Burrr...It's so Cold! Where's the Global Warming?

This is chapter 25 in my book, Fever Rising, and examines the extreme cold temperatures that parts of North America have experienced over the past couple of years leading many residents in these areas to scoff at global warming, while despite that, the last two winters in a row have been setting records for heat!

Here are links to earlier threads of the book, the first 24 chapters, published free on the pages of ATS. In the sinkhole chapter you'll find links that lead you back to earlier threads.

So much moisture in the atmosphere
The Humans are Dying
A closer look at the Bayou Corne Sinkhole
The reason for sinkholes, land slips and land cracks

Chapter 25: Burr...It's so Cold! Where's the Global Warming?

Oh man, how I’ve heard the rants lately about how the global warming crowd is nuts because it’s been so damn cold over North America the winter of 2013-14. Yes, it’s been cold…in North America, but what about the rest of the world? There are some cold spots elsewhere to, but most of the world is setting records for heat. Let’s take a look at Alaska temperatures while most of the lower 48 froze.

While most of U.S. froze, parts of Alaska set record highs
ClimateCental.org, Dec. 10, 2013
By Andrew Freedman
While the continental U.S. has been shivering from coast-to-coast with temperatures dropping as low as minus-40°F amid one of the most severe early December cold snaps in several years, one state bucked the trend in an historic way. The same contorted jet stream pattern that brought the brutal cold to the lower 48 states pushed a pulse of milder-than-average air into Alaska, where some spots recorded
temperatures unheard of for December.

Along Alaska's northern coastline, which lies above the Arctic Circle, the warmest December temperatures on record in at least 70 years occurred this past week. At the airport in Deadhorse, which serves the oil production hub of Prudhoe Bay, the temperature hit 39°F on December 7, the highest December temperature on record there since at least 1968, said Rick Thoman of the National Weather Service (NWS) in Fairbanks in an interview. Even more notable, perhaps, was the fact that it was raining, rather than snowing. Rain there is unusual so late in the year.

The article claimed that December high temperature records were also set at Barter Island Air Force Base, which is located along Alaska’s North Slope region. Wainwright, another Arctic Shore location, also reached a balmy 32 degrees F, breaking an old record set in 2006. Areas south of Prudhoe Bay had temperatures reach into the 40’s. The first nine days of December ran 22 degrees above average in Barrow, and 18.5 degrees above average in Kotzebue, according to National Weather Service data.

A strong ridge of high pressure was the main cause of the record warmth in Alaska. The high caused the jet stream, which is a high speed current of winds in the upper atmosphere, to go north of the state, while simultaneously displacing cold, Arctic air southward into Canada and the continental U.S.

2013 was one of the hottest years on record. The prior year was one of the hottest years for the United States. Repeatedly, news stories highlight the data that shows the world is warming and global regions that are suffering extreme cold can even attribute their cold snaps to global warming. In the last chapter I discussed the radical rollercoaster of a jet stream that surged way up north over Alaska and then dipped far south into the continental United States. It’s that pattern that brought the warm temperatures to Alaska and cold temperatures as far south as the Gulf Coast. It’s also the reason that Europe waited for a winter that failed to arrive. They had a mild winter in terms of snow and cold, but a very harsh winter in terms of wind and rain. The jet stream surged north again around Greenland where warm temperatures persisted for the second winter in a row and brought intense weather patterns to Europe.

As U.S. shivers, Europe waits for winter to arrive
From TerraDaily.com, Jan. 8, 2014
While part of North America is suffering through a record freeze, northern Europe is enjoying unusually balmy temperatures that are disturbing wildlife, traffic and the winter sports season.

The month of December was one of the mildest in a century in the Nordic countries, according to meteorologists, with temperatures exceeding their normal seasonal average by four to five degrees Celsius (24 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit) in Norway and Finland.

Oslo experienced its warmest Christmas since records began in 1937, while in Helsinki and southern Finland the second half of December was the mildest in 30 years. In Koege outside Copenhagen the mercury reached 11.6 degrees C (52.9 F) on Christmas Eve.

This year began in a similar vein: pavements in all the Scandinavian capitals were uncharacteristically free of ice and snow, with the white stuff appearing only briefly in Oslo and Stockholm in early December.

Parts of Siberia, known to be the coldest places on earth, are experiencing freakish warm temperatures as well. The warm spell has been holding strong in Siberia for a couple of years. During the summer of 2013, temperatures surged to 90 degrees in Siberia. I saw a picture of a town with a river running through it that is usually ice covered during that time of year (taken in Dec. 2013) with the land around it buried in snow. In the photo the river was flowing and the grass was visible on the banks. Temperatures there usually dip down below zero.

