I'd love to see an ELI5 summary of what this is predicting globally for the upcoming season. It's interesting, but hard for me not being trained in this domain to really understand how to interpret such detailed information.
When the polar vortex is strong, it maintains its cylindrical shape and keeps the cold air trapped within that cylinder at the pole (like those blowing air barriers on the doors to shops in the summer that blow air down and stop the cold air from escaping the store).
When warmer air masses push into the polar region in the fall (which happens more often now due to global warming), it disrupts and weakens the polar vortex and leaves open channels for the cold air to escape during the winter. This cold air then cools parts of the Northern hemisphere, causing pockets of cold (generally to the South), while the warmer air also bunches up and causes pockets of warm (generally to the North).
The end result is wild temperature and weather swings during Winter (colder in the Eastern USA and Europe - see the last two images in the article), and we're in for a doozy this year.
It's actually happened multiple times already, 1989, 2011, as well as 2021. After 2011 (during which there was rolling blackouts, boil-water advisories) an advisory board made recommendations for upgrading the infrastructure. The advice was of course ignored and Gov. Abbott later disbanded the division responsible for oversight -- can't have any pesky government regulations!
I think there are many different reasons, the bigger picture of course is climate change. More concretely, air is getting warmer at the North Pole (due to glacier/ice melt, open water reflecting less sun etc.), which reduces temperature gradients (those that fueled the Yet Stream that was responsible for the stable Polar Vortex).
Grant scale of ocean water temperature change is another reason, and (more specifically) more chance for more snow in Siberia.
The north pole weather system is connected to all other weather systems, so it is not easy to define a clear causal chain.
It will get both unseasonably warm at times and have several days of biting cold at others.
The original name for what we now call “Global warming“ or “climate change” was “climate unsettling”: balancing mechanisms that allowed seasons to have predictable temperature and precipitation (like El Niño) are being disrupted. The relatively small rise of average temperature (one degree) is enough to move airmass. Those block otherwise stable currents. Things aren’t where they are supposed to be.
Isn’t it more that they aren’t where we expect them (plus higher energy systems tend to be more chaotic). There isn’t really any supposed to be when it comes to nature, just expected/precedented.
While there is certainly no place an airmass is supposed to be, this framing makes it sound like the problem would go away if we just updated our expectations.
Do you think the problem would go away if we updated our expectations?
There is a fair argument to be made that most of the "problem" concerning the environment is a problem specifically /for humanity/. The planet, and likely most of our peers on the planet, don't care.
So yes, an El Nino is "supposed" to be <here> /for us/, but an El Nino is only "expected" or "just so happened to always be" <here> for the planet at large.
What makes you think that animals and plants are less affected by unusual weather than humans? Most species have a lot less technology to help them cope with the change.
For example, plants which leave dormancy (or proceed to a new phase such as flowering) during the unusually warm periods, only to be severely damaged when the cold returns. Species may be maladapted to the new weather patterns.
We also see the less direct ecological effects such as new pests thriving in area -- new weather patterns create an ecosystem to which the species is no longer adapted. E.g. fungi killing trees. Or for humans, "tropical diseases" becoming common in more northern areas.
Life has existed long before humans ever came onto the scene, and life has experienced environmental highs and lows that would make humanity shriek in absolute horror.
Life will go on and the Earth will continue to spin and orbit, whether humanity does or not.
Evolution has made most lifeforms care about their wellbeing. In my ethics causing unnecessary suffering and loss of diversity is not okay just because ultimately the universe will reach a state of maximum entropy and everything will have been without meaning.
So what's your point? That we shouldn't care about climate change because "life goes on"? That's a pretty low bar.
Personally I would like to preserve a future both where humans can survive and some of Earth's great ecological diversity is maintained. Those systems can't "care" because they're not sentient, but I am.
My point is that the concept of "El Ninos should happen <here>" is specifically a human perspective. As far as the planet and our peers are concerned, it doesn't really matter where such phenomena occur. Nature gonna nature and life gonna life.
Besides that, personally I have no attachment to humanity in particular. Objectively, the planet would be much better off without us around. That's not to say I would go out of my way to not exist; I'm already here, might as well enjoy my time here. But I'm not going to go out of my way to "preserve humanity" or whatever either. Life has persevered without us before we came around, and life will persevere whether we exist or not.
Is it? In terms of how much we get along with the enrivonment compared to our peers, we do pretty horrible. The planet wouldn't care since it doesn't care about life one way or another, though; I grant you that.
