The much-hyped "Polar Vortex [6]" that plunged much of North America into dangerously low temperatures is giving the climate change denialist crowd an opportunity to gloat—and, typically, display their ignorance. Bloomberg [7] on Jan. 7 presented a sneering Tweet from Donald Trump [8] dismissing global warming as "bullshit" because the "planet is freezing." But the Bloomberg account, as well as a video on the Greenpeace Blog [9], quotes Rutgers University climate researcher Jennifer Francis [10] explaining how the Vortex was likely unleashed by—yup, global warming! It seems that the Jet Stream, which normally serves as a boundary separating cold air to the north from warm air to the south, is being destabilized; receding arctic sea ice [11] lessens the temperature difference either side of the Stream, thereby slowing its velocity and causing large loops and meanders to form, and even for it to get "stuck [12]." When this happens, North America and Europe are going either into extreme heat or extreme cold, depending on where the jet gets jammed. Recent record-breaking highs in Chicago and Fairbanks, as well as shriveling heat waves [13] across the Great Plains, may have been caused by the same phenomenon now sending the mercury plunging in the Midwest and Northeast.
Sorry, Donald.
We we have noted [14] (repeatedly [15]) that "global warming" is actually a misleading term, allowing the denialists to gloat at every cold snap. What we are looking at is better understood as climate destabilization. Others have called it "global weirding [16]," portending more extreme weather [17] rather than a steady and uniform rise in temperature everywhere around the word. (More at Time's Ecocentric [18] blog, Jan. 6)
