Okay, There's the Heat. It Had to be Somewhere.

 


Nothing fuels skepticism about the climate emergency more than cold snaps of the sort now affecting western Canada. In previous years it's been the dreaded "polar vortex" that has plagued eastern Canada.

One thing climate change has taught us is that, when it is unduly cold in one region, you will find some other region that is unduly warm, even hot. Currently that heat can be found across America's southern states and, wait for it, in Alaska.

The South and Southeast remain under the influence of a system that will provide above-normal temperatures through midweek.

"Record warm temperatures are expected for broad areas of the South," Mullinax said. "Parts of the South Central U.S. will soar into the 70s and 80s once again this afternoon, with temperatures becoming warmer across much of the Deep South by Tuesday."

At the island community of Kodiak, the air temperature at a tidal gauge hit 19.4C (67F) degrees on Sunday, the highest December reading ever recorded in Alaska, said scientist Rick Thoman of the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy. He called it “absurd.”

A few years ago, in the middle of the long Arctic night, temperatures got well above the freezing mark inside the Arctic Circle. No sunlight to heat anything. Middle of winter. It was a heatwave. In 2014, snow and freezing rain brought Atlanta, Georgia to a standstill.  Meanwhile Barrow, Alaska basked in mid-60s temperatures.

It all comes down to physics. The effects of Hadley cells and Rossby waves. Wild gyrations in the Jet Stream. The old normal, the Holocene, has given way to the Anthropocene, our new normal.

Comments

  1. Northern PoVDecember 29, 2021 at 9:54 AM

    "Yeah, my blood's so mad, feels like coagulatin'
    I'm sittin' here just contemplatin'
    I can't twist the truth, it knows no regulation
    Handful of Senators don't pass legislation"

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Up in Smoke. 300 Sq. Mi. of Amazon Rainforest Lost Every Day.

Image
  The Amazon rainforest is disappearing at what should be an alarming rate. 312 sq. mi. or 808 sq. kms. every day. Over the past 30 years humans have destroyed a patch of the Amazon equal in area to the states of Texas and New Mexico . The Amazon – historically a great carbon absorber, since trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen – now releases more carbon than it stores, which adds to, rather helps to reduce, our global climate crisis. Deforestation rates decreased slightly from 2004 to 2012. But since then, they’re back on the rise, especially in the past couple of years, since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil. In 2018, as Bolsonaro campaigned as a patriotic man of the people, scientists predicted that once the Amazon lost more than 25% of its tree cover, it would become a drier ecosystem, all because deforestation changes weather patterns (due to how trees respire), which in turn reduces rainfall. Furthermore, as the forest becomes fragmented, areas surrounded...
Read more

Who Asks "Why?"

Every time there's a conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, all we hear is 'why?'  Why, as in, whose fault is this? It's easier to affix blame if you can truncate the event. Pick a convenient start date, something recent. In this case we'll make it either the Israeli eviction of Arabs from Jerusalem or the scuffle that took place outside the mosque in response. If those don't work, let's go for Hamas launching unguided rockets into Israel. That's even better because it tags Hamas with the blame. The nice thing about this approach is you can just keep using it. It goes on and on, just as it has for the past half-century since the '67 war. You can even date this whole mess to the beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Israelis are said to have called these periodic wars, "mowing the lawn." The idea is that, every now and then, you have to take these Arabs to the woodshed. And then you keep your powder dry unt...
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr...
Read more