An early disruption event is starting for the Polar Vortex
severe-weather.eu
severe-weather.eu
When warmer air masses push into the polar region in the fall (which happens more often now due to global warming), it disrupts and weakens the polar vortex and leaves open channels for the cold air to escape during the winter. This cold air then cools parts of the Northern hemisphere, causing pockets of cold (generally to the South), while the warmer air also bunches up and causes pockets of warm (generally to the North).
The end result is wild temperature and weather swings during Winter (colder in the Eastern USA and Europe - see the last two images in the article), and we're in for a doozy this year.
Grant scale of ocean water temperature change is another reason, and (more specifically) more chance for more snow in Siberia.
The north pole weather system is connected to all other weather systems, so it is not easy to define a clear causal chain.
The original name for what we now call “Global warming“ or “climate change” was “climate unsettling”: balancing mechanisms that allowed seasons to have predictable temperature and precipitation (like El Niño) are being disrupted. The relatively small rise of average temperature (one degree) is enough to move airmass. Those block otherwise stable currents. Things aren’t where they are supposed to be.
Do you think the problem would go away if we updated our expectations?
So yes, an El Nino is "supposed" to be <here> /for us/, but an El Nino is only "expected" or "just so happened to always be" <here> for the planet at large.
It's a question of what perspective is used.
We also see the less direct ecological effects such as new pests thriving in area -- new weather patterns create an ecosystem to which the species is no longer adapted. E.g. fungi killing trees. Or for humans, "tropical diseases" becoming common in more northern areas.
Life has existed long before humans ever came onto the scene, and life has experienced environmental highs and lows that would make humanity shriek in absolute horror.
Life will go on and the Earth will continue to spin and orbit, whether humanity does or not.
Greetings Professor Falken!
Personally I would like to preserve a future both where humans can survive and some of Earth's great ecological diversity is maintained. Those systems can't "care" because they're not sentient, but I am.
Besides that, personally I have no attachment to humanity in particular. Objectively, the planet would be much better off without us around. That's not to say I would go out of my way to not exist; I'm already here, might as well enjoy my time here. But I'm not going to go out of my way to "preserve humanity" or whatever either. Life has persevered without us before we came around, and life will persevere whether we exist or not.
That's specifically a human perspective.
The amount of atmospheric CO2 continues to grow linearly[1] at best. The earth's climate may find a new equilibrium when CO2 stabilizes, or it may not. The resulting equilibrium may be conducive to human life, or it may not. But until that number flattens, we can only expect more change. And, of course, that is only one of the many stressors on the climate.
[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2915/the-atmosphere-getting-a-...
If you believe that I've got some beans you can buy.
This equilibrium you're chasing is much more transient than you'd like to think. Especially in the face of more and more accurate/precise observations.
The commenter I replied to said "I’m unsure about if ... the earth [is] finding a new equilibrium point potentially on the order of hundreds to thousands of years..."
I pointed to NASA measurements showing that atmospheric CO2 is increasing linearly and has been for some time. Whether its increase accelerates or decelerates or remains flat depends largely on many unpredictable factors (primarily humans).
Consequently (I tried to answer) - no, the climate will not find an equilibrium ("a state of rest or balance due to the equal action of opposing forces") as long as one of the primary forces driving the system out of balance continues to change (i.e., we keep dumping more CO2 into the air) without some countervailing force changing at roughly the same rate. Today there is no countervailing force, so there will be no equilibrium.
I don't see how your comment ("this equilibrium you're chasing"?) relates at all.
CO2 will rise, but it will eventually necessary uncouple from it's relationship to temperature at which point some other factor we are wholy unaware of will probably do something as equally disturbing to our environmental "equilibrium".
If you transform the system in respect to time, you'll find that from some perspective almost nothing ever happened, and from another the whole thing was wildly unstable and unpredictable.
It already doesn't matter what CO2 levels are doing now. Up and to the right and how hard is probably completely irrelevant. What matters is the flux of the system, and everything points to the fact that weve already left the station. There's no unwinding this thing, and it's not going where anyone thinks it's going.
The truly conservative thing to be doing would be to prepare ourselves for the most violent future, but instead what we're trying to do is grip onto the past with our already dying hand. Weakening our heart at the very moment we need to bolster it.
Everything is going to be fine, but you and I will be dead. I assure you of that.
Most ecosystems prefer and need some stability... myself included
But what if it's not?
The ecosystem does not "care", it's not a person, it does not have feelings. The only entities perceiving a drastic problem will be animals, including us.
> Global atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in parts per million (ppm) for the past 800,000 years. The peaks and valleys track ice ages (low CO2) and warmer interglacials (higher CO2).
Unfortunately, it continues:
> During these cycles, CO2 was never higher than 300 ppm. The increase over the last 60 years is 100 times faster than previous natural increases. In fact, on the geologic time scale, the increase from the end of the last ice age to the present looks virtually instantaneous.
(Note the last dot on the chart in the upper-right corner representing 2021's average value of 414.7 ppm. This corresponded to a time roughly 3 million years ago when ocean levels were 16 to 82 feet higher than today.)
[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
The article is not vague, it is actually very precise and focused. It uses a technical vocabulary which is appropriate for its intended audience.
Water. A slight increase in global temperature means more water sloshing around in the atmosphere. Of course "the weather" is partially a result of how that water is distributed around the world... but in conjunction with a more "dynamic" atmosphere, this can lead to things like: weather events occurring in places they usually don't or more severe weather events or stranger timing than usual.
