Last Friday, with this recent bomb cyclone, 53.7% of the nation was covered in snow; more than any time since record-keeping began -- As the oil industry knowingly lies to us and rakes in profits
Your explanation makes a lot of sense, Thom. Unfortunately too much of the American population has a very low knowledge of science, let alone routinely practices critical thinking and data analysis. So this will literally go over their heads. In addition, it's a lot to expect most people to connect the dots. The homeowner in Ohio paying higher insurance rates is unlikely to see that as connected to the company having to make up for bigger claims due to Florida hurricanes. And even if they do, linking that to climate change is a stretch. And naturally nobody (including me) wants to say they are partially responsible for ongoing disasters...or pay for them.
All this simply means that strategic education showing these connections has to be clearly and repeatedly presented to the public. And this is something the news media almost never does today, although from what I've seen a fair number of high school students do have a sense of what is happening. As usual, change will come from the bottom up as the public slowly becomes aware of environmental linkages, and hopefully a tipping point will be reached where change is effectively demanded from "leaders." But these will neither be easy nor quick; hopefully we have enough time to make that shift. And once we do, supporting developing countries that will not or cannot easily make major energy changes will be a whole other issue.
I've worked with these guys; oil industry execs, politicians, investment bankers, etc. They all have one thing in common; they would all shove their kid under a bus for $1 million, maybe a lot less. They just don't care. They are all sociopaths.
Feeling for everyone in the US. Nothing like this were I am in Europe (at the moment), although some countries do have a lot more snow than usual. Stay safe!
Very informative article. Thank you. But like one of the other commenters, I cannot fathom why people are out in such weather. They had ample warning. Where do you have to go so bad in a white-out blizzard that you end up in a 46 car pile up? But I guess we've all done it, including me when I was younger, pushed our luck figuring we could make it home from somewhere. Not a good way to start the New Year.
As always, Thom Hartmann is precise in his explanations, whatever the topic. I recall, having to explain to my college classmates that everyday weather reports are different from climate change analyzing, which is 15 to 30 years managing to climate change reporting.
One 1980s book on climate explained the jet stream in terms of quantum leaps! That wind usually makes gentle loops around the pole (not a straight circle as the NOAA animation suggests), and the number of these loops depends on the total global temperature. You can't have half a loop; they have to add up to a whole number! So, as global temperature changes, the jet stream first fragments and then abruptly reorganizes itself into a different number of loops. That will change the areas that usually receive winds from North or South. Needless to say, there will be a dramatic impact on precipitation and growing seasons!
Climate science has become much more sophisticated since that book was written, but it remains the clearest explanation of the jet stream that I've found yet. I wish I could remember its title or find an online animation that illustrates the principle.
I once set a bowl of water on a sunlit balcony for the birds, and then started watching the water while half was in sunshine and half in shade. I could actually see tiny whirlpools forming along the border between sun and shade! Even a slight temperature difference had that much impact on one small bowl of water. Imagine how much it could disrupt the air and ocean currents of the whole planet!
This is a solid research piece, and as such it may be accessible with shared readers across the planet. However, the weather, our individual living experiences, income levels, urban and rural locations and age will moderate all our abilities to respond effectively over the next 3-4 decades.
The Copenhagen Consensus Center https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/ has produced some remarkably pragmatic global observations and suggestions.
Tragically, with billions being spent in the US and EU on profitable auto manufacturing of all electric cars with highly challenging batteries with disposal issues and limited duration, we are looking and another century with crowded roads, road range, and extraction resource wars. AND, WE ARE NOT FOCUSING NATIONAL AND GLOBAL TRANSPORTATION NEEDS ON DEVELOPING OUR PEOPLE AND GOODS TRAIN TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM. This is a social and economic choice that would have bigger and quicker climate savings than building billions of battery powered cars https://www.grunge.com/155798/the-real-reason-the-united-states-has-no-high-speed-rail-network/.
Canadian scientist, professor emeritus, Vaclav Smil, has written comprehensively on the global community's practical energy needs https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/global-cracks-complicate-wests-energy-transition-2022-06-02/ showing that 8 billion people, soon 12 billion people, does not have the ability to maintain their current living standards with out assurance of reliable high energy sources. Unless we build more atomic power plants, continue to use LNG or quickly find a fusion or hydrogen safe and cost effective power system for our high energy industrial power needs all our living standards will have to drop.
