THE COLD SPELL AND GLOBAL WARMING

Climate Change Might Just Be Driving the Historic Cold Snap; Climate change skeptics are pointing to the record cold weather as evidence that the globe isn't warming. But it could be that melting Arctic ice is making sudden cold snaps more likely—not less

Bryan Walsh, January 6, 2014 (Time Magazine)

“…Unsurprisingly, the extreme cold has brought out the climate change skeptics…[but weather] is what happens in the atmosphere day to day; climate is how the atmosphere behaves over long periods of time. Winters in the U.S. have been warming steadily over the past century, and even faster in recent decades, so it would take more than a few sub-zero days to cancel that out…[I]t may well be that global warming could be making the occasional bout of extreme cold weather in the U.S. even more likely…[The] disruption to the polar vortex [causing the freeze] may have been triggered by a sudden stratospheric warming event…[The Arctic is warming] faster than the rest of the planet, almost twice the global average…which in turns makes it more likely that cold Arctic air will escape the polar vortex and flow southward…” click here for more

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