THE REAL HEAT WAVE

It is really hot here in the Sacramento area.  Yesterday we spent a lot of time in the pool.  Then, late in the evening, we spend some time on the patio.  It was nearly 10 o’clock at night, the sun was long gone, and it was still hot.  We turned on the news and found out it was still 99 degrees out.  Several people make jokes about how global warming may be true after all.

The reality is that scientists actually know a lot about why we get this kind of weather.  It turns out to have nothing to do with Global Warming at all, The real culprit turns out to be:  WAVENUMBER-5.  What?  You live in California.  You endured all those droughts, wet winters and heat waves and you never even heard of wavenumber-5?  Well, weather (I know, I know) you believe in wavenumber-5 or not, it explains a lot.

https://phys.org/news/2017-04-scientists-link-california-droughts-distinctive.html

Wavenumber-5 consists of five pairs of alternating high- and low-pressure features that encircle the globe about six miles (10 kilometers) above the ground. It is a type of atmospheric phenomenon known as a Rossby wave, a very large-scale planetary wave that can have strong impacts on local weather systems by moving heat and moisture between the tropics and higher latitudes as well as between oceanic and inland areas and by influencing where storms occur.

It turns out that wavenumber-5 is not exactly a new development, it is just newly discovered.

To determine the degree to which the wave pattern influenced the California drought, Teng and Branstator used three specialized computer models, as well as California rainfall records and 20th century data about global atmospheric circulation patterns. The different windows into the atmosphere and precipitation patterns revealed that the formation of a ridge by the California coast is associated with the emergence of the distinctive wavenumber-5 pattern, which guides rain-producing low-pressure systems so that they travel well north of California.

This must be fake science; because there is no hint that wavenumber-5 is caused by CO2 or even hydrocarbons.  What if we wasted all this money studying Global Warming when we should have been focusing on wavenumber-5?  Oops…there’s the problem.  Even Governor Brown came up empty trying to find a way to tax wavenumber-5.

TDM

2 thoughts on “THE REAL HEAT WAVE

    • It is hard to determine causation here, particularly when evaluating such a short term of time. In some ways this article actually contradicts the CO2 impact on weather theory because it speculates that the arctic warming itself may be the principle cause of the variation. The truth is that we do not know because the actually scientific observations are so frequently viewed through the lens of computer simulations which have been spectacularly unsuccessful at predicting anything and which even when back loaded with data often fail to confirm the computer program. So far, there is not one single scientific study using a controlled environment that begins to duplicate the predictive impacts of CO2. While we should all be concerned about cleaning up the environment and our atmosphere, I suspect that CO2 levels are relatively unimportant.

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