Kink in the Jet Stream and Climate Change Spur Extreme Weather (Bloomberg)

Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-25/the-world-s-on-fireblame-a-kink-in-the-jet-stream-the-climate Please see link above for original text, embedded hotlinks and comments.

Kink in the Jet Stream and Climate Change Spur Extreme Weather Brian Wullivn, Eric Roston – Bloomberg July 25, 2018 Kinked, buckled, stuck or stalled, it doesn’t matter how you describe it, the jet stream -- the ribbon of wind that circles the Earth -- is doing strange things.

The calamity list includes wildfires across Scandinavia, Greece and California, record heat in Texas, Japan and Africa and flooding rains along the U.S. East Coast that could last another week. The world is hotter in general, which means when temperatures spike, they do so off a higher baseline.

“We are seeing some extreme jet-stream behavior, where the jet stream is contorting into these extreme loops both sharply towards the poles with ridges of high pressure and dips to the equator with troughs of low pressure,’’ said Jeff Masters, co-founder of Weather Underground in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “The extreme configuration is getting stuck in place which means that places are getting long periods of extreme weather.’’

Burnt automobile line the streets following a wildfire east of Athens, on July 25.

Photographer: Yorgos Karahalis/Bloomberg 1

Globally, at least 170 people have died in fires, floods and heat on three continents. Electric markets around the world -- and the coal and natural gas that generate the power -- have spiked as days of high temperatures through Asia, North America and Europe continue to mount and weary residents turn to air conditioning to keep their misery at bay.

In California, parts of Yosemite National Park were closed and visitors told to flee as a fire rages in the forests and mountains, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as Cal Fire. The blaze, called the Ferguson Fire, has killed at least one person, consumed more than 38,000 acres and is about 25 percent contained. Smoke from the fires has caused an air-quality alert to be posted in the mountains and foothills of central California, according to the National Weather Service.

Records Break Temperature records were shattered in Japan when readings reached 106 degrees Fahrenheit (41 Celsius); Waco, Texas, hit an all-time high of 114; and Finnish Lapland touched a new mark.

The situation in Scandinavia has been “pretty mind boggling,’’ with the Baltic Sea water rising to 15 degrees above average and Lapland north of the Arctic Circle reaching the 90s, Masters said. “That is really eye catching sort of heat.’’

Earlier in July, Ouargla, Algeria hit 124.3 degrees, which is the highest temperature recorded in Africa, said Kevin Trenberth, distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. California and the U.S. Southwest have also had a string of temperatures at or near 120 this July.

“In very arid conditions, those sort of things are possible and we are seeing more of them in different places around the world,’’ Trenberth said.

Climate Change Science will need time to study if this extra-hot summer is because of climate change or bad luck for those baking, soaking and choking, but this is what global warming would look like. The exact cause of why the blocking in the atmosphere got going this July might require a bit of study too, said Greg Carbin, branch chief at the U.S. Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

“Everything is backed up,’’ Carbin said. “And it is global.’’

High on Carbin’s list of potential suspects, but not the only possible perpetrator, is a large highpressure system lazily spinning clockwise in the western Atlantic Ocean, dominating the basin, and leaving weather patterns backed up like cars stuck in rush hour traffic. On top of that, there is a trough over the Bering Sea, a deep area of low pressure, that is helping keep the U.S. Southwest hot.

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“It is really a chicken-and-egg thing,’’ Carbin said. “It is really hard in the atmosphere to know what came first because everything is so interconnected.’’

Human Driven Climate scientists say they have high confidence that human-driven warming is a part of the heat waves, simply because the composition of the atmosphere has changed so dramatically in the last generation or two.

“It is important to know that any heat wave has both natural and now, human causes,” said Michael Wehner, a senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “So in plain language, climate change simply makes these heat waves hotter than they would have been otherwise.”

Researchers today also need much less time than they did in previous years to determine the extent of any human influence on weird weather. The World Weather Attribution project, an international collaboration of scientists, expects to have its first analysis of the European heat wave published by the end of the week. Previous work -- on a 2014 European heat wave -concluded that such an event was 35 times more likely than it would have been without warming.

Meanwhile, computer forecast models show few changes to the current weather. What this means is, if it is hot where you are, it will probably stay that way. If it is raining, get used to it.

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Two choices: 1) Recognize that nature is dominant in all climate events and mankind should use fossil fuels and nuclear to protect humanity.

2) Follow claims by alarmist that mankind is responsible for climate change because we use fossil fuels and stop using them. Drift back to much smaller population and forgo the benefits of modern living.

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London 1600s

France early 2000s. Anything seriously wrong with this climate?

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Redwood trees used to grow in Colorado: Climate Change

Petrified redwood tree in Colorado, USA 6

Wildfires happen in nature for millions of years before use of fossil fuels.

Flooded village in the Netherlands, 1300s. Painting by Hans con Bartels (1856 – 1913) 7

Link: https://www.history.com/news/worlds-most-catastrophic-floods-inphotos One flood was known as the “Great Drowning of Men.” The Grote Mandrenke was the result of a vicious North Sea tempest that swept across parts of Europe in January 1362. The effects of the storm were first felt in England, where one chronicler wrote that “a strong gale blew from the north so violently for a day and night that it flattened trees, mills, houses and a great many church towers.” The damage was even worse in the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, which experienced a catastrophic storm surge that overran nearly every dike and levee in its path.

Anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 people drowned, and it was said that 60 different parishes in Denmark were “swallowed by the salt sea.” Elsewhere in the Low Countries, erosion from the flood permanently transformed the coastline and led to the disappearance of whole islands. Along with other storms during the Middle Ages, the Grote Mandrenke also played a role in forming a shallow North Sea bay in the Netherlands known as the Zuiderzee.

Few floods in recorded history compare to the one that rocked the Indus River Valley in 1841.

The trouble began in January of that year, when an earthquake triggered a massive landslide on the slopes Nanga Parbat, a Himalayan peak located in what is now Pakistan. So much bedrock tumbled off the mountain that it blocked the flow of the rushing Indus River and created a lake 500 feet deep and several dozen miles long.

When the natural dam finally burst that June, the lake emptied at a rate of 540,000 cubic meters per second, unleashing a gargantuan flood wave almost 100 feet high. The casualties from the disaster were not recorded, but it was known to have wreaked havoc on several hundred miles of the Indus Valley. Whole villages were wiped off the map, and an entire 500-man Sikh army was reportedly consumed near the city of Attock.

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Historians are still not entirely sure what caused one of Britain’s worst natural disasters.

Devastation in ‘Summerset-shire’ and ‘Norfolke’ during the Bristol Channel flood of 1607. Around 2000 people are thought to have died in the inundation, which may have been the result of a tsunami. (Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images) The deluge began on the morning of January 30, 1607, when a great surge of seawater overran some 200 square miles of southwest England and Wales, completely drowning at least 20 villages. One witness wrote of seeing “huge and mighty hills of water, tumbling one over another” and advancing with “great swiftness” over the landscape.

Such descriptions have led some researchers to theorize that the floods were the result of a massive tsunami brought on by an earthquake, but others maintain that a squallinduced storm surge and spring tide are the more likely culprits. Whatever its cause, the flooding proved devastating for the low-lying regions surrounding the Bristol Channel, where some 2,000 people were killed. In Somerset, the floodwaters surged 15 miles inland and briefly turned the famed hill at Glastonbury Tor into an island.

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