Stormy Weather
or Climate Calamities
If you happened to read my post from a few weeks ago about the heat dome that killed everyone on the West Coast, you’re certainly aware of the dangers of climate change. If you are, you’re morbidly preoccupied by the fact that it’s going to kill us all. You’re completely on board with the settled science that proves we caused it. And if all that’s true, it won’t surprise you to know the heat dome was followed by arctic conditions and a blizzard forecast to kill everyone in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and in any geographic proximity to the Great Lakes.
This story from Fox Weather — “Arctic blast overspreads the Midwest and Great Lakes after monster blizzard slams millions” — broke the whole thing down in all its brutal lethality:
A life-threatening situation unfolded as a monstrous blizzard unleashed feet of snow and vicious wind gusts throughout the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes … while the lakes still have partial ice cover, the sharp drop in low-level temperatures created steep lapse rates … Combined with saturated air in the main snow-producing layer, this set the stage for intense snow bands to form.
The conditions in the Midwest were so severe some people we know in the Northeast (particularly Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island) died just from reading about them and from thinking about being outside in that cold. It’s almost as impossible to overestimate the effects of mass hysteria as it is to underestimate the danger of saturated air in the main snow-producing layer. EGAD!
The formal meteorological term for the phenomenon that produces drastically different climatic conditions in adjacent geographic areas is Normal Atmospheric Tensions Under Regional Elements (NATURE). We used to be warned about fooling with her. But that was in the less arrogant, meddlesome, and wealth-redistributing days before the formation of the IPCC and the emergence of Al Gore as a public nuisance.
Those days are long gone.
Our Man on the Street
To find out just how bad the monstrous blizzard and saturated air had gotten, we sent one of the climate scientists from O’Brien Meteorological Group (OMG) to Ice Floe, Wisconsin, to speak with Olov Johansson, who managed to survive the monstrous blizzard with the saturated air. What follows is an excerpt from their conversation:
OMG: Thank you for meeting with me, Olov.
OJ: Ja.
OMG: I’m curious. Is the second s in your last name silent?
OJ: Nej. The first.
OMG: I see. Well, Olov, what climate conditions do you think accounted for the recent weather conditions here?
OJ: It was cold, and it snowed.
OMG: What do you think contributed to the fact that it was so cold and so snowy?
OJ: It was winter.
OMG: Do you think it was climate change.
OJ: No. It was winter.
OMG: Do you think climate change had anything to do with it?
OJ: Yes. It changed from summer.
OMG: What do you say to people who contend the blizzard and its attendant conditions were attributable to climate change?
OJ: Nothing. I don’t talk to them.
OMG: If you did talk to them, what would you say to those who think extreme weather is attributable to global warming?
OJ: I’d tell ‘em to come live here next winter.
OMG: And what would you say to those who think people cause global warming and climate change?
OJ: I’d tell ‘em to bring as many of those folks as they could find up here next winter to warm things up.
OMG: Thank you, Olov. Do you have anything you’d like to ask me?
OJ: Ja. Could you ask Al Gore if he’s ever been here in the winter?
At the conclusion of the interview, Olov went back out on the ice to continue his fishing. He was wearing a t-shirt and shorts.
WTF, Batman?
I understand, for various reasons, people have vested interests in getting themselves lathered up over extreme weather. Meteorologists need to make a living. Some people have narratives to sell and wealth to redistribute. Other folks have lifelong commitments to monsters under their beds, boogeymen in their basements, and other fabricated sources of panic. But according to California Water Research (of all sources!), extreme heat in the western US combined with extreme cold in the Midwest during winter is a recognized warm West/cool East dipole.
The dipole is driven by wavy or amplified jet stream patterns, often involving persistent high-pressure ridges over the West and a trough downstream that allows Arctic air outbreaks into the Midwest and Eastern United States. It allows a kind of whiplash in which the West warms disproportionately, the Midwest and East see Arctic outbreaks, and people with agendas, politically driven narratives, and money at stake freak the hell out.
Similar dipole patterns occurred in 2013–2015 and 2018–2020, but either Al Gore was on vacation or we just weren’t as prone to getting worked up back then. A 4000-year paleoclimate perspective suggests such West-warm/East-cold patterns have natural precedents; however, the IPCC, the Democrat Party, and electronic, mainstream, and social media didn’t exist in those days. So, we generally found better things to do like be rational, live our lives, enjoy the seasonal changes in the weather, and save our horror and hysteria for slasher flicks and the Democrat Party’s attempts to … actually I don’t know what the hell the Democrat Party’s attempting to do. The powers of observation I refuse to relinquish tell me they don’t, either.
Here’s the deal, kids. We’re here. We’re too late to join the Heaven’s Gate cult. It wouldn’t make any difference anyway since Comet Hale-Bopp only comes around about every 2,533 years. And since the Heaven’s Gate crew boarded the comet on March 22, 1997, we don’t know if there’s any room for us anyway. That means we’ll have to find a way to recognize the climate of Earth is dynamic and ever-changing, live with it, try to hang in there until the year 4385 when Hale-Bipp comes around again, or find another cult (other than The Holy Church of Climate Change) to give us a reason to take ourselves out.
So, what say we all take a few deep breaths, appreciate nature, and sing a song.
Just as the world turns, so the seasons change — as do the variables that dictate the semblance of each from year to year, decade to decade, millenium to millenium. My skepticism began as I listened to the climate-change doofs proclaim that carbon dioxide, which keeps green things growing and producing the oxygen that we humans require to breathe, needed to be banished from our environment. But I realized that climate-change doofs were actually dumber than doofs when they declared cow farts to be an existential danger. That's just utterly stupid.