Heat Monsters strangle the Polar Vortex

And drive out the cold to Canada and/or Siberia. This painting is derived from a typical temperature anomaly map from the 2016-2017 winter. the area above 80N has not been closer than 5C from the old (1958-2015) average so the heat around Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya, and also in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas near Alaska and far east Siberia are not really so anomalous now. But this new climate regime(Anthropocene 0.02?) won't hang around long enough to ever become normal, or derive a climatic baseline from.

In fact we are forcing things so fast that the whole idea of a climatic baseline is becoming meaningless