One of the main difficulties with tornado records is that a tornado, or evidence of a tornado must have been observed. Unlike rainfall or temperature, which may be measured by a fixed instrument, tornadoes are short-lived and very unpredictable. If a tornado occurs in a place with few or no people, it is not likely to be documented. Many significant tornadoes may not make it into the historical record since Tornado Alley was very sparsely populated during the 20th century.
Much early work on tornado climatology in the United States was done by John Park Finley in his book Tornadoes, published in 1887. While some of Finley’s safety guidelines have since been refuted as dangerous practices, the book remains a seminal work in tornado research. The University of Oklahoma created a PDF copy of the book and made it accessible at John Finley’s Tornadoes(link is external)
by P. Homewood, August 7, 2018 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
Climate change: ‘Hothouse Earth’ risks even if CO2 emissions slashed
It may sound like the title of a low budget sci-fi movie, but for planetary scientists, “Hothouse Earth” is a deadly serious concept.
Researchers believe we could soon cross a threshold leading to boiling hot temperatures and towering seas in the centuries to come.
Even if countries succeed in meeting their CO2 targets, we could still lurch on to this “irreversible pathway”.
Their study shows it could happen if global temperatures rise by 2C.
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The utterly corrupt body of climate science has been getting ever more desperate to scare people about climate change and thereby submit to their radical anti capitalist agenda.
People are not falling for it, so we are now being subjected to ever more absurd announcements like this.
During the 1930s, when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was about 100 ppm lower than today (310 ppm vs. 410 ppm), United States heat waves were just as if not more common than recent decades.
Recently there has been much ado about heat waves and the hottest-ever-recorded-temperatures making their rounds in Northern Hemisphere summer.
Yet scientists have determined that heat waves are largely driven by natural variability, not anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
During the 1930s, when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was about 100 ppm lower than today (310 ppm vs. 410 ppm), United States heat waves were just as if not more common than recent decades.
Recently there has been much ado about heat waves and the hottest-ever-recorded-temperatures making their rounds in Northern Hemisphere summer.
Yet scientists have determined that heat waves are largely driven by natural variability, not anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
But while Scripps is trying to tie the record-high ocean reading to the broader wave of media coverage on global heat waves, there are a few caveats to note about what the scientists found.
First, these measurements are taken from a pier that’s near the shoreline, which would not necessarily make it representative of the entire Pacific Ocean, and therefore easily influenced by local weather events.
The “anomalously warm temperatures for the past week” that Scripps researchers observed at their pier somewhat mirror the temperature pattern in 1931, and indeed, the daily records broken in the past week have been very close to readings from 87 years ago.
There is an upward trend in temperature readings from Scripps’ pier, but the trend seems to also broadly coincide with the flipping of a natural ocean cycle, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, to its warm phase. That flip occurred around 1976.
Despite all the hysterical “heat wave” and drought reports being put out to the public by the media, the Northern Hemisphere as a whole is in fact not at all that much warmer than the mean since 2000.
According to Dr. Ryan Maue, northern hemisphere temperature anomaly was zero on July 30 and the northern hemisphere land surface anomaly was actually -0.20°C.
It has been for northern Europe a hot summer. Is it climate change as the media would like to have us believe? Or, is it something much simpler? For example, ocean patterns. Off the coast of Africa, water was coldest in the entire record back to 1950. A temperature change in one place of the oceans, means a change elsewhere also.
The UK July ranked 3rd warmest since 1950 in the very long term (starting 1659) temperature data-base from Central England.
SPOTLIGHT: The iconic magazine is now a purveyor of propaganda.
BIG PICTURE: On her PolarBearScience.com blog last week, zoologist Susan Crockford called our attention to a startling admission over at National Geographic. It acknowledges publishing fake news. Or, as it more delicately puts it, we “went too far in drawing a definitive connection between climate change and a particular starving polar bear.”
An “Editor’s Note” explains the magazine added a wholly misleading caption to a video of an emaciated polar bear filmed last August. When it published this video on its website in December, National Geographic declared: “This is what climate change looks like.”
Actually, this is what dishonesty looks like. Neither the magazine nor the person who did the filming knew anything about that bear. It might have been stricken with disease. It might have sustained an injury that impeded its ability to hunt. As the Editor’s Note now admits: “there is no way to know for certain why this bear was on the verge of death.”
During 2017, there were 150 graphs from 122 scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals indicating modern temperatures are not unprecedented, unusual, or hockey-stick-shaped — nor do they fall outside the range of natural variability. We are a little over halfway through 2018 and already 108 graphs from 89 scientific papers undermine claims that modern era warming is climatically unusual.
For the sake of brevity, just 13 (15%) of the 89 new papers are displayed below.
The rest of the non-hockey-stick scientific papers and graphs published thus far in 2018 can be viewed by clicking the link below.
The L. A. Times published a Ca. climate alarmist wildfire story falsely claiming that the states most recent wildfires are result of “heat like the state has never seen”.
