(Illustration: Alder Point Road in southern Humboldt County, about a two-hour drive slightly southeast of the northern coast, taken Feb. 24, 2011, and found at Kim Sallaway Photography).

“Polar Vortex!”

A couple of words used extensively this Sunday morning blasting from headlines on news sites across the InterWebs in meteorologist-attempts to quickly, graphically explain the extremely-harsh winter storm churning right now through a big chunk of the US: Temperatures will be 30 to 50 degrees below average Sunday from the Plains to the Upper Mississippi Valley, forecasters said.
This will be one of coldest periods ever on record — Chicago could see a drop to about minus 20-freezing degrees.
And this ‘polar vortex‘?
Via NASA:

The polar vortex is a winter phenomena.
It develops as the sun sets over the polar region and temperatures cool.
During the spring, the sun rises and the absorption of solar radiation by ozone begins to heat the polar stratosphere.
This heating eventually causes the vortex to disappear along with the polar night jet.
However, this process is helped along by planetary-scale waves that propagate up from the troposphere.
This wave event that drives the vortex breakup (or final warming) acts to also increase the temperature of the polar region and ozone levels.
We mark the day of the vortex breakup when the winds around the vortex edge decrease below a particular value (about 15 m s -1on the 460 K potential temperature surface).

Supposedly in the normal run of things, the polar vortex stays over Canada and the Arctic, but this year, part it has crushed southward. As the Northeast digs out of Winter Storm Hercules last week, this vortex deal will freeze their asses even more.
From Climate Central last Thursday:

The cause of the Arctic outbreak can be traced to northeastern Canada and Greenland, where an area of high pressure and relatively mild temperatures is set to block the eastward progression of weather systems, like an offensive lineman protecting the quarterback from the other team.
The atmospheric blocking is forcing a section of the polar vortex to break off and move south, into the U.S.
The polar vortex is an area of cold low pressure that typically circulates around the Arctic during the winter, spreading tentacles of cold southward into Europe, Asia, and North America at times.
Except this time, it’s not a small section of the vortex, but what one forecaster, Ryan Maue of WeatherBELL Analytics, called “more like the whole enchilada” in a Twitter conversation on Thursday.

And the big-big monkey-wrench in this environmental scenario is climate change, and despite the cold, it’s all a direct product of humanity’s bid for so-called civilization — the burning of fossil fuels, and all the related burnings. Hard to fathom for the greedy, self-ignorant, is winter storms and global warming — cold and heat, as Milton warned: “…the parching Air burns frore, and cold performs th’ effect of Fire…”
From LiveScience in February 2011 — about the same time the photo above was snapped:

“There’s no inconsistency at all,” Michael Mann, the director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, told LiveScience.
“If anything, this is what the models project: that we see more of these very large snowfalls.”
…
“Climate is the statistics of weather over the long term,” Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institute for Science at Stanford University, told LiveScience.
“No specific weather event can by itself confirm or disprove the body of scientific knowledge associated with climate change.”
Instead, Mann said, climate change is like a pair of loaded dice.
If you erase the 5 on one side of a die and replace it with a 6, you’ll roll twice as many 6s.
There’s no way of knowing which of those 6s you would have rolled without loading the die, just as there’s no way of knowing which hurricane would have fizzled without climate change.
In the long term, though, the global warming trend becomes clear.
“Climate change is an intrinsic part now of every roll of the die,” Mann said. “We’ve stacked the odds.”
But stacked the odds for what?
Models suggest the answer is bigger storms.
Warmer air in the atmosphere can hold more moisture, Mann said, and the condensation of that moisture puts more energy into storm systems.
“It’s sort of a double whammy,” Mann said.
“The storms become more powerful and they contain more moisture.”
In the United States storms might track a bit more northward, and the East Coast might see more Nor’easters, Mann said.
North America isn’t going to get so warm that snow disappears, he said, and when cold air hits extra-moist air, snowfalls are likely to get larger.
Some research has suggested that global warming could fuel bigger thunderstorms as well.

The heat we’re generating is effecting every square-inch of our weather/environment — all over.
Irish climatologist Dr Kieran Hickey and just one little piece/example of climate change and extreme everything:

The main cause of this decline is that the average storm track across the Atlantic has shifted northwards by between 100 and 200km, meaning that Ireland, which was in the centre, is now somewhat towards the periphery.
This does not mean, as we have seen in the past fortnight, that all storms will follow the average track, and it still means that Ireland is and always will be vulnerable to major Atlantic storms.
What is at issue is the frequency and severity of these storms.
The driver behind this average storm-track movement is changes in the climate.
The sequence of recent major weather disasters should not be ignored.
Since November 2009, barely a six-month spell has gone by without some significant weather upheaval in Ireland.
The sequence included major flood events (2009 west of Ireland, Cork city; 2011 Dublin and Wicklow) and localised severe and recurrent flooding, both river and coastal (in Cork and Galway and in many other places), the two major cold spells of 2009-2010 and November to December 2010 and, more recently, the cold spell that lasted for nearly most of the first half of 2013, leading to the fodder crises.
Then we had the summer heatwave along with very active thunder and lightning.
Last year was a year of extremes, but bizarrely the average figures for various meteorological parameters won’t show anything significant — but it certainly wasn’t a normal year.

No year from here-on-out will be normal, and the “new normal” will shift fairly rapid. And this walking-the-dog changing climate is inherently odd/back-ass backwards — or down under, as in Australia, which just weathered its hottest year on record:

The Bureau of Meteorology says that overall Australia’s temperatures have gone up by 1°C over the last century, with the majority of warming occurring since 1950.
It says Australia has experienced just one cooler than average year – 2011 — over the last decade: the 10-year mean temperature for 2004-2013 was 0.5°C above average.
The Bureau says sea temperatures have shown a similar increase, with sea surface temperatures in waters around Australia being half a degree Celsius above normal in 2013.
What puzzles scientists is that last year’s warming came when the El Niño weather pattern over the Pacific, usually deemed responsible for heating up eastern areas of Australia in particular, was in a neutral or inactive phase.

Yet with all this heat, there’s always the madness (via Climate Progress):

While the impacts of the record-breaking heat are painfully apparent to Australians, since the election of Prime Minister Tony Abbott in September, those in power have chosen to pretend the problem doesn’t exist.
As prime minister, Abbott has abandoned the country’s emissions target, made efforts to repeal Australia’s carbon emissions trading scheme and dissolved the country’s climate commission.
While Australia is red hot going into the New Year, Abbott’s approval ratings are rock bottom.
And with Abbott choosing to surround himself with people such as his top business adviser, Maurice Newman, who last week argued that Australia had fallen “hostage to climate change madness,” both trends are likely to continue.

In the US, the cold is the culprit for mindless right-wing birds.
Chris Mooney at Slate lists the stupid, and then lists the reality, and all the climate-change denying bullshit is so SOS, and the same loud-mouth characters preening like they had sense.
Mooney also writes for the always-informative DeSmogBlog, and pretty-much nails the whole denial ‘enchilada.’

Earlier this morning on California’s north coast, the sun came up in a rim of orange burning up from the east, which is part-n-parcel for environment change in these regions — dry, clear and fire.
And despite the record snow dumps back east: Snowpack readings were 11 percent of normal in the northern Sierras and 30 percent of normal in the southern Sierra, the DWR reported.

Cold in the hot-house.