Your Fault For Wiggly Jet Stream Causing Cold Weather Doom? Not So Fast

Usually, ARS Technica is chock full of climate crisis (scam) hysteria. This article actually shoots down the notion that it was you and your forebears who caused the doomy winter weather in Texas. Which is a shame that someone actually has point out that these climate cultists are nuts

Blaming a wiggly jet stream on climate change? Not so fast

Some songs are earworms—catchy whether you like them or not. (I won’t infect the rest of your day with an example. WT – I will. Electric Crown by Testament) Some explanations in science seem to be the earworm equivalent: inherently intuitive, making them stick readily in the mind. That’s obviously the case for the hypothesis that a warming Arctic leads to a wigglier jet stream, producing weather extremes in the mid-latitudes like the recent epic cold snap in the central US.

The cold arrived after the spinning “polar vortex” in the upper atmosphere above the Arctic was disturbed in January, unleashing its contents southward as the jet stream detoured from its usual commute. Could this behavior actually be a consequence of global warming? The suggestion has appeared in news articles and Twitter threads across the land. But the idea is stickier than the science says it should be. (snip)

Weather data from the last few decades contains some trends in the mid-latitudes, implying that the warming Arctic could be messing with weather patterns there. However, this is a case where the mantra “correlation is not causation” serves well. Climate scientists don’t just hunt for trends and then blame them all on human-caused climate change. They study the mechanisms that could drive those trends to evaluate which hypothesis (sometimes among many) can actually explain them.

Two points. First, I’ll acknowledge that a warming world could cause weather pattern changes and “freak” weather. We just don’t truly have the observed data from previous warm periods to truly know if this is usual or unusual. Second, the climate cult scientists and the cult disciples do, in fact, blame Other People for what is happening now, without real evidence. What if what we see is the norm during a Holocene warm period, but, mostly caused by nature? Unfortunately for the cult, that would cause problems with their cult dogma, just like having winter weather is problematic, hence the Blamestorming to make winter weather part of their beliefs set.

A 2017 study, for one example, concluded that trends in the stratospheric polar vortex were likely to be the result of natural variability rather than human-caused sea ice loss. And an article published in the journal Nature Climate Change last November noted that observations and studies in the last few years haven’t strengthened the case. “The short-term tendencies from the late 1980s through to early 2010s that fueled the initial speculation of Arctic influence have not continued over the past decade,” the authors wrote. “Long-term trends in the Arctic Oscillation and [jet stream] waviness, updated to winter 2019/20, are small and indistinguishable from internal variability.”

IPCC reports, too, have evaluated the state of the science on this question. The 2019 Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate checked in quite recently. “There is only low to medium confidence in the current nature of Arctic/mid-latitude weather linkages because conclusions of recent analyses are inconsistent,” the report stated. “Overall, changes in the stratospheric polar vortex and [Arctic Oscillation] are not separable from natural variability, and so cannot be attributed to greenhouse gas forced sea ice loss.”

Until the Warmists can offer up actual, hard evidence that winter weather can be worse because jet stream polar ice melting yada yada yada due to you eating a burger, it’s just natural variability. Just like always.

But, don’t expect the cult to give up on their doomsday cult dogma talking points. They never do. Space aliens could show up and give them definitive proof through watching the Earth and lots of planets and being super advanced that what is happening is mostly natural, and the cultists would call them deniers.