Climate Change and the cold snap in Texas

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It looked like the whole Northern hemisphere was freezing last week. While my niece was able to walk on the sea for the first time in her life near Helsinki, the thermometer hit -18 degrees in Dallas, last Tuesday.

Is that global warming? Well, maybe. It looks like the polar vortex got a bit crazy. In a “normal” situation the polar vortex is pretty stable. It is a cold mass of air that spins around the poles in the stratosphere (8 to 50km of altitude). It is contained by the jet stream, a ring of very fast wind that also belongs to the lower stratosphere. All this is inherently stable because the pole area is cold and has a low pressure, and it is surrounded by warmer air at a higher pressure.

Climate change causes the poles to warm up a lot faster than the rest. So the jet stream weakens, gets all wavy and can’t contain the polar vortex any more. Some bits of it can even separate and wander South as far as Texas. So they get a cold snap, courtesy of global warming.

Climate change is way too big to be explained here. But if you are interested, Sir John Houghton wrote a complete briefing about it some time in the 90’s. He presented it to Margaret Thatcher, who then “shocked first the Royal Society then the UN with speeches crackling with environmental passion” (BBC News, 8/4/2013). An excellent read.

References

Polar vortex:

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02022018/cold-weather-polar-vortex-jet-stream-explained-global-warming-arctic-ice-climate-change/

Sir John Houghton’s briefing

http://www.gci.org.uk/Documents/Global-Warming-the-Complete-Briefing.pdf

Margaret Thatcher:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22069768

 


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