Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Although global warming might have been implicated in harsh weather in the Rockies, Forbes author Dr. Marshall Shepard definitely wants to make it very clear he is not trying to link this snow event to climate change, even though there is a growing body of evidence that global warming will make extreme cold and snow more likely.
The Blizzard In The Rockies Doesn’t Disprove Climate Change But People Will Say It Anyhow
Marshall Shepherd Senior Contributor
Sep 29, 2019, 04:52pmI predicted several days ago that some people would be tweeting that this early season snowstorm in parts of the Rocky Mountain region somehow refutes anthropogenic climate change. Rob Bailey, a computer engineer in Ohio, brought the Tweet at this link to my attention. I am sure there are many more just like it.
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So why is the region experiencing such record cold and snow conditions in terms of magnitude of the event? To answer this question, we have to look to the jet stream. According to the NWS Glossary, the jet stream is a region of “relatively strong winds concentrated in a narrow stream in the atmosphere, normally referring to horizontal, high-altitude winds….The position and orientation of jet streams vary from day to day.” The wavy pattern of the jet stream is a very strong determinant of general weather patterns, particularly in terms of temperature and wetness. With this storm, the jet stream plunged southward bringing extremely cold air into the region. An upper-level low approaching from the Pacific region supplied the moisture.
To be clear, this is a weather event. I am not attributing it to climate change at all. However, I do want to conclude with something that is very counterintuitive to many people. There is a growing body of evidence (and a few counter-narratives) in the peer review literature that suggests that because the Arctic region is warming, there is less of a difference in temperature between the polar and tropic regions. That difference, called a gradient, is what determines the strength of the jet stream. If the difference is smaller due to so-called Arctic Amplification (warming in the Arctic), the jet stream would be wavier. The “so what” is that a jet stream with greater wave amplitude means more extreme troughs or “dips” with cold air and more extreme ridges or “humps” with warm air. In other words, the extremes on both sides of the temperature range are amplified.
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Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2019/09/29/the-blizzard-in-the-rockies-doesnt-disprove-climate-change-but-people-will-say-it-anyhow/
The following image seems to have upset Dr. Shepherd, because some cruel contrarians are using this image to mock the urgency of our global warming emergency.
Now don’t any of you go upsetting Dr. Shepherd even further by suggesting what he wrote doesn’t make sense.
Update (EW): h/t Right-Handed Shark points out Dr. Shepherd was not nearly so coy a few months ago when he linked the record heatwave in Europe to global warming.
I don’t envy those Alarmists. All their predictions go to crap all the time. Whatever they say turns out to be wrong in shorter and shorter time periods. Why cant the climate conform to their whims? Why cant it do what they say it must do?
5′ in 24 hours…That is how glaciers are rebuilt
Not exactly…
only if it stays at that rate the entire season and it doesn’t’ melt for multiple years… but one blizzard not so much.
But just imagine how much it has to snow for a glacier to form and move down a mountain valley in a span of tens to hundreds of years, like we know occurred during the LIA.
I am thinking…a lot.
It takes cold to wring the moisture out of air and make snow.
And less heat transport from the tropics to the poles would seem to be required for that to happen on a hugely expanded scale while the TSI is more or less constant.
Which would increase evaporation from tropical oceans.
This increased moisture then meets cold air and is dropped as snow.
So it would seem perhaps for all of that to occur, would require a more zonal jet stream pattern to bottle up cold air so it is not transported south and modified.
All of this would require some sort of modification in the Hadley cells.
We know that sometimes two ITCZs can form over the Pacific.
I have long wondered just what must be happening in the tropics during an ice age, or when neoglaciation is leading to a new advance.
Two ITCZs would lead to a zone of descending hot dry air between them….
This would keep more heat in the tropics and less would go poleward.
They would each perhaps be not as high.
Pure speculation, but one thing is sure…during a glacial epoch, the atmospheric circulation must be greatly altered from what we see in present day conditions.
