U.S. had its coldest February in more than 30 years

The research center existing first doesn't normally preclude a nuisance claim. But land use legal scholars always like to point out that people tend to move to the nuisance, mostly because such residential developments tend to be cheaper. Sprawl tends to envelop industrial areas over time.

I'm just curious as a point of reference. No judgment. Heck, most American cities try too hard to separate land uses, which exacerbates sprawl. Rather than pretending we can always avoid conflicting uses through geographic dispersion, we should probably put in more effort to streamlining resolution of particular cases.

"The coldest 2nd tuesday of a leap year March on record in the last 100 years."

Another example is when you see reports of some county experiencing a once-in-500-year flood, trying to establish the shock value of how unusual and terrible a catastrophe that is.

But if you're observing 500 such counties, then every year that will happen to some one of them. You just never notice the 499 data points where it didn't.

In fact, the amount of CO2 that we have already released has triggered the knock-on effects, which is the melting of permafrost and the subsequent release of vast quantities of Methane gas, which is 84 times more damaging than CO2.

Unfortunately, climate is not simple. By definition it is a complicated effect. But the coldest February ever seen is 100% in agreement with the predictions in Climate change.

One of those predicted disruptions is a weakening of the margins of the polar vertex. This results in cases where the front of vertex pushes deeply far south. As a result, cold polar air can move deep into the US interior (so, say, 0°F or less in St. Louis) while Alaska is baking in 50-60°F.

In other words, one of the predictions of global warming is that the US will see an increase in extreme cold events in winter even as the average Earth temperature is increasing.

And this is just local & transient. There's a good article that discusses this (and related things) at Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2021/02/19/3-t.... Take a look at the temperature anomaly map at the bottom; it shows a big colder-than-usual area over the central US, and another over Siberia. But it also shows warmer-than-usual areas in between them (around the North Pole), and another in Southern Asia. And it lists the "World" anomaly as 0.0 °C. So it's not that everything was colder, it was just that the cold was in different places than usual, and we happened to be one of the colder-than-usual places.

But that map is just for February 19. When I look at the map for today (https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2anom), I see a cold area across part of Russia, and another around Alaska, but also warm bands across the Eastern US, Asia-Mideast-part-of-Africa, and parts of Antarctica. The World anomaly is listed as +0.4°C. Neither of these single-day maps tells you that much about what's going on in the longer term.

Similarly, this anomalous cold month in the US was just February. According to the report: "Meteorological winter (December through February) was quite mild and dry across the contiguous U.S. The average temperature was 33.6 degrees F, 1.4 degrees above average, placing Winter 2021 in the warmest third of the winter record. Maine had its third-warmest winter; California had its 12th warmest." So while February was colder than usual here, December and January were warm enough to more than make up for it.

But again, that's just three months in one country. If you look at the US report on all of 2020 (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/national-climate-202012), it was the fifth-warmest on record, and 1.33°C (2.4°F) above the 20th-century average. And globally (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202012), 2020 was the second-highest temperature on record, 0.98°C (1.76°F) above the 20th-century average.

You can certainly find many days and months where it was unusually cold in a particular country or region, and many where it was much hotter than usual in a particular country or region. But that doesn't really mean much of anything; you really need to look at averages over larger areas and longer times.

I would describe myself as agnostic on the topic simply because I haven't done enough personal research, but the devout belief that many people have in human-caused global climate change is really off putting, primarily because it's hubristic in so many ways: that our presence and actions are harming a 4.5 billion year planet in the span of a few decades; that our models are that good; that our data is that good; that our analysis and conclusions are undoubtedly true, etc. My inner skeptic just freaks out.

The article accompanying that cover has nothing to do with climate [0]. It's discussing the 1973 oil crisis and its effects, one of which is a shortage of fuel to heat homes during the winter.

In addition, discussion of "global cooling"/a "big freeze" appears to be more representative of news coverage than the state of climate research at the time [1].

[0]: http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,9082...

[1]: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bam...

A quick google search would bring up plenty of scientific literature about why global warming causes more extreme weather events. This past February (and several of the last winters) there have been incidents of instability of the polar vortex which are directly linked to the melting of the polar ice caps. Those areas get hot (in recent years, over 90 degrees Fahrenheit) and it blocks out the cold air [1]:

> While the polar vortex is well documented, its behavior has become more extreme as a result of climate change, according to Ullrich. He explains: warming of the Earth has led to the loss of Arctic sea ice, transforming a highly reflective icy surface to a dark absorptive surface. The change is warming higher latitudes and reducing the temperature difference between the warmer mid-latitude and polar regions. This weakens and destabilizes the polar jet stream, causing it to dip into lower latitudes, bringing polar air farther south. Ullrich expects future climate change to further weaken the polar jet stream, bringing rise to more extreme and unusual weather patterns.

[1] https://climatechange.ucdavis.edu/climate-change-definitions...

Normally the jetstreams & currents of the atmosphere keep the cold up north.

What we are seeing is a destabilization of long running separation of different thermal systems[1]. The arctic is making a break for it. It's heading to places it's never been before. Because the climate is changing.

And it's melting the icecaps. It's making northern route shippings increasingly likely. It's possibly going to shut down the thermohaline circulation that is one of the major movers of ocean water.

> What do you guys think?

I am extremely sad that we have to deal with skeptics. That people aren't just shocked, awed, terrified, because they see such stupid little small minded evidence as "it was cold around here soooo....". This used to be a dynamic planet, where ocean currents flowed, where ice formed & ebbed, where birds and bees and insects flew. And all of that seems to be drying up. The entropy, the differences across earth, seem to be normalizing into a big boring average, where everything just sits, baking, in a world-wide equilibrium.

I think it's extremely sad to see such denialism. It's morally & existentially reckless, it's unserious in the extreme in the level of diligence it shows, and it's polluting the public space with it's unresearched, un-backed-up skepticism.

[1] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22112020/warm-arctic-cold...

Forecasts are telling us a 2°C increase before the end of the centuary is already inevitable. If we do not change anything, a 4°C increase is really probable.

It is easy to imagine that a lot of place will become not be suitable to human life.

It is so complex because the amount of things that play a role there. Some of the components you have are i.e. sea currents (like the Gulf Stream, making England warmer than it should be) or the polar vortex, a more or less stable cyclone that runs in the upper atmosphere. Global warming affect those components, and in particular was the polar vortex what caused the cold weather in the US the last months.

But when you talk about climate in the context of global warming, you are talking about yearly global temperature averages, not what happen in only one region or in a few days/months.