Columnist.
My mission is to supply value added forecasts to anyone that wants them. As such, when it comes to energy, I could care less where the energy comes from. I need to make an accurate forecast that benefits the client, else the client has no need for me and I get fired. So whether energy comes from wind, solar, natural gas, nuclear reactors, fossil fuels, eating cheetos, snapping your fingers -- *it does not matter to me.* You still have to know if it's two degrees warmer or two degrees colder than normal. If you worked for an energy company, hedge fund, retail company, city, or almost any thing you can imagine, and you hedged your planning toward our *very cold and snowy* winter forecast put out before the fact, then you had an advantage over the competition. That is what I do.
With the upcoming hurricane season right around us, I want to amplify a bit for you some of the background research we do along with why I am very concerned about the Eastern Seaboard in the coming few years. I think this cycle of concern has *not* reached what is a natural, forecastable peak, but I am going to show the relationship between the 1950's hurricanes and the coming cooling of the Atlantic Ocean. While it is starting now, the warmest water ends up near the East Coast while the cooling develops to the northeast. It happened very similar to this in the late '50s and '60s! I feel it's important our readers and objective people in the climate/weather argument understand how climatology is linked hand in hand to the weather. I have made past events the foundation on which I stand today to reach for tomorrow.
My last couple of posts have dealt with major weather/climate stories I think are lurking. The worry about the upcoming hurricane season is something I will have every year for the East Coast until we reverse the pattern we were in during the 1950s. I think we have another five to seven years, and I am very surprised it has not been worse. But it takes just one 1954 or a '54-'55 back-to-back season to get that score close fairly quickly. I am on this "kick" to expose before the fact some of the nonsense being spewed and accepted by what I see as an increasingly desperate AGW crowd. It's now or never for them, though to their credit, they have the political will backing their interests in the form of the EPA that could care less about the fact the department's lines of evidence have nothing to do with reality.
James Hansen has a fantasy book out called "Storms of my Grandchildren." I say fantasy because it seems that if you are climate scientist, or pretend to be (Dr. Hansen is actually a trained astronomer and a darn good one from what I have heard), you are allowed to make forecasts that no one now will be around to verify, and the ones you do make short term are allowed to bust and then be claimed as correct anyway. I think a lot of people in my business, who pre-date the rise of the climate science hero, are wondering if we chose the wrong profession. However, I have a real story. It ties in with the major worry we have about what on paper in the large term is a less than spectacular hurricane season. And now I see forecasts coming out that look and sound much like what WeatherBell Analytics has had out for quite some time now.
Once upon a time, oh, say 20 years ago, the talk was that the Pacific would be in a constant state of El Nino. Though this was an admission that the antics of the tropical Pacific control a large part of the global temperature, the idea of the El Nino and a forever warming planet was a global warming proponent's dream come true. Because they ignored climate cycles and did not understand what Weatherbell.com meteorologist Joe D'Aleo, who also runs the climate blog "ICECAP," showed plainly -- that in the colder cycles of the Pacific, the La Ninas outdo El Ninos and vice versa -- they assumed this would continue forever. As the earth adjusted to the warmth supplied by this natural cycle, the warmth that was occurring, combined with the change of the Atlantic cycle to warmer, lead to a marked decrease in Arctic sea ice. It reached a crescendo in 2007, the year of the death spiral along with forecasts of no summer ice in 2014. Through it all, our side of the AGW argument said this is a natural phenomena, and once the AMO flipped, the summer sea ice, which is the most obvious talking point for those advocating the Arctic death spiral, would come back. As always, the Southern Hemisphere ice, because it was above normal, was ignored.
There is a huge event being forecasted this year by the CFSV2, and I don't know if anyone else is mentioning this. For the first time in over a decade, the Arctic sea ice anomaly in the *summer* is forecast to be near or above normal for a time! While it has approached the normals at the end of the winter season a couple of times because of new ice growth, this signals something completely different -- that multiyear growth means business -- and it shows the theory on the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) is likely to be on target. Once it flips, this red herring of climate panic will be gone. Global and Southern Hemisphere anomalies are already unmentionable since the former is well above normal and the latter is routinely busting daily records.