At some point, a growing ice sheet extending ever higher would have increased snow deposition on it from orographic (or whatever the right word is for winds forcing air kilometers high over ice instead of a rock mountain) lifting.
One prerequisite condition might involve a particular weather pattern becoming locked into place for a hugely extended period of time. We see such things in a small time scale now, but imagine a pattern that locked in for months or years.
When they can attribute everything to global warming, their theory becomes non-falsifiable and ceases to be science.
Exactly. Or, if it’s unusually cold, it’s just weather, but if it’s unusually hot, it’s climate change. As you say, the whole theory is non-falsifiable; ergo, not science.
Too warm = AGW
True dat Bob
Too Cold = AGW
Too much, rain/snow = AGW
Too little, rain/snow = AGW
Forest Fire = AGW
Add any current undesirable condition here = AGW
e.g. : Trump = AGW
Don’t laugh its been reported.
How can they possibly be wrong. See What Did They Tell You.
Read Jerry Pournelle’s (and Niven and Flynn) “Fallen Angels”. It’s just a novel right. Guys. Right>
That’s why they changed the name from “global warming” to “climate change.” Like the Devil or the Boogeyman, it can be blamed for absolutely anything as a means to frighten idiots and children.
Remember that the average consumer of this “news” has daily contact with nature limited to the three steps from the foyer of the apt. building to the seat of their Uber, henceforth into the office elevator.
People who live a life in the hinterlands, outdoors, are not this easily fooled.
Climate will do what climate will do as it has for hundreds of millions of years. Meanwhile, decisions and policy need to be based on hard fact.
There are some crucial, verifiable facts – with citations – about human-generated carbon dioxide and its effect on global warming – and what those hundreds of millions of years have to tell us – people need to know and understand at hseneker.blogspot.com
The discussion is too long to post here but is a quick and easy read. I recommend following the links in the citations; some of them are very educational.
Let’s not hit Dr. Shepherd to hard. The patterns in jet stream flow were discovered in the 1950’s. By the 1980’s it was pretty clear that the flow pattern of the northern jetstream varied periodically. The change between a smooth flow and a convoluted flow has happened at least 4 times since 1950.
The only difference recently is that some scientists have said they have measured a warming in the Arctic that causes the jetstream to fluctuate more widely. They are right. It is climate change. The cause(hypothesis: increasing CO2 in the atmosphere raises global temperatures causing the Arctic air to warm and increasing the variations flow of the Northern jetstream) has so many interconnecting variables, and at this point only one data point- the recent 20 years or so, it’s nothing more than the most recent conjecture. Even saying “associated with” is a giant leap.
Unfortunately for the leftisit/socialists who started this campaign weather and climate are so UNpredictable they take centuries of data to draw any real, significant conclusions, much less make predictions.
The only climate change I’m at all worried about is that a possible dual solar minimum is the first detectable step in the beginning of a new glaciation. That would be climate change. Variable weather is a nuisance.
I would reply to the good doctor as follows: what you say about greater variability in the weather may be true, but it is also true that thanks to fossil fuels, we are easily able to adapt to these events (snow blowers, ploughs, air conditioners etc.). A transition to wind turbines and solar panels would not suffice to deal with a slight reduction in weather extremes.
I was in the dentist office waiting to be drilled (ok, no laughing) and here in MSP we had a real warm/humid last day of Sept. High 86F, dewpoints lower 70s. So I overhear a patient being escorted to his dental room and they were small talking and the weather came up of course. He says something to the tune of ‘ It’s sooo warm out. It’s scary. Global warming is really happening’ yadda yadda. I rolled my eyes and wanted to retort but bit my tongue. The 3 days leading up to this warm day were all below average, cool and wet. Wonder what this idiot-in-life had to say on those days. It’s so ingrained. The idiocy/naive that surrounds us is depressing.
