The Battle Of The Bulge: Jet Stream Wars
Meteorologist Cliff Mass Slams Extreme Weather Hype
You can’t have failed to notice it. On both sides of the Atlantic, journalists and activist scientists are, with almost religious zeal, frenetically hyping extreme weather - especially hot weather - in order to re-package summer and sell it to us as a ‘climate emergency’. It’s a desperate ploy and I have to say, I don’t think it’s working. Not after Covid, not after the ‘vaccines’. They’ve blown their cover, but fear-mongering is basically all they’ve got in order to change public perception, so they’re going at it hammer and tongs with the alleged ‘climate crisis’, which is their second major gateway crisis (in addition to pandemic preparedness) required for the introduction of a globalist form of communism which looks a lot like fascism and reeks of stakeholder capitalism.
Here’s an example of the hype at the BBC. Even after temperatures in southern Europe failed to beat the record set in 2021 and didn’t even get anywhere near the 48C recorded in Athens in 1977 and Sardinia in 1965, they’re still pushing the heatwave = climate crisis message, like their lives or livelihoods depend on it. I don’t know, maybe they do. Perhaps that’s what being a shock-jock journalist journalist is like nowadays - ‘Push ze alarmist agenda or ve terminate you.’
Large swathes of southern Europe continue to swelter in record heat as wildfires rage across the continent.
Temperatures hit a high of 46.3C in Sicily on Tuesday, and crews battled fires in Greece and the Swiss Alps.
Most of Italy's major cities are on red alert, meaning the extreme heat carries a health risk to everybody not just vulnerable groups.
Scientists say climate change is making heatwaves longer, more intense and more frequent.
Across the world, millions of people are being impacted by extreme weather; from soaring temperatures in the US and China, to heavy rainfall in East Asia.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says heatwaves will become more severe in the years ahead, and that extreme weather patterns highlight the need for more climate action.
"These events will continue to grow in intensity and the world needs to prepare for more intense heatwaves," said John Nairn, senior extreme heat advisor at the UN agency.
Of course, they’re plugging the wildfires too, as evidence of the catastrophic impact of the ‘climate crisis’, except that, in reality, most of those fires are started deliberately or inadvertently by humans and modern ‘eco-friendly’ forest management practices contribute much to their intensity and spread.
The USA and China also get a mention:
Extreme temperatures have also gripped other parts of the globe including the US and China.
More than 80 million people in western and southern US states are under advisories for a "widespread and oppressive" heatwave.
Temperatures at California's Death Valley hit a near-record 52C (125.6F) Sunday, while on Monday Arizona's state capital Phoenix tied its record of 18 consecutive days above 43C (109.4F).
OMG! Look at all these poor suffering people who flocked to Death Valley to commit almost certain suicide via heat exhaustion just so they could be pictured standing next to the thermometer. It’s just so tragic.
All those mad Brits too, booking holidays in Spain, Greece and Italy, just so they can get away from the washout summer at home and die happy in the deadly climate changed heat which has engulfed southern Europe. Climate emergency tourism is now a thing. It’s weird. Driven, I presume, by some nihilistic urge towards self-destruction, folks are not running for the hills; quite the reverse, they’re running straight for the hellish centre of the Climate Change Inferno itself. Like Storm Chasers I guess, but those who want to actually be sucked up and spat out by the whirling winds of the tornado just so their obituary can read: ‘I was there. I got the T-shirt.’
There’s the thing though: after the ‘hottest June ever’ in the UK, the summer has gone AWOL and we are having to put up with cool temperatures, wind and rain, more reminiscent of autumn than summer. This is part and parcel of the same weather system (driven by a southerly jet stream configuration) which is responsible for the heatwave in southern Europe, as I explained here:
The Heatwave In Southern Europe And The Mysterious Vanishing Act Of 40C Heatwave Propaganda In The UK
Weird. ‘40C - it could happen again this year’ was all the rage in the lamestream media and Met Office press releases just a few weeks ago, when we had our ‘hottest June ever’. We were being warned about a coming series of deadly heatwaves over the summer which could push temperatures back over 40C, unheard of until last year.
