The 2017-18 Cold Snap vs. Global Warming

The 2017-18 cold wave invading the Eastern United States is, historically, among the longest and bitterest. That was the subject of a Washington Post report front-paged in the New Jersey Star-Ledger on December 30, 2017 under the title The last time it was so frigid for a ball drop in NYC was 1962. (The story appeared elsewhere under various titles.)

Jason Samenow, the reporter, talks of all of the record low daily temperatures, including low daily maximums. It’s a report on weather, and the atmospheric conditions, such as the positioning of the jet stream, that make these intense, long cold waves happen. Typically, winters in the Northern United States are marked by occasional cold waves that last a few days, then retreat, followed by a return to average or above average temperatures. But occasionally, these cold waves line up in such a way that one after another plunges South from the arctic, often piercing all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico and Florida. These conditions happen from time to time, and can last weeks. They’re nothing new. The winters of 2013-14 and 2014-15 gave us this pattern.

Yet, right smack in the middle of the article, Samenow finds it necessary to say this:

Although it may be tempting to question global warming when temperatures are so frigid, the abnormally cold weather over the eastern U.S. and parts of Canada is an anomaly compared to conditions over the rest of the world. Most locations are presently experiencing weather that is considerably warmer than normal. 

It is also worth remembering the following: The three warmest years on record globally, since records began in the late 1800s, are 2014, 2015 and 2016. 

2017 is expected to rank among the top five warmest years on record. 

So far this year, warm weather records have outpaced cold by a factor of 3 in the United States.

Now, this may all be true. But why change the subject? Is the press so obsessed with the Left’s climate change agenda that they have to sneak it in even as 200 million Americans shiver in record cold?

It’s irrelevant and misleading. The facts cited are a statistical illusion, even if true. It sounds dramatic, right? The warmest years globally, measured as the average temperature, are all recent. More record highs than record lows. More areas globally experiencing above average temperatures. It sounds downright startling—or is at least intended to.

But think about it. The Earth, globally, has warmed by about one-two degrees Fahrenheit since about 1880. It stands to reason that the warmest years, on average, would have occurred toward the end of the 1880-2017 period. It stands to reason also that we’d get more record highs than record lows.

But keep in mind that the temperature differences are matters of fractions of a degree. For example, the average temperature for the 1880-89 decade is 1.42 degree F. cooler than the 2000-09 decade. Not that much. If you transported an 1880 resident to 2017, he wouldn’t notice a difference in the weather. (He would, however, notice how much longer, healthier, cleaner, and more prosperous the average person’s life had become. But that’s another issue.) Just the mere fact that record lows and record cold waves still occur is proof that the Al Gore-like hysteria over some speculated global warming catastrophe is so overstated as to be laughable—if not for the human catastrophe that awaits us if the Environmentalist Left’s anti-energy “solution” to climate change is actually implemented. Note that New Year's Eve 2017 is being hearkened back to 1962. That late December 1962 cold wave heralded the arrival of the 1962-63 winter, which Life Magazine front-paged in it's 2/8/63 issue as “The Most Savage Winter of the Century” up to that time—it, too, being the result of the same jet stream pattern.

Now, weather interests me. It always has. The climate change issue also interests me. But why do I have to have politics rubbed in my face when the issue is a weather phenomenon that happens from time to time, and has always happened from time to time? (Yes, the once mundane issue of climate change is mostly a political issue these days.) Cold is cold, even if the projected 5º low for New York City would have hypothetically been 3º in 1880 (not accounting for the “heat island” effect).

This is why people say that the media is biased toward the Left-statist agenda.

Perhaps I’m being a little hard on Samenow. Perhaps he (or his Washington Post editors) felt compelled to counter President Donald Trump’s seeming ridiculing of climate change. He joked about needing some “good old Global Warming” to deal with the cold wave (If it even was an innocent joke. With Trump, you never know. He so often shoots from the hip regardless of facts, it’s hard to tell. See Trump mocks ‘good old Global Warming’ as cold spell hits US.)

Anyway, here in Readington, New Jersey, I’m dealing with the cold. As of this writing, the cold wave is expected to last at least through this upcoming weekend, with the coldest blast yet to arrive by Friday, with highs Friday and Saturday forecast at 13º and 10º and lows of -1º and -2º. That would make it a solid two weeks since it set in—an unusually long period without a break. I’m hoping for a good old-fashioned East Coast blizzard. Why let a good cold wave go to waste? But nothing yet. I expect always to be dealing with cold waves, regardless of mild and gradual fluctuations in climate. And I hope that industrial progress and the freedom it is built on is allowed to continue apace so people 137 years from now can live as improved a life then as I do now compared to that guy from 1880—even if the cold wave of 2154-55 results in an NYC low of a balmy 7º instead of 5º.

Related Reading:

Sierra Club's Jeff Tittel Smears Star-Ledger Article and its Contributors for Excluding Climate Religion from Hurricane Analysis