It’s cold out there
Right now, it is very cold in the central and eastern United States. Minneapolis has been in the news (for this as well as the bad sort of ice), but it’s not just there. The Mayor of New York has warned locals about a major snowstorm (and suggested it would be a good time to stay home and borrow the e-book or audiobook of Heated Rivalry from the city libraries). There’s freezing weather in parts of Texas that are really not built to handle it.
Various people, as usual, have said the cold weather refutes global warming.
As you all know, the issue with global warming is that it’s global (there’s a hint in the name) rather than local. I always recommend looking at global temperature patterns. Here’s the global temperature anomaly, from Climate Reanalyzer, at the University of Maine
The map is based on today’s weather forecast around the world, averaged over 24 hours and compared to the average for the same day of the year from 1979 to 2000. As you can see, it’s unusually cold in the USA. It’s also unusually cold in a band across Asia. On the other hand, it’s unusually warm in Greenland and the far north of North America and in Siberia.
This image shows a view around the north pole
You can see here the problem is that the cold that belongs up in the Arctic has slipped down over Asia and North America. There isn’t extra cold in the world, it’s just in unusual places. This sort of unusual movement of north polar air is perfectly consistent with global warming models.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »