February 4, 2023

"Parts of the Northeast woke up to the coldest morning in decades on Saturday, with temperatures 30 degrees or more below average and wind chills in the extremely dangerous category."

"Virtually the entirety of New England was included in wind chill warnings, while Mount Washington’s minus-109 degree wind chill set a record for the entire United States. The National Weather Service office serving the Boston region described the cold as 'a historic Arctic outbreak for the modern era,' and warned that 'this is about as cold as it will ever get.'"

57 comments:

Original Mike said...

"warned"? Odd phrasing.

rhhardin said...

Temperature, not wind chill, is the thing. If you're exerting yourself, you in addition have to heat all the air you breathe up to body temperature, which may exceed your aerobic capacity. To make it up, you breathe more, and it gets worse. The source of snow shoveling heart attacks.

The wind matters only on bare skin that's not well heated.

What's the temperature of a metal flag pole with an ambient 20 degree temperature and 60 mph wind? 20 degrees. Same as the air you have to heat up if you breathe it.

Dave Begley said...

Obligatory CAGW scam comment here.

AlbertAnonymous said...

What happened to all the global warming?

Old and slow said...

Climate change strikes again. It's irrefutable, and that's the trouble isn't it?

madAsHell said...

Which crisis will this portend?

StoughtonSconnie said...

It’s the New Ice Age, er I mean Global Warming, er I mean Climate Change. . . Aw the hell with it, it’s weather tgat isn’t stable and predictable. We need socialism!

madAsHell said...

Wait! What??

Just last week in Davos, Al Gore assured me it was global warming!

Glenn Howes said...

Here in New England, I turned off the heat pump and left it to the oil boiler to get us through the night. I’m pretty sure anyone into electrification who replaced their gas or oil boiler with an air source heat pump had a pretty unpleasant night. Now that it’s on the plus side of zero, I’ll turn it back on.

madAsHell said...

Wait! What??

Just last week in Davos, Al Gore assured me it was global warming!

Original Mike said...

"What's the temperature of a metal flag pole with an ambient 20 degree temperature and 60 mph wind? 20 degrees."

Wouldn't it be a tad warmer? The energy in the wind would heat the pole.

JK Brown said...

And that's why we can't have the Global Warming Crisis and, instead, had to shift to Climate Change.

Rusty said...

Polar Bears! Or something. I dunno. It's cold. It always gets cold in winter in the northern latitudes. Oddly enough. In the earths orbit around the sun we are at our closest to the sun. Also oddly enough. The sun seems to have a lot to do with our climate.
We should probably study the sun more instead of climate models.

JK Brown said...

"The wind matters only on bare skin that's not well heated."

Not strictly correct. Wind matters for anything that is trying to keep heat above the dry bulb temperature. The wind carries away the air warmed by the object replacing it with cold air. Wind Chill is a measure of the flow of heat away and the effect of cooling due to evaporation. I takes more to keep your house warm on a cold windy day than on a cold still day.

Louise B said...

Good thing the Northeast doesn't depend upon windmills and solar power for its energy! Fossil fuels will keep everyone warm. /sarc.

traditionalguy said...

Not enough sunspots to shield earth from cosmic rays making too many clouds over the Pacific Ocean. Result is mini ice age from arctic air storms coming down in jet stream troughs that block east to west flow thus making weeks long heat waves in the summer and weeks long mega ice and snow storms in winter. Once the next year’s snow fall lands on unmelted last years snow the glaciation snowball will build up and up.

Too bad we stupidly eliminated oil and gas pumping needed to fight the hot and the cold, all for a Big LIE.

BIII Zhang said...

Off topic, but the US military has shot down the Chinese spy balloon 5 miles off the coast of Myrtle Beach, SC this afternoon at around 2:45pm.

https://imgur.com/a/euvqfhk

Dave Begley said...

In the WaPo comments, our liberal elite assert - ipse dixit - that climate change explains this cold snap.

The Left has been wrong about this for five decades. Why won’t they admit they have been wrong?

They were wrong about covid and are wrong about this. Their stupidity is both expensive and deadly.

The University of Nebraska has been bad at football for about 20 years now. At least they know enough to keep firing their loser coaches.

Kevin said...

and warned that 'this is about as cold as it will ever get.'"

So people don't start thinking of the benefits of global warming, right?

effinayright said...