I think the real distinction I’m unsure about is if the problem is the earth finding a new equilibrium point potentially on the order of hundreds to thousands of years or if the problem is we’re overall making the earth worse at supporting human life. I’d guess a mix of both, but certainly the adjustment as areas that once had a consistent climate x move to a different climate y is pretty bad by itself
My understanding is that a new equilibrium can only be found, in general, when the net new input(s) to a system have stopped changing.
The amount of atmospheric CO2 continues to grow linearly[1] at best. The earth's climate may find a new equilibrium when CO2 stabilizes, or it may not. The resulting equilibrium may be conducive to human life, or it may not. But until that number flattens, we can only expect more change. And, of course, that is only one of the many stressors on the climate.
You're implicit assumption is that the system's response to ever increasing CO2 is indefinitely linear and proportional?
If you believe that I've got some beans you can buy.
This equilibrium you're chasing is much more transient than you'd like to think. Especially in the face of more and more accurate/precise observations.
I think you misread my comment, I made no such assumption.
The commenter I replied to said "I’m unsure about if ... the earth [is] finding a new equilibrium point potentially on the order of hundreds to thousands of years..."
I pointed to NASA measurements showing that atmospheric CO2 is increasing linearly and has been for some time. Whether its increase accelerates or decelerates or remains flat depends largely on many unpredictable factors (primarily humans).
Consequently (I tried to answer) - no, the climate will not find an equilibrium ("a state of rest or balance due to the equal action of opposing forces") as long as one of the primary forces driving the system out of balance continues to change (i.e., we keep dumping more CO2 into the air) without some countervailing force changing at roughly the same rate. Today there is no countervailing force, so there will be no equilibrium.
I don't see how your comment ("this equilibrium you're chasing"?) relates at all.
CO2 may momentarily be one of a convoluted set of factors that contribute to the dominant harmonic component of the system with the output "global temperatures", but it is not in and of itself stable in it's relation to the output of the system. Clearly due to the afore mentioned "convoluted set of factors" having their own internal period/fluctuations/harmonics of convolution.
CO2 will rise, but it will eventually necessary uncouple from it's relationship to temperature at which point some other factor we are wholy unaware of will probably do something as equally disturbing to our environmental "equilibrium".
If you transform the system in respect to time, you'll find that from some perspective almost nothing ever happened, and from another the whole thing was wildly unstable and unpredictable.
It already doesn't matter what CO2 levels are doing now. Up and to the right and how hard is probably completely irrelevant. What matters is the flux of the system, and everything points to the fact that weve already left the station. There's no unwinding this thing, and it's not going where anyone thinks it's going.
The truly conservative thing to be doing would be to prepare ourselves for the most violent future, but instead what we're trying to do is grip onto the past with our already dying hand. Weakening our heart at the very moment we need to bolster it.
Everything is going to be fine, but you and I will be dead. I assure you of that.
Looks like someone else went out arguing, but I do actually agree with this. Maybe where I’m optimistic is that I think we are on track to stop adding more co2 within the next few hundred years or so (hopefully much sooner). Though I do think it’s worth knowing the natural environment also introduces co2 to the atmosphere at a roughly linear rate (via volcanos)
A major problem is the rate of change. The climate changes naturally all the time, but these processes usually take a couple of millennia. In that time frame the biosphere has time to adapt; species can migrate etc. We're in the process of compressing millennia of change into a hundred years.
If "the problem" is that we're expecting an unnatural level of consistency, yes, it would. (If you consider "the problem" to be that weather is chaotic, then of course the answer is no)
I don't think there is any "purpose" to the ecosystem, it just exists as it does. But previously that ecosystem was suitable for what became human life, which is why we exist in it, and obviously it's very bad for us if we manage to shift the ecosystem into something that does not support human life.
The ecosystem does not "care", it's not a person, it does not have feelings. The only entities perceiving a drastic problem will be animals, including us.
Somewhat similar perspective: large magnitude swings over long periods are just very low frequency, high amplitude oscillations. They are just as much expressions of more energy in the earth's systems as thermal expressions such as higher average temps in the ground/water/atmosphere.
Basically this line, from the caption of the 3rd line graph at the US climate.gov site[1] that shows large magnitude swings over long periods:
> Global atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in parts per million (ppm) for the past 800,000 years. The peaks and valleys track ice ages (low CO2) and warmer interglacials (higher CO2).
Unfortunately, it continues:
> During these cycles, CO2 was never higher than 300 ppm. The increase over the last 60 years is 100 times faster than previous natural increases. In fact, on the geologic time scale, the increase from the end of the last ice age to the present looks virtually instantaneous.
