Reposted from the Cliff Mass Weather Blog
New Podcast: Global Warming and the Northwest Heatwave, Plus the Weekend Forecast
The severe heatwave this week has been on everyone’s mind, for good reason. It was one of the most severe weather events of the past century.
A number of media outlets and activists have claimed that global warming, forced by greenhouse gas emissions, is the central cause of this event.
Such claims are in contradiction to the best science, modeling, and observations. My podcast sets the record straight providing concrete evidence that natural variability was the key for this event.
And the podcast also includes the latest forecast, predicting dry conditions and temperatures in the lower 80s west of the Cascade crest, and around 100F for eastern Washington. Wildfires have started north and souther of Washingon and some smoke is moving in aloft (see satellite image this morning).
At this point the smoke should remain aloft, some surface air quality in most of Oregon and Washington remains good.
Listen to my podcast below or select your preferred streaming service
HT/Cam_S
Yellowstone is doomed “But it is not the first time this has happened”-
Yellowstone’s most famous geyser could shut down, with huge ramifications (msn.com)
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Wow. And all these years, I thought Old Faithful sat on a big pool of water, on an undeground hot spot, and once the water reaches boiling point, SPEW!!! Up comes the geyser column.
I had NO idea that hot weather could shut down an underground aquifer the way we shut off light bulbs. I have been enlightened.
(Seriously, must I add /s here?)
Well light bulbs can get shut off if the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine or it gets too hot or cold!
Fortunately, artificial sources of water are somewhat reliable (and refreshing).
https://www.koin.com/local/multnomah-county/pop-up-pool-keeps-homeless-cool-during-portland-heat-wave/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
That “twitter_impression=true” stuff is very, very important…
could
Meanwhile, it’s 57° at my house near Charlottesville Virginia this morning.
57° on July 3.
By the bye; you should add an F to that temp. Many here use C. That in C would be 134.6 F. A tremendous heatwave. (grin)
And on this day in 1863, it was 87 DF in Gettysburg, PA, which is about 140 miles north of your location.
And twelve score and 5 years ago tomorrow, in Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson recorded 76 degrees F under partly cloudy skies at 1pm, which, since there was no Daylight Saving Time, was equivalent to noon EDT. Interestingly, the forecast for noon tomorrow in Philadelphia is 76 degrees F under partly cloudy skies!
Talk about a climate breakdown! Absolutely the same weather 245 years ago.
Well, if you consider the urban heat island effect, it may actually be several degrees cooler now than back in 1776.
Correction: TJ’s 1pm is our 2pm (Spring ahead and Fall back)
But still pretty much the same. 79F forecast, taking a conservative 3-degree UHI adjustment it’s the same 76F.
Oops! I had to delete my comment upon rereading.
And oddly enough, we here in the Midwest will be having a few days of hot, humid July weather, possibly an attempt at 91F (or not), but 70s to 60s at night, with high humidity.
I can almost hear the Junebugs hitting the screen door on the back porch, like they used to do.
“A number of media outlets and activists have claimed that global warming, forced by greenhouse gas emissions, is the central cause of this event.
Such claims are in contradiction to the best science, modeling, and observations. My podcast sets the record straight providing concrete evidence that natural variability was the key for this event.”
Wow Cliff, we agree!
consensus?
“A number of media outlets and activists have claimed…the central cause of this event”
Strawman.
No? So who exacty says “caused”? Not intensified, not made worse, not contributed to, but “caused”.
Thats right, no one, a strawman.
The beauty of the CAGW ideology is that they take an insignificant, and benign warming, which they claim is mostly if not entirely manmade, and then use it as a “force multiplier” of sorts, such that any unusual or record-breaking weather, they claim, was “enhanced” by said manmade warming. It is a claim built of whole cloth, based on a Big Lie. It has to be deconstructed, starting with the Big Lie.
Is a “force multiplier” sort of like “worser than the worsest worst worse”? lol
When I were a snooty nose boy, it were called ‘a lever’
“based on…the Big Lie”
What specific lie are you talking about?
The pattern of a brief warm period in between periods of cooler weather has cropped up elsewhere at other times. I noticed that the UN is touting a ‘record high’ temperature in Antarctica not long after a record low temperature. Where I am in the UK we’ve had 2 or so brief periods of warm weather sandwiched between periods of unseasonably cooler weather. It’s a recurring pattern of sorts but is it perhaps a symptom of a step change in temperatures after a La Nina? I seem to recall similar periods of unsettled temperatures with high spikes in the late 70’s and 80’s when we had the step changes in temperatures after El Nino’s. Have to see what happens over the next couple of years to see where this is all going.
Back in the 1950s I remember some very cold winters and hot and dry summers in southeastern Washington State.
“I noticed that the UN is touting a ‘record high’ temperature in Antarctica not long after a record low temperature.”
Part of Antarctica is much closer to the equator than the rest of the continent and this is where the high temperatue was recorded. The same thing happened a couple of years ago. It means nothing as far as Antarctic cold goes.
“It was one of the most severe weather events of the past century.”
If temperature is the measurement creating the severity, then the instruments used to measure the severity must be the same ones used for the past century.
Maybe Ciff and others should consider the difference between wet bulb and dry bulb temps. You know, the ‘feels like’ temp that the talking heads on TV use. An ‘real meteorologist’ would give due consideration if the winds/air were coming off the deserts of Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona.
Did the sudden temp drop of 50F signal an immediate dive into an Ice Age?
they are doing their darnedest to draw a link between “man-made” sea level rise and the tragic condo collapse in Miami.
