Somewhere in the world, a whole town is missing their tea-leaf readers.
The Physics tells us (practical beats us over the head) that more CO2 will mean warmer nights. It is a 97% certified mantra that warm nights are a fingerprint of man-made global warming.*
Well don’t look now, but CO2 causes cold nights too (and get this… on the East Coast).
Extreme-weather winters are becoming more common in US
Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the simultaneous occurrence of extremely cold winter days in the Eastern United States and extremely warm winter days in the West, according to a Stanford-led study published in Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres. Human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases are likely driving this trend, the researchers report.
Used to be that single seasons were “weather” and thirty year trends were “science”– now all they need is a single repeated season and half a country:
“Looking back at temperature data from the past 35 years, we’ve found that in fact 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 did have the biggest difference in winter temperature between the East and West.”
This is pretty freaky — can you imagine how smart these guys must be to spot this pattern? We are talking GCM-Rorschach. Coming soon — record differences from 6 – 9am in Spring mornings in States starting with P.
After that, alternating hot-cold weather split north-south, oh wait…
Note the standard press release formula
Part I: Start with two paragraphs of spooky ominous observations.
Part II: it’s onto the mechanism, sorry, the money-request: Mention how we need to understand this better, how this kind of weather costs billions, stretches resources… tick, platitudes, done… “Understanding the physical factors driving extreme weather could provide policymakers with more reliable information…
Part III: wave hands (don’t clap, it’s microagressive) just jazz them. Here’s The Big Evidence:
The Stanford study finds that the occurrence and severity of “warm West, cold East” winter events increased significantly between 1980 and 2015.
…because before 1980 there was a constant 4 billion trendless years.
Look out for the ridge trough pattern as the Moon traverses Jupiter:
This is partly because the winter temperature has warmed more in the West than in the East, increasing the odds that warm days in the West coincide with cold days in the East. Along with warming of the West, a “ridge-trough” pattern of high atmospheric pressure in the West and low atmospheric pressure in the East has also been producing greater numbers of winter days on which large areas of the West and East experience extreme temperatures at the same time.
“What we’ve found is that this particular atmospheric configuration connects the cold extremes in the East to the occurrence of warm extremes in the West,” said lead author Deepti Singh,…
And anomalous patterns jumped over the Moon. Weasel words coming:
Despite long-term warming across most of the globe, some regions can experience colder than normal temperatures associated with anomalous circulation patterns that drive cold air from the poles to the mid-latitudes. In fact, circulation patterns that facilitate such extremes are potentially a response to enhanced warming, the study’s authors point out.
Potentially this type of word-salad waffle can fool gullible editors and useful idiot fans.
“Although the occurrence of cold extremes is often used as evidence to dismiss the existence of human-caused global warming, our work shows that the warm West, cool East trend is actually consistent with the influence of human activities that have modified Earth’s climate in recent decades,” Singh said.
Thus does a mere potential become “actually consistent” with the exact opposite of what the models predicted.
PART IV: the get-me-out-of-jail climate soothsayer clause
And the hot-cold thing will probably, maybe, potentially stop anyway (unless it doesn’t):
That said, the simultaneous occurrence of extreme western warmth and extreme eastern cold will likely decrease if global warming continues through the 21st century, because warming of winters in both the West and East will likely reduce the occurrence of cold winters in the East. Still, the researchers project that some extremely cold events will still occur even with high levels of global warming.
We can see the future and it will be “Yes”
“We can absolutely expect further increases in hot events if global warming continues,” Diffenbaugh said. “But our results also highlight how complex climate change can be. We should be prepared for both warm and cold extremes – sometimes simultaneously – now and in the future.”
Climate change could be the greatest incidence of confirmation bias ever recorded in history.
This is grand mal Tasseomancy. Warmer nights are not so much a fingerprint of global warming, as a tea-leaf-print.
* (now is not the time to mention that clouds cause warm nights and hot car parks also cause warm nights too).