It's all part of the same system. The same polar vortex that is pushing Arctic air down to the Gulf of Mexico - pardon me, the Gulf of America - is drawing warm Pacific air up into south-central Alaska, meaning that if you live in Kansas or Indiana right now, you may well want to consider a trip to Alaska to warm up. Now, while you're considering that trip north to escape the cold, you may or may not be aware that there are voices blaming all this on - you guessed it - climate change. But as it happens, even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) which is all-in on climate change, is ambivalent about any such connection.

Here's what they have to say about the polar vortex:

The Arctic polar vortex is a band of strong westerly winds that forms in the stratosphere between about 10 and 30 miles above the North Pole every winter. The winds enclose a large pool of extremely cold air. (There is an even stronger polar vortex in the Southern Hemisphere stratosphere in its winter.) The stronger the winds, the more the air inside is isolated from warmer latitudes, and the colder it gets.

Here's what it looks like right now - you can see the bands of prevailing winds bending sharply from north to south, bringing that cold air down. And, if you look at the upper left-hand corner, you can see Alaska getting some warm Pacific air pushed up, causing our unseasonably warm temperatures.

 This isn't a new discovery. Meteorologists have known about the polar vortex for many years. The same phenomenon happens in the Southern Hemisphere in winter, and even other planets have similar events; Saturn, for example, has a strong vortex around its poles that has been observed for years.

So, is it caused, or worsened, or altered, by that great bugaboo, climate change? As I mentioned, NOAA is ambivalent.

Among the questions readers have been asking us is whether global warming is affecting the polar vortex in a way that would—paradoxically—make severe winter weather outbreaks in the mid-latitudes more likely. According to (NOAA stratosphere expert Amy) Butler, the idea isn’t as counter-intuitive as it seems at first glance.

“For example, disruptions of the polar vortex occur when the vortex is bumped from below by large-scale atmospheric waves flowing around the troposphere,” said Butler. “The waves are always there, but anything that changes their strength or location—including changes in surface temperature and pressure that result from sea ice loss—can potentially influence the polar vortex. So the idea would be that even though you have an overall warming trend, you might see an increase in the severity of individual winter weather events in some locations.”

Here's the onion:

But while the hypothesis is plausible, Butler said, “I don’t think there is any convincing evidence of a long-term trend in the polar vortex. What we see in the record is this very interesting period in the 1990s, when there were no sudden stratospheric warming events observed in the Arctic. In other words, the vortex was strong and stable. But then they started back up again in the late 1990s, and over the next decade there was one almost every year. So there was a window of time in the early 2010s where it seemed like there might be a trend toward weaker, more disrupted or shifted states of the Arctic polar vortex. But it hasn’t continued, and more and more, it’s looking like what seemed to be the beginning of a trend was just natural variability, or maybe just a rebound from the quiet of the 1990s.”

You can boil that down to "we don't know." And that's fine; that's how science is supposed to work. There's no convincing evidence of a long-term trend, although there are some unexplained variations, such as the quiet period in the 1990s. The absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence - but it's still the absence of evidence, which precludes drawing any conclusions. And models, which in the realm of climate are of limited use, aren't helping to draw any conclusions here, either.

"Some climate model experiments do predict that continued warming will lead to a weakening of the polar vortex. “It’s true that when you run some high-resolution climate models, with a realistic stratosphere, and a realistic sea ice layer, and you reduce sea ice cover, these models predict that the polar vortex gets weaker,” Butler said.

But then there's this:

At the same time, other model simulations predict that warming and sea ice loss will lead to a stronger polar vortex. Part of the reason for the disagreement is that the impact of Arctic surface warming and sea ice loss on the atmospheric waves that can disrupt the polar vortex is very sensitive to exactly where and when the sea ice loss occurs, and that hasn’t been consistent across model simulations.

That's a long way around the statement "We don't know." And that's fine. Science is - or, at least, is supposed to be, about inquiry. Gather data, examine it, form hypotheses, test by experiment and observation. Distill all of the NOAA statements on the polar vortex town and you get "We're still gathering data."

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As for the great American deep freeze, indications are that you folks down in the lower 48 are going to be getting a break early next week, when your normal winter weather will reassert itself. The polar winds will go back to their usual path, and people in my old Upper Midwest stomping grounds will no longer be looking with envy at the temperatures in Anchorage.

And soon enough, here in the Great Land, we'll return to our usual winter weather.

Once again the climate scolds have been shown that this isn't worth sacrificing our modern lifestyle; indeed, this polar vortex event is a great argument for the necessity of abundant, affordable energy, to keep warm, if nothing else.

Stay warm, all of you on the Outside!