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Why More Frequent Cold Blasts Could Be Coming From Global Warming

News Feed
Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Frigid air that normally stays trapped in the Arctic has escaped, plunging deep into the United States for an extended visit that is expected to provoke teeth-chattering but not be record-shattering.It's a cold air outbreak that some experts say is happening more frequently, and paradoxically, because of a warming world. Such cold air blasts have become known as the polar vortex. It's a long-established weather term that's become mainstream as its technical meaning changed a bit on the way.What it really means to average Americans in areas where the cold air comes: brrrrr. What's happening is the jet stream — that usually west-to-east river of air way above ground that moves weather systems along — has made a roller-coaster like dip from the Pacific Northwest to the Southeast and is stuck on that wavy track. To the west of that plunge, in California, it's hot and dry. But to the east and just above the dip, it's a taste of the North Pole.“We're just getting a lot of cold Canadian and Arctic air that's being just channeled from north to south,” said Dan DePodwin, AccuWeather director of forecast operations. “We really expect this to be more of a prolonged stretch of well below historical average temperatures. We're talking 12 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit (7 to 14 degrees Celsius) across a large portion of the eastern half of the country.”The worst will be in areas that just got hit with heavy snow, from Kansas to Washington, said National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center meteorologist Zack Taylor: “That's where we could see actual overnight lows down well into the single digits, perhaps even below zero in some places across the Ohio Valley and the Plains.”Judah Cohen, seasonal forecast director at the private firm Atmospheric and Environmental Research, called this a polar vortex event. He and DePodwin called it a stretching of the polar vortex, which is cold air normally penned in high above the Arctic that's there year round.“Think of it as like a rubber band at rest, kind of roundish,” Cohen said. “If you start pulling on it, it gets elongated like a hot dog or like pulling on a rubber band. It gets stretched out.”When the polar vortex stretches it can either bring that cold air south to the United States or toward Asia, said Cohen, an expert in winter weather. Other times, when something called sudden stratospheric warming happens, the polar vortex moves away from the Arctic and comes south or even splits. That's not the case this time, Cohen said.Other meteorologists, including Yale Climate Connections' Jeff Masters, along with National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center meteorologist Laura Ciasto, who co-writes the agency's “polar vortex blog, " say the polar vortex term is being misused. Technically, the polar vortex is 20 miles high in the stratosphere. And what's happening right now is down lower.These type of polar vortex disruptions — stretching or moving entirely out of the North Pole — are happening more frequently, according to a study last month by Cohen, Woodwell Climate Research Center scientist Jennifer Francis and others.“There's a climate change signal in that,” Francis said.The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world, which means the difference between temperatures up north and down south are shrinking, Francis said. Arctic sea ice is shrinking, especially near the Barents Sea in Scandinavia, which releases more heat into atmosphere. That means more energy bouncing off and warping or moving the polar vortex, Cohen said. DePodwin, who was not part of the study, said that makes sense because of these changes in the Arctic “the jet stream seems like in a warming world may be more amplified.”Yet winters globally are on average 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) warmer than 25 years ago, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data. There can be more more cold outbreaks and warmer winters at the same time, DePodwin said.“Keep in mind that this is a small part of the whole climate, a couple of weeks of weather in a small part of the Northern Hemisphere,” DePodwin said, noting that climate change is years and decades across the globe. “Climate change does not mean that we will expect to see no more cold weather. It just means that the average temperature overall is going up and we still expect to see colder shots.”The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

Frigid air that normally stays trapped in the Arctic has escaped, plunging deep into the United States for an extended visit that is expected to provoke teeth-chattering but not be record-shattering

Frigid air that normally stays trapped in the Arctic has escaped, plunging deep into the United States for an extended visit that is expected to provoke teeth-chattering but not be record-shattering.

It's a cold air outbreak that some experts say is happening more frequently, and paradoxically, because of a warming world. Such cold air blasts have become known as the polar vortex. It's a long-established weather term that's become mainstream as its technical meaning changed a bit on the way.

What it really means to average Americans in areas where the cold air comes: brrrrr.

