oven and the kitchen gets warmer, does that mean the refrigerator will get colder?
“we show that the observed positive trend in the warm-West/cool-East events is attributable to historical anthropogenic emissions”
They HAD to say that or they never would have gotten published.
JoNova already covered this.
Western Australia presently has a hot North and cold South.
Perth September minimum was coldest on record back to 1897. Ditto a half dozen more towns within about 150 miles. Some towns in the tropics have had hottest evah months in the hottest evah year. See JoNova blog for more.
I would really love a scientific explanation of the mechanisms that create this somewhat unusual juxtaposition. And why people link it to “Climate Change”.
Geoff
All sounds very convincing…to a ethnic/gender studies or journalism major who have ensured themselves of no knowledge, but a great deal of another’s opinion.
To anyone else it is logical idiocy to presume CO2 is hyper-sensitive to the axial tilt of the earth and at the same time is a reputed planetary blanket.
They use virtually the same methodology used by Cattiaux et al.: define ad hoc criterias for surface temperature series, use 500mb pressure vague data, create some teleconnection so it is all linkable to CO2 rising and Britney Spears’ albums sales charts that can be correlated to other authors.
JGR should be simply ashamed of themselves.
Glaciations will soon become cases of extreme global warming…
Governments get the science they pay for.
LOL
I will test this by putting a heater in my refrigerator. If all goes well according to the model, it will get colder. It’s what the consensus believes.
As Dr. John Christy has said in his testimonies to Congress, the majority of broken temperature records have been the cold ones.
And those winters on the east coast were far below zero. I recall temps in the neg 40’s during recent years. These are scary for people and animals who get stuck out on the roads and fields. You are not even safe in your home if the power winks out. I think during 2014 there were extreme low temps across much of the NE, and this was not getting much coverage. I had to drive google really hard to find out if all of the power was online in these states, and I did find one nuclear reactor that was shut down during this cold snap. I am sorry not to leave a ref, but I can find the info if needed by anyone here.
And thanks for Eric Worrall’s attention to this abysmal bit of computer modeling. “We modeled how human emissions caused 40 below temps and we verified human emissions caused 40 below temps.”
[Broken] records is gamed by having short records. The longer the record, the harder it is to break the record min and max, therefore, saying so many records without knowing the record length or just throwing records of various lengths together, has no particular meaning.
Here are the numbers from John Christy’s testimony to Congress.
“Another extreme metric is the all-time record high temperature for each state. The occurrence of the records by decade (Figure 1.1 below) makes it obvious that the 1930s were the most extreme decade and that since 1960, there have been more all-time cold records set than hot records in each decade. The clear evidence is that extreme high temperatures are not increasing in frequency. The recent claims about thousands of new record high temperatures were based on stations whose length-of-record could begin as recently as 1981, thus missing the many heat waves of the 20th century. So, any moderately hot day now will be publicized as setting records for these young stations because they were not operating in the 1930s.
…
About 75 percent of the states recorded their hottest temperature prior to 1955, and, over 50 percent of the states experienced their record cold temperatures after 1940.”
John Christy on record lows, continued:
Then, one might look at the more recent record of extremes and learn that no state has achieved a record high temperature in the last 15 years (though one state has tied Energy and Power Subcommittee 16 John R. Christy, 20 September 2012 theirs.) However, five states have observed their all-time record low temperature in these past 15 years plus one tie. This includes last year’s record low of 31°F below zero in Oklahoma, breaking their previous record by a rather remarkable 4°F. If one were so inclined, one could conclude that the weather that people worry about (extreme cold) is getting worse in the US. (Note: this lowering of absolute cold temperature records is nowhere forecast in climate model projections, nor is a significant drop in the occurrence of extreme high temperature records.)
