An Important Weather SHIFT

This is not a contribution to the raging global warming debate in which some people who pretend to be civilized threaten those who disagree with them with torture and death.

And it’s about a weather trend, not what happened last week in one place.

This is about a global weather shift. And if this shift is correctly described below, then it has major consequences. But almost no one is talking about it.

In their local areas, this shift has been apparent to North American gardeners for years, as they have been increasingly able to grow plants farther north than previously possible. The first map below is the USDA (US Dept. of Agriculture) Plant Hardiness Zone map published in 1990. It told gardeners what plants would survive in their geographical zone, but gardeners learned to “cheat” the zones in recent years, growing plants rated for one zone south of their garden. The second map below was a revised zone map published by the Arbor Day Foundation in 2006 because they knew the USDA 1990 map was seriously out of date (the maps are from Mother Jones):

Notice how Zones 3 and 4, for example, shifted north, in some places by hundreds of miles, indicating warmer temperatures farther north.

In 2012, the USDA published their own new zone map and admitted that the “new map is generally one 5-degree Fahrenheit half-zone warmer than the previous map throughout much of the United States.” So they admitted that the lowest temperature to be expected in many areas was five degrees F greater in 2012 than it was in 1990!

That same warming trend was bringing heat and drought farther north each year. For a decade, Northern Mexico has been struggling with heat and drought. In 2010 and 2011, this condition moved into Texas with a vengeance, bringing scorching heat and a lot of wildfires. In 2011, the wildfires spread to New Mexico and Arizona, with Colorado often experiencing smoke from these fires. In 2012, winter temperatures averaged six to seven degrees F above normal in Colorado, and by Spring, the fires arrived en masse in Colorado and Utah, and by Summer, even into Wyoming and Montana:

     Colorado farmers are facing disaster

During the Summer, more than 60% of the counties of the lower 48 states of the US were declared drought disaster areas.  And this Winter has been far milder than normal in most of the US:

     U.S. Agriculture Secretary: 2013 already a drought disaster

America’s first official disaster areas of 2013 were designated because 597 counties have experienced severe drought conditions for eight consecutive weeks, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Last year, 2,245 counties in 39 states were declared disasters by the USDA. With continued drought projected for much of the United States, farmers may have another hard year ahead of them.

     2 Great Lakes hit lowest water level on record

…the lakes…declined 17 inches since January 2012.

     Chicago expected to tie record for lack of snow

Chicago’s mild winter reaches another milestone on Tuesday: 319 days without an inch of snow falling.

That ties the record set in 1940. Wednesday will break the record and, with temperatures forecast to surge into the 50s Friday and Saturday, the record streak will continue.

     Low water may halt Mississippi River transport next week

And a good summary:

     2012 was hottest year on record for Lower 48 states

The average temperature was 3.3 degrees higher than in the 20th century…

Last year was the hottest year on record for the contiguous 48 states, marked by near-record numbers of extreme weather events such as drought, wildfire, tornadoes and storms, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

And surface temperatures in the Arctic have been rising for years. Here is the longer-term chart:

While the US heats up, Canada’s winters become more mild, and the surface temperature rises in the Arctic, there have been increasingly fierce and deadly winters over the last few years on the other side of the North Pole, especially in eastern Europe. From 2012:

     Europe death toll rises in big freeze

     Blizzards hit eastern Europe hard

And from 2013:

     Pyrenees ski resorts top world snow charts with over 7 meters (23 feet) of snowfall in one month

     Heaviest snowfall in many years hits Polish-Slovakian border

     Snowiest winter in 100 years paralyzes Moscow

     New satellite image shows the unusually frigid and snowy conditions that blanketed much of Great Britain

     Heavy snowfall closes dozens of roads in Turkey

     Record snowfall closes lifts and roads in the Pyrenees

     Snowpocalypse Russia: ‘Snow tsunami’ swallows streets, cars, buildings

     Europe hit by blizzards, air traffic havoc, deaths

     Croatia snowfall shatters record set in 1861

     Snow blankets parts of Middle East, Jerusalem

     ‘Lowest temperaure in Bangladesh’s history’ brings at least 80 deaths

     Unprecedented cold spell breaks 50-year records in Pakistan

     Heavy snow, torrential rain, gale-force winds batter Greece

     Russian Trans-Caucasian highway closed due to heavy snowfall

     China’s extreme cold snaps records

     More than 100 dead as cold snap hits India

     Record cold snap grips Korean Peninsula

     Coldest winter in decades for Russia with snow as much as 5 meters (16½ ft) deep – Plows cannot reach roads to clear them

And I can go back to 2012 headlines and find a lot more of the same, though, as usual (as always???), the trend accelerated in 2013.

Admittedly, claiming trend changes for weather is a dicey business. Weather has a knack for frustrating those who declare trends. But there is strong evidence for a rather persistent procession of heat marching north toward the geographic North Pole in the Western Hemisphere and cold moving south from the Pole in the Eastern Hemisphere.

So, if that’s right, what could be the cause?

Well, there’s another well-known phenomenon making a similar directional march. Here are some graphics from ModernSurvivalBlog.com that track the movement of the magnetic North Pole, with the data supplied by conventional scientific organizations such as NOAA. Here is an animated gif of the movement over the last 400 years:

And here’s the last 150 years:

And over the last 50 years:

From the creator of these graphics:

Since 1860, the magnetic pole shift has more than doubled every 50 years…During the past 10 years, the magnetic north pole has shifted nearly half of the total distance of the past 50 years!

Here’s another way to look at the accelerated movement:

Where is the pole heading? In the direction of Siberia. All this is not woo-woo information, airports that paint magnetic compass readings on their runways are having to repaint those number every several years.

What’s happening is that, depending on where you are, a compass reading can change by one degree every five years.

The magnetic South Pole is doing the same type of movement away from the geographic South Pole, having moved off the land mass of Antarctica years ago.

Most simplified graphics of the Earth’s magnetic field look something like this:

So the question is: Is weather moving with the movement of the magnetic poles? Another way to frame the question: At the magnetic poles, the Earth’s magnetic field captures charged particles flowing from the Sun on the solar wind and directs them toward the surface, an effect visible in the extreme northern and southern latitudes as the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis. Is the same energetic pattern also delivering the coldness of space to the planet’s surface? Or is it the relative thinness of the magnetosphere at the magnetic poles?

Well, if it’s correct that this coldness is moving with the magnetic poles, why should anyone care? Because if substantial coldness is moving away from the traditional locations of the geographic poles in Arctic and the Antarctic, then it would seem that the ice at the geographic poles would melt far more quickly than most would expect before equivalent new formations of ice could develop, particularly in the South Pacific where there is no landmass nearby. Perhaps I am uninformed, but I have not heard that such an effect is being accounted for in anyone’s climate change model. And as shown at the beginning of this post, the movement of heat north through North America from the south is proceeding rapidly. If this continues, or more likely accelerates, there might be a whole lot more melting of polar ice caps than previously expected, raising sea levels faster than almost anyone anticipates.

And perhaps my effort above was feeble, but there is a lot of evidence out there for this weather shift. So why are so few talking about it? Clearly, because it doesn’t fit people’s models of how things work. Magnetic pole movement is straight out of conventional science, while the idea that it would impact the weather is not. The solution for most? Ignore the evidence.

What is the Transition? Part 3 is here.