Yet Another Attempt To Blame Cold Winters On Global Warming!
By Paul Homewood
Every year it seems we get a new study linking cold winters to global warming and “melting” Arctic ice.
Only last month I debunked the latest attempt, and I assumed this must be the same study. Turned out I was wrong!
This is what Unscientific American has to say about the latest paper:
The polar vortex in recent years has brought the kind of miserable cold to northern states that made it hard to breathe outside. We’re probably in for more of the same.
That’s the finding of a new study published yesterday in the journal Nature that finds that as the Arctic warms, it is shifting the polar vortex to Europe. That in turn will bring more bursts of frigid cold to North America.
Those temperature drops could lead to miserable days in February and March, the research finds. Conversely, those drops in temperature could offset some of global warming’s effect in those regions, said Martyn Chipperfield, professor of atmospheric chemistry at the University of Leeds and a co-author of the paper.
“Climate change can lead to extremes; it’s not like a regular change, everyone to the same extent at all times and places,” he said. “Despite the overall warming, you can get in places like the Northeastern U.S. extreme cold events. That’s consistent with climate change and global warming.”
The polar vortex is a fast-moving band of air that encircles the frigid Arctic in winter months and traps it there. Its movement is part of a decades long change.
The polar vortex has actually “shifted persistently” away from North America and into Europe and Asia over the last 30 years, researchers found. That results in cooling over North America but warmer winters in Europe.
As global warming decreases sea ice, the sun’s warmth absorbed by the ocean is instead released from the ocean for a longer period of time, which disrupts the vortex.
When the vortex weakens, a growing number of climate scientists argue, the cold Arctic air migrates to lower latitudes, as happened in early 2014 and 2015. The sudden and somewhat prolonged burst of cold broke pipes and water mains and more than doubled energy bills in places like New York and New England as it wreaked havoc across a wide swath of the country.
The full paper is here.
So let’s see what NOAA are reporting for winter temperatures in the US Northeast:
No sign of winters getting colder in the last 30 years, is there?
Now, of course, these temperatures have been heavily adjusted by NOAA, so it might be that these endless studies are right, and NOAA’s temperature record is worthless. I think we have a right to know.
Of course, seasonal averages only tell us so much; maybe cold spells are being disguised by warm ones in the overall average.
The USHCN station at Elmira has one of the longest running datasets in New York, and below is the whisker plot of daily mean temperatures for each year. There is absolutely no evidence that extreme cold days are on the increase, or getting colder, there. Or the opposite for that matter.
What is very noticeable, however, is that winter days tended to be much milder in the 1920s and 30s.
While we’re at it, we might as well debunk the myth that snowfall has been increasing:
Donna Laframboise wrote last week wrote about serious flaws in the peer review system, and how many scientific papers nowadays may simply be untrue.
This latest piece of junk science rather proves the point.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Some climate trivia (from NCDC’s data:
In 2016, six contiguous northeast states made record HIGH winter temperatures (DJF). But, all six had colder trends, from 1998-2016, as did the NE Region and the US 48 states. All six had wetter winter trends, 1998-2016, as did the NE Region.
Perhaps the 1997-1998 ENSO had an impact rather than some added CO2?
Repeat after me: Weather is not climate. Weather is not climate. Weather is not climate.
In school, many years ago, the teachers would send us to the chalkboard to write some insight over and over and over.
Likely it doesn’t do much good. I do not remember what those insights were.
These appear to be preemptive papers in anticipation of future cooling. Since most of the warming in Tavg comes from Tmin rising more than Tmax has fallen, a decline in Tmin would stop further rising of the GMT products. Such an undermining of the global warming narrative is not to be tolerated.
Some thoughts on the prevailing climate folklore on the occasion of Halloween.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2016/10/31/climate-folklore-on-halloween/
That’s exactly what it is. Alarmists have built up an extensive library of ‘peer reviewed’ papers available on-demand to debunk or confirm the latest weather event as being a cause or consequence of global warming. All events lead to catastrophe. Select as required.
The answer is AGW…now what was the question?
They keep missing the side of the barn..
… so they are now building a bigger barn. 🙂
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
Facepalm 🙈
As soon as I read words like “Could” & “Probably” I just turn off. Why do the authors bother to continue, when they effectively admit they don’t really know?..