The BBC have been forced to admit this fact and reluctantly consign dreams of a return of 40C+ temperatures in the UK this summer to the waste bin of media propaganda history:
While the intense heatwave continues across southern Europe, the United Kingdom has been much cooler and wetter.
Weather patterns have been stuck in the same position and there is no real sign of that changing.
The UK therefore is not likely to see any of that extreme heat in the coming days or weeks.
So when are we likely to see any warmth return?
After the UK's warmest June on record, the weather patterns took a significant shift.
We said goodbye to high pressure which brings generally settled weather and a feed of warmer air from the south and replaced it with low pressure bringing rain and cooler weather.
This change was due to movement of the jet stream - a fast wind high in the atmosphere.
To the north of the jet stream you have the cooler Arctic air with rain-bearing weather systems being formed. To the south is where the warmer tropical air sits.
The north-to-south movement of the jet stream dictates, therefore, how warm or cool it might be in any location.
Right now, the jet stream is stuck in a position through central Europe and we call this a blocked weather pattern.
Here is their graphic to illustrate what is happening:
The BBC of course, being unable to reconcile the fact that natural weather patterns are causing the heatwave in southern Europe, have to grasp at straws by suggesting that there might just be a connection with a wavier jet stream and climate change. It’s really quite pathetic to be honest:
Whether climate change is having an impact on blocked weather patterns responsible for the current heatwave is complex and not entirely clear.
Cliff Mass, a professional meteorologist, who has also published on the subject, is very clear:
So heatwaves are localized (and transient) conditions and only a small portion of the globe is experiencing unusual warmth. Greenhouse warming from greenhouse gases is much more uniform.
So what is causing the localized warming? The answer is very evident if we plot the upper-level map (for 500 hPa, about 18,000 ft) at the same time (see below). Blue areas indicate troughing (low pressure) and red areas indicate ridging (high pressure).
The warm areas are closely associated with ridging aloft and cool areas with upper-level troughing. Ridging is associated with sinking air and warming. The opposite with troughing. Ridges and troughs also have wind patterns that can move tropical warmth poleward (and vice versa).
Such wave patterns are quite natural. There is no convincing evidence that the atmosphere becomes wavier (thus with more heatwaves and cold waves) under global warming. I have read all the literature on this and have published on the topic myself in the peer-reviewed literature.
The waviness of the upper-level flow was particularly high-amplitude this winter and spring, producing enhanced cooling in some areas and warming in others. Such as the cool/wet conditions in California, and warmth in southern Canada.
Let me repeat: there is no reason to think this waviness is other than the expression of the natural variability of the atmosphere.
Even though there are continued and repeated attempts to link jet stream configuration with generalised global warming, Cliff mass is very much not alone in dismissing what is essentially just a hypothesis because of a lack of clear, credible, robust scientific evidence.
But we won’t have heard the last of it. I guarantee it.
Incidentally, when I was in Death Valley, approx. 1996 or so, when I entered, the ranger warned us the temp was 129F. I can't remember the exact date, but could look it up.
Mowat, the noted Canadian leftist and Greenpeace activist, and whose house my wife used to walk by regularly as a kid in Port Hope, ON., wrote in his book West Viking (written while we were still in the global cooling scare) that there were probably at least dwarf forests growing in Greenland when the Vikings arrived in 985 AD and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History reports “… Erik the Red discovered two areas of southwest Greenland which were suitable for farming, with grasslands and small stands of alder and birch.” You will note that it is too cold today for any type of forests to grow in Greenland, and there is zero ability to farm, unless modern technologies are utilized – and even then, crop selection is very minimal. Mowat also reported the Arctic pack ice was much less in that Viking discovery era than today. Dr. Fred Singer writes that when the Vikings first settled Greenland, they grew vegetables, and it was warm enough to allow the population to grow to 3,000 people and by 1100 AD the place was thriving enough that they had their own bishop and twelve churches. Nature reported in a 2010 article that clamshell studies also confirm Norse records. Meanwhile, the Archeological Survey of Canada has also noted around “A.D. 1000, a warmer climate resulted in the tree line advancing 100 kilometres north of its present position.” The results of this? Especially in northern Europe, “the period between 1150 and 1300 was truly a flowering period, for population reached unprecedented levels that were never to be seen again until the late 18thcentury in many countries; the English population experienced a staggering threefold increase in its population during the last century since the Domesday Survey in 1086”. [11]
This climate optimum (also called a climate anomaly) coincided with a period of increased solar activity (see below). Farming of various crops extended hundreds of kilometers farther north than it is possible today.
