Polar Vortex Sends Life-Threatening Freeze To US 684
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Reuters reports that the Midwestern United States is shivering through the region's lowest temperatures in twenty years as forecasters warn that life-threatening cold is heading eastward as a polar vortex of freezing Arctic weather sweeps across the United States. 'The coldest temperatures in almost two decades will spread into the northern and central U.S. today behind an arctic cold front,' says the National Weather Service. 'Combined with gusty winds, these temperatures will result in life-threatening wind chill values as low as 60 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit/minus 51 degrees Celsius).' The coldest temperature reported in the lower 48 states on Sunday was minus 40 F (-40 C) in the towns of Babbitt and Embarrass, Minnesota. Meteorologists warn that the wind-chill factor could make it feel twice as cold, causing frostbite to exposed parts of the body within minutes. Eleven people have already died in weather-related incidents in the past week, including a 71-year-old woman with Alzheimer's who wandered from her home in upstate New York and was found frozen to death only 100m away. Polar vortexes occur seasonally at the North Pole, and their formation resembles that of hurricanes in more tropical regions: fast-moving winds build up around a calm center. Unlike a hurricane, these are frigid polar winds, circling the Arctic at more than 100 miles per hour. The spinning winds typically trap this cold air in the Arctic. But the problem comes when the polar vortex weakens or splits apart, essentially flinging these cold wind patterns out of the Arctic and into our backyards. 'All the ingredients are there for a near-record or historic cold outbreak,' says meteorologist Ryan Maue. 'If you're under 40, you've not seen this stuff before.'"
Painful cold (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Painful cold (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, here in NE Ohio we're expecting lows about the same as we saw in 1994, while this is an unusual cold pattern it's not like it's unprecedented.
Re:Polar "Vortex" AKA Alberta clipper (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Polar "Vortex" AKA Alberta clipper (Score:5, Informative)
Not where I live in Alberta. Anything North of Calgary doesn't get Chinooks all the often and we are stuck in the deep freeze. We just don't whine about it like the Easterners. Yesterday morning it was -34c with a wind chill of -45c. We decided it would be better to walk to the grocery store instead of driving as the car was just to frozen over. This morning we remembered to plug it in and it's no where near as cold, only -24c not sure of the wind chill. Still walked to work though.
Re:Cue the climate change deniers ... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-global-warming.htm [skepticalscience.com]
TL;DR: Both of the terms in question are used frequently in the scientific literature, because they refer to two different physical phenomena.
It's not cold if you have gear (Score:5, Informative)
This is all media drama. Real story here is how most people do not want to layer-up for weather like this. They will chance it wearing jeans, no hat (don't want to mess the 'do) and dressing just warm enough to make it to their car. This works great until car leaves you stranded because injectors gel'd up, or whatever. In this weather, walking a couple miles in the wind wearing only blue jeans, no hat/socks/mitts will easily f- you up. If you need to dress lightly, at least throw some appropriate gear in the trunk in case you *do* need to be out in it. Even new cars can have trouble in extreme cold.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
"Also, while those -30, -40 etc numbers sound terrible, if you dress properly its not that bad and further, they usually happen betwen 4am and 7am and quickly moderate."
The last winter like that I was still in high school (less than 10 years ago) and, unfortunately, the combination of waiting for the bus at 6:20am and teenage stupidity meant I was outside in -35F (-75F wind chill gusts) without a coat. Looking back, I'm starting to think I may have been a little bit retarded.
Re:Cue the climate change deniers ... (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, like *I FUCKING SAID*, I'm perfectly fine with the idea that climate and weather are two different things. I just want some consistency. You can't just pick and choose weather events and say "This weather event counts as evidence, but this one doesn't." Nor can you construct a hypothesis that is so convoluted as to be supported by ALL EVIDENCE, and which is impossible to disprove. That's not science, it's religion.
Re:Cue the climate change deniers ... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually it DOES NOT. When the evidence was corrected, it showed the medieval warm period and the roman warm period to both be warmer.