(Note the last dot on the chart in the upper-right corner representing 2021's average value of 414.7 ppm. This corresponded to a time roughly 3 million years ago when ocean levels were 16 to 82 feet higher than today.)
Well, I should clarify that in terms of geological time the "large magnitude swings" I was thinking of when I wrote that are still very high frequency. I was thinking in terms of large temperature fluctuations over periods of days, weeks, months, like the ones experienced during when the polar vortex destabilizes and floats around the northern hemisphere.
This is HN, where part of the culture is sharing articles which require technical knowledge to understand. And where many of the comments help make sense of them.
The article is not vague, it is actually very precise and focused. It uses a technical vocabulary which is appropriate for its intended audience.
The problem wasn't technical vocabulary, the problem was a lot of stuff to read, and the conclusion not having a good tl;dr. I have horrible dyslexia, and I was about to go to sleep when I saw the article. But it seemed important, so I was looking for a tl;dr
Because if they say it like that, they think It would undermine the climate change image in the minds of the masses. That is why we see such silly headlines like `Earth had its 6th-hottest July and year to date on record` from NOAA.
Yep, it would definitely benefit from a summary or simple English paragraph before the main text. It could actually prepare the reader for the more difficult comprehension.
Isn't it mostly all a give and take? Siberia gets more snow, Greenland less, then the pressure fronts swap again, etc. All in all the annual snow curves look rather narrowly distributed and severe weather seems to be over-dramatized? Even in the event of a (precedented) vortex collapse the predictions are not that dramatic, or am I misreading it?
Water. A slight increase in global temperature means more water sloshing around in the atmosphere. Of course "the weather" is partially a result of how that water is distributed around the world... but in conjunction with a more "dynamic" atmosphere, this can lead to things like: weather events occurring in places they usually don't or more severe weather events or stranger timing than usual.
If Russia remains economically isolated after Putin is ousted, wouldn't that worsen the odds of positive political reform in Russia? Economic sanctions are the stick, but if they continue even after Putin is gone, where is the carrot? If the new leader proves themselves bad as well, the sanctions should obviously be resumed.
They have everything. Fertile soil with lot of fossil fuels for energy. If they didn't have corrupt political oligarch nexus they would easily be the richest countries in the world.
Since Global petroleum supply and demand is inelastic even a small shortfall in Global Production will result in much higher prices
In the turmoil of regime change in Russia production would fall and probably not come back online again for decades
When the wall fell Russian production declined and has never reached its 1980s Peak because of the geography of Russia. In fact I think most of the wells that were turned off at that time have never come back online and recent production increases are due to new infrastructure being built
If Putin's gone Russia collapses into anarchy and civil war. Putin has spent the last 20 years ensuring that there is no viable "new leader" of Russia. He's structured the Russian state so that every possible person in power has a well-delineated job to do, they all distrust each other, they all report to him, and nobody has the bigger picture. Anyone who gains enough of a following to threaten him gets thrown out of a window or poisoned with polonium. If he didn't do this he would've been ousted years ago.
Countries in the midst of civil war aren't very good at shipping natural gas either. Europe's best hope for not freezing is to go invade Russia, capture the pipelines and gas fields, and staff them with Europeans. Unfortunately this plan has worked out for Europe (and the world) approximately never.
My (extremely limited) understanding is that even if Putin wanted to flip the script and move Russia away from an oligarchy, that he'd be replaced with someone stronger, more heartless, etc.
Does somebody have an idea for how reform could occur in a place that has never really been "free"?
Won't it increase the odds of positive political reform in Europe and elsewhere, if they have energy independence rather than being beholden to dictatorial petrostates? It seems like a worthwhile goal even outside of the environmental benefits.
That seems another matter to me. Are the sanctions against Russia meant to change Russia's warmongering behavior, or are they meant to save the environment? At present these motivations seem to align, but if the political situation in Russia changes that may no longer be the case.
If nobody buys Russian gas even after sanctions are lifted, that's not because of sanctions against russia, but rather because nobody likes to do business with a bully that has shown they will happily attempt to screw you over with any power they hold over you, no matter how friendly they have been in the past.
In the short terms, Germans are rightly thinking "We'd rather get through the winter with local coal than pay Moscow" so no, this is not an environment benefit, yet.
However it is a good trend in longer term - I don't think that there is desire for a long term "turn back to coal", it's just short-term expedience until a better alternative can be built up - after all, those coal plants exist already. Yes it's done under difficult conditions now as a consequence of not doing it under good conditions earlier.
