Tag Archives: Cold

Severe Cold from Global Warming? NOPE (Doug Lewin in error)

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“The fix is in with Doug Lewin, whose mission is the eradication of fossil fuels in power generation via the ‘virtual power plant’… Pick your term between ‘energy transformation,’ ‘deep decarbonization,’ Net Zero, Green New Deal.”

Doug Lewin, climate alarmist and PR voice for the Texas renewables industry, posts on social media with the tag line, “Growing jobs, increasing justice, and reducing pollution in Texas.” In his Texas Energy and Power Newsletter, he blamed the state’s current freeze on Global Warming (aka climate change) as follows:

Climate Impacts: We’ve Seen This Movie Before

A few days ago, when the forecasts for Jan. 15 were still at or near freezing, I started feeling like we’ve seen this movie before: warnings of a weakening polar vortex, steadily worsening forecasts each day … This is what happened in February 2021 and December 2022. And it’s happening again.

These severe storms did not used to be so common. But this will be the third time in four winters that one has hit Texas. This underscores the growing body of data that suggests climate change is fueling Arctic warming, which weakens the polar vortex (a jet stream-like air current 10-30 miles above the Earth) allowing Arctic blasts and exceptionally low temperatures into the continental US.

Monique Sellers of the National Weather Service talked with the Dallas Morning News about the connection to climate change. “Climate change plays a role, Sellers said. The average winter temperature in Texas is rising. But conditions are also more volatile, with intense, short-term freezes increasing in likelihood each year.” 

“‘One of the confounding conundrums of climate change is that winter has become warmer, but we have more deep freezes,’ Sellers said.” 

We’re unfortunately getting more evidence of this with each passing year. Texas is growing. If future winter storms are going to be more extreme, we need to be ready. Peak demand on cold winter mornings is growing at a stunning rate…. We’ve got to act — quickly — to address the other side of the supply-demand equation.

Unusual cold from unusual warming? Settled science? Just the opposite. This hypothesis turns out to be bogus. I posted at the Climate Change Professionals Group (LinkedIn):

Posts from the ‘climate alarmist’ side are linking severe cold snaps such as in the U.S. presently on global warming effects: “Climate scientist blames global warming for more Arctic blasts in winter.” This hypothesis is countered by a recent article in Nature (2023):

“No detectable trend in mid-latitude cold extremes during the recent period of Arctic amplification,” Judah Cohen, Laurie Agel, Mathew Barlow & Dara Entekhabi

It is widely accepted that Arctic amplification—accelerated Arctic warming—will increasingly moderate cold air outbreaks to the mid-latitudes. Yet, an increasing number of recent studies also argue that Arctic amplification can contribute to more severe winter weather. Here we show that the … temperature of cold extremes across the United States east of the Rockies, Northeast Asia and Europe have remained nearly constant over recent decades, in clear contrast to a robust Arctic warming trend.

Analysis of trends in the frequency and magnitude of cold extremes is mixed across the US and Asia but with a clearer decreasing trend in occurrence across Europe, especially Southern Europe. This divergence between robust Arctic warming and no detectable trends in mid-latitude cold extremes highlights the need for a better understanding of the physical links between Arctic amplification and mid-latitude cold extremes.

John Christens of the alarmist side responded:

Rob Bradley – So glad to see that you’re now posting research that supports the conclusions of the UN IPCC and the US National Climate Assessment (NASA, EPA, DOE, NSF, Smithsonian Institute, etc.) and is consistent with everything we would expect from Anthropogenic Global Warming. (here)

To which I responded:

Frankly, the false narrative you and I decry (thank you) was used by Doug Lewin in his influential Texas Energy and Power Newsletter and by several folks against me on LinkedIn threads.

So yes, I am happy to report that this is a PR stunt by climate alarmists to make their point in the middle of unusually cold times.

Now, if the GHG signal is not oriented toward summer afternoons but winter nights at high latitudes, will the alarmist community also tone down the exaggeration? Can you call that out too?

Final Comment

The fix is in with Doug Lewin, whose mission is the eradication of fossil fuels in power generation via the “virtual power plant,” a mix of:

  • Open-ended wind and solar subsidies to continue to idle thermal generation;
  • Batteries (a third subsidy play) as needed for renewable intermittency;
  • “Smart meters” in the home and business to price-ration demand to (wounded) supply.

