Silence Is Not Consent
You may have noticed I have been very quiet here at The Patriot Post. The reason is because the game is on and the pre-game talk is done. This El Niño is what I have been waiting for since the last one. And to me, it’s a simple test. To review, I stated many times last spring that a major spike was coming in the global temperature due to El Niño, and as I called it, borrowing from an Old Buffalo Springfield song called “For What It’s Worth,” this would be a “Field Day for the Heat.” I even went so far as to say that it would not surprise me if Al Gore, citing the major global warming spike, would come out and run for president with an atmospheric apocalypse agenda.
You may have noticed I have been very quiet here at The Patriot Post. The reason is because the game is on and the pre-game talk is done. This El Niño is what I have been waiting for since the last one. And to me, it’s a simple test. To review, I stated many times last spring that a major spike was coming in the global temperature due to El Niño, and as I called it, borrowing from an Old Buffalo Springfield song called “For What It’s Worth,” this would be a “Field Day for the Heat.” I even went so far as to say that it would not surprise me if Al Gore, citing the major global warming spike, would come out and run for president with an atmospheric apocalypse agenda.
That is how impressed I was with the warming coming.
As shown in the NCEP model global temperature initialization graph, the spike is here and right on time. This is the warmest five-month period on NCEP record (35 years). February will be the fourth month out of the past five that featured record warmth. No surprise. The question is what happens after this. NCEP is seeing the warming, but cooling is coming and it sees that too. The model is a great tool because it’s updated every six hours with state of the art features to initialize the global temperature. Why it isn’t looked at more is beyond me (perhaps because it shows cooling?).
The big question: Is what follows a big drop like after the El Niño spikes of ‘06-'07 and '09-'10, a theory I first posited on national TV after the winter of '06-07’? Or is a new benchmark being established? If it’s the latter, my ideas are toast. That is not to say C02 has to be causing it, it’s only to say my reasons for the forecast I made are wrong. So I shut up. If I am right, I shut up also, because what else is there to say?
In any case, I made some predictions on how this would be handled by the people driving the AGW train, and they are coming true. Combined with the election, this is being touted loudly. Furthermore, with the end of the cool summers like we experienced for three consecutive years over the central U.S. — which were PREDICTABLE, since we called them Garden of Eden summers in the breadbasket of the nation before the fact — there will be a perfect storm of spiking global temperatures and U.S. heat (and likely a much bigger hurricane season) as we head for the election.
Here are the summers of ‘13, '14 and '15.
Those were very different from the hysteria whipped up over 2010-2012.
We are forecasting a hot summer from the Plains to the Mid Atlantic states this year. And if I may remind you, the summers of 2010-2012 were vey much like 1952-1954
All this, of course, will ignore the two most reliable ENSO research centers.
Scripps Model:
JAMSTEC:
I am almost certain both sites do not agree with me on the AGW issue, but Scripps and JAMSTEC are super research centers and I love them both. I don’t shut out people because we may have a disagreement.
These models have a flip to La Niña lurking that will lead to the global temp falling back to or below the 2012 levels from 2017-2019.
Because La Niñas are notorious for major warm season events here in the U.S. (heat, hurricanes), I am quite certain — as certain as I was about all the hysteria now with the spike — that any drop in global temperatures will be ignored. It’s disaster du jour, and the best is yet to come. It’s not unlike the ozone hole strategy. We always here about it opening up, but didn’t it have to close first if it’s going to open again?
In any case, I am silent because it’s time to put up or shut up. This is a big forecast test for me, and I do understand how nature can tell me I am wrong, given my job. With the exception of the three weeks I was not working while switching jobs, I have worked everyday for 15 years. I’ve never missed a day without some kind of contribution to whoever I was working for. When you fight that much with the weather, you understand how you could be wrong.
Far different from being vested in one issue all your life, where everything you have depends on you being right, people like me live for the fight, win or lose. When you fight every day, that is how you look at things, which is very different from the people who only have one answer in mind and will not tolerate any dissent.
So my silence is not consent, it’s me watching the game unfold in front of me.
The words of Abraham Lincoln come to mind:
“I do the very best I can, I mean to keep going. If the end brings me out all right, then what is said against me won’t matter. If I’m wrong, ten angels swearing I was right won’t make a difference.”
Joe Bastardi is chief forecaster at WeatherBELL Analytics, a meteorological consulting firm.
