Weather

Finally, Some Good News: Warm Weather Shown to Slow Coronavirus Spread

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By Foster Kamer – Re-Blogged From Futurism
Let the sunshine in.

In a moment when the world seems more desperate than ever for the slightest ray of hope, here’s some (literally) sunny news:

Warm weather has been correlated with a slowdown in the spread of COVID-19.

The paper comes from a squad of data scientists and economists at Beijing schools Tsinghua University and Beihang University, using data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, related to 4,711 confirmed cases of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

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Cold Pattern Continues for Much of the US

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By Paul Dorian (perspectaweather.com) – Re-Blogged From WUWT

12Z GFS forecast maps of 500 mb height anomalies show strong ridging from Alaska to the west coasts of Canada and the US both late this week (left) and early next week (right). This type of upper-level air flow will allow for the transport of these next couple of Arctic air masses from northern Canada into the central and eastern US. Maps courtesy NOAA, tropicaltidbits.com

12Z GFS forecast maps of 500 mb height anomalies show strong ridging from Alaska to the west coasts of Canada and the US both late this week (left) and early next week (right). This type of upper-level air flow will allow for the transport of these next couple of Arctic air masses from northern Canada into the central and eastern US. Maps courtesy NOAA, tropicaltidbits.com

 

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California Wildfires, Climate Change, and the Hot-Dry-Windy Fire Weather Index

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By Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D. – Re-Blogged From http://www.drroyspencer.com

California Wildfires, Climate Change, and the Hot-Dry-Windy Fire Weather Index

Summer and early Fall are fire season in California. It has always been this way. Most summers experience virtually no precipitation over much of California, which means that the vegetation that grows during the cool, wet Winter becomes fuel for wildfires in Summer.

When you add the increasing population, risky forest management practices, and lack of maintenance of power lines, it should be little wonder that wildfire activity there has increased.

Few news reports of wildfires can avoid mentioning some nebulous connection of wildfires to human-caused climate change. This is a little odd from a meteorological perspective, however.

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Hurricane Dorian: Just Weather, Not Climate Change

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By Chris Martz Weather – Re-Blogged From WUWT

goes16_ir_05l_201909070042We’ve made it three weeks without extreme weather and/or climate change hysteria making rounds on social media. Unfortunately, that streak has come to an end, making the lives of most weather forecasters like me a lot more difficult.

We are quickly approaching climatological peak of the Atlantic hurricane season¹ (September 10th) (Figure 1), thus it should be NO surprise to anyone that we have seen an uptick in tropical activity. However, I stand corrected － people are losing their minds about it.

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Slowest Start to Atlantic Hurricane Season Since 2004

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By Anthony Watts – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Watching the current maps and models, it appears the 2019 Atlantic Hurricane Season is off to a slow start. For people that the depend on disaster porn (climate alarmists, media) that means no weather events to claim as being climate driven.

Current map from NHC

With no current areas of storm development, 2019 has had the slowest start since at least 2004 when Hurricane Charley was named on August 9th, 2004.

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April Snowstorms: The Rule, Not the Exception

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By Chris Martz – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Last week, the Great Plains and upper Midwest were pummeled with a late-season blizzard. A wide swath of 10 to 20+ inches of snow buried parts of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, with the highest totals in the 20 to 30 inch range centered in far western Minnesota, and much of South Dakota (Figure 1).¹ The storm was not technically a “bomb cyclone” because the air pressure didn’t drop 24 millibars within 24 hours, although it did get close.

Figure 1.Observed snowfall from Winter Storm Wesley – NWS Twin Cities.

The highest official snowfall report was 30.8 inches in Wallace, South Dakota, although higher amounts in scattered areas were more than likely.² On top of that, an ice storm occurred in numerous Midwestern states, a dust storm moved through the southern Plains, and 80 mph wind gusts were observed in Texas and New Mexico, while thundersnow was reported in other locations.²

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Scientists Find Bounds of Weather Forecasting is 2 Weeks

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Re-Blogged From WUWT

From Penn State University and the “but we guarantee you there’s no predictability limit in climate science” department comes this interesting study.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In the future, weather forecasts that provide storm warnings and help us plan our daily lives could come up to five days sooner before reaching the limits of numerical weather prediction, scientists said.

“The obvious question that has been raised from the very beginning of our whole field is, what’s the ultimate limit at which we can predict day-to-day weather in the future,” said Fuqing Zhang, distinguished professor of meteorology and atmospheric science and director of the Center for Advanced Data Assimilation and Predictability Techniques at Penn State. “We believe we have found that limit and on average, that it’s about two weeks.”

