Twit-in-chief Tweets

We all know that Californians are suffering from terrible wildfires. Thousands of buildings have been destroyed. Many have lost their lives, including firefighters, including a great-grandmother who died with her great-grandchildren. It is a tragedy.

So what did Donald Trump, president of the U.S., have to say? This:

There has been a “firestorm” of angry responses to his ignorance and callousness. I think this one is particularly apropos:

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California Wildfires

With the devastating wildfires terrorizing California, climate deniers are doing everything they can to try to persuade people that it’s no big deal, and even the big deals have nothing to do with man-made climate change. To believe them, you have to believe some ridiculous things — like the notions that hotter temperatures and more drought have nothing to do with wildfires.

Climate Disasters: Billions and Billions of Dollars

NCEI (the National Center for Environmental Information) has some fascinating data about the number, and cost, of billion-dollar climate related disasters in the U.S. since 1980. Cost estimates are adjusted for CEI (the Consumer Price Index) in order to make older costs comparable to their modern counterparts.

This is what Climate Change Looks Like

As bad as this is … it’s going to get worse.

Why use temperature Anomaly?

Some people ask “Why use temperature anomaly rather than just temperature?” because they are curious, maybe even confused about it, and want to learn. Some climate deniers claim that doing so is a mistake which invalidates trend analysis, in part because they’re stupid, in part because they’re members of the “pompous ass” club.

Stupid Shit

Imagine every single report ever about the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, from the 1960s when the surgeon general’s report came out up to the present day, beginning with the statement that “No single case of lung cancer can be definitively linked to smoking.”

A Human-Caused Signal is Now Evident

Space.com has an interesting article about recent research by Santer et al. (2018, Science 361, 245) into how the seasonal cycle of temperature has changed. It’s a topic we’ve looked at recently for surface temperature in the USA. Santer et al. study it in the troposphere (both TLT, the lower troposphere temperature, and TMT, mid-troposphere temperature), and look for patterns over the whole globe.

Result: a human-caused signal is now evident.

Global Warming: Let It Snow

With the oppressive heat striking across the world, I thought I might provide a little relief to readers plagued by high temperatures by discussing something they might welcome right about now: snow.

Heat Waves Gone Wild

This summer we haven’t just had heat waves, we’ve seen them plaguing vast areas around the northern hemisphere. Intense heat in Sweden sparked an epidemic of wildfires in their drought-stricken forests, so bad that they had to ask other nations for help. A dozen of the wildfires were in the Arctic circle, no less.

Global Warming Naive

At a town hall meeting near Philadelphia, 18-year-old Rose Strauss had a question for Scott Wagner, the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania:

You’ve said that climate change is a result of people’s body heat, and are refusing to take action on the issue. Does this have anything to do with the $200,000 that you have taken from the fossil fuel industry?