Bad News For All Of Us, Especially Climate Denialists: 2019 2nd Hottest On Record

The year 2019 was the second hottest on record says NOAA.
On this map, shades of red are warmer than average for 2019,
blue is colder than average.  Central North America
was the only real cold spot. 

It was predictable and expected news earlier this month, but it's still alarming:

NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information just came out with their global assessment for the year 2019.

In case you missed it, 2019 was the world's second hottest year on record.

Here's part of a summary from NCEI:

"For 2019, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.71... degrees above the 20th century average. This was the second highest among all years in the 1880-2019 record and just 0.07 (degrees F.) less than the record value set in 2016.

2019 marks the 43rd consecutive year (since 1977) with global land and ocean temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th century average.

The five warmest years have occured since 2015; nine of the 10 warmest years have occurred since 2005. The year 1998 is the only 20th century year among the 10 warmest on record.

The annual global land and ocean temperature has increased at an average rate of +0.13F per decade since 1880; however, since 1981, the average rate of increase is more than twice that rate (+0.32F).

For the 21-year span that is considered a reasonable surrogate for pre-industrial conditions (1880-1900), the 2019 global land and ocean temperature waws 2.07F above the average."

I dunno. Do you see a trend here?

Well, a few people don't see this. The year 2019 seemed to be year a lot of the media dubbed as the time people got it. That the world is warming up and it is dangerous. A crisis, really.

However, there's still that lively group that will tell you that the world is not warming up. Or if it is, it's just a temporary, natural cycle. Or, if they do concede warming is happening, it's not a big deal.

The denialists can just drive you crazy if you let them.  Their counterpoint to this latest bit of news on 2019 and climate change and other world warming news is like this:

"Yeah, but South Dakota had one of its coldest years on record in 2019!"  True, but as South Dakota goes, so goes the world? Um.....

If one more idiot tells me that climate change doesn't exist because some Podunk town had a record low temperature, I'm going to scream. You don't want to hear my scream. It's awful.

Still, they persist.

Back in November, felon and one of the most vile, most stupid commentators out there (and that's saying something!) Dinesh D'Souza tweeted this gem:

"Remember nuclear winter? Of course you don't.  That's because it didn't happen. Yet it was all the rage on the Left in the 1980s. A generation from now, no one will recall climate change either, and for the same reason. The apocalypse has become a political racket!"

Can I be Captain Obvious here again?  People feared nuclear winter but it didn't happen because Russia and the United States decided it would be a bad idea to nuke each other into oblivion.   Friggin' idiot!

Social media sure as hell isn't helping. I don't know exactly how large a percentage of the public is in the climate denial camp, but platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube certainly amplify the false voices of this denialism.

I'll offer just one example: On January 16, Time magazine online reported:

"YouTube has been 'actively promoting' videos containing misinformation about climate change, a report released Thursday by campaign group Avaaz claims, despite recent policy changes by the platform intended to drive users away from harmful content and conspiracy theories."

When you go on YouTube, there's an 'Up Next' feature.  You're watching the video you want to watch, which is the first video in the list of videos on the right side of the screen that YouTube's algorithms think you'd want to watch.

According to the Time report:

"'We've found that it's very likely that at least one in five users who search or a term like global warming or climate change could be sent down this type of misinformation rabbit hole,'" says Fadi Quran, a campaigns director at Avaaz, and one of the report's authors. 'Scientists are working so hard to educate people about the existential threat we face and YouTube is allowing bad actors among us the last word on this issue for many people.'"

Previous studies have suggested that the majority of videos related to climate change on YouTube are at odds against what scientists are telling us.

Even with all this, there are islands of optimism , as a piece in  The Guardian points out, 2019 might have been the year that climate denialism might have been defeated. At least partially:

"The global climate strike, Greta Thunberg's meteoric rise to international prominence, as well as several high-profile international conferences and reports - all contributed in putting climate skeptics on the back foot.

"Even Donald Trump, who previously claimed that the climate crisis was a 'hoax' invented by China to hold back American industry has begun to brag  all his administration has done to address it."

Never mind the fact that Trump's bragging, as always, is a fake facade. Trump is rebranding before our eyes, like he always does to suit his needs.  Trump has done pretty much nothing in terms of  climate change at all, and now his position is that climate activitsts and others are just negative people.

Trump notwithstanding, the discussion around climate change is now mostly how to address it, and not whether we should address it. This is a debate we should have had at least a couple decades ago but better late than never, I suppose. I'm glad we've at least reached this point.

That Guardian article/editorial, which is definitely worth reading, summarizes the many different approaches to what we can and should do about climate change.

It boils down to this, according to the Guardian in one of the best basic outlines of where we stand:

"No one seems quite clear what is the ultimate goal of the global fight against the climate crisis. Is it merely to enable constant economic growth in a sustainable way, or is it about imposing limits on humanity's ambitions in pursuit of a more harmonious relationship with nature."

Climate denialist have long said environmentalists' goals are to take freedom and independence and wealth away from you and me.

Will we find sustainable ways to keep something like our current lifestyle going?  Do we need to keep our current lifestyle going? Should we find something more sustainable, but still far from some grim dystopia? How?