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Predicting heat waves? Look half a world away

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Re-Blogged From WUWT

When thunderstorms brew over the tropics, California heat wave soon to follow.

When heavy rain falls over the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia and the eastern Pacific Ocean, it is a good indicator that temperatures in central California will reach 100°F in four to 16 days, according to a collaborative research team from the University of California, Davis, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Climate Center in Busan, South Korea.

University of California – Davis

An orchard of young trees withstands drought in California's Central Valley in 2014. The ability to predict heat waves in the Central Valley could help better prepare and protect crops and people from the impacts. Credit UC Davis

An orchard of young trees withstands drought in California’s Central Valley in 2014. The ability to predict heat waves in the Central Valley could help better prepare and protect crops and people from the impacts. Credit UC Davis

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Ice Tsunami Forces Residents To Evacuate Along Lake Erie

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Re-Blogged From CBS Pittsburgh

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — High winds continue to cause chaos across the East coast, and residents near Lake Erie are dealing with another problem caused by the winds, an ice tsunami.

Huge chunks of ice are being pushed off of the Niagara River, and onto lakeshore areas.

Incredible video posted to social media by the Niagara Parks Police Service shows the ice stacked up along Niagara River Parkway, and falling onto the roadway.

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Amid the Dimmest Sun Since 1978 – a Month Without Sunspots

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By Anthony Watts – Re-Blogged From WUWT

The sun today is cue-ball blank, a perfect unmarred sphere:

Solar Dynamics Observatory HMI Continuum

The sun has just passed an entire calendar month with no sunspots. The last time this happened, in August 2008, the sun was in the nadir of a century-class Solar Minimum. The current stretch of blank suns shows that Solar Minimum has returned, and it could be as deep as the last one.

The last time a full calendar month passed without a sunspot was August 2008. At the time, the sun was in the deepest Solar Minimum of the Space Age. Now a new Solar Minimum is in progress and it is shaping up to be similarly deep. So far this year, the sun has been blank 73% of the time–the same as 2008.

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Polar Vortex & US Cold Waves

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By Dr Roy Spencer – Re-Blogged From WUWT

It’s much easier to devise and promote a climate change theory than it is to falsify it. Falsification requires a lot of data over a long period of time, something we don’t usually have in climate research.

The “polar vortex” is the deep cyclonic flow around a cold air mass generally covering the Arctic, Canada, and Northern Asia during winter. It is irregularly shaped, following the far-northern land masses, unlike it’s stratospheric cousin, which is often quite symmetric and centered on the North and South Poles.

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Spot The Volcano

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By Willis Eschenbach – Re-Blogged From WUWT

It’s been a while since I played “Spot The Volcano”. The premise of the game is that the decrease in temperatures from volcanic eruptions is nowhere near as large as people claim. So I ask people to see if they can identify when a volcano erupted based on the temperature records of the time.

Now, I say that the main reason the temperature drop from volcanic eruptions is so small is that when we get a reduction in downwelling radiation from any cause, the equatorial oceans start to cool. When that happens the clouds form later in the day, allowing in more sunshine. And the net result is that any cooling from the volcanic eruption is mostly offset by the increase in incoming solar energy.

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Does The Climate-Science Industry Purposely Ignore A Simple Aspect of Strong El Niño Events That Causes Long-Term Global Warming?

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By Bob Tisdale – Re-Blogged From WUWT

It was a little more than 10 years ago that I published my first blog posts on the obvious upward steps in the sea surface temperatures of a large portion of the global oceans…upward steps that are caused by El Niño events…upward steps that lead to sunlight-fueled, naturally occurring global warming.

There is a very simple explanation for those El Niño-caused upward shifts that also make themselves known in the sea surface temperature data for much larger portion of the global oceans than I first presented a decade ago…the upward steps that are blatantly obvious in the satellite-era (starts November 1981) of sea surface temperature data for the South Atlantic, Indian and West Pacific Oceans, as shown in Figure 1, which together cover about 52% of the surfaces of the global oceans.

Figure 1

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Another Climate Propaganda Story Promoting the Normal as Abnormal

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By Dr. Tim Ball – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Almost every day there are stories in the media about weather or climate events that create the impression that they are new and outside of the normal pattern. None of them are. The objective is to sensationalize the story, even if it means using a meaningless period. A simple trick is to pick a period in which your claim is valid. This practice of cherry-picking the period of study is not exclusive to the media. It was a clear sign of corruption of climatology brought to a head with Roseanne D’Arrigo’s infamous comment to the 2006 National Academy of Science (NAS) panel that “if you are going to make a cherry pie, you have to pick cherries.”

That doesn’t condone the media use of the technique. All it does is illustrate why it was a convenient technique for creating a deception about what is normal. For example, a 2017 BBC headline said “Hottest June day since summer of 1976 in heatwave.” That is 41 years, which is statistically significant but not climatologically significant. A Youtube story reports “Sydney has wettest November day since 1984.” CBS Pittsburgh reported “NWS: 2018 is the 2nd Wettest Year on Record in Pittsburgh.” The record began in 1871 or 147 years ago, but even that is not climatologically significant. The ones I like are this one from North Carolina, that says, “A Look Back at the Coldest day Ever in North Carolina.” “Ever” is approximately 4.5 billion years.

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The High Cost Of Weather

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By Willis Eschenbach – Re-Blogged From WUWT

I saw a few headlines today that got me to thinking. One said:

THIRD-STRONGEST HURRICANE AT LANDFALL IN RECORDED U.S. HISTORY

The second said:

HURRICANE MICHAEL PROJECTED TO CAUSE $30 BILLION IN DAMAGES

The third said:

155 MPH WINDS, 490,000 WITHOUT POWER, TWO DEAD

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‘Global Warming for the Two Cultures’

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By Dr. Richard Lindzen – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Over half a century ago, C.P. Snow (a novelist and English physical chemist who also served in several important positions in the British Civil Service and briefly in the UK government) famously examined the implications of ‘two cultures’:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.

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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #331

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Brought to You by www.SEPP.org, The Science and Environmental Policy Project

By Ken Haapala, President

General Comment: Three major events occurred this week for evaluating the effectiveness of the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its subordinate organization, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in issuing reports on the causes of climate change, a process that has been ongoing for hundreds of millions of years. The major events were: one, a speech by MIT Professor emeritus, Richard Lindzen; two, an independent evaluation of the surface data set established by the Hadley Center and the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University; and three, the publication of the first of three special reports by the IPCC for its parent organization, the UNFCCC.

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Dr. Roy Spencer’s Appearance on Fox News

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By Anthony Watts – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Dr. Roy Spencer was on the Tucker Carlson show yesterday, talking about climate change and the attempt to link it to hurricanes. When Tucker asked about “Bill Nye the Science Guy”, Dr. Spencer pointed out that Nye participated in a fraud video on CO2, and mentioned that I “cleverly showed the whole thing was faked”. Watch.

Meteorologist: Climate change not causing more hurricanes
Sep. 14, 2018 – 3:26 – Former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer says that the number of major hurricanes making landfall in the U.S. has actually fallen since the 1930s.

For those that want to see how I took Al Gore and Bill Nye down, have a look at this post:

Al Gore and Bill Nye FAIL at doing a simple CO2 experiment

Years later, that video with the fraudulent experiment is still up on Al Gore’s “Climate Reality” website. Clearly for them, the end justifies the means.

CONTINUE READING –>

Weather and Climate in the Real World

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By Dr. Tim Ball – Re-Blogged From WUWT

My overall career interest is the impact of weather and climate on human history and the human condition. Much of this involved the impact on primary industries like agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. For 17 years I produced monthly columns titled Weather Talk in the largest circulation farm magazine in Canada, Country Guide. Despite the popularity with the farmers and agribusiness, I was fired because I wrote about what was wrong with the science of the global warming issue. Shortly after ending with Country Guide I began a similar column in a magazine called The Landowner and have produced monthly columns for several years now. Beyond the sin of disagreeing with the official government position on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), I spoke out about the failure of Environment Canada to improve forecasting for farmers or even consider their specific needs. While they were doing that, the Auditor General of Canada identified they spent $6.8 billion in a seven-year period (1998-2005) on climate change that produced nothing. It produced worse than nothing because a portion of the money was spent on the Canadian climate model that contributed to the IPCC amalgam of models; as Ken Gregory showed, its projection was the worst of all of them (Figure 1).

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China Plans to Bring Artificial Rain to Area Three Times the Size of Spain

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By Marc Prosser – Re-Blogged From Singularity Hub

Artificial rain is set to fall on mountainous plains three times the size of Spain. At least, that’s the plan for China’s latest weather manipulation project.

