No worries, the Cult of Climastrology will come up with some other Reason
Arctic climate change may not be making winter jet stream weird after all
An influential, highly publicized theory — that a warming Arctic is causing more intense winter outbreaks of cold and snow in midlatitudes — is hitting resistance from an ongoing sequence of studies, including the most comprehensive polar modeling to date.
In science, this is called a hypothesis, because it was never proven, nor put through the rigors of the Scientific Model
The idea, first put forth in a 2012 paper by Jennifer Francis, now at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, and Stephen Vavrus, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is that two well-established trends — Arctic amplification (intensified global warming at higher latitudes) and depleted sea ice — can force the polar jet stream to dip farther south, thus causing more intense bouts of winter weather than might have otherwise occurred.
Over the past decade, this hypothesis sparked widespread public interest and scientific debate, as various high-profile cold waves and snow onslaughts hit North America and Eurasia, including a deadly, prolonged cold wave in Texas last February.
The idea was to blame cold, snow, and ice on Other People driving fossil fueled vehicles and refusing to give up their money, choice, and freedom to government
But the cooling has been far from ubiquitous and the Arctic-midlatitude link has been difficult to detect in simulations by global computer models. Instead, the models point more strongly toward the gradual, longer-term trend of milder midlatitude winters that one would expect in a human-warmed climate. (A separate line of research is addressing extremes during the summer, such as the unprecedented heat wave that struck the Pacific Northwest in June; see below.)
And those models, when you read through the soft-peddling
In this study and others, Screen and Blackport suggest that the connection between Arctic sea ice loss and extreme midlatitude events is real, but not necessarily causal. Instead, they argue, a third factor — most likely large-scale changes in atmospheric circulation that may not be permanent — is probably driving both the sea ice loss and the extreme winter events.
It either does or doesn’t. “Suggest” means they have no clue, so, until they can scientifically prove it, it doesn’t. And that still would prove anthropogenic causation
At the same time, Francis maintains that global models can’t fully replicate the Arctic-midlatitude connection simply by adding or removing sea ice, especially if the results lump together conditions across a whole winter or the entire midlatitudes.
So, their models stink even worse that we thought.
The appeal of a counterintuitive idea
The appeal is blaming cold and snow and ice on citizens to gain control over them. And the Warmists never think this will negatively affect themselves.
Read: That Whole ‘Climate Change’ Is Messing With The Winter Jet Stream? Never Mind »