I guess it depends on whether some of the great minds of the world find solutions, or at least paths forward, or whether the usual opportunists make things worse.....

This is one hell of a season finale cliff hanger, folks.

Huge Nor'easter And Frigid Arctic Blast Obnoxiously Heated Up Climate Change Debate

Huge expanses of coastal New England ocean water froze over
during last week's record cold spell. The Arctic outbreak did not
prove or disprove climate change, but activists on either side
seized on this big time, facts be damned 

The long Arctic siege that gripped much of the eastern half of the country finally ended Sunday, and the cleanup is well underway from that super powerful nor'easter last week.

Although the Arctic wasteland spell is over, the heat that the cold blast generated in the climate change activist wars show few signs of abating, though.

The brutal stretch of winter weather proved to be a sort of climate Rorschach test of sorts between climate activists on one hand, the climate change denialists and skeptics on the other.

I think the climate change activists did have the intellectual upper hand in this latest battle, but there was still over the top claims on either side.

SILLY DENIALISTS

Surprise, surprise, Donald Trump was the most simplistic of the denialist bunch. We were barely one day into the Arctic siege when he declared global climate change a hoax. Hey, it was cold on the U.S. East Coast, so that's the only indicator of whether the world was hot or cold, right?

Yeah, or something like that. Trump is a real friggin'  climate scientist. (If you didn't notice, my snark font is on.)

Then there was the familiar trope that came roaring back along with the Arctic winds that activists had somehow "rebranded" global warming into climate change, so that they could allegedly blame every kind of weather on fossil fuel emissions.  Hey, now they're saying any weird weather is humans' fault! Silly climate activists! (Ugh.)

For instance, Rex Murphy in Canada's National Post had his sarcasm font on in full blast as he wrote about all those silly little people worried about global warming, er, climate change:

"During the most savage Hyperborean blasts and numbing cold even the little ones busy themselves with exercises to remind themselves of the truth of things. Children in schools hang up posters of the Amazon rainforest, check the temperature in Tanzania, have revivalist reruns of "An Inconvenient Truth" to keep the sense of global peril fresh in their anxious empty little heads."

Cripes, Murphy's prose is as purple as my frostbitten fingers were during the worst of the Arctic blast.

NUANCES, NUANCES, NUANCES

I suppose was a faint glimmer of a point in Murphy's rant about "branding."

Here's why I think that: A number of climate scientists and other activists during the winter siege pointed out that the extreme weather was "consistent" with climate change.

Notice the careful wording. They weren't drawing much of a direct line between the frigid weather pattern and climate change. The climate change crowd was more accurately saying the spell of weather was paradoxically "consistent." with global warming. No proof, but the weird weather pattern might, just might, have had something to do with climate change.

A few activists did flatly say that the cold wave and nor'easter were definitive signs of climate change. Those activists were wrong. A single weather event is proof of nothing. Weather is variable. A world that's overall warmer than it used to be can still have cold weather. It can still have winters. Life goes on, after all.

However, back to that careful working, and the crux of why I said Murphy had a slight point about branding.

The basic science of climate change is simple: Put more carbon dioxide in the air, and more of the sun's heat gets trapped in that atmosphere. So all things being equal, the world warms up.

Then mix in all the nuances of the many ways climate change can affect how things are where you live. And then consider the  million different ways it can affect conditions at all other points of the world. On top of that, add in the complexities that exists with or without global warming. Examples include local effects, natural ocean and air circulation cycles, and factors we might not even know about yet.

Which means you get the simple, if incorrect arguments: "It's cold out where we are, therefore there's no global warming." say the climate denial crowd.

That, versus the scientists: "The weather pattern we are in is consistent with climate change, but it's hard to blame one weather event on climate change. Plus, there are many factors involved that may or not be influenced by climate change, and scientists are still studying these aspects. Melting sea ice in the Arctic might be screwing around with the jet stream and might be bending it in ways that make these Arctic outbreaks in the eastern United States. However, there are winters that aren't so cold because..........."

See the problem? Us humans crave simple explanations for what's going on around us. I know I do. Explanations of how climate change might be affecting us are often not simple at all. We tune out. That's why Donald Trump's tweet got so much attention. It was a simple if wrong sales/con job. He's a great marketer. Simple messages sell.

It's hard to market climate change in ways the public easily understands.

Under climate change, weather extremes will probably continue to get, well, more extreme. You get into the weeds arguing with climate deniers and skeptics on this point, too.

One example is Accuweather Meteorologist Joe Bastardi, among others. Now, I respect Bastardi as a talented meteorologist. He's one smart cookie, and my snark font is definitely OFF when I say that. Where I have a problem with Bastardi is his climate change skepticism. He's not a denialist, but he is very skeptical.   His argument often goes as follows:

Yes, the weather here is exceptionally cold/hot/wet/dry/windy ---- whatever, but it's happened before, so there's nothing going on that's out of the ordinary so there's no human caused climate change. (I'm oversimplifying his argument a bit here.)