While Taleb can be an acquired taste, I do like his take on averages:
“Mix a $2,000 bottle of wine with a $10 one. The 2 bottles will be worth less than $1,005 each.”
If it’s bad, Global Warming did it.
If it’s good, it happened despite Global Warming and will soon stop happening.
Wish I could relocate that article that a senior scientist wrote a few years ago, stating that the higher CO2 is actually one of the onsets of ice ages. More heat creates more vapour which creates more snowfall which takes longer to melt, which eventually does not melt, which then leads to most heat being reflected, which leads to an ice age.
always thought this guy is gonna be proved right.
You are correct: if the snow lasts through one summer, it is more likely that the next year it will do the same but more. Once the ground cannot thaw completely, a real risk in Winnipeg, permafrost sets in and the next year it sets harder, and so on.
The frost reached about 15 feet down in Winnipeg a few years ago, freezing the water mains 10 ft down cutting off customers. If that happened 5 years in a row, it would take a long time to reverse.
Snow that makes it through the summer can become a glacier.
Wot about the Russians? Or the Ukrainians? Tis them wot dunnit Shurely or is it Shirley?
I’m afraid the alarmists have more unhappy times ahead with so many cycles turning down together in PDO, ENSO, AMO, and solar. A lot more trial balloons of global warming causes cold will need to be flown.
…and that’s going to be an issue.
I’m serious when I say I’m very concerning about what will happen when the reality of “not really an apocalypse” runs into “but I’ve lived my life like there was going to be one” meet.
We can joke about “drinking the Kool-Aid”, but remember where the term came from. We aren’t talking about rational folks here…
If it is supposedly so warm in the Arctic, then why is the jet stream bringing such cold air down so far south in balmy September? This is just weather, and it is the 30 years of observed weather patterns that determines what the longer term climate trends are doing. Which is why every alarmist making claims about every tornado and hurricane and making climate attributions to CC are also false. Climate science is being reduced to the childish equivalent of monsters under the bed.
It is very complimacated, and we are unable to understand it because we have not been subjected to sufficient edutainment of the properly filtered modern climate sciencism variety.
I guess that’s cause that’s what Jet Streams do. 😊
“Global warming will make extreme cold and snow more likely.” I don’t like to be taken for a total idiot.
Ah but Curious George, if you aren’t part of the politically correct intelligentsia, corporate donor elite or political elite, you, like me, are an idiot. At least as far as the above are concerned.
Well, Hillary had a term for a large segment of Americans, “Deplorables”. H and her ilk think the same of us skeptics, “Deniers”. And I am sure there are a great number of other ‘D’ words they would use as well.
Quote from H”
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric.
Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2016/09/13/irredeemable-clinton-deplorable/
Simply put, if you disagree with any aspect of the leftist agenda, you’re deplorable.
“And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million.”
There is a message here somewhere. I think I get it and I think 11 million other people get it but I do not think Hillary gets it.
Hillary thinks she is going to get it. She’s making her move as we speak. She is back in the News and on the “attack”. Me thinks Hillary and her Democrat “worshippers” are planning on a “brokered” Convention on July 13–16, 2020, at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ….. where all the current Democrat POTUS candidates will be REJECTED and Hillary will be nominated as the Democrat POTUS candidate opposing President Trump.
They are the ones falling victim to Wizard’s 1st Rule…..
But yes I am a nasty deplorable.
As for the “politically correct intelligentsia,” I live in an enclave of these people so I am here to tell you that their “brainpower” is confined to whatever tiny narrow field they studied; the rest is slavish acceptance of arguments from authority. Since any “authority” is accepted without critical thinking, Gwenyth Paltrow or Dr. Oz have as much traction with them as the scientific pioneers of our age–they literally can’t tell the difference! Otherwise how could they be paying $200 a pop to “freeze their fat” in cryogenic cylinders while downing “green smoothies” with enough oxalates to give a horse a kidney stone? They may be good at trading bonds or inheriting Daddy’s hedge fund, but most of them are functionally idiots when it comes to anything real-world and practical. Hence all this silly drama.
