Is global warming behind America’s snowstorms?

Is there any weather condition which cannot be blamed on anthropogenic global warming (AGW)? No, it seems, judging by the reaction in the US liberal press to the snowstorm which has engulfed much of the US over the past few days. According to Bloomberg it is all down to a loopier-than-normal jet stream, “the kind of event that could become more common as climate change accelerates”. A similar claim was made by Eric Mack, a correspondent on Forbes, who wrote this week that the poles are warming disproportionately and that, “studies [he didn’t say which ones] have shown that all this unusual and rapid warming in the north affects the jet stream in new and sometimes weird ways”. This week’s storm, he asserted, would soon come to be seen not as a once-in-a-generation event but as normal winter weather. The New York Times has made a similar claim, as has Britain’s Guardian – the latter of which subtly reversed its recently-acquired habit of using the term ‘global heating’ and went back to good old ‘climate change’ for the occasion.

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David Abulafia

Should this Anglo-Saxon drama have a diverse cast?

        Is global warming causing the temperature to plunge to minus 40 Celsius? No-one should dismiss something out of hand merely on the grounds that it seems counter-intuitive – the climate could, theoretically, throw up more intense cold weather spells at the same time as observing a general warming trend. It is just that there is compelling evidence to the contrary. For example, the IPCC’s sixth assessment report, published in 2021, cited a number of analyses showing that “cold spells have undergone a reduction in magnitude and intensity in all regions of North America”. In other words, the reality is not counter-intuitive at all. Generally, rising global temperatures have led to a lessening of cold extremes in North America; it is just that this week’s weather was an extreme, random event which occurred in spite of the general climatic trend.