Name:   MAJ USA RET - Subject:   SO THE PROs NEVER SAW IT COMING Date:   2/20/2014 9:14:07 AM

“The Official Forecast of the U.S. Government Never Saw This Winter Coming.

“The cause of the tough winter, as is well known by now, is the polar vortex, a strong and persistent ridge of high pressure over the eastern Pacific and the west coast of the United States. First, it’s causing California’s drought. Second, polar winds are flowing northward around the high-pressure ridge and then plunging down along the ridge’s backside.

“What the Climate Prediction Center hasn’t been able to figure out is why that ridge has maintained its position so persistently. ‘Sometimes trying to figure out why something happened is as hard as making the forecast of what will happen.’” [Bloomberg Business Week, 18FEB14] 

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-18/the-official-forecast-of-the-u-dot-s-dot-government-never-saw-this-winter-coming 

The reason they did not see this coming is because they kept their observations too narrow both historically and with respect to discipline.  They have not been listening to solar astronomers and paleo-climatologists/geophysicists.

For the past couple of years we have been (elsewhere) hearing of the paucity of sunspots. Whenever that has happened, the climate cools significantly in the years following.  The longer the lull in sunspots… the more protracted and severe is the cooling (Google: "Maunder Minimum").  Climatologists seem to be ignoring the climactic optimum (temperature maximum) which occurred about 8000 years ago in the current interglacial period (Google: "Holocene Temperature Variations").  In EVERY instance of the optimum, the temporally near side is gradually decreasing global temperatures… to some sort of limit… followed by a rapid temperature decline into the succeeding glacial period (Google: "Vostok Ice Core Data").

I am surprised by the parochial behavior of myopic meteorologists.  I am dismissive of ignorant and/or misleading journalistic coverage of this issue. A good scientist includes objective observations, respect for history (Google: "Theory of Uniformitarianism"),  and passive application of mathematically honest statistics.  A respectable journalist does not blindly represent conjecture as fact.