We appear to be on a collision course, WITH a humanity mass of 8-12 billion aptly being in a similar situation as the Exxon Valdez vessel before it grounded and caused the largest, permanent environmental disaster - because no amount of tug boat power could change its trajectory 1/2 degree, in time, CONVERGING against the compounded, rapidly changing global climate factors.
To put this in perspective for those who need more than science, personally, I have worked at the Northern tip of Greenland and Alaska, and have seen dramatic changes is temperatures, ice coverage and increasing unpredictability in the last 40 years. Alaska's January temperatures for January increased from -25 to +25 degrees between 1975-1995 where I built my first home, and Prudhoe Bay went from having 23 days of ice free conditions as we built TAPS to having almost 4 months of ship accessibility for barges by 2000. And the Exxon Valdez environmental damage has been permanent and irreversible.
However, an all green economy with millions of little all electric cars and millions of solar cells and windmills will not 'save' or 'prevent' an increasing level of discomfort for all of us in the 2022-2150 interim decades. We need a broad global economy focusing billions of dollars and research talent on energy research, plus, we may need to accept, in truth, that the Copenhagen Consensus Center and people such as professor emeritus Vaclav Smil are not conservative criminals.
Mr. Hartman's citations:
Back in 2012, Rutgers’ Dr. Jennifer Francis and the University of Wisconsin’s Stephen Vavrus published a hypothesis to explain the increasingly extreme variations in weather we’re experiencing in the northern hemisphere. While still the subject of scientific debate, their hypothesis was both elegant and easily understood.
As long as the Arctic Ocean was covered with deep, hard ice it produced a permanent and cold plateau of stable-temperature air. That cold air dome, in turn, stabilized the temperature and pressure of the air above it so the circular flow of high-altitude winds around the Arctic — called the normal “polar vortex” — were largely kept in place at those high, northern latitudes.
We had summer and winter, storms and snow, fronts pushed through quickly by the Jet Stream, but extremes like we’ve been experiencing for the past decade were the stuff of science fiction disaster movies.
Extreme weather was kept at bay because the “gradient” or difference in temperatures between the cold arctic polar vortex air and the warmer air from our mid-latitudes produced a “wall” of sorts to keep the cold air over the arctic.
In addition to the polar vortex, there’s another river of air flowing in a circle around the north pole at a different altitude that largely controls our weather. Called the Jet Stream, it pushes along cold and warm air masses, producing the fronts and weather we experience.
North of the Jet Stream is the cold, arctic air; south of it is our warmer air. When parts of the Jet Stream dip down over North America, we often see that phenomenon of cold- and warm-front air-mass collisions producing “fronts” that provoke storms ranging from rainfall to tornadoes to derechos.
As MIT climatologist Judah Cohen told Newsweek last week:
“When the polar vortex is in its normal or strong state, there is a strong ribbon or river of air that flows rapidly from west to east...that acts like a barrier that separates cold air to the north over the Arctic and milder air to the south across the mid-latitudes.
“When the circulation around the polar vortex becomes less and less circular in shape, the cold air normally confined to the Arctic can expand southward to the mid-latitudes, including the U.S., Europe and East Asia.”
But two decades ago the ice covering the top of the world, that cap of arctic sea ice, hit a tipping point and began to melt so completely it was replaced by open water, which is both warmer than ice and, being dark, absorbs rather than reflects heat from the sun.
As NASA’s Earth Observatory scientists note:
“[A] pattern of steep Arctic sea ice decline began in 2002.”
The arctic is now warming several times faster than the mid-latitudes, in part because of this “dark water” phenomenon replacing reflective ice and in part as a consequence of the entire planet’s CO2-driven global warming.
As the air above the arctic warms, it reduces the gradient — the difference in temperatures — at the boundaries between the arctic and the mid-latitude air.
When that temperature gradient decreases, so does the strength of the “wall” of the boundary created by arctic air hitting mid-latitude air. As that “wall” which helps hold in place the Jet Stream weakens, the cold air above it can push through, past, or under the Jet Stream. It then ends up in your front yard as -42 temperatures.
