From Watts Up With That?

By Charles Rotter and Anthony Watts

Weather and climate both operate through natural oscillations—recurring rises and falls that resemble overlapping sine waves rather than straight-line trends. Daily and seasonal weather patterns are the most familiar examples: temperatures warm and cool, storm tracks shift from north to south and then back, and atmospheric pressure systems migrate in predictable cycles. These regular patterns demonstrate that even the “short-term” atmosphere is inherently rhythmic, shaped by the Earth’s rotation (Coriolis force), tilt, and uneven solar heating.

On longer time scales, climate is driven by larger oscillatory systems such as El Niño/La Niña, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). Each of these produces alternating warm and cool phases with significant impacts on global weather—affecting rainfall, drought, hurricanes, and temperature anomalies. They don’t disappear just because climate discussions focus heavily on greenhouse gases; in fact, these cycles often dominate the year-to-year swings that get labeled as extreme or unprecedented.

Even broader climate variations, such as those tied to Milankovitch cycles, show that Earth’s long-term temperature history is a repeating rhythm of warm and cold epochs—ice ages and interglacials—arising from predictable orbital mechanics. Instrumental records reflect similar behavior: warming and cooling phases in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries align well with these natural oscillations. Yet models frequently struggle to capture the amplitude and timing of these cycles, leading to misattribution of short-term warming peaks to human-caused forcing.

Recognizing the cyclical nature of both weather and climate isn’t a denial of external influences—it’s an acknowledgment that natural variability is fundamental to how the system works. When such oscillations are ignored instead of acknowledging their significance, we end up with a skewed view of what drives changes in amplitude. The simple point is: yes there are oscillations in the climate system but

the climate system is not a simple oscillator.

A large number, perhaps the majority, of people, including many “climate scientists”, have a subconscious mental model of the climate. Without realizing it, they think about weather (and in the long term, climate) as if it were a giant oscillating mechanism, endlessly swinging above and below some ideal baseline. Every winter, when a deep Arctic blast reaches the mid-latitudes, that picture gets dragged out and surfaces in discourse. It is also usually coupled with the phrase “polar vortex.” The same claim appears on cue: the polar vortex is “swinging harder” because “extra energy” has been added to the system. The image people carry around is a planetary sine wave being pushed into larger and larger excursions, as if carbon dioxide driven heat were simply turning up the amplitude dial.

What keeps this idea alive is that very few people ever question the underlying cartoon. A sine wave feels authoritative. It looks analytical. It resembles the kind of sketch someone might make to explain “the climate,” so it slips into the discussion without challenge. And once climate is imagined as a wiggly line, any increase in energy must, in that mental model, stretch the wiggles vertically. The simplicity is exactly what makes the model appealing — and exactly what makes it misleading.

The climate system is not an oscillator. It has oscillatory components, but the whole system is a gradient-driven heat engine. It moves energy from where there is a lot of it (the tropics) to where there is very little (the poles). If more energy enters the system, the distribution of that energy doesn’t increase the amplitude of some hypothetical wave. Instead, the equator-to-pole gradient changes, because the poles warm more rapidly than the tropics. Meanwhile, tropical thunderstorms act like an atmospheric relief valve that limits how warm the equator can become. The system redistributes energy; it doesn’t behave like a spring someone tightens.

This misunderstanding is best handled visually. Most people think in pictures, not equations. So, if we want to clear away the oscillator myth, a sequence of animations helps. The first shows the clean mental model people already carry. The second shows the popular misconception — the one invoked every time a deep freeze hits Buffalo. And the third shows a more honest cartoon representation of what happens when a heat-engine system warms unevenly across latitudes.

To begin, here’s the animation that matches what most people imagine when they think of the climate, a simple sine wave, calm and predictable, vibrating around a fixed baseline.

Animation 1: The Default Mental Model, A Stable Regular Oscillator

This is the picture most people carry around without ever articulating it. A tidy oscillation, always returning to the same average, with peaks and troughs equally spaced in time. You see a smooth world cycling gently between “a little warmer” and “a little colder.” Nothing here suggests that putting more energy into the system would move the baseline. The only available knob is amplitude.

