Guest essay by Eric Worrall

h/t Dr. Willie Soon; Another end of snow prediction.

Snow in Texas and ice in Alabama? Unusual cold weather could become more common

A wavier jet stream brings cold Arctic air down south. That may be a counterintuitive result of climate change, some scientists say.

BY ALEJANDRA BORUNDA
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 13, 2019

This week, temperatures are expected to hit historic lows across much of North America. Already, it has snowed in Texas and frozen in Tennessee, and hundreds of towns and cities are preparing for icy cold weather.

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Scientists are embroiled in an active debate right now about this loopiness. Some think the jet stream is wavier now than it has been in the past, and that its bends and bows will intensify as the planet warms further. That might mean that cold air could come sliding down from the north more often, a counterintuitive result of long-term global warming, explains Zach Zobel, a climate scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center.

Others, though, say that cold bouts haven’t gotten worse over the past few decades, and in fact, the long-term trend tilts toward warming. A recent study shows that, overall, the intensity of Northern Hemisphere cold events has weakened over the past 50 years. Compared to the long-term average warming trend since 1901, the coldest day of the year is up to 5 degrees Celsius warmer now. And the likelihood that any place in North America will feel a record cold is decreasing: The coldest day of the year is less cold than it used to be, and that number is increasing about five times faster than the average rate of global warming, the study says.

“Even if the jet stream does become a little wavier, that cold arctic air is less cold than it used to be,” says Russell Blackport, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Exeter. “So even with that same circulation anomaly, those cold events should be becoming less severe.”

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Read more: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/11/arctic-blast-polar-vortex-cold-weather-climate/

They can fiddle the temperature record, build dodgy reconstructions and they can hide declines all they want, but the one thing they cannot do is conceal evidence of extreme cold weather right in front of people’s eyes.