Temperatures of 19℃ in Warsaw on 1 Jan 2023, 5.1℃ more than the previous record

well, that was timed well for Christmas. While Buffalo got hammered twice by snow so far, it almost totally missed Rochester and portions in central NY.

Rochester still got a white Christmas which stuck around for a few days and definitely was a little prettier than the dreary snowless typical days in the region so far. The amount of shoveling required to date in Rochester: 0 hours. (Nothing accumulated above 2 inches.)

Texas and FL did get affected to record setting weather from that arctic blast. Hopefully most of the citrus trees survived.

Again, these short and extreme swings are often caused by a wavy jet stream that bring shifting North-South wind components to the weather while a the large scale vorticity passes by eastwards.

Wavy jet stream in turn is caused by a dying slowing jet stream. And this is also connected to global warming dynamics. While they do bring brief periods of more extreme cold, they do not help the average temperature stay low over the winter.

So look at the *averages*, not the brief extremes, and the pattern seems pretty clear.

In summary: just one cold brief arctic blast so, but no exceptional temperatures for most areas (afaik) in the NE.

As for Buffalo's luck, they may have be getting tons of Lake-effect snow from lake Erie.

The existence of a temperature is evidence of climate change.

We shut down a large swath of the global economy for Covid, and emissions only went down 4.6%[0]. We then faced shortages that are in some areas still ongoing today, not to mention inflation.

I think if there's any technological hope of fixing the problem, damaging the supply chain through some sort of degrowth strategy will create a large obstacle to getting there. I also think that if you tried to do this in a democratic society, your party will be voted out in the next election. To me it doesn't seem like lower consumption is the solution given all of this.

[0] - https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2022/06/30/greenhouse-...

All and any solutions (except living with it) fail because they lack a global enforcement mechanism. Individual and national action has been failing for this reason for decades. All of the "treaties" signed so far lack the same core element. The nice thing about a technological solution (really you need multiple solutions but assume they all arrive at the same time) would be that it would self organise (people will choose to move to fusion power IF it is cheaper than coal etc). But it's now too late for that too since even if the solutions came out tomorrow, any chance of implementing them globally before the 2040s is basically gone (no one will buy a tesla for 60k to save 5k a year in fuel costs, no one will spend 10bn on a fusion power plant when they already have a newish gas turbine plant with 30 years of life left in it).

The key now adaptation. But as was the case with the problem 30 years ago, it will take 30 years for people to take that seriously. It's not until people are already drowning that they will pay for a life-preserver and by then it's too late...

I've not been able to bring myself to have a closer look at the fruit trees around here (Nuremberg area), for fear of seeing some very doomed buds.

Would you rather have cold winters or hot summers?

Warm winter = less gas usage for heating = less money for Russia’s war. Putin won’t be in power by the time the Arctic opens up.