While it seems counter-intuitive, the research argues that plunging temperatures could come from changes in the jet stream caused by climate change.

Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer A Francis has released a number of papers about changes in the jet stream brought about by warming Arctic temperatures.

Her conclusions suggest that warming Arctic air caused by greenhouse gas emissions has caused changing to the jet stream that is pushing colder Arctic air further south, causing temperatures to plunge from the High Plains to the Deep South.

The jet stream shift has sent frigid air across the central part of the country, and deeper into the south than normal.

Alaska, meanwhile, is being hit by unusually warm conditions and California is facing record-breaking drought, Francis said.

She said the strange weather is becoming more likely because of climate change.

“We can’t say that these are extremes are because of climate change but we can say that this kind of pattern is becoming more likely because of climate change,” Francis said.

NASA analysis has also drawn a link between the jet stream, climate change and colder temperatures.

A 2010 NASA analysis tied colder temperatures over the course of 2009 to an event similar to the wavy jet stream, called “Arctic oscillation” — a see-sawing pressure system over the North Pole. That oscillation pushed cold air to teh south.

The NASA analysis also said that despite cold snaps, and other weather changes being a part of naturally occurring patterns, they are still in line with a “globally warming world.”

Can extreme weather events like this weekend's historic outbreak of cold Arctic air across the U.S. be caused by the warming of the Arctic?

Though it seems counterintuitive – global warming bringing about extreme cold – the answer may be yes, according to scientists like Weather Underground's Dr. Jeff Masters and Dr. Jennifer Francis, a research professor at Rutgers University's Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences.

The cause is believed to lie in the jet stream, the fast-flowing river of air high above the Earth that marks the boundary between cold, polar air to the North and warm tropical air to the South.

As the jet stream shifts position back and forth over North America throughout the year, it plays a major role in the weather patterns and temperatures we experience in the U.S. In recent years, the movement of the jet stream has changed significantly, bringing "weather whiplash" with strange, out-of-season weather events more frequently than in the recent past.

Francis has been a leading voice in recent years for research that points to rapid changes in the Arctic – including a dramatic decline over the past 30 years in Arctic sea ice extent, which exposes more of the Arctic Ocean to the sun's rays in the summer – as the likely culprit behind the jet stream's increasingly odd behavior.

The cause is thought to be what scientists call Arctic amplification, the tendency of the polar region to experience more warming (and at a faster pace) than the rest of the Northern hemisphere. This heightened sensitivity is due to the Arctic's snow cover and sea ice, and the feedback loops triggered by their presence (or absence).

"As sea ice retreats, sunshine that would have been reflected back to space by the bright ice is instead absorbed by the ocean, which heats up, melting even more ice," Francis explained in a March 2012 article at Yale360.

"Extra heat entering the vast expanses of open water that were once covered in ice is released back to the atmosphere in the fall," she adds. "All that extra heat being deposited into the atmosphere cannot help but affect the weather, both locally and on a large scale."

Why? Because the Arctic is warming so quickly – about twice as fast as as the rest of the planet – the difference in temperature between the Arctic and the lower latitudes is narrowing.

That temperature difference drives the jet stream; when it shrinks, the jet stream slows and undulates more. It also moves more north-south than east-west (its usual flow), and can get stuck in patterns that last for much longer than they did even a few years ago.

And when that happens, the waves of the jet stream slow down and become larger and more sluggish. When they increase in size thanks to Arctic amplification, they move eastward more slowly, allowing the weather associated with them to stick around longer.

Still, not all climate scientists accept the linkages between long-term global warming, thinning Arctic sea ice, and weather events like this weekend's. The science around attributing weather events at lower latitudes to what happens in the Arctic is still very new, and scientists are far from consensus on whether such a link exists.

In August, a study published by Elizabeth Barnes of Colorado State University called into question Francis' research that links Arctic amplification with the recent changes in the jet stream. And In September, the National Academy of Sciences convened a workshop that drew dozens of climate scientists from around the world to discuss this topic.

But the possibility between what's occurring in the Arctic and what happens when extreme weather hits will undoubtedly continue to receive an increasing amount of attention.

For more, hear Dr. Jeff Masters and Jennifer Francis talk more about how Arctic warming is changing weather in the U.S. in this video:

Man made global warming is real because? ( insert any answer here, doesn't matter because they are all correct ) 

You'll find these cold extremes have been predicted in the scientific literature. Watch the video.

Innocent bystander wrote on Jan 7^th, 2014 at 10:07pm:



No problems.

They'll just change their hypothesis to AGCC (Anthropogenic Global Climate Change).

They have an answer for everything.