With Canada and most of north central USA still stuck in a "polar vortex", Donald Trump did his usual, "What the hell is going on with Global Waming [sic]? Please come back fast, we need you!", which makes most people want to scream, and a certain limited number of American Republicans snicker or guffaw, depending on their personalities.
Well, Donald, this is it. This is exactly what you get with global warming: messed up weather.
The polar vortex, a swirling circulating mass of very cold air, is nothing new. It always hovers over the poles. What is new is the frequency with which it ventures further south in recent years. And this happens because climate change is disrupting the jet stream, the normally smooth and stable air flow that sweeps west to east acoss North America and the North Atlantic. Because the Arctic is warming two to three times as fast as the rest of the planet due to climate change (according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the jet stream can become wavy or kinked, and the polar vortex it normally protects us from can become split. Part of it can separate off as a separate little polar vortex, and this is what is currently hovering over north central North America.
This is causing some extreme weather eliciting an excess usage of the word "unprecedented", one of the press' favourite words, with temperatures approaching record lows in parts of Minnesota and North Dakota (windchill readings of around -50°F, which is about -45°C) and even colder north of the border, along with some extended and record-breaking snowfalls.
Now, I don't expect Donald Trump to underestand anything as complex as climate and weather - he apparently has problems with some much simpler concepts - but he does need to try. If it helps, here are a couple of kids, aged 8 and 10, explaining some of the concepts to Mr. Trump.
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