Why Is It So Cold?
November 19, 2014
Assistant Editor
The northeast corner of the United States is currently going through a real-life version of the movie Frozen, except not uplifting: Homes are iced over, enormous snow walls have trapped people inside Walmarts, and the region is experiencing what the Weather Channel called "one of the longest sub-freezing spells on record for the month of November." It's so cold outside that people are dying—as of today, one in New Hampshire, one in Michigan, and at least five in New York.
And it doesn't appear to be relenting, either. Washington DC announced a weather emergency yesterday in anticipation of even colder temperatures. In Buffalo, which set an all-time, nationwide record for snowfall in a 24-hour period this month, people are posting photos of their doors sealed shut by snow. Casper, Wyoming, broke a record with a temperature of minus 27 degrees on Wednesday.
So why is all this happening? I asked Dr. Jin-Ho Yoon, a climate scientist at the Atmospheric Sciences and Global Change Division Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, what was causing all of the extreme cold weather. He said climate change might be to blame for at least some of it.
The big question here is whether this extreme weather is manmade, and Yoon said that it's hard to say for sure. Since there's so much variability in the climate, there's no way to definitively say which weather events are the result of human interference and which are the result of wholly natural causes. And, Yoon adds, there hasn't been enough scientific research about extreme cold fronts to make a strong argument about their possible connect to climate change.
"There are two potential causes: One is that the reduction of the Arctic sea ice can amplify the polar vortex," he said. In other words, as the sea ice melts, freezing-cold air escapes from the Arctic and travels elsewhere. Yoon co-authored a recent study on the subject that pointed out that many of these cold spells tend to happen just after sea levels drop in the Arctic.
When you look at the forecast on NOAA—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—it actually looks as though the northeastern United States is poised to be warmer than average this winter.
Vice is an innovative and new-aged news broadcasting company. This article really shocked me because they're saying climate change is not yet for sure all caused by humans and the increase of human activity contributing to global warming and climate change is still not for sure. I definitely disagree with this article because there has been sufficient research and scientific data regarding the impacts which humans have on the climate and quality of air. Vice, you've let me down.
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