And of course, Bastardi is right on one aspect of his argument. There have been cold snaps as bad or worse than the one we just had. There have been nor'easters as bad or worse than the one that socked New England and Atlantic Canada last week. There have been bigger heat waves than the ones that we've had in recent years. All these historic weather events happened without human-induced global warming.

However, Bastardi is missing the most on point of these questions.

Of course these weather patterns have happened before. But are they becoming more frequent than they used to, and if so, why? Are floods getting more frequent and worse in some parts ofthe country than decades ago? Are weather patterns that cause these long lasting cold outbreaks like the one we just had happening more often? again, f so, why? Those are the pertinent questions here.

I'm not sure I have the answer to these questions, but those queries are the ones most worth examining.

Another trope among denialists is to try and discredit all science, as way of trying to convince the public to not believe anything based on scientific fact.

For instance, on Sunday, the climate denial site Watts Up With That mocked NOAA for a winter forecast they put out last fall that said chances were greater than even that the southern and eastern United States would, overall, have a warmer than average winter.

Watts Up With That crowed about the cold weather in the East and parts of the South. Never mind that the winter is less than half over, and, despite the cold spell, these areas could, on the whole, have a milder than average winter. (Notice the January thaw that's now creeping into many of these areas.)

As many, including, to his credit, Bastardi pointed out, it's possible we could have warm weather the rest of the winter, which would make the season a bit on the mild side. We just don't know yet.

NOR'EASTER AS CLIMATE POSTER CHILD

The nor'easter that struck the U.S. and Canada east coasts last weekend strengthened at almost a record pace, and brought near record and even record storm surges to many coastal communities in New England and Canada, especially in Massachusetts.

Waves and coastal flooding batter Scituate, Massachusetts during
last week's epic nor'easter. The storm was huge, and inflated the
arguments over climate change. But it was just one storm, so I'm
counseling that everybody relax. 

The denialists claimed that it was a bitter cold storm, so no global warming. Yeah, it was cold on the western side of the storm, over eastern North America.

But it was super warm on the eastern side of the storm, over the Atlantic Ocean. Nobody lives in the middle of the ocean though, so that warm side of the storm was ignored.

Meanwhile, the climate change activists were a little more careful, but still emphasized that the unusually high tides that flooded Boston and other communtiies were the hallmarks of climate change.

Climate change might have had an influence on all that high water, but it wasn't the principal reason for the flooding. The storm struck when astronomical tides were higher than average, due to the position of the moon.

The worst of the storm also struck just when high tide was scheduled to come in during the early afternoon Thursday. Bad timing, to say the least.

Sea levels have risen due to climate change over the past several decades. Which means climate change did add to the strength and height of the storm tide, It was probably worse than it would have been without climat echange, but it wasn't the main reason for it.

Again, nuance strikes again, and we humans have little patience for that.

This keeps going around and around of course. The always obnoxious Brietbart News, among others, tried to stake the claim that climatologists automatically blamed global warming on the first signs of heat waves last summer, but pooh-poohed the idea that a cold wave on one sliver the globe -namely the eastern U.S., canceled out global warming.

Of course, no reputable climatologists said any such thing.

As long as the denialists have allies in government, sustained by huge campaign contributions by the oil industry and conservative bazillonaires, the science, details and nuances will be as lost in the public discourse as the stuff that floated out to sea when the storm surge hit Scituate, Massachusetts last week.

There will be other exreme weather events. They'll come fast and furiously. (Witness the fatal flash floods, debris flows and mudslides in California on Tuesday)

If you are interested in climate change, and you should be, here's my advice: Don't listen to the shrill public false "debate" when there's a big storm. Seek out the experts, the sober scientists, the politicians that resist hype, the media outlets that don't have much of an agenda, but just want you to know what's really going on.

Doing all these things can be difficult.  But at least you'll know what's really going on. And maybe, just maybe, you'll retain your sanity.

Why Is Everybody Ignoring Louisiana?

Louisiana is experiencing the nation's worst
disaster since Superstorm Sandy. Why haven't we
paid more attention to this calamity? 

The question in the headline of this post is being asked more and more in weather geek circles.

The ongoing flood disaster in Louisiana has certainly been in the news, but it hasn't gotten the attention of other calamaties of similar size.  

Louisiana is probably on par with Superstorm Sandy in 2012 in terms of how widespread the destruction is.

The Weather Channel has the latest tally: 

So far, 11 people have died. The flooding had destroyed or damaged at least 40,000 homes. About 30,000 people and 1,000 pets have been rescued. So far, at least 40,000 people have sought FEMA disaster assistance.

In Ascension Parish (parishes are akin to counties in other states) at least 15,00 homes and businesses are flooded. In Livingston Parish, home to 138,000 people before the flood, it's estimated taht 75 percent of the homes are total losses.

I'm sure the death toll will rise. NOLA.com reports that they haven't even really begun door to door searches yet, and there are probably victims in some of these flooded houses.

Bottom line: This is huge.

So why has the media sort of yawned over this one?

Marshall Shepherd, writing in Forbes, has several theories.  Among them: The storm didn't have a catchy name like a hurricane, i.e Katrina.

