Essay by Eric Worrall
Global warming is causing colder Februaries, and arctic cold outbreaks, according to climatologist Judah Cohen.
Thanks To Climate Change, February Is Now The Cruelest Month
Jeff McMahon
Senior Contributor
Jan 29, 2023,12:14am ESTThose unusual frozen Februaries in Texas may not be so unusual anymore.
Early winter has been warming across North America, but late winter is another story. Scientists have documented a cooling trend over more than 40 Februaries, marked by dangerous and increasingly common intrusions of Arctic air deep into the United States.
“December has certainly been warming if you look at the U.S.,” Judah Cohen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says in a recent video. But “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 said in an interview with Peter Sinclair, a videographer for Yale Climate Connections who posts pithy snippets of interviews on his excellent Youtube channel, greenmanbucket.
…
Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2023/01/29/thanks-to-climate-change-february-is-now-the-cruelest-month/
The video interview;
The abstract of the paper;
Linking Arctic variability and change with extreme winter weather in the United States
JUDAH COHEN , LAURIE AGEL, MATHEW BARLOW, CHAIM I. GARFINKEL, AND IAN WHITE
SCIENCE
1 Sep 2021
Vol 373, Issue 6559
pp. 1116-1121Cold weather disruptions
Despite the rapid warming that is the cardinal signature of global climate change, especially in the Arctic, where temperatures are rising much more than elsewhere in the world, the United States and other regions of the Northern Hemisphere have experienced a conspicuous and increasingly frequent number of episodes of extremely cold winter weather over the past four decades. Cohen et al. combined observations and models to demonstrate that Arctic change is likely an important cause of a chain of processes involving what they call a stratospheric polar vortex disruption, which ultimately results in periods of extreme cold in northern midlatitudes (see the Perspective by Coumou). —HJS
Abstract
The Arctic is warming at a rate twice the global average and severe winter weather is reported to be increasing across many heavily populated mid-latitude regions, but there is no agreement on whether a physical link exists between the two phenomena. We use observational analysis 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.
…
Read more: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.abi9167
Colder winters are obviously a sign of global warming. Lets hope governments get global warming under control, before we all freeze to death.
Update (EW): Willis points out Februaries are actually getting warmer.
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Yep.
Just what I’ve been suggesting for 15 years now.
Solar variability affects jet stream meridionality which affects global cloudiness to alter solar energy into the oceans which shifts the balance between El Niño and La Niña for a warming or cooling world.
Stephen, I agree with your mentioning El Niño and La Niña, although I admit that my perception of their differences is based on my viewpoint in west-central Argentina. From here it certainly looks like (is coordinated with, which is not proof) a La Niña phase produces much weaker west to east wind flow, and the Antarctica Polar Vortex gets cold air much further north than normal. We now appear to be going into a Neutral phase and maybe even an El Niño, and remember what they say: El Niño is a good boy, and La Niña is a bad girl.
What solar variabilty?
NASA claims TOA solar energy has barely changed in the satellite age. Down slightly since the 1970s.
There’s more than one kind of solar variability. In this case, it’s sunspot count that’s way down, removing the cosmic ray shield provided by sunspot emissions. This leads to more high-altitude cloud and meridional jet stream.
But climate models are crude and don’t deal with even visible clouds.
If the month of February is getting colder, then there shouldn’t hear any whining about not being able to hold the Winter Olympics.
But our children weren’t supposed to know what snow was! Maybe they won’t know what green grass is…
“We then use numerical modeling experiments forced with trends” – more garbage in garbage out nonsense. And these clowns claim to be scientists. They should be selling used cars instead of scaremongering!
How dare you insult used car salesmen. That takes special skills.
Last Spring I decided to give my 2005 Toyota Camry to charity.
