Although summer’s still warm on the backside, and it’s only early September, cold weather is closer than just-around-the-corner — last month, old reliable, the weather-worn Farmers’ Almanac predicted, “…frigid conditions, bitter conditions,” for this coming winter.
They prognosticated a similar prognosis for 2013/14, and were very-much correct.

Two words with only one season’s worth of common usage/knowledge, ‘polar vortex,’ might be on a return visit. And a warming planet makes it more likely.
A new study published today in Nature Communications seems to indicate melting Arctic sea ice makes this cold-ass ‘vortex’ loop further south, and is “…dynamically connected…” to the cause/effect of harsh winters in the US.

(Illustration found here).

And the old Farmers’ Almanac ain’t seen nothing yet, the weird, now becoming the normal:

Through July, at least, “this is the most unusual year on record” when it comes to that data, Deke Arndt, the NCDC’s chief of climate monitoring, told NBC News.
“We haven’t seen this much extreme warmth entrenched alongside this much extreme cold for this long since at least 1900.”

This has become a whacked, wacky world, huh?