"Good grief, it's like talking to a freaking wall!(The Mills River Progressive, "Earth to Scientific Illiterates: Winter Does NOT Mean No Global Warming!"). That is a very timely and very astute observation.
...Global warming is actually expected to increase “heavy precipitation in winter storms,” and for the northern hemisphere, there is evidence that these storms are already more frequent and intense, according to the draft U.S. National Climate Assessment....
When it’s winter on Earth, it’s also summer on Earth … somewhere else. Thus, allow us to counter anecdotal evidence about cold weather with more anecdotal evidence: It’s blazing hot in Australia, with temperatures, in some regions, set to possibly soar above 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the coming days....
Also see this."
It is a subject Dredd Blog has also alluded to (Snowpocalypse Goes Up & Comes Down) at similar times and/or events.
The reality of the arctic cold incursion is that we have yet another indicator of a damaged global climate system:
The strife caused by the extreme weather is being blamed on a “polar vortex", a spinning wind that in normal years has a beneficial effect in that it keeps sub-zero air trapped above the North Pole. A weakened polar vortex has allowed the trapped air to spill out of the Arctic and hurtle south in an anti-clockwise movement across the face of the US.(Guardian, emphasis added). We have discussed the issue in the sense of systems science in previous posts, pointing out that a system has characteristics:
Just why the polar vortex has proved to be too weak to contain the cold air this winter will be a matter for intense scientific study and debate for some time to come. The phenomenon might in large part be explained by the natural changes in climate that occur in the Arctic in winter, including the North Atlantic Oscillation that has a dominant impact on wind patterns and storm tracks in the region.
But Noaa, a federal agency, has also floated the possibility that a reduction in summer sea ice cover caused by climate change could be a factor behind the weakening of the polar vortex. That would have the paradoxical effect that while Arctic waters are getting warmer, North America experiences much colder snaps such as the present severe weather as a result of Arctic air spilling out from the North Pole and moving south.
All single weather events are systemic indicators of the global climate system which any single weather event is an integral part of.(False Climate Change Meme Infects The President). Reductionist arguments are not the way to deal with systemic problems of a damaged system (Government Climate Change Report - 3).
That global climate system which has been damaged by global warming creates our local weather, including every single weather event, therefore all single weather events are part of the global climate system that has been damaged by global warming pollution.
We can only have an impact on our local weather, or on any single weather event, by fixing the global climate system that has been damaged by pollution.
A competent, world-wide, concerted effort ... in other words a macro response, is what we need to accomplish.