NOAA official admits warm December weather is not due to global warming

 I don’t know how the weather is where you are but here in New Hampshire we have experienced an unusually warm November and December. So warm in fact that I was able to sit outside and read a book during the first week of my recent recovery from surgery, it was absolutely beautiful and I enjoyed (as much as you can enjoy anything during recovery) every minute of it.

  In years past we have experienced warm fronts during the Winter and I have always joked that only a liberal can walk outside in New England in January, experience a beautiful 50 degree day and proclaim it is a sign of impending doom because it means we are destroying the planet.

  So I have been patiently waiting for the stories to come out about how the days I have been enjoying are proof that global warming is destroying the planet but I have been disappointed because the global warming alarmists have been quiet on this issue.

  And now according to this NPR story Mike Halpert, NOAA’s deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center, has admitted during an interview that this warm weather is natural and is not due to global warming.

  First he gives a little explanation of why the warm weather is natural:

 There’s a couple of factors at play here. I think everybody’s well aware that we have a strong El Nino that’s kind of started back last spring, and El Nino is known to exert a pattern that oftentimes favors warmer-than-average temperatures. There’s another factor that seems to maybe have been playing even a larger role over the last four to six weeks. It’s something that we call the Arctic oscillation.

It’s an atmospheric pattern, and it relates basically the pressures at the polar regions to the pressures in the mid-latitudes where we live. It becomes much more newsworthy, typically, when we’re very cold here because that’s associated with the negative phase of the Arctic oscillation oftentimes. And what that means, is that the polar vortex, which may be surprising to some but not to a meteorologist – the polar vortex, which is located around the pole, weakens and allows cold air to spill out. This year, we’re seeing the opposite. So we’ve had a strong polar vortex, and it’s cold up at the polls but not really anywhere else.

  He is then asked if global warming is playing a role in the warm weather and here is what he had to say:

If it is, it’s probably fairly insignificant at this point. If it were to play a role, it would be more likely if, somehow, climate change is impacting either the Arctic oscillation or El Nino, and we’re not really aware that it is at this point. If you think about, maybe – the high temperature over the weekend was 70, so maybe without climate change, it would’ve been 69. I think it’s a fairly insignificant role, if any role at all.

  Normally I would have expected him to say that global warming is impacting El Nino and the Arctic oscillation but as you just read he is admitting it has no effect on either one. But there is something else that he said which I find most interesting: when asked if the weather could just snap back to normal in the next week or so he said, “the Arctic oscillation is something that’s really not predictable at long lead times.”

   At this point you should remember that Mike Halpert is the deputy director of the Climate PREDICTION Center and yet he admits a natural climate process is not predictable at long lead times. So the prediction center is admitting it cannot predict natural occurrences in the climate at long lead times yet his job is to predict man-made climate changes decades into the future? Am I missing something here? Is my brain not functioning properly after the surgery?

This is a stunning admission in my opinion and Mike Halpert might want to bring a couple of boxes to the office tomorrow because he might be packing up his personal belongings…

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium