WHAT'S OLD SLAVONIC FOR "POLAR VORTEX?"

I've been skeptical for some time about the weathermen using terms to push Narrative.

The expression for a patch to a model to explain this year's anomaly is ad hoc.  Such as what happens when January takes place in the big coastal cities.  Then it's "polar vortex."  Sufficient ad-hoc-ery, though, might as well be indistinguishable from a millenarian cult.

Here it is February, and a musing from 2021 remains relevant.  "All the same, I can't help but wonder whether these cold snaps that keep showing up around Groundhog Day aren't Kuhnian anomalies, and whether climatologist are so wedded to their paradigm of anthropogenic global warming that any ad hoc patch will do."

Here it is late in February, 2025, and there has been snow on the ground all week.  Perhaps it will melt away in another week.

Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they d@mn well please, and that includes late-fall weather in the Great Lakes.  Whether Cold Spring Shops will be getting immediate gratification from a new snow-thrower or not does not, by itself, confirm or refute any of the predictions of climate chaos.

The shovel-ready snow that came during several small snowfalls never rose to the worst-case levels the weather guys on TV called attention to.  As the northern hemisphere does its spring thawing, though, the storm track will shift in such a way as to bring those Panhandle Hook lows through, with the wet snow, well through March and into April, and the snow thrower is ready for such an event.

Kuhnian anomalies, though?  Look what turned up in Popular Mechanics.  "An Ancient Diary Reveals How 3 Horrifying Summers May Have Altered the Path of an Entire Nation."

What happened?

• An abnormally cold period known as the Little Ice Age significantly cooled down most of Europe during the late 16^th through early 19^th centuries, but historical documents reveal it had the opposite effect on some regions.

• Transylvania experienced some cold flashes, but mostly suffered from punishingly hot summers that resulted in famine and a boom in the rodent population that spread the Bubonic Plague.

• While the Little Ice Age was not caused by human activity, researchers think that historical records like this are valuable in helping us determine how to prepare for natural disasters and prevent anthropogenic climate change in the future.

That's not what a Transylvanian diarist recorded.

The Little Ice Age, as it’s now known, was a period during which the expansion of mountain glaciers had a severe impact on the European climate. From the 16^th to the mid-19^th century, the unusual weather patterns caused most of Europe to experience what seemed like an everlasting winter. But, oddly enough—as a team of researchers found out when they looked through pages of chronicles and diaries from the period—Transylvania instead suffered from strangely hot weather that led to famine and a Bubonic Plague epidemic.

“The analysis of the periods in which the testimonies were recorded indicates that the great majority of the analyzed century is characterized by relatively warm weather, with hot summers and hot years, particularly cold winters and cold years, being mentioned very rarely,” the research team said in a study recently published in Frontiers in Climate.

The records did include a cold snap or two.

The Little Ice Age did bring a few cold flashes to the Transylvania region. Some writings from 1510 record a winter so harsh that hay for livestock dried up and led to a string of thefts, while others from 1550 recall a winter that dragged on until May. But alas, much more common were the heat waves, which written records attest continued for several consecutive years.

Winters dragging on into May? We've seen a few.

Perhaps in the historical record might be evidence for people pushing anthropogenic climate change to revisit their priors.

The Little Ice Age was not the result of human activity, but the researchers who read through all these accounts think that such documents could teach us more about those causes and possibly help us prevent anthropogenic climate change in the future.

“By corroborating historical sources with modern proxy data, not only a deeper understanding of past climate variability,” the team said in the study, “but also obtaining relevant information for managing current and future climate variability.”

Or, perhaps, understanding that "climate variability" is not ours to manage?