However the backlash against mobilization will hopefully take Putin out of power, end the Ukraine war, and result in fresh supplies of gas for Europe.
Who knows who comes after Putin.
However if Europe is running low on gas, and gas is available, Europe will save a lot of pain by buying it.
They deliver oil and gas, we deliver carrots so they dont starve.
I think the carrot Russia wants is cash. Starvation in Russia requires freakish levels of malicious incompetence (I know it has happened...) Mollisols are the best farming soil there is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_science#/media/File:Globa...
This soil map may also offer some insight into why Russia wants to take Ukraine so badly. That's some of the best farmland in the world.
In the turmoil of regime change in Russia production would fall and probably not come back online again for decades
When the wall fell Russian production declined and has never reached its 1980s Peak because of the geography of Russia. In fact I think most of the wells that were turned off at that time have never come back online and recent production increases are due to new infrastructure being built
Countries in the midst of civil war aren't very good at shipping natural gas either. Europe's best hope for not freezing is to go invade Russia, capture the pipelines and gas fields, and staff them with Europeans. Unfortunately this plan has worked out for Europe (and the world) approximately never.
Does somebody have an idea for how reform could occur in a place that has never really been "free"?
They need to become unable to support a nuclear arsenal.
China is the new Russia anyway.
In terms of raw statistics - i.e. numbers of innocent people murdered in illegal war - I'd really like to understand which nation you think it is?
The more unstable Russia becomes, the more the value in reducing how much of a threat it is. Even if other threats remain.
Given that Germany is now turning coal plants back on to cope, I can't even see that there is alignment with the environment even in the short term.
However it is a good trend in longer term - I don't think that there is desire for a long term "turn back to coal", it's just short-term expedience until a better alternative can be built up - after all, those coal plants exist already. Yes it's done under difficult conditions now as a consequence of not doing it under good conditions earlier.
it is, as I said above, not an either-or. The environmental benefits (which might be a good step, but will not be in themselves enough to "save" anyone) are outside of the consideration, and not the matter at hand. I thought that was clearly phrased.
Rather, removing Russia, or other petrostates ability to blackmail with energy supply, makes them less likely to warmonger. Russia's warmongering is very much supported with oil and gas leverage - i.e. threats of "don't interfere or you'll go cold". Like the other reply says - if bullies no longer have a hold over you, you'll get less bullying. It's a poor assumption that Russian leadership will be better or even different in nature any time soon, Putin or not. And it's good for European domestic politics as well, to be less concerned with appeasing other powers, especially dictators.
They're not capable of doing anything to save the environment - in fact it's likely they're a net-negative. Russia is still selling that energy to someone - right now China and India - and it's unlikely the new buyers will be taking the same steps to burn the natural gas as cleanly or efficiently as western Europe would.
It's hard to read
I think the most interesting scale on that weather page is the red-blue one where the extremes of both then veer into other colors - often the same colors, but that's OK because they will only appear within 'moats' of red or blue covering the typical temperature distributions. So you have increasingly deep shades of blue or red to indicate very cold or hot weather, and then purple to white within those areas for record-setting-breaking extremes.
I guess you could just do normal vs deviant scales, but given our sensitivity to the dichotomies of weather people have an inherent need to know what sort of extreme it is.
"Polar" refers to the poles, in this case the North geometric pole, and "vortex" is an exact description of what wind is doing in a polar vortex.
Storms have been given names since the early 19th century, so your "used to be" here is well beyond the threshold of living memory.
My interpretation of the parent post is that it refers to the naming of every typical winter storm during a season, which was begun by the Weather Channel in 2012. I do in fact remember the debate at the time over that practice.
Wikipedia gives only two examples of winter storm names predating 1900, "The Great Snow of 1717" and "The Schoolhouse Blizzard" or "Children's Blizzard" of 1888.
That seems to be a different practice than winter storms Ajax, Bella, Cara, Delphi, Echo and Ferus of the 2021-2022 season.
And is it really "entirely" in how I see it? I'm referring to the breathless intonation of modern weather talking heads as they discuss normal weather phenomena as a "polar vortex" (in scare quotes). They used to just say it was going to snow more or be colder. The use of "polar vortex" in that context definitely amps up the drama.
So, we have a very rare, very extreme weather phenomenon that’s hit multiple in the last 10 years after decades of static behavior. The wiki on the Polar Vortex even attributes the 2013 storm with popularizing the term due to the heavy reporting.
* technically it's always there around the north pole, but we only talk about it when it dips down into populated areas.
I'm not over 70, but you never used to hear "polar vortex" in popular weather forecasting broadcasts. I'm not a meteorologist, so I can't comment on its use by pros.
And you never used to hear about named storms unless they were tropical cyclones.
The point being, the weather phenomena is not new, nor is using polar vortex to describe it. And just because you hear about something in the media for the first time and it seems exaggerated, that does not necessarily invalidate it or somehow make it a "pedestrian event" being over-hyped. It could be, but in this specific case, it definitely does not. And those words, as explained elsewhere, are the correct words to use from a descriptive point of view.
> The earliest scientific papers describing the broad-scale tropospheric or stratospheric flow as a “circumpolar vortex” or “polar vortex” are from the late 1940s and early 1950s. (Although a much earlier usage appears on pg 430 of Littell’s Living Age Map, 12 November 1853.)
Because it was behaving in a manner consistent with at least a few thousand years.
> And you never used to hear about named storms unless they were tropical cyclones.
Which is no different to today?