“Hillary Clinton so far ahead in polls that she ‘doesn’t even think about’ Donald Trump anymore” 24 October 2016 Hillary Clinton so far ahead in polls that she ‘doesn’t even think about’ Donald Trump anymore
via Real Climate Science
October 25, 2024 at 08:15AM
Paul Dorian
Overview
The World Series begins on Friday night, October 25th, in Los Angeles, California between the LA Dodgers and the New York Yankees. The weather will likely not be much of a factor for Games 1 and 2 with dry and warm conditions expected in southern California and daytime highs not far from 80 degrees. The World Series could end as late as November 2nd this year if all seven games are required to determine a champion. With the extra playoff round added a few years ago, a November finish to the baseball season is going to be more common and the weather can certainly be impactful. In fact, the weather has had a big impact on several World Series games in recent history ranging from biting cold-to-extreme heat and with respect to snow and rain as well.
The hottest day of the month of October in Los Angeles during 2017 turned out to be Tuesday, the 24th which is when the 2017 World Series got underway. The high temperature on that afternoon was 105 degrees and the game time temperature of 103 degrees was the hottest of any World Series game in recent history.
Notable examples of World Series games in recent history in which weather played an important role
The hottest World Series game of recent history took place in Los Angeles, California on October 24th in 2017. In that World Series, Game 1 between the Houston Astros and LA Dodgers featured a game-time temperature of 103 degrees. That first game was won by the Dodgers by the score of 3-1 with all runs knocked in by the three home runs that were hit by both teams. Houston went on to win the 2017 World Series in seven games, but no other game was as hot as Game 1 which featured triple-digit heat. In fact, by the time the Series returned to Los Angeles for games 6 and 7, game time temperatures were in the much more comfortable upper 60’s.
Weather maps are shown here from the night of October 28th in 2008 which was the day after the rained-shortened World Series game in Philly and the day before it resumed. On this “in-between” day, very cold air surged into the Philly metro region on the backside of a strong coastal storm and several inches of early season snow accumulated in some suburban locations. Maps courtesy Penn State eWall (surface – upper right, 500 mb – upper left, 700 mb – lower left, 850 mb – lower right).
Perhaps the most memorable World Series game in recent history with respect to overall weather conditions was Game 5 of the 2008 World Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays. That game began on October 27th in 2008 with a starting time temperature of 47 degrees and rain was falling. The rain intensified as the game progressed and was ultimately suspended in the 6th inning – the only World Series game ever to be suspended. The game could not be resumed on the next day as a powerful early season nor’easter continued to pound away on the Philadelphia metro region with a cold, steady rain and even several inches of snow fell in nearby Bucks County. Finally, two days after the game began, Game 5 resumed on a cold night in Philly with first-pitch temperatures at 44 degrees along with a gusty northwest wind on the back side of a departing coastal storm and the Phillies went on to clinch their second World Series title ever.
Weather maps are shown here from the night of October 22nd in 1997 which featured Game 4 of the World Series played in Cleveland, Ohio. An unusually strong upper-level trough of low pressure was positioned just to the north of the Great Lakes (upper, left) and contributed to very cold conditions for Game 4 with snow flurries throughout the contest. Maps courtesy Penn State eWall (surface – upper right, 500 mb – upper left, 700 mb – lower left, 850 mb – lower right).
In perhaps the coldest World Series games ever – and the records are sketchy pre-1970’s as Major League Baseball did not track weather records – one of the most memorable contests was Game 4 of the 1997 World Series in Cleveland, Ohio between the Indians (now Guardians) and the Florida (now Miami) Marlins. The first two games of that World Series were played in Miami, Florida where temperatures were in the high 80’s. The games then shifted to Cleveland for Games 3, 4 and 5 and the weather was dramatically different than in Florida. Indeed, the first-pitch temperature for Game 4 on October 22nd, 1997, which was won by Cleveland was 35 degrees and a wind chill in the teens. In fact, snow flurries were falling at the onset of Game 4 and continued throughout the contest and ice patches formed in some areas on the infield. The Florida Marlins eventually won the 1997 World Series with an extra-inning Game 7 victory played in balmy Miami, Florida (game time temperature of 80 degrees).
Weather maps are shown here from the evening of October 10th, 1979 which was the day the World Series began in Baltimore, Maryland between the Orioles and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Low pressure along the Mid-Atlantic coastline not only generated some rainfall for Game 1, but it funneled in very chilly air from the north as well and the combination of the cold and wet conditions played a role in the overall sloppy performance. Maps courtesy Penn State eWall (surface – upper right, 500 mb – upper left, 700 mb – lower left, 850 mb – lower right).