I am not using these statistics to prove the weather in the US is becoming less extreme and/or colder. My point is that extreme events are poor metrics to use for detecting climate change. Indeed, because of their rarity (by definition) using extreme events to bolster a claim about any type of climate change (warming or cooling) runs the risk of setting up the classic “non-falsifiable hypothesis.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/21/dr-john-christys-testimony-before-congress/
In my opinion that east-west temperature see-saw is just an illusion. Many people were wondering not long ado what will happen when the 2016 El Nino is over. It had been preceded v by an approximately flat temperature platform that could be regarded as a hiatus. Ignored was the fact that this temperature platform was artificial in the sense that it was created from warn water left over by the 1998 super El Nino’s hasty departure. A step warming started in 1999 and piled up that warm water until global temperature was a third of a degree higher than before. It took only three years. It was an oceanic phenomenon but nevertheless Hansen declared it to be a product of greenhouse warming. You cannot turn greenhouse warming on and off like that But he saw that nine out of ten warmest years ever fell into the first decade of the twenty-first century and wanted to take advantage of this. This clutter of “warmest ever” years became hot stuff because there were more and more of them and they all sat on top of that platform. The warmth of the platform then started to gradually diminish. And eventually it was over-ridden by the El Nino of 2016. The peak of that El Nino took four years to form. In another four years it should be all finished and the post-El Nino temperature should go back to the temperature that existed in the nineties, before the Super El Nino of 1998 arrived. By which I mean the real temperature, not the fake warming that NOAA and its associates are showing there now.
It is entirely possible the West Coast rain drifted east. Just after those rains ended, there was flooding in central Texas. Then east Texas and Louisiana. Then the panhandle of Florida and East Coast. They could have all been essentially a monsoonal episode in succession.
It’s snowing in the mountains of California.
The temperature in Europe will now be as in November.
Rainfall in Australia cause a drop in temperature on the continent.
Weak La Niña may take several years.
The Sci-Fi story for this has already been written: http://www.baen.com/fallen-angels.html
Of course Global Warming causes colder winters. It causes warmer winters as well. And colder summers and warmer summers. The theory fits everything, so it must be true, mustn’t it.
I am working on a research paper to be published in Nature where I have discovered that up is actually down, fire is ice, land is ocean, and frick is frack. That is, what I construct of my universe to be true, I will manipulate with words to make it true. I cannot be proven wrong. That is why the paper is so fitting for Nature. This is similar to arguments I see from people about glacial melting. More sea ice extent and expanding glaciers is proof of warming because the glaciers are sliding to the sea faster due to bottom melt. Also, less sea ice extent and retreating glaciers is proof of warming, because they are melting throughout. In fact, all states of glaciers proves global warming is taking place.
“winter temperature dipole”. Wonderful piece of Newspeak, a completely meaningless combination of words in the English language.
Global warming causes colder winters? Then heat must start flowing from cold to less cold places. I wonder what the First Law of thermodynamics thinks of that.
They will just coin a new term to explain it: ‘negative heat.’
The Arctic temperatures as we move back into winter are showing cause for concern. Or can we also dismiss this of being insignificant?
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
I looked at that chart. And then I looked at charts at random across the 48 years they have been keeping track. Looks very much the same so not sure what you were getting at.
Whoops, 58 years. But any reasonable, thinking person will get the idea: Arctic temperatures very often spike like that across the entire recorded history.
The point I’m trying to make is that such things have happened before, but there is a difference that at this stage of cooling, the temperatures previously have at least dropped below the average as well as rising above it.
This year it just seems to be high and staying high.
It’s my feeling that the arctic is shrinking not because of accelerated melting, the summer temperature seem pretty average, but the winters are not as cold, so less ice forms. If things continue as they have started this year, less ice will again be formed leading to lower summer ice levels. I’m aware that the ice is refreezing reasonably quickly , but ‘m not sure that is a good indicator for the rest of the year.
The only thing that causes cold on this planet is lack of sunshine.
We rarely get much sunshine in Wales, but it’s pretty mild and rainy most of the time.
This pattern happens more often during global cooling and during La Nina’s. Some of the more extreme versions occurred in the 1970’s. A huge amplification of it can feature the polar vortex plunging very far south…….even into the Upper Midest or Northeast.
This happened a few times in the recent very cold Winters.
Not sure why they didn’t look at the actual reality of observations because these contradict much of what is stated.
According to these idiots there’s nothing global warming can’t do.
But one thing is beyond doubt: global warming makes people go mad. There’s no other explanation.
Back at the time of the (in)famous Rio earth summit it was clearly stated that “Global Warming”( as it was then called ) was caused by winters becoming warmer and not by summers becoming hotter. The warming winter effect was called by nights, not days, becoming warmer. This meant that the average annual temperature would increase because the minimum temperatures – which occur during winter nights – were higher and not because the maximum temperatures in summer were increasing ( which they were not anyway). This allowed warming to occur without any rise in summer temperatures. Now we are expected to believe that high summer temperatures cause winter minima to fall so that the average annual temperature rises anyway!
I think it was Goebbels who said “He who controls the past controls the future; he who controls the present controls the past”
QED
George Orwell got it exactly right.