As reported by the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the system includes solid fuel burners, drones, planes, artillery, and a network of weather satellites covering vast swathes of the Indian Ocean. The aim is to create a distributed system capable of combatting climate change and increasing rainfall in the region by up to ten billion cubic meters, or approximately seven percent of China’s annual water consumption.

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Inconvenient Data: Fewer and Fewer People Die From Climate-Related Natural Disasters

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By Anthony Watts – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

Bjørn Lomborg writes on his Facebook page of a reverse hockey stick graph, one that is certainly inconvenient to the gloom and doom message of climate alarmists who try to link regular weather events to climate. So, Lomborg plays their game, and the results are surprising.

Fewer and fewer people die from climate-related natural disasters

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Rise and Fall of Central England Temperatures

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By Tony Brown – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

[The many good charts did not transfer in pasting. Please use the link at bottom to see them. -Bob]

This article examines the continued cooling of CET this century

  • Looks at a similar scenario of regional cooling in America
  • Examines CET related urbanisation issues, and the current Met office allowances for this
  • Notes the centuries long general warming of our climate.
  • Notes considerable English seasonal variability over the centuries
  • Examines the key component parts of the weather that affect the British Isles
  • Queries whether wind direction, strength and longevity are major factors in shaping our climate over the centuries.

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A Hard Rain’s Gonna Chill

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By Willis Eschenbach – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

I was re-reading an old post of mine entitled “How Thunderstorms Beat The Heat“. I say “re-reading” because I couldn’t remember writing some parts of it. Yes, it was only from two years ago … but during those two years, I’ve researched and written 83 other scientific posts here at WUWT, plus another 152 political and other posts at my own blog … so things can get lost in the flood.

In any case, I got to thinking about the following graphic from that post. It shows how much evaporative cooling occurs as a result of evaporating the observed amounts of rainfall.

scatterplot oceanic evaporation vs temperature

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Been There, Exceeded That

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By Willis Eschenbach – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

Much angst has been expended on a very vague climate threshold, the so-called “2 degrees Celsius limit”, sometimes called the “2° global warming tipping point”.  I find it all quite hilarious, for a reason that will become clear shortly. First a bit of prologue. Here’s the New Republic from 2014 about the two-degree limit:

This Is What Our Hellish World Will Look Like After We Hit the Global Warming Tipping Point

BY REBECCA LEBER, December 21, 2014

The de facto assumption of climate change policy is that the world must limit the increase in global temperatures to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above pre-Industrial levels, or risk hitting a tipping point where the impact becomes irreversible.

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Global Warming and Extreme Weather

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By Andy May – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

This is #6 of 7 posts on the hazards of global warming.  If you can’t read the sign, it says “Global Warming, Absolute Truth that can not be questioned.”  The other two are discussing a global warming research vessel that was trapped in the ice. One wonders why the article doesn’t mention the ship was on a global warming mission. The other responds “For the same reason they didn’t publish those Muhammad cartoons.”

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Where The Temperature Rules The Total Surface Absorption

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By Willis Eschenbach – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

Reflecting upon my previous post, Where The Temperature Rules The Sun, I realized that while it was valid, it was just about temperature controlling downwelling solar energy via cloud variations. However, it didn’t cover total energy input to the surface. The total energy absorbed by the surface is the sum of the net solar energy (surface downwelling solar minus surface reflections) plus the downwelling longwave infrared, or DWIR. This is the total energy that is absorbed by and actually heats the surface.

According to the CERES satellite data, globally, the solar energy absorbed by the surface averages 162 W/m2. The downwelling longwave averages 345 W/m2. Conveniently, this means that on average the earth’s surface absorbs about a half a kilowatt per square meter on an ongoing basis. (And no, I have no interest in debating whether downwelling longwave radiation actually exists. It’s been measured by scientists around the world for decades, so get over it, Sky Dragons. Debate it somewhere else, please, this is not the thread for that.)

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How Science Tamed the Weather

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By Larry Kummer – Re-Blogged From the Fabius Maximus website

Summary: Today’s post reviews a fun book about some of the systems that make us safe — but https://fabiusmaximus.com/2017/12/21/science-tamed-the-weather-keeping-us-safe-while-we-sleep/which we too often ignore or even mock. The headline is exaggeration for effect (progress has been beyond what most people would imagine a century ago, with more to come – but we’ll never fully “tame” nature).

Review of Warnings: The True Story of How Science Tamed the Weather.

The true story of how science tamed the weather.

By Mike Smith (2010).