I once helped a colleague with his PhD dissertation (in emergency health medicine). Smart guy. Well qualified. In emergency health medicine.
He also believed in pretty much every conspiracy theory going, including, unfortunately, being a 9/11 Troofer, something that, in hindsight (as I haven’t seen him for a decade), ended our relationship.
BTW, my ‘hood in Toronto (actually, not far from Stephen McInyre) has political opinions that range all the way around the spectrum from moderate left to tinfoil hat left (usually indistinguishable form the lunatic right, of course).
And while I do respect someone with a reasonable job description, so many of them are “consultants” and “alternative” practitioners that I often wonder if I’m in a Twilight Zone episode.
Yeah, that one jumped out pretty quick.
According to Presidential candidate, Tom Steyer, you are not “super-sophisticated” enough to understand.
Ole Tom managed to buy himself a seat at the next Democrat debate. I wonder what Bernie has to say about that? Bernie used to say millionaires and billionaires are bad for democracy but since Bernie has become a millionaire, he has dropped that complaint and focusing exclusively on the bad billionaires. Bernie, Tom Steyer is one of those bad billionaires. Perhaps you should raise this issue at the next debate. Tom will be standing right there.
Democrats never had any complaints regarding millionaires and billionaires that supported them.
It was only the other side’s rich people who were a problem.
If liberals didn’t have multiple standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all.
Wall Street doesn’t want Bernie or Warren. Dems can’t run Biden…it may be back to Hillary 🤓
That would be so funny to watch. Can you imagine round two of Trump versus MissSpoke Clinton?! Maybe they will give Chelsea a try, she could always claim to be a millennial and “well spoke”. Unlike her mother.
“it may be back to Hillary”
That’s what see is thinking. You can see the wheels turning when she talks. She is hoping the current field is so weak (and they are) that the Democrat elites will eventually come to her and ask her to represent the Democrat Party. Hillary told us the other day that she had 66 million endorsements for president, while whining about losing the election to Trump.
Trump has a year before the next election. That ought to be enough time for the Justice Department to show that Hillary tried to steal the 2016 election by using the Obama administration and foreign govenments to try to undermine and defeat Trump. And right after Trump was elected, Hillary and her people, includig the Democrats in Congress, started the current efforts to oust Trump in a secret coup.
The Deomcrats in the House of Representtives are abusing their political power for selfish, partisan purposes and the only hope for this country is to remove the Democrats from power in the House and Senate and Presidency.
The Democrats in Congress have become Domestic Enemies of the United States. They are trying to overthrow a duly elected President of the United States. It’s not going to work.
That’s the very essence of elitism.
Well the good doctor said,” If the difference is smaller due to so-called Arctic Amplification (warming in the Arctic), the jet stream would be wavier.”
So they make this up as they go along.
Well, my theory is that as the Arctic warms, the jet stream gets kinkier and ends up tying itself in little knots.
My theory makes just as much sense and is just as well proven as his theory is. So Shepherd therefore is a Science Denier.
The following report shows USA crop progress to 29Sept2019.
To this non-expert, it looks much later than last year. As I recall, planting across the Great Plains was ~one month late for the past two years. An early frost could reduce crop yields considerably. We will soon know.
The scoundrels and imbeciles out there will blame global warming for these wet and cold conditions. They will be wrong.
https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/8336h188j/cv43p9652/5d86pc14q/prog4019.pdf
Again, to a non-expert it looks like the growing season is soon ending in the western prairies.
https://weather.com/maps/tendayforecast
The crop yields in the prairie states will be of interest.
Killing frost overnight in Calgary and area to end the third quarter, after a foot or more of snow was dropped since Friday. I’d say it’s over, at least around here.
