According to Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, the climate crisis has caused extreme weather events and deadly heatwaves.
Climate change is often associated with extreme weather events such as the Hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast over the weekend, knocking out power to over a million people, leaving many people dead, or the deadly heatwaves in the Pacific north-west earlier in the summer.
Scientists have struggled for years to understand the link between extreme winter weather events like snowfalls and unusual cold snaps in the northern hemisphere and Arctic warming or Arctic amplification. This is one of the hallmarks global warming.
This connection was made clearer by the new report, Linking Arctic variability, change, and extreme winter weather in America.
The authors claimed that this Arctic change increased the chance of the North Pole's tightly spinning winds, also known as the Arctic stratospheric Polar vortex, being stretched, and thus increasing the likelihood of extreme weather events in the US.
Judah Cohen, one the paper authors, said, "I know it's counterintuitive. I think that's why there's so much resistance to our idea." How could a warmer Earth lead to more extreme cold? That's what we were arguing.
Cohen is also a visiting scientist at MIT, and serves as the director of seasonal forecasting for Atmospheric, Environmental Research. He explained that he was prompted to do his work by an extreme snowstorm in Texas in Feb. Many people died in the region as a result of subfreezing temperatures, and over 4 million homes and businesses were without power.
Cohen stated that he believes this paper was the only one that showed the connection between Arctic change and the cold wave. He also explained the physical mechanism behind the stretched Polar Vortex.
Cohen said that if the polar vortex looks nice and circular it is an indication that all the Arctic cold air has been bottled up. It stretches in this way, so a portion goes to Asia and another part goes towards Eastern North America. That's what we were seeing. That's what was happening with the Texas cold waves.
This report was compiled by the authors after conducting observational analyses over the past 40 years of the stratospheric vortex. They also did numerical modeling using some of the same models that experts used to predict weather events such as Hurricane Ida.
The future could see the findings of the study have an important impact on warnings prior to extreme cold weather events.
According to the report, the identification of the precursor pattern for stretching events could potentially increase the warning time for cold extremes in Asia and Canada.
It may also be a way for policymakers to start making important, potentially life-saving, arrangements ahead of the next major storm, such as those in Texas.
The report said that preparing for severe winter weather will only make it more costly. This was evident during the Texas cold waves of February 2021.
