Guest essay by Linnea Lueken
NewScientist, a publication dedicated to popularizing science, recently published a post titled “Extreme winter weather isn’t down to a wavier jet stream,” reporting on a new study that shows, the jet stream is not getting wavier in winter months due to climate change. This is true, and it has been evident for some time, but runs counter to assertions commonly made by climate alarmists.
NewScientist writes that “[i]ncreasingly erratic winter weather in the northern hemisphere isn’t a result of the polar jet stream getting more wavy, according to new research . . ..”
Although the vast bulk of the article is devoted to insisting that climate change is causing worsening winter and summer weather, claims regularly debunked at Climate Realism, the publication deserves some credit for reporting the study’s results concerning the jet stream, which was, in fact, the focus of the research itself.
The new reports findings are not actually that “new,” in the sense that Climate Realism has reported on research that came to the same conclusion several times in the past few years, here, here, and here, for instance. There is copious evidence showing that not only are cold snaps not uncommon, but that the jet stream’s (and more specifically, polar vortex) influence on extreme winter weather has been acknowledged since at least 1853. Years of studies looking at the frequency of and intensity of polar vortex events have found no consistent trends. As pointed out by my colleague Anthony Watts in this post on the subject, “a 2021 study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found no statistically significant increase in jet stream waviness or meandering in recent decades,” and he explains there has never been a consensus among scientists when it comes to the issue of polar vortex/jet stream behavior.
The post at NewScientist goes on to explain the new study, saying “recent erratic behaviour isn’t out of the ordinary,” and that the jet stream has been both wavier and less wavy than it is today.
Unfortunately, that is where the NewScientist and the authors of the paper it was discussing ceased to follow the evidence. One of the study’s authors reassured NewScientist that climate change is still “affecting extreme weather events in all sorts of really important ways,” and that the jet stream is actually becoming wavier in the summertime, “where it is getting slower, with bigger waves, which leads to things like big heatwaves, drought, and wildfires.”
This would be compelling if existing data backed up the claim, but, in fact, big heatwaves, drought, and wildfires have not become more frequent or severe in recent decades. Heatwaves were much more severe in the earlier decades of the 20th century, and overall drought has been declining while precipitation increases. Now that it is summer, many outlets are attempting to claim that hot weather is driven by climate change. In doing so they almost always ignore where heat records are being set, as it is often at airports and other heat-absorbing locations, and ignore historical records that show hot summers are not unprecedented.
Similarly, data shows that wildfires were worse in the past with research from NASA and the European Space Agency showing that acreage lost to wildfires has declined markedly over the past few decades.
The NewScientist, and the AGU study it references, should have quit when they were ahead. They should have published their unalarming findings about climate change’s lack of an impact on the winter jet stream without then assuring people that despite their study’s findings, they really are true believers and climate change is making weather worse. The latter point is refuted by real world data.
It sure is making alarmists erratic though.
Rita cracks me up every time I watch her clips.
Still, I lack a fundamental comprehension of how “climate change” affects weather given that the definition of climate is a rolling 30 year average of weather. It is unfathomable to accept that given weather changes the rolling 30 year average of weather, that changes to that mathematical calculation affects weather.
Color me a realist.
The only fundamental comprehension that you need to keep in mind is that you cannot have a rational conversation with irrational people. And the belief that “climate change” affects weather is absolutely irrational, And as you point out has cause and effect completely reversed (and even that is not totally correct).
Completely reverse, yes, and used in a circular argument.
Keep in mind one can not have a rational conversation with irrational people.
Reminds me of old sage advice:
Never engage in a battle of wits with the unarmed. He never knows when he has lost.
Never wrestle with a pig. You’ll get covered in sh*t and the pig likes it.
Also true.
It must be understood that the phrase ‘Climate Change” has nothing to do with change in the climate. The climate has been changing for at least 4.5 billion years and most educated rational people are aware of this.
To members of The Climate Change Cult (The CCC), the phrase ‘Climate Change’ means: Catastrophic global overheating caused by C02 that is released from combustion of fossil fuels’. There is substantial evidence that there is no “catastrophic” global warming, regardless of cause. The so called ‘evidence’ of catastrophic climate change comes mostly from computer models that are known to predict heating that is much higher than that measured from actual thermometer data.. Members of The Cult are not allowed to acknowledge this and cannot rationally discuss it. Many members of The CCC appear to be rational in conversations about other topics.
Duplicate from yesterday.
Arctic polar vortex anomalies (so far) have not been linked to anthropogenic factors, but
there natural factors potentially influencing it,
like the sun
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22854-0#:~:text=In%20spite%20of%20the%20presence,bold%20and%20bold%2Ditalics%20respectively.
or volcanoes
vhttps://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020JD034450
For True Believers, telling the truth for once, can be scary, and they don’t want to risk being branded a heretical climate denier, so they just had to include the standard climate liturgy.
The Jet Stream be Jet Streaming like it always been doin’.
I’m a retired process engineer and read as much as I can on the physis of climate change in the belief that it is a scam. I have just been reading Physics of Atmospheres by J.T.Houghton and I have seen what I consider to be the key faults of the current theories on GHG. My conclusions are that.
I once accepted that the Climate Scientists were right just overstating the effect but I don’t believe it at all now. The whole forcing by back radiation isn’t correct. Ned Nikolov is absolutely correct but clarification why and how can be added.
I’m going to try to put this down on paper and face the ridicule.
And there are quite a few people in the field of atmospheric science who would agree w (most of) those points. Im not sure but to me it looks an increasing number of scientist either concur or have started to look at the GHE in detail and all the assumptions around it. This is a healthy development. But it might seem that way because i have become more interested in the subject..
You know, when monitoring equipment changes, so does the recorded data:
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-boulder.amp
Climate is weather in a given area observed for 30 years. Climate change is therefore weather change in a given area observed for 30 years.
The definition of climate and the principle of cause and effect dictates that the weather must change before the climate can change. therefore, saying that climate change causes weather change is illogical, as it is circular reasoning.
I think 60 years is (much) better..
It’s not until recently that the Jet Stream passed into common parlance it will take a little while for maniacal warmers to cook up a narrative to include it, This is a first attempt, don’t be too unkind. I feel sure that future attempts will be more imaginative.