All very interesting, but no one has explained why people choose to go out in weather like that when they've been warned not to. Making airplane reservations is a bit different, but you'd think people would learn from past years -- but it doesn't seem to be registering in their little brains. Looking at videos of people driving through knee-high water, or the tough ones with their 4-wheel drives thinking they can conquer any snowdrift has to make us shake our heads at the choices people make. I don't know what William Clay needed from the store so badly to have him walk in the worst blizzard ever; I'd guess it was for something addictive though, something that'd support either the fossil fuel industry, or the tobacco or narcotic industries.
Now they are saying Buffalo had a "once in a generation" winter storm---NOT HELPING! Furthermore, it is not likely to prove to be true. The message should be that there is no such thing as normal weather anywhere on the globe. The language used concerning these tragedies does not help when dealing with the Republican brain. They do not do nuance, and none of us do chaos.
But what you have so aptly described is going to mean just that, climate chaos that will continue to ramp-up if we don't try every measure within our means to slow the warming. More people and animals will suffer and die. Some are inclined to throw their hands up, feel helpless, and cave.
The younger generations know they are far from giving-up. Love/hate the internet, it is their opportunity to learn and organize. They are going to need it when they are finally forced to live under the ground or under the sea part of the year (attempt at dark humor).
Well as long as the Liars from the oil business continue to profit from killing us , the republicans keep profiting from deniers of all reality, and we don’t change the rules for how the Supreme Court is set up and monitored. We will not be able to sustain life and its just the small price we have to pay to make sure these corrupt deals with the devil by corporations and republicans can continue to carve out their twisted choices.
We will continue to destroy the earth and all of the gifts a supreme being trusted us with. But the rich will stay rich till they are finished with this destruction.
Anyone and everyone who has lost family to extreme weather in the US needs to get together & file class action lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry. We also need public interest law firms to step up & take these cases.
All true and most Americans have known about it. I don't recall exactly when, but the Oil Industry had a report about global warming but never disclosed to the public. It came about bits and pieces.
Thank you for the explanation. I regularly share these posts, I just hope my fb friends take the time to read it.
Your explanation makes a lot of sense, Thom. Unfortunately too much of the American population has a very low knowledge of science, let alone routinely practices critical thinking and data analysis. So this will literally go over their heads. In addition, it's a lot to expect most people to connect the dots. The homeowner in Ohio paying higher insurance rates is unlikely to see that as connected to the company having to make up for bigger claims due to Florida hurricanes. And even if they do, linking that to climate change is a stretch. And naturally nobody (including me) wants to say they are partially responsible for ongoing disasters...or pay for them.
All this simply means that strategic education showing these connections has to be clearly and repeatedly presented to the public. And this is something the news media almost never does today, although from what I've seen a fair number of high school students do have a sense of what is happening. As usual, change will come from the bottom up as the public slowly becomes aware of environmental linkages, and hopefully a tipping point will be reached where change is effectively demanded from "leaders." But these will neither be easy nor quick; hopefully we have enough time to make that shift. And once we do, supporting developing countries that will not or cannot easily make major energy changes will be a whole other issue.
I've worked with these guys; oil industry execs, politicians, investment bankers, etc. They all have one thing in common; they would all shove their kid under a bus for $1 million, maybe a lot less. They just don't care. They are all sociopaths.
Feeling for everyone in the US. Nothing like this were I am in Europe (at the moment), although some countries do have a lot more snow than usual. Stay safe!
Very informative article. Thank you. But like one of the other commenters, I cannot fathom why people are out in such weather. They had ample warning. Where do you have to go so bad in a white-out blizzard that you end up in a 46 car pile up? But I guess we've all done it, including me when I was younger, pushed our luck figuring we could make it home from somewhere. Not a good way to start the New Year.
As always, Thom Hartmann is precise in his explanations, whatever the topic. I recall, having to explain to my college classmates that everyday weather reports are different from climate change analyzing, which is 15 to 30 years managing to climate change reporting.
One 1980s book on climate explained the jet stream in terms of quantum leaps! That wind usually makes gentle loops around the pole (not a straight circle as the NOAA animation suggests), and the number of these loops depends on the total global temperature. You can't have half a loop; they have to add up to a whole number! So, as global temperature changes, the jet stream first fragments and then abruptly reorganizes itself into a different number of loops. That will change the areas that usually receive winds from North or South. Needless to say, there will be a dramatic impact on precipitation and growing seasons!
Climate science has become much more sophisticated since that book was written, but it remains the clearest explanation of the jet stream that I've found yet. I wish I could remember its title or find an online animation that illustrates the principle.