The news cycle is full of other big stuff: Trump, unrest in Milwaukee, the Olympics are all competing for news viewers. Marshall also says the flood evolved over the weekend, when news organizations aren't nearly as staffed or engaged as they are during the workweek.

Marshall brings up a rather scary, sad reason Louisiana might have been downplayed in the national conscience: There have been so many huge floods lately that this one seems like old hat.  We've had a ever-lengthening string of enormous so-called 500 year floods. South Carolina. Texas. (twice!) West Virginia, Maryland.

And here we go again, another flood. When something becomes routine, it's not news anymore. Of course, if big floods become so common that they aren't news, something's wrong.

It's probably a combination of climate change, which makes epic rain storms and floods more likely, and the fact that we're paving over flood plains that is causing this. (If you pave over forests, marshes and fields with shopping centers and neighborhoods, the water will no longer harmlessly fill up a bayou. It will flow into people's houses instead. )

The fact that floods that wreck thousands of homes, affect thousands of people at one time has become routine and a "new normal" should be frightening to a lot of us.

If this "new normal" means all these victims are ignored, then they don't get the help they need. As NOLA.com put it in a headline: "National Media Fiddles While Louisiana Drowns."

People are doing heroic work in Lousiana to help flood victims. But it takes the glare of the national spotlight to force as much aid into the disaster zone as possible. If the general public is more aware of a catastrophe like Louisiana, the more likely they are to dig into their pockets to help.

Or as NOLA.com put it: "As Louisiana well knows, the loosening of the recovery purse strings is directly commensurate to the number of people who are made aware of the scope of the devastation. In this case, where national news coverage has been scarce, locals have every reason to worry that recovery funds will be just as scarce."

Let's just hope lots of attention, and relief money and supplies for Louisiana flow into the state faster than the flood waters did.





rce.

But broaden the focus a little, and some links appear. The frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall events have increased globally, said Kenneth Kunkel, a climate scientist at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

“Each decade, it has been higher than the previous decade, for about the last 30 to 40 years,” he said.

Both the land and the oceans have been warming up, which has increased the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, he said. The oceanic moisture feeds into the storms that form over land. It is likely that the storm in Baton Rouge last week produced more rainfall than it would have 40 years ago, Kunkel said.

Texas, Oklahoma Start To Dry Out, Finally. Was Flood Climate Change?

This house in Wimberly, Texas was swept
away by flash floods in May. Photo by Jay Janner,
Austin American Statesman.  

Most of Texas and Oklahoma must love this forecast: Little or no rain is forecast there over the couple of days. This after enjoying a few dry days this week.

Instead, the flooding has spread northward into Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri.

The rains of May in Texas and Oklahoma were beyond incredible. As Dr. Jeff Masters points out, rainfall records for any month were shattered in many Oklahoma and Texas cities.

Masters writes: "Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon (Texas A&M University) came up with a back-of-the-envelope estimate for how often you would expect such an extremely wet month in his state: About every 2,000 years, assuming the climate of the past century were to persist."

Of course, the climate is changing. I can't sit here and show to what extent global warming influenced this epic flood in Texas and Oklahoma, but events like this seem to becoming more likely as climate changes.

As the left leaning Media Matters points out, the mainstream media, reporting on the Texas floods, has been in some cases a little more aggressive about bringing the subject of climate change into their coverage.

CNN brought in Bill Nye to discuss the possible connections to climate change, and several reports by this news organization brought up the potential climate change connection to the Texas floods in particular and an increase in huge gullywasher floods in general.

Media Matters noted that on the NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, reporter Miguel Almaguer discussed the "weather whiplash" that brought Texas from drought to epic flood in weeks, and showed how climate scientists think the whiplash is often related to climate change.

The CBS Evening News also brought up climate change in their coverage of the Texas floods.

ClimateChange.org has an interactive map showing the way record precipitation has increased across the United States.

I don't trust the dearth of record events before, say 1900 or so. The records are sparse, and not necessarily all that accurate.

But the trend in more recent years is clear, as you can see in the interactive map:

Social Media Buzzword In California: #droughtshaming

A man documents California water wasting to post on social
media. Image from The Today Show.  

Despite a bit of out of season rain earlier this month, the incredible California drought grinds on with no sign of stopping.

The latest Drought Sign Of the Apocalypse: There is now zero percent of normal snowpack in the Sierra Nevada.

That's the snow that should be there now running into reservoirs to help get California through its normal long dry summer.

There's just little patches of snow up there. Nothing to really help quench California's thirst.

As reservoirs lower and dry vegetation threatens to burst into flames, Californians are being told more and more urgently: Don't waste ANY water.

A few people might not be getting that memo, or feel like they are above water restrictions.

That has led to a new trend in California, says The Guardian newspaper: Drought shaming, or in the hashtag vernacular of Twitter, #droughtshaming.

Probably inevitably, notes the Guardian, the drought shaming has become the latest war between the ultra rich 1 percent, and the rest of us.

Says The Guardian:

"Targets in the past few weeks have included Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, for maintaining obscenely green, lush lawns, visible from the air; Walmart, for sourcing its bottled water from the drought-stricken state at enormous profit; rich Beverly Hills residents, for filling up their pools; and even a local Ritz hotel that was 'water misting' its too-rich-to-be-hot patrons."