The most northerly town in the world, Novosibirsk, had yet to see snow as of the first of the year for 2014. The month of December is usually snow covered. One time in 1963 they experienced some thaw on Christmas Eve with a little bit of rain, but nothing like what they observed in December of 2013. These kinds of temperatures in Alaska, Siberia and Greenland spells catastrophic disaster for mankind if they hold steady because of the unprecedented land and sea ice melt.

I mentioned several times previously, the year 2013 was one of the hottest on record, but the month of November was the actual hottest global temperature month since record-keeping began.

Weather.com, Dec. 17, 2013
By Terrell Johnson and Nick Wittgen
Last month was the warmest November since modern temperature record keeping began in 1880, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced today in its latest State of the Climate report.
With a combined land and ocean surface temperature of 56.6 degrees Fahrenheit, November 2013 also was the 345th consecutive month – and the 37th November in a row – with a global temperature higher than the 20th century average.
Higher-than-average monthly temperatures were reported on nearly every continent around the world, including much of Europe and Asia, coastal Africa, Central America and central South America, as well as in the North Atlantic Ocean, southwest Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean.

Continued...

Russia experienced its warmest November since records began in 1891. Parts of Siberia and Arctic islands in the Kara Sea were 14 degrees above normal on a daily average.

The article stated that cooler-than-average temperatures were reported in parts of North America, northern Australia and southwest Greenland, but that no record cold monthly temperatures were reported.

After all the statistics that show warm global temperatures, why the drastic cold? I’ll get into that, but first, I’d like to point out that the cold is only in a small part of the globe…North America. It’s the more populated regions of North America feeling the cold, so it’s getting a lot of attention on a global scale when it’s more about our American egos that all of a sudden the world is entering a mini-Ice Age because they experienced drastic cold.

Remember, the United States had experienced their hottest year on record for the year 2012. The Twin Cities reported that it was their hottest year on record with temps 3.2 above average. The NY Times came out with a story to that said 2012 was the hottest year on record and it wasn't even close. It shattered the previous record by a full degree, which the story said is usually measured in fractions. Ten of the warmest years on record have happened in the past 15 years. More evidence that hydrogen sulfide and methane gas levels are on the rise.

Given that these are stats for America, some say it’s not the hottest year on record for the world, but if you look back over the past couple of years and the weather all over the globe how does one dispute the weather is super-charged. Look at Australia over last few months of 2012. They suffered through such an extreme heat wave that the Australian Weather Bureau added colors to their weather maps;

NBC News, Jan. 9,2013
By Jason Cumming
“Australia's record-breaking heatwave has sent temperatures soaring, melting road tar and setting off hundreds of wildfires - as well as searing new colors onto weather maps. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has added dark purple and magenta to its weather forecasting map to represent temperatures of 51 to 54 degrees Celsius (123.8 to 129.2 Fahrenheit), officials said. Temperatures on the map were previously capped at 50 degrees Celsius, represented by the color black.”

They added these colors because of the heat waves that have been blistering their country over the past two Australian summers which are resulting in wildfires 'the worst they've seen in a decade.' Some of the wildfires were so bad they were referred to as ‘Tornadoes of Fire.’ One family that clung to a jetty to survive one of these tornadoes had to hang on for three hours to escape the devastating fire. The Holmes family fled the roaring inferno and jumped into the sea.

"The next thing we knew everything was on fire, everywhere, all around us," Tim Holmes told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Holmes, his wife and their five grandchildren, ages 2 to 11, hung on to the dock submerged in the water as the fire destroyed three of their family homes.

The winter season of 2013-14 heat continued to break records. It was so hot that record numbers of animals were dying including massive numbers of bats falling dead from the sky in Australia.

We’ve established that the world is warming up at a dangerous accelerating rate that may wreak some havoc with the Gulf Stream. This is most likely already taking place and may be playing a huge role in why there are such drastic cold temperatures in certain areas. We also discussed the ‘out of whack’ jet stream which is bringing warm and moist air from the western Pacific Island nations, more specifically, Indonesia.

We’ve also explored the possibility of volcanic ash cooling global temperatures a couple of times. Although this is a great threat, I’m not sure that it’s happening just yet. I believe that the volcanic activity around the Ring of Fire, which includes Indonesia and the high activity in the Russian peninsula of Kamchatka, is definitely adding to the rapidly increasing methane levels in turn causing the warming. This warming aids in melting the ice. This melting ice then adds to the thin earth crust underneath the world’s oceans, especially around the coasts of Indonesia causing more magma to move around deep under the earth’s surface, thus more and more volcanoes.

Here’s what Jonny Mnemonic said on his website about the possibility of a mini-Ice Age. One of his readers asked him if he thought that the volcanoes would actually reverse the runaway global warming and stop the extinction level event that we face.

