But elsewhere the weather was much worse. Since Dec. 21st, tornadoes have struck Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Dozens of people died.
On New Years Eve the Mississippi and Merrimac rivers are flooding, flooding large areas of Illinois and Missouri. Dozens more died. Thousands have fled their homes for higher ground.
This past summer Asia and the Pacific were hammered by 16 hurricanes (cyclones), including the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Western hemisphere (Patricia).
On Wednesday the same weather system that brought flooding and tornadoes to the United States brought temperatures 50 degrees hotter than normal to the North Pole. At the end of December the temperature at the North Pole was above freezing, reaching 35 degrees.
This has happened before. A few years ago we had tornadoes in January and February, but this year is particularly bad because it's an "El Niño" year. El Niño years also occurred in 1953 and 1980, causing a string of tornadoes in December. The combination of El Niño and climate change made 2015 the hottest year on record.
The people who have been hardest hit by tornadoes and floods come from states whose Republican representatives in Congress say that climate change is a hoax, that temperatures aren't rising: politicians like Ted Cruz of Texas and James Inhofe of Oklahoma.
Last year Inhofe brought a snowball into the Senate to "prove" that climate change isn't happening. It was stupid stunt, because one snowfall doesn't prove climate change isn't happening (the large snowfalls that year were caused by a weakening of the polar vortex, when warm air intruded on the North Pole and pushed cold air into the Northeast). But long-term trends do, and beach volleyball weather on Christmas in New York is the culmination of trend that has been occurring for the past 50 years. We've seen it here in Minnesota: in the 1990s the beach volleyball season started in May and ended in August. In the past few years we've regularly started as soon as early to late March and played until late October and mid-November.
The tornadoes and floods hitting the Bible belt aren't God's wrath, or Nature's wrath, or the planet wreaking revenge on us for killing polar bears and whales. It's thermodynamics, plain and simple. Hot air has more energy and holds more water, causing more extreme storms.
This year's weather is worse than previous El Niño years because it's being exacerbated by global warming. As carbon dioxide from the burning of oil, gas and coal continues to build up in the atmosphere, the Pacific will continue to warm to the point where this year's high ocean temperatures will become the norm.
Before long every year will be an El Niño year.
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