From the Cliff Mass Weather Blog
I am getting tired of writing about the Seattle Times, but their miscommunication is simply getting worse, and I think you should know about it.
Take the front page of the online Seattle Times yesterday. There is a big picture showing a dry-looking scene in eastern Washington with a headline that eastern Washington will face another summer of sparse water supplies (see below).
The problem? Their headline is not true. The evidence is clear and definitive.
After a very wet, cool spring, the soil moisture is above normal for most of eastern Washington, including much of the dryland farming region, where wheat and barley are grown. Here is a picture taken in the Palouse last week by the very talented professional photographer Jack Graham. Look any different from the picture in the Seattle Times?
There is near normal soil moisture in the desert area from Yakima/Tri-Cities towards Moses Lake, where most farming uses irrigation.
Soil moisture with green being above normal
What about the water supplies for irrigation? The Yakima River reservoirs are way above normal in stored water and the Columbia River water forecasts are excellent (see below). Plenty of water for irrigation agriculture and even farmers with junior rights will be taken care of. Snowpack is well above normal. Rivers are above normal.
In short, the headline in the Seattle Times does not reflect reality and provides another example of the paper poorly informing its readership.But poor Seattle Times journalism doesn’t end with false water shortages in eastern Washington.
Also on the Seattle Times front page was a story that Colorado will lose half its snow by 2080 and look like Arizona. The research paper making these extreme claims has all kinds of technical problems, including the use of totally unrealistic assumptions for increases in greenhouse gases (RCP8.5). Furthermore, the models used do not have sufficient resolution to properly simulate the convective (thunderstorm) warm-season showers of the region, and how such showers will change under global warming.
The Seattle Times is always running “stories” about the importance of local journalism. I do believe that responsible, accurate local journalism is very important. How sad that Seattle Times hype, exaggeration, and advocacy, coupled with demonstrably wrong information, is making a statement against the value of local newspapers.
An idea would be for little newspapers to be created that correct the stories of the big newspapers in a city. It could be an electronic one offered to subscribers to the big paper. A nice green grasses picture like that in this article and a short audio interview with a local farmer. Maybe called Seattle Tymes Redux.
The Seattle Times is a Blethen paper, like many of my local Maine papers. Founded by Alden Blethen of Maine in 1896, I think. This is not the worst that rag is capable of, they were instrumental in sending me to prison on bogus charges some years back. I believe the Seattle based “journalists” do the actual writing and the Maine hacks do the cutting and pasting while smoking a fatty or two. I can say that with some authority because I have been to a Kennebec journal Christmas party and “That Smell” permeated the entire area around the hotel. To be fair, the local sportswriters are excellent. They have to write their own material and actually get out of the office. They are pretty formidable drinkers, though.
Looks like we have a lot of readers that need to review the definition of the word drought.
From weather.gov — “What Is Drought? Drought is a deficiency in precipitation over an extended period. It is a part of normal climate variability in many climate zones. The duration of droughts varies widely. Drought can develop quickly and last only for a matter of weeks, exacerbated by extreme heat and/or wind, but more commonly drought can persist for months or years. <more…> https://www.weather.gov/safety/drought#:~:text=Drought%20is%20a%20deficiency%20in,duration%20of%20droughts%20varies%20widely.
Sure looks to me like Eastern WA is in a drought. Droughts aren’t measured by soil moisture. Having lots of water for irrigation does not mean there is no drought.
The headline for the article online is What’s in store for Eastern WA as water becomes more scarce throughout the West?
Cliff Mass’ blog post says the headline isn’t true. The article is based upon current conditions and climate projections and nowhere in his post does Cliff May show there is not a drought currently in Eastern WA.
He go on to say there isn’t a water shortage in Eastern WA. This is a straw man argument.
Cliff Mass didn’t show the climate projections to be false. The online article gives no source for the projections used for the article. While most of us are familiar with the low quality of climate models and the useless nature of their projections, this also is not addressed in the blog post in question.
“Eastern WA faces another summer of scarce water supplies.”
The Seattle Times.
He go[es] on to say there isn’t a water shortage in Eastern WA. This is a straw man argument.
jeffery p
Water supply is the issue.
“Cliff Mass didn’t show the climate projections to be false”
They are a fantasy, built on unvalidated computer games.
Nobody has to prove anything
Has anyone proved that the tooth fairy doesn’t exist.
Every time I’ve cited peer reviewed science in support of a comment the Times has removed it. They allow violations of terms of use for the people name calling me a denier and worse but empirical evidence that destroys the narrative is forbidden.
ABC news closed their comment section several weeks ago. So they no longer have to contend with contrary voices such as ours.
The Hill closed theirs a while back because the false narratives were being destroyed in the comment sections.
Almost all of the “news” outlets have removed them, even local stations and newspapers.
