A Polar Vortex collapse sequence has begun
severe-weather.eu
severe-weather.eu
For the record I track weather for a multitude of sports are dependent on specific aspects so am close to the forecasting nature.
Otherwise all you have is stuff like "global temperatures are going to rise by n degrees over the course of the century" with n being a relatively low number for us humans used to local weather having much greater temperature swings. Sure, if we're educated we can understand why this is a huge problem, but for people who don't want to hear this (and may benefit in the short term from not hearing it) "the weather is going to be 5 degrees hotter in a century" doesn't sound all that bad.
So in order to cut through some scientists look for more dramatic events that could come as a consequence of this. The problem of course is that the climate is wild and hard to predict over large timescales and sometimes they're wrong, and then the climate change deniers use that as evidence that they're lying.
I would say that the impact to global weather phenomenons are might not be well understood though that seems more like local (large local like continent wide) impacts as opposed to general global weather trend.
But given the chaotic nature of the climate and complex feedback loops these local predictions seem to be hard to make. You can say that some catastrophic events are going to become more common, but you can't say "the 12th of November 2038 a huge storm is going to ravage this country and cause countless deaths and billions of $ in damages, so let's invest this money now to prevent it from happening".
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=daily+express+weather&atb=v81-1&ia...
I've just noticed they use Celsius to make it seem cold and still use Fahrenheit to make is seem hot. (Temperature in Fahrenheit has not been printed by the national weather forecaster since 1970).
So, it's not really a new trend.
Yeah. Nothingburger.
OP not a comment on long-term climate change, but a statement on how grossly inaccurate short-term forecasts are common (10-20cm of snow is most often 2-5cm, etc).
And no ads, because our taxes pay for it. I'm not sure why anyone uses any other website at all. Maybe it's because of the conspiracy to privatize forecasting and extract rent from it.
I'm in the US, and use both http://weather.gov and http://windy.com. I think they complement each other.
weather.gov is best for the "forecast discussion" page, which often gives backstory on which parts of the forecast are certain and which are speculative.
windy.com gives multiple forecasts from different agencies, which also helps calibrate confidence. They also have some great visuals, and a very good interface.
My sense - and the sense of many working in climate science and media monitoring - is that there's a climate change denial industry [1] which is working very hard to lie about the catastrophic effects of developing climate change, and also to shift blame away from those responsible for causing them.
[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-15-1259-9_...
I see we are supposed to get snow end of Jan now. Of course weather forecasts here really suck and you can't trust the weekend forecast until its Friday afternoon.
There is, which is why it's a disservice -- and unscientific -- to say things like: it's colder than usual today == climate change.
If you attribute every daily variance in the weather to the climate crisis, is it any wonder people stop believing or caring?
> An observed variance in weather *over one day or even a few days*
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/weather-vs-climate
If you observe a few days of severe weather, you've observed severe weather. Taking a mere observation over one week of weather activity cannot be looked at in isolation and simply called "climate change, tada!"
FTA:
>When scientists talk about climate, they're often looking at averages of precipitation, temperature, humidity, sunshine, wind, and other measures of weather that occur over a long period in a particular place. In some instances, they might look at these averages over 30 years. And, we refer to these three-decade averages of weather observations as Climate Normals.
Not really, it's also in line with the limited amount of high-quality data we have.
E.g. viewed in isolation, recent Gulf of Mexico hurricanes were pretty bad (2019 in particular, IIRC). But if you look into history, 1932,1933 was also pretty bad.
Arguably, if we had even more recorded history, such outliers wouldn't seem that exceptional - there still is a possiblity that climate change is affecting hurricanes (making them worse) but you can't just look at the variance (outliers) - trend is also (more?) important.
For example, Texas getting three "500 year" floods in 3 years. These were floods that were estimated to be a 0.2% probability in any given year. The fact that they are happening at much higher frequency is because the entire probability distribution has shifted (and expanded). Now if you improved your ability to peer into the past and found another "500 year flood" a few hundred years back, you'd be tempted to think everything is fine, when everything is decidedly not fine.
Taking only Texas as an "example" means you're cherry picking data. I'm sure we could find other parts of the world that had multiple rare events in every decade of the last century as well.
> Same for other extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts.
Extreme weather events are extremely hard to define, and have such a low occurrence rate that you cannot extrapolate an increase in the timeframe we're discussing on a global level.
