But who allows principles to get in the way of sales? Certainly not the NYT, so perhaps it is unreasonable to expect its advertising base to behave any better.

There’s going to be SOMEWHERE, though as time goes on you’ll have to pick a smaller and smaller region of space and time to manage this, that has the “coldest $PERIOD ever”.

That cold snap was due to the f-up of the arctic. It was, IIRC, 20-30C warmer than normal at that time. And the big thing that keeps the polar jet running, and therefore the polar air at the poles, is the huge temperature difference of a frozen surface solid and on moving keeping the cold dense air at the poles.

But without the ice, the ocean moves much easier and it can warm the air more than the ice would have and reduce the cold temperatures, making it easier to mix and less dense than the temperate or returning polar airmass, so therefore it would get much much further south than it used to.

IIRC too, the other side of the USA was seeing near-summer temps…

When the air moves around, it’s a little like moving an air lump under the newly laid wallpaper.

DL: Good question, and the answer is very interesting.

The heat wave and the cold snap were both caused by the same outcome of global warming as we are seeing it today.

Interestingly, Dr. Rahmstorf is a key member of the team that has figured this out. The idea, briefly, is that the existence and nature of the jet streams is a function of the differential in heat between the equator and the polls. Global warming has caused a change in that differential, and this has caused the jet streams to set up a curvy, slower moving, and generally persistent pattern, which in turn changes weather patterns dramatically. A given area of the Northern (and probably southern, but the research has not addressed that) hemisphere can experience persistent warmth, or cold, or wet, or dry, for a much longer than usual period of time, including the movement of either very cold air south or very warm air north.

See this: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2017/03/28/global-warming-has-and-will-continue-to-cause-extreme-weather-new-research/

I was just curious then what is different about these two situations since they are both addressing specific periods in time instead of trends, since the heat wave is attributed to global warming but the cold snap (I think) isn’t related to it. The article I read about the cold snap attributed it to a stubborn jet stream, but is there something different then about the causes of the European heat wave? How do we know that the European heat wave was a result of global warming as opposed to actually having been caused by other factors that apparently caused the cold spell?

I suspect there is something more scientific going on to differentiate these two events and was curious as to what those differences are, since at a thousand-foot surface level they seem inconsistent. I would think the professor, again based on my surface understanding of the science, would have better used the examples of the problems caused by rising sea levels, which is a result of a global warming trend, rather than attributing the casualty count of one specific heat wave to global warming.