Contributors

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Yeah, It's Cold. And Yeah, It's Because of Climate Change

Every year we go through this: we have a cold spell and Donald Trump and all the climate change deniers gloat: "It's cold! There ain't no global warming!"

Yes, it's cold in the Midwest. As I write this it's -28 degrees in the Twin Cities, and the low was -30 degrees.

But if you look at other places, it's not cold. Why, in Anchorage, Alaska, it's 33 degrees above zero. And in Juneau, it's 39 degrees above zero.

It's 67 degrees warmer in Alaska than in Minnesota. How can that be?

Climate change.

Climate change has completely screwed up the jet stream. In the past the jet stream bottled up the cold air around the North Pole. Now that the arctic has warmed so significantly that the jet stream is weakened, and that cap of cold air at the pole is no longer stable. It wobbles around a lot, and now the "polar vortex" has slipped down into the Midwest.

But don't worry: this is temporary. By Saturday it'll be 39 in Minnesota, a swing of almost 70 degrees in just a few days.

Meanwhile, Australia is being roasted by record-setting high temperatures, over 120 degrees in some places. And 2018 was the fourth warmest year on record. The other three warmest years were 2016, 2017 and 2015.

When the four warmest years on record are the last four years, you just can't deny that the planet is getting hotter at a record pace. And the primary cause is the trillions of tons of greenhouse gases that we are putting in the air.

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