Clear and cold this Tuesday morning here on California’s north coast, but:

In northern Minnesota right now, the temperature has dipped to a staggering -42 F. The chill is running so deep in the North Star State that it’s not only colder than in the lands above the Arctic Circle, it’s actually colder than some of the daily temperatures on Mars—you know, the planet 78 million miles further from the Sun on average.

(Illustration found here).

My youngest daughter lives in Minneapolis and she told me yesterday by phone then it was sunny and beautiful outside, but “nobody is out. I haven’t left my apartment in two days.”
On Sunday, she told me it was warmer…“up to minus six.”
“Up” — WTF!

As a parent, can’t helping worrying about her situation. She claims she’s got all the necessary equipment, but weather is still weather, and in the nowadays, it’s ‘weird’ weather.
This near-science-fiction winter is not the coldest on record, but imost-likely is just another ‘weird’ form of our future as it ‘…may be a counterintuitive example of global warming in action.’
Yesterday, from Climate Central:

Researchers told Climate Central that the weather pattern driving the extreme cold into the U.S. — with a weaker polar vortex moving around the Arctic like a slowing spinning top, eventually falling over and blowing open the door to the Arctic freezer — fits with other recently observed instances of unusual fall and wintertime jet stream configurations.
Such weather patterns, which can feature relatively mild conditions in the Arctic at the same time dangerously cold conditions exist in vast parts of the lower 48, may be tied to the rapid warming and loss of sea ice in the Arctic due, in part, to man-made climate change.
…
The forecast high temperature in Fairbanks, Alaska, on Monday was in the 20s Fahrenheit — warmer than many locations in Georgia and Alabama.
That fits in with the so-called “Arctic Paradox” or “Warm Arctic, Cold Continents” pattern that researchers first identified several years ago.
Such patterns bring comparatively mild conditions to the Arctic while places far to the south are thrown into a deep freeze.
…
Jennifer Francis, a researcher at Rutgers University and the most prominent proponent of the hypothesis that Arctic warming is altering the jet stream around the Northern Hemisphere, told Climate Central that while the cold snap is brief in duration, it fits with patterns observed this year and in other recent years.
“The persistence of the pattern seems consistent with an amplified jet stream configuration that we expect to see occur more frequently as the Arctic continues to warm disproportionately,” Francis said in an email.

And that’s a key — “warm disproportionately” — to the walking-the-dog climate change. Hot here, cold over there.
Which will only get worse — way-colder, way-hotter:

A new study published in Nature suggests that climate change is even worse than scientists had previously anticipated, upgrading the forecast from “dangerous” to “catastrophic.”
According to the study’s authors, temperatures are currently snared in an upward spiral: As earth gets hotter, the heat prevents sunlight-reflecting clouds from forming, trapping more heat and further exacerbating the problem. The result could be a temperature climb of 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

And nobody laughed…
And no one cried.