As captioned in the Boston Globe: Reuters photo. Frozen breath formed ice around the face of a Minneapolis resident on Wednesday.
2013 will probably rank as one of the top 10 hottest years in human history, and 2014 is on track to join 2013.
You wouldn’t know that from the denialists and those in thrall to them, who claim freak snow storms and historic cold show warming has stopped — though the snow and cold are caused by a breakdown in the jetstream and a slipping of the polar vortex, probably caused by global warming.
A two-minute explanation, from White House Science Advisor John Holdren:
White House description:
Published on Jan 8, 2014
President Obama’s Science and Technology Advisor, Dr. John Holdren, explains the polar vortex in 2 minutes—and why climate change makes extreme weather more likely going forward. Learn more at http://wh.gov/climate-change. January 8, 2014.
More:
- Boston Globe editorial, “Polar vortex: America in Deep Freeze”
- Bloomberg News, The Grid: “Why is it so cold? The polar vortex explained”
- Eli Rabbett points out a point the denialists keep missing on record cold temperatures — were there no warming, the record lows should be closer in number to the record highs. But not so.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Wouldn’t worry about Greenland melting, and humans have nothing to do with it if it should or should not.
First, what little is melting is due to volcano activity under the sheet
Second, there is nothing out of the ordinary about Arctic Ice growing and shrinking – been doing that for a few 100,000 years.
Guess you don’t remember Eric the Red’s voyages, huh?
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Causing the Greenland ice sheet to melt and slip into the ocean is more than “spitting in the ocean.”
Go look at that Sesame Street video again. Scale is important.
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Humans are irrelevant in nature, Ed.
You are spitting in the ocean, arguing it raises the sea level.
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We blame humans for what humans do. Slick sidewalk from the rain? Humans made the sidewalk, and humans can engineer the concrete not to be slick when wet.
Global warming? Humans have dramatically increased the amount of greenhouse gases, dramatically increasing the greenhouse effect, and prompting warming above the 20th century average.
We can fix that, too.
Human causation of environmental disasters is not new, not even modern. The collapse of the irrigation systems around Babylon, the destruction of the farmlands around the Yellow River, the destruction of the forests of Lebanon, the salting of the orchards and fields of Carthage, the over-grazing of the Great Basin, the mismanagement of American forests leading to the fires of 1908 and 1910, the overplowing that led to the Great Dust Bowl, the diversion of water that doomed the Aral Sea — humans change the environment and thereby cause catastrophes way, way too often.
Can we learn?
“Experience keeps a dear school,” Ben Franklin said. “But some will learn in no other.”
Too band for humans, eh?
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Ed, its you who fails the cause/effect calculation, not I
You blame man, not nature.
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You can think that dry sidewalks will prevent rain; the Constitution gives you the right to believe any fool thing you wish, and to tell others about it.
However, neither the Constitution nor any other law compels people to follow your contrary-to-nature or contrary-to-common-sense beliefs.
And your denial that rain wets sidewalks doesn’t make it so.
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John Quiggin chimes in, with shout-out to Al Roker:
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Ed,
You and your ilk live by your own self-generated truth that wet sidewalks cause rain.
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Absolutely False!
The Jet stream has not broken down.
There is nothing “abnormal” about a polar vortex
There is nothing “abnormal” about the North Pole having a different, even warmer, temperature than somewhere else.
There is absolutely nothing abnormal about these conditions whatsoever.
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“Lexington Libertarian” took issue with the video, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out what reality might stand behind those views. Among other things, LexLib said this cold streak “plays havoc” with climate models — though without explaining how.
So, over there, I responded (but LexLib has yet to approve the comment from moderation — will s/he ever?):
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[…] Annals of Global Warming: Polar vortex, explained in two minutes […]
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“Dishonest”??
hohohoho
Nope, FACTUAL – but to your ilk of zealots, facts are dishonest!
hohohoho
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Better to be brainless than dishonest. Sea cucumbers at least perform valuable filtering of water. Denialists, not so much.
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Yes, the Anthropogenic Causation of Climate zealots, no matter what happens, it human caused.
“There is no snow!” – Man’s fault.
“There is too much snow!” – Man’s fault
“There is the same amount of snow” – Man’s fault.
Your ilk is utterly brainless.
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