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.
…
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.
…
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.
Doesn’t the lying get boring? Admit it’s weather and use the green billions we are about to waste, and build sea defences or replant trees along the cost to stop the now weak soil from breaking down, build strong river walls. Clean out the street drains so the roads don’t flood, paris needs to do this, and london… With the many billions left over, use it to on schools, train the unemployed so they can work, we need doctors and nurses in the uk, and more hands on work, bring the factories back.
Children will no longer know what snow is.
Has anyone noted any reports or made any sightings of AlGore in Montana in the past few days?
“… Dr. Marshall Shepard definitely wants to make it very clear he is not trying to link this snow event to climate change …”
Even though he is.
Doublethink the ability to maintain two conflicting notions simultaneously without mental discomfort is an ability the most successful alarmists can carry off with aplomb.
Funny, the Washington DC area had it’s highest snow total ever in 2010 in the latter stages of the last solar minimum. Here we are 9 years later and we have just dropped into another solar minimum and we are having huge fall storms with a jet stream that plunged south. Australia has had snow in the last couple of months where it’s never been recorded before after a sudden and unusual Antarctic stratospheric warming. And about 1 month ago there was a very good post showing how the ENSO cycle could be correlated to different portions of the solar cycle. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/09/04/enso-predictions-based-on-solar-activity/ Dr. Shepherd reminds me of the cop in the old joke about a drunk priest that rear ended the car of a “person of color”. The cop asks the priest, “how fast was he backing up when he ran into you?”
The 10000 year solar minimum might be implicated !!
“might” is a bit of stretch.
Maybe if you’d said the 11 year minimum might be implicated, then a “maybe” could be in order.
But 10 millennia… ???
Given how bad the Maunder Minimum of 330 years ago was for Europe in the historical records, I seriously doubt we’re anywhere like that now.
mods pls delete.
Thx.
J
From the article: “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.”
Cold air has been dipping into the United States like this. long before CO2 ever became an issue. You need to find some other cause than CO2 for the jet stream movement.
I recall a 3-ft snow on top of an existing 2-ft in the 1950’s when I was a small lad near Bozeman, MT. My grandfather predicted a bad storm based on the circle around the moon & my parents talked about it for years.
This was the result of meridional flow of the jetstream that is the result of low solar activity. If you look at the jetstream you can see it making these long looping dips into low latitudes and the accompanying Rossby waves. Its really annoying that these meteorological phenomena that have been happening for generations are not just explained rationally – instead of inferring that weather events are the result of some phantom warming or cooling.
It is linked to climate change, an irregular, recurring change, but does not have a discernible anthropogenic cause, and could not in any conventional sense be classified as “catastrophic”.
Extreme warmth and cold doesn’t necessarily result from just a wavier jet stream, but also a strong one. To get extreme cold or warmth, you need to transport air southward or northward in a hurry before significant modification can occur. To have a strong and amplified jet, you need a large temperature gradient across the jet. Climate change, if man made and true, will not be apparent for a long time. We are just seeing an unusual weather pattern that has occurred in the past and will happen again.
Persistence of extreme patterns (these happen from time to time) occur for a variety of reasons (ENSO, positions of anomalous systems on the other side of the world, soil moisture, anomalous deep snow cover, etc.) I wish I could predict these patterns on a seasonal scale with skill! We learn more as time goes on, but we really don’t have all the answers yet. It seems to me that the AGW religion has crept deeply into our science.
I don’t necessarily agree with Dr. Shepherd on this one. My comments may not mean much because I don’t have a PhD and am not involved in climate modeling, but I have been a meteorologist for about 40 years, have looked at tons of weather and climate data, and don’t see things that have not happened in the past. My long term prediction, these extreme weather events will continue to cold (cold and hot, dry and moist).
I am going to have to watch the video I recorded of Suzuki talking about the pine Beatle epidemic in BC. Is he still claiming it doesn’t get cold enough anymore?
Well I watched the show but it was not as described in the tv guide, it was about leather back turtles.
To be clear, I am not saying that Marshall Shepard is a liar. It’s just that some of the things he says are untruthful. Well, pretty much all of them. OK, all.