Oh it’s largely over alright. Yields are going to be dismal. The growing season was ok but cooler in the Canadian prairies (and likely Canadian states to the south of said prairies) – interesting to note that heat isn’t really all that required to grow many crops, just light and nutrients/water. Corn of course does not fit this description. That said the “fall” weather thus far has been abysmal. Sprouting, disease and other quality issues are going to be substantial this year.
From the eastern prairies we had a “good summer” if you count summer as a six week block between end of June and early August. Otherwise we’ve been about 4-5 C below normal since around April.
buggs – I had a similar talk this morning with my friend Joe D’Aleo of weatherbell.
I believe Joe and his partners are most reliable weather forecasters in the world. Joe and I are both worried about North American prairie crop yields this year.
It is notable that planting on the Great Plains was one month late in both 2018 and 2019. We had a good summer growing season in 2018 but 2019 has been poor.
In 2002 I (we) predicted global cooling to start by 2020 to 2030, and for the past !five years or so I’ve been saying “closer to 2020”. Maybe it’s already started. Hope not. 🙁
One week later update: Northern Great Plains harvest are far behind 2018.
https://www.usda.gov/media/agency-reports
Crop Progress NASS Weekly, Mondays
https://usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/8336h188j
https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/8336h188j/t435gs386/n8710438t/prog4119.pdf
And it’s getting cold.
https://weather.com/maps/tendayforecast
Climate change and CO2 can do anything. It’s magic.
When Al Gore, Justin Trudeau, Leo DiCaprio et al, stop flying, start walking, and move into 300 ft2 apartments I’ll consider global warming.
I still say it’s not a problem.
They want to have the baby and … We’ll see if society will go along with them again.
If decreased temperature gradient makes the jet stream wavier, then why have I never heard a claim that it is wavier in the summer than in the winter?
And if it does not eventuate it will be because of global warming. He has made a brilliant each way bet.
Bingo!
Why haven’t you heard that the oceans could be releasing more energy causing global warming? After all they say the oceans may have caused the “pause” by absorbing more energy .
Thats not what makes the jetstream take meridional flow. When the sun is very inactive it produces less UV and heats up the tropical ozone layer less. When the tropical ozone layer is more heated it bloats out and keeps the jet stream suppressed underneath it – and unable to invade lower latitudes. When the solar activity is low – the ozone layer cools and compacts – allowing the jet stream to slide further south. This oscillation from zonal flow patterns to meridional flow patterns has been noted for a long time. I wonder why its not mentioned by the meteorologists trying to explain away aberrant weather.
Nope.
That explanation is pure sophistry.
Isn’t it amazing how a bloating ozone layer at the top of the Stratosphere, 31 miles in altitude, prevents jet stream loops down in the Troposphere at a jet stream’s maximum altitude of 8 miles?
Marshall Shepherd’s explanation is almost as bizarre.
N.B. how Shepherd reverses the logic. He uses the less of a temperature gradient between air masses as causing more violent exchanges of temperatures…
Less of a gradient means less violent exchanges of heat towards the polar regions. Less violent heat exchanges means less violent storms. Completely opposite to Shepherd’s claim.
It’s not that simple. Sheperd is correct that the temperature gradient between the North Pole and the Equator drives the jet streams, but that gradient is always at a minimum in the late summer and early fall every year, just before the Arctic starts to cool again. But what happened in the Pacific Northwest was not an indication of a ‘weak’ jetstream pattern. Such storms are more expected later in the fall, as the temperature gradient over the Northern Hemisphere is increasing rapidly, and the jetstream is ramping up.
While the gradient powers the global jetstream pattern, and a larger gradient produces stronger jet streams, the actual course the jet stream takes is the result of a large number of complicated things, and I would be willing to bet that we don’t know many of them, much less understand them.
The snow storm in the Pacific Northwest this past weekend featured an unusually strong and pronounced jetstream flow for this time of year. There was nothing ‘weak’ about it. I don’t know why it happened, but there is nothing in this storm that supports the AGW crisis argument. It does not refute it, but it certainly does not support it.
