- From the bottom of the scare barrel: “Tropical Storm Maria is forecast to make landfall in the Tohoku region on Monday… Only two previous tropical storms on record have made landfall on Tohoku’s Pacific coast: one in August 2016 and the other in July 2021…. Total rainfall in the area could exceed the average amount seen for the entire month of August in a normal year, the [Japanese meteorological] agency said.” As far as can be determined, “on record” means since 1991, and their more complete record of typhoons making landfall anywhere in Japan since 1951 has hundreds of entries and those making landfall somewhere in Tohoku has 213.
- At last a storm, woo hoo: The New York Times “Climate Forward” hollers “The water is here” because “Tropical Storm Debby is a reminder of the Southeast’s climate vulnerabilities”. See, it’s “an area of the country that isn’t always top of mind when it comes to the most severe effects of climate change” whereas “Sure, the West has droughts and fires. Yes, the Midwest has floods and violent winds. And it’s true, the Northeast is experiencing intensifying humidity and sea level rise. But the 11 Southeastern states are uniquely susceptible to much of that and more.” Only nobody noticed. Then “Debby exploded from a whisper of a tropical disturbance into a soaking, slow-moving hurricane in a matter of days. The result has been neighborhoods underwater in Sarasota, Fla., tornadoes in North Carolina and extensive floods in areas from the Florida Panhandle to central Virginia.” So that hugely active hurricane season we were promised, well, look, a storm brewed up “in a matter of days” and Florida saw flooding. Incredible.
- Not to be outdone, the mother ship emailed “Hurricane Debby, which made landfall in Florida, could produce historic levels of rainfall across the Southeast this week.” When it didn’t the story headline was rewritten to “Debby Will Bring Heavy Flooding to Georgia and the Carolinas”. Oh well. If at first you don’t succeed, hide the evidence.
- La Presse complains that “Juillet 2024 arrive au deuxième rang des mois les plus chauds jamais enregistrés dans le monde, tout juste derrière juillet 2023, ce qui met un terme, de peu, à une triste séquence de records de température mensuelle à la surface de la planète.” Which we pounce on as proof of nothing but the credulity induced by mathiness, since the supposed gap is 0.04C and if you can’t measure the temperature in any one place to that degree of precision it is fatuous to say you can measure it in all of them. Plus as an alert viewer adds, the paper also showed “a map of the United States purporting to show record heat days. The most recent such records are in 1994; there are two in 1936 and one in 1913.”
- It does not mean what you think it means: the Wikipedia article on the “Neogene”, the geological “period” between the Paleogene that ended exactly roughly 23.03 million years ago and the “Quaternary” that supposedly started approximately 2.58 mya, contrasts its temperature with that of “preindustrial” times and declares it “0.5 °C above pre-industrial”. We are not making this up. But they might as well be, since the total global industrial activity index for the period before man domesticated fire at all, let alone used it to pressurize steam and drive crankshafts, was a small pile of pointed sticks, bone fishhooks, and a few sharpened stones. Guys, everything before 1776 is pre-industrial. Really. And it was mostly a lot warmer than today. Really.
- Up is down, hot is cold and less is more: Phys.org runs a piece saying “The story of Greenland keeps getting greener – and scarier. A new study provides the first direct evidence that the center – not just the edges – of Greenland's ice sheet melted away in the recent geological past and the now-ice-covered island was then home to a green, tundra landscape.” But then Willis Eschenbach fixed their headline to read “Greenland fossil discovery proves that despite lower CO2 levels, the earth was warmer in the past” because they’re talking about something that happened a million years ago, or perhaps 400,000, during an interglacial (the “Holstein”) warmer than the current Holocene. Dang.
- Speaking of which, Scientific Climate Alarmism comments that melting ice in the Arctic is causing accumulating ice in the Arctic. “Warmer temperatures were supposed to make Arctic shipping easier” but instead “the melting of local ice due to global warming enables thicker ice from Greenland to flow into the corridor’s choke points, reducing the length of time when ships can move through the passage.” Dang again. When will that ice get with the program and disappear, taking those wretched white bears with it?
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21 Aug 2024 | News Roundup