Blogger BIII Zhang said...
Off topic, but the US military has shot down the Chinese spy balloon 5 miles off the coast of Myrtle Beach, SC this afternoon at around 2:45pm.

https://imgur.com/a/euvqfhk
***********
US military shoots down Chinese spy balloon over Atlantic Ocean

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/us-military-shoots-chinese-spy-balloon-atlantic-ocean

But....but...But!! Just last night Chicom Chuck was gloating that our military couldn't possibly shoot it down for.....reasons.

SNORT

MadTownGuy said...

I blame Al Gore.

Tommy Duncan said...

oth expensive and deadly.

"The University of Nebraska has been bad at football for about 20 years now. At least they know enough to keep firing their loser coaches."

Here's a quip from a Cornhusker friend of mine in Omaha: What's the difference between Wheaties and the Nebraska football team? --The Wheaties belong in a bowl.

Tommy Duncan said...

During the summer I was accustomed to seeing electric vehicles in downtown La Crosse. They are nowhere to be seen in the depths of winter. Hmmm.

Eleanor said...

I spent last night in RI with no power. There are still people not far from me who are not back online yet. The power company is blaming the wind, but transformers are blowing out all over the place.

Original Mike said...

No warming for the last 8-1/2 years.

Big Mike said...

Just last week in Davos, Al Gore assured me it was global warming!

@madAsHell, well that explains it. It’s the Al Gore effect.

Rick67 said...

In the WaPo comments, our liberal elite assert - ipse dixit - that climate change explains this cold snap.

I appreciate comments from Dave but on this occasion would push back a little. I am a reluctant convert to the "climate change is a real and urgent problem" stance. Wrote a long blog post to summarize how I arrived and won't repeat it here except to say it was an unintended result of spending several months learning as much as I could about Greenland.

I understand why skeptics (with whom I can sympathize) complain about the shift in rhetoric from global warming to climate change. However one of the more detailed books about Greenland is also about climate change, how it's not simply a matter of "earth gets hotter", how it's more complex than that. Climatologists, taking into account not only evidence from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, note there is evidence some places become dry, some become wet, some become warmer, some become colder. Planet earth is not simply one aggregate clime and temperature, it's a more complex, dynamic system.

The concern raised over climate change indeed includes concern over average temperature and faster melting of ice sheets and (something most people aren't aware of) the global ocean "conveyor belt". If that conveyor belt is disrupted then we will have some serious problems, including the pleasant British Isles becoming more like Hudson Bay.

Could I be wrong about climate change? Could the "experts"? Sure. Despite my "conversion" am highly suspicious how the Left uses what could be a real problem to advance the communist project.

Narr said...

Scratch one red balloon!

Smilin' Jack said...

“The National Weather Service office serving the Boston region described the cold as 'a historic Arctic outbreak for the modern era,' and warned that 'this is about as cold as it will ever get.'"

Wait...Arctic? I thought the Arctic was warming faster than anywhere...aren’t they growing pineapples and bananas up there now? How can Arctic air give us historic record cold?

jim5301 said...

Another cold weather event equals no climate change post. How exciting. Maybe someone could explain to me why if a cold weather spell is strong evidence the earth is not getting warmer, records showing that the earth actually is getting alot warmer on average is irrelevant to the question? But expecting some logic from the Althouse crowd is asking for alot I know.

Roy Lofquist said...

and warned that 'this is about as cold as it will ever get.'"

Somebody's gotta say it - Here! Hold my beer.

n.n said...

Normal.

gilbar said...

This is, The Definition of Global Warming.. I mean, Climate Change!

Michael said...

Wind chill is lower still if you ride a motorcycle nude and wet.

FullMoon said...

"Coldest morning in decades" assures us it has been even colder in the past.

Big question is not if climate is changing. Question is can we adapt.

Obviously, we can

Bruce Hayden said...

“Maybe someone could explain to me why if a cold weather spell is strong evidence the earth is not getting warmer, records showing that the earth actually is getting alot warmer on average is irrelevant to the question? But expecting some logic from the Althouse crowd is asking for alot I know.”

Because those “records” are faked. Anything less than worldwide doesn’t really matter, since the temperature goes up here, and down there. So, with a limited number of sites, around the world, primarily in the US and Western Europe, the worldwide temperature is massively extrapolated. Some data collection points represent small areas in New England, while others represent many millions of square miles. And that is on land - a large majority of the planet is water which is almost completely unrepresented. You might say that if the data collection points were constant, then the trend could be deduced from them. Except that data collection points are constantly being added and dropped. When the Soviet Union rose up, hundreds of its data collection points disappeared - which alone might account for some of the apparent warming around that time. Plus, there is an urban heat island effect that appears to be underestimated. Plus much of the calculation appears to be almost completely non transparent. This is at least partially, apparently, to prevent skeptics from reviewing the work. Yes, they actually said that.

