What's With The Cold?

After a succession of mild winters, northern United States dwellers are biting their lips on the cold reality that has lately set in just out the door.  Things are cold, growing zones have been laughed all the way back to Washington, and everyone and their brother is suddenly looking to castrate Al Gore.  Then we have the mainstream media, with their horror stories of how awful this slightly difficult winter has been, and how freezing temperatures have made it all the way down to (gasp) northern Florida.  I have news for these people, I really do: It's been pretty cold in snaps as recently as 2012, that very same year where we thought we were going to all die from being consumed in a huge fireball of drought and intense heat:

That's a polite map too (I never took a shot of the map that we had back in 2011 where Miami clocked in at a lovely 32 for an overnight low), but it does tend to illustrate a point nicely.  In the west we see all sorts of blotches on the colorful landscape, indicative that there are some mountains there throwing things off a bit.  Not so back east, where we have a lovely arc heading southward, nearly uninterrupted.  The Great Lakes, at least in their southern reaches, seem to moderate things a little bit, and there is a discernible line of defense in Virginia and North Carolina where the cold seems to taper off in a sudden halted advance (those Appalachians are doing their work, yessir), but by and large the only thing stopping the onslaught is a very warm and moist Gulf of Mexico giving a punch back northward.  Without it, that 30 we see over in Laredo, Texas (right east of where the US-Mexico border curves southward again) would be a more familiar sight in New Orleans or Daytona Beach.

The last great glacial period of our climate was pretty much a situation where the Gulf of Mexico had the tar beaten out of it by a mile high mountain of ice that spent thousands upon thousands of years pushing south of it's chief rival, Hudson Bay.  Really, if we want to know what is with the cold, we can blame Hudson Bay, because it is inviting it's friend the Polar Air Mass/Vortex/Flavor of the month name south, and they then decided to crash a party over at Jet Stream's house, and... well, those are some pretty cold days we have been having lately, right?  Back in the late seventies, this sort of thing happened for a few winters, and combined with the cooling trend we saw from the forties until then, all sorts of scientists (many of whom now argue in favor of global warming) were thinking that our interglacial period was up.  What they did not know was that while things are quick to warm up (a melting glacier is like a runaway freight train that melts under itself and heats up by virtue of getting lower in elevation, melt-water heating the surrounding ice, etc.), the freezing process, at least in terms of climate, takes a lot longer.  That huge continental glacier still had to fight off summer melt, lower-elevations, etc.  Hudson Bay is the endurance fighter to the Gulf of Mexico's quick show, for sure.

Anyway, that could open up a whole other can of worms regarding Climate Change (gasp), which I am more than eager to jump into, but for this post at least, I will keep things simple:

1. We have seen this sort of cold before and this is not the apocalypse.

2. You can get a hard freeze as far south as Tampico in Mexico or Miami in Florida, simply because we don't have east-west mountain ranges to block off the Arctic air masses which Hudson Bay can send far more south than anything resembling similar latitudes over in frosty Siberia (which, as a rule, gets even colder, but tends to keep the freezer up farther north; they have forests which can see -70F in a normal winter while seeing 70F during the summer, while we have a much more southern treeline than they do, because Hudson Bay keeps us on ice longer).

3.  It's actually been uglier in some parts before:

4.  As you can see from the map, there are people in Montana and Alberta that have experienced in actual temperatures what we whine about regarding wind chill further east.  They have airports there too, not to mention freeways and schools, but manage to survive.

5.  Don't think this leaves us out of the water as far as "no more normal winters" are concerned.  We could very well have another scorcher of a summer with next to no rain, like California is current experiencing.  I think they got an inch in parts today, but you know what I mean.  A day of rain hardly makes up for a year without it.  What's that, you say, not every part of the world is frozen right now?  Indeed.  We are experiencing a lot of extremes.  Our continent is no stranger to periodic extremes, true, but prolonged?

6.  You can probably panic a little bit at that thought.  Still, wait to see how the next few winters turn out before declaring victory of your opposition in the climactic political game.  It's cold, but not outrageously so, nor is it normal.  This is a spike in overall trends.

Just throwing some of this out there... in the meantime we can explore more of what cold means.