Abnormally warm temps are happening right now

Here we go again. Another "disrupted polar vortex" pushing brutally cold temperatures deep into the southern states of the continental U.S. The last memorable one was the deep freeze of 2021, which came within a gnat's eyelash of taking down the entire Texas electrical grid. (Gov. Greg Abbott dishonestly blamed wind turbine failures, when in fact the most significant failures were with natural gas power generation.) Officially 246 Texans died in that event, but excess mortality statistics suggest the real toll was more like 700-800 dead.

This one won't be quite as bad, but it's still plenty cold. Our house in Kansas is working hard to stay warm right now.

If this leads you to think global warming is bunk, think again, for multiple reasons. The first is that it's January, i.e., winter. Winter is when it gets cold. Occasionally in winter it gets really cold. And even though the climate overall is rapidly warming, winter hasn't yet been canceled.

More enlightening, though, is what we see when we look around, at other parts of the planet. If we were to look right this moment at the high Arctic (including, um, Greenland!), where in the dead of winter we expect it to be extremely cold, what we'd find is that it's abnormally warm. The image below shows what's going on. Click on the image for a larger view. Use your browser's back (<-) button to return and continue reading.

Temperature anomaly 2026-01-24

 

It's often the case that when the polar vortex that encircles the Arctic and traps cold air at high latitudes is disrupted or stretched, cold Arctic air escapes and is pushed far southward, while at the same time warm mid-latitude air is pushed northward, causing the Arctic, or parts of it, to become abnormally warm. That's what we're presently seeing. Jet stream "waviness" is involved in this pattern, and climate change might produce wavier jet streams, potentially amplifying outbreaks. The Arctic is warming far more rapidly than lower latitudes, and Arctic warming narrows the temperature gradient driving the jet stream, slowing it and promoting deeper waves, which can cause cold outbreaks farther south.

It's important to understand that the image above doesn't show absolute temperature but, rather, temperature anomaly, which means deviation from normal. The scale on the right maps colors to temperature anomaly (in degrees Celsius). Thus deep blues mean much colder than normal, and bright reds mean much warmer than normal.

The source of the image is the Climate Reanalyzer tool from University of Maine, which you can view here. The climate maps are updated daily, so you can always get a current view of what's going on around the world. Various kinds of information is shown; be sure to select (mouse over) "2m Temp Anomaly" from the left side of the page to view what I'm showing here. This is a really useful tool. I keep it bookmarked and refer to it from time to time.

When interacting with the Climate Reanalyzer tool you can click the map to see other parts of the planet, or scroll to the bottom of the page to see the entire globe. Each click displays a different region. If you did so right now you would see that most of Africa is warmer than normal, as is much of Asia. So is a lot of Australia and most of Antarctica. Which puts the central U.S. into a larger context.

Indeed, that's my main point. I'm not an expert on polar vortexes or jet stream circulation patterns, but I do understand that the conditions I'm experiencing in the moment in my own location don't say a lot about the global climate. It's useful to realize that the continental United States comprises just 1.6% of the total area of the planet, and what's going on with us isn't representative of the planet as a whole. There's usually even significant variation within the U.S. itself. Presently the western third of the U.S. is experiencing warmer than normal temperatures. The image below provides helpful global perspective. To my eye, it appears that more of the planet is abnormally warm than abnormally cold right now.

Temperature anomaly 2026-01-24

 

While we're on the subject of "planet as a whole," I should note that there are tens of thousands of monitoring stations around the globe and aboard ships and ocean buoys that take daily measurements used to compute global average temperature. These give us a very accurate view of how the temperature of the planet is changing, and unfortunately it's warming at an unprecedented rate—far faster than it ever would under "natural" conditions. Last year was the third hottest year in the instrumental record. 2024 was the hottest by a large amount. 2023 was the second hottest. The ten hottest years in the instrumental record, going back to the 1800s, all occurred in the past decade.

While I'm on the subject, I should mention that I have a book about global warming consisting of essays from this blog. 

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

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