The wife asked why not sell it? I said because the battery was dead, the car stalled five seconds after you jump started it, it needed a paint job, the front wheel bearings were making noise, the rear bumper had a big dent and the left taillight was broken (never let the wife drive your car), the CD player didn’t work and the keys would not open the driver’s door if the FOB didn’t work, and they would fall out of the ignition while you were driving (worn out keys). . And most important, I couldn’t find the title.
The wife, a former real estate agent, sold the car in one day and got $1,100 in cash, in spite of the fact that the guy couldn’t drive it (He jump started it repeatedly, and it stalled repeatedly). But he knew how to get a new title and brought me papers to sign the next day. He never got to drive the car before he bought it. Selling a used car takes a special skill. I couldn’t believe it. Of course I never saw any of the $1,100 cash.
Charities do not want junk cars like you describe. They want a vehicle that can quickly be sold. Call and ask them. {There is an intermediary you deal with, rather than the charity.}
I sold an old truck in the same manner as your better half.
🙂 I’ve had a Toyota Camry for 15 years that has 350,000 on the clock. Replaced a few things (radiator, alternator) and it’s often used on dirt roads. It averages 110km/hr, at just under 3k rmp, over the 1,400 km between Johannesburg and Cape Town with one stop for petrol. I get offers regularly and could sell it tomorrow if I wanted. In South Africa at any rate.
Arctic surface temperature records for the longest period available suggest there is a cyclical component at work possibly related to the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation.
Yes, this is the main component of the most recent warming. I’m thinking we will find out very soon now as the cool phase of the AMO could begin as soon as 2025.
However, we’ve seen general warming since the depths of the Little Ice Age. That suggests another component as well. Most likely related to previous warming periods (Medieval, Roman, Minoan, etc.). I believe these could be explained by salinity differences across global ocean currents. Interestingly, humans could also have augmented this change with massive micro-plastic pollution of the oceans since the 1970s.
“massive micro-plastic pollution of the oceans since the 1970s.”
Plastics deteriorate outdoors to microparticles
Sunlight and heat cause the plastic to break down into more methane and ethylene, both of which have little or no effect on the global average temperature. Because methane is a very low concentration and its greenhouse effect is almost completely overlapped by the stronger water vapor greenhouse effect. Methane is also not a long lasting greenhouse gas.
Ocean current cycles affecting floating ice. I bet that Judah Cohen never thought of that.
Previous observatins have found no link bewteen Arctic amplification and any chnages to the Rossby waves – extreme weather.
Here’s a link.
You pay your money and you take your pick.
Ingrowing toenails.
But send me money and I’ll soon prove that it does that too.
Why are you writing lines that don't wrap, but juest keep going on off the edge of the browser windowMy most recent computer model proves that global warming causes damage to script formatting functions!
/sarc off
Yeah, I discovered that after I posted from my laptop. I tried to find a way to fix it, but there’s no “edit” available.
Try one of the paste options such as “paste as plain/unformatted text”. The defaults are usually OK.
There’s a scroll bar.
It looks like he got “pre /pre” to work.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/test-2/
If I attempt to correct something in this comment box, the entire sentence disappears. That’s fun. If I do a ‘find’ for my name’s first 4 letters on WUWT I get 2 at the top I don’t want. So I start with an up-search arrow. On Jo Nova’s site, the opposite happens.
The “anticipation” AI fills in stuff I don’t want or otherwise screws up the text.
I am beginning to think I understand “global warming” better than I do the process of making comments.
😎
I’ve had whole lines disappear on me also. Not all the time. (Maybe when I’ve copy/pasted something into the comment?)
When I use “Ctrl + F” after logging in, I also see an additional 2 hits but that’s there are an additional two “gung”‘s on the page after logging on.
(WordPress upper right title bar and top of the comment section. “You are logged in as …)
Why is your font smaller than everyone else’s? And, yes, I do mean font.
It’s the same as if you ask a devoutly religious person if there is anything in the world that isn’t according to their God’s will.
Climate alarm is a religion, which is why it makes religious claims, that all effects seen in the world are the result of “the Sins of Man”.