In the days when I had to be aware of global weather trends for business reasons I had access to an excellent private weather forecaster, who explained that “polar pigs” slip off the Arctic and bring very cold weather in the process from time to time. He was very adept at spotting when conditions might produce a “pig” that happened to affect a more populous part of the Northern hemisphere – but he never suggested there was any climate trend involved. Besides, he knew he could only forecast on a regional scale a short time ahead, and on a continental or global one no more than a season or two ahead.
Reblogged this on Jaffer's blog.
Well look out this year. Joe Bastardi at Weatherbell is forecasting anomalous cold and snow for the NE US starting about mid November. It looks like the NE US right down into PA, OH, and IN are in for old time winter. The kind I remember having as a kid here in Indiana when more often than not there was snow on the ground when we went rabbit hunting Thanksgiving morning and also during Christmas. This truck driver dreads dealing with the lake effect when I travel up that way on I-90 though. I don’t like it but I can handle it. Last year they sent me in for a pickup to a place SE of the Bunker Hill memorial the day after Boston had it’s heaviest snow on record and I made it in and out but it wasn’t easy.
Joe talks about what is coming and why in both his daily update and Saturday summary videos. Just click the link below then go up and click the premium tab and the free videos will pop up.
http://www.weatherbell.com/premium/#joe-bastardi
Interesting, add a depressed solar effect and the invert the causes, the result still sounds nice and sciency.
So what has they accomplished? Lot of sciency sounding sophistry…
Tom… Exactly! What do they (the scientists and the politicians they advise) expect seven billion of us to do to stop it? A cynic might suggest that these warnings will keep their tax-payer fund support coming in.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” —Upton Sinclair
Is there any weather that is not “consistent with climate change and global warming”?
Heavy rains and a much wetter than normal year in Texas after they declared the state was in a “permanent drought”. The likes of Hayho, Dessler, Seager, Schafersman, and Romm who were all out there making that declaration in interviews were never called to task for the completely busted climate forecast by any of the papers that published the BS. And today they are still taken seriously enough to get frequent press for their alarmism. Shades of Wadhams.
All weather “proves” AGW and there is no weather that can disprove it… Heads they win, Tails you lose and if the coin explodes mid-air, that was AGW, too…
Is there any correlation between the vortex shift and the magnetic pole shift?
From the climate is allway changing dept…
“University of Sheffield, has found that warming in the Arctic may be intensifying the effects of the jet stream’s position, which in the winter can cause extreme cold weather,”
thanks to – http://xmetman.com/wp/2016/11/01/waving-jet-stream-spells-bring-cold-winters/
See, you have to be clever & go to university to discover natural feedbacks …..or just ask a farmer !!!
Their skill is in the way they constantly state highly debatable claims as a mantra, eg “As the Arctic warms”.
This is from the Alaska Climate Research Center: http://akclimate.org/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.html
“If a linear trend is taken through mean annual temperatures, the average change over the last 6 decades is around 3.0°F. However, when analyzing the trends for the four seasons, it can be seen that most of the change has occurred in winter and spring, with the least amount of change in autumn.
Considering just a linear trend can mask some important variability characteristics in the time series. The figure at right shows clearly that this trend is non-linear: a linear trend might have been expected from the fairly steady observed increase of CO2 during this time period.
It can be seen that there are large variations from year to year and the 5-year moving average demonstrates a large increase in 1976.
The period 1949 to 1975 was substantially colder than the period from 1977 to 2014, however since 1977 little additional warming has occurred in Alaska with the exception of Barrow and a few other locations.
The stepwise shift appearing in the temperature data in 1976 corresponds to a phase shift of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation from a negative phase to a positive phase. Synoptic conditions with the positive phase tend to consist of increased southerly flow and warm air advection into Alaska during the winter, resulting in positive temperature anomalies.”
There is not a cause and effect relationship between temperature and CO2 in their data, yet the commonly presented story is that “the Arctic has warmed by 3 degrees” making little attempt to point out that it is deg F not C.
The reference to cooling from 1949 to 75 ties in the with observed cooling at that time elsewhere, but there have been considerable efforts to eliminate that cooling, as shown in Kenneth Richard’s latest piece at No Tricks Zone:
http://notrickszone.com/2016/10/31/revealed-ipcc-adds-0-3c-of-phantom-warming-between-3rd-5th-reports-met-office-removes-0-3c-from-1880s-1940s-warming/
If so called ‘Global Warming’ does indeed cause colder winters, doesn’t that constitute a kind of negative feedback? The global temperature tends to be relatively stable over very long periods of time, some form of negative feedback would tend to make that happen.