A hot summer in the North of the world

When I read the article below about unusually hot weather in the Northern hemisphere I had to laugh.  Why?  Because I live in the Southerrn hemisphere in Australia and we have been getting a lot of reports of an unusually cold winter -- e.g. here.

So the Green/Left have been up to their old tricks again and reporting only the facts that suit them.  There is not one mention of cold weather anywhere below.  It's so blatant. It is one big cherry-pick and as such is totally dishonest.  You can "prove" just about anything by carefully selected examples. The report below is not remotely scientific.

Two comments from fellow skeptics were also interesting.  They also mentioned the selectivity in the reports below.

Climatologist Tim Ball wrote:

"Why don’t they report all the record cold temperatures being set. For example, the coldest July 2 in 107 years in Eugene Oregon and the lowest ever recorded by satellite in Antarctica at -144°F.

The pattern is due to a normal Meridional flow in the Rossby Wave of the Circumpolar Vortex.

One  of the failures of climate science is it studied averages initially then in the 1970s started looking at trends. Even today it has ignored variation and that is a sure indicator of the increased Meridional flow.

What is happening is normal, explainable and yet being exploited by those with a political agenda"

Paul Driessen wrote:

"My recollection is that the hottest temperature ever recorded in Alaska was 100 degrees F … in Fort Yukon … in 1915. I’ll bet the Post didn’t want to mention that little inconvenient truth, nor a lot of other record highs in other parts of the world, many inconvenient decades ago"


In the town of Sodankyla, Finland, the thermometer on July 17 registered a record-breaking 90 degrees, a remarkable figure given that Sodankyla is 59 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in a region known for winter snowmobiling and an abundance of reindeer.

This is a hot, strange and dangerous summer across the planet.

Greece is in mourning after scorching heat and high winds fueled wildfires that have killed more than 80 people. Japan recorded its highest temperature in history, 106 degrees, in a heat wave that killed 65 people in a week and hospitalized 22,000, shortly after catastrophic flooding killed 200.

Montreal hit 98 degrees on July 2, its warmest temperature ever measured. Canadian health officials estimate as many as 70 people died in that heat wave.

In the United States, 35 weather stations in the past month have set new marks for warm overnight temperatures. Southern California has had record heat and widespread power outages. In Yosemite Valley, which is imperiled by wildfires, park rangers have told everyone to flee.

The brutal weather has been supercharged by human-induced climate change, scientists say. Climate models for three decades have predicted exactly what the world is seeing this summer.

And they predict that it will get hotter - and that what is a record today could someday be the norm.

"The old records belong to a world that no longer exists," said Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It's not just heat. A warming world is prone to multiple types of extreme weather - heavier downpours, stronger hurricanes, longer droughts.

"You see roads melting, airplanes not being able to take off, there's not enough water," said Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. "Climate change hits us at our Achilles' heel. In the Southwest, it's water availability. On the Gulf Coast, it's hurricanes. In the East, it's flooding. It's exacerbating the risks we already face today."

The proximate cause of the Northern Hemisphere bake-off is the unusual behavior of the jet stream, a wavy track of west-to-east-prevailing wind at high altitude. The jet stream controls broad weather patterns, such as high-pressure and low-pressure systems. The extent of climate change's influence on the jet stream is an intense subject of research.

This summer, the jet stream has undulated in extreme waves that have tended to block weather systems from migrating. The result has been stagnant high-pressure and low-pressure systems with dire results, such as heat waves in some places and flooding elsewhere.

"When those waves are very big - as they have been for the past few weeks - they tend to get stuck in place," said Jennifer Francis, a professor of atmospheric science at Rutgers University. Last year, scientists published evidence that the conditions leading up to "stuck jet streams" are becoming more common, with warming in the Arctic seen as a likely culprit.

Gone are the days when scientists drew abright line dividing weather and climate. Now researchers can examine a weather event and estimate how much climate change had to do with causing or exacerbating it.

Last year, when Hurricane Harvey broke the record for how much rain could fall from a single storm, researchers knew climate change had been a factor.

Months later, scientists presented findings that Harvey dumped at least 15 percent more rain in Houston than it would have without global warming. Theory, meet reality: When the atmosphere is warmer, it can hold more moisture. Climate change does not cause hurricanes to spin up or thunderstorms to develop, but it can be an intensifier.

In Dallas, where the temperature hit 100 on 10 out of 11 days this month, three homeless people have died of heat-related causes in the past week, said Brenda Snitzer, executive director of the Stewpot, a downtown shelter.

SOURCE