It came on Saturday, courtesy of the Washington Post (Scientists say Arctic warming could to blame for blasts of extreme cold). I knew it was coming. They say that our recent Arctic blast is caused by … climate change.
The article is typical of this kind of nonsense, full of qualifiers, as in “…understanding any link between planetary warming and extreme cold remains a work in progress,” and …observations of jet stream patterns have not confirmed the hypothesis.” and “there’s still a lot of mixed feelings in the scientific community, though there is some tantalizing evidence that there is some ‘there’ there.”
What is this “tantalizing evidence”? They do not say. They are vague except in explaining that there is an area of low pressure normally parked over the Arctic, surrounded by bands of fast-flowing air. When the winds are strong, the band is tight, and the cold air is kept in check. Often in winter, the vortex acts like a wobbling top, and Arctic air escapes and invades areas south, like Canada and the Northern US.
I just learned yesterday that Dave Foreman had died last September at the age of 75. This got me to thinking and wondering about him, how genuine he was, and how real the group he helped found, Earth First!, was. I long suspected that EF! was an Intel front, used to demonize real environmental groups, a large blackwashing effort. The group was certainly divisive. I remember sitting at a restaurant up in northwest Montana, where a cooler sported a bumper sticker that said
