Here’s The Guardian’s online headline: “Weather tracker: world braces for sudden stratospheric warming event.” *
As one who lives at the bottom of the troposphere, I’m not worried. The stratosphere is, after all way up there. (Anybody see a Chinese balloon lately?) The stratosphere is one of four general zones in our atmosphere, topping the troposphere (the zone of mixing or “weather”) and underlying the mesosphere and thermosphere. Most people have never been there. It’s bottommost boundary with the troposphere varies in an inverse relationship in altitude mostly by latitude; the boundary is higher in equatorial (low) latitudes and lower in polar (high) latitudes, ranging from about six miles to 12. Yeah, as I said, it’s way up there.
The online article by Matt Andrews suggests by the use of “braces for” at the outset that a sudden atmospheric warming event is a coming catastrophe. Typical and nothing new. We’ve been hearing for twenty years that imminent worldwide weather disasters approach or occur because of climate change. What were we given about two decades ago? End of the world in 2012, then 2020? Now when? “We have only eight years left…” The sky is falling, or should I write “the stratosphere is falling”?
The troposphere is the zone of mixing, the lowest level of the atmosphere characterized by the vicissitudes we call “weather,” the state of the atmosphere in a locality at a certain time. I look outside my library window now to see gray late winter sky. If I opened that window, I would almost certainly feel the season’s average morning temperature at forty degrees north latitude some 300 miles inland. Sometimes it’s sunny and warmer “than usual.” Sometimes colder. The vicissitudes are not limited to one season. I’ve shivered in June and perspired in late winter.
In western Pennsylvania on Wednesday last, the temperature approached 70 degrees Fahrenheit under very strong winds. On Friday the mercury fell and approached 20 degrees Fahrenheit under strong breezes with snow flurries swirling in late afternoon. Sweating and freezing, I carried on some outside activities this past week. The wind chill on Friday chilled me. In the coming week, the fluctuation so typical of spring and a sudden warming event in the troposphere will drive the temperatures once again to 70 for a day; and then the temperatures will crash by 25 or 30 degrees F. Big deal or no deal at all? It’s weather. It’s late winter. It’s the end of one polar vortex and the beginning of another, both rather short-lived. Cold and warm air masses meet, wage a war at their mutual boundary, sometimes cause tornadoes, and generally make people say, “What can you do; it’s the weather.”
Those in the media have been brainwashed to believe the swings toward higher or lower temperatures or toward humid or arid conditions portend the end of the planet and all its life. In truth, a warmer troposphere would ideally make the stratosphere’s lowest altitude rise; that’s what happens in the equatorial zone. The colder and more dense air of the polar troposphere is a bit squashed, so the stratosphere starts at a lower altitude, but the air’s destiny isn’t written in stone; if it were, then we would seek a geologist for weather predictions.
For millennia we humans have had a Second Coming Complex. Almost all beliefs incorporate endings; after all, if there was a beginning, there is probably an ending. Remember Harold Camping? He predicted (prophesied) the end of the world for May 21, 2011. I know because I saw a large billboard with that message in Reno, Nevada, on May 22 that year. That I can write this blog more than a decade later indicates that his prophecy was incorrect. Harold wasn’t the first to predict “The End” (his own came two years later), and he definitely won’t be the last as people like Matt Andrews will take up the cry “Apophis is coming, Apophis is coming” in a decade or two. And haven’t Al Gore and Greta Thunberg been warning us about “The End.” Lord, protect us from the doomsayers—that is, until Doomsday. Harold Camping, instead of religion, you could have used climate as the basis of your prediction (prophecy?). That’s what Al Gore was using when you made your prediction about "The End," and Greta Thunberg uses it now under the aegis of Al.
From Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, through a few of the earliest psychoanalysts, and into our own experiences with nightmares, we know that dread storms the human mind and makes us shiver in anxiety. Sometimes, and usually when we least expect it, a frightening tornado of despair approaches every brain, maybe, as Dickens has Scrooge say, as a result of an “undigested piece of meat.” For so many journalists today, everything indicates a “climate disaster” because most of them are unaware of what Charles Lyell, echoing the Father of Geology James Hutton, called “uniformitarianism,” the principle that what occurs as geochemical and geophysical processes today had occurred before, and that just as streams flowing downhill in the past eroded their valleys, so streams now do the same (when they aren’t subject to structures that we build: dams and levees, for example). Just as “ice ages” and “interglacials” have come and gone over the past 2.5 million years, so they will come and go again, often driven by Earth’s wobble on its axis and the shape of its orbit, well known as Milankovitch Cycles. And in the process of chilling and heating, gases like water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane play a role that is enhanced or diminished by Earth’s albedo, including the reflectivity of both clouds and land, the latter sometimes covered by ice, sometimes by dark vegetation, sometimes by dust.
