After enduring days of record-setting, eye-watering levels of smoke in the air, the Seattle area is in for relief, thanks to a shift in wind patterns. But the debate over whether this is the "new normal," the old normal or the abnormal is likely to play out for months and years to come.
The National Weather Service is predicting a rise in onshore air flow, sweeping plumes of wildfire smoke toward the east (sorry about that, Wenatchee) and moderating temperatures. Thursday's high temperatures in the Seattle-Olympia area are expected to be 12 to 17 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than today's .
[...] In his latest blog post , University of Washington atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass explains the mechanism behind this week's smoky skies: An express train of lower-atmosphere winds delivered smoke from fires in the North Cascades and southern British Columbia directly into Puget Sound.
[...] Is this a taste of the new normal in an era of global warming? Not necessarily. Mass has argued persuasively that the wildfire trend actually marks a return to the "old normal" after nearly a century of aggressive fire suppression and forest mismanagement.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:42PM (4 children)
Not true here. Note how
Again, not true. My argument was
1) Due to the major change over the past few decades in how wildfires are treated, we would see a huge increase in the rate and size of wildfires.
2) Thus we would expect to see a huge increase in wildfires even if the climatologists were wrong about their prediction. Thus, frequency of wildfires is not a valid way to falsify predictions of global warming.
Moving on
Then where is this evidence? And let us note that the long term temperature sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 is the most important parameter in climatology. Being very wrong on this one can mean the difference between already being too late to stop climate change from global warming and not having to worry about the serious problems of global warming for a couple of centuries.
It's also telling that you think this is merely about "It's OK for me to continue to believe AGW is completely false". I believe AGW exists and that it will cause some modest degree of harm to us and our environment. The problem is that big public spending on climate change won't happen unless someone can show near future serious harm from climate change. The attempt to claim wildfires as a climate change casualty is one such game for doing that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:16PM (1 child)
So by your own line of reason, increases in wildfire frequency isn't evidence that changes in how wildfires are treated have lead to increases in wildfire frequency because there is another theory that also predicts it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 24 2018, @04:51AM
One has to look at the data in more detail. There was a huge increase [nih.gov] in acreage burned by wildfires after around 1983 and these fires were allowed to burn longer. From the linked report, tables 1 and 2 show substantial increase in the frequency and size of wildfires starting in the early 1980s with a huge jump at the time and moderate increases since. The huge jump coincides with the change in policy.
And later on, the report had this to say
In other words, instead of ruthlessly suppressing large fires within a week of the fire starting as were done in the 1970s (and part of a policy dating back to roughly the 1920s in the US), they often allowed the fire to burn for just over seven weeks on average. That's roughly an order of magnitude longer!
Notice how we went from the one basic parameter of wildfire frequency to more useful ones (for distinguishing hypotheses at hand), particularly that of the duration of wildfire burns. It is typical of the climate hysteria approach to seize on some minor bit of data as evidence of the harm of climate change, which upon deeper study turns out to be a bunch of uninformed bullshit.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:42PM (1 child)
Then where is this evidence?
That you are ignorant of the evidence, and when presented with it you actively ignore it to remain ignorant, is not proof that there is no evidence.
Try opening an elementary school science textbook as a starting point. Demonstrating the greenhouse effect is a science-fair level undertaking.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 24 2018, @04:45AM
I think it's telling you can't state even a single piece of that evidence. Sounds to me like you're even more ignorant of the evidence than I am.