What's happening is the jet stream — that usually west-to-east river of air way above ground that moves weather systems along — has made a roller-coaster like dip from the Pacific Northwest to the Southeast and is stuck on that wavy track. To the west of that plunge, in California, it's hot and dry. But to the east and just above the dip, it's a taste of the North Pole.

“We're just getting a lot of cold Canadian and Arctic air that's being just channeled from north to south,” said Dan DePodwin, AccuWeather director of forecast operations. “We really expect this to be more of a prolonged stretch of well below historical average temperatures. We're talking 12 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit (7 to 14 degrees Celsius) across a large portion of the eastern half of the country.”

The worst will be in areas that just got hit with heavy snow, from Kansas to Washington, said National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center meteorologist Zack Taylor: “That's where we could see actual overnight lows down well into the single digits, perhaps even below zero in some places across the Ohio Valley and the Plains.”

Judah Cohen, seasonal forecast director at the private firm Atmospheric and Environmental Research, called this a polar vortex event. He and DePodwin called it a stretching of the polar vortex, which is cold air normally penned in high above the Arctic that's there year round.

“Think of it as like a rubber band at rest, kind of roundish,” Cohen said. “If you start pulling on it, it gets elongated like a hot dog or like pulling on a rubber band. It gets stretched out.”

When the polar vortex stretches it can either bring that cold air south to the United States or toward Asia, said Cohen, an expert in winter weather.

Other times, when something called sudden stratospheric warming happens, the polar vortex moves away from the Arctic and comes south or even splits. That's not the case this time, Cohen said.

Other meteorologists, including Yale Climate Connections' Jeff Masters, along with National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center meteorologist Laura Ciasto, who co-writes the agency's “polar vortex blog, " say the polar vortex term is being misused. Technically, the polar vortex is 20 miles high in the stratosphere. And what's happening right now is down lower.

These type of polar vortex disruptions — stretching or moving entirely out of the North Pole — are happening more frequently, according to a study last month by Cohen, Woodwell Climate Research Center scientist Jennifer Francis and others.

“There's a climate change signal in that,” Francis said.

The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world, which means the difference between temperatures up north and down south are shrinking, Francis said. Arctic sea ice is shrinking, especially near the Barents Sea in Scandinavia, which releases more heat into atmosphere. That means more energy bouncing off and warping or moving the polar vortex, Cohen said.

DePodwin, who was not part of the study, said that makes sense because of these changes in the Arctic “the jet stream seems like in a warming world may be more amplified.”

Yet winters globally are on average 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) warmer than 25 years ago, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data. There can be more more cold outbreaks and warmer winters at the same time, DePodwin said.

“Keep in mind that this is a small part of the whole climate, a couple of weeks of weather in a small part of the Northern Hemisphere,” DePodwin said, noting that climate change is years and decades across the globe. “Climate change does not mean that we will expect to see no more cold weather. It just means that the average temperature overall is going up and we still expect to see colder shots.”

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

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Why we only recently discovered space is dark not bright

For centuries, Europeans thought that eternal daylight saturated the cosmos. The shift to a dark universe has had a profound psychological impact upon us