Fear sells newspapers and TV attention; fear sells politics; fear sells religion. Dread is in the air as much because of the constant stormy rhetoric of climate alarmists as it is because of deep-seated archetypes nested in our inner brains. Do I care what Matt and other reporters report because they are eager to tell a tale over-told? Whereas Matt's article is just a mote, it occurs in the context of a mountain of such articles. We’re all going to die because climate change is an “existential threat.” Even the President has said that, and we all know his expertise as professional truck driver, award winning university professor, top-of-his-class graduate, great speech writer, articulate politician, and whatever else pops into his head at the moment.
Oh! Look. The clouds are breaking outside my library window; the sun is brightening my woods; the weather is different just ten minutes into this writing. UV light strikes the ground and reradiates in IR light, unseen but no doubt not unfelt by the squirrels, birds, deer, and bugs outside. My world warms slightly this morning. Now that was unexpected; the prediction called for continued cloudiness. What’s going on? Is that what they call “weather”?
To give Matt some credit, I should note that he does say in his article, “It is important to note that not all SSW events are the same.” Golly, should that thought have influenced The Guardian’s editors to reframe the headline? Do we really need to “brace” for the coming change in the stratosphere and the end of a polar vortex? Have there not been polar vortexes before? Remember that it snowed in Miami on January 19, 1977. Even Freeport in the Bahamas saw a wet snow that January. Freeport, mind you. Freeport! The last time I was there was in a January; the weather was pleasantly warm.
It’s weather. Not climate. It’s often uncomfortable; sometimes very dangerous; but also pleasant at times. For ten thousand years the world has been in an interglacial warm period, sometimes interrupted by anomalous cold, such as during the Little Ice Age, and sometimes interrupted by warming as during the Medieval Warm Period. But you can rightly guess that not all years or seasons had predictable weather during the past ten millennia. Sweating and shivering is our lot—as far south as Miami and Freeport, it seems.
Every story seems to be tied to climate, from asteroids approaching to earthquakes in Turkey. In the minds of journalists, “If I can make a connection, I’ll write it. Who just wants a story about a cold or warm spell, a humid or dry spell that occurs in isolation? In my Pulitzer-desirous mind, I want to put a story in a larger context.” And that makes me wonder how entrapped the minds of the media are: They can see the world and its events only through a single topic, only from a single perspective.
When people hear repeatedly, “The science is settled” coming from “experts” and “self-proclaimed experts” their minds run to the default setting. The problem is that in a complex world, few people have the interest to peruse the volumes of research that by virtue of being on the periphery of climate studies, tend to add to the perception that “the science is settled.” And because individuals don’t live long enough to see climate swings driven by multiple causes in multiple areas, they tend to take shortcuts, sometimes at their own economic peril by accepting the “solution du jour,” such as electric vehicles, the demise of fossil fuels, and giant bird-killing windmills that produce electricity at higher costs and don’t work, as Texans discovered, on cold and windless days. And because those “in charge” have bought into the “settled science,” individuals across the world have lost the cheap energy they had in abundance and could have until non-fossil-fuel technologies demonstrate their value as replacements.
Once collective human brains get stuck on a perspective, they tend to stay stuck. That particularly applies to dread and to a pervasive anxiety fostered by those in news and entertainment media. Scare tactics, even subtle ones like “braces for” work. The Guardian’s editors seem to know that and use it to sell what they say. Sure, as I indicated, it's just one short article. But it isn't because it occurs as another addition to the mass of such articles that suggest climate change is responsible for...Well, you name it, and you'll probably find an article on it.
Of course, Matt might argue that “it’s just semantics”; don’t take it so seriously. “I saw a weather channel report and decided to turn it into an article. Boss liked it.” But then, isn’t everything said justified as “just semantics”? Even messages that tell us “Be afraid; be very afraid." Harold Camping, Al Gore, and Greta Thunberg were all correct; it’s just that they “got the date wrong.”
Want some advice? 1) Read through some of that IPCC research and its conclusions. 2) Read through articles, such as “Modulation of ice ages via precession and dust-albedo feedbacks” by Ralph Ellis and Michael Palmer.** 3) Suspect the motivation of those who take government and private money to jet off to exotic locales to discuss how the rest of the world is ruining the world or to go off to study how climate change is affecting the mating habits of puffins, penguins, and people. 4) Realize, as Freud realized about cigars, that sometimes it’s just weather.
Brace yourself. More such reports that try to tie weather to climate change are coming your way. Brace yourself for droughty or humid conditions, for storms, for ice and snow, and for heat waves. And as an aside, I’ll mention that as I write this, a winter weather advisory has been issued for the Midwest and the Northeast because a mass of cold air spilling out of Canada and into the United States will likely trigger snow, rain, and icy rain. Be afraid. Or just be prudent and dress for the weather of the day.
* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/17/weather-tracker-world-braces-for-sudden-stratospheric-warming-event
** https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674987116300305
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