Despite what you may have read or heard lately, man-made global warming is NOT the main culprit in our worldwide cycle of wide weather ‘extremes.’
Stronger than usual HIGH PRESSURE RIDGES and DEEP ‘TROUGHS’ OF LOW PRESSURE between them are causing these often disastrous droughts, heatwaves, floods, coldwaves, hailstorms, 70 mile per hour staightline-winds, blizzards, etc., etc., etc.
Peaks in solar activity and wide swings in sea-surface ocean temperatures are likewise resulting in ‘pendulating swings’ in the meteorological scale.
Take the worst drought in at least 200 years in California for a prime example. Stanford University has correctly pointed out in a recent report "that it’s the HUGE ‘PACIFIC HIGH’ west of California that stretches back to Hawaii, that’s the primary climatological factor for the extreme drought conditions, not global warming."
Even our dry, hot, fire-ravaged summer of 2014 in the Inland Northwest was NOT caused by global warming, but the enormous ‘blocking ridge’ of high pressure in the waters off the west coast of North America. Meteorologist Randy Mann and I predicted the development of this gigantic ridge months before it happened.
In an Associated Press article released on Monday, September 22, Jeff Barnard found that the warming temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean over the last century have been due to "natural changes in the wind-flow patterns, not increases in greenhouse gases linked to global warming."
Jeff went on to point out that there is "evidence that local winds are a more important factor explaining ocean warming than greenhouse gases."
How much warming have we actually seen in the waters off the West Coast in the past 115 years since 1900? Well, according to NOAA, the increase in surface temperatures in the Eastern Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Alaska into British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California has been a rather puny 1 degree Fahrenheit over the entire time span.
One last climatological fact that I wish to underscore in this week’s column, scientists could not tie global warming into the October 5, 2013 record killer blizzard in South Dakota, the coldest winter in modern times in the North Country of the U.S., the freak storms in Germany, the torrential rains in Europe this spring and summer, or the much colder than normal year in Britain in 2014.
Tom Karl, NOAA’s National Climate Data Center’s director recently said, "There is no single factor that is responsible, including global warming, for the wide weather ‘extremes’ that we are seeing around the world. Natural variability is always a part of any extreme climatic event.
Also, our long-term climate chart dating back to 2,500 B.C. on our website forecasts more ‘extreme’ and fluctuating weather until 2020 when we expect conditions to become colder as solar activity will be minimal at best plus a possibility of a strong, cooler La Nina. But, by the 2030s, the Earth’s temperature is expected to warm up once again and perhaps climb to levels higher than what we have today. Only time will tell.