Of course, drought shaming via social media is an alternative to getting real data about real water wasters, because in many cases, such data is no longer available.

It's now next to impossible for water managers to get real data on who is actually wasting water and who is not, according to Mother Jones,  originally reported by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting.  

From Mother Jones:

"In 1997, state legislators voted to weaken an important open government law, the California Public Records Act. The reason: Palo Alto city officials were concerned with tech executives' personal information would be made public, as Reveal reported last month.

The move largely made individual and corporate water use private even though public agencies coudl have simply redacted the sensitive personal information - like home addresses and phone numbers - as they often do when releasing records."

Back in 1991, when California was also going through a bad drought, the Oakland Tribune sued the East Bay Municipal Utility District under the Public Record Act to obtain the list of the biggest residential water users.

The resulting Oakland Tribune story on the biggest residential water users, the district toughened conservation rules.

Now, with the public records laws weakened because of the sensibilities of Palo Alto tech industry executives, no such reporting can so far go on. Which means there are a few residential water wasters out there acting with impunity.

That is, until they are found out by individuals using the #droughtshaming hashtag.

So you see, drought has one other effect. It causes a lot of public discord and disagreement.

Maybe El Nino will bring welcome rains to California by November or so. Until then, it's going to be a long hot California summer. And I'm not just talking about the weather. I'm talking Californians' emotions and politics.

eveal asked East Bay MUD for the names of the top 100 residential water customers today. Even though the public records law was weakened in 1997, the district can give us the information if it determines "the public interest in disclosure of the information clearly outweighs the public interest in nondisclosure."

But the district is refusing to release the information. "For numerous reasons, including the privacy interests of our customers, EBMUD protocol prohibits the disclosure of individually identifiable consumption data of its customers," wrote Rischa Cole, assistant to the general manager of the district, in an email.

So for now, the district's 1.3 million customers in Alameda and Contra Costa counties who all are being asked to use less water don't really know how much their thirstiest neighbors are using, much less who they are.

 

Watching Scary, Fatal Illinois Tornado In Real Time

Yesterday's giant tornado ripping through Rochelle, Ill.  

Us weather geeks, and some of the general public have been doing this for a few years now, but it still fascinates me.

With instantaneous media and technology, we watch disasters unfold in real time. We don't learn about them after the fact anymore.

So it was last evening as we watched an enormous, fast moving tornado rip across the northern Illinois countryside, live on our laptops and smart phones.

There were live feeds, videos and photos of the tornado and its damage put up minutes or seconds after the event happened, ever-changing radar images showing the progress of the storm and who would be targeted next.

The guilty part of this? It's disaster as live entertainment. Like a reality show,

Entertainment is a harsh word in this context, of course. I, and surely most people, were not happy or applauding to see the gigantic twister threaten lives and property.

We felt a sense of dread, not excitement, when we saw images of Grubsteakers Restaurant in Rochelle, Illinois, instantly reduced to rubble during the peak of the evening dining hour. Did anyone in there survive?  

Another image of that giant Illinois tornado.  

Happy spoiler alert: The restaurant's owner, a real hero, barked orders for everybody to go into a basement storm shelter as the storm approached. They were all trapped down there when a wall fell on the door, but were rescued, dusty but uninjured, about 90 minutes after the storm struck.

So it wasn't entertainment, exactly, maybe more like fascination, as the giant tornado kept at it on our computer screens. The storm was incredible, as most big tornadoes are. Its forward speed was frightening as it charged across the flat Illinois landscape.

Above the actual stout, wedge-shaped funnel, a fat, ragged cyclinder of clouds raced in a circle overhead. The clouds were white on the forward facing side as the sun tried to break through the clouds at the edge of the storm, and brown and black in the rest of the maelstrom.

Little fingers, mini funnels, sometimes reached out horizontally rom the main tornado. That's why we were glued to our screens watching this. It was a monster. A monster movie. Except the storm was real, and real people were suffering.

Unlike in a reality show, there were no winners.

The tornado killed one person, and injured at least eight others. Given the size of this storm, I suppose we're lucky it didn't kill more people. Still, one death and those injuries and that extensive damage is too much.

We'll go back today and look at some more updated videos, some of which are at the bottom of this post.

The tornado season is still young, and other large tornadoes could devastate other quiet Midwestern towns this spring and early summer.

When the next big tornado comes, we'll be back watching it live. And hoping the storms stay entertaining. By that I mean, completely missing any towns, villages, houses or farms.

From Live Storms Media, here's the Illinois tornado crossing Interstate 39:




Next video via Facebook, Stephanie Curtis:

Are We "Weather Porn" Addicts? And Is That A Bad Thing?

There's nothing inherently wrong with viewing
images like this tornado in Moore, OK, but..... 

Lately, if you really want to create a storm in the meteorological  community, just bring up the term "weather porn."  

And this storm has nothing to do with wind, rain, snow or destruction. But maybe it does have a little to do with hot air.  Or not. You decide.

What precipitated (ha!) this latest kerfuffle among weather geeks was a recent article by David Bauder, a television writer for the Associated Press.