Now we get to the belief that dominates public rhetoric. Whenever extreme cold shows up — not extreme warmth, which is predictable enough — we hear that the climate is now “whiplashing,” “swinging harder,” or “oscillating with greater amplitude.” The implication is that adding energy to the system somehow causes bigger deviations, both warm and cold, even though nobody ever explains why a system supposedly getting warmer overall would produce more extreme cold. The intuitive picture silently does the work.

To capture that misconception, here is Animation 2. It begins with the same amplitude as Animation 1, then grows dramatically as the cycle progresses. This is the cartoon model behind the claim that “climate change makes cold extremes more extreme,” which is trotted out with particular enthusiasm during winter.

Animation 2: The Misconception — Amplitude Growing With Added Energy

This is the internal movie millions of people play in their heads without realizing it. In this picture, the climate is a mechanical oscillator. Add energy, and the oscillations stretch vertically. The system doesn’t shift; it spasms. Cold extremes plunge lower; warm extremes shoot higher. This is the “climate whiplash” graphic in its purest form.

The contradiction becomes obvious the moment we compare it with the actual physical pattern associated with a warming world — specifically, polar amplification and tropical constraint. The tropics don’t warm as freely as the poles because once ocean surfaces reach the upper-20s Celsius, deep convection ramps up. The atmosphere begins exporting heat upward more aggressively, and the resulting anvils and cloud fields reflect more incoming sunlight. The same convective towers that remove moisture also transport energy away from the surface, limiting how far temperatures can rise. These feedbacks aren’t precise or fully quantified, but they do create a regime in which large, sustained increases in tropical sea-surface temperatures become increasingly difficult. Meanwhile, polar regions lack these stabilizing mechanisms entirely, which is why warming, when it occurs, tends to be concentrated at high latitudes.

A weaker gradient means the climate engine has less temperature contrast to work with, not more. And in gradient-driven systems, a weaker contrast typically yields a calmer system, not a more volatile one. The public rarely hears this because the oscillator myth is too convenient. It allows every cold event to be reclassified as “further evidence” of warming. The sine wave simply expands to absorb all contradictions.

To correct the picture, the third animation shows what a simplified warming world might look like in cartoon form. The baseline rises — most noticeably at the low end — and the amplitude narrows slightly. The upper bound rises a bit, but the lower bound rises much more. The whole wave shifts upward, because the system is warming, but the total vertical range (our cartoon version of the equator-to-pole spread) gets smaller.

This isn’t a forecast. It’s a conceptual picture that at least respects the idea of uneven warming across latitudes. It doesn’t claim the real world behaves like a sine wave; it simply avoids the mistake of treating energy input as amplitude growth.

Animation 3: Baseline Rising, Gradient Narrowing

Most readers will grasp the point immediately. The third picture strips away complexity and leaves only the structure of the argument: warming strengthens most at the bottom of the distribution, not the top, and the gradient shrinks. The oscillation does not stretch into a taller oscillation. The entire band narrows.

The contrast between Animation 2 and Animation 3 reveals something deeper than a physics correction. It exposes the rhetorical trick used to shoehorn all weather events into a single storyline. When warm extremes happen, they are said to validate the warming trend. When cold extremes happen, they are said to validate the “increasing amplitude” story.

Once readers appreciate that the oscillator metaphor itself is flawed, the winter rhetoric loses its mystique. A polar outbreak becomes a weather event, not a metaphysical expression of a stressed climate oscillator. And a warming world with strong polar amplification no longer magically produces more extreme cold while simultaneously claiming credit for eliminating it.

The goal of these animations is not to endorse any particular theory of climate behavior. The goal is to remove a seductive but incorrect mental model that quietly, yet powerfully, shapes public debate. The real climate system is complicated enough without adding imaginary springs and oscillators. At the very least, we can stop pretending that a planetary heat engine behaves like a plucked guitar string. And once that picture fades, a number of confident wintertime pronouncements fade with it.

Bookmark this post. Winter is upon us. You’ll have plenty of use for it. And remember, spring is just around the corner!