Weird, Weirder and Weirder-er
Is an SUV soup coming to street corner near you?
It is getting less uncommon that the things I choose to write are overtaken by events, almost as soon as they are published. Two posts ago I told y’all that erratic weather patterns were confounding farmers all over the the world. Last week I described how Central Europe had been beset by the Boris supercell that came from a seemingly fluke loop in the polar vortex. “Seemingly fluke” is how magic, sorcery, or divine intervention are often attributed when natural events like eclipses and earthquakes strike. On closer examination, we can usually ascribe an author, and where weather weirding is concerned, that’s us.
The fluke loop in the polar vortex that added 10 billion euros to the GDP of Central Europe in four days was a wobble in the jet stream created by the temperature differential between the equator and the North Pole, generated by global heating, which in turn, was caused by burning 100 million years of stored sunlight in less than two centuries. We are on track to burn that much in the next 10 years as we burned in all that previous time.