Warnings tells a well-written and exciting story about natural disasters, the progress of science, and the workings of America’s bureaucracy. It is a story about the advances in meteorology (one of the many technologies which makes our world run) and a government service (the National Weather Service). Many Americans are oblivious or contemptuous of one — or both.

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Distorting of Climate Science

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By Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website

Summary: Scientists and journalists play a vital role in the public policy debate about climate change, explaining the reports of the major climate agencies. Here Roger Pielke Jr. describes an example of how they too often misrepresent those findings, distorting the debate and feeding the public’s loss of confidence in science as an institution.

About those exaggerations in the media about climate.

“Pielke on Climate” – part 2 of 3.

About the misreporting of experts’ reports.

By Roger Pielke Jr. at The Climate Fix.

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Hurricane Harvey And Wind Farm Output

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

At least one news outlet has noticed that renewable energy is exceptionally vulnerable to hurricanes and other extreme weather events. How will renewables power the future, if climate change produces more extreme weather?

Harvey Set to Overpower Wind in State Generating the Most

Storm could knock out between 2.1 and 3.6 gigawatts of power near the Texas coast

By Brian Eckhouse, Chris Martin, and Ryan Collins
26 August 2017, 04:59 GMT+10

One of the worst things that can happen to a wind farm is too much wind.

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Weather-Related Natural Disasters: Should We Be Concerned About a Reversion to the Mean?

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By Roger Pielke Jr – Re-Blogged From Risk Frontiers

The world is presently in an era of unusually low weather disasters. This holds for the weather phenomena that have historically caused the most damage: tropical cyclones, floods, tornadoes and drought. Given how weather events have become politicized in debates over climate change, some find this hard to believe. Fortunately, government and IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) analyses allow such claims to be adjudicated based on science, and not politics.  Here I briefly summarize recent relevant data.

Every six months Munich Re publishes a tally of the costs of disasters around the world for the past half year. This is an excellent resource for tracking disaster costs over time.  The data allows us to compare disaster costs to global GDP, to get a sense of the magnitude of these costs in the context of economic activity.  Using data from the UN, here is how that data looks since 1990, when we have determined that data is most reliable and complete.

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The Laws of Averages: Part 1, Fruit Salad

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By Kip Hansen – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

1st_Law_of_Averages_sm

Averages: A Primer

As both the word and the concept “average” are subject to a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding in the general public and both word and concept have seen an overwhelming amount of “loose usage” even in scientific circles, not excluding peer-reviewed journal articles and scientific press releases,  let’s have a quick primer (correctly pronounced “prim – er”), or refresher,  on averages (the cognizanti can skip this bit and jump directly  to  Fruit Salad).

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NOAA: Above-Normal Atlantic Hurricane Season is Most Likely This Year

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– Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

‘Weak or non-existent’ El Nino is a factor

Forecasters at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center say the Atlantic could see another above-normal hurricane season this year.

For the upcoming Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 through November 30, forecasters predict a 45 percent chance of an above-normal season, a 35 percent chance of a near-normal season, and only a 20 percent chance of a below-normal season.

“As a Florida resident, I am particularly proud of the important work NOAA does in weather forecasting and hurricane prediction,” said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. “These forecasts are important for both public safety and business planning, and are a crucial function of the federal government.”

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New List of Extreme Weather Mortality Events Shows Events of the Past Were Worse Than Today

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By Anthony Watts – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

Measuring the human impact of weather – WMO issues new records of weather impacts in terms of lives lost

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has announced today world records for the highest reported historical death tolls from tropical cyclones, tornadoes, lightning and hailstorms. It marks the first time the official WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes has broadened its scope from strictly temperature and weather records to address the impacts of specific events.

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Aerosols Strengthen Storm Clouds

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From the UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

An abundance of aerosol particles in the atmosphere can increase the lifespans of large storm clouds by delaying rainfall, making the clouds grow larger and live longer, and producing more extreme storms when the rain finally does come, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin.

storm-cloud

New research from the University of Texas at Austin shows that aerosols create larger storm clouds capable of producing more rain. CREDIT Brian Khoury

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Weather Observers Misread Wind Speeds, Skewing a Major Hazards Database

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By Anthony Watts – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

Weather spotters who report storm measurements and observations to a U.S. national compendium of storm data often exaggerate winds speeds—by about one third, on average.

beaufort-wind-scale

By   EOS.org

People may think they know how hard the wind is blowing, but science shows that they usually get it wrong. Researchers have known this for years, but a recent study seeks to quantify just how bad humans are at figuring out the speed of wind gusts without the aid of meteorological instruments.
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Fable of Stable Climate

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By Anthony Watts – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

Ice_Age_Temperatures[1]

Translation from the Dutch book review “Het Sprookje van een stabiel klimaat” by Hans Labohm. Posted on the climategate.nl blog.

