OK, I’ve tried to ignore these wonky wackadoodle cultish belief articles, not even bothering with them on Twitter. This one caught my attention, though, for the headline and a specific line
Is deep freeze the latest sign climate change is accelerating?
Hundreds of thousands of fish have choked during Australia’s hottest monthsince records began, swathes of the United States is colder than the north pole, new ruptures have been found in one of the Antarctic’s biggest glaciers and there are growing signs the Arctic is warming so fast that it could soon be just another stretch of the Atlantic.
And so the new year is carrying on where the old one left off, with growing signs climate disruption is accelerating at a more destructive rate than many scientists predicted.
The US deep freeze, which has plunged temperatures in Minnesotato -50C(-58F), may appear to have little in common with the searing heatwave that cooked Marble Bar, Australia, in 49.1C. But the extremes are consistent with theories about how increasing human emissions change major weather systems.
As carbon builds in the atmosphere, the planet warms and the ice caps melt, so the temperature gradient between the equator and the poles flattens out. Although the science is not yet conclusive, many scientists believe this is weakening the jet streams, which are important drivers of weather systems.
So, what caused this?
You think it’s brutally cold in New Jersey today as the polar vortex tightens its grip? Well, luckily you weren’t standing outside in River Vale in Bergen County on Jan. 5, 1904.
That’s when the air temperature dropped to 34 degrees below zero — without factoring in the wind chill. To this day, that insanely frigid reading stands as the coldest temperature ever recorded in the Garden State, according to New Jersey State Climatologist David Robinson, whose office is based at Rutgers University. (snip)
New Jersey’s coldest month on record was February 1934, when the statewide average temperature was only 17.2 degrees, Robinson said. That’s the average of all the daily highs and daily lows in each region of the state.
New Jersey’s coldest year on record was 1904, with a statewide average temperature of 47.8 degrees.
OK, that’s just NJ, and there were plenty of cold records broken this year. But CO2 was below the safe level of 350ppm. And different states will have different records. It just goes to show that weather happens. There’s no witchcraft of CO2 involved. Having a warm period is normal.