But remember, it's all how you pick and choose your data, except for one fact. History. When we know places like Greenland/Iceland were historically freer of ice, etc. Then we KNOW that in the past it was in fact warmer.
Re: Under 40 (Score:0, Informative)
Mostly irrelevant. The scales converge briefly around -44.
Prius are in fact better in snow than the avg car (Score:5, Informative)
Prius are heavier for their size and weight distribution thanks to the batteries and the transaxle (generator/motor). This added weight makes the Prius far better in the snow than the average front wheel drive vehicle.
Just an FYI...
My Prius was the best non-4x4/AWD vehicle i've driven in the snow. But no, nothing is quite as nice as 4x4
I call bullshit on your real winter (Score:5, Informative)
The NOAA lists -27F as the lowest recorded temperature in Chicago.
They also have a list of days with a temperature below -16F and 1980 wasn't listed.
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/lot/?n=chi_temperature_records [noaa.gov]
Re:Cue the climate change deniers ... (Score:5, Informative)
Has a habit of touting every storm or weather incident (even earthquakes) as proof of global warming, but denying those same incidents as proof against global warming.
I suspect that is selection bias on your part. While the media do love to play up the "global warming" angle after every calamity, in every interview with an actual climate scientist that I've seen, the scientists seem pretty eager to distance themselves from that sort of speculation. If they have their dander up, they might point to theories which predict that the frequency and intensity of storms will increase, but that's about as far as I've seen them go.
Re:Cue the climate change deniers ... (Score:2, Informative)
Well, considering the jet stream usually runs further north without large southward lobes in it, and considering it is the temperature differential between the arctic and southern climes that creates a strong jet stream, a warming trend in the arctic weakens the jet stream and allows these polar vortexes to move south. So yes, this is actually a result of global warming. Global warming doesn't actually say that the planet will turn into a boiling hot place. It simply says that global average temperatures are rising. The effect of that is to put increasing amounts of energy (in the form of water vapor) in to the atmosphere. This means more intense storms more frequently. That includes winter storms. It pushes weather out to the extremes on both sides. Deeper freezes, hotter summers, less temperate weather.
Re:Please stop the hyperbole! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Threatning the midwest! (Score:5, Informative)
Well, eventually, yes . . . but most of us not today.
Re:In which units? (Score:5, Informative)
While normally I'd agree with you, wind chill isn't actually a temperature. It's an imaginary reference temperature based on the heat loss rate of a human (comparing the rate with wind to the stagnant-air rate of a different temperature). So, "twice as cold" here has a logical definition: the heat loss rate of a human is twice as high.
Re:Cue the climate change deniers ... (Score:4, Informative)
You can see "global cooling" from your window? How high is your floor?
Just kidding of course. As someone else pointed out, global warming and climate change don't mean exactly the same thing. But I guess you're right that some folks have started to use the latter where they used to prefer the former, simply because certain other people react on every story which has "ice" or "snow" or "cold" in the title with a reflexive "see, AGW is a socialist conspiracy".
For the record: [wikipedia.org]
In the scientific literature, there is a strong consensus that global surface temperatures have increased in recent decades and that the trend is caused primarily by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases.[2][3][4] No scientific body of national or international standing disagrees with this view,[5] though a few organizations hold non-committal positions.[6] Disputes over the key scientific facts of global warming are now more prevalent in the popular media than in the scientific literature, where such issues are treated as resolved, and more in the United States than globally[7][8].
Re:Cue the climate change deniers ... (Score:2, Informative)
I'm fine with the idea that climate and weather are different things.... You can't have it both ways.
Firstly, I'm not a climate expert (though I did study some climate physics) so I'm not going to come into the debate about whether a particular hurricane was influenced by global warming, however in this case there are two underlying statements here
These two statements are in no way contradictory. Think about a marble at the bottom of a bowl. Now you start moving the bowl back and forward a bit. Sometimes the marble moves slowly, sometimes it moves quickly. If you add more energy to the system by moving the bowl more, it will still sometimes move fast (hot weather) and sometimes slowly (cold weather). The average will just be faster.