This holds true if you assume a system is static, which is one of the hardest communication points the scientific community has to convey to the general public. A good part of climate science is not just mapping the statistics of a system, but analyzing those in terms of physics and chemistry to figure out what causes dynamism in the climate system.
The driving mechanic behind climate change theories is that we are changing the chemistry of the atmosphere, which is making the climate unstable. If you just look at the statistics through the lens of data science, it's easy to write off effects as "not enough data", but this is a simplistic view, stemming from not spending huge amounts of time learning and studying climate science.
This is a strange characterization of the increase in CO2 and resultant heat retention. It's not itself "unstable".
> If you just look at the statistics through the lens of data science, it's easy to write off effects as "not enough data", but this is a simplistic view,
Selecting only a specific set of events in specific areas is, by definition, cherry picking data.
You used the same phrase elsewhere in the thread. I am not sure if we agree on what "cherry picking" really means. There is a difference between isolating relevant variables and cherry picking data. For example, if you wanted to track the long term trend of lion weight in Africa, you wouldn't also include in your dataset the weights of monkeys in South America. That'd just add irrelevant noise because, even though they are measurements of animal weight, they are not what we are studying. It absolutely would not be "cherry picking" to exclude monkeys from your sample. Real cherry picking would be things like excluding particular years of measurements or finding other reasons to exclude data that goes against a trend you are looking for.
I'm not sure how you got this from what I wrote. I specifically said "changing the chemistry of the atmosphere", which is not a strange characterization of an "increase of CO2" in the atmosphere, it is word for word a correct description of that action. I have no idea what you mean by "It's not itself "unstable", especially in the context. If you mean that changing the chemical makeup of the atmosphere doesn't make climate patterns unstable, then you're just wrong.
> Selecting only a specific set of events in specific areas is, by definition, cherry picking data.
This also literally has nothing to do with what I said. Are you some kind of weird GPT bot or something? I'd assume you accidentally wrote back to the wrong comment, but you quoted me... If you'd go ahead and reread my post, and not skip the big words, you'll see that I was trying to convey that because we have such limited data, and it's data from a system that's ridiculously large and dynamic compared to the data, any purely statistical analysis is going to be absolute garbage. Hence, you also need to use logical reasoning about cause and effect, what types of chemical shifts in the atmosphere will cause what types of outcomes.
But really, you need to stay a little more on task if you'd like to discuss and debate. Just confusing at this point, and I'm still not sure if you're trolling or a bot or just flailing.
And so we end up stuck in this stupid limbo, where because no one can be certain that climate change caused this disaster, nothing is ever done in response to any disaster. We should be viewing these events as a serious call to action.
This is still debated. The notion that weather has become more extreme still relies on very little data and statistical models trying to fit different types of events into the same model. ...and none of the models are able to digest all types of events across the entire world, over the entire 100 year reference time window.
But more importantly, the debate around it is a distraction.
The proven fact is that global warming has occurred and continues, AND that it will cause sea level rise within our lifetime. That fact has sufficient serious consequences for nations/states/cities to begin planning local responses, and maybe coordinate global emissions reductions (though this seems increasingly too little, too late).
And here we are, equally "valid" proof that global warming is not real.
I'm not absolving the people intentionally distorting the facts, but the people who centered the conversation on local maxima bear some blame for the shakiness of the conversation.
I said then that it would cause problems and today you have people equally saying, "see how cold it is!"
Neither is proof and now we have a muddle discussion with the media happy to run whatever stirs things up.
The proper move some time ago was to center the discussion around some proxy for global temperature (avg ocean temp perhaps) instead of the variable.
Even now, we shouldn't be speaking about unusual events in terms of climate change. There are more people in more places with more cameras and ability to report unusual weather.
Reputable news outlets are also good about including boilerplate like:
"While we can't attribute any single event to climate change, scientists predict an increasing frequency of events like ___."
Extreme event frequency is one of the most unambiguous signals of climate change that people can see and relate to. I feel like you're either consuming sub-par media or attacking a straw-man.
I'm not sure what you mean. If temperature records are broken consecutively do you really think it's just up to chance?
Based on this article: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/projected-ranks
"The warmest years globally have all occurred since 1998, with the top ten being 2016, 2019, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2014, 2010, 2013 and 2005 (tied), and 1998, respectively."
Can you think of a reason why this should not count as evidence? I want you to disrupt the conversation.
