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North America's Weather Turns Weird, Wild, and Extreme. Here's Why (msn.com) 124

Posted by EditorDavid from the cruel-summer dept.
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: An outbreak of severe storms, including deadly tornadoes, hail bigger than DVDs and life-threatening flooding, has ravaged the South, coming amid a month of wild weather across North America. Texas is baking beneath heat indexes as high as 120 degrees, the coasts are cool and mostly calm and Canadian wildfire smoke is suffocating much of the northern U.S.

If it seems the weather has been a little bit "off" since the calendar flipped to June, you're not imagining it — things have been downright weird. It's all linked to a bizarre jet stream pattern, which is displacing air masses from their typical positions and disrupting the movement of weather systems across the continent.
Among other things, the jet stream created a sprawling heat dome in Canada which "helped sap the landscape of moisture, leaving it ripe to burn," the article points out.

"Meanwhile in the southern U.S., the roaring southern branch of the jet stream has been energizing storms. That's brewed back-to-back rounds of severe weather, complete with strong winds, tornadoes and 'gargantuan' hail — and the pattern doesn't look to budge soon." [El Niño] historically, has been linked to split-flow jet stream patterns like the one driving wild weather across parts of the Lower 48. Natural variability, a.k.a. randomness, is also a big player, but it stands to reason that the two factors, overlapping together, are in large part culpable for what we've been facing.

Some scientific research also suggests human-caused climate change may increase the chances of slow, wonky jet stream patterns such as the one being observed this summer. The idea is that the disproportionate warming of the high latitudes is reducing the temperature contrast between the north and south, weakening the jet stream and thus causing it to take bigger dips and meander more. It remains a controversial idea.
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North America's Weather Turns Weird, Wild, and Extreme. Here's Why More

North America's Weather Turns Weird, Wild, and Extreme. Here's Why

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  • but MAYBE it's because of Justin Bieber.

    Maybe.

  • Hailstones bigger than DVDs?

    Are these ultra-thin, disc-shaped hailstones?

    If you really wanted to give an impression of size without resorting to standard units of measure (12cm or slightly less than 5 inches in diameter), maybe cantaloupe-sized? I don't know.
    • It was the ribbed versions of hailstones...not the ultra-thin type.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rossdee ( 243626 )

      Presumably this is after they have hit the ground and gone splat.

      It would be more useful to talk about how much they weigh.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      More to the point, how much did they weigh. It's the momentum that counts, and for falling ice that's usually mainly weight dependent. (Yeah, you COULD build a lifting body out of ice, but you'd need to do it on purpose.)

    • Hailstones bigger than DVDs?

      Are these ultra-thin, disc-shaped hailstones?

      Clearly they were referring to storage capacity. DVDs are quite outdated, so these days even a good size hailstone contains more data. Problem is, they melt before you get halfway through watching the movie.

  • Yeah no wonder. There are like 0 trees in the US. All been replaced by a concrete wasteland. Look at Asian countries and then compare to Africa or America on the same latitude. The difference should be obvious

  • You guys are starting to crack people up (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rbrander ( 73222 ) on Saturday June 17, 2023 @12:55PM (#63610518) Homepage

    First three posts are all "this isn't climate change" and also "stop talking about it".

    Guys, you've gone from frustrating and aggravating to eye-rolling to kind-of-funny. Not because the debate has changed - we've been pretty clear all along on our side, though your reasons have shifted (away from solar cycles, after two of them) -- but because you've lost. People are barely listening any more.

    At least, the ones who make the real decisions. The private backers of $20B renewables+powerline projects in North Australia, Morocco, Libya are not betting tens of billions of dollars on a fairy tale. They believe. So do all the people who just voted in the three giant climate acts (Infrastructure, IRA, and CHIPS are all climate acts) and failed to more than scuff the paint on them with the debt hostage demands.

    This very year is estimated to be Peak Gasoline. Peak Transportation Fuels hits in 2026. Less oil will be sold, worldwide in 2030 than 2028. It's already happening. And weather like this is just going to usher that along. The dates I just gave may even be timid, because every time somebody has predicted the pace of renewables and batteries they've been too timid. (That said, we're down to such sort timelines, they're probably accurate.)

    You've lost, it's all over but the shouting. Can you please stop shouting?

    • If Obama and Biden put out a joint statement that they were mistaken about climate change, what do you think the republicans would say?

      1) They would agree
      2) They would say something about being "woke" and say yes climate change is real

    • Re:You guys are starting to crack people up (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 ) on Saturday June 17, 2023 @02:02PM (#63610694)

      This very year is estimated to be Peak Gasoline. Peak Transportation Fuels hits in 2026. Less oil will be sold, worldwide in 2030 than 2028.

      People have been predicting peak oil my entire life. I don't take them seriously for obvious reasons.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rbrander ( 73222 )

        Very different.
        This is a prediction of peak oil *sales*, not production. It does not attempt to predict mother nature, just the human energy economy, which has 1% as many variables. We can only make so many cars per year, it takes years to build a factory, so 2030 is highly predictable.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          This is a prediction of peak oil *sales*, not production. It does not attempt to predict mother nature, just the human energy economy, which has 1% as many variables. We can only make so many cars per year, it takes years to build a factory, so 2030 is highly predictable.

