From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Global warming is causing colder Februaries, and arctic cold outbreaks, according to climatologist Judah Cohen.

Thanks To Climate Change, February Is Now The Cruelest Month

Jeff McMahon
Senior Contributor
Jan 29, 2023,12:14am EST

Those unusual frozen Februaries in Texas may not be so unusual anymore.

Early winter has been warming across North America, but late winter is another story. Scientists have documented a cooling trend over more than 40 Februaries, marked by dangerous and increasingly common intrusions of Arctic air deep into the United States.

“December has certainly been warming if you look at the U.S.,” Judah Cohen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says in a recent video. But “February, going back to 1979—so quite a few years now—we’re actually seeing in the center of the U.S. a very distinctive cooling trend.”

…

“We tend to get more severe winter weather when the polar vortex is weak and more milder rainy weather when the polar vortex is strong, and we’ve seen a decrease in the strong state of the polar vortex and an increase and the weak state of the polar vortex,” Cohen said in an interview with Peter Sinclair, a videographer for Yale Climate Connections who posts pithy snippets of interviews on his excellent Youtube channel, greenmanbucket.

…Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2023/01/29/thanks-to-climate-change-february-is-now-the-cruelest-month/

The video interview;

The abstract of the paper;

Linking Arctic variability and change with extreme winter weather in the United States

JUDAH COHEN , LAURIE AGEL, MATHEW BARLOW, CHAIM I. GARFINKEL, AND IAN WHITE

SCIENCE
1 Sep 2021
Vol 373, Issue 6559
pp. 1116-1121

Cold weather disruptions

Despite the rapid warming that is the cardinal signature of global climate change, especially in the Arctic, where temperatures are rising much more than elsewhere in the world, the United States and other regions of the Northern Hemisphere have experienced a conspicuous and increasingly frequent number of episodes of extremely cold winter weather over the past four decades. Cohen et al. combined observations and models to demonstrate that Arctic change is likely an important cause of a chain of processes involving what they call a stratospheric polar vortex disruption, which ultimately results in periods of extreme cold in northern midlatitudes (see the Perspective by Coumou). —HJS

Abstract

The Arctic is warming at a rate twice the global average and severe winter weather is reported to be increasing across many heavily populated mid-latitude regions, but there is no agreement on whether a physical link exists between the two phenomena. We use observational analysis to show that a lesser-known stratospheric polar vortex (SPV) disruption that involves wave reflection and stretching of the SPV is linked with extreme cold across parts of Asia and North America, including the recent February 2021 Texas cold wave, and has been increasing over the satellite era. We then use numerical modeling experiments forced with trends in autumn snow cover and Arctic sea ice to establish a physical link between Arctic change and SPV stretching and related surface impacts.

…Read more: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.abi9167

Colder winters are obviously a sign of global warming. Lets hope governments get global warming under control, before we all freeze to death.