He noted that the evening news, and lots of other news sources are loaded up with weather stories.

This, Bauder seemed to argue, had as much to do with ratings as news value. After all, people are attracted to dramatic images of extreme weather. Weather porn, if you will.

I've always freely admitted that some of what I post on this here weather and climate blog thingy is weather porn.

Hey, I'm just as much a fan of weather porn as the next guy or gal, even as I know I also have a responsibility to offer sober stuff, non-hyped stuff, not sensationalism

I really don't see the harm in weather porn, at least in moderation.

What really drew a negative reaction, and I can see why, is a source for Bauder's story characterized ABC News meteorologist Ginger Zee as a "pornographer."

Here's news consultant Andrew Tyndall, quoted in Bauder's piece:

"If Ginger Zee reported in the role of climatologist rather than meteorologist, I would praise ABC's 'World News Tonight's' decision as a daring intervention into a crucial national and global debate.....Instead, she is more like a pornographer."

I, as a weather geek and journalist, and many outspoken meteorologists, have real problems with Tyndall's quote.

First of all, Ginger Zee has proven herself to be a highly capable, accurate and good meteorologist and journalist.

Also, implicit in the Tyndall quote is an assumption that maybe every news story that even touches on weather ought to be sounding alarms on global warming.

.....when we're done watching the dramatic tornado video,
it's time to help people like this. (Photo by Sue Ogrocki, AP)   

It's true journalists really have a duty to spread as much accurate information on climate change as possible.

But not every news story, not every weather story warrants an exhaustive examination of global warming.

If a storm is an immediate threat, if a tornado, hurricane, flood, blizzard, snow storm, ice storm, cold snap or heat wave is threatening a city, a region or a country, those potentially affected want to know what's up with this particular crisis. And how to protect themselves.

One the storm passes, that would be a good time to examine whether global warming had a role in the disaster or really bad weather.

Additionally, it's a necessary public service when people like Ginger Zee describe for us the implications and hazards of a storm or extreme weather.

That said, it's also true that TV networks and other media outlets love, LOVE showing footage of extreme weather. Frankly so do I.

I openly refer to wild, dramatic videos and photos of tornadoes, hurricanes and the like as "weather porn." People get off on it. I do, too.

Of course, this enthusiasm for "weather porn" gives me some serious pangs of guilt, and should for everyone who enjoys weather porn.

The people who were killed in that storm left behind grieving loved ones. The houses that were destroyed belonged to someone. The lives that were uprooted by the severe weather will never be the same.

I like to think our addiction to weather porn has a good side. That maybe it inspires us to help those who were victimized by dangerous weather. That it makes us lobby for better structural standards, and zoning to keep people from building in hazardous places.

I'd also like to think all these images of severe weather prompts us to become activists against climate change.

That's the hope, anyway.

The power of nature is thrilling, awe-inspiring, deadly, tragic and incredibly vivid.  I will continue to be a fan of weather porn, and I'm sure a lot of other people will, too.  

I just hope we don't sit back and do nothing once we've finished watching that video of an EF-5 tornado destroy a pleasant Great Plains small town.

Weather Clickbait: How Major Media Get You To Read Their Weather Stories

Are scary weather headlines making you nervous?
Could be intentional, to make you click on web sites.  

Some people call it "clickbait." It's a way to encourage people to hit a link on your web site to drive up the number of views, and thus the perceived value of the web site to advertisers.

On one hand, you want to encourage people to read your stuff. That's why you're there, doing the weather dance on this Internet thingy here.

On the other hand, people get a little  way too strident with scary headlines meant to scare everyone about the weather, and to get those coveted clicks.

You got that as the nation was hit by an abrupt Arctic cold wave this week. Yeah, the cold snap was impressive, but it wasn't the worst ever. At least in most places. Just kind of a shock to the system after a relatively mild autumn.

But you gotta get those eyeballs reading. so you come up with the wildest headlines you can.

There seems to be some rules to this clickbait madness.

For one, you have to use the word "millions" as much as possible. I guess people are drawn to that word, and if you say "millions" will be affected, millions of people will latch on to your web site. Never mind that few of these millions will be all that affected by your weather drama.

Some examples.

The headline at NBC news Monday morning as a cold wave arrived was "Hello Winter! Millions Brace For Snow Ahead Of Arctic Blast."

At CBS news Monday morning, the weather wasn't the lead story like it was over at NBC, but they had it on their home page: "Eye Opener: Millions of Americans In Path of Massive Arctic Blast."

CBS loves "millions." In July, they informed us that "Severe Weather Affects Millions In Northeast."

At the Weather Channel, they use "millions" a lot, like on this October 14 headline about some bad thunderstorms and a tornado threat: "Severe Weather Outbreak: Millions Threatened, Damage Reported."

The worst weather use of the word "millions," as pointed out by The Vane, was a Tweet sent out by NBC News in June: "Severe Storms, Destructive Winds and a Gustnado Threaten Millions Today."

Considering that one gustnado, which is a small swirl of wind within a strong wind gust at the beginning of a thunderstorm, is a weak thing that at worst would cause minor damage in a neighborhood, could hardly threaten millions.

