By Paul Homewood

 

 Jaime Jessop has an excellent put down of the latest piece of junk science:

 

In the Times yesterday, we read the following:

The jet stream — the powerful transatlantic wind that dominates British weather — is being shrunk by climate change, scientists say.

Climate change shrinks many things: the US economy, fisheries, fish, chips, Salamanders, wasps, tropical moths, plankton (could they get much smaller?), mountain goats, the Winter snowpack, the Sahara Desert, oyster habitat in California, the ranges of Adelie Penguins and bumble bees and Sweden’s tallest mountain. In fact, probably the only thing which climate change doesn’t shrink is hurricanes, which are becoming ginormous and threatening to gobble up huge areas of the US. Note also how climate change obligingly shrinks mountain goats and mountains – meaning the poor dimininutive critters won’t feel so overwhelmed by their environment because as they shrink, it shrinks also. How sweet. I guess that’s what you call #ClimateJustice for small(er) furries. But anyway, we can now add the Jet Stream to that long list above, courtesy of research scientist Tim Woollings:

Tim Woollings, associate professor of atmospheric physics at Oxford University, who has published a new book, Jet Stream, said: “The planet is warming rapidly due to humanity’s greenhouse gases. It means the whole of the Earth’s tropical belt is likely to expand, pushing the jet stream north so it shrinks in size and accelerates.”

The warning comes as greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere hit a new high, keeping Earth on track for global temperature rises of 4C-5C by 2100. This weekend CO₂ levels reached 410 parts per million (ppm) at one global reference laboratory in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and 414ppm at another in Alaska. Such figures are a huge rise on the 350ppm seen in 1990.

Apparently, this “means that Britain is at growing risk of more violent storms in winter and searing heatwaves in summer”.

Woollings suggests that, as the world warms, the jet stream will spend more of the winter across the British Isles and go further into Europe, letting storms keep their power as they reach the UK.

In summer it is likely to shift further to the north than now, opening Britain to hot air from the tropics.

Scientists have long been reluctant to link weather events to climate change but, said Woollings, the number of extremes means connections can be made. He cited the stormy winter of 2013-14 as the first evidence that the jet stream was altering.

Reluctant? Who is he kidding? They’re falling over themselves to attribute extreme weather to climate change. They can’t get in there quick enough!

Now this is all very well but what the Times doesn’t tell you in its eagerness to convince readers that heatwaves in summer and storms in winter are heading their way is that this is just another hypothesis about what might happen to the jet stream due to GHG warming and it is a hypothesis which relies upon a predicted consequence of GHG warming which has not been observed, despite the best efforts of scientists to torture the data in order to claim that it has been observed. The predicted consequence is accelerated warming in the tropical troposphere, the so called tropospheric tropical ‘hot spot’, which has remained annoyingly elusive.

 

Full story here.

As Jaime goes on to explain, Woollings’ theory of an accelerating jet stream is the total opposite of Dr Jennifer Francis’ theory that the jet stream has grown weaker and more meridional, as a result of Arctic warming.

She naturally claims this is the cause of more frequent and severe extreme weather as well.

In reality, it has been well understood for decades that global warming leads to an expansion of the tropical zone, in turn pushing the weather belts polewards. HH Lamb explained this phenomenon well in his books.

During global cooling in the 1960s and 70s, it was this movement of weather belts back towards the Tropics which was responsible for the catastrophic droughts which beset a wide swathe from the Sahel right across to India at the time.

The current shift back to the poles should result in the jet stream shifting north of the UK during winter.

What is transparently obvious from all of this alarmist claptrap is that neither Woollings or Francis has actually bothered to check the actual data about the jet stream.

Instead they have alighted on a few random weather events and developed a theory around them.

 

But if they studied the history of the Little Ice Age, they would have discovered that the weather was a lot worse then, as the renowned historian Geoffrey Parker elaborated on in his book, “Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe”.

For those who have not read it, my review of it here offers a glimpse of the weather disasters the poor souls had to put up with in those days.

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

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November 27, 2019 at 01:43PM