Robert Scribbler:
In the Arctic today, there's a warm wind howling over Siberia. It's a wind blowing from the northwest. A wind originating from the Arctic Ocean. Siberia is warming up today because warm air blew in from the direction of the North Pole. This should strike everyone as ridiculously, insanely odd.
From Japan Today:
A cold air mass gripped the Japanese archipelago, bringing heavy snow and gusty winds to a wide area of western and central Japan on Sunday, forcing airlines to cancel many flights and West Japan Railway Co to reduce the speed of bullet trains on sections of the Sanyo Shinkansen lines.
The blanket of snow reached as far as southwestern Japanese cities such as Nagasaki and Kagoshima and the temperature in Naha, the prefectural capital of Okinawa, dropped to 8.9 C on Sunday morning, far below the average low for January.
Amami Island, a subtropical island located some 380 kilometers southwest of Kagoshima City, also observed snowfall for the first time in 115 years, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.
Mother Ship reports from Hong Kong.
An unusual meteorological occurrence is happening and is proving weather forecasts wrong: A polar vortex stretching from Siberia is pushing south and is pummelling Hong Kong with a bitter cold and biting winds the territory is unfamiliar with this time of the year.
As of 2.20pm (Hong Kong time) today (Jan. 23), the temperature at Ngong Ping on Lantau Island, where the Big Buddha is located, stood at 1.1 degrees Celsius.
Taiwan and South China:
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Unusually cold weather in eastern Asia has been blamed for more than 65 deaths, disrupted transportation and brought the first snow to a subtropical city in southern China in almost 50 years. Here is a look at the worst cold weather to hit the region in years: TAIWAN Temperatures in Taiwan's capital of Taipei plunged to a 16-year low of 4 degrees Celsius (39 Fahrenheit), killing 57 mostly elderly people, according to government officials. The semi-official Focus Taiwan news website reported that 85 people had died.
CO2 levels like that have not been seen in three million years and there is a "total heat forcing at the top of the atmosphere that likely hasn't been seen for all of the past 10 million years.” Robert Scribbler reports the dire climate change news coming out of the Arctic once again and notes that it is colder in North Vietnam than it is on the shores of the Siberian Arctic.
There, in the long dark of polar night, all that overburden of greenhouse gasses is doing its work to re-radiate the sun's heat. And the ocean sitting beneath the inexorably thinning and greatly reduced sea ice is also transporting that accumulated heat into the Arctic air. Firing off weather systems that run northward in Kamikaze fashion. Surging up through the gauntlet of Greenland chill along that increasingly dangerous storm bombification zone of the North Atlantic. Howling over Svalbard and into the Arctic itself. Giant heat engines aimed directly at the Arctic's heart.
And heat the Arctic in strange and stunning fashion all of these various processes do -- with a large region of extreme, above average temperatures stretching from the North Pole itself, to the northeast tip of Greenland, all throughout a quarter-pie section of the High Arctic above the 80th parallel, on into the Kara, the Laptev, and finally terminating in what should be deeply frozen North-Central Siberia. This entire vast region features temperatures in the range of 20 degrees Celsius or more (36 degrees Fahrenheit) above average for this time of year. For today, for this vast section of the Arctic, it's as if the Winter Season did not exist.
We are no longer living in our normal world. Scribbler continues.
Just off the coast of Svalbard the current temperature is 3.7 C (or 39 degrees F). That's the same reading that Taipei City Taiwan, thousands of miles to the south and sitting in the ridiculously warm Southwest Pacific, saw yesterday. Running along the zero degree Longitude line to 85 North, just a few hundred miles from the North Pole, we find 1 C or 34 F temperatures. Temperatures run near or even above freezing along a vast section of ice-covered waters in the Arctic Ocean above 80 North Latitude and on toward the coast of Siberia. There at 74.5 North and 87.55 East, a freakishly warm northwest wind howling out of the Arctic Ocean is pushing temperatures to -1.4 C (29.5 F and above the point at which salty ocean water freezes). It's colder now in the hills of North Vietnam at 20.1 North Latitude, 103.9 East Longitude with temperatures there hitting -1.5 C (29.3 F).