I remember the first Earth Day in 1970. I was a freshman in high school and we had an Earth Day Assembly. There was a play with Steppenwolf's "The Monster" blaring. They changed the words, "America where are you now, don't you care about your sons and daughters?" to "America where are you now, don't you care about your *parks and waters*?" The young ladies from the drama club and the cheerleaders were dressed up as trees running around on stage. When I saw that, I wanted to become a tree-hugger, but alas, none of the trees were interested in hugging a 5 foot 2 inch, 160 lb. freshman nerd.
I was fortunate to have wrestled under Bill Koll for three years at Penn State. I say fortunate not because of the beating I took on the mats with my 1-4 career record -- we weren't as good as we are now under Cael Sanderson, but we always were a top 10 dual meet team and dominated the east, in spite of fierce opposition from the likes of Lehigh and Navy -- but because wrestling under Coach Koll and assistant Andy Matter re-enforced the values I learned from my parents. The child of strict Italian parents, my first year or two at Penn State was like a kid being released into a candy shop whose never had a sweet before. I almost flunked out of school, but once I went out for wrestling, my grades shot up as the discipline returned. I quickly understood that if you want something you have to work for it. It also showed me why athletics can be a huge aid in education if done *right*. A big lesson for me: If you want something and someone is smarter or stronger than you, you have to outwork them to even have a chance.
In 2006 I made a comment that the East Coast was looking down the barrel of a gun over the next 10 years (unfortunately and unknown to me, someone publicized it as it just being in 2006). I made the comment because I felt we were going into a period similar to the 1950s. I stated that *at least two major hurricanes* would hit *from the Carolinas and points north* over the next *ten years.* It was a simple forecast. We had eight major hurricane in seven years in a similar cold PDO/warm AMO cycle and I knew it was coming back on! I knew where the climate cycle was going, so if I take 25% of what happened in a similar cycle, then I think I have a good chance of being right. Not brain surgery. Not *hyping* something to get attention. Just simple deductive process.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with a report that indicates we are all living on borrowed time as far as the global warming situation goes. There is no way I am going to cede the term "climate change" to them since the climate is always in a state of change. That ploy is simply a smokescreen because of how bad they busted with the hysteria they were whipping up about the globe *warming*. They should be held accountable for what they said, and not simply co-opt a redundant term that is a *natural* fact.
I think most man-made global warming skeptics are not realistic. We have to understand: *It doesn't matter if we are right to the people that are demonizing us.* By that I mean this idea that somehow we are winning when the powers that be continue to shut down the very sources that would make our nation strong and self dependent. They could care less about what is right and wrong concerning what is really driving the climate. If you actually cared, why would you make the statements we see coming out of many of the political elite in this nation, given data that at the very least is questioning their ideas, and in many cases, going the opposite direction? You wouldn't. It's because they don't care about all this, except that it's a smokescreen to continue accomplishing their real mission that, unfortunately, most of the people that really care about what is right and wrong are not involved in.
The question is: Am I one?
I am starting to think the AGW/climate change/climate disruption/carbon pollution agenda is to simply make such outrageous comments that my side gets tired of having to deal with it. This hit me a couple of nights ago when I tried to watch five minutes of the "all nighter clim-a-thon" being staged by a select group of senators. After a couple of minutes -- and I will not say what I heard or who said it to set me off -- I decided it was enough, so I watched something with more substance -- Dallas -- on TNT. Oddly enough Bobby Ewing stopped his nephew JR Jr from fracking his part of Southfork by saying there was an endangered species on the property (the lean Prairie Chicken I think it was). Even Dallas has an energy-based debate going on. Interestingly enough Southfork, which in the show is a working cattle ranch, is also in the cross hairs of climate change since, after all, we all know cows cause increases in methane which is one of those dreaded greenhouse gasses that, if left unchecked, will take the Earth to Venetian temperatures (sarcasm).