The next 30 or so years should be interesting in terms of how they will be able to maintain the illusion. The AMO and PDO oscillations that were largely responsible for the “Ice-age cometh” scare of the late 70s and the Global Warming scare for the next ~40 years are now going to turn downwards again for (they’ve already started by the looks of things), so we could expect a period of cooling for the next 30 or so years, by which time they will be frantically screaming about the “Ice-age cometh” and the cycle will start again. If we haven’t totally destroyed the entire industrialized society by trying to stop people from changing the climate. That is folly, as man’s actual contribution is a rounding error on a rounding error, models are wrong. All we could manage to do is to squander the accumulated wealth of a thousand generations and leave our grandchildren in squalor and destitution. This will be done, ostensibly to prevent our grandchildren being left in squalor and destitution. The cynic in me ponders whether this was the plan all along.
This constitutes science? A correlation is not a physical link
Postal rates have been going up for the past four decades. That has obviously caused more cold Februarys in NA.
It is, to ArtStudents™
“A correlation is not a physical link”
Climate change alarmists don’t understand this concept.
Anyway, net result, planet is greener, NASA, crop yields up, OWID, less deaths from cold weather, Lancet, and extinctions declining IUCN,
The planet hasnt been happier in a long time!
How about we celebrate Happy Earth Day?
An area, particularly around deserts, the size of the USA has got greener over the last 20 to 30 years according to NASA satellite imagery, thanks to increased atmospheric C02 and less cold nights particularly in Winter. More biodiversity, more plant and animal habitat, top soil fixed, water moisture fixed. It’s all good news.
We need more fossil fuel burn, to up the CO2 levels.
They had to come up with a “cold is a sign of warming” bit of pseudoscience to support their narrative because of the pool of record-setting cold high-pressure building in East Siberia. Having set records in northeast China, a cross polar flow is sucking some of that bitter cold air over the top of the globe and aiming it south. As many look west for the next storm, they should be looking north. By next Saturday air from Siberia could be howling down the streets of New York City. Not a good day to be homeless. Hope the grid can handle it.
https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2023/01/29/arctic-sea-ice-over-the-top/
The claim isn’t that ‘winters’ are getting colder; just Februarys, and even then only in ‘parts of Asia and North America’.
According to UAH, Februarys in the lower 48 US states (USA48 in the data) have been warming at a rate of +0.15C per decade since 1979.
This compares to an overall winter (Dec-Jan-Feb) warming rate of +0.18C/dec in the US lower 48. That’s very close to the Northern Hemisphere rate of +0.17C/dec, again according to UAH.
In contast to UAH, the NOAA surface temperature record shows practically no February warming across the US lower 48 states since 1979 (just +0.06C/dec).
The NOAA winter warming rate is closer to that of UAH for the US lower 48, but still slightly cooler; +0.17C/dec compared to +0.18 (UAH).
I wonder why this would be the case, given the allegation that NOAA is supposed to be making the surface record warmer?
They’re, er, not infallible.
These ‘temperature’ numbers based on global averages – some converted from °F, ‘corrected’ for station drop-out, urban heat island effect, changing price of fish, phase of the Moon, etc deliver an accuracy greater than the actual, raw temperature data upon which they are based. An impossibility.
Truly ‘Manmade’ warming.
I say again, the NOAA data is cooler than the UAH satellite data in this case.
Are you suggesting that UAH is making the warming up?
MS Excel may be the greatest cause of “Man Made Warming” there is.
“Cohen et al. combined observations and models to demonstrate “ that they too can make stuff up.
“We then use numerical modeling experiments forced with trends..” that seemed right to us.
Yes, it’s bang on narrative, alright. But it’s hardly new..
2014
Global warming – you must be joking! How melting Arctic ice is driving harsh winters
“Dr Holdren has been reporting directly to the President on the real time effects of climate change and is keen to understand what this new research tells us about the future impact of changes to the jet stream.