Jumpingjackflashhypothesis.blogspot.com
By Jonny Mnemonic
As for the ice age potential, we may see volcanic winter due to all the volcanoes erupting. That could lead to an ice age. Unfortunately, that might not help all that much if the oceanic heat is coming from below, from volcanoes in the oceans, which is what I suspect. Then we may end up with the worst of both worlds: warming oceans and lots of methane and hydrogen sulfide emissions, and freezing air temps. Then if you light a fire for warmth, you might just blow up.

I have been watching for signs of volcanic winter, extraordinary cold events, and there have been a couple. There was the 30+ inches of snow in New York in late May (almost June). To find anything comparable, climatologists had to go back to 1816, “The Year Without A Summer,””Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death,” which was caused by the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora. Then there was the 44 inches of snow that hig Lead, South Dakota in early October (barely even fall).

That’s too few events to draw any hard conclusions yet, but…ominous. I suspect we’ll have thousands of years where the Earth fluctuates between extremes of heat and cold in terms of air temps, as the volcanic eruptions slowly subside. The methane will be pushing toward warmer temps (which melts ice and induces more volcanic eruptions), and the volcanic emissions will push toward cooler temps. So, like a gong ringing, the Earth will reverberate between the two extremes, slooowly fading back to quiet, or what we would call normalcy. But when this happened in the Permian-Triassic, it took as long as 30 million years before things were ‘back to normal.’ In other words, we’d best be making long-term plans that don’t involve too much reliance on being able to survive on the surface of the Earth, more or less forever in practicality.

Aside from volcanic winter that surely will cause some global cooling, it may be the ocean’s currents that are wreaking the havoc right now. With the well-above-average warm temperatures in regions of the world that hold the most land ice, it’s a certainty that too much of this ice is going to melt and flow into the ocean’s adding not only weight to the volume but a cooling effect on the warm currents.

Continued...

The Gulf Stream current brings the warm tropical waters from the Gulf of Mexico down around Florida and up to the North Atlantic over to Europe. If the ice melt on Greenland flows into the ocean, it will affect this current by cooling it down and sending Europe into a deep freeze, which we saw a little of in the winter of 2012-13. Not so much so the following winter.

The Gulf Stream splits off after traversing the East Coast where some flows to Canada’s Atlantic Coast while the rest cuts across the North Atlantic to Europe. This flow plays a major role in creating much milder winters for both Europe and the northeastern coast of the United States. This current is believed to actually keep these regions about five degrees warmer than they would be without the current.

A five degree temperature change would be catastrophic. Would this happen if the current stopped because of the cold ice added to it from Greenland? Many scientists believe it would. They believe that this action would send Europe into a bitter Ice Age. They also believe that it would create major climate change for the entire planet. A man named Roger Gagosian of the Woods Hole Oceanograhic Institution believes that the Northeastern United States would suffer from winter cold temperatures twice that of the record colds we currently have.

There is even some hope among scientists that a slowed-down Gulf Stream may actually help off set the global warming of today. It’s believed that a weakened current, rather than a complete stop, may only bring milder temperatures and wouldn’t be so drastic. This is what we may already be experiencing with the record cold snaps and winter blasts that have affected most of the United States in the winter of 2013-14.

Here is another statement about the ocean currents Jonny made at Above Top Secret.

Post by JonnyMnemonic
AboveTopSecret.com
The Above Network, LLC
Dangerous Gas may be the cause of super-charged, mass die-offs, quakes and more
www.abovetopsecret.com...
The oceans and their currents are also affecting climate and weather. If you think of the surface of the Earth as being the waters of the Earth and the atmosphere combined - e.g. everything that isn't 'ground' - then the oceans contain probably 98% or so of the thermal energy of the surface of the Earth, because water is so much denser than air. It takes a whole lot more energy to raise or lower the temperature of a cubic kilometer of water by 1 degree than it does to change the temperature of the same volume of air. And those currents have changed and are changing, probably as a result of either the volcanic eruptions and their heat or because of the massive influx of fresh water from the melting ice, and probably it's both.

Quote: "A changing Gulf Stream off the East Coast has destabilized frozen methane deposits trapped under nearly 4,000 square miles of seafloor, scientists reported Wednesday. " usnews.nbcnews.com...

So that oceanic heat-moving current is obviously changing, and ANY change to that current is bad news. The fact that it's destabilizing those methane hydrate deposits off the East Coast means that heat is backing up, not being transported toward Europe as it once was. So we're getting milder winters in the Northeast, even as parts of Europe are freezing their gonads off. And as that heat continues to melt away those methane deposits, that will make the atmosphere absorb more energy per square meter, which will melt more ice, which will cause more volcanic eruptions, and destabilize the oceanic currents even more and cause more methane releases, and on and on it goes, the process constantly reinforcing and strengthening itself. And all along, as the oceans heat, the bacteria that produce hydrogen sulfide will be expanding their territory, increasing their emissions.