This is a government play. Pick your term between “energy transformation,” “deep decarbonization,” Net Zero, Green New Deal. And inexcusably, it is the end goal of a faux classical liberal, electricity technocrat Lynne Kiesling, who recently endorsed Lewin as follows:

ERCOT needs reform, but not in the direction they have gone. An essential source of information about Texas is Doug Lewin’s Texas Energy and Power Newsletter. Too many of his essays have been important and insightful for me to pick one, so I’ll just recommend subscribing to his newsletter if you want to keep up with one of the most vibrant local economies in the US and the steps and missteps its political leaders are taking as they try to balance the many objectives of such a complex system.

More intervention in the name of correcting prior? “Fixing” political control rather than removing it? I will deal with Kiesling’s bizarre “free market” statism in a future post.

The post Severe Cold from Global Warming? NOPE (Doug Lewin in error) appeared first on Master Resource.

Cold brings out more climate lunacy

By Joe Bastardi

I am not even talking about wind turbines failing due to it being too cold.

Instead, cold brings out the Lunatic Fringe when it comes to climate. Because of the everyone-gets-a-trophy mentality that many of them have (no matter what happens, they always attribute it to climate), they try to blame cold on warming.

Let us get something straight. The so-called global temperature is a horrible metric for climate because temperatures are a third derivative indicator of climate. Wet bulb temperatures are far better and best are saturation mixing ratios. They show the relationship of water vapor to temperatures and, since there is no such relationship between CO2 and temperature, intuitively it means CO2 can not be proven to do anything.  And so they refuse to quantify the mixing ratios.  But the increase in water vapor due to warming oceans can be directly linked not only to increased temperature but also to understanding where and when it’s warmer; we see it has to be water vapor since the warming is in the coldest driest areas much more than toward the equator. This, by the way, sets off a whole chain of events that I have been trying to show people. While I am at it, I would be happy to show this entire hypothesis to groups that want to see it.  At the very least, you can laugh it out of existence. ( I am confident when I explain, you won’t) I have explained this dozens of times and can defend the hypothesis. I figure the best way to prove it is to get out in front of events in the weather and expose these people when they open their mouths on something I was predicting way before. They are clueless until it happens since the only way they care about the weather is to use it for non-weather purposes.

In any case the public does not understand that even if we use the global temperature, it’s an average of all observations. If it is 1 degree above average, it means there is enough warmth to outdo the cold by that much, but there is still going to be cold around.  There is still going to be much of the planet not knowing it is warm unless they are told and told so in a way that is pure exaggeration (hottest ever). Trying to use a temperature that is a bit over 59 (though at actual weather stations its under 58) and portraying it as hot is deceptive and delusional. 59 is not hot. The fact that it is warmer where its coldest and driest DECREASES temperature contrast and lead to less severe events.

But what about the idea that warm causes cold?  This is Climate 101 from back in the 1950s. So they recycle it because no one reading this probably cared about the climate in the ’60s, and if you don’t, certainly their mindless minions did not. The idea is, if the world warms, it is because of more water vapor, so the snowier areas of the world, though warming more, would get more snow, and it would naturally start to counter warming. I learned about this idea when I was 8 years old out of some books my dad gave me on the weather. I learned it again at Penn State in the 1970s  pre Michael Mann ( he is at U Penn now). It is a natural built-in cycle that follows Le Chateliers, something that is never mentioned.

Weatherbell laid the trap for the cold you see now, starting back in Spring. We are now going out as far as 9 months in our forecasting (hence the hurricane forecast that came out in December). In any case, the bullet points in the forecast had this from Aug 15 (first official release).

  • The first part of winter may be mild.
  • The coldest and snowiest part of the winter should be from mid-January onward.

From our summation:

I expect the opposite of last winter, where we came out of the gate fast and then fell apart. I can’t rule out a 2009 December to remember, but the idea here is the core of the worst part of winter, relative to averages, should be from mid-January onward.

Why? Because we expected blocking. And, of course, the know-nothings pushing CAGW think this is something out of the ordinary.

Well, look at Jan 1977:

Let’s see Feb 1958:

How about Jan 1985?

I can get any spectacular cold month and find blocking. I am using these because they occurred before Al Gore and his ilk started pushing all this jibberish, which, of course, has an army steeped in ignorance and arrogance now following it.

Let us take this month so far:

It was seen; it was predicted. We have shown the stratospheric event in early December ( there is one now, so look out Mid-Feb to mid-March, and the models are seeing it).  Like I said the people saying that this is a sign of climate change are ignorant and so emboldened that they get no resistance or pushback; that they are arrogant.

