It's the Day After Tomorrow Today!

Oh, no! The Polar Vortex is everywhere! Just like the movie The Day After Tomorrow. This proves climate change isn't happening!

Well, not exactly everywhere. The temperature in Moscow, for example, was 34 degrees when I checked earlier today. In Sochi, where the Winter Olympics are going to be held, it's going to be in the 50s this week (30s in the mountains where the skiing takes place). While we've been getting socked by cold and snow, it was 36 and raining in Lillehammer, Norway, where the 1994 Winter Olympics were held. Australia's recent spring was the hottest on record and the country has been hit this year by searing heat (more than 100 degrees in the agricultural areas) and more bushfires. In December Alaska was setting record high temperatures while the rest of the United States was cold. This last November was the hottest on record world-wide.

But, the deniers say, global warming isn't happening because it's the coldest it's been in 20 years!

Exactly. Average temperatures have been rising so steadily that what used to be a typical cold snap for places like Minnesota is now the exception rather than the rule. When I was a kid most every year we'd get a week or two of -20 degree temperatures. Now we freak out when it gets that cold and cancel school.

Checking current temps on weather.com around the world is interesting. The high for the North Pole today is going to be 27 above zero! The high in Duluth, Minnesota is going to be -15. Yes, the North Pole is going to be 42 degrees warmer than Duluth.

Why is the weather so weird? Well, when the North Pole is so warm, it pushes the jet stream south, which pushes cold arctic air south into the United States. A warmer North Pole was one of the reasons Hurricane Sandy was so much bigger and veered west instead of east.

If temperatures rise a few degrees worldwide, they will increase 10 or 20 degrees at the poles, causing more melting and more weird changes to the jet stream.

A lot of people have been citing stories like this (More Record Lows than Highs in USA in 2013) as "proof" that climate change isn't happening. But they neglect to read the actual story:

Through Dec. 28, there have been 11,852 daily record lows in 2013, compared with 10,073 daily record highs, according to Walton.

A "daily" record occurs when a specific location sets a record high or low temperature for a particular day; other types of records include monthly and all-time.

Walton said that an unusually cold spring was the main factor in the "cool" 2013.

The year 2013 was a stunning turnaround from the USA's amazingly warm year of 2012, when more than 34,000 record highs were measured across the country, as compared with only about 6,600 record lows.

In 2013 there were slightly more record highs than record lows, while in 2012 there were five times as many record highs than record lows. And then there's this:

Through November, the most recent month for which national and global climate statistics are available, the world was having its 4th-warmest year on record, while the USA was seeing its 35th-warmest on record, the NCDC reports.

The upshot: global warming is global. We can expect fluctuations from one region to another, from one year to another, but the overall trend is increased temperatures, which causes more forest fires, heat waves, and paradoxically, cold snaps as the warming North Pole pushes the jet stream south.