This is just a case of trying to stuff a round storm into a square paradigm.
That is not what Shepherd wrote.
Shepherd explicitly stated that weak gradients cause wavier jet streams which allow more extreme troughs/dips with cold air.
i.e. Extreme storms.
The jet streams follow the angle of the sun. A decreasing angle of sunlight means the jet streams moves to the South. Large air masses and their circulation cause the waves in a jet stream.
There are named oscillations of the jet stream (the northern hemisphere polar front one) in terms of zonal-vs-meridional. Two that I am familiar with have acronyms of AO and NAO. These two mostly oscillate largely together, not always. The AO typically has its “low” state having the northern polar front jet stream being wavier and dipping farther south around central & eastern North America, and its “high” state with that jet stream taking a less wavy and more northern path through and around central and eastern North America. The NAO oscillation has its high state favoring a more-north position of the northern polar front jet stream in eastern North America and at least the west half of the North Atlantic. When NAO and AO disagree with each other with NAO being high and AO being low, usually $#!+ happens in central and/or eastern North America. I have yet to hear of NAO and AO having their states having significant correlation with seasons, and I see that as strong evidence that the amount of temperature gradient that powers the NH polar front jet stream does not have significant effect on how wavy/otherwise that jet stream is. Even though I agree with warming of the Arctic making that jet stream slower.
An hypothesis which predicts everything predicts nothing.
Or causes everything but predicts nothing.
Climate science (TM) predicts that whatever happens, it’s bad and all our fault.
Well, here in Toronto, when we had “record” low levels of water in the Great Lakes, someone rolled out the requisite “science is settled” super-duper model that said, indeed, this was the “new normal”. We needed to spend BILLIONS OF DOLLARS!!! in dredging the channels, maybe spending a few hundred millions on the recreational boating industry (seriously: their boats were too far from the water…)
Of course, a few years later, when we had “record” high levels of water in the Great Lakes, someone rolled out the requisite “science is settled” super-duper model that said, indeed, this was the “new normal”. We needed to spend BILLIONS OF DOLLARS!!! on infrastructure, etc.
Repeat as needed.
Aye Caligula and John!
yes, yes, yes, Dr. Sheppard- there is some supposed, possible, maybe, evidence that Arctic warming produces cooling elsewhere. The point people like him miss entirely- intentional or not- is that people just like him love to jump on every single warm day or event or “hottest evah”. Remember how during the very first Climate Change meeting they intentionally picked the hottest day of the year, and intentionally turned the A/C off? Thinly veiled fraud from the start, so why wonder when ordinary people like me say Ha, told you so. There is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary with the earth’s climate, and no number of young children taking a day off school will convince me otherwise.
W/all the attention on the starving polar bears, is no one thinking of the poor mountain goats? I call out mountain goat discrimination!
I was thinking theres a LOT of meat on that mountain goat;-)
I noticed that also, That goat sure looks like it has been eating very good
There’s mountain lions to cure that problem.
Would not the decreasing “temperature gradient” mentioned by Dr. Marshall Shepherd mean fewer tornados and hurricanes?
And if we use a hypothetical and say that due to global warming the Arctic/Antarctic poles become as warm as the middle latitudes; would that not make weather disappear?
It then doesn’t make sense that warming of the Arctic causes a wavering jet stream that then causes colder weather.
Last year the US had one of its snowiest winters and forest fires were at a minimum this summer. Was that due to global warming? If it was, we need more of it.
Not just the USA Europe too,USA also smashed cold records, more evidence of the GSM than a Dr Shepherd cold is a warming event. Open question for all how much does Dr shepherd get paid to come out with this nonsense.
a more extreme temp gradient is unstable…..that would make the jet stream even more unstable
Just the opposite of what he’s claiming
“a more extreme temp gradient is unstable”
No, evidence suggests ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4455715/ ) it strengthens the polar vortex ‘fencing in’ the Arctic air exactly as he is suggesting. A weaker gradient makes for a slower, wavier more meridional vortex bringing colder air south and sending warmer air north. It’s weather, it happens every year at some time to some degree – but the science suggests it will become more pronounced with a warming Arctic. Lo and behold – thats exactly what is happening – the Arctic is getting greater pulses of warmer air advecting in to replace the colder air being sent south.
