It's very hot in the U.S. Southwest, East, and Midwest, as well as Mexico. There was also a winter storm warning in Montana and Idaho. Which story do you think is dominating the news?
The BBC reports, "Climate change made US and Mexico heatwave 35 times more likely." It's a great story, typical of the quality of England's government-owned newspaper. But what the heck does it mean?
The lede comes to the BBC from an outfit called the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group. "Working with scientists around the world, WWA quantifies how climate change influences the intensity and likelihood" of an extreme weather event.
Note that they don't try to gauge whether an extreme weather event is due to climate change. That's a given. Their business is to quantify how hysterical they should make the public about an "extreme weather event."
I want to add that I'm sure the scientists are reputable and sincere in their findings. My beef is with how they reach their conclusions. Common sense would tell us that saying a stretch of weather is "35 times more likely" is a load of horse hockey. It's unfathomable.
I'm sure they can run their programs and show us their data points, but in the end, it's guessing. This is especially true when you start with the premise that the hot weather in the summer is an aberration.
Newsweek has the story of the cold snap in Montana and the Mountain West.
Parts of Montana and Idaho were both hit with a “winter storm warning” by the National Weather Service (NWS), which published a map on Monday showing which regions were to be affected. Up to 15 inches of snow was possible in some areas overnight, the experts said, as they warned of the dangers for drivers and possible power outages.
The New York Times recently ran a retrospective of the 1936 killer heat wave, which was more deadly than today's scorcher largely because there was no air conditioning.
The heat wave, which pushed temperatures to 100 degrees in Illinois and 120 degrees as far north as North Dakota, left some 5,000 people dead.
In New York, a high of 106 degrees was recorded in Central Park. Desperate for relief, people slept on roofs and fire escapes and flocked to public pools, which stayed open until midnight. New York City recorded 21 drownings as adults and children who didn’t know how to swim but were desperate to cool off jumped into the water.
The WWA can be seen as just another anti-energy organization that wants us all sitting in the dark shivering while we starve to death.
“The results of our study should be taken as another warning that our climate is heating to dangerous levels,” said Izidine Pinto, Researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.
“Potentially deadly and record-breaking temperatures are occurring more and more frequently in the U.S., Mexico and Central America due to climate change.
“As long as humans fill the atmosphere with fossil fuel emissions, the heat will only get worse – vulnerable people will continue to die and the cost of living will continue to increase.”
Is anyone still listening to this? Even if we stopped adding CO2 to the atmosphere in the next ten minutes, it would take decades for any sizable effect to be seen, and there is no guarantee that the temperature would come down.
If the climate is changing, there isn't much humans can do about it except what we've always done: adapt and survive.
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