From the Cliff Mass Weather Blog
I am getting tired of writing blogs on this issue.
Another Seattle Times front-page story pushing a false narrative on climate change came out on Sunday. A story that is full of scientific errors. An advocacy piece that poorly informs its readers.
This article, part of a ClimateLab series, claims that global warming is causing our regional precipitation to increasingly fall as rain, rather than snow. And that this year is a sample of the future of our region.
This article is guilty of acts of omission. Of citing questionable sources. And of wrong and inaccurate statements.
Let me tell you about a few.
El Nino’s Impacts
This report talks about low snowpack this year but does not make clear that El Nino is the key cause, not climate change. This winter has been influenced by a strong El Nino, which typically caused less snowfall over the Northwest and lots of rain over California after the new year.
Both are happening, as expected.
Snowpack Hype
The article states that since 1955 the region’s snowpack has declined by one-third.
This is very deceptive. The mid-1950s was an unusually cold/snowy period. Cold and snowy due to natural variability (such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation).
Let’s look at the change in Northwest snowpack over the past 40 years…. a period when global warming has been greatest (see below). Below is the snow water content (called SWE) over the region on April 1, right before the melt season.
Virtually no change over the past four decades.
Not what the Seattle Times is suggesting.
The article then states that:
the snow that does reach the ground is melting earlier in the year as our dry season trends longer and hotter.
This is simply not true. For example, consider the melt-out date at Steven’s Pass (4000 ft) over the past four decades (see below).
The Seattle Times got it completely wrong. The melt-out dates are trending LATER, not earlier!
Here are the average melt-out dates at Stevens by decade, if you don’t like to read graphs:
1980s: 30 May
1990s: 1 June
2000s: 2 June
2010s: 4 June
2020s: 6 June
Later melt out, not earlier.
Paradise Ranger Station at 5000 ft is very similar–no trend towards early melt-out
1980s 10 July 10
1990s 15 July 10
2000s 10 July 10
2010s 13 July 10
2020s 15 July 4
What about reservoir levels?
You would think that lower-level reservoirs would be showing a trend toward dropping water levels, but the Seattle Times OWN GRAPH for Chester Morse Lake shows no downward trend over the past 20 years (see below). No climate signal is evident.
Courtesy of the Seattle Times
A Snow-Free Future?
This article really goes into scary, apocalyptic mode when it describes the future, suggesting that as much as SEVENTY PERCENT of the snowpack could be gone by the mid-2080s.
My research group has completed detailed regional climate simulations using reasonable increases in greenhouse gases (RCP 4.5) and found a decline in snowpack about half of what the Seattle Times is quoting.
A challenge, but 75% is a lot better than 30%.
Finally, this Seattle Times article does not consider some important mitigating factors for the future.
For example, precipitation should increase modesty during this century due to global warming, providing more water to store behind dams and in reservoirs. And great improvements in long-range weather prediction allow reservoirs to remain much higher since better predictions provide more warning of storms and thus time to lower reservoir levels if needed.
This Seattle Times article was financed by a collection of activist foundations and the University of Washington. It shows the dangers of advocacy journalism.
H/T Keith S
Interesting to see there has been no change in snow water content over the past four decades. After all, we would expect the snow to melt earlier and earlier in the spring as temperatures rise long term. The same goes for the melt-out date. Does the Pacific Northwest have a magic forcefield protecting the area from CO2?
Ever hear of photosynthesis?
As the majority of the population observes no significant changes happening in their weather from year to year, but their cost of living being hammered by ‘climate’ taxes they will start to reject all the government, academia and media bullshit.
‘As the majority of the population observes…’
Sorry to say but this brings to mind the old question that “if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” – meaning that until the so-called mainstream media breaks ranks with the Left, the majority of the population isn’t going to observe anything.
They’ll observe the rising prices!
Yes, apparently Canadians are just waking up to the fact that much of their alarming increases in food, fuel, transport and just about everything that’s hammering their budgets is being driven by the compounding effects of Trudeau’s carbon tax, which I read is also applied as a “tax on a tax”, as it comes on top of their Provinces’ GSTs.
I reckon this is a pointed example of how people just don’t grasp how an increase applied to basic inputs costs delivers compounding impacts on retail prices after 3 or 4 stages of production, transport, storage, handling and retailing.
Yes, but will the media point out that climate alarmism, monetary debasement and overall government hostility to productive activity result in higher prices or that it’s all just the fault of greedy entrepreneurs?
The mainstream media that is owned by the rich are hoping to make trillions from so-called “climate change” spending, which is estimated to be around $US200 trillion to stop warming by 2050.
This report by Cliff Mass appears to show that The Seattle Times is selling the BullStuff to its customers, in the belief that’s what they want. Since The Seattle Times is a business (not a public service) they will only clean up their act if subscribers abandon them. Not going to happen in Seattle, the city is dysfunctional and proud of it.
Yes, it’s a tribe, a religion.
Mass is constantly debunking this stuff in The Times and other places, yet he still thinks we need to worry about “global warming”. He keeps pointing out the lack of evidence, but still… I just don’t get it.
I just don’t get it.
Maintaining a popular public opinion so as to not be automatically dismissed?
Truncating the antecedents is writers of history’s way of shaping their narrative, climate being no exception.
