Yuuup. A few years ago, when the entire United States was experiencing record lows, the Earth had an above average overall temperature. Imagine how hot everywhere other than the United States must have been, if the average was still higher despite our record lows.
The graphic isn’t all that accurate. The text says a colder period is because of a warmer planet but then the cold area from a meandering jet stream looks larger. The missing part is the warmer air that leaks into the polar areas, causing a feedback loop by further deteriorating the balance of cold and warm that drives the jet stream.
this one might be more clear. still the same story though
It’s a bit prettier. What’s missing (and I know this is meme territory so it’s not a big deal) is how the jet stream is not just weak and wandering, but literally breaking in places and that’s where warm air into the poles happens. And it’s not hard to understand warmer where there’s normally ice means less ice.
Last time that much fresh water got dumped in the Atlantic ocean (when the glacier over north america melted) it resulted in an ice age over Europe… So… Good luck guys 👍
Phew. Glad I’m not in Europe
Western Europe in particular benefits from being warmer than its latitude would suggest due to Atlantic Ocean currents.
These currents are literally a coin toss away from breaking down, and it’s getting worse every year. Climate scientists are in unanimous agreement that the collapse is coming, and faster than a geologic timescale.
If (when) this happens, European countries will look more like Siberia than the Mediterranean.
Humanity is already dead. The time for drastic action was 30 years ago. We’re just talking corpses.
Phew glad I’m in a ski resort lol
My thoughts exactly. As a non-European, it sounds like the appropriate response is to drive my Chevvy Suburban 5 miles on the highway for 30 minutes to work in near standstill traffic.
I’ll just be over here with my pickup truck acting as my lights and music while I hang out in the front yard.
From that picture it looks like the weak jet stream is the problem. We just need to build a ton of wind farms across Canada to blow it harder so that it becomes more powerful. Easy.
You need to convince them the Earth is a sphere first.
I swear just a few years ago it was polar vortex this polar vortex that on the news everyday about the cold weather and I haven’t heard it once this year.
Weird, we’re experiencing the opposite in Europe.
That’s because the polar vortex slid off the Arctic onto North America, allowing warmer air to creep northward on your side of the globe. I remember in '21, while we had record cold in the southern US, Siberia was on fire.
This. The meme is inaccurate in that the polar vortex is in fact currently unusually strong. It’s just unusually shaped and oddly elongated. I hope the two following images show up correctly.
Strength of the polar vortex. Blue line is this winter:
source: http://weatheriscool.com/
Map showing the mean 500 hPa geopotential height and surface (2m) temperature anomalies for this week, as forecasted on Monday by ECMW:
Fun fact, when the jet stream gets perturbed like that and develops the sinusoidal deviations that we are experiencing, it’s called a Rossby wave.
These waves are actually super normal as the jetstream shifts with the seasons and moves north/south, especially when in a La Niña phase of the ENSO, which we are in right now.
The Hadley circulation cells whose boundaries define the jet stream are driven by convection. The US lies right along a jetstream boundary between two cells, and just downwind from the pacific ocean, so our weather is particularly sensitive to the temperature differences across the pacific ocean.
El Niño patterns have a hot equatorial pacific ocean which drives significant convection on the southern cell of the jet stream crossing the US, stabilizing it. La Niña patterns have a smaller gradient between the temperatures in the cells to the north and south of the relevant jet stream, especially as climate change relatively warms the arctic faster, leading to higher amplitude destabilizations during La Niña patterns like we are experiencing now.
More fun facts about these Rossby waves: they have been proposed as the mechanism to drive the eddies that end up forming planets in protoplanetary disks around baby stars (see the wikipedia page for Rossby waves above), and as the mechanism behind the hexagonal shape of Saturn’s polar cell. Worth noting that the exact mechanism for that hexagon is still highly debated, but Peter Gierasch used to have a fun model using a modified record turn table to create a rossby wave that formed a hexagon as a proof-of-concept that has stuck with me.
Will the increased snow cover at lower latitudes reduce warming? (I’m guessing probably yes, due to increased albedo. But, snow is also an insulator, and might be holding ground heat. I don’t know which effect will be greater.)
If it does reduce warming, will the amount be significant relative to anthropogenic climate change? (I’m guessing probably not.)
And just out of curiosity, did the Southern Hemisphere experience similar polar disturbances last winter, or in the past few years?
The problem here is that the snow will melt at some point. The reason this is happening is because the sea ice that existed year-round until now is nearly gone each summer. The lack of consistent ice covering means that there is a greater amount of energy being absorbed by the ocean, perhaps not year-round, but that it’s happening so much more in the summer is sufficient to utterly outweigh any amount of temporary snowfall anywhere else on the globe.
How do I quantify this to my hypothetical parents who reject climate change, and to my hypothetical siblings who don’t know one way or another?
I mean, you could think of it like rain. Imagine that you have a bucket, and it’s out in a rainstorm. There’s a plant in the bucket with some soil, and a tiny little pinhole in the bottom that lets out a couple of drips at any given time. Now, let’s say you want to make sure that the plant gets just the right amount of water, so that it still gets the right amount of rain, but it doesn’t flood and overpower the leak out of the bottom. What’s the simplest solution? Figure out how quickly the rain is coming down, and then cover part of the bucket so you only get the right amount of rain, right? Now imagine that some hooligan comes by and decides to muck with your bucket, because for the slightest moment, it will bring their sad, shriveled heart some measure of joy to make your life worse. They decide to move the cover. Maybe they take it off entirely, and that would guarantee the plant would die, but they’re a sick, evil little gobshite, so they only move it off when you’re out for the day, and then they put it back when you get home. When you go into your house, they take off the cover again, letting in the full torrent of rain. You look at the bucket, and wonder why the plant is getting flooded. Why isn’t the cover working anymore? Because it’s only there to help some of the time, and the damage that’s done while it’s missing is piling up faster than the drain can sink it away
The plant is the entire world ecosystem, you are the careful equilibrium that has been in place since the Oligocene, the rain is sunlight, the cover is arctic ice, the little gobshite is the corporations and individuals that have decided that their personal aggrandizement is the only thing that matters.
You want real trouble? Now imagine that when the level of water reaches high enough in the bucket, the cover doesn’t even fit anymore. That’s what happens when the permafrost and methane hydrates release their payloads in the coming years. That way lies the Permian mass extinction.
No. Well at least the first 2 weeks of the year are the warmest on record. A polar vortex just moves warmth elsewhere. It’s fair that a few days of snow cover is increased albedo for a few days, but it’s a drop in the bucket. A blanket of snow also keeps the ground warm.
It’s just nature’s hernia
i heard climate change is a hoax
Clean yur ears out sunny
obviously you don’t want to make america great
I think we’re past the point of humour on that one.
it’s ok ; it was never funny