My loyal readers know him as co-author of my blog: the geologist, paleoclimatologist and climate sceptic Gerrit van der Lingen, an antipode of Dutch origin who has been living in New Zealand for many years.

Gerrit van der Lingen has recently published a fascinating book, “The Fable of a Stable Climate, the writings and debates of a climate realist”, which contains a collection of his essays, lectures, discussions and letters to the media about climate and associated subjects.

Most of the public information about the climate comes from scientists who studied the weather and weather processes and who consider temperature data of 150 years already a long period. For van der Lingen this is only one heartbeat in the geological history, which forms the only correct context for judging the present climate developments.

While studying climate change in the past he realised that the present belief in man-made catastrophic global warming (AGW = Anthropogenic Global Warming), caused by CO2 emissions, is not supported by the science. He became involved in the climate debate, in which the protagonists of the AGW, who believe in the dominant role of mankind in the warming of the atmosphere, and the antagonists, who base their opinions on factual data and observations, are diametrically opposed to each other. It seems to be a debate between ideology and pure science.

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What Are They Really Counting?

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By Kip Hansen – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

teddy_bears

WARNING: This is not a technical essay. There is almost no science in it. It is not about AGW or any issue involved in the Climate Wars. My editor describes it as “chatty”. It does ask two extremely important questions.

We are all constantly bombarded by numbers….in the press, on the radio news, on the TV news, here at WUWT. Numbers as sheer numbers, numbers as graphs, charts, images, and in words and more words. Putting a number with an idea has a magical power over our minds – it makes the idea ‘more true’ – it offers to our minds a sort of proof for ideas and concepts.

In this essay, I look at an important question, one we must all ask – ask ourselves and ask the sources of these numbers – What exactly are they really counting? In our little introductory image (cute, huh?) we see they are counting  “counting bears”. 1 bear, two bears. But, what exactly? In the upper panels, they are counting green plastic counting bears. Their count = 1 (and in words – one). In the bottom panels, they are still counting plastic counting bears, but one red bear and one blue bear, or 2 (in words – two) bears altogether. Even more exactly though, the bottom panels have one red bear, one blue bear and zero green bears.

This is not just being fussy. When we have only the information in the top panels, we count one bear (and maybe note that it is green). As far as we know, all bears in this context are the same color, and color doesn’t matter. If these were real seal-eating/fish-eating bears, some might be white, some brown, some grizzled, some a cross-breed mixture. For biologists, the difference is important – refer to the Polar Bear Wars. For a camper on the tundra, one very hungry bear, possibly man-eating, is more than enough, regardless of color.

For this kindergarten example, we see that even in the most elementary types of counting , there are details that may need to be explored and explained.

Just to be clear, all measurement is the same as counting in this regard.

meas·ure   ‘meZHər/   verb      to ascertain the size, amount, or degree of (something) by using an instrument or device marked in standard units or by comparing it with an object of known size. “the amount of water collected is measured in pints” some synonyms: count, calculate, compute, quantify

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International Study Reveals That Cold Weather Kills Far More People Than Hot Weather

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Re-Blogged From The Lancet

Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analysing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries [1]. The findings, published in The Lancet, also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells.

“It’s often assumed that extreme weather causes the majority of deaths, with most previous research focusing on the effects of extreme heat waves,” says lead author Dr Antonio Gasparrini from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the UK. “Our findings, from an analysis of the largest dataset of temperature-related deaths ever collected, show that the majority of these deaths actually happen on moderately hot and cold days, with most deaths caused by moderately cold temperatures.” [2]

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A Global Warming Allegory

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Guest essay by William M. Briggs, statistician. Reposted from his blog wmbriggs.com
and From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com
A very odd thing happened in Science. Turns out a famous weatherman has been forecasting highs in the 60s then 70s for New York City all winter long. But the temperature never rose above the single digits, teens, twenties, and thirties.

One day a writer at the New York Post wrote an article telling people not to trust the weatherman, who, it turned out, had issued a prediction for the following day for a “High of 80!”

Climatologists stationed at NASA on the Upper West Side were incensed that a non-scientist would interfere with Science. So the climatologists

 

spoke with the weatherman, who said he was basing his predictions on a sophisticated computer model. The weatherman admitted his difficulties, but said his model would have performed great if only he had better measures of surface snow cover.

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