Thunderfoot made a video about betting whether the next year will be the hottest year or not and if you bet against climate change then you would lose the bet all the time.
Or my favorite: "bomb cyclone"
The thing that struck me with the headline was the use of "arctic hounds" as an unnecessary metaphor (to help sensationalize). Now, with your comment, it maybe just seems all too fitting. Metametaphor.
What very dramatic prediction ?
The 'collapsed' arctic vortex, like in 2004 and 2013, might or might not result in the "Beast from the East" in Europe, and its USA equivalent – too soon to tell.
As for snow, Spain already had quite exceptional snow.
Which is sad, because there shouldn't even be a "weather industry". NOAA / National Weather Service gives away a free weather report to every American for nearly every place in the entire US. There shouldn't be a reliable way to "overhype" weather.
Fewer cool graphics but much more understandable article.
We have our share of bizarre weather this winter - while it's customary for snow to melt right before Christmas - I can't recall there being this little snow not only in December - but through Christmas and well into January.
I just went for a walk and watched people skating on the nearest pond - which is usually frozen this time of year, but also covered in a meter or more of snow.
Meanwhile they're having a white Christmas in Bergen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcyone_and_Ceyx
The phrase "halcyon days" seems to be used in English also for the warm days in the middle of winter:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/halcyon_days
I'm not sure how common this warm mid-winter period is in general but I've certainly noticed it in the 15 years I've lived in the UK and it must have been common in Greece in the past also. In recent years, also, but Greek winters in modern times tend to be very mild anyway. Nothing like in Norawy, I'm sure :)
We got a bit of snow, then some rain, and all the packed snow on trails and paths where people walk, hike, run, and bike have become sheets of ice. Snow is great for outdoor winter stuff, but ice is really hard to deal with.
A good snow would totally be fun, though. I just got new boots, too!
Snow here sucks, for 4 reasons.
1. More than a couple inches on the ground is rare enough that cities and counties do not have a lot of snow clearing equipment. So when we get one the rare incidents of a foot or more on the ground, it takes forever for the streets to be cleared.
2. Most people aren't familiar with driving on snow, so even when the roads are passable it sucks.
3. People are idiots. As a columnist in the Seattle Times once put it, they will be at the top of a steep hill, have just watched 20 other cars try to make it down and lose control, and think "I've got a Subaru Forester so I'll be fine" and become car #21 in the heap at the bottom.
4. The ground here is relatively warm during the winter. It quickly melts the first layer of snow, which then refreezes as smooth ice sheet when subsequent layers of snow pile up. So where places with cold ground have snow with road underneath, we get snow with an ice sheet underneath between it and the road. We end up with roads that are technically more challenging to drive on, which makes #2 even worse.
Yeah, we have seen the pictures from Madrid but come-on, you dont have to prepare like its gonna be 6 feet of snow tomorrow.
Where I live now there was 30cm of snow in the last couple of days and everyone is happy and playing outside, and tomorrow will be work as usual (well for covid). Most major roads have been swept, and those that aren't you just drive a little more careful. I guess there is a different level of preparedness (here you are required by law to have winter tires on your car), but still it seems like some places treat it as an end-of-the-world scenario as if it's impossible for humans to live like that.
1. While we do get snow every winter, it tends to be mixed with icy rain, not the powdery stuff you get in more northern climates. What tends to happen is a bit of snow will fall overnight, then go into a melt/flash-freeze cycle as the temperature hovers around freezing.
2. Because it only snow (with any major accumulation) once or twice a season, there isn't a huge incentive to invest in more snow removal equipment. The state DOT handles major roads, but neighborhoods are largely left to clear their own snow. My last neighborhood had a contract with a construction company from out of the region for major snow - they'd drive up their trucks (with plows attached) and set up camp at the edge of the area for a few days, then go home.
3. DC is highly transient. Lots of drivers who simply don't have much experience driving in snow.
4. Public transit is terrible. So, everybody tries to go to work, and if their only car is a Corvette, so be it. And of course, they spin it into a ditch as soon as they try to get on the highway.
A good point, I've noticed that too - despite how close we are, the snow in Norway always seems different, more powdery and less slushy.
The UK is mostly temperate, but occasionally it isn't. Buying snowploughs and using them once every five years is a difficult ask for constrained council budgets, and drivers might get a couple of weeks of heavy snow every few years in which to practice their not-sliding-into-other-cars skills.
https://scotgov.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html...