Adobe Stock Photo/Phoebe Watts A blue Earth ascends over the barren surface of the moon, against the black void of space. This famous photograph, Earthrise, was taken on Christmas Eve of 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders. After almost six decades, we take this image for granted. But imagine a different Earthrise, in which space isn’t black but bright blue, like the clear day sky. As strange as it may strike you, this is how most Europeans imagined it for centuries. We know our understanding of the universe has undergone other major transformations, with far-reaching effects. For example, the shifts from an Earth-centred to a sun-centred universe and from a finite to an infinite universe weren’t only scientific discoveries. They made people genuinely rethink their place in the cosmos. The shift from a bright to a dark universe is of comparable significance, but it has been almost lost to history. In recent years, through my research in literary history and the history of science, I have tried to piece together when this shift happened. When, so to speak, did space turn dark? And I’ve found myself asking: what happened to us in the process? Earthrise, a photograph taken from the lunar surface in 1968, crystallized the idea that space was darkNASA Consider the testimony of Domingo Gonsales, the protagonist of the first English science-fiction novel, Francis Godwin’s 1638 Man in the Moone. Travelling to the moon aboard a swan-powered spacecraft, Gonsales reports seeing very few stars – and these few, “by reason it was always day, I saw at all times alike, not shining bright, as upon the earth we… see them in the night time, but of a whitish colour, like that of the moon in the day time with us”. Why does he see fewer stars than we do from Earth? And why are they pale, like the moon seen in the daytime sky? Because his space simply is the daytime sky. The sun has dimmed the light of the brightest stars and drowned out completely that of fainter ones. From our perspective, Gonsales’s universe is upside down. In his version, it is in daytime that we see it as it really is, whereas at night it is obscured by Earth’s dark shadow. But if we ascended into space at midnight, we would eventually break out of the shadow, into the eternal day beyond. In Francis Godwin’s Man in the Moone, the protagonist Domingo Gonsales sets sail for the moon in his swan-powered spacecraftHoughton Library Gonsales doesn’t mention the shadow, but we catch a glimpse of it in another early space travel story, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Approaching Earth, Milton’s Satan sees “the circling canopy / Of night’s extended shade”. In imagining a premodern Earthrise, then, we should add this shadow into the picture – a dark cone extending from the gibbous planet into the blue heavens and disappearing below the lunar horizon. Other authors explain why space isn’t just bright, but bright blue. The most common explanation is that the “firmament” – the variously imagined vault of the cosmos – was blue in colour. This is the view, notes Milton’s contemporary, the atomist philosopher Walter Charleton, held “not only by vulgar, but many transcendently learned heads”. In looking at the day sky, they thought they were simply looking at the end of the universe. The path towards Earthrise This universe also appears in visual art. Here, again, comparison with Apollo 8 is instructive. Some hours after capturing Earthrise, the crew delivered a radio broadcast to Earth from lunar orbit. Commander Frank Borman wished Earthlings a merry Christmas and read from the biblical account of creation. For the first time, humans attained a comparable, godlike perspective on their blue planet, sparkling in the black abyss. But when premodern artists illustrated these same biblical verses, they often drew the inverse: dark Earths, suspended in azure heavens. To complete the alternative Earthrise, imagine one of these darker Earths, rather than the familiar “blue marble”, ascending over the lunar surface. And it wasn’t just poets and painters. Philosophers and scientists also imagined such universes. Aristotle describes “the shadow of the earth (which we call night)”. Two millennia later, so does Copernicus, writing that “while the rest of the universe is bright and full of daylight, night is clearly nothing but the Earth’s shadow, which extends in the shape of a cone and ends in a point”. There was nothing irrational about such views. Early European thinkers simply had no compelling evidence to the contrary, especially regarding the nature of outer space and of Earth’s light-refracting atmosphere. Without such evidence, why suspect that night is the rule and day the exception? What reason had a premodern Christian to break with centuries of tradition and no longer view the heavens – the abode of God, angels and blessed souls – as a realm of eternal light, but one of eternal darkness? A 13th-century manuscript depicts a grey Earth casting a black shadow into a blue universe (left). The newly created Earth is also imagined as a black marble surrounded by a blue cosmos in a 15th-century manuscriptHeritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy; Bibliothèque nationale de France Which isn’t to say bright space was universal, even in premodernity. Thinkers of the Islamicate world, for example, accepted dark space from the 9th century onwards, though the reach of their views in the West seems to have been limited. By all accounts, dark space had to be rediscovered by European thinkers in the 17th century. For one thing, the period saw major advances in the scientific understanding of the atmosphere. Indeed, “atmosphere” is a 17th-century word, and one of the first to use it in English was Walter Charleton, whose universe can be described as the missing link in the story: neither bright nor dark, but changing from one to the other as the observer turns towards and away from the sun. This is because Charleton’s universe is still bounded by a firmament – although a black one, “and not azure, as most suppose” – and is also filled with swarms of tiny particles or “atoms”, driving him to speculate about their visual effects. But for Otto von Guericke, who accepted an unbound, infinite universe, and made groundbreaking experiments studying the vacuum, space is, precisely, space. If we found ourselves in such “pure”, “empty” space, with “no body lighted by the sun either underneath or before” us, we would “see nothing other than shadow”. From this point on, dark space is increasingly accepted by European scientists and scientifically literate thinkers. But that isn’t where the story ends, because bright space still survives for centuries in the popular imagination. Fast-forwarding to 1858, here is the astronomer James Gall, imagining ascending into space in a work aimed at the Victorian general reader: “We look around, and oh, how strange! the heavens are black”. Gall knows space is black, but he doesn’t expect his audience to know it. And this audience isn’t necessarily uneducated in other departments. It isn’t an ignoramus or a child who, as late as 1880, still believes the universe is an “enormous sphere of blue” – it is a distinguished literary historian, David Masson. Isolated instances continue into the 1920s, the very doorstep of the Space Age. We are dealing, then, not only with a lost, but also remarkably recent shift in our cosmological imagination. Because some of the most striking evidence appears in literary works, especially space travel narratives, it was first noticed by literary scholars: C. S. Lewis and, more recently, John Leonard. But it is yet to receive sustained study, and its cultural impact remains almost entirely uncharted. This impact has been profound, although it often hides in plain sight. For example, it is widely recognised that images like Earthrise transformed our planetary and environmental consciousness. Earth became “whole” and “blue”, but also “fragile”: emblematic of the imperatives of political unity and ecological sustainability, as well as the threat of nuclear warfare and anthropogenic climate change. What isn’t recognised, however, is that this transformation wasn’t due solely to a new view of the planet, but also of what surrounded it. Whole Earths had been imagined, depicted and reflected on since antiquity. But most floated in bright universes, eliciting very different reactions. The impact of Earthrise was therefore even greater than commonly understood. Once such images entered mass circulation, they wiped away even the last remaining vestiges of the old, bright cosmos, searing its exact inversion into the popular imagination: Earth as a luminous oasis in a dark cosmic desert. Earth was never “blue” or “fragile”, as such. It appeared so against the lethal darkness around it, which now became not only a scientific but also a cultural and psychological reality.

