The weather has been pretty chilly on the east coast of the United States this November. On Saturday November 3 they had a foot of snow in Maine with lesser amounts across the rest of New England. Now a "polar vortex" cold front is moving down across the midwest bringing snow and temperatures 20° below across much of the midwest. I'm sure many people are thinking "global warming is bunk" as they scrape their windshields and shovel their driveways and deal with the unseasonable cold.
Meanwhile, here in Alaska, the weather is really nice. Farther down the west coast the weather has been unseasonably warm all fall, with temperatures into the 90s in California well into October. And just offshore, some of the warmest temperatures ever recorded are heating things up across a huge area of the northeast Pacific Ocean. The size of this positive temperature anomaly ---shown above on Nov. 3, the same day a foot of snow fell in Maine--- is truly amazing. Look at the figure above and then compare the warm region off the west coast to the size of chilly Maine or even all of New England. The warm area over the NE Pacific is at least 50 times bigger then all of New England, and its at least 10 times bigger then all of the snowy midwest. Its roughly half the size of the entire North American continent. Its HUGE.
Global warming is already here. Its just unevenly distributed.
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