Asked about this sudden interest in her work from the US Presidency, Francis muses thoughtfully. “Yes, we’ve had a lot of interest from policy makers”, she acknowledges.”
https://theecologist.org/2014/nov/21/global-warming-you-must-be-joking-how-melting-arctic-ice-driving-harsh-winters
We have a constant ramping up of visibly failing scenarios..
A guy that can’t even dress himself, or at least properly adjust his vest’s collar, takes a stab at hand waving. For more such high quality work, send money.
Hey now, that is bordering on cancel culture. Are you attempting alarmist methodology. LOL
Hi there
I went back to my comment and link to webcams for the snow in the Alps, and spotted your reply about ‘boiling oceans’.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/01/25/bbc-end-of-snow-how-climate-change-threatens-to-close-ski-resorts/#comment-3671642
I wonder was it an ‘off cuff remark’ or the Feynman ‘tea cup energy’ situation you were having in mind ?
so we get increased meandering of the jet stream because of arctic sea ice loss during february when arctic sea ice is near max ? and cooling at twice the global average would be ~2 degrees , so temp is -20 instead of – 22 ; causing major changes in global circulation ? i guess you have to be an MIT climate scientist to understand it
screen’s comprehensive study in nature , archived on wuwt , concluded no connection between arctic ice and jet stream . i guess judah doesn’t read actual science
A few years ago, they were claiming it was the low number of ice-Wadhams in the NH summer that caused the cold winters. That is, the cold February was caused by warm September.
It is hard to keep up with the nonsense.
I will note that here in central Washington State, my morning temperature was 7°F [-14C].
Not to mention, in the rest of the world cold out breaks are less frequent, less intense, shorter, and cover less area. In feb, and the rest of the year.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab4867/meta
Well we better fund more research to see if Global Warming will also be making March’s colder too
Hmmm! So all the times it happened in the preindustrial times were just accidents? BTW it is very cold in Greenland right now. Also cold in Antarctica. In fact, the majority of the SH has had a relatively cool summer.
Antarctic sea ice is below average. Kind of interesting with the cool summer. This should be producing a lower albedo which one would think should cause warming. Any ideas on the conflict?
Geothermal? Disruption of the circumpolar current? It certainly isn’t a lack of solar activity.
Check with the ice expert Chris Turney
https://www.foxnews.com/science/stuck-in-our-own-experiment-leader-of-trapped-team-insists-polar-ice-is-melting
“Global Warming is Causing Colder Februaries”
War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength; black is white;
Global warming is causing colder Januaries, Februaries, Marches, Aprils, Mays….
…except when we get a few days of sunshine.
The trends is for decreasing outbreaks.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab4867/meta
If there has been a recent change, it is likely due to solar activity shift and oceanic/climatic oscillations.
If you had a friend with an above ground pool, you’d remember when everyone would walk in a circle, adding energy, it’d create a smooth, controlled whirlpool. It was when everyone got out or stopped that the water became choppy & chaotic with rogue waves.
It’s strange that Judah consistently find the opposite of what other research shows us and what the physics tells us to expect.
Paper describing academic fraud as innovative writing technique surprisingly popular among academics.
https://twitter.com/nathlarigaldie/status/1606240836236169216
“826 likes (and counting) and 157 retweets for a study that claims the best way to publish is to p-hack and HARK your way through it. This is not acceptable, and I am astounded by the amount of appreciation it is receiving.“
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42995-021-00120-z
Warming caused by human CO2/CH4 (well mixed greenhouse gases) is not possible after saturation of their main absorption frequencies is reached. Saturation moves the greenhouse effect’s radiative forcing to within a few meters of the surface and well within the atmospheric boundary layer.
Since the ABL exists in thermal equilibrium with the surface, the absorbed energy moves back into the atmosphere quickly as part of it’s ongoing thermal equilibrium processes. These processes are always active. The biggest source is conduction although some increased radiation also will occur. The net result is to attenuate nearly all of the radiative forcing.