Hmm. Opportunism rather than reality. There have been several reports indicating widespread structural failures and a lack of repairs over time that culminated in a sudden cascade failure of the whole building. Not climate change but mismanagement. It’s about as logical as blaming an avalanche in the Swiss alps on sea level rise quite frankly.
Emails to the local planning board indicate that the building manager was complaining about the county’s delays in approving an updated parking plan so that they could get started on repairs.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/surfside-condo-manager-repair-delays
In 2003 Western Europe endured two periods of intensely hot weather, in France referred to as a Canecule. The first was during May for about a week when temperatures i peaked around 44C, but the second more serious period was over a fortnight in August.
As most people are aware, France, particularly Paris, shuts down in August and goes on holiday, putting elderly parents into rest homes. This happened in the 2003 canecule when temperatures rose to around 44C for most of thie fortnight. It was subsequently reported that 15000 people died in France as a result of these high temperatures, mainly in Parisian Care Homes. Expectedly there was a public and media outcry and new laws enacted to make abandoning the elderly to care homes in August forbidden in future, as spells of hot weather like this occur during the summer every few years in France. Interesting that Climate Change was not blamed for these 15000 deaths, but the summer weather.
It wasn’t just France…
The heatwave of 2003 – Met Office
More than 20,000 people died after a record-breaking heatwave left Europe sweltering in August 2003. The period of extreme heat is thought to be the warmest for up to 500 years, and many European countries experienced their highest temperatures”
so just coincidence that this was the warmest in 500 years? Of course it is climate change!
If sporadic heatwaves = climate change, but in many areas of this latest NW heatwave, the temps didn’t reach those set in 1941, I call null hypothesis.
“so just coincidence that this was the warmest in 500 years?”
Yes, until proven otherwise, and that hasn’t been done.
Coming out of th Little Ice Age – yes, weather.
What else is reasonable?
Auto
You actually believe that it was the warmest in 500 years? Lack of temperature measuring devices back then might temper one’s enthusiasm for such speculation. Lies, damned lies and CliSciFi lies.
The mercury thermometer was invented 300 years ago. That means that you have no way of knowing what the warmest temperature was for 500 years.
False claims easily shown to be false shows that your beliefs are also false. That shows that you are easily led into magical thinking.
The thermometer goes back 307 years, and very limited in use for most of those years, in most areas even of Europe. So any 500-year claims are pure nonsense worthy of you griff.
A single localised occurrence of extreme weather does not indicate a long term trend in global climate. It’s little more than random chance – like winning the lottery once then claiming you have a ‘system’ that cannot lose.
And btw
griff
You seem to have missed BobM’s question.
Would you prefer living in 1700 to 1775 when CO2 was so benign, or this terrible time of “dangerous” CO2, 1950-2025?
Question: I can intuitively understand how a rotating air mass would tend to fling air outwards, resulting in a low pressure area. What I don’t understand is how an air mass that rotates in the opposite direction “sucks air in”, causing a high pressure area.
Is there a simple explanation that I am missing?
This question has always been at the back of my mind, but I just sort of accepted it.
Sitting in the 112 ºF warmth recently and trying to explain that, no, it wasn’t global warming to various people the question popped up in the back of my mind again.
CLOCKWISE ROTATION HAPPENS IN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE….every year there are local high and low temp records set somewhere on earth…it’s weather…that’s all.
The rotation does not cause either high or low pressure, but rather the rotation of the air is a result of the earth’s rotation. In the Northern hemisphere, airflow is diverted to the right so air moving from a high pressure rotates clockwise while air moving into a low rotates counter-clockwise. If the earth did not rotate, air would move directly away from high pressure to low pressure. Look up Coriolis force. Centrifugal ‘force’ which is what you are thinking of does have some effect, increasing the force of winds coming out of a high-pressure area (since it is working with Coriolis force) while it decreases the wind going into a low. (since it is working against the Coriolis force)
Philip
The air in a high pressure system has descend from aloft (this descent is what causes the compressional heating). The compressed air cannot go back up again and so it spills out to the side. The “sucking air in” in this case occurs at the top of the weather layer, the air spiralling out of the high pressure at ground level is the “exhaust” of this vertically organised weather system.
All you need to know about pressure systems is here. This was a cut-off (poleward of the jet stream) warm-core high which gets more intense (with the same circulation as lower levels) with height. While there must be inflow at the top to get outflow at the bottom, per Phillip Mulholland’s post below, it occurs so high in the stratosphere that we don’t have enough rawindsonde observations that go that height (above 100,000 ft) to accurately plot it. When I was doing raidosonde observations I considered myself very lucky to hit 80,000 feet.
Richard,
Your link doesn’t work for me. Could you try again.
“What I don’t understand is how an air mass that rotates in the opposite direction “sucks air in”, causing a high pressure area.”
Causation is the other way around. Air flows outward from a high pressure area. It is then subject to Coriolis effects which create the rotation. Air that moves toward the equator is then moving more slowly than the surface below, so appears to be moving W. Conversely toward the pole.
The Northwest heat is indirect evidence of the strength and persistence of the La Niña, whose intensity is disguised by recent tampering with the Pacific SSTs (which also exaggerated the magnitude of the 2016 El Niño).
I’m honor bound to say that I found Cliff Mass’ podcast to be free of hype and in line with the climate realist point of view.
I still object to the hysteria that he fanned and through omission allowed to be used to support the CAGW narrative, but I hope a lot of people hear his podcast and perhaps will be receptive to it.