As usual with climate fear articles like this one in the L. A. Times the scientific reality present a far different picture. The latest scientific study completed by the Royal Society concludes that global wildfires are in decline.
by P. Homewood, August 1, 2018 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
There have been just seven summers over 20c since 1910:
1911
1933
1947
1976
1995
2003
2006
While we don’t know how this summer will work out (and neither does Bob Ward), since 2006 we have had eleven distinctly average summers.
The hot summers above are still rare events, and are all essentially weather events. There is no evidence that these extreme weather events are becoming more frequent.
This post was inspired by Anthony Watts’ recent post about wildfires and their unwillingness to cooperate with the Gorebal Warming narrative.
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A Geological Perspective of Wildfires
The Fire Window
Geological evidence for ancient wildfires generally consists of sedimentary charcoal deposits (inertinite). Fossil charcoal is also a key factor in understanding the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere, particularly oxygen content. The first clear evidence of fire is in the Late Silurian.
by Tony Heller, July 31, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
July 31 afternoon temperatures have been declining in the US for a century, with the hottest year being 1917 when almost half of the US was over 95 degrees.
Climatologists trying to predict global warming forgot the sunshine in their sums. After correction of this startling error of physics, global warming will not be 2 to 4.5 K per CO2doubling, as climate models imagine. It will be a small, slow, harmless and net-beneficial 1.17 K.
by Tony Heller, July 30, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
In 1999, NASA’s James Hansen was concerned that the very high-quality US temperature record didn’t match Hansen’s fake global warming trend.
How can the absence of clear climate change in the United States be reconciled with continued reports of record global temperature? Part of the “answer” is that U.S. climate has been following a different course than global climate, at least so far. Figure 1 compares the temperature history in the U.S. and the world for the past 120 years.
in the U.S. there has been little temperature change in the past 50 years, the time of rapidly increasing greenhouse gases — in fact, there was a slight cooling throughout much of the country …
by Cliff Mass, July 25, 2018 in CliffMassWeatherCimateBlog
There appears to be a problem with the temperature sensor at Seattle-Tacoma Airport: it seems to be running several degrees too warm.
This is not the first time this has happened. And excessively warm temperatures at airport stations seems to be a growth industry around here. In a previous blog I talked about the problem at Yakima–which has been fixed. Ellensburg is running too warm as well.
But this blog will be about Seattle-Tacoma Airport, whose official NWS/FAA temperature sensor is located between two of the runways.
Despite a rapid local sea level rise rate nearly 3 times the global mean (1.8 mm/yr), 15 of 28 studied atoll islands in the southwest Pacific increased in shoreline area during 2005 to 2015 according to a new study (Hisabayashi et al., 2018). For the 3 islands that experienced extreme shoreline erosion – with one atoll island even “disappearing” – a Category 5 cyclone was identified as the most likely causal factor.
Consequently, the authors conclude that “the dramatic impacts of climate change felt on coastlines and people across the Pacific are still anecdotal”.
What’s wrong with comparing Super Storm Sandy’s devastation with projected sea level rise? They are two different things! One is a storm surge, the other an incremental change in either sea level or land subsidence (sinking) or both. For one we can evacuate the immediate area where landfall is forecast to hit in order to save lives. For the other, we have the time to build dikes and barriers like those in England and Holland, or flood-proof, or move. Super Storm Sandy is not unprecedented, and neither are extremely stormy and erratic periods of climate with catastrophic storms, like the Grote Mandrenke — The Great Drowning of Men — of the Little Ice Age. Let me set some perspective.
Journalists should do their job. They should check the most pertinent facts for themselves — in this case: Is sea level really rising 7-10 mm/yr in the Solomons?
Finding out that it hasn’t and isn’t makes a much more interesting story than “yet-another-alarmist-talking-point”.
Do note that while coral atolls are generally self-regenerating, sand spits/sand bars are not — they are at the mercy of the currents and waves.
Encore dans toutes les mémoires, la canicule de 2003 et ses 15 000 morts n’a pas été la plus meurtrière de la France du XXe siècle.
Il faudra marquer cette année 1911 d’une croix noire. » Voilà ce qu’écrivait, à la fin de l’été, un médecin du département de la Seine inférieure. À l’évidence traumatisé par les conséquences de la terrible vague de chaleur qui frappa alors, de juillet à septembre, toute l’Europe mais surtout la France et la Belgique. « Pendant la longue période de chaleur, la mort n’a cessé de faucher les tout-petits élevés au biberon », ajoutera ce médecin.
Une canicule de juillet à septembre
Encore dans toutes les mémoires, la canicule de 2003 et ses 15 000 morts n’a pas été la plus meurtrière en France. C’est ce que rappelait Catherine Rollet dans un article (1) paru en 2010. Cette historienne et démographe, décédée en décembre 2016, y racontait la dramatique canicule de l’été 1911.
For those that are sure there’s global warming driving tornadoes and other severe weather events, here’s some inconvenient news. Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has updated his tornado loss data via his Twitter account. He writes:
by Tony Heller, July 25, 2018 in TheDeplorableClimateScienceBlog
In 1972, forty-two “top European and American investigators” predicted a rapidly approaching new ice age – based on an increase in snow and ice cover from 1967-1972.
The technique employed ….. depends on the averaging of information from standard and ‘infra-red satellite weather pictures.
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