And maybe most importantly, over the last couple decades, despite all the shenanigans, the global temperature really hasn’t gone up or down much for very long. Since, it turns out Michael Mann was caught fudging his hockey stick, and the climate scientist community was caught hiding the decline.

Why am I so cynical? Partially it’s because I watch all of the climatistas panic when the Arctic ice starts decreasing, year to year. The polar bears are all going to die!!! No they aren’t. They thrive. But the it expands, for several years unnoticed. And starts decreasing again, and they go through the exact same panic. Or they panic when the ice sheet over one small part of Antarctica diminishes - and ignore that it is increasing elsewhere there. Maybe most importantly though, for me, multivariate regression shows that CO2 isn’t even in the top 5 drivers of global temperature. Significantly more important are the tilt of the earth (went first because I saw yesterday that is is projected to be the reason that the Sahara went from desert to jungle and back), wobble, how far it is from the sun, sunspot cycles, and, interestingly to me, where we are in the El Niño/La Niña cycle. The effect of CO2 (etc), whatever it might be, is swamped by the noise and error components of these much ore significant components. This is likely why astrophysicists and physicists were eliminated from the infamous study determining that 97% of Climate Scientists agreed about Global Warming. Also eliminated were statisticians, like the ones who proved that Mann’s Hockey Stick was a statistical anomaly.

FullMoon said...

Jim5301 said...

Another cold weather event equals no climate change post. How exciting. Maybe someone could explain to me why if a cold weather spell is strong evidence the earth is not getting warmer, records showing that the earth actually is getting alot warmer on average is irrelevant to the question? But expecting some logic from the Althouse crowd is asking for alot I know.


Scroll on up to link provided by Original Mike at 3:15 for the answer to your query.

Mason G said...

"records showing that the earth actually is getting alot warmer on average..."

Well, when you go back and lower recorded temperatures from the past...

typingtalker said...

Re: Global warming or not ...

Individual cold weather events as evidence of not-global-warming are as valid as individual hot weather events are of global-warming. Neither is.

I return you now to our regularly scheduled program.

boatbuilder said...

"The wind matters only on bare skin that's not well heated."

That is absolute nonsense.

Have you ever actually been outside? It's a lot--a whole lot--colder--no matter what you are wearing--when the wind is blowing.

boatbuilder said...

Hey Rick67. Nice try.

Most of us understand that the issue is "complex."

I personally understand that the issue is complex, but that none of the models that the geniuses who are supposed to be able to figure it out better than anyone else use to predict "climate" have been correct for the past 50 years, and all of their errors are one the side of predicting higher temperatures than has actually been the case.

Now you want me to believe that because you have some sort of inside dope because you spent some time in Greenland and read about it, the alarmists are correct.

No sale.

Have you ever read "Arctic Dreams?" Guy spends a lot of time way up in the Arctic in the early 80's. A very good writer. Barry Lopez. Spends a lot of time taliking about Arctic archeology, lamenting that the people who used to live up there don't anymore, because its too cold.

I would suggest some Steven Koonin.

RBE said...

Got to -22 last night here in the Green Mountains and currently 0 this evening. Warming up even more to 30+ on Sunday. It was hard to keep this old NE house warm using, two wood stoves, oil furnace and two electric space heaters. It has been a few years since it's been this cold but really not that unusual.

rcocean said...

Does wind chill apply only to people and animals? Yes, wind chill applies only to people and animals. The only effect wind chill has on inanimate objects, such as car radiators and water pipes, is to more quickly cool the object to the current air temperature. The object will NOT cool below the actual air temperature.

KellyM said...

Good grief. As a kid, I recall January and February lows in northern VT easily in the -30 to -40 below area on a regular basis. It was cold enough that I could hear the trees crack from the cold and see the northern lights dance. Those were the times when two wood stoves were cranking and it felt like Miami in the living room. LOL

gpm said...

Currently a toasty 13 degrees in Boston. Will be in the 40s by tomorrow afternoon. Just staggered out to a bar s block away late this afternoon (and the liquor store a block away yesterday). Why to live in the city.

