As temperatures in the U.S. plummeted this week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration made sure to remind Americans that climate change isn't out of the ordinary.
NASA Climate pointed to the long-term trends since humans began pouring greenhouse gases into the Earth's atmosphere.
Just because it's cold for a day, a week, or a season, it doesn't mean global warming is over. All months have been warming since recordkeeping began in 1880, including December. The main cause: human activities. Stay tuned next month for the Dec. 2022 data point. pic.twitter.com/IPYiKMWa9B
— NASA Climate (@NASAClimate) December 22, 2022
According to NASA Climate, the rate of change being experienced since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution is 10 times faster than the average rate of warming. The greenhouse effect was established in the late 19th century.
The atmospheric gases that have trapped more of the Sun's energy in the Earth system have been produced by human activities.
The impulse to deny climate change is tempting, but it's also worth remembering that the Earth's warming is a global phenomenon and that while one area may experience frigid temperatures, the planet as a whole continues to heat up.
Here is your friendly winter reminder that usually in this day and age when North America is frigidly shivering, most of the rest of the world experiences above average temperatures. I wonder why?🤔 pic.twitter.com/jF6TqerGgi
— Guy Walton (@climateguyw) December 23, 2022
More than 170 people died and 4.5 million homes and businesses were left without power as a result of a polar vortex that hit the Great Plains in February of 2021. There are studies linking the winter outbreak to climate change. Due to the fact that the Arctic is warming faster than any other region on Earth, higher temperatures have been shown to weaken the behavior of polar vortices so that they wander south over the continental U.S.
Those seemingly counterintuitive findings have done little to quell the climate change denialism that is prevalent on social media in the winter months, promoting versions of the view "If global warming is actually happening, how come it's so cold outside?" The most famous example of faulty logic was in February of 2015.
The chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee asked the chair if he knew anything about the warmest year on record. There is a snowball just outside. It is very cold out. It's very un-seasonable.
The planet will experience cold winters for decades to come because of the rise in atmospheric CO2 and the decrease in sea ice.
"The bottom line is that not only are extreme cold events not inconsistent with the 1 degree Celsius of warming that we've already had, we can expect them to continue in the foreseeable future," Noah said.
The low temperatures that swept over Canada this week can be included. The longer-term trend shows that the number of record high daily temperatures continues to outnumber the number of record lows by 2:1. According to computer models, the disparity will grow to 50:1 by the end of the century.
There is a temptation to dismiss the reality of climate change with more than one million homes without power in the U.S. A wave of climate denialism has coalesced on the social networking site.
Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, has been alarmed by the increase in climate denialism on social media.
Mann told E&E News that social media was a primary medium for dissemination of the facts about the climate crisis. It becomes very difficult to communicate these facts, which is exactly what bad actors like Russia and Saudi Arabia want, by infecting the online discourse with massive troll and bot armies.
The effect of climate denialism can be felt at holiday gatherings and in the halls of Congress by those who claim that cold weather proves climate change isn't true. Climate scientists like Peter Gleick are familiar with these views.
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