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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) by Reziac on Wednesday May 28 2014, @12:55PM
No, but the total mass of data does disprove it... if you stop cherrypicking only the most recent century (except for those pesky most-recent 15 years, of course) and realise that the total record has always gone up and down like a yoyo, and that we're presently in an unusually warm bit of an extended cold snap, expected to become another ice age within 1000 years or so. Ice ages are not good. Warming is better, if you want to keep eating.
Personally I think the AGW crowd -- the very definition of "useful idiots" -- have fallen into an "Earth First" type trap, which looks like sound environmental policy on the surface, but could have the "unintended consequence" of human extinction: Just two degrees of cooling could plunge the globe into a permanent ice age. Yet there are scientists who want to do cloud seeding to cool the planet.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.