The second coldest game in recent history was the first game of the 1979 World Series in Baltimore, Maryland between the Orioles and Pittsburgh Pirates. This game took place on October 10th, 1979, with first-pitch temperatures right around the 40-degree mark along with a steady, chilly rainfall which no doubt factored into the six total errors, three committed by each team. In fact, Game 1 which was won by Baltimore was originally scheduled for Tuesday, October 9th, but was postponed due to a wintry mix of rain and snow. Back in those days, the World Series began earlier in the month of October compared to today, but that didn’t prevent very cold weather from impacting the beginning of this Fall Classic. The Pirates ended up winning the 1979 World Series in 7 games by winning three games in a row after trailing in the series three games to one.
One final note, the last time the Dodgers and Yankees faced off in the World Series was at the end of the “strike-interrupted” season of 1981. The Dodgers won the Fall Classic that year – 4 games to 2 – with Fernando Valenzuela, Ron Cey, Steve Yeager, and Pedro Guerrero leading the way and Tommy Lasorda at the helm.
Meteorologist Paul Dorian
Arcfield
arcfieldweather.com
via Watts Up With That?
October 25, 2024 at 08:04AM
By Paul Homewood
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Peter Lilley initiated a debate in the House of Lords yesterday, to discuss the impact of the climate agenda on jobs and growth.
This was the crux of his speech:
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“It is hard to overstate how crucial cheap energy is for economic growth and prosperity. The quadrupling of oil prices in 1974 ended three decades of rapid growth in western economies. Energy price rises have invariably been followed by a slowdown in growth. On the other hand, thanks to shale oil and gas in America, that country has had cheaper energy and grown faster than other western economies, and China’s extraordinary growth has been fuelled by cheap coal.
Let me start with a few facts about climate change and the climate agenda impacts. First, Britain has reduced its territorial emissions of CO2 more than any other major economy and they are now back to the level they were in 1879. Secondly, Britain has more offshore wind power than any other country bar China, not to mention its onshore wind, solar and bio energy.
Thirdly, despite or because of this, British industry pays the highest electricity prices in Europe. They doubled in real terms over the two decades up to the start of the Ukraine war, even though real gas prices remained largely unchanged over that period.
Fourthly, we have already lost most of our aluminium industry and are losing our primary steel-making capacity and, with it, thousands of jobs. We are seeing the Grangemouth refinery turning into an import terminal and other British refineries under threat. We import an increasing proportion of energy-intensive goods, such as cement and bricks.
Fifthly, when our manufacturing industry moves abroad, it does not reduce global emissions at all—far from it. We now import many carbon-intensive products, so the reduction in Britain’s carbon footprint is only 36%, much less than the near halving of our reported territorial emissions.
Finally, the Government propose to accelerate the move to net zero regardless of cost, to prevent new North Sea exploration and instead import oil and gas, and to ignore or deny the impact this will have on our energy costs, growth and jobs.
This is an unusually significant debate because, as far as I can tell, it is the first time that Parliament has formally debated the impact on jobs, growth and prosperity of our decision to decarbonise our economy. Our failure to do so has been part of a collective institutional failure by Governments of all parties, both Houses of Parliament, the BBC, the Climate Change Committee and other public bodies to permit or promote an informed debate on the economic costs and benefits of net zero.
Costs were never discussed during the passage of the Climate Change Act in 2008, nor during the 90-minute debate committing us to net zero in 2019. It is extraordinary that we still have no official cost-benefit analysis of net zero, five years after embarking on the project.”
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He goes on to eviscerate the repeated claims about the so-called advantages of pursuing Net Zero, and how debate has been shut down about the downsides. I was tickled by this particular comment:
The Industry Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, who pursued the Sue Gray route to the upper echelons of the Labour Party, was given a little section of his own in the Labour manifesto, in which he said that
“by accelerating the transition to clean, homegrown energy”
we will not only
“end the era of high energy bills”
but be
“helping ourselves and exporting our solutions worldwide. But if we choose to go slowly, others will provide the answers, and ultimately we’ll end up buying these solutions rather than selling them”.
Where has he been for the past 20 years? Far from choosing to go slowly, we have outpaced other countries, but we have had to buy the solutions from abroad. Imports of renewable technologies vastly exceed our exports. Foreign suppliers have finally begun to make wind vanes in this country and assemble generators here, which is welcome, but they are largely for our fields, and those companies are not going to make us an exporter. The only turbines we export are gas turbines, which we are phasing out and urging others to do likewise. The only area where we might take the lead in developing a new industry is small nuclear, which I persuaded the Energy and Climate Change Committee to back a decade ago. I hope this Government will give that project more welly than my Government did.