Somehow they get them back quickly within days. Or those with difficulties driving in the snow stay at home, not sure what it is.
Years ago my average commute in the evening was 25min or so, with the first snow of the season, this was upped to 3.5h.
Desperately listening to the radio as they read off the list of school closures was the local sport :-P
Heck, with climate change 1" is probably the equivalent to a foot of snow half a decade ago. I jest, though probably not far of the mark.
The other factor is the UK road system is kinda densely used with many bottlenecks already and any factor will quickly increase that, so a few flakes will see drivers over or under compensate causing a ripple that can turn into waves very quickly.
But it's always fun. The dynamics of the UK weather sure do make for interesting repercussions and whilst those same dynamics play out in other countries, they are more stable and more adjusted to such things.
Just look at how lock-downs impact area's, peoples habits changing suddenly has ripple effects and in the UK - toilet roll is serious business.
Another way to view it is - a covering of snow, even less than 1CM in London is headline news in the UK. You probably have to look at Miami to get a comparable response to snow.
But as a child I too always questioned the saying "too cold for snow", the high pressure aspect is why as a rule of thumb, it works for the UK, but always exceptions to rules.
Prepare for erratic weather. Storm's coming.
The answer to both is that we need to do something different.
And look at what “masks protect other people” accomplished. 40% of the American population gleefully advertising that they don’t care about other people.
You don’t have to change people’s minds if you can change their actions.
Do you think if the US government had said, “we’re going to ask you nicely to take off your shoes at the airport so your neighbor’s grandma doesn’t get blown up?” that would’ve gotten people to take their shoes off?
The timeline for severe consequential effects of climate change are a hundred years away.
Your hysteria only damages the climate change cause, because in 10 years time people will use proclamations such as yours to deny climate science.
As part of 4+ Year process to get my timberland thinned to reduce fire danger (through the state approval process which is terrible, but finally happened), it came up that historically - based on archeological data - fires used to happen in this area every 10 to 15 years. It has been 115 years since a fire happened on the property.
Massive buildup of fuel (due to suppressing small Fires and not allowing cutting or timber harvesting), combined with many people living and using power equipment in an area that historically was thinly populated means massive fires when they do happen. Which is what you saw.
It’s my opinion that if we give people in the west unrealistic timelines, it will only serve to undermine the political effort to solve the issues for the long term.
That’s for all sorts of reasons, principally economic and geographic.
Why not?
The insurance industries already disagree with you. Trying getting flood insurance in some parts of the UK now. It wouldn't have been a problem thirty years now, now it's impossible.
And try selling a house that can't be insured. But perhaps you don't think losing that kind of capital investment isn't a real consequence for everyday life?
Alarmism is ultimately counterproductive, because the risk is that people will see the gap between their personal experience and the climate prognostications, and decide the whole thing is complete bullshit. So it’s important that we are precise in our communication, and honest about the state of our knowledge.
We face a monumental struggle to deflect the asteroid of climate change by the end of the century, and we need public buy in to do it. Anything that undermines that will magnify the challenge many times, and perhaps even render it impossible.
[0] https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08DAMASCUS847_a.html
[1] https://library.ecc-platform.org/conflicts/turkey-syria-and-...
And they will look at the huddled masses and say; "Dirty foreigners. Why don't they stay where they belong instead of trying to mooch our hard-earned wealth" and build higher walls.
For crying out loud.
1: https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/sci-tech/face-numbingly-cold-w...
Those blankets have practically zero thermal advantage, and really are only good to deflect wind, rain, and snow. (As well as signaling.)
Please keep a large wool blanket in your vehicle if you are in a location that threatens extreme cold with the inability to walk to safety.
I would hate for someone to be stuck in a tight spot and realize the useless thermal properties of those blankets the hard way.
I would hope people going out in winter also have proper coats and pants, but extra blankets as well a proper survival kit is a very good thing. Small grain shovels are also quite nice.
Actually a decent explanation of what "polar vortex" means and a good illustration of how it causes winter weather. Without even "and this means the end of humanity tomorrow!" hype.
This armchair level of understanding (even if my summary is not right on the nose) is what we need when we encounter people who actually want to politicize the weather. Will we defeat ignorance, or will ignorance defeat us?
It's not ignorance that's the problem. The people orchestrating global warming denialism aren't stupid - they are just cynically self-serving.