By Paul Homewood
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38417198
More Arctic alarmism from the BBC:
Temperatures at the North Pole could be up to 20 degrees higher than average this Christmas Eve, in what scientists say is a record-breaking heatwave.
Climate scientists say these unseasonably warm weather patterns in the Arctic region are directly linked to man-made climate change.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38417198
Unsurprisingly, scientists know it’s man made because that’s what their models tell them:
Dr Friederike Otto, a senior researcher at Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute told BBC News that in pre-industrial times "a heatwave like this would have been extremely rare – we would expect it to occur about every 1,000 years".
Dr Otto added that scientists are "very confident" that the weather patterns were linked to anthropogenic climate change.
"We have used several different climate modelling approaches and observations," she told BBC News.
"And in all our methods, we find the same thing; we cannot model a heatwave like this without the anthropogenic signal
Meanwhile, H Sterling Burnett gives us the full facts at the Federalist website:
Much has been made about the well-above-average temperatures the Great White North has experienced this year and during the winter of 2015. For example, The Washington Post ran a story on December 20 titled “Pre-Christmas melt? North Pole forecast to warm 50 degrees above normal Thursday.”
Undoubtedly, the most vocal and least careful proponents of the theory that human use of fossil fuels is causing climate change will seize on this isolated fact as proof anthropogenic climate change is occurring. Some of them already made such claims in late November, when the temperatures in the Arctic were also well above average for that time of year.
In a November Live Science story, University of Rutgers professor Jennifer Francis said:
The Arctic has been in uncharted territory pretty much all year long, ever since last fall. … The loss of the sea ice, the increased melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the thawing of permafrost, the changes in the weather patterns, the rising sea level – it’s all consistent with our expectations for the response of the climate system to increases in greenhouse gases. It’s been totally expected.
The problem is, as a careful reading of The Washington Post story reveals, while temperatures in the Arctic are relatively high, high temperatures, while not the norm, are also not unusual. That’s because the kind of weather patterns that have caused the past two years of warmth have happened once or twice each decade at least since the 1950s, according to a recent paper that will appear in the influential journal Nature.
The Weather Constant Is Change
In the middle of 2016, the world emerged from an unusually powerful El Niño, which had raised ocean temperatures well above average. The El Niño has been replaced by a La Niña, which has contributed to swiftly cooling land temperatures, but it takes time for the latent heat contained in the ocean to dissipate.
Simultaneously, snow swept over Eurasia at the fastest pace on record in October. This snowfall caused cooler temperatures that, when combined with an extreme high-pressure system that formed in Siberia in October and persisted for more than a month, shifted the jet stream, pushing milder air toward the Arctic. The jet-stream shift, combined with low-pressure systems in the Pacific and Atlantic, kept temperatures relatively high and prevented extensive sea ice from forming. The low sea-ice levels further contributed to warmer temperatures.
Low sea ice and high Arctic temperatures are not a consequence of human-caused global warming. They result from the same natural factors that have controlled weather in the Arctic and around the world since the beginning of time. Nature, not human-produced greenhouse-gas emissions, is responsible for the “melting” North Pole, as well as the deep freeze that has been occurring over the past month throughout much of Asia, Siberia, and even parts of the United States.
As Ryan Maue, a meteorologist with WeatherBell Analytics, told The Washington Post, the large Arctic storms that drew mild air into the Arctic in 2015 and 2016 are “part and parcel of Atlantic weather variability.”
In an October 2016 Nature Geoscience study, researchers running climate-model simulations against 600 years of climate records “found no evidence of Arctic sea-ice loss having impacted Eurasian surface temperature. … We conclude that the observed cooling over central Eurasia was probably due to a sea-ice-independent internally generated circulation pattern.”
This finding was seemingly confirmed in an October Geophysical Research Letters paper, which finds shifts in large-scale, regional Atlantic and Pacific Ocean circulation patterns are likely responsible for both sea-ice loss in the Arctic and more frequent cold winters in Europe recently.
http://thefederalist.com/2016/12/23/nobody-needs-freak-north-poles-higher-temps-right-now/
For some reason the BBC forgot to mention that Siberia has been in the grip of some of the coldest weather in recent weeks, with temperatures tumbling to minus 79F, breaking all previous cold records.
What’s behind the record cold snap? A high-pressure system has settled over the North Pole, which is pushing Arctic air further south than normal. While some in the media are quick to blame #Climate Change, it’s actually just weather. When the polar jet stream dips down far enough, it can bring record-breaking temps to otherwise moderate areas.
As the“Siberian Times,” pointed out, this was not the week when there was any evidence of global warming occurring in western Siberia.
http://us.blastingnews.com/news/2016/12/bone-chilling-temps-sink-to-80-degrees-f-in-siberia-shattering-records-001346871.html
