The flammable chemtrail snow vortex of doom

Those of us in the northern slice of the United States have had to contend with unusually cold weather over the past few weeks, coupled with snow and ice that have reached even the usually mild southeast.  My original hometown of Lafayette, Louisiana actually got snow two days ago, and Lafayette is the place that my dad described as being so Deep South that if it were any deeper, we'd have been floating.

And almost everyone has heard about the snow storm that paralyzed the city of Atlanta, leaving highways gridlocked, thousands of car accidents from minor to horrifying, and hundreds of students who were stranded at their schools overnight.

What many of you may not know, though, is that the white flakes you saw falling from the sky over the last few days...

... may not have been snow.

*cue scary music*

At least, that's the contention of a variety of conspiracy theorist types who evidently have three scoops of rocky road with extra nuts where the rest of us have brains.  Take a look, for instance, over at The Resistance Journals, where a post hit yesterday called "What is With the Snow From the Recent Storm -- Solar Vortex?"  Notwithstanding that I think he means "polar" vortex, in that post we find out that (1) there is no doubt that the government is now controlling the weather, (2) the snow that has fallen doesn't seem to be melting, and (3) people have reported that this snow is flammable.

Now, I'm not buying the "flammable" part.  Snow is made of frozen water, which is notoriously non-flammable, explaining why water is commonly used to put out fires.  And as far as the snow not melting, that may have something to do with the fact that it's cold.  Snow does that when it's below 32 F, you know.

Then we have this lunatic, over at YouTube, who believes that chemtrails are being used to generate snow to combat global warming, and this has created special snow.  He then does an experiment, which you must watch for the humor value alone, wherein he tries to set some snow on fire first with a butane lighter, and then with what appears to be a propane torch.  When faced with the blue-hot flame of the propane torch, the snow basically evaporates instantaneously, and the guy is mystified by its disappearance.  "Where is the water?" he asks, evidently having forgotten that in third grade we all learned that there is a third state of water besides liquid and solid.

"What is this?" he asks.  "This ain't snow.  This is crazy."

Yes, sir, it is that.

So the wingnuts are really having a field day with the recent weather.  But of course, being a skeptic, I had to run an experiment of my own.  You can't just discount something because you're biased to think it is ridiculous; that wouldn't be proper skepticism, right?  Fortunately, here in upstate New York we are liberally endowed with snow at the moment, so I got a beaker and went out into my front yard and collected some, and brought it inside and put it on my kitchen counter.

Fig. 1.  Some snow in a beaker.  Yes, I have beakers at home.  Don't judge.

I attempted to light it with a match, with no success.  The match made a sizzling noise and went out, which I believe is the expected behavior.

So then, I let the beaker of snow sit on my counter for about an hour.  After an hour, this is what it looked like:

Fig. 2.  The same snow after one hour had passed.

Note how much less volume the water takes up than the snow did.  This, of course, is part of the explanation for why the aforementioned lunatic didn't notice much in the way of water coming from his chunk of snow after it was hit with a blowtorch; snow has lots of air space.  (And it's relevant that the snow from my front yard was old snow that had had several days to pack down.  Even so, it lost about 80% of its volume when it melted, give or take.)

The whole time I was running this experiment, my dog was staring at me in hope, because when I'm rummaging around in the kitchen it usually means food is being prepared, and if food is being prepared, it means he might get some.  He did not really understand why I was messing about with beakers and snow and cameras in the kitchen, and no ribeye steaks were being cooked.  His general philosophy is, "Why be in the kitchen if no ribeye steaks are involved?"

Fig. 3.  Grendel looking perplexed.  This is a common look for him.

So, after running my highly scientific experiment, I have come to the conclusion that (1) the recently fallen snow is not flammable, (2) when it melts, you get plain old water, and (3) none of this has anything to do with "chemtrails." 

Oh, and (4); if I don't cook ribeye steaks soon, my dog is going to be really disappointed in me.

And I'm not even going to address something I saw on Reddit a couple of days ago, which is that the recent snowstorm is all part of a big experiment being run at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.  How on earth an underground particle accelerator could be used to influence the weather on the other side of the freakin' world, I have no idea.  So I'll end here, with a wish that wherever you are, you are experiencing clement weather.  I don't know about you, but I've had about enough of this polar vortex crapola, even if it isn't being artificially created by the government.

The polar vortex agenda

Dear readers,

Before I get to today's post, I want to point out something that you probably have already noticed -- a new feature in the upper right-hand corner of Skeptophilia labeled "Donate."  If you're a regular reader -- or even if you're not, and just want to support the effort and time it takes to bring posts to you six days a week that leave you thinking or laughing or both -- then consider making a donation!  You can contribute securely through PayPal, and your (much appreciated) donation will help assure that we will be able to continue to provide you with skeptical content for a long time to come.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

cheers,

Gordon

*************************************

Rush Limbaugh is kind of predictable.  All you have to do is watch the weather map. If we have any sort of anomalous weather, you can guarantee that a day or two later he will be drawing on his skills as a climatologist to inform his loyal listeners that whatever it is had nothing to do with global warming.  It's just like clockwork, sort of like intestinal gas after a meal at Taco Bell.

This time, though, he's gone a step farther.  The piece of the polar vortex that has been spinning its way across the northern United States, causing widespread damage, thousands of school closings, and wind chills in some places lower than -50 Fahrenheit, is not real, Limbaugh says.  It's all a hoax.  And guess who is perpetrating this hoax?  You'll never guess.

The liberals.  Told you you'd never guess.

