Polar Vortex Re-ignites Global Warming Debate

January 10, 2014

It’s been a week of whiplash weather, with temperatures in the mid-50s this weekend, just days after record-breaking cold in much of the country. The “polar vortex” brought temperatures 30 to 50 degrees below what’s typical in many places. Schools were canceled because such low temperatures could be dangerous.

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh said the term “polar vortex” was a hoax, cooked up by liberals, to serve their global warming agenda. Limbaugh was lambasted by everyone from Forbes magazine, to Slate.com, to Al Roker. The nation’s most famous TV weatherman pulled out an old textbook, showing that “polar vortex” is a legitimate term that’s been around for decades. It’s where the arctic air resides, generally around the polar regions.

But the question remains, was man-made climate change to blame for the bitter cold?

“Yeah, at this point, this is early research, and it is just a theory, it’s not widely accepted,” said Jeff Masters, meteorologist at the popular website, Weather Underground. 

Masters explained that much of the U.S. got an arctic blast of an unusual movement of the jet stream. The jet stream normally flows west to east. It acts as a barrier, locking seriously cold air into the polar regions, and keeping it away from most of the U.S. But as the arctic ice melts and northern temperatures heat up, there’s less of a temperature difference between the far north and the U.S.

“And when you don’t have a temperature difference, you don’t require the wind to blow as strongly, to try and equalize the temperature difference and the pressure difference, that exists between the two locations. So now the jet stream isn’t constrained to flow very fast west to east. It can kind of slow down, take big meandering loops,” said Masters.

Masters said last week, the jet stream dipped down to the south, making way for that arctic air to blast the U.S. Some scientific journals, such as Oceanography, have already published papers on this theory. But Masters said there needs to be more research before climate change change can be blamed for the southern movement of the polar vortex.