By the way, where were they in late December when it was so warm, and this came out on CFACT:

https://www.cfact.org/2023/12/29/extreme-cold-on-the-table-for-europe-and-then-the-u-s/

They simply Weaponize Weather in a Phony Climate War.

Someone should write a book with that title.

The post Cold brings out more climate lunacy appeared first on CFACT.

An Outbreak of Polar Stratospheric Clouds

From Spaceweather.com

By DR.TONY PHILLIPS

Dec. 17, 2023: (Spaceweather.com) A cold wave just swept through the Arctic stratosphere. Really cold. We know because on Dec. 17th these colorful clouds appeared over Sweden:

Above: A “PSC selfie” by Lights over Lapland driver Dimitrios Roukounakis

“It’s that magical time of year again,” says Chad Blakley, owner of the aurora tour guide service Lights over Lapland in Abisko, Sweden. “We just witnessed a spectacular display of polar stratospheric clouds.”

Widely considered to be the most beautiful clouds on Earth, polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) are rare. Earth’s stratosphere is very dry and normally it has no clouds at all. PSCs form when the temperature in the Arctic stratosphere drops to a staggeringly-low -85 C. Then, and only then, can widely-spaced water molecules begin to coalesce into tiny ice crystals. High-altitude sunlight shining through the crystals creates intense iridescent colors that can rival auroras.

NASA forecast models of the polar stratosphere show that temperatures have indeed dropped into the very low range required for colorful Type II PSCs:

Above: Note the temperature dip inside the highlighted yellow oval

During a typical Arctic winter, PSCs appear no more than a handful of times, and the first sightings usually come in January. The apparition on Dec. 17th marks an early start, and may herald many more PSCs to come. Stay tuned!

more images: from Pekka Lähteenmäki of Helsinki, Finland; from Alan C. Tough of Elgin, Moray, Scotland

This Isn’t the First Time in Human History Our Winters Have Become Milder

This Letter to the Editor, written by CO2 Coalition Member Euan Mearns, was published in The Press and Journal, October 26, 2023.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Euan is firing on all cylinders now!!

Sir, with reference to the letter from Ivan Reid, 18th October. He is of course totally correct; our winters have become less snowy and milder than during our youth. I recall the deep snow drifts on Kirriemuir Hill in the 1960s.

And during my grouse beating days in Glen Clova in the 1970s they used to set aside a half day to shoot hares and another half day to shoot capercaillie. Times have changed, and in 2020 illegal shooting of mountain hares (culling) was banned in Scotland (Wikipedia). Thousands used to be shot every year. It does not seem to be necessary to call on climate change to explain the demise of the mountain hare. Hopefully the population will soon recover.

In the countryside I frequent most often in Aberdeenshire and Perthshire, there is an abundance of buzzards and ospreys, red-dear and roe-dear, seals, beavers and sadly many dead badgers along our main roads.

Melting Alpine glaciers are perhaps the most poignant symbol of a slowly warming world. However, a little-known fact is that Alpine glaciers have all but melted completely 12 times in the last 10,000 years (since the end of the last glaciation). This is known through Carbon 14 dating of woody fragments found in the ice. These dates form clusters signifying times when trees grew in the ice basins from where the glaciers now flow.

The exact cause of these cyclical changes in glacier length is unknown, but a likely candidate is cyclical changes to ocean currents. The depth of the last cold and snowy trough occurred around 1850 and warming will likely continue for another few hundred years until the glaciers have all but disappeared as was the case when Hannibal crossed the Alps with his elephants in 218 BC at a time called The Roman Warm Period. Perhaps Scotland’s climate is affected by these same cyclical forces?

PS With reference to Mr. Hannan, 19th October: pre-industrial CO2 in the atmosphere was 0.028% and today it is 0.042%. 3% is on the threshold of being harmful, but current levels are nowhere near this dangerous threshold.

Dr Euan Mearns

Aberdeen

Wrong, Washington Post, Cold Kills More People in the United States (and Globally) Than Heat

From ClimateRealism

The Washington Post’s (WaPo) dedicated (twice a week) climate columnist, Michael J. Cohen, the so-called Climate Coach, posted an article stating as a fact that high temperatures kill more people in the United States each year than cold temperatures. This is false. Data and peer reviewed research consistently show that far more people die in the United States annually from cold temperatures, and cold related health complications, than from hot temperatures and heat related health complications.

