The US may be about to turn blue in the next couple of months, just not in the political sense. It's good news for those who enjoy colder winters, as they may be here for awhile as a side effect of climate change,
particularly Arctic ice loss:
As strange as it sounds, Kim believes the intense cold air outbreaks in recent winters across Europe, Asia, and North America are, in his words, “a side effect of global warming.” Building on results released in the new paper and his interpretation of other researchers’ findings, here’s his best guess of what’s going on. Abnormally warm waters in the tropical Atlantic travel up the Gulf Stream toward Europe in the late summer and fall months, motivating exceptional sea ice melt in the Barents-Kara seas north of Scandinavia. When that area is ice free, the open water releases heat into the atmosphere during November and December, and sets up an anomalous blocking pattern over the Ural Mountains.
By midwinter, as more and more heat is being transferred to the Arctic, the troposphere and stratosphere can link up, destabilizing the polar vortex, weakening the jet stream, and sending waves of cold air southward. Call it a grand unifying theory of the polar vortex.
But if you're a warm weather person or don't care for winter sports, fear not! If enough ice melts, a whole 'nother, unpredictable pattern will probably dominate.
- Really weird ocean critters!
- We know that pterosaurs got huge near the end of the Cretaceous. There's even some, albeit scant evidence, for a variant that might have been more like an air-whale. But the ones we have decent remains from got pretty damn big.
- BTW, I'm sorry if this SciSat seems a little rushed, but it rained really hard here in Austin and that's now so rare, I guess anyway, that my cable and intertrons went out for two days.
- Hey, guess who hates real science and likes that good Old Testament creationism?
- Last but certainly not least, the satire Nobel Prizes are out. Science Marches ON!
NEUROSCIENCE PRIZE [CHINA, CANADA]: Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, and Kang Lee, for trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.