Typo in penultimate paragraph:
“For example, precipitation should increase modesty during this century due to global warming”
Should read:
“For example, precipitation should increase modestly during this century due to global warming”.
Although more precipitation will also encourage more modest clothing.
Agreed. There’s nothing like a spell of warm, dry weather to decrease modesty! In the nicest possible way, of course!
I find this story mildly amusing here in the UK (Lincolnshire) where we’ve had our 2nd big snowfall of the season (before and after Christmas) and, whilst ‘big’ is a relative term for just a few inches of snow, it’s more than the brief wet flurries we’ve had in between.
Typo alert! Near the end of the post, (I gotta check the blog) I see:
Quite true – in general, sun and warm weather leads to decreased modesty.
Unless you’re “Naked and Afraid” in the rainforest
One begins to realize that “journalists” are now climate experts and we must spend our efforts treating them as such because they are the ones people “listen” to.
sarc noted.
Seattle Times, LA Times cut from the same cloth or dirty rag, whatever your choice.
Oh My God, Not Again.
That the article was funded by “a collection of activist foundations and the University of Washington”, the UW being my alma mater, set me up to look for the purposeful misreporting of the data. Thanks to the author of the WUWT piece handily shredding the data as presented in Seattle Times article, I didn’t have to look too hard to see it was the usual BS from the climate cultists and the UW.
There is no climate crisis. And man cannot control the weather nor the fluctuations of same. Idiots.
Are there any real “scientists” remaining? Askin’ for a friend.
There are still geologists, the real climate scientists, but the media doesn’t listen to them.
Cliff Mass:
Keep up the great work!
There has been a great deal of non-science about precipitation and snow in the Northwest. The American West, in general, has some sort of mass delusion about water — in the south they scream Mega-Drought and in the North they worry about snowpack and claim “not enough water” while advocating for the destruction of dams that provide reservoirs to provide water in dry years.
Even when their is TOO MUCH snow,they cry that snow has diminished.
Thank heavens for the injections of sanity from Cliff Mass.
In short facts and propaganda seem not to inhabit the same universe and the Seattle Times has chosen the universe with no rules or integrity.
They are calling the 30-year weather the Climate now, so of course it is always changing.
This is a very welcome viewpoint from a very knowledgeable source. Many thanks!
Here in North Lincolnshire England there is also been no trend of the date of the first snow of the winter getting any later in the season since 1977.
This is the number of times the first snow fell before December 1st for each 15 year group of the record since 1977.
1977/78 to 1992/93
6 times
1993/94 to 2007/8
8 times
2009/10 to 2023/24
8 times
So over the last 15 years it has snowed more often before December 1st then it did during the late 1970’s and 1980’s.
Obviously a very large vertical accretion of male bovine excrement. We as a people will never learn until the government has clamped us down! Even then when the fecal matter hits the air moving device it will be too late!!!
There is no such thing as “advocacy journalism”. There is biased journalism and nothing else.
ALL journalists have editors. Accomplished journalists know what biases their editors have and write accordingly in order to get their articles with their by-lines published. Same as it ever was.
“My research group has completed detailed regional climate simulations using reasonable increases in greenhouse gases (RCP 4.5) and found a decline in snowpack about half of what the Seattle Times is quoting.”
You bring a lot of sense to the discussion, Cliff, but you still accept too much of the CO2 delusion. The models are crap, and what comes out of them is crap.
Whatever happened to the latest about-face which occurred a short time after the “The children aren’t going to know what snow is” quote (at a time with mild winters with little snow), which just a few years later (at a time of severe winters with record snowfalls) morphed into “Heavier snowfalls are consistent with global warming.”
Based on the most recent version of the ever-contradictory “climate” pontificating, shouldn’t the “models” be BURYING us in the future under “RCP 4.5,” you know, “consistent with global warming?”
(Not a serious question, because the manure spit out by models that ASSUME atmospheric CO2 “drives” the Earth’s temperature, something that is NOT supported by empirical evidence, is meaningless speculation, not “science”).
Indeed. CLIMATE MODELS ARE UNSKILLED.
Required Reading (for Mr. Mass and others)
Climate Models Fail by Bob Tisdale
Available FREE, here:
https://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/new-book-climate-models-fail/
Nice Cliff, Seattle isn’t what it used to be. I see no reason to ever visit again.
I used to live there and my family still does and I’m not going back.
I was last there 20years ago, two people shot and killed a couple blocks from my hotel, and those were the good old “safe” days. Blue state disaster zone now, Gaza probably safer.
I gotta say I’m totally bored by intellectual cowards like Cliff Mass. Here he posts all this data that obviously shows there’ nothing going on in terms of a changing climate yet he hides behind obviously wrong models like RCP 4.5 as if they’re meaningful. If absolutely nothing has happened in the past 40 years then why is he saying it’s “reasonable” to think the climate will change in the next 50.
It’s cowardice.
As I recall the drought in California would never end.
uh huh.
Now “they” are quite clear that the drought in British Columbia will never end due to climate change, so my only question is “when” will it end.
because it will end, because of course it will because it’s a cycle.
If I search “when will too much california moisture end” I’m pretty sure i will find it will never end, because AGW.
How is it going in the Sierra Nevadas right now, any start-up Donner parties?
Atmospheric rivers are a bugger, good thing there are large wheeled gas vehicles and electricity.
nothing new under the sun.