None of this is news and this sort of post reveals the desperate extent to which this site and its adherents are willing to go to deliberately muddy the issue and spread mis-information – as evidenced by the misleading headline.
The linked article is not “evidence” of anything, it’s a hypothesis.
Do you think this hypothesis has any merit?
Tornadoes of stronger categories are actually on a slight downward trend. As for hurricanes, those (at least generally) aren’t powered by horizontal temperature gradients like most other storms are.
Hurricanes and tropical storms are by definition not powered by any horizontal temperature gradients.
They exist exclusively within a single air mass. If they move into a zone of air mass boundaries, they become extratropical.
I am curious why you would qualify the assertion?
And what is this about a slight downtrend?
The trend is sharply lower.
Many recent years have had numbers that were fewer than had ever before been recorded, even while we are almost certainly doing a far more thorough job of counting them all.
And most recent years have had numbers similar to what in past decades would have been a near record low year that only happened once or so a decade.
Another example of how alarmists have been not only wrong but the exact opposite of correct in their predictions is in the number and intensity of droughts.
Places which for many decades had frequent and severe droughts have seen few if any of them in recent decades. The northeastern US is an excellent example of this, but in fact the entire country has on the whole far fewer recent droughts that the historical averages suggest is normal for our country.
This past year has had the fewest number and least aerial coverage of drought in the recorded history of these events.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/24/2018-u-s-tornadoes-on-track-to-be-lowest-ever-noaas-temperature-trends-blow-a-hole-in-climate-correlation/
I thought the wavey jet-stream was explained by a quiet sun, not the thermal gradient of the atmosphere by latitude.
Natural causes not allowed in the climate wars.
So the second lowest Arctic ice extent just occurred last week because of polar amplification of temperature caused by crisis anthropo global warming! And now a heavy blizzard, in Montana (in Glacier National Park where warmists recently had a ‘funeral’ for the final days of the famous glacier) caused by extremely cold air in a wavy jet descended. Cold air from yhe balmy Arctic.
So PhD* (new style KrackerJack^тм degree prizes) Shepherd thinks there will be snarky Twitters! That, Dr*S, is your brain trying get thru to you that the climate puppy is dead.
Let ’em squirm!
All those maggots on a hook of their own making – let ’em squirm.
They’ve sold their souls to a Nongqawuse delusional prophecy about the weather.
Now let them rationalise and make fools of themselves as it falls apart.
Millennialists! If a person doesn’t stand for something, they’ll fall for anything. Could be an Xhosa proverb!
By 1858, approximately 40,000 people had starved to death and over 400,000 cattle were slaughtered. Amongst the survivors was the girl Nongqawuse; however, her uncle perished.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Cape_Colony_from_1806_to_1870#Xhosa_cattle-killing_movement_and_famine_(1854-1858)
But the summer heat waves were because of a stronger, not weaker, jet stream.
Where was the gradient then?
Contradiction is the only constant in the warmist narrative that they make up as they go along.
But when the dippy jet stream brings a summer heatwave on the backside…… definitely climate change. A dippy jet stream was blamed on global cooling during the (now erased) global cooling scare. Can’t have it both ways – maybe it is all just natural earth climate/weather!
Why are alarmists so unaware of their own utter hypocrisy and bankrupt credibility and why does no one in the MSM/scientific community/authority/politics call them out?
Can’t have it both ways
They can have it more than 2 ways out of 2 – they can have five!
And every one of them worse than we thought.
If warming causes cold, some people may call that negative feedback.
Perhaps how our climate remains quite stable for thousands of years.