We have had many debates like this in the past, and they have all been equally depressing. The Minister regularly fails to address any of the real issues raised, and instead reels off the usual Net Zero mantra. Meanwhile, members from all parties queue up to pat him (and themselves) on the back for saving the planet. Having said that, there were two very good contributions from Lord Frost and Lord Strathcarron.
This time the Minister responsible was Lord Hunt, and there was no change. He spent most of his response in telling us that we need to do Net Zero to save the world from a climate catastrophe, while promising “good-quality jobs”.
Nowhere in his answer was there any mention of the number of jobs already lost or put at risk. No mention of the cost of Net Zero. And no mention of the fact that while UK emissions have dropped by 235 mt since 2008. the rest of the world’s are now 4950 mt higher.
Lord Lilley gave a robust summation to close the debate:
My Lords, I am grateful to everybody who has made fantastic contributions to this excellent debate. I pay particular tribute to the Government spokesman, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, whom we have just heard. His response to everybody and everything that was said was one of the most fair-minded and constructive that I have heard, not least in fairly representing what I was trying to say—though I am not accusing him of agreeing with me.
I want also to congratulate my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead on an outstanding maiden speech. It was noteless; it was witty; it was compassionate. We are aware, obviously, of her other great legacy on modern slavery. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, reminded us of her concern for the just about managing in our own country, and she emphasised her concern for the poorest, who are the greatest victims of climate disasters—when you are hit by a flood, it does not matter to you whether they are more frequent than floods in the past; they are still a disaster. But the reason the poor are vulnerable is that they are poor, and the reason that they are poor is that they do not have the access to cheap energy that makes us rich. If we deprive them of access to cheap and affordable energy they will remain poorer for longer. Even if we in this country think that we can afford excessively high energy costs, we should not try to impose them on the poor and slow down their growth.
I next thank the noble Lord, Lord Deben, who offered my greatest support for what I had to say, since, because he could not refute a word that I had said, he chose to criticise things that I had not said. He criticised me for saying, allegedly, that we should not make any contribution on this front. What I actually said was:
“I accept that we must be prepared to make our proportionate contribution”.
He went on to say that I had said something in Cabinet under Mrs Thatcher, which is simply untrue. I remind him of the exchange we once had in John Major’s Cabinet, which was not about this but about statistics, when he was wrong.
The noble Lord did not respond to the points about why he needed to take costly legal action to prevent publication of the analysis that his committee had done on the cost of climate change avoidance in 2050. My general view is that when people do not want to publish facts it is because they think the facts are rather weak. I assume that is why he did not refer to them.
On the general issue of costs, with the exception of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, almost nobody who was enthusiastic for doing more and spending more and who generally goes around saying that we can do that in a costless fashion commented on the costs I gave. None of them referred to the fact that we have the highest costs of electricity for our industry of any country. One can only assume again that they are embarrassed by the facts. Likewise, when it came to new industries, apart from small nuclear, which I mentioned and have advocated for a long time, nobody gave detail of how these industries are going to generate new prosperity when we have doubled the amount of onshore wind, trebled the amount of offshore wind and quadrupled the amount of solar or whatever it is, when that has not happened so far.
There were a couple of important arguments that it is important for me to address because they go to the heart of the issue. One was on the issue of external costs, which was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the noble Lords, Lord Willetts and Lord Browne. Theirs was the logical response to what I am putting forward, which is to say: “Yes, you’ve got to balance the costs of doing something against the damage that would be done if you don’t, and the logical way to do that is a carbon tax”. If we take the American Government’s estimates, for example, which say that the carbon tax should be $51 per tonne, which is about the equivalent to $10 per megawatt hour, it does not make any difference to the fact that renewables would still be uneconomic in this country.
Then came the most difficult issue, which people who take my position have to face up to, and that is the threat of existential crisis. If continuing to do nothing—I am not proposing that we do nothing—were likely to result in the extinction of the human race, or even its immiseration, almost no costs would be too great to avoid it. I accept that.
I put down a Question some while ago to the Government asking whether they knew of any peer-reviewed science, or science produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—whose
job it is to consider the science—which forecasts that, if we do nothing over the coming centuries, it will lead to the extinction of the human race or even its immiseration. They said that no, there was no such peer-reviewed science, so those who invoke it are invoking something that is not peer-reviewed science, although that does not mean to say that it is wrong. Some things can turn out to be right that have not yet got through the peer review process. But let us not pretend that we are dealing with a threat that scientists have declared to be existential—they have not.
