Pirate's Cove

This is all your fault, you know that, right?

How Global Warming Can Cause Europe’s Harsh Winter Weather

As Germans shiver through double-digit negative temperatures and more than 80 centimeters (30 inches) of snow in parts of the country, climate science deniers have taken to social media to argue that global warming is a hoax.

Their claim — which has been repeatedly debunked by climate scientists — is that extremely cold weather shows that carbon dioxide emissions are not warming the Earth.

In fact, the effects of global warming may even have favored the extremely cold temperature.

The past week’s sub-zero temperatures and heavy snowfalls are more than just a cold winter. They are made more likely by the collapse of the polar vortex — a huge ring of cold winds raging in the Earth’s stratosphere — at the North Pole.

The polar vortex is closely connected to the jet stream, a band of strong winds about 10 kilometers above the ground. At the polar front, this flows between warm air from the tropics and subtropics, and cold polar air. The pressure extremes that form in this transitional area at lower layers are sometimes referred to in weather reports as the Icelandic low or the Azores high.

And, because it’s gotten slightly warmer over the past 170 years, all because you refuse to give up your use of fossil fuels and give up your freedom to government, the Arctic has gotten warmer and we’re doomed and blah blah blah.

Through the burning of fossil fuels, people have heated the planet by more than 1 degrees Celsius (1.8°F) since the Industrial Revolution. The decade from 2010 to 2019 was the hottest on record. Climate change, however, doesn’t only lead to higher temperatures, but more extreme weather.

See? Your fault.

Seriously, this is some major league doomsday cult stuff, isn’t it? No matter what, they always have some answer that supports their cultish beliefs.