> Are the sanctions against Russia meant to change Russia's warmongering behavior, or are they meant to save the environment?
it is, as I said above, not an either-or. The environmental benefits (which might be a good step, but will not be in themselves enough to "save" anyone) are outside of the consideration, and not the matter at hand. I thought that was clearly phrased.
Rather, removing Russia, or other petrostates ability to blackmail with energy supply, makes them less likely to warmonger. Russia's warmongering is very much supported with oil and gas leverage - i.e. threats of "don't interfere or you'll go cold". Like the other reply says - if bullies no longer have a hold over you, you'll get less bullying. It's a poor assumption that Russian leadership will be better or even different in nature any time soon, Putin or not. And it's good for European domestic politics as well, to be less concerned with appeasing other powers, especially dictators.
> Are the sanctions against Russia meant to change Russia's warmongering behavior, or are they meant to save the environment?
They're not capable of doing anything to save the environment - in fact it's likely they're a net-negative. Russia is still selling that energy to someone - right now China and India - and it's unlikely the new buyers will be taking the same steps to burn the natural gas as cleanly or efficiently as western Europe would.
Was told it’s not a problem, still plenty of cheap food to eat and no one will really freeze to death anyway because they have alternative ways to stay warm.
Possibly off-topic: the variety of color scales used here is wild, and interesting. It looks like of them may have pre-established meaning within the community of expertise (like the rainbow-ish one for the image after "Overall, no sign of any influence from below."), but many of them are versions of a double-ended scale (white in middle, at 0), but there's a wide variety of double-ended scales. I wonder if this less disorienting to the domain experts?
I'm kinda used to them, there's a 'library' of color scales used in scientific visualization that aims to balance contrast with complexity and also be accessible to color-blind people. Matplotlib docs have good reference material on this iirc.
Right, but with those goals in mind a lot people say "so viridis it is!" and leave it at that; but there's nothing like viridis on that page, which is intriguing.
I think the most interesting scale on that weather page is the red-blue one where the extremes of both then veer into other colors - often the same colors, but that's OK because they will only appear within 'moats' of red or blue covering the typical temperature distributions. So you have increasingly deep shades of blue or red to indicate very cold or hot weather, and then purple to white within those areas for record-setting-breaking extremes.
I guess you could just do normal vs deviant scales, but given our sensitivity to the dichotomies of weather people have an inherent need to know what sort of extreme it is.
Yes I noticed that too, and I agree with your guess about why it’s ok. Fundamentally the functions here are smoothly varying, which avoids ambiguities and some some contrast effects that affect chloropleth maps. Long path length in colorspace == more opportunities for nearby discrimination, even if with overlapping hues
The quality is great. This website taught me what a "polar vortex" is, which the news the past couple years did not do. I now understand the relationship between the seasons, the polar vortex, the jet stream, and what that means for the weather here in Maine where the jet stream cuts the state into two distinct climates, and the jet stream moving up or down ends up causing extreme weather events here in the state, like unusually cold or warm winter weather for certain parts of the state.
I also learned a little about how existing high energy weather events can destabilize the formation and existence of the polar vortex and how that means bad news going forward for predictable winters in my state.
I learned all this and didn't even read the whole thing.
If you search the author's name, it seems like he predicts this every winter. Meanwhile the seasonal forecasts of reputable meteorologists at the Met Office, DWD, and MeteoSwiss (I didn't bother to check more) all predict a high chance of above normal temperatures in Europe this winter.
It wouldn't be so bad if people wouldn't STILL deny it's:
1) happening at all.
2) man made.
3) possible to do something about.
4) evident that every action counts, no matter how small or futile it seems for now
Politicians can only ride on climate change "opposition" because they expect to gain votes from it. In the end, the costs climate change will inflict both in economic and human terms will be unfathomably huge and we will all be forced to relinquish some of the things we enjoy every day.
Consequences will come and they will hit you, no matter where you live. Climate catastrophes will hit you directly (e.g. destroyed homes) or indirectly (e.g. refugees, broken supply chains, rising costs etc.).
Both the comment you replied to and its parent are throwaway and basically parallel imo. Rah rah climate change vs dismissing the link to climate change are both super boring at this point, but somehow one is presently the top comment and the othe dead.
This sort of pseudo-centrist argumentation that is fixated on signaling that everyone is hypocritical and/or flawed isn't helpful either other than as an attempt to demonstrate the speaker's intelligence to the audience.
There's enough climate denial and the problem is acute enough that there doesn't need to be an acknowledgment for every "but we've already had bad weather" person out there. Engaging is largely pointless.
