Jennifer Francis: The Cold Weather Affecting The Eastern US now is Global Warming – ‘It’s Inevitable But Mysterious’

Each year that the US gets severe cold weather (which has happened a lot over the past 20 years), there’s always a few climate change fanatics who claim that it’s due to global warming. They have to you see. Snow, ice and severe cold are bad for business. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Winters were supposed to get warmer, shorter, spring was supposed to arrive earlier and summers were meant to be searingly hot. Severe cold weather at the end of January doesn’t fit the narrative, so they change the narrative. Simples.

I recall the good old days, when President Trump was around to troll the climate change fanatics with tweets like this:

In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 29, 2017

They went into hysterics of course, on that occasion claiming that it was ‘just weather’ and that Trump was using ‘just weather’ to ridiculously claim that global warming wasn’t happening. ‘Experts’ and the Guardian laid into him lie a pack of hyenas:

US president again conflates weather with climate to mock climate change

Experts call comments ‘scientifically ridiculous and demonstrably false’

The president was reheating two favourite tropes: the conflation of weather with climate to pour scepticism on global warming, and the supposed cost to the American taxpayer of the Paris climate accord, from which he has confirmed the US will withdraw.

Climate scientists, however, have long warned against using individual weather events to ponder the existence or otherwise of global warming. Weather, they point out, refers to atmospheric conditions during a short period; climate relates to longer-term weather patterns.

“There is a fundamental difference in scale between what weather is and what climate is,” he said. “What’s going on in one small corner of the world at a given moment does not reflect what’s going on with the planet.”

But severe (often record breaking) cold weather has been happening so frequently, particularly in the eastern US, that climate change fanatics are now having to admit it’s not ‘just weather’ after all, as they previously shrieked and screamed in response to being trolled by Trump, it’s actually a bizarre and counter-intuitive result of global warming. Yep, the new global warming is . . . . . . cooling!

Hence, with Bidet now in charge, who made it his first task on day one of his fake Presidency to sign the US back up to the Paris Accord, and the upcoming COP26 meeting in Glasgow, climate alarmists are keen to keep the man-made global warming narrative going, even during severely cold winter weather.

So the NYT, noting the present cold weather in the US, has once again wheeled out Jennifer Francis along with her theory of how Arctic warming causes extreme weather, a theory which has been doing the rounds for several years now, which has been severely criticised by scientists, has little real evidence in its favour, but is all they’ve got, so they keep regurgitating it to explain inconveniently cold and snowy weather.

Disturbances to the upper-atmosphere phenomena known as the polar vortex can send icy blasts from the Arctic into the middle latitudes, chilling Europe, Asia and parts of North America. The disturbance and its effects have persisted for an unusually long time this year, said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, with two disruptions of the polar vortex so far this year and, potentially, a third on the way.

Research into the interplay of the complex factors that bring on blasts from the polar vortex is ongoing, but climate change appears to be part of the mix. While warming means milder winters overall, “the motto for snowstorms in the era of climate change could be ‘go big or go home!’ said Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, a company that provides information to clients about weather and climate-related risk.

The wild weather has its origins in the warming Arctic. The region is warming faster than the rest of the planet, and research suggests that the rising temperatures are weakening the jet stream, which encircles the pole and generally holds in that frigid air. In early January, a surge of sudden warming hit the polar stratosphere, the zone five to thirty miles above the surface of the planet.

But it’s not clear cut, as the NYT itself admits:

While the scientific evidence supporting climate change is indisputable, the connection between climate change and the disruptions in the stratosphere is not so settled. Dr. Cohen was an author of a paper last year in the journal Nature Climate Change, which looked at winter data from 2008 to 2018. The team found a sharp increase in Northeast winter storms over the previous decade. “Severe winter weather is much more frequent when the Arctic is warmest,” Dr. Cohen said.

Dr. Butler, however, said that across the full historical record, which goes back to 1958, “There is no indication of a long-term trend” in polar vortex disruptions. The weather patterns that affect the vortex “occur naturally even in the absence of climate change,” with some decades showing no disruptions and other decades with one in almost every year.

But Jennifer Francis is having none of it. There simply must be a connection she states; we just haven’t discovered it yet:

To Dr. Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, the influence of climate change on these phenomena is inevitable, if still somewhat mysterious. “We’re changing the planet in such dramatic and incontrovertible ways,” she said. “The atmosphere is different now. The Earth’s surface is different now. The oceans are different now. So there must be some connections that are yet to be discovered as we do more research on the stratospheric polar vortex.”

This is climate science for you. This is extreme weather attribution. If the data doesn’t fit the theory, if the theory fails, then just invoke the climastrologists’ Inevitability Principle, which states:

A must cause B, even though there’s no evidence that B is caused by A, simply because A ‘changes everything’ and A is ‘settled science’.