Rising Temperatures Disturbing Americans' Slumber, Study Says

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterWEDNESDAY, Dec. 10, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Climate change is costing people some shut-eye, and a new study...

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterWEDNESDAY, Dec. 10, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Climate change is costing people some shut-eye, and a new study says it’s only going to get worse.Higher daytime or nighttime temperatures slightly lower the amount of sleep a person gets, researchers reported in the December issue of the journal Environment International.By 2099, people could be losing up to 24 hours of sleep each year due to rising heat, researchers projected.“This work is an important step toward understanding how sleep is affected by environmental stressors like heat, which can increase the risk of disease and even death,” said lead researcher Jiawen Liao, a postdoctoral research associate in population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.“If we can help people sleep better, we may be able to reduce illness and save lives,” Liao said in a news release.Hot weather can disturb sleep in several ways, researchers said in background notes. Heat prevents the body from cooling down, can trigger a stress response and reduces the time a person spends in deep sleep and REM sleep.In turn, poor sleep increases the risk of many different health problems, including heart disease, breathing issues and mental health disorders, researchers said.“We already know that when there are extreme heat events, more people die from cardiovascular disease and pulmonary disease,” Liao said. “What will this mean for population health as global temperatures continue to rise?”For the new study, researchers analyzed sleep data collected for more than 14,000 adults, amounting to more than 12 million nights of sleep. The team compared people’s sleep against weather data for their area to see how temperature affects sleep.Results showed that an 18-degree Fahrenheit difference in daytime temperature was associated with about 2.2 minutes of lost sleep, while the same increase at night was linked to more than 2.6 lost minutes of sleep.“This may seem like a small amount, but when it adds up across millions of people, the total impact is enormous,” Liao said.As one might expect, sleep loss is highest during the hot summer days from June to September, researchers said.There also are geographic differences, with folks on the West Coast losing nearly three times as much sleep as people in other regions.All told, U.S. adults could lose between 9 and 24 hours of sleep each year by 2099, depending on where they live, researchers projected.Rising temperatures also were associated with more disrupted sleep throughout the night, and more time spent awake in bed, researchers said.Researchers next plan to investigate whether indoor cooling, green roofs or better sleep hygiene can counter the effects of heat and help people get a good night’s sleep. They also plan to see whether improving sleep can reduce heat-related health problems.SOURCE: Keck School of Medicine of USC, news release, Dec. 5, 2025Copyright © 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