This all looks to be an unstoppable behemoth of doom now, which is why they're preparing mass fatality legislation, and FEMA camps, and stocking up on bullets, and having anti-zombie training, and digging underground bunkers, and spending like there's no tomorrow - because there isn't, not for life as we know it, not on the surface of the Earth.

I'd like to add that I wrote this chapter over a year ago and some of the trends I mention are continuing, for example, this past winter was the planet's hottest since record keeping began in the 1880's and I talk a bit about the Gulf Stream slowing down and we just had a thread here at ATS that shows this is becoming a reality. It's pretty interesting times indeed.

originally posted by: Rezlooper

We’ve established that the world is warming up at a dangerous accelerating rate that may wreak some havoc with the Gulf Stream. This is most likely already taking place and may be playing a huge role in why there are such drastic cold temperatures in certain areas. We also discussed the ‘out of whack’ jet stream which is bringing warm and moist air from the western Pacific Island nations, more specifically, Indonesia.

I was waiting for that initial non-committal inclusion about the Gulf Stream, and sure enough up it popped.
When I was a kid at school we used to talk about the Gulf Stream, but also about the Jet Stream in tandem. When they are both present, they compliment one another, and our prevailing wind from the West right across the Atlantic, our Westerlies have all but disappeared, especially over the last few years. However, talking about the Greenland melt alone may not be the total answer.
I have been watching the Met office forecasts very carefully over the last four years or so, and ALWAYS our abnormal weather has been put down to a wonky Jet Stream, and no mention ever about the Gulf Stream at all...except once, and that was this year, and that was pretty vague? The thing is, how broken is the Gulf Stream already before it even becomes the North Atlantic drift?

Enjoyed this chapter of your book just like the last two dozen!
Good reading and maybe some bad dreams in store for me but I am staying tuned :-)
Thanks REZ
Regards, Iwinder

a reply to: Rezlooper

If only the general population understood anything about heat sinks or thermodynamics in general, maybe we could start taking some steps now :\

But that'll never happen lol

originally posted by: smurfy

originally posted by: Rezlooper

We’ve established that the world is warming up at a dangerous accelerating rate that may wreak some havoc with the Gulf Stream. This is most likely already taking place and may be playing a huge role in why there are such drastic cold temperatures in certain areas. We also discussed the ‘out of whack’ jet stream which is bringing warm and moist air from the western Pacific Island nations, more specifically, Indonesia.

I was waiting for that initial non-committal inclusion about the Gulf Stream, and sure enough up it popped.
When I was a kid at school we used to talk about the Gulf Stream, but also about the Jet Stream in tandem. When they are both present, they compliment one another, and our prevailing wind from the West right across the Atlantic, our Westerlies have all but disappeared, especially over the last few years. However, talking about the Greenland melt alone may not be the total answer.
I have been watching the Met office forecasts very carefully over the last four years or so, and ALWAYS our abnormal weather has been put down to a wonky Jet Stream, and no mention ever about the Gulf Stream at all...except once, and that was this year, and that was pretty vague? The thing is, how broken is the Gulf Stream already before it even becomes the North Atlantic drift?

I think most of the weather extremes in the Uk so far have been a result of the jet stream, and that the Gulf Stream is something they feared could as it slowed, start causing more weather headaches. Two years ago, the Greenland Block caused a lot of ice melt, and these last two winters have seen some intense and different weather for the UK, so maybe it has already started taking its toll. Same as for the East Coast of the US this past few months. The cold water from the Greenland melt is returning back to this area and sure enough, this winter has been the coldest on record for the Northeast.

originally posted by: Iwinder
Enjoyed this chapter of your book just like the last two dozen!
Good reading and maybe some bad dreams in store for me but I am staying tuned :-)
Thanks REZ
Regards, Iwinder

Sorry for that, Iwinder. Just mean to inform, but I know it's scary stuff. I still hope and pray I'm wrong but regardless, something is off with mother nature.

You are right.

One of the lamest and most ignorant arguments against climate change is "OMG winter is really intense here in NY so therefore climate change does not exist....."

Global warming is measured on global averages folks, not local realities....

originally posted by: Quetzalcoatl14

You are right.

One of the lamest and most ignorant arguments against climate change is "OMG winter is really intense here in NY so therefore climate change does not exist....."

Global warming is measured on global averages folks, not local realities....

robertscribbler.wordpress.com...

Guess what? NorthEast USA & Canada was very cold relative to normal. The rest of the planet shows much more hot (red) compared to normal.

a reply to: mbkennel

You made the same exact point he made...that the northeast was pretty much the only part of the world that experienced cold while everyone else experienced warmer temps and he suggested that those in the northeast claim global warming doesn't exist because they are freezing their arses off, and yet, they are the only ones freezing their arses off.