Guest essay by Eric Worrall
It is predictable that climate alarmists like Michael Mann are quick to see anthropogenic influence in high profile extreme weather events, like Hurricane Harvey. But Mann’s message about Harvey has interesting implications for the Texan wind power industry.
It’s a fact: climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly
Michael E Mann
Tuesday 29 August 2017 00.07 AEST
What can we say about the role of climate change in the unprecedented disaster that is unfolding in Houston with Hurricane Harvey? There are certain climate change-related factors that we can, with great confidence, say worsened the flooding.
What we know so far about tropical storm Harvey
Sea level rise attributable to climate change – some of which is due to coastal subsidence caused by human disturbance such as oil drilling – is more than half a foot (15cm) over the past few decades (see here for a decent discussion). That means the storm surge was half a foot higher than it would have been just decades ago, meaning far more flooding and destruction.
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Finally, the more tenuous but potentially relevant climate factors: part of what has made Harvey such a devastating storm is the way it has stalled near the coast. It continues to pummel Houston and surrounding regions with a seemingly endless deluge, which will likely top out at nearly 4ft (1.22m) of rainfall over a days-long period before it is done.
The stalling is due to very weak prevailing winds, which are failing to steer the storm off to sea, allowing it to spin around and wobble back and forth. This pattern, in turn, is associated with a greatly expanded subtropical high pressure system over much of the US at the moment, with the jet stream pushed well to the north. This pattern of subtropical expansion is predicted in model simulations of human-caused climate change.
More tenuous, but possibly relevant still, is the fact that very persistent, nearly “stationary” summer weather patterns of this sort, where weather anomalies (both high-pressure dry hot regions and low-pressure stormy/rainy regions) stay locked in place for many days at a time, appears to be favoured by human-caused climate change. We recently published a paper in the academic journal Scientific Reports on this phenomenon.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/28/climate-change-hurricane-harvey-more-deadly
Back in 2011, climate scientists were predicting global warming would lead to stronger winds.
If Mann is right, if large scale stationary weather patterns are to become more frequent – days, maybe weeks of low wind speeds, potentially coupled with cloudy conditions which prevent solar systems from working, in my opinion the renewable energy business model in regions affected by this phenomenon is well and truly broken.
No plausible backup power regime other than fossil fuels or nuclear power could cope with such prolonged outages.
Original article h/t Willie Soon
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What is the difference between a subtropical high pressure system and a normal high pressure system? I live in Colorado, and we often see a strong blocking high-pressure system in central or western Colorado (or thereabout) during the summer.
Origin zip code. If the high forms in the subtropics, it is a subtropical high. If it forms in the mid or upper latitudes, we just call them highs.
I always use a cap ‘H’ just so folks don’t think you are on some other type of high.
It depends where you’re smoking that whacky tobacky.
“Scientists” will sound the alarm and demand policies be changed to conform to their predictions. Then, the same “scientists” will change their minds for one reason or another, and demand a different set of policies. It is all in the name of “science,” therefore it must be obeyed.
Anyone that sees a problem here may want to speak up.
As we all know, it is impossible to make a comparison of what happened to what would have happened because we can’t really know what would have happened.
[pulls out soapbox, climbs up]
Once again, “climate change” is not a force that, um, changes the climate. Climate change is the sum of all the changes in the weather norms and averages of a region. “Climate change” doesn’t cause slowly moving hurricanes and increased subtropical highs — those things ARE the “climate change”. Well, except that they aren’t that, either, they’re just “weather.”
Houston, and the entire Gulf Coast, is a low-lying, poorly-draining swamp subject to occasional torrential downpours, and sometimes they don’t move off all that briskly. One only has to look at the history of flooding in Houston to see this is not “unprecedented,” but it is about as bad as it gets — as far as we know, for the short time people have been living there and keeping records.
The alarmists switched from “global warming” to “climate change” because the warming wasn’t so global, nor was it very warming. We need to hold their feet to the fire on this topic, because using “climate change” as a cause is like saying that the changing height of a seedling causes it to grow.
James and readers.
An article written prior to the current situation.
