I will guarantee that Climate Change deniers are going to seize upon the recent extreme cold sweeping the USA to make fun of the dangers of “Global Warming”. They will deliberately ignore the Polar Vortex aspect, and the fact that these extreme cold temperatures down here a part of a pattern of increasingly erratic and uneven Polar Vortex activity which is terrible news for the melting of the polar ice caps — which have been assaulted by equally freakish WARM weather in the last few years, for example:
Less than a month ago the world was shocked when the temperature in the Arctic Circle reached a record-breaking 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit. While remarkable in its own right, it was merely the exclamation point on an astonishing, prolonged and widespread heat event across all of the Siberian Arctic.
CBS News July 15th 2020
Also:
The extreme and unusual warmth in this region alarmed scientists worldwide, prompting a group of 14 scientists from six countries to collaborate in a study to figure how something this out-of-bounds could occur. On Wednesday, the researchers released their findings in a comprehensive climate attribution study, declaring, "This large-scale prolonged event would have been essentially impossible without climate change."
CBS News July 15th 2020
To better understand the dynamics involved:
How Is the Polar Vortex Affected by Climate Change?
While the polar vortex is well documented, its behavior has become more extreme as a result of climate change, according to Ullrich. He explains: warming of the Earth has led to the loss of Arctic sea ice, transforming a highly reflective icy surface to a dark absorptive surface. The change is warming higher latitudes and reducing the temperature difference between the warmer mid-latitude and polar regions. This weakens and destabilizes the polar jet stream, causing it to dip into lower latitudes, bringing polar air farther south. Ullrich expects future climate change to further weaken the polar jet stream, bringing rise to more extreme and unusual weather patterns.
Now one very important thing to remember is that “Climate Change” is more aptly considered “Climate Catastrophe” or “Climate Chaos” : it will in no way be a smooth and gradual warming — like turning up your home thermostat!
We are poking at Nature … and, like an angry bear, once it has reached its breaking point a wide variety of deadly — but unpredictable things— are coming.
We are cracking open Pandora’s Box and strange wonders are slipping out: Torrential rains causing flash-floods in one place / accompanied by dreadful parching droughts elsewhere, polar cold in Texas and 100.4 F in Siberia, gradual warming causing a sudden change in the Gulf Stream could ironically plunge Europe and the East Coast into bitter cold.
Human civilization needs stability; destroying the Earth equilibrium is deadly foolish.
I believe estimates of the damage caused by Climate Chaos will be orders of magnitude more disruptive than official estimates now being promoted, and far more weird and dramatic than we are planning for. Only once it is too late to change will we discover hidden feedback loops and unknown boundary conditions. Unlike previous disasters that only affected a fraction of humanity and so only destroyed a local civilization, we now have a global economy, a global social structure, and no place on Earth will be safe from immense challenges.
The Nazi regime is rightly hated for killing millions, inaction on climate may doom BILLIONS … we have wondered how Germans could have stood by and let it happen … and we are standing by.
Any reasonable sacrifice in the short term is better than slipping quietly to irretrievable disaster.
We need a global effort of immense size and scope, and we need it with desperate urgency.
The climate disruptions we see today are largely responses to CO2 emitted over the past few decades, but there are many lags in the system so some of the effect of changes 20 years ago are just becoming unmistakable now, and they will in turn cause other changes which will take another 20 years to be dangerous.
Unfortunately any remedies will also have lag effects, so if we wait too long even an effective cure may not take into effect until after the patient (our civilization, if not our species survival)has died.