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Tim Palmer, a climate scientist and professor at the University of Oxford in the U.K., has published a somewhat controversial Perspective piece in the journal Science. In it, he theorizes that heavy thunderstorms in the western tropical Pacific (due to global warming) this past winter caused changes to the flow pattern of the jet stream, which resulted in the "polar vortex" that chilled the northern part of North America for the first four months of 2014. The winter of 2014 was cold in the U.S., of that there was no doubt. Subzero temperatures became the norm and heating bills skyrocketed. At the time, very few who experienced it were blaming it on global warming, but that may very well have been the cause anyway, Palmer suggests--despite the fact that global temperatures haven't been rising lately.
The abstract (and link to paywalled journal article) can be found at: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6186/803
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Immerman on Sunday May 25 2014, @03:09PM
Sounds bogus to me. What mechanism would transfer the heat into space that quickly? Convection is out, because the air never leaves the Earth. Conduction is out, because there's no material up there to conduct into. That leaves radiation - and while pumping warm air above most the insulating greenhouse gasses would certainly accelerate the rate of radiative heat losses in that air, the amount of air involved would be miniscule, and the rate of heat loss only moderately higher. If the storms covered most of the planet for decades the cumulative effect might eventually become a problem, but that's not very likely.
As for rapidly freezing things in the Arctic, you don't need any special mechanisms - somebody/thing dies and gets buried in snow during a serious -30* snowstorm and they'll be hard-frozen before you know it - and such weather is hardly rare in the Arctic. If they're wading through deep snowdrifts at the time they might not even fall over.