‘…The trouble with living in a swamp: Houston floods explained
By Dylan Baddour May 31, 2016 Updated: April 19, 2017 4:14pm…’
The above is an article from The Houston Chronicle. It contains many references to all the Climate Change issues…gotta get your climate change references in… but as a local paper it has historical facts and photography that shows this city is a Swamp City.
The introduction.
‘…Things get bad when Houston floods. Water swamps homes, takes lives and shuts down the city. But it should be so much worse. There shouldn’t even be a city here…
…Early settlers drained marshes to build Houston town in a muddy bog. Fast forward less than 200 years and the city stands above water, mostly, thanks mostly to 2,500 miles of managed waterways…’
Houston Is A Swamp City. Houston got stuck with a huge but outdated system. Mid-century engineers didn’t anticipate two important things: how bad the rains could get and how much urbanization would exacerbate the floods….
Build subdivisions past the high flood mark. Install levees to protect all those costly homes. Use flood insurance to protect the wealthy. Let the poor that follow the rich be the photo op when the levees fail. Then blame republican car drivers for the catastrophe. Okee dokeee!
Mann hasn’t been right about anything yet. I doubt he’s right about this either.
Boy, is he convincing or what! BS like this is much better than real evidence: “The main condition for resonance is the formation of a zonally-directed waveguide for a particular zonal wavenumber k, which depends only on the wavenumber and the shape of the zonal-mean zonal wind (U) profile. Such a waveguide is present when a mid-latitude region of positive squared meridional wavenumber l2 is bounded by latitudes both north and south where l2 vanishes, inhibiting the dispersion of wave energy and trapping excited planetary waves in the upper troposphere (300–500 mb).”
#SettledSeance https://twitter.com/RogerGLewis/status/902786478371196928
97% of all Mediums agree communication with the dead is possible.
The moment you become part of the (climate)mafia, horizontal is the only way out. You just know too much. And they know it.
So this is his only option because the people behind this (and many many other frauds) are not nice people. They are only interested in power.
Michael Mann wrote: “The stalling is due to very weak prevailing winds, which are failing to steer the storm off to sea, allowing it to spin around and wobble back and forth. This pattern, in turn, is associated with a greatly expanded subtropical high pressure system over much of the US at the moment, with the jet stream pushed well to the north. This pattern of subtropical expansion is predicted in model simulations of human-caused climate change.
More tenuous, but possibly relevant still, is the fact that very persistent, nearly “stationary” summer weather patterns of this sort, where weather anomalies (both high-pressure dry hot regions and low-pressure stormy/rainy regions) stay locked in place for many days at a time, appears to be favoured by human-caused climate change.”
As if stalled weather fronts only started happening recently after humans started burning fossil fuels.
How about all those stalled high-pressure systems over the U.S. during the extremely hot 1930’s? That happened before CO2 was an official issue. The fact is, weather systems stall periodically because of the way the winds blow. Mann claiming to see a pattern in the jet stream that creates the high pressure system in the West at the present is laugable. The high-pressure system there just formed in the last few weeks and will not be there long, as the patterns are continuously changing.
Here’s your high-pressure system (marked). Let’s see how long it sits there. And when it moves, will Mann claim CO2 did the moving?:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/500hPa/orthographic=-104.15,42.81,355/loc=-110.639,39.826
Mann fears change that’s too fast, too slow, or remaining too stationary.
Interesting that Dr. Mann mentioned land subsidence from drilling for oil but ignored increased water removal from population growth.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/circ1182/pdf/07Houston.pdf
Slightly an aside, but may speak to motivation. Some websites, such as wxshift.com ignore browser settings Not to use your location. That behavior can often be blocked by Not allowing JavaScript for the site, but that can also disable functionality that one might like to view, such as: wxshift.com//climate-change/climate-indicators/us-wildfire
More on topic, a paper that looks at 132,000 years of relative sea-level changes in the Mediterranean Basin: https://www.academia.edu/34197755/Late_Quaternary_sea-level_changes_and_early_human_societies_in_the_central_and_eastern_Mediterranean_Basin_An_interdisciplinary_review?auto=bookmark&campaign=weekly_digest
Sea-level from tidal gauges, both with and without (estimated ?) land subsidence: http://www.sonel.org/-Sea-level-trends-.html?lang=en
One might need to verify what they mean by ‘trends’, also.