Classic case of wanting to have it both ways.
No. A classic case of a pseudo-scientist masquerading as a scientist.
A PhD does not a scientist make.
I hate their models BUT, their waving their hands and saying “see this makes sense” is a tiny step in knowledge, Need good data, theoretical equations and then they should model it for a nice tidy sosricsl world with simple layered atmosphere that first priduvrs a jet stream and then by forcing a lower gradient ( in two different ways: high arctic or colder equatorial) and show us the model that makes it wavey.
“To be clear, this is a weather event. I am not attributing it to climate change at all.”
But when the same wavy jet stream brought France a couple of hot days in the summer, it was “climate change” and NOT a weather event.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2019/06/28/heatwave-climate-change-connections-in-one-simple-analogy/
Post updated. Thanks, I forgot about that!
“The following image seems to have upset Dr. Shepherd, because some cruel contrarians are using this image to mock the urgency of our global warming emergency.
What image?
“What Image?”
Maybe it was added later. It’s a triptych of snow accumulating on a garbage dumpster, first 2 feet, then three, then four.
Its an embedded facebook image, the original of a twitter link referenced by Dr Shepherd in his article.
https://twitter.com/RmbaileyRob/status/1178345616231014403
Globull warming causes more snow. Negative feedback anyone?
Marshall Shepard is using “apaphasis” to mention “global warming” by insisting the weather has nothing to do with global warming.
Could it be an indicator of “global cooling”, and is Marshall Shepard trying to conceal or deflect this by parenthetically mentioning global warming?
Wavier? Look up the largest temperature delta in one day in the lower 48. Extreme temp changes in MT are called weather.
TCI down because of less UV because low of solar activity ,shrinking atmosphere, that induces the jetstream to meander and to send cold air in southern regions (Mike Lockwood) and is responsible for cold(rt) winters.
It doesn’t matter. Whatever the anomalous weather event might be, it will be blamed on human CO2 emissions and the anthropogenic climate cataclysm those emissions cause. It’s an assertion that’s impossible to refute or falsify because everything, weather wise, is attributed to it. You’ll have about as much luck convincing witch doctors that every malady and bad event isn’t caused by evil spirits. There’s no rational response to an irrational assertion and it’s rather unfortunate that so many, many people are so irrational about something as ubiquitous as the weather.
Yes, weather. That’s all it is and ever will be for us, lowly, short lived, humans is weather. We don’t live long enough to experience or to appreciate climate. Sure, we have ‘records’ of past weather but like so much in the past those records are up for interpretation and subject to the whim and whimsy of the personal bias of the historian, record keeper, or hack statistician that collected, collated, catalogued, copied or fudged the thing together. Whatever suites the purpose is included and whatever doesn’t suite the purpose is left out and then is cherry picked to death in wiggle-fit/trend-line fashion leading to endless food fights here and on other sites. I’m not making light of the debate or how important it is to keep the witch doctors from sacrificing us all to the climate god(s). I’m just frustrated that we actually need to have the debate to begin with and are wasting so much time, money and effort on a subject that should, rightfully, be relegated to small talk amongst strangers on a train. It’s weather. It doesn’t become climate until enough time has passed for a geologist to get involved in the discussion and then you can refer to my earlier thoughts on historical records for an idea on where that will lead.
Personally, if it is getting warmer? Good. Warmer is better as far as I’m concerned. Colder is bad news and, more than likely, bad news is on the way, eventually regardless of what we do. In the long view, on any significant time scale, what we do doesn’t matter. Ask any geologist. On a geological time scale we were never here.
Cheers
Max
You’re right. This is all anthropocentric hubris. Sadly for the watermelons they chose the wrong apocalypse to sell ie. they should have gone for the cooling narrative. But there is hope for rationality yet : they will get bitten by the rebellion of their own spawn.
Cheers, Mike.
And what caused the extreme circumpolar jet stream excursions in the 1970s?