Maintain ‘The Message’, in the face of all contrary evidence. The Message is the Priority!
Well, on the other hand, if it had been a late heat wave… LOL
According to Wikipedia, “Shepherd has written that African Americans may be more vulnerable to the effects of global warming, such as heat-related deaths.”
Now, now… You’re all being nasty to poor Shepherd. He just wants to science AND keep his funding. 😀
I live 17 miles from the main entrance to Glacier National Park on the west side. The road East was closed yesterday. However I could go 65 miles north to Canada through BC now that Global Warming has created those lush tropical paradises in BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Thanks Al Gore and Michael Mann
That’s called the “Banana Belt of Montana.”
It is true that the jet stream pattern determines the cold and hot regions. That is the whole point with El Nino’s and La Nina’s. They shift the jet stream which causes a shift in weather patterns.
So anything that can affect the jet stream has the ability to affect weather.
On the morning news here in Australia a chunk the size of Sydney has broken off somewhere in Antarctica. Interestingly, the newsreader stated scientists say this is perfectly natural event and nothing to do with climate change. GOSH! SHOCK! HORROR!
Patrick, note how even when an event has nothing to do with climate change climate change gets the obligatory mention. That is called subliminal messaging. Propaganda has very clear rules to be followed, and the MSM are constantly using them to push the Climate Crisis agenda. I wish I knew why?
Heres another article that has little to do with cc yet cc is in there,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-49877237
“Propaganda has very clear rules to be followed, and the MSM are constantly using them to push the Climate Crisis agenda. I wish I knew why?”
They do this to gain political power for the Democrats. Most of the MSM are Democrats/Leftists so they are propagandizing for themselves as much as for the Democrat politicians. Fixing Climate Change would give the fixer absolute control over the lives and economy of the people of the United States. That is the goal of all socialists, so you should be able to see why the MSM and the Democrats push the Green New Deal so much because they want to control *everything*..
The radical Left has no problem lying to people if it gets them what they want. The Ends justify the Means, they think. Any Means is acceptable, including carrying out a coup against a sitting, duly elected President of the United States.
I hear Trump’s campaign contributions have been pouring in ever since the Democrats have started this latest trumped-up effort to oust Trump over the Ukrainian telephone call. The Democrat’s undermining game is firing up the Trump supporters. I look forward to November 2020. That’s when the People can fix this Political Crisis the Democrats have created.
So how does this explain observed Meridianal Jet Stream flows PRIOR to the Global Warming hysteria, when CO2 was 300ppm or lower?
Asking for a friend who has a Magnetic, and Sunny, Personality… ;0)
“So how does this explain observed Meridianal Jet Stream flows PRIOR to the Global Warming hysteria, when CO2 was 300ppm or lower?”
It doesn’t. It’s just another unsubstantiated claim by a promoter of human-caused climate change.
Unfortunately, climate science is inundated with unsubstantiated claims about CO2. In fact, just about all the claims about CO2 are unsubstantiated other than that it is a greenhouse gas, but noone can tell you if it actually adds any net heat to the Earth’s atmosphere, therefore, they cannot claim CO2 is doing anything in the atmosphere with confidence, including shaping the jet streams.
Alarmist Climate Science.= One Unsubstantiated Claim After Another. All based on the unproven claim that CO2 adds net heat to the Earth’s atmosphere.
I think the assertion that a lower temp gradient with latitude means a wavier jet is false.
If there were such a correlation, it would be easy to demonstrate.
The interactions are far more complex than such a simple analysis could describe.
I think there is a far more prosaic phenomenon occurring:
Whatever is happening recently that the warmistas need to ascribe to a failing hypothesis in order to avoid having the last thing they predicted falsify the whole wobbly house of cards they have constructed, is what new studies will demonstrate is caused by global warming.
IOW…studies show that the newest findings will invariably ascribe the most recent observations to global warming, no matter what those observations are.
I could not get past the headline.
A 1951 book by Bertrand Russell, called The Impact of Science on Society, shows what is going on :
“The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray. “…
“Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”
Looks like the technique is being perfected.
Another journalist PhD who believes man-made global warming causes colder weather. And he tells you so with a straight face. These elitist alarmists have no shame … or critical thinking skills.