          And this has been predicted many years before - especially by the oil companies where they've been reaping in the profits but not investing in new R&D. They see the writing is on the wall where sales will decline - not quite to zero - b

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Cyberax ( 705495 )
        People underestimate the miracle of fracking. It basically doubled the worldwide oil reserves, so as a result, right now there's no oil production bottleneck in sight.

        What is going to happen is the peak _demand_ for oil. Developed countries are rapidly moving towards EVs and more fuel-efficient vehicles, and this is rapidly reducing the need for oil. In fact, the US oil consumption had peaked in 2005: https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]

        These fuel efficient vehicles are now filtering into developing count

        • People underestimate the miracle of fracking. It basically doubled the worldwide oil reserves, so as a result, right now there's no oil production bottleneck in sight.

          Yep. World leaders said "well, I can afford a water filter" and the rest is... ugh.

    • They show up every thread and they get modded up to +5 until actual mods instead of sock puppets come in and mod them back down. But by the end the damage is done because people have moved on from the thread and the majority of eyeballs have seen it.

      What shocks me is that /. Still has astroturfers. It's been over a decade I think since this website was a significant part of the internet. I can't help but Wonder if the reason they're here is because this website is just on a list from years ago when it

  • This is impressive... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is impressive to people who have no historical context. For those of us who have been around for more than a few decades, it's not.

    • Well, duh.

      If you've been around for more than a few decades, it won't affect you, you'll be dead before the planet becomes uninhabitable.

    • This one is for all your smooth brains out there. https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]

      Can you point out which historical context you're speaking about?

      • This one is for all your smooth brains out there. https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]

        Yes, it's gotten a little warmer as we came out of the last glaciation.

        If you're going back beyond old-farts' lifetimes, though, try expanding your horizons a bit - back to the carboniferous, at least. And look at the ongoing drop in the carbon dioxide level during the deep ice ages, its failure to fully recover during the intervening periods of glacial retreat/advance combs, and the fact that the LAST deep glaciation ALMOST hit the l

  • Will all these southern states be applying for federal disaster relief? They're all too happy to vote against northern states asking for money.

  • I had six tornadoes come through my area in Northwest Ohio just a few days ago, the closest only five miles away (I saw the rotating wall cloud forming as it passed by, mother nature is awesome). It's going to be an interesting summer this year. The local weather stations were completely surprised by the storm's development. It was a much cooler than normal day making the appearance of tornadoes even that much more surprising.

  • If you look at the actual air circulation patterns, we see patterns like cyclones forming right in the middle of where the jet stream traditionally flows. These cyclones contribute to Arctic Amplification by mixing southern and northern air -- doing the opposite of the jet stream which normally works to isolate polar air from southern air. Cause and effect can be hard to suss out in a complex set of differential equations, but the fact is the jet stream is routinely breaking into huge 1000km across eddies
  • The U.N. has a report stating that the livestock industry contributes more to the greenhouse effect than *transportation*. The ability to *do* something is as close as choosing what you will eat at your next meal.
  • ... I didn't even read the article. If you put that in the article's headline, I can pretty squarely assume it's a load of crap.

  • We're living in the age of stupidty. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Christian right of when I was younger, has NOTHING on the fucking loons that believe our Climate is only 40 years old. The Cult of Climate Change are first rate idiots. What's insane, is that these morons can't even remember the contradictions that these mainstream outlets vomit out month to month. So they keep on posting and sharing this kindergarten dribble. FUCK!
  • We have to change how our economy works, it's that simple.

    And the people who stand to lose the most from that will do their damnedest to make sure it doesn't happen, by making any serious public discussion about it impossible.
  • I'm so tired of all these woke articles about climate change. We've always had weather. We've always had CO2 well over 400ppm. CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas; CO2 is just what plants eat. Plants are good. Everyone knows that climate change is a Jewish conspiracy led by space-laser owner George Soros and his band of trans-sexual baby groomers. Cigarettes are good for you, and are as American as apple pie and cowboys. We should finish the job Trump started and let Exxon Mobile drill baby drill our national parks

  • One of the many factors involved in how CO2 and other compounds affect climate and weather, is also around aerosols, particularly those created by cargo shipping, mostly in the Northern hemisphere.

    https://www.nasa.gov/feature/e... [nasa.gov]
    https://www.science.org/doi/10... [science.org] (2016)
    https://prospect.org/environme... [prospect.org]

    There's been an interesting 'experiment' occurring for decades as these ships spewed aerosols as they traversed the oceans. These aerosols essentially acted as cloud seeding, which effectively reflected so

  • Canada was set on fire by arson. Just look at the satellite image of fire starting, it makes it obvious. There is also a secret HAARP weather modifying technology. No one knows how many of those tornadoes are artificial, but sure helps push the green narrative to get us to eat insects and lab tumor burgers.

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