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." --Mahatma Gandhi I listen to the song "I go to Extremes" by Billy Joel quite often. In fact, as I am writing this, I am listening to it. Given my personality, it fits. It's probably why I love the weather and the challenge of forecasting its extremes; it's in the blood. I'ts also why I am well acquainted with what the weather has done and what it can do, which is why to me this whole climate fight is turning into some kind of silly bad dream. The average is a product of all events, some more extreme than anything we are seeing now. In fact I believe by making the public aware of what the weather has done and the extremes that are a *natural* part of life on the planet, we do a service by helping people to understand this is nothing mysterious, and is forecastable.
I was watching the president in California announce a billion dollar fund to combat the effects of climate change, and guess what? Every hair on my neck did not stand up on end! In fact I actually agree with this. Why? Because the climate is changing -- always has and always will. We are putting more people in harm's way every day. So we should be putting money toward adapting to its effects -- *of what comes natural!* My whole life on the New Jersey shore, I grew up understanding that it was just a matter of time before the glorious beach was going to be severely re-arranged by nature. Why? It's happened before and will happen again.
You are holding the Olympics in a subtropical climate and you are complaining about it being warm? Or how about the reason it's so cold in the U.S.? I think Arctic ice melt was one of the reasons. The winters of the 1970s were comparably cold. The winter of '76-'77 was one of the warmest on record in Alaska and much of the Arctic, with near record *high* Arctic sea ice. So why is it that time, at the height of the ice age scare, it wasn't the same thing as being pushed now? The reason: because there is no difference -- it's natural and cyclical, and since we came out before the fact with a cold and stormy winter, modeling it after 1917-1918 and 1993-1994, obviously it's something that has happened before.
I am going out to Las Vegas the week of February 16 to talk to clients in the insurance industry on the weather risks we face in the coming years and decades. The title of the talk, "Going Forward by Way of Looking at the Past," is a play on words from the movie "Back to the Future." As I was putting this together, it struck me as odd that the man-made global warming argument even exists. I am presenting many examples of past weather events that are similar to today, and I marvel at how climate alarmists have gotten away with this. If you've seen something before, why should the same thing happening now be the result of something completely different? We have had cold winters, warm winters, heat, drought, hurricanes, tornadoes -- all this has happened before. How is all this somehow different, and why do some many people push it?
I have stated often that *knowing climate* is huge in being able to accurately forecast the weather. I want to show an example. Back in the spring of 2008 I got a chance to talk to a science class at my old high school, Mainland Regional, in Linwood, New Jersey. One of my dearest friends had a son that was interested in weather, so we were very close. His other son is now a budding TV journalist in Little Rock, Arkansas (perhaps I will get a chance to do a global warming interview with him if I play my cards right). I jumped at the chance to talk to them. It was kind of funny because one of the teachers was the captain of my high school's cheerleading team when I was a 5' 2", 160 lb. freshman weather geek and my crushes at the time alternated between the caption and her sister. But she was in the audience and I guess she probably thought,"Wow, this guy is still a weather geek" -- or perhaps not since she probably was not aware I was alive when I was a freshman in high school.
According to a very wise advisor of mine, the perfect cup of coffee is not scalding hot, and most likely contains a bit of sweetener and cream. I have come to realize that this applies to more than just a cup of coffee. I tried to explain to him that in the climate debate, an extended hand is often met with a slap in the face. However, I am once again going to try and extend a hand and brew a perfect cup of coffee by revealing two ideas that the man-made global warming crowd would have some credibility in trying to use. Keep in mind, the coffee I like is still going to be darn hot and is more espresso than latte. So let me start by stirring the pot.