EPA Eliminates Mention of Fossil Fuels in Website on Warming's Causes. Scientists Call It Misleading

The Environmental Protection Agency has removed references to fossil fuels from its online page about climate change causes

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency has removed any mention of fossil fuels — the main driver of global warming — from its popular online page explaining the causes of climate change. Now it only mentions natural phenomena, even though scientists calculate that nearly all of the warming is due to human activity.Sometime in the past few days or weeks, EPA altered some but not all of its climate change webpages, de-emphasizing and even deleting references to the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, which scientists say is the overwhelming cause of climate change. The website's causes of climate page mentions changes in Earth’s orbit, solar activity, Earth's reflectivity, volcanoes and natural carbon dioxide changes, but not the burning of fossil fuels. Seven scientists and three former EPA officials tell The Associated Press that this is misleading and harmful.“Now it is completely wrong,” said University of California climate scientist Daniel Swain, who also noted that impacts, risks and indicators of climate change on the EPA site are now broken links. “This was a tool that I know for a fact that a lot of educators used and a lot of people. It was actually one of the best designed easy access climate change information websites for the U.S.”“It is outrageous that our government is hiding information and lying,” said former Obama National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief and Oregon State oceanographer Jane Lubchenco. “People have a right to know the truth about the things that affect their health and safety, and the government has a responsibility to tell the truth.”An October version of the same EPA page, saved by the internet Wayback Machine, said: “Since the Industrial Revolution, human activities have released large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which has changed the earth’s climate. Natural processes, such as changes in the sun’s energy and volcanic eruptions, also affect the Earth’s climate. However, they do not explain the warming that we have observed over the last century.”That now reads: “Natural processes are always influencing the earth’s climate and can explain climate changes prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s. However, recent climate changes cannot be explained by natural causes alone.”“Unlike the previous administration, the Trump EPA is focused on protecting human health and the environment while Powering the Great American Comeback, not left-wing political agendas,” said Brigit Hirsch, EPA spokesperson, in an email. “As such, this agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult. Plus, for all the pearl-clutchers out there, the website is archived and available to the public.” Clicking on “explore climate change resources” on the EPA archived website leads to an error message that says: “This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it.”Former Republican Governor Christie Todd Whitman, who was EPA administrator under George W. Bush, said, “You can refuse to talk about it, but it doesn't make it go away. And we're seeing it. Everybody's seeing it.”“We look ridiculous, quite frankly,” Whitman told The Associated Press in an interview. “The rest of the world understands this is happening and they're taking steps... And we're just going backwards. We're knocking ourselves back into the Stone Age.”Democratic EPA chief Gina McCarthy blasted current EPA chief Lee Zeldin, calling him “a wolf in sheep's clothing, actively spiking any attempt to protect our health, well-being and precious natural resources.”Nearly 100% of the warming the world is now experiencing is from human activity, and without that, the Earth would be cooling and dropping in temperatures until the Industrial Revolution, Swain and other scientists said. The EPA listed natural causes “might be causing a very tiny amount of warming or cooling at the moment,” he said.Marcia McNutt, a geophysicist and president of the National Academy of Sciences, said that there is consensus among experts from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, or NASEM, on the causes of climate change. “Numerous NASEM reports from the nation’s leading scientists confirm that the climate is changing as a result of human activities,” McNutt said. “Even the EPA acknowledges that natural causes cannot explain the current changes in climate. It is important that the public be presented with all of the facts.”Former EPA climate advisor Jeremy Symons, now a senior advisor for Environmental Protection Network of former EPA officials, said: “Ignoring fossil fuel pollution as the driving force behind the climate changes we have seen in our lifetime is like pretending cigarettes don’t cause lung cancer.”Michael Phillis contributed to this report.The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – December 2025

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