Pirate's Cove

Wait, see, climate cultist Marshall Shepard isn’t really saying it does either, he’s just kinda wink winking that it’s all your fault

The Blizzard In The Rockies Doesn’t Disprove Climate Change But People Will Say It Anyhow

I predicted several days ago that some people would be tweeting that this early season snowstorm in parts of the Rocky Mountain region somehow refutes anthropogenic climate change. Rob Bailey, a computer engineer in Ohio, brought the Tweet at this link to my attention. I am sure there are many more just like it. It was as predictable as the sunrise or a pendulum changing sides. By now, we are used to seeing people tweet such things on a cold day or when it snows. The counter punch that I often hear is that “people do the same thing with a hot day or a heatwave.” The reality is that cherry-picking one day, one storm, or one week of weather to describe climate change is problematic and may reveal a lack of understanding of weather and climate. Here’s why the snowstorm in the Rockies and surrounding regions says nothing about climate change. (snip)

A couple of points are worth noting. People who make contrarian arguments about climate change often bring up cold events (Remember the snowball in Congress). In reality, there is nothing unusual about snowfall at this time of year in the Mountain West. In 2017, meteorologist Jon Erdman wrote at Weather.com:

See, this is all just weather, and normal. And he’s right. But, of course, remember that Warmists have told us numerous times that snow would be a thing of the past.

So why is the region experiencing such record cold and snow conditions in terms of magnitude of the event? To answer this question, we have to look to the jet stream. According to the NWS Glossary, the jet stream is a region of “relatively strong winds concentrated in a narrow stream in the atmosphere, normally referring to horizontal, high-altitude winds….The position and orientation of jet streams vary from day to day.” The wavy pattern of the jet stream is a very strong determinant of general weather patterns, particularly in terms of temperature and wetness. With this storm, the jet stream plunged southward bringing extremely cold air into the region. An upper-level low approaching from the Pacific region supplied the moisture.

To be clear, this is a weather event. I am not attributing it to climate change at all. However, I want to conclude with something that is very counterintuitive to many people. There is a growing body of evidence (and a few counter-narratives) in the peer review literature that suggests that because the Arctic region is warming, there is less of a difference in temperature between the polar and tropical regions. That difference, called a gradient, is what determines the strength of the jet stream. If the difference is smaller due to so-called Arctic Amplification (warming in the Arctic), the jet stream would be wavier. The “so what” is that a jet stream with greater wave amplitude means more extreme troughs or “dips” with cold air and more extreme ridges or “humps” with warm air. In other words, the extremes on both sides of the temperature range are amplified.

See, he’s not attributing it to ‘climate change’, he’s just saying that it’s climate change.