I once set a bowl of water on a sunlit balcony for the birds, and then started watching the water while half was in sunshine and half in shade. I could actually see tiny whirlpools forming along the border between sun and shade! Even a slight temperature difference had that much impact on one small bowl of water. Imagine how much it could disrupt the air and ocean currents of the whole planet!
This was a good explanation along with the video. Greed is causing inaction by Republicans and fossil fuel CEOs. They are in bed together!!
This is a solid research piece, and as such it may be accessible with shared readers across the planet. However, the weather, our individual living experiences, income levels, urban and rural locations and age will moderate all our abilities to respond effectively over the next 3-4 decades.
The Copenhagen Consensus Center https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/ has produced some remarkably pragmatic global observations and suggestions.
Toyota Automobile MFG has done really well with fuel economies https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/2021_Toyota_Prius.shtml.
A small country, Denmark, with 4-5 million people has pioneered the manufacturing and placement of windmills and developed an all green economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Denmark but they, like Germany and France are desperate for natural gas LNG supplies https://www.euronews.com/2022/11/16/germany-completes-lng-terminal-in-move-to-diversify-energy-supply.
Tragically, with billions being spent in the US and EU on profitable auto manufacturing of all electric cars with highly challenging batteries with disposal issues and limited duration, we are looking and another century with crowded roads, road range, and extraction resource wars. AND, WE ARE NOT FOCUSING NATIONAL AND GLOBAL TRANSPORTATION NEEDS ON DEVELOPING OUR PEOPLE AND GOODS TRAIN TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM. This is a social and economic choice that would have bigger and quicker climate savings than building billions of battery powered cars https://www.grunge.com/155798/the-real-reason-the-united-states-has-no-high-speed-rail-network/.
Canadian scientist, professor emeritus, Vaclav Smil, has written comprehensively on the global community's practical energy needs https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/global-cracks-complicate-wests-energy-transition-2022-06-02/ showing that 8 billion people, soon 12 billion people, does not have the ability to maintain their current living standards with out assurance of reliable high energy sources. Unless we build more atomic power plants, continue to use LNG or quickly find a fusion or hydrogen safe and cost effective power system for our high energy industrial power needs all our living standards will have to drop.
We appear to be on a collision course, WITH a humanity mass of 8-12 billion aptly being in a similar situation as the Exxon Valdez vessel before it grounded and caused the largest, permanent environmental disaster - because no amount of tug boat power could change its trajectory 1/2 degree, in time, CONVERGING against the compounded, rapidly changing global climate factors.
To put this in perspective for those who need more than science, personally, I have worked at the Northern tip of Greenland and Alaska, and have seen dramatic changes is temperatures, ice coverage and increasing unpredictability in the last 40 years. Alaska's January temperatures for January increased from -25 to +25 degrees between 1975-1995 where I built my first home, and Prudhoe Bay went from having 23 days of ice free conditions as we built TAPS to having almost 4 months of ship accessibility for barges by 2000. And the Exxon Valdez environmental damage has been permanent and irreversible.
However, an all green economy with millions of little all electric cars and millions of solar cells and windmills will not 'save' or 'prevent' an increasing level of discomfort for all of us in the 2022-2150 interim decades. We need a broad global economy focusing billions of dollars and research talent on energy research, plus, we may need to accept, in truth, that the Copenhagen Consensus Center and people such as professor emeritus Vaclav Smil are not conservative criminals.
Mr. Hartman's citations:
Back in 2012, Rutgers’ Dr. Jennifer Francis and the University of Wisconsin’s Stephen Vavrus published a hypothesis to explain the increasingly extreme variations in weather we’re experiencing in the northern hemisphere. While still the subject of scientific debate, their hypothesis was both elegant and easily understood.
As long as the Arctic Ocean was covered with deep, hard ice it produced a permanent and cold plateau of stable-temperature air. That cold air dome, in turn, stabilized the temperature and pressure of the air above it so the circular flow of high-altitude winds around the Arctic — called the normal “polar vortex” — were largely kept in place at those high, northern latitudes.
We had summer and winter, storms and snow, fronts pushed through quickly by the Jet Stream, but extremes like we’ve been experiencing for the past decade were the stuff of science fiction disaster movies.