One other factor does remain. An increase in evaporation and latent heat production. As a result, global precipitation should increase slightly leading to drought reduction.
This is the effect these climate scientists fear.
Did anyone else actually read the abstract? Forbes is just running a click-bait headline. Dr. Cohen isn’t saying that global warming is causing, the changes in the SPV, merely linking the changes in the SPV to lower February temperatures.
They are peeing on your feet and telling you is global warming
Well, February is just beginning so if it is unusually cold that will be proof positive but a warmer than usual February will just be an outlier in observations. Pure speculation based on a short period of observation that is localised and subjective.
As ridiculous as the idea that a 1 or 1.5 degree of warming signals a long term climatic shift, or is actually a planetary emergency.
Although a convenient measure, using a 30 year period to define a climate is nearly as ridiculous. From my personal observation it appears that weather trends often follow a roughly 30 year cycle.
What happened to the old adage “the longer a weather trend exists the longer it is likely to exist.” It is also possible that there could be two or more back to back trends that still do not signal a semi-permanent change. I say semi-permanent, as permanent can only apply to trends that stretch into infinity or at least near infinite. A term that makes as much sense as nearly-dead.
On Joe Bastardi’s Twitter page last week I saw this—>
“China Daily reported some 1,000 ships currently stuck in Laizhou Bay in the eastern Bohai Sea, as 10,500 sq. miles/27,000 km2 sea surface has frozen, according to the Chinese Meteorological Association the greatest ice extent since records began.”
looks newsworthy to me, one would think a financial outfit like Forbes would be
interested in 1000 ships unable to sail..
Vessels trapped in ice in Laizhou Bay, Bohai sea – Maritime Bulletin (odin.tc)
‘But “February, going back to 1979—so quite a few years now…’
It’s the unintentional comedy that makes it all so compelling. 43 years out of the last 4.5 billion years… quite a few years, yes, yes, do tell more.
It is likely not good to go back 4.5 B years. Any weather and climate reports ought to be after the final closure of the Isthmus of Panama at ∼3.5 Ma. Then, one ought to stick with weather in the late-middle of the interglacial times.
“The Arctic is warming at a rate twice the global average “
But the Arctic warming is entirely in the coldest six months of the year and mainly at night (TMIN). That is good news for the polar bears … although good news for the polar bears is bad news for the seals. Colder regions in the N.H. getting warmer winters is one of the great benefits of the warming from 1975 to 2015.
That line from the abstract was quite a deception.
And Arctic sea ice extent has been increasing since 2012.
“The United States and other regions of the Northern Hemisphere have experienced a conspicuous and increasingly frequent number of episodes of extremely cold winter weather over the past four decades”
BS alert. Most statistics cite the winter of 1978-79 as the coldest in U.S. history. While it was exceptionally cold in many eastern areas this winter, the cold in ’78-’79 expanded over a larger part of the West, so that year still holds the record.
Here in SE Michigan the winters have become warmer, with less snow, since I moved here in 1977. It is the only climate change I noticed, helped a lot by living in the same home since 1987 and four miles south in an apartment from 1977 to 1987. The change was not large and some people did not notice.
This is the first Eric Worrall article I can’t recommend to others. There’s nothing wrong with the article, but I just don’t want Judah Cohen to get any publicity. He ought to take his data mining and models and throw them in a circular file.
Daily list of the best climate science and energy articles I’ve read:
Honest Climate Science and Energy
“The Arctic is warming at a rate twice the global average”
He’s out of date. That reputable source of climate research – the Grauniad – says it is warming at three times the rate of anywhere else. It has been saying it for several months now so it must be true!
Next year’s headlines:
“Arctic warming four times faster than the global average, and worse than we thought. Polar bears are so upset they are throwing themselves into the sea. Igloos are melting.”
Climate change scaremongering is like my lame jokes — most people don’t recognize climate change scaremongering, or my lame jokes, as jokes.