Bad Year for Wild Fire

We’ve already seen an over-abundance of area burned by wildland fires in the U.S. As bad as it’s been in the western states, it’s been even worse in Alaska. And Canada has, unfortunately, had to write a new record book.

The Bob

Bob Tisdale is rapidly becoming, for me, what Donald Trump is for John Stewart.

Good guy, bad guy

The guy on the right is succumbing to heat stress. He’s outside because he’s attending a rally to protest removal of the confederate flag — a rally organized by the Ku Klux Klan. Notice the swastika on his shirt?

The guy on the left is helping him up the stairs, into the shade.

The black guy.

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Fundamental Differences between Bob Tisdale and Reality

I guess Bob Tisdale didn’t like my pointing out that when revision goes his way he heaps praise on it, when it goes the opposite way he denegrates it. In an attempt to save face he has posted about what he calls “fundamental differences” between the updates. He only ends up proving my point — but WUWT readers don’t get to see that, because of the data he doesn’t show.

New GISS data

NASA GISS has released their data for temperature through June of 2015. Prior to now, they have used ERSSTv3b (extended reconstructed sea surface temperature version 3b) for sea surface temperature, but they have now switched to the revised, updated ERSSTv4 (version 4). Let’s take a look at the new data and how it compares to its predecessor.

Most Extremely Hotter-than-usual Month

In a recent post I showed that in June the northwest had its most extremely hot month on record.

Breaking Climate

An oft-used analogy for the effect of man-made climate change is that the weather is on steroids. Baseball players have always been able to hit home runs, but with performance-enhancing drugs they hit more than they could without. Similarly, climate change is making the weather do things more often, more severely, than it could without. This is not natural.

But that old analogy won’t cut it much longer. Because the climate will keep changing, taking weather not just into “enhanced” territory but to a state like nothing we’ve seen before. It won’t just be dangerous, it will be violent. Weather won’t be on steroids any more. It’ll be on meth.

SO hot

Cliff Mass, in his blog post about recent temperatures, asks the question “Why is the Northwest so warm?” He then proceeds to answer the question “Why is the Northwest warm?” What he doesn’t address is the question he himself asked: why SO warm? Perhaps we should say “so hot.”

Extreme

One of the subjects that interests me (a lot of people, in fact) is extreme values. By definition, they’re not very common. It follows that when we look at observed data to discover what the likelihood of extreme values is, we have little data to go on.

I was wrong

Not long ago I posted about results from Prashant Sardeshmukh of a study he and others did regarding the frequency of hot days, based on reanalysis data.

I considered the results so implausible that I concluded they had made a “rookie mistake” in using a different cutoff limit for the two time spans they compared, a mistake which would completely invalidate their results.

I haven’t seen the data, but I’ve heard enough testimony from credible sources that Sardeshmukh et al. are both honest and competent. I am now convinced, the mistake was mine.

I was wrong.

I’ll also take this opportunity to apologize for any and all unnecessarily snarky content. I’m OK with being snarky on one’s own blog, but if you’re going to do that then get the facts right first. I didn’t.