Extreme weather was kept at bay because the “gradient” or difference in temperatures between the cold arctic polar vortex air and the warmer air from our mid-latitudes produced a “wall” of sorts to keep the cold air over the arctic.
In addition to the polar vortex, there’s another river of air flowing in a circle around the north pole at a different altitude that largely controls our weather. Called the Jet Stream, it pushes along cold and warm air masses, producing the fronts and weather we experience.
North of the Jet Stream is the cold, arctic air; south of it is our warmer air. When parts of the Jet Stream dip down over North America, we often see that phenomenon of cold- and warm-front air-mass collisions producing “fronts” that provoke storms ranging from rainfall to tornadoes to derechos.
As MIT climatologist Judah Cohen told Newsweek last week:
“When the polar vortex is in its normal or strong state, there is a strong ribbon or river of air that flows rapidly from west to east...that acts like a barrier that separates cold air to the north over the Arctic and milder air to the south across the mid-latitudes.
“When the circulation around the polar vortex becomes less and less circular in shape, the cold air normally confined to the Arctic can expand southward to the mid-latitudes, including the U.S., Europe and East Asia.”
But two decades ago the ice covering the top of the world, that cap of arctic sea ice, hit a tipping point and began to melt so completely it was replaced by open water, which is both warmer than ice and, being dark, absorbs rather than reflects heat from the sun.
As NASA’s Earth Observatory scientists note:
“[A] pattern of steep Arctic sea ice decline began in 2002.”
The arctic is now warming several times faster than the mid-latitudes, in part because of this “dark water” phenomenon replacing reflective ice and in part as a consequence of the entire planet’s CO2-driven global warming.
As the air above the arctic warms, it reduces the gradient — the difference in temperatures — at the boundaries between the arctic and the mid-latitude air.
When that temperature gradient decreases, so does the strength of the “wall” of the boundary created by arctic air hitting mid-latitude air. As that “wall” which helps hold in place the Jet Stream weakens, the cold air above it can push through, past, or under the Jet Stream. It then ends up in your front yard as -42 temperatures.
burning up the Planet
purely for Profiteering
if that doesn't Define
'Evil' than I don't
know what does
and
giving Tax Subsidies
to those burning
down Society
bring doubts
to any future
Mankind be
Hoping for.
All very interesting, but no one has explained why people choose to go out in weather like that when they've been warned not to. Making airplane reservations is a bit different, but you'd think people would learn from past years -- but it doesn't seem to be registering in their little brains. Looking at videos of people driving through knee-high water, or the tough ones with their 4-wheel drives thinking they can conquer any snowdrift has to make us shake our heads at the choices people make. I don't know what William Clay needed from the store so badly to have him walk in the worst blizzard ever; I'd guess it was for something addictive though, something that'd support either the fossil fuel industry, or the tobacco or narcotic industries.
But Taaahom, science is hard and math is boring!
Now they are saying Buffalo had a "once in a generation" winter storm---NOT HELPING! Furthermore, it is not likely to prove to be true. The message should be that there is no such thing as normal weather anywhere on the globe. The language used concerning these tragedies does not help when dealing with the Republican brain. They do not do nuance, and none of us do chaos.
But what you have so aptly described is going to mean just that, climate chaos that will continue to ramp-up if we don't try every measure within our means to slow the warming. More people and animals will suffer and die. Some are inclined to throw their hands up, feel helpless, and cave.
The younger generations know they are far from giving-up. Love/hate the internet, it is their opportunity to learn and organize. They are going to need it when they are finally forced to live under the ground or under the sea part of the year (attempt at dark humor).
Well as long as the Liars from the oil business continue to profit from killing us , the republicans keep profiting from deniers of all reality, and we don’t change the rules for how the Supreme Court is set up and monitored. We will not be able to sustain life and its just the small price we have to pay to make sure these corrupt deals with the devil by corporations and republicans can continue to carve out their twisted choices.
We will continue to destroy the earth and all of the gifts a supreme being trusted us with. But the rich will stay rich till they are finished with this destruction.
Anyone and everyone who has lost family to extreme weather in the US needs to get together & file class action lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry. We also need public interest law firms to step up & take these cases.
Thanks. The ignorance still amazes me.
All true and most Americans have known about it. I don't recall exactly when, but the Oil Industry had a report about global warming but never disclosed to the public. It came about bits and pieces.