Here's what he had to say in Monday's Rush Limbaugh Show:

Do you know what the polar vortex is? Have you ever heard of it? Well, they just created it for this week...  Now, in their attempt, the left, the media, everybody, to come up with a way to make this sound like it's something new and completely unprecedented, they've come up with this phrase called the "polar vortex."  If you've been watching television, they've created a graphic, all the networks have, and it basically consists of a view of the planet if you are right above the North Pole. They put this big purple blob, or blue blob, or red blob, depending on the network you're looking at, over the entire North Pole, and they call that the polar vortex. It actually sounds like a crappy science fiction movie to me, but anyway, that's what they're calling it.

We are having a record-breaking cold snap in many parts of the country.  And right on schedule the media have to come up with a way to make it sound like it’s completely unprecedented.  Because they’ve got to find a way to attach this to the global warming agenda, and they have.  It’s called the ‘polar vortex.’  The dreaded polar vortex.”

Liberals are in the middle of a hoax, they’re perpetrating a hoax, but they’re relying on their total dominance of the media to lie to you each and every day about climate change and global warming.  So they created the polar vortex, and the polar vortex, something’s happened, and that cold air which normally stays is in the North Pole, something’s happening, something deeply mysterious and perhaps tragic is happening.

Whatever it is that keeps the polar vortex vortexed in the Arctic Circle is vanishing, and that cold air is coming to us. Normally it stays up there. But now it's down here. How did it get here? That's the deepening mystery. That is the crisis. That is what is man-made. Man is destroying the invisible boundaries that keeps that air up there. How did it get cold in previous winters? Well, it got cold in previous winters, but, see, as far as most people are concerned, this is as cold as it's ever been in their lives. Well, but, Snerdley, I'm just telling you their technique. Forget truth. The truth and the Democrat Party, the truth and the American left never intersect.

My point is you have a lot of people who are believing that this is as cold as it’s ever been.  You might think that flies in the face of global warming.  Ah, ah, ah, ah.  Global warming’s not climate change, and we, folks, are causing all of this, you must understand.  The hoax continues.

So, let's analyze this, shall we?

First of all, let's look at his first contention, which is that the "polar vortex" was just invented by liberals last week to scare everyone, for reasons unknown.  Strange, then, that the term was first used 150 years ago to describe the Arctic air circulation (Littell's Living Age, #495, 12 November 1853, p. 490), and has been standard terminology in climate science ever since.  All you have to be able to do is to use Wikipedia -- something that apparently is outside of Mr. Limbaugh's rather limited skill set -- to find out that the reduced ice coverage in the Arctic Ocean, coupled with weakening of the polar air circulation, has been known for years to cause "meanders" in the jet stream that sometimes cause whirling blobs of cold air to break loose from the main polar vortex -- just like what happened this week.

But let's consider other sources.  They had a lot to say about the phenomenon this week over at ClimateCentral.org, where in an article on this week's weather we read:

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...  The warmth in the Arctic made headlines in early December when the temperature hit 39°F in Prudhoe Bay, north of the Arctic Circle. That was the highest December temperature on record there since at least 1968, according to the National Weather Service.

Even more interesting was what Rick Grow, writing for The Washington Post, had to say:

Large atmospheric waves move upward from the troposphere — where most weather occurs — into the stratosphere, which is the layer of air above the troposphere. These waves, which are called Rossby waves, transport energy and momentum from the troposphere to the stratosphere. This energy and momentum transfer generates a circulation in the stratosphere, which features sinking air in the polar latitudes and rising air in the lowest latitudes. As air sinks, it warms. If the stratospheric air warms rapidly in the Arctic, it will throw the circulation off balance. This can cause a major disruption to the polar vortex, stretching it and — sometimes — splitting it apart.

What is unusual about this week's event is that instead of just spawning a minor meander, nearly the entire polar vortex came unhinged and started drifting south -- which you can see on the following map, showing that while Chicago was in the deep freeze, northern Labrador was experiencing far warmer than normal conditions:

 

What I find interesting about this is that when we set record high temperatures -- like we did two weeks ago in the Northeast, when in my usually chilly home town we shattered all previous records for that day with a balmy 67 Fahrenheit -- the climate change deniers point out that as everyone knows, there's a difference between weather and climate.  That was just a single day's high, nothing to be concerned about.  But when we have cold weather, you have bloviating windbags like Mr. Limbaugh ranting about how the icy conditions show that global warming is a hoax.

Sorry, dude, you can't have it both ways.  If you can't use single weather events to support climate change, you can't use single weather events to deny it, either.  But the problem is that then, you're forced to look at trends -- which means that you'd have to be honest and admit that the global average temperature is increasing steadily.  Which is the last thing that Limbaugh and his cadre want to do.

So who is it, exactly, that seems to have no intersection between their agenda and the truth?

As I've said before: to reject the basic tenets of climate change, you have to ignore mountains of hard data from the last fifty years, coupled with the predictions of climate models developed by some of the best climatologists in the world.  Because they have no particular difficulty coming to consensus; well over 90% of climate scientists not only believe that the Earth is warming, they believe that the warm-up is due to human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels.

The problem is, more people listen to fools like Rush Limbaugh than listen to the scientists, which is exactly what people like him want.  Dumb folks down.  Science is hard, and often confusing; here, let me tell you what to think.  The people who are trying to get you to change your ways are just liars and hoaxers with a secret agenda to destroy the U. S. of A.  It's okay, you can still drive your Hummer around with a clear conscience.

And outside, the wind is still howling, and the weather is becoming more and more unpredictable.  Today, as I write this, it's -4 F.   By Saturday, it's predicted to be 48 F and raining.  In upstate New York, in mid-January.

Liberal agenda, my ass.