Having lived and gone to university in the Palouse region of eastern Washington/north Idaho, it’s important that springs be cool and wet to promote growth of their main crops – winter wheat, and dried peas and lentils, but that the summer when the harvest takes place to be warm and dry. The worst thing that can happen to a ripening grain crop is excessive rain which can literally rot the crop on the stem, and also makes it difficult to harvest the crops The picture showing all the green above taken last week is perfect … and now over the next month it needs to dry out to keep production up.
Liars can spin things to make them sound exactly the opposite of the truth … and did so here.
So far this spring there has been a never ending stream of storm clouds generating in the Western Pacific which then move over the western US. It rained here in NorCal last weekend, and rain is also forecast for this upcoming weekend. The weather forecast for Thursday, the 9th, was for 89F last week. Now that forecast is at 85F as overhead clouds continue to cool the region.
Not sure when the picture was taken but it seems to be showing a wheat field with a combine during harvest. That would show golden grain and straw and not drought. The other picture seems to show current conditions, wet and green – pre-harvest. Have family all thru the high desert of eastern WA and OR. Nothing new here either way!!
Miscommunication? No, it’s called lies. At best, disinformation.
When the facts do not support you, very few will notice if you fall back on lies.
Nice word, that – “miscommunication.” Really, what is now called “disinformation” – but what old-timers like me call “bald faced lying.”
The default response to the offense of disinformation propaganda is always a self-righteous appeal to “what about this…and this and this and this and this and this”.
.
This is the reason why posts like this one (Seattle Post Article on Eastern Washington Drought) are so important in WUWT. Expose propaganda for what it is…. a manipulative derangement of facts. The default response to the offense of disinformation propaganda is always a self-righteous appeal to “what about this…and this and this and this and this and this”. And the issue of a particular offense to truth, (a disinformation article) gets lost in the sauce of existential commitments within a myriad of supposedly higher more relevant truths. This seems to happen no matter how offensive the disinformation is to the truth. Now if the grid of truth consensus is rooted in a grid of disinformation propaganda, then the higher truths will be a matter of subjective conviction with facts strewn about. In our effort to stand for the truth, we must stand on particular facts and the particulars of real evidence even when no one else is playing by the logic of cause and effect or the ethics of truth. Where our evidence lacks the rigors of science, we must be humble. We must avoid being like the very thing we oppose. If a hypothesis is a hypothesis call it hypothesis…a theory…a theory. Increasingly people are abandoning the logic of cause and effect and the ethics of truth in public discourse. The use of propaganda disinformation must be opposed whether they are for us or against us.
Just for fun,
I have watched a bunch of old 007 movies lately…. lots of shorelines, beaches
etc….they look the same 50-60 years later. Yet I cannot conclude that sea
levels have not risen based on my observation. My observation is only the
beginning of the scientific endeavor. Most people like myself, (gardener,
theologian, social worker) have no knowledge or interest in all the variables
of sea level (submarine volcanism, water temp, gravitation variance, Wind and
ocean currents, trash dumping, cliffs falling, bird poop, space junk, huge
cavasses opening under water, ice melting, tidal forces) but I was trained in
the complexities of the logic of cause and effect and the ethics of truth. It
seems that the logic of cause and effect has been lost on our youth and
something else has taken over.
August 16,2008, the August skies in PA appeared as if the month of August had rapidly
fled into late Sept. My potatoes crop failed to have a third set with healthy
plants. My working hypothesis at the time was that there is something about the
sun that I had no knowledge of: variability in irradiance. So, I sought an
answer on the internet and found WUWT. I discovered that the sun was in the
deep slumber of the minimum of SC 23 and had a very large corona mass ejection
significantly reducing irradiance even to the naked eye. 2010, the sun picked
up and I had a bumper crop of giant potatoes and tomatoes. And again, the
minimum of SC 24, resulted in several dim and wet summers 2018,2019 and 2020.
Then I learned that cosmic radiation increased cloud cover and rain. Those wet
dim years made gardening much harder. I assumed that increased cosmic radiation
due to the solar minimum was the reason gardening was so hard those year. Yet my assumption was based on a hypothesis not fact. Increased cosmic radiation is a fact of the solar cycle and its impact on the atmosphere with increased cloud cover is a fact but the relationship between those two facts and my gardening experience are nothing more than a hypothesis that needs further investigation…that I will never do. This is the logic that
has been lost.
I mean Seattle Times … not Post but they are hardly different.
I wouldn’t put it past the psychopaths running WA state to sell the water to another state or another country and just concoct a false narrative that there are drought condition in order to explain away the shortfall. Hell, these democrats are so insane over their climate cult agenda that they’d dump the water in to the ocean to force a drought to “prove” their climate cult voodoo predictions are correct. That’s how crazy people running things are now.
https://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/ftpref/data/water/wcs/gis/maps/wa_swepctnormal_update.pdf