A new study in Nature says climate change may force the polar vortex to dip down more often, triggering bone-chilling winters in Europe and North America. Many of the claims of an overheated Earth dissipate during winter as temperatures plummet and heating bills rise. Yet the authors write that as the Arctic warms and more sea ice melts, additional ocean water is exposed, absorbing the sun's warmth.

The excess warmth then gets released over a longer time period, interrupting the polar vortex and pushing it down into lower latitudes. Sea ice, however, reflects the sun’s rays back into space, causing temperatures to plummet during the winter.

That’s what happened in early 2014 and 2015 when Arctic air bullied its way toward more temperate regions.

El Niño connection

During the winter of 2016, the world was affected by a powerful, naturally occurring El Niño that hampered the vortex’s ability to plunge into lower latitudes. It also ramped up global temperatures for about 15 months, just long enough for NOAA and NASA to breathlessly proclaim the global warming pause was finally over. Previously, the well-studied acknowledged pause was a fly in the alarmist’s ointment, with no statistical warming for nearly 19 years.

Scientific agencies composed largely of academics came up with numerous reasons to explain away the lack of expected warming, leading to nearly 70 excuses for the hiatus.

Even the UN’s IPCC said in its last assessment report the pause was real. So NASA and NOAA took their highly coveted datasets and started rejiggering the temperatures of the last century to make the last 16 years look hotter. They even erased the post-1940 cooling period.

Scientific uncertainty

The new study is rife with problems.

It’s based on computer models and a limited observational period. Plus, Arctic sea ice has rebounded nearly 25 percent from 2012 levels and continues to grow each year. Arctic temperatures so far this year are consistent with what they averaged during the 20th century. The study is a beginner’s course in everything that’s wrong with the peer-reviewed process as detailed by Donna Laframboise:

Remember, meteorological institutions around the world use these U.S. datasets as they didn’t have their own up until 1980. During the first two World Wars, many countries weren’t recording temperatures at all.

They were committed to winning wars, so there are decade-long gaps.

NOAA and NASA estimate what global temperatures were since 1870 because only the U.S. was actively recording them with any normalcy. Nobody was regularly taking the daily or even monthly temperatures in undeveloped regions.

History repeats itself

In 1974, Time magazine wrote how scientists were convinced the Earth was cooling and it was causing the polar vortex to expand. That was when scientists believed catastrophic global cooling was occurring. Forty years ago, they said we were headed for a new Ice Age, that crops would fail and summers would vanquish. They prophesized for years but nothing happened.

We were theoretically ejecting so much soot and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere we were blocking out the sun (despite instruments showing no decrease in solar output reaching the ground).

Turns out ocean cycles had a far greater impact on the Earth’s climate.

What is global warming?

Today we blame carbon dioxide (CO2), an odorless, colorless, trace gas that is a byproduct of fossil fuel combustion. A chorus of activist scientists, backed up by an overeager media, say that as we produce more CO2, the upper atmosphere heats up. Under the law of thermodynamics, nature abhors a vacuum.

As such, the lower atmosphere (the air around us) warms up to reach equilibrium with the upper atmosphere. That’s the premise behind the theory of global warming. Except the upper atmosphere is not heating up as modeled. As Tony Heller writes at his site Real Climate Science, “climate scientists will say whatever politicians are currently paying them to say.”
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