The Polar Vortex Is Acting Up

A blog post published January 16 explains how the stratospheric polar vortex has contributed to the extreme cold temperatures experienced recently in Canada and U.S.A. The polar vortex winds are 30 km above us over the Arctic. These winds are far above the tropospheric jet streams which are winds at about 9 km altitude. The polar vortex over the last two weeks was more disrupted at the lower levels, closer to the stratosphere-troposphere boundary. High pressure has been sitting in the troposphere over Greenland. The recent minor stratosphere warming may have reinforced this Greenland high pressure, which then drove a wedge into the stretched-out polar vortex in the lowest part of the stratosphere, splitting it into two lobes. This disturbance became just strong enough to fully reverse the winds of the polar vortex in the mid-stratosphere, causing a sudden stratospheric warming. The disturbance caused the cold air outbreak over North America. A disrupted polar vortex increases the odds that the tropospheric jet stream will stay shifted farther south, which increases the risk for cold air outbreaks. Other climate processes like the ongoing El Niño also impact the location of the jet stream throughout the winter.

Calgary’s minimum daily temperatures at the airport plunged from -15.4 °C on January 9 to -36.2 °C on January 14, 2024.

CO2 Is Not Pollution. It’s The Currency of Life

Joseph Fournier, a member of the CO2 Coalition, wrote an article about the benefits of CO2. He says that CO2 is not a pollutant, contrary to claims by the media and politicians. Fournier wrote “I seriously doubt the average person would accept this perspective, if they understood that CO2 is in fact a prerequisite of Life, and that global food production will expand by trillions of dollars in the coming decades as CO2 levels continue to rise.” Svante Arrhenius, the father of the enhanced greenhouse hypothesis wrote “By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid [i.e. CO2] in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind.” That is, Arrhenius argued that rising CO2 concentrations would benefit planet Earth and people.

We are experiencing the expanding plant kingdom, the acceleration of agricultural productivity and a stabilizing climate. The CO2 fertilization effect increases both the rate of photosynthesis and the water use efficiency. Remote sensing data from satellites have shown the expansion of green plants from 1982 to 2015 was equivalent to adding over 20 million km2 of leaf surface area or twice the size of the United States. The current CO2 concentrations are around 425 ppm and that the saturation limit of the CO2 fertilization effect in most species of plants is in the 1,100 to 1,300 ppm range, it is reasonable to suggest that humanity has only begun to realize this benefit in food production. There is also the climate stabilization effect that occurs from plant biomass accumulation, which includes enhanced soil moisture retention, cloud seeding, and higher rainfall recycling rates. Recent studies have estimated that the natural cooling influence of the global greening has limited the global warming since the 1970s by upwards of 0.5 °C.