We are left with the central core of the debate: should we have an honest discussion about the costs and benefits of pursuing the path of net zero? I am glad to say that the Church was on my side on that front—that we want an honest debate. We can do that only if the Government and bodies such as the CCC, the National Grid and the Royal Society have the honesty and integrity to admit that about their information. The Royal Society—or the author I cited—has admitted that his figures were underestimates. We can have that debate only if we have that information from those sources in an unbiased way rather than in a campaigning way. I am grateful to everybody for contributing to the beginning of that debate for the first time in Parliament.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
October 25, 2024 at 06:05AM
From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
Yes, it’s that old bogeyman again!
From the Mail:
The network of ocean currents which keep the Earth’s climate stable could be about to collapse, scientists have warned.
In an open letter, 44 of the world’s leading climate scientists say that key Atlantic Ocean currents – including the Gulf Stream – are on the brink of failure.
The scientists caution that the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could lead to ‘devastating and irreversible impacts’ which will affect ‘the entire world for centuries to come’.
The resulting climate fallout could plunge the UK into a ‘new Ice Age’, with winter temperatures plummetting up to 15°C (27°F) below the current average.
While the collapse of the Gulf Stream would be disastrous for Britain, that vital current is just one small part of AMOC’s massive global system.
This giant ocean conveyor belt is critical for moving heat around the planet, but research suggests that it has been slowing down and could soon reach a tipping point.
Without urgent action, the scientists warn that AMOC could fail completely within the next few decades.
As warm water travels northwards from the tropics, it hits the sea ice around Greenland and the Nordic countries, cooling and becoming much saltier.
As the water cools it becomes denser, sinking rapidly towards the bottom of the ocean where it flows back southwards before once again warming and rising to the surface.
This process of ‘deep water formation’ is the engine for a vast global conveyor belt which pumps heat and water all around the Atlantic Ocean.
However, studies suggest that AMOC’s deep water engine has started to slow and is now showing worrying signs of breaking down altogether.
As global temperatures rise, melting ice pours fresh water back into oceans, diluting the denser salty water and preventing it from sinking.
If this process were to break down entirely, it would have catastrophic knock-on effects including the weakening of the Gulf Stream and the disruption of global weather patterns.
Its “The Day After Tomorrow” all over again!
As with a lot of climate scams, this one is based on just a few years data, from which the “scientists” conclude that they have identified cataclysmic changes that have not happened for millennia.
The Met Office give a more balanced summary:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/oceans/amoc
Note this particular sentence:
Oceanographers have been measuring the AMOC continuously since 2004. The measurements have shown that the AMOC varies from year to year, and it is likely that these variations have an impact on the weather in the UK. However it is too early to say for sure whether there are any long term trends. Before 2004 the AMOC was only measured a few times,
So we only have data since 2004, and the year to year variations are large. To pretend that such a short series is in any way significant is not only unscientific but fraudulent.
This is what the series shows:
It would appear that there is little trend since around 2008.
The idea that the AMOC never changed before 2004 is absurd anyway.
Bob Dickson & Svein Østerhus laid out in their study, “One hundred years in the Norwegian Sea”, the major climatic changes in the Norwegian Sea and the rest of the Arctic:
All were associated with changes in Atlantic currents and the AMOC. The Warming in the North, for instance, occurred because of the influx of warm Atlantic seawater, in exactly the same way as with recent Arctic warming. As the Met Office explain, warm water evaporates leaving saltier water, which sinks because it is more dense. Saltier water of course freezes at lower temperatures, so Arctic sea ice tends to contract. (Note when it freezes, the salt tends to leech out, so either way the sea becomes saltier).
The Great Salinity Anomaly which followed the Warming was the result of that influx of warmer water retreating, in part because of northerly airflow :
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00291950701409256
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These weather patterns are part and parcel of the Arctic Oscillation, another perfectly natural cycle. The anomalously higher pressure over Greenland marks the time of the negative AO:
From NSIDC:
https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/icelights/2012/02/arctic-oscillation-winter-storms-and-sea-ice
As fresh, polar water replaced warmer Atlantic water, salinity levels fell – hence the name given to the event. Just as Arctic sea ice had retreated during the Warming, it expanded rapidly during this period. The GSA was not just a phenomenon in the Norwegian Sea, because the polar gyre carried this fresh water around the whole of the Arctic Ocean.
Another factor identified by Dickson and Osterhus in the freshening of the Arctic Ocean is increasing discharge from Eurasian rivers into the basin. A warming climate means a wetter climate in those regions. And more river discharge leads to more sea ice and a colder Arctic.
In other words, these processes tend to be self correcting. Milder weather leads eventually to more sea ice and a colder climate, until eventually the AO flips back to positive again.
I’ll leave the final comment to Dickson & Osterhus:
All these changes were the result of natural processes. There is no evidence that these will change in future.
via Watts Up With That?
October 25, 2024 at 04:04AM