I guess they were trying to promote another weather buzz word, so those are so popular. That's why every cold wave involves a "polar vortex." More on that in a minute.

Last Saturday, AccuWeather hit a trifecta of clickbait terms, including the word "millions"  with its cold weather forecast story: "Polar Vortex To Blast 200 Million People With Arctic Air."

AccuWeather, in addition to using "million" also used the word "blast," which always works in clickbait style headlines, and "Polar Vortex" which since last winter has been THE go to word to describe a cold wave that would drive clicks to your web site.

A Google search this morning for "polar vortex" got me more than 13 million links. Hey, millions! "Millions to Read About Polar Vortex When Doing a Google Search" is my clickbait headline of the day.

For the record, the Polar Vortex is a big swirl of low pressure up in the Arctic. It's always there, as far as anyone can tell it's always been there, it moves around a lot, and it waxes and wanes in strength.

Sometimes the Polar Vortex gets closer than usual to the United States, or a piece of it breaks off and actually enters the United States. This happens occasionally in some winters, and that's what happened last January when the nation had a severe, but not unprecedented cold wave.

However, everybody seized on the term Polar Vortex as if it were the ultimate villain from a cheap monster movie, because the media discovered the term is clickbait.

Now, every time it gets slightly cool in any part of the country, we learn the POLAR VORTEX IS INVADING AGAIN!!!!! AAAYYYYEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Actually, despite the headlines. You aren't going to die. But maybe you should take a jacket with you if you go out.

A lot of the media has learned to seize on normal meteorological terms and bring them to the public. There's really nothing wrong with that. If people are interested in learning about meteorology, then they should learn about it. It's all good.

Unless the misuse the word and confuses the public. We get that sometimes with a cool, clickbaiting term derecho. It is a neat word to say:  "deh-REY-cho."

It sounds like the romantic lead in a 1950s western set in West Texas. Kind of like the Cisco Kid.

No doubt, derechos are nasty.  They're big, huge fast moving, long lasting lines of severe thunderstorms.  NOAA's Storm Prediction Center defines a derecho precisely as a "swath of wind damage extending for more than 240 miles, including wind gusts of at least 58 along most of its length, and several, well-separated 75 mph or greater gusts."

They can be as bad as tornadoes, so it's time to batten down the hatches when a derecho is forecast to hit you.

The problem is, some weather forecasters started calling fairly localized, marginally severe storms derechos. So if somebody gets hit by this so-so storm, and they heard it was a derecho, they'll note the storm didn't turn out to be all THAT bad.

Then, if a derecho approaches the next time, people might not take shelter as readily.

Yes, mis-using weather terms as clickbait can actually kill people.

Naming storms and weather events is clickbait, too. The Weather Channel has famously noted that, as they give monikers to winter storms.

The snowstorm that hit the Upper Midwest this week was named "Astro" by the Weather Channel.

I'm surprised when the storm was forecast, the headlines on all the web sites wasn't "Ruh-Roh, Reorge," something Astro the dog on the Jetsons would say when something bad was about to happen. 

The trouble is, how do you define when to name a winter storm? With tropical storms and hurricanes, it's easy. If it's a warm core storm that originated in the tropics and has sustained winds of at least 39 mph, you give the tropical storm or hurricane a name.

It's easy to keep track of them that way.

But a winter storm isn't as confined, or as easily definable as a tropical storm or hurricane.

A snow flurry that deposits a quarter inch of snow on the Florida Panhandle might qualify as a scary winter storm there. Here in Great White North of Vermont, if we get a quarter inch of snow, the entire state yawns in abject boredom.

Finally, can we please, PLEASE, stop giving the suffix "apocalypse" or some form of that word.

Every snowstorm is a "snowocalypse"  Every heavy rainstorm is a floodocalypse. Every nasty windstorm is a galocalypse, or something.

What's next?  if the forecast calls for a sunny, pleasant day, will that be the sunocalypse?

As I write this, there's a light rain shower going on outside, the wind is gusting to 20 mph and the temperature is starting to drop as a cold front arrives. Nothing horrific out there.

But I need clickbait. How's this for the an alarming headline I could use to describe today's weather:

"Millions Threatened By Weather Blogger Being Blasted By Vermont  Rainshowertemperaturedropocalypse He Named Bob That Feels Like A Derecho In His Imagination!!"

Yeah, that needs work.

First Impressions: Obama Climate Report Moving The Issue Forward?

On Tuesday, the Obama administration's big fat report on climate change landed, THUNK! on all us media scribes and blogs.  

Feeling the heat: Obama's latest climate change
report and action plan might actually drive
the debate on what to do about the crisis forward.  

Actually, at first glance at the thing, I'm kinda impressed.

I haven't had a chance to go through the whole thing yet, and I know the devil is in the details.  But Obama and his climate guys and gals got some things right.

First of all, the report seems to emphasize how climate change is affecting you, me, Joe Blow from Idaho and Polly From Peoria.

The report tries to avoid abstraction and emphasizes that climate change isn't a distant worry and maybe some day it will flood some island somewhere so who cares?

The emphasis from this is we're living it now, here's the proof and it's going to get worse.