My apartment is nearly at the top of a fairly new seven-story building. Haven't turned on the heat in maybe a dozen years. Just parasitizing off the heat rising from the units below. Never gets below the lower 60s. At most I need a little sheet across my lap and legs to be quite comfortable reading the Althouse blog.

On-line Boswords crossword tournament tomorrow afternoon! Though it's more fun to go in person to the tournaments at the beautiful Roxbury Latin School.

--gpm

tim in vermont said...

You know that the temperature adjustments moving past temperatures down are legit because they are so confident in them that they feel free to destroy the original records.

Creola Soul said...

Global warming is a bitch.

Mutaman said...


Blogger Bruce Hayden said...



"Because those “records” are faked. "

Just when you think the Althouse crowd cannot get any dumber.

Yancey Ward said...

The record of climate of the earth shows that it is always changing, and if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, guess what- it will go on changing, just like it did when our ancestors were regularly shat out onto the ground by the ancestors of lions and hyenas. The goal of no climate change is just about the silliest idea ever, and JimIQ53 believing in it isn't surprising at all.

Milwaukie guy said...

The 1930s were the warmest decade of the 20th century until the historic temps were adjusted downward to make the 90s appear warmer. This is a fact.

Krumhorn said...

Because those “records” are faked. "

Just when you think the Althouse crowd cannot get any dumber.


It’s odd how incurious the lefties can be. Bruce gave an excellent outline of the issues, but the details of the phoniness to the temperature record are well-established. The climatistas themselves admit to “adjustments” to the data that nobody with any wits can accept. And naturally, those adjustments furthered the leftie narrative. And then they promptly destroyed the physical record so that nobody can see their shenanigans. Moreover, the heat island issue has profoundly skewed the data. Recording sites that were in rural fields for many decades are now in recent parking lots or next to industrial units. There are a great many photos of those locations that used to be cornfields.

When these serious deviations from normal science are pointed out…and let’s don’t get started on the stupid bristlecones and the Yarra river hanky panky…..someone is called dumb. You can never go wrong by pointing out that the lefties are nasty little shits.

- Krumhorn

Milwaukie guy said...

Studying metro temperatures, almost all the "global warming" is urban, the heat islands. The diurnal temperature in rural and small town America has changed little, but the nightime temp in the cities keeps rising as the conrete gets poured.

Fudging the urban heat island effect is one of the main tools in your Earth is Burning kit.

Rusty said...

Mutaman said...

"Blogger Bruce Hayden said...



"Because those “records” are faked. "

Just when you think the Althouse crowd cannot get any dumber."

Why won't Dr. Mann release his data? It has been claimed that a lot of the climate modelling rely on Dr. Mann's data. Why won't he release it?
The NOAA data collecting sites that aren't located near heat sinks have not recorded any increase in temps.
Now. If you want to contribute to the dialog with some actual climate information then we'd be happy to discuss it.

RMc said...

The University of Nebraska has been bad at football for about 20 years now.

Well, the last six (and seven of the last eight) have all been losing seasons, one of the longest streaks in school history. The days of the Huskers winning three national championships in four years (1994, 95, 97) are gone forever.

Big Mike said...

@Rick67, if you had really really studied Greenland then you’d know that 1000 years ago it was possible for hundreds of people to survive for nearly 400 years living on Greenland with no more than Medieval farming technology. Care to try that now? The rules are simple:

No fossil fuels for heat.

No wood beyond what you find in the form of driftwood.

Plows are allowed, but must be no more than what was used in Medieval times. No advanced technology like from the 15th century or later.

No fishing. There are no fish bones in their midden heaps. To my knowledge no one knows why not.

Let us know when you’ve survived your first winter.

Milwaukie guy said...

I only became interested in the AGW debate when Mann published his hockey schtick. As a journeyman historian I saw it and wondered what happened to the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA). My bullshit detector went to DefCon 1.

True fact: Over the last million years of the Quaternary, the climate has been in a cycle of ~100,000 year glaciations punctuated with 10-15,000 year interglacials. We are in about year 11,650 of the Holocene interglacial.

In the previous interglacial, the Eemian, that Antarctic ice cores show a world temperature 5° C warmer, coincidentally when early modern humans enter the fossil record in numbers.

Fire up the coal plants!

Mason G said...

"Why won't Dr. Mann release his data? It has been claimed that a lot of the climate modelling rely on Dr. Mann's data. Why won't he release it?"

He doesn't need to- just believe in him. It's a religion.