It is often helpful to understand the meteorological situation, especially when thinking about the potential for climate change.
The Northwest experienced a very warm/dry period at the end of the year. There is no doubt about that.
But the opposite is happening east of the Rockies, where snow and record cold are on the horizon.
Check out this morning’s map of minimum temperatures across the US (click to expand). Temperatures dropped for teens in the upper plains and was as low as MINUS 26 in the Colorado Rockies.
Some positions have daily record lows and some have MONTHLY record lows (see below).
So how can the East of the country have a historic cold while the Northwest is much warmer than usual?
The answer is that the upper level wave pattern has become amplified, with a high in the West and a low in the East (see upper level map for this morning at 5am)
There is no evidence that such amplification has anything to do with global warming.
Is the globe 1-2F warmer due to increasing amounts of greenhouse gases? Entirely possible.
But does global warming explain the extremely cold and warm events that the United States has recently experienced?
The answer is clearly no, with a wealth of scientific literature to support this claim.