Also, unlike the UN reports climate reports that come out every year or so, this one seems to be written in plain, everyday language. The parts I've seen are written in something of a conversational tone. I like that.

When you're talking about something the public needs to pay attention to, you can't blind them with science. Yes, it has to be scientifically based, but not many people have the patience to wade through academic abstracts. The people who wrote this report understand that.

I also like that the well-orchestrated release of the report, done on what turned out to be a slow-ish news day, meaning the major, mainstream media ran with this.

There are signs the media might be moving past the false debate rut it's been in, where every time they do something on climate change, they have to give a skeptic equal time to prove how "balanced" they are.

Kind of like having one scientist on saying the Earth is round and another saying it's flat, for the sake of balance.

The Obama report from Tuesday might push things along in the media a bit.

Now, can we please move the debate on how best to respond to climate change? There are signs the debate is starting. It's going to be a complicated one.  How best to respond to the myriad of threats posed by climate change?

What basic philosophy should underly these debates? Free market solutions? Grass roots?  Government programs?  International efforts?  Some complex mix of all of the above?

This will be difficult, to say the least, but I'm beginning to hope we are finally moving beyond the "maybe it's happening, maybe it's not" stupidity.  

I also like the fact that Obama summoned several TV meteorologists to the White House to discuss the climate report.

It's interesting that television meteorologists have been among the most skeptical groups regarding global warming.  The theory goes that computer models that forecast day to day weather are often wrong, so some television meteorologists assume the computer models that predict global climate change could be REALLY wrong.

Getting meteorologists into the thick of the climate change discussion is a wise move. Because people are familiar with TV meteorologists. We tend to like them. So they could become a good way of informing the public about climate change, whether something that happened locally is just normal weather, or could be tied to a changing climate.

Of course, the ever reliable Fox News had their own take on all this, as they always do. Fox's Dana Perino tried to goad the meteorologists to ask Obama about Benghazi rather than climate change.

(In Perino's defense, she said she was only joking, so we needn't get too exercised about this.)

In Fox world, the only thing happening is Benghazi. Like the Obama administration is the only one that may or may not have tried to do a political spin on an international crisis or problem.

However, I'm guessing Fox News will become a self-parody in the world of global warming. They will either ignore it, or mock it and Fox News fans will love it.

But they're a minority, and the rest of us, with the help of Obama's climate report, will roll up our sleeves and get to work on dealing with this big threat.

Sixth Warmest Global July And Does Media Under Report Disaster Links to Climate Change

The National Climatic Data Center  announced today the globe had its sixth warmest July on record, and the 341st consecutive month of above normal temperatures.

Most of the world was warm in July, 2013, but
as always, a minority of places ended up cool.
 

If you are under the age of 28, you've never seen a month on Earth that was cooler than normal. Yikes!

That July scored in the Top 10 hottest Julys, but didn't set a record for the hottest continues a trend over the past couple of years in which the world definitely seems to continue running a fever, but the rate at which the atmosphere is warming has slowed.

That makes sense. There hasn't been an El Nino weather pattern in years now, and El Nino tends to lead to spikes in global atmospheric temperatures.

That might be why we're muddling along at nearly unprecedented warmth, but we haven't been setting new records lately.

Of course, there were local heat waves that were unprecedented. Parts of Siberia, China and Japan had their hottest weather on record. And Greenland set an all time record high of 79 degrees in July.  The bottom line: July was within spitting distance of a record high for the planet, and some areas did have their most torrid weather ever.

Just because July was "only" sixth warmest, and not the all time hottest on Earth doesn't mean global warming has gone away. The pace at which the world is warming varies over some years and decades. Sometimes it speeds up, and sometimes, as it has in recent years, it slows down.

Yes, our emissions of carbon dioxide are warming the planet, so the overall trend is up. But all this extra carbon dioxide doesn't mean other natural climate trends go away. The climate always has up and down bumps because of natural changes in weather patterns, ocean temperatures and so on. This variability will probably never go away, no matter how much CO2 we pump into the atmosphere.

All this means that not every year will be the warmest on record. We'll maybe go years, perhaps a decade or two occasionally in which the world doesn't set a heat record.

Meanwhile, I was looking at the Climate Progress web site, and they are dismayed that in their minds, the media is ignoring a link between global warming and the forest fires in Idaho and much of the rest of the West

Is the question Climate Progress raises valid?

A big wildfire in Idaho this month.  

I do like the Climate Progress site, but it is a little unfair to blast the media for not tying climate change to the western wild fires every time there's a report on them.

People are most interested in the breaking news. Are the fires worsening? Has anyone been hurt? Any homes destroyed? Any changes in strategy on how to fight them?

There is, of course, room for analytical pieces on whether the western fires are related to global climate change, and there have been a number of such articles.

Many of those articles are necessarily a bit muddy. Though climate scientists almost all agree humans are warming the planet, there's still some argument over what that means in specific areas. Evidence does point toward a warmer, drier West due to global warming, but that's not necessarily a totally settled case.

Those western wildfires might indeed be a symptom of global warming. It seems totally plausible to me, but don't ask me to bet my next paycheck on that idea. At least not yet.