Cohen’s Climate Coach Column this week discussed the extremely hot temperatures occurring in mide- July around the globe, suggesting climate change is becoming so severe that the world needs a new scale to measure heat. Fahrenheit, the actual temperature, is insufficient. Of course, the heat index has existed for years and is reported daily, yet Cohen treats it as if is a new thing and should be reported in lieu of daily high and low temperatures. One can debate this point, but there is no debating one claim Cohen made – it’s simply and objectively false. Cohen claimed, “[i]n the United States, where heat is already the leading weather-related killer, hundreds die each year, especially the elderly, reports the Environmental Protection Agency.”

As a matter of fact, in some years hurricanes kill more people than heat, its rare, but it happens. However, the evidence strongly suggests it is rarely the case, if ever, that excess heat takes more lives than excess cold temperatures in the United States or anywhere else.

Cohen may be confused because the EPA data he cites only counts deaths actually coded as due to hypothermia as due to cold. But thousands of people die each year in the U.S. of cold related health complications. An article in Public Health Post points out that even the number of death directly attributable to cold – hypothermia and cold caused tissue damage – number more than 1,300 each year, more than the few hundred directly attributable to heat, from heatstroke, for example. Thousands more die from health complications caused by cold temperatures. According to the Public Health Post:

Each year in the United States, about 1,330 people die of cold exposure, essentially freezing to death.

Cold-related illness and death are underreported because only a small number are appropriately recognized and coded as hypothermia and tissue damage. Yet, cold temperatures can worsen conditions like heart disease and respiratory illness, causing hospitalizations and deaths that may not be recognized as related to the cold on death certificates or hospital records.

Nor are the Public Health Post’s claims outliers in the medical, public health, and climate literature, rather the EPA’s claims represent the minority opinion. For example, a study from researchers at the University Illinois in Chicago (ULC) published in the peer reviewed journal Environmental Research determined, in the words of ULC’s press release:

cold temperatures are responsible for almost all temperature-related deaths, according to a new study published in the journal Environmental Research.

According to the new study by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago, patients who died because of cold temperatures were responsible for 94% of temperature-related deaths, even though hypothermia was responsible for only 27% of temperature-related hospital visits.

“With the decrease in the number of cold weather days over the last several decades, we still see more deaths due to cold weather as opposed to hot weather,” said Lee Friedman, associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences in the UIC School of Public Health and corresponding author on the paper.

Repeated large scale studies covering dozens of countries and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people published over the past decade in one of the top medical journals, The Lancet, have consistently confirmed that everywhere temperature related deaths have been studied, cold kills more people, 10 to 17 times more people on average, than heat. One Lancet study examining temperature related deaths in China found 46 times as many people died from such conditions as cardiovascular diseases and chronic respiratory diseases affected by nonoptimal cold temperatures than from deaths attributable to nonoptimal hot temperatures, in 2019.

Another Lancet study examined temperature related deaths from 384 locations in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, UK, and USA, and found in each and every country cold related deaths outnumbered heat related deaths by a large margin. (see the figure below)

This study found that in the United States deaths related to sub-optimal cold temperatures were nearly 16 times greater than deaths attributable to suboptimal hot temperatures.

Interestingly, neither extreme cold nor extreme heat seem to be the biggest killers – people take preventative measures or adjust activities during such events – rather moderate cold was by far the biggest cause of suboptimal temperature related deaths of all. (see the graph below)

Long-term data presented in a recent Climate Realism post by meteorologist Anthony Watts, demonstrates that heatwaves are not increasing, contrary to what has been claimed or implied by hundreds of headlines and stories in recent weeks. Also, as revealed and discussed in numerous climate realism articles, here, here, and here, for example. When it comes to temperature related deaths, cold kills more people than heat, and the good news is that as the Earth has modestly warmed, deaths resulting from suboptimal temperatures have declined dramatically, primarily from the a decline in cold related deaths.

One can only wonder why the EPA has ignored this copious research to claim that hot temperatures kill more people than cold temperatures in the United States each year. Perhaps it, and reporters like Cohen paid to promote the narrative of a climate crisis, cherry pick the data to fit the alarming story they want the public to believe. If so, WaPo and the EPA are both doing the public they are supposedly serving, a disservice. It’s time for both organizations to change course and follow the science.

H. Sterling Burnett

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.

In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.