I can’t bear it out with any specific statistics or data, but my feeling is that the weather machine is now operating in a different mode. Whether its stable, even for the short term, or not its too early to tell yet.

The Antarctic seems to be changing too. Ice extent is much more stable there than in the Arctic because the Southern Ocean is a much more effective heat sink-it tends to dampen out the discrete events and trends The Southern sea ice has been remarkably constant while the North has undergone a catastrophic decline. But for the last few years, there has been a slight but measurable drop in the summer sea ice, less than in the North, but undeniable nonetheless.

Hopefully, the world heat engine is settling into a new state, one more capable of handling the constantly increasing temperature. I hope so. Maybe the change will be gradual when it comes, and it won’t be the abrupt runaway cascade we fear.

I can’t prove any of this, of course. I’m not even convinced myself, but I’ve been studying this for a while now and I’d like to think I’m developing a sort of intuition about it.

An alarming heatwave in the sunless winter Arctic is causing blizzards in Europe and forcing scientists to reconsider even their most pessimistic forecasts of climate change.

Although it could yet prove to be a freak event, the primary concern is that global warming is eroding the polar vortex, the powerful winds that once insulated the frozen north.

The north pole gets no sunlight until March, but an influx of warm air has pushed temperatures in Siberia up by as much as 35C above historical averages this month. Greenland has already experienced 61 hours above freezing in 2018 – more than three times as many hours as in any previous year.

Seasoned observers have described what is happening as “crazy,” “weird,” and “simply shocking”.

“This is an anomaly among anomalies. It is far enough outside the historical range that it is worrying – it is a suggestion that there are further surprises in store as we continue to poke the angry beast that is our climate,” said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. “The Arctic has always been regarded as a bellwether because of the vicious circle that amplify human-caused warming in that particular region. And it is sending out a clear warning.”