Yet, in the 1100s, Greenland cooled dramatically, briefly stabilized, and then dropped even further in the 1200s to the early 1400s. Sirocko (2010) places the earlier event at the beginning of the 1310’s, while a more commonly accepted time frame for the first cold phase is the coinciding solar minimum called Wolf minimum from 1280-1350. There were repeated cold snaps and advancing glaciers and sea ice from that time onward, but it was not until the early 1600’s that the most devastating effects of the Little Ice Age began to set in, which is the more commonly used date for its beginning. As Dale Mackenzie Brown writes “An ice core drilled from the island's (Greenland’s) massive icecap between 1992 and 1993 shows a decided cooling off in the Western Settlement during the mid-fourteenth century.” But the recent recovery in temperatures is only putting us back to the average temps from an earlier age!
Indeed, when I was visiting Iceland at Skaftafell Nat'l Park a few years ago, Icelandic historians know from extant deeds – and have put in the displays at the park - that somewhere around FORTY old Viking era farms are currently buried under the Vatnajokull glacier system (the largest in the world outside of Greenland and Antarctica). In other words, it was simply much warmer in the Icelandic settlement era than it is today. We are routinely informed of the melting of Greenland glaciers today at lower altitudes, but demonstrably there are at bare minimum low altitude glaciers in roughly the same geographic area that had seen more melting and more pronounced glacial recession one thousand years ago than we see today. Al Gore may want to visit Skaftafell National Park in Iceland on one of his many jet-setting, carbon burning trips to check the facts himself. More evidence: There are records of grape growing occurring in places in northern Europe back during this optimum where they can't grow today. Gregory McNamee, in the Weather Guide Calendar (Accord Publishing, 2002) noted that wine connoisseurs might have gone to England for fine vintages (can’t grow fine vintage grapes there today!), that heat loving trees like beeches carpeted Europe far into Scandinavia, and Viking ships crossed iceberg free oceans to ice free harbors in Iceland…”. Art Horn writes that “In the winter of 1249 it was so warm in England that people did not need winter clothes. They walked about in summer dress. It was so warm people thought the seasons had changed. There was no frost in England the entire winter. Can you imagine what NOAA would say if that happened next year?
For the stupid, intentionally ignorant, anti-science, fasco-Marxist wokesters, some actual science from climatologists
The truth is, there has been global warming recently – but it started around the time of the Revolutionary war, and today we are still BELOW the average of the past 3,000 years. And this is not just for Europe, Greenland and North America, yet another red herring that has recently been thrown out by the desperate global warmers. The universality of the Viking and Mediaeval climatic optimums is written about by Kegwin, who wrote in Science, 1996:274:1504-1508, the mean surface temp of the Sargasso Sea (which lies roughly between the West Indies and the Azores), which was obtained by readings of isotope ratios in marine organism remains in sediment, shows we are, today, below the three thousand year average, and far below the Medieval Climatic Optimum, albeit far above the LIA. Civil Defense Perspectives, Mar. 2007, Vol. 23, #3, p. 1, notes that evidence for this climatic optimum has been found in all but 2 out of 103 locations where it was examined for, including Asia, Africa, South America and the western U.S. The following graph of temperature in the Sargasso Sea tells you all you need to know (note: that big horizontal line running across the page is the 3,000 year average!), Interestingly, the warmer times coincided not only with the best harvests, but also the least amount of major storm activity.
Or let’s put it another way, from the Dansgaard & Johnson study, here on ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Average-near-surface-temperatures-of-the-northern-hemisphere-during-the-past-11000-years_fig5_313127868