From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

Clearly climatists are worried about current cold weather, ironically triggered by the beginning of COP28 coinciding with heavv snow closing airports in Munich, for example. Add to that Buffalo Bills NFL playoff game postponed due to extreme cold. So Climate Central coordinated a PR campaign lest the believers lose faith in Global Warming.  Later below are noted the three themes that appear.

Why we still have brutal cold snaps even as the planet warms to record levels, CNN

Why extreme cold weather events still happen in a warming world, PBS

Extreme cold in a warming world: Climate instability may be disrupting polar vortex, UPI

Extreme cold and climate change: What’s the deal?  CBC explains.

What is climate? And how is it different from weather? Deutsche Welle (DW)

Why is it so cold in the UK right now – and how long will Arctic chill last? The Guardian

Extreme cold still happens in a warming world – in fact climate instability may be disrupting the polar vortex, Yahoo News

1.  Cold is Weather, Not Climate

Some of the reassurances are the familiar refrain that cold is weather, while warming is forever.

2.  CO2 Causes Extreme Weather of All Kinds

Others claim that rising CO2 causes all kinds of extreme weather, including big chills.  Actually, those stories are way out on a limb, contrary to what IPCC itself says.  Roger Pielke Jr. explains at his substack page What the IPCC Actually Says About Extreme Weather.  I promise, you’ll be utterly shocked. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Back to extreme weather — let’s take a look what IPCC AR6 says about the time of emergence for various extreme events. Here are some direct quotes related to specific phenomena:

• An increase in heat extremes has emerged or will emerge in the coming three decades in most land regions (high confidence)
• There is low confidence in the emergence of heavy precipitation and pluvial and river flood frequency in observations, despite trends that have been found in a few regions
• There is low confidence in the emergence of drought frequency in observations, for any type of drought, in all regions.
• Observed mean surface wind speed trends are present in many areas, but the emergence of these trends from the interannual natural variability and their attribution to human-induced climate change remains of low confidence due to various factors such as changes in the type and exposure of recording instruments, and their relation to climate change is not established. . . The same limitation also holds for wind extremes (severe storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms).

The IPCC helpfully provides a summary table for a range of extremes, indicating for various phenomena whether emergence has been achieved with medium or high confidence at three points in time:

to date (today), i.e., specifically when IPCC AR6 was completed in 2021,
by 2050 under RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5, and
by 2100 under RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5.

Those three dates are displayed as the 3 right-most column in the table below.

A white entry in the table means that emergence has not yet been or is not in the future expected to be achieved. The blue and orange entries represent the emergence of respectively increasing and decreasing signals at various levels of confidence.

Take a moment and look at the table carefully. Look especially at all those white cells.

Clearly, with the exception perhaps of only extreme heat,
the IPCC is badly out of step with today’s apocalyptic zeitgeist.

Maybe that is why no one mentions what the IPCC actually says on extreme events. It may also help to explain why a recent paper that arrives at conclusions perfectly consistent with the IPCC is now being retracted with no claims of error or misconduct.

3.  CO2 Makes the Polar Vortex Unstable

The wavy polar vortex is a real phenomenon, but blaming it on us driving our SUVs is a stretch too far.  A previous post deconstructs this warmist claim.

No, CO2 Doesn’t Drive the Polar Vortex (Updated)