The Polar Vortex

We here in Colorado (at 7,900 feet) are in the midst of a cold snap, with temperatures in the below-zero range. Typically this time of year in our state we enjoy daytime temperatures in the thirties, though often with sub-freezing at night. This morning as I stepped outside our garage to deliver some recyclables to the bin, I was hit with what is called an “Artic blast”, and that is actually a correct label. Such cold air as we currently have is unnatural for our area, and does indeed originate in the Arctic.

This post represents my current understanding of the phenomenon. I grew up in Billings, Montana, and remember Christmases, though not accurately, only anecdotally. One year my friends and my brother were out in the street in front of our house in shirtsleeves playing kickball. Another year my older brother was taking me skiing, and we arose before sunrise to below-zero temperatures. The vehicle we borrowed from our uncle for the trip, an IH Scout, would not even turn over, much less start. Just as well, as my winter clothes would not have sustained me that day.

Every year in winter (and on every planet with an atmosphere) the rotation of our Earth creates (in our case) counterclockwise winds around the Arctic, two of them, one by the troposphere, one by the stratosphere. These winds are known as the “polar vortexes”, and vary in strength from time to time. Heat produced in the tropics is naturally transported north by various mechanisms, including air, ocean currents, and transport in the tropo- and strato-sphere. (Hurricanes and tsunamis are heat-transport mechanisms, always moving poleward.) When the vortexes are strong, that air does not penetrate the Arctic, and as a result we have warm winters in the Northern Hemisphere.* Ergo, our shirtsleeves that Christmas.

On the other hand, if the vortexes are weak, then that warm air will invade the Arctic, forcing frigid air down low, where it escapes and creates a very cold Northern Hemisphere winter.

The purple/magenta band on the above images shows the current polar escape. It illustrates why I saw cold and snow yesterday as I tuned in on football games in Philadelphia and Buffalo. As Arctic blasts go, this one is mild, that is, they have been in the recent past much more severe. I think it was 2022 when such a blast reached down to Texas, causing their windmills to seize, paralyzing them in cold. Natural gas, which they use as a backup, cannot easily be turned on and off – it takes a few days, so the state had to buy whatever gas they could, and prices soared. (Climate Alarmists, of course, blamed the 2022 Texas fiasco on natural gas rather than windmills.)

As I grasp the situation right now, and subject to better understanding as I progress, the Arctic and transport of equatorial heat to there is the primary driver of what we call “climate”, and not CO2. We are in the grips right now of what I call “egg spurts”, or charlatans masquerading as scientists, aka “experts”. They are driven by a political agenda, and therefore do not even try to represent real climate and how it really works. They reduce everything to CO2, a harmless fertilizer gas. If CO2 indeed causes warming, it is inconsistent as hell, and even if so the result is barely perceptible on human skin. Water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas. CO2 shrinks to irrelevancy beside it. (Therefore, Climate Alarmists invented the expression “enhanced CO2 effect” to magnify it, turning it into our nemesis.

Why CO2? They don’t say, but it is not hard to fathom. The source of most of the CO2 we are putting in the atmosphere (that part not done by nature itself) is fossil fuels. They are our lifeblood. They give us warmth and wealth, food and medicine, industry and advanced materials for construction, and really nice machines we call automobiles (ICE’s) to move us about. Without fossil fuels, our lives get worse, our numbers shrink. Since that is the result, and many of the leaders of the Climate Alarmist movement are not stupid, that can only be their objective.

It is truly a misanthropic agenda.

But that aside, polar vortexes exist and have been a large part of our climate extremes, both in heating and cooling, for millions of years. When I was a kid the weather forecasters called them “Canadian fronts”, as if that country, rather than suffering them first, caused them.

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*The Arctic in winter receives no sunlight and is so cold that there is no water vapor, and so no greenhouse effect. As a result, heat arriving there from the tropics is sent into outer space via outgoing longwave radiation. Alarmists claim that the Arctic warming experienced in winter is a result of CO2 and global warming, but it is not. It is merely a cooling mechanism for the planet, a heat exchange system.