Originally Posted by
Hotel Tango
Climate has never been a stable entity since day 1. Climate has changed constantly over the centuries and did so long before man could be held accountable for those changes.
Beautifully crafted strawman. Who
said that climate doesn't change all the time?
But to paraphrase 777Nine, what a strange thing that
this (sudden massive Arctic melt, whatever) is happening on a Gargantuan Scale
just after the Industrial Revolution and an unprecedented population explosion. Mighty coincidental.
Originally Posted by
SOPS
First it was global warming. Then it’s was climate change. And now it’s a climate crisis? Spare me.
Don't worry. It's probably too late already.
Water pilot makes an excellent point. Same stark evidence where I live -- a wide continent and an ocean away. When I first moved to these parts four decades ago, you could go up to the Mont Blanc glacier on the ancient cog railway and amble down to the thing. Since then they've had to build a freaking cable car from the station up there down to the glacier, then it kept retreating so now it's additional metal stairways every year. (Only the fittest survive the climb back up.) And they've conscientiously painted each year of the retreat on the bare rock. Pretty graphic.
Again ---- funny old case of synchronicity that this should be happening
just now in this era of truly massive consumption of fossil fuels. SUCH a coincidence.
Anyway, to the thread topic, I haven't a clue, and whoever said probably none of us can speak with authority on this is certainly right. Though generally speaking, more energy in the system (extreme weather) would make more turbulence unsurprising, I
suppose.
What I've read is that the jet stream is generally weakening because what drives it is the stark interface between arctic and tropical air masses. When the Arctic was all frozen up, the air above it was Cold, collapsed in on itself. So the atmosphere (let's say troposphere) there was compact. Contrast this with the tropics, where the sun drives everything to tremendous heights. So there was always a slope downwards from equator to pole (Why else would wind want to blow north in the northern hemisphere, Coriolis notwithstanding)?
Now, with rapidly heating poles (bare, radiation-absorbing rock instead of reflecting ice) you have the "ice-albedo positive feedback loop" that is the lifting upper limit of the polar troposphere and flattening the slope. The jet stream is weakening and starting to meander, like the stream from a garden hose with the water pressure radically reduced. So it meanders down south in eastern North America in winter and you have -40° in Chicago (and the climate-deniers say "See?!? What'd I tell ya!!") and then meanders north last month, bringing tropical air to Alert, a Canadian military base and the world's most northerly settlement. They had temperatures in the mid-20s celsius, whereas usually they're lucky to get much above 5° in July.
That's what I've read, anyway.