Now of course that leads to the idea you've alluded to that climate discussion follows a religious sort of diction. There's some truth to that, but imagine for a second that the most extreme form of the argument is true, that climate change is 100% unfounded religious nonsense. Even in that worst case scenario, you end up with multiple sources of renewable energy, reduced pollution, reduced consumption of resources, increased energy efficiency, less consumerism, and so on... things we should be doing anyway with or without the greenhouse effect. Can any religious doctrine match the usefulness of this eschatology?
You see this is why all media around climate change has become apocalyptic. Anyone who doesn’t want to have the exact same doomer conversation is called a denier and shut down, meaning that there are increasingly less people to point out the hyperbole.
Not every damned post about climate change needs to be replied to with a condescending lecture.
Isn't the dramatic discursive style abundantly supported by the acuteness of the problem, and the various non-climate related advantages accrued from the methods used to mitigate it?
The fact that annoying/religious-oriented people exist does not diminish that aspect.
Let's say we give additional attention to people who complain about being shut down. I don't want to be too cynical, but the response is likely to be along the lines of not being interested in the various mitigation strategies. There might be quality arguments but the conclusion will largely be inaction or just devil's avocation for its own sake. If we move away from the "called deniers and shut down" or complaints about free speech part there's often not actually a lot of material left. Which is why the answer is sometimes to simply not have the conversation.
It's a hoot that the weather has been made to be so dramatic with terms like "polar vortex" and named storms for what used to be thought of as fairly pedestrian occurrences.
>> Storms have been given names since the early 19th century, so your "used to be" here is well beyond the threshold of living memory
My interpretation of the parent post is that it refers to the naming of every typical winter storm during a season, which was begun by the Weather Channel in 2012. I do in fact remember the debate at the time over that practice.
Wikipedia gives only two examples of winter storm names predating 1900, "The Great Snow of 1717" and "The Schoolhouse Blizzard" or "Children's Blizzard" of 1888.
That seems to be a different practice than winter storms Ajax, Bella, Cara, Delphi, Echo and Ferus of the 2021-2022 season.
Tropical cyclones have been given names for a long time, but that's not what I was referring to. Now-a-days snowstorms and other run-of-the mill phenomena are given names. That's pretty recent.
And is it really "entirely" in how I see it? I'm referring to the breathless intonation of modern weather talking heads as they discuss normal weather phenomena as a "polar vortex" (in scare quotes). They used to just say it was going to snow more or be colder. The use of "polar vortex" in that context definitely amps up the drama.
Because polar vortex storms aren’t a very common phenomenon. Aside from the past couple of years, the previous occurrences seem to be 2014-2015, 2013-2014, and then 1985 prior to that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_vortex
So, we have a very rare, very extreme weather phenomenon that’s hit multiple in the last 10 years after decades of static behavior. The wiki on the Polar Vortex even attributes the 2013 storm with popularizing the term due to the heavy reporting.
This isn't a general-winter-weather thing like that. The polar vortex is a very particular phenomena that only lasts 1-3 days* and doesn't necessarily come with snow. Its signature is just extreme cold, on the order of -40 degrees or lower, even in areas that only very rarely go below -5 F (-20 C).
* technically it's always there around the north pole, but we only talk about it when it dips down into populated areas.
Unless you are over 70, named storms and the polar vortex have been a feature of meteorological reporting since before you were born. Your impression that this a change is due to your ignorance.
I'm not over 70, but you never used to hear "polar vortex" in popular weather forecasting broadcasts. I'm not a meteorologist, so I can't comment on its use by pros.
And you never used to hear about named storms unless they were tropical cyclones.
The media (and weather broadcasts) latched onto the term in the 2013/2014 winter, and has been using it ever since. And the media is prone to over-exaggeration, we know that, no argument. There have even been scientific papers about whether the use of the term is problematic and how to best describe it to non-experts. Even using the word ignorant, as the person you replied to above did, is not a slight IMO (at least, I don't see it that way, I see it, in the context used, as a descriptive term for "the state of not knowing").
The point being, the weather phenomena is not new, nor is using polar vortex to describe it. And just because you hear about something in the media for the first time and it seems exaggerated, that does not necessarily invalidate it or somehow make it a "pedestrian event" being over-hyped. It could be, but in this specific case, it definitely does not. And those words, as explained elsewhere, are the correct words to use from a descriptive point of view.
> The earliest scientific papers describing the broad-scale tropospheric or stratospheric flow as a “circumpolar vortex” or “polar vortex” are from the late 1940s and early 1950s. (Although a much earlier usage appears on pg 430 of Littell’s Living Age Map, 12 November 1853.)