At the same time, for a given level of energy input there is a maximum height the marble can reach (limited by friction which sets the rate of loss of energy of the marble). It very rarely reaches that level, but it often get close. If you shake the bowl more strongly that maximum level will be higher. In the same way, the biggest storms you get with global warming will be bigger than it would be possible to get without global warming. This means that there will be some exceptional events where it really is possible to talk about global warming having a direct effect.
Re:Cue the climate change deniers ... (Score:5, Informative)
"at a rate far far less than predicted by all your models."
Patently False. They aren't rising as fast as the worse case scenarios the media likes to report. They are rising within model predictions.
"Nor have they risen to temperatures that exceed recent human history past"
irrelevant. Then rise in the past was do to different reasons. WHAT EXPERTS IN THE FIELD OF CLIMATOLOGY are talking about is energy trapped by excess CO2.
" Dismissed global warming that transpired on other celestrial bodies in our solar system during the same time."OK, you are just waving your ignorance arounbd.
A) If you are implying the warming is from an extrenal source, say in increase in the out put of the SUns energy, it would apply to every single body in the solar system in accordance to the inverse square law. Other body warming is NOT happenign on all bodies, and where it does happen there is no correlation to it happening on few other bodies.
B) IF you are implying there is an increase in the energy output of the sun, we would know becasue we measure it pretty accuratly. The rising trend does NOT correlate with the Suns activity.
" Has a habit of touting every storm or weather incident (even earthquakes) as proof of global warming, "
um, that's the media, not scientists who are experts in that field of study. However, there will be an increase in the energy of events. This can be stronger storms, or more storms,. The bottom line: more energy expressed over time.
"we did have some of the hottest years in recent record during the late 90's.
That really nice and I"m sure that makes sense in your little box of ignorance, sadly it shows you are completely ignorant and just restating the same bull crap Fox has fed your simpleton mind.
"We have also had some of the coldest incidents in recorded history in recent years as well."
As expect by climate change models, dumb ass. The term climate change is older the global warming, BTW.
Facts:
1) Visible light comes from the sun.
2) Visible light creates IR when it strikes something
3) CO2* absorbs IR energy
4) We put out far more CO2 then can be absorbed by the pre-industrial climate cycles.
So tell me: What's happening to the extra absorbed energy id it is impacting the climate?
There is a reason you echo chamber only cherry picks 'facts' and never talks about the actual science.
*This applies to other gases as well, but CO2 is the biggest one we emit at this time.
Re:Painful cold (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cue the climate change deniers ... (Score:1, Informative)
Incorrect. You're statment have been shown to be wrong. Your bias is forcing you to clinging to a narrative that has been proven to be false. Please learn and apply critical thinking skills.
"medieval warm period and the roman warm period to both be warmer."
In one section of the globe, not the global temperature.
"Temperatures in some regions matched or exceeded recent temperatures in these regions, but globally the Medieval Warm Period was cooler than recent global temperatures"
Bold by me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period [wikipedia.org]
"Theophrastus (371 – c. 287 BC) wrote that date trees could grow in Greece if planted, but could not set fruit there. This is the same situation as today, and suggests that southern Aegean mean summer temperatures in the fourth and fifth centuries BC were within a degree of modern temperatures. This and other literary fragments from the time confirm that the Greek climate during that period was basically the same as it was around 2000 AD. Dendrochronological evidence from wood found at the Parthenon shows variability of climate in the fifth century BC resembling the modern pattern of variation.[3] Tree rings from Italy in the late third century BC indicate a period of mild conditions in the area at the time that Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period [wikipedia.org]
Re:Cue the climate change deniers ... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Cue the climate change deniers ... (Score:3, Informative)