http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2010/12/bundle_up_its_global_warming.html
The earth continues to get warmer, yet it’s feeling a lot colder outside. Over the past few weeks, subzero temperatures in Poland claimed 66 lives; snow arrived in Seattle well before the winter solstice, and fell heavily enough in Minneapolis to make the roof of the Metrodome collapse; and last week blizzards closed Europe’s busiest airports in London and Frankfurt for days, stranding holiday travelers. The snow and record cold have invaded the Eastern United States, with more bad weather predicted.
As global temperatures have warmed and as Arctic sea ice has melted over the past two and a half decades, more moisture has become available to fall as snow over the continents. So the snow cover across Siberia in the fall has steadily increased.
The sun’s energy reflects off the bright white snow and escapes back out to space. As a result, the temperature cools. When snow cover is more abundant in Siberia, it creates an unusually large dome of cold air next to the mountains, and this amplifies the standing waves in the atmosphere, just as a bigger rock in a stream increases the size of the waves of water flowing by.
The increased wave energy in the air spreads both horizontally, around the Northern Hemisphere, and vertically, up into the stratosphere and down toward the earth’s surface. In response, the jet stream, instead of flowing predominantly west to east as usual, meanders more north and south. In winter, this change in flow sends warm air north from the subtropical oceans into Alaska and Greenland, but it also pushes cold air south from the Arctic on the east side of the Rockies. Meanwhile, across Eurasia, cold air from Siberia spills south into East Asia and even southwestward into Europe.
It’s all a snow job by nature. The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it.
When scrambling to explain all the cold weather people only expose their ignorance of climate science. They also, fortunately, produce statements that, even those who don’t understand the science, see as illogical. Notice Dorling says “climate change” as he tries to suggest the current cold is just an anomaly in an overall warming trend. Others point to storms and flooding as further evidence of changes due to warming.
None of what Cohen presents is new. If he knew anything about climatology and the history of climate research he would know that existence of the Circumpolar Vortex and its pattern of Rossby waves has been in the literature since the Jet Stream was discovered in WWII and then the identification of the Waves by Carl Rossby in 1946. The concept of the Waves were linked with the concepts of Air Masses and their movement in determining patterns of weather in the Middle and High latitudes. Marcel Leroux claimed to have rediscovered these and named cold Polar outbreaks, formerly called continental Arctic (cA) or maritime Arctic (mA) air masses, as Mobile Polar Highs. What is not explained is the sinuosity in the Vortex and changing patterns over time that create differing weather patterns that drive these outbreaks of cold air south. There’s evidence that they are related to changes in the Sun that result in changes in the Solar Wind and its varying impact on the earth”s atmosphere. The science of all the current thinking is so wrong that they forget that it is the cold air that is in charge and dictates the patterns of middle latitude weather.
