New fire danger threatens to worsen most disastrous wildfire season in California history
Dr. Jeff Masters and Bob Henson
20 October 2017
(Weather Underground) – A record-breaking heat wave will build over Southern California over the weekend and peak on Tuesday, bringing triple-digit temperatures that could set marks for the hottest temperatures ever recorded so late in the year in the Los Angeles area. Accompanying the heat will be the notorious Santa Ana winds, which will bring a multi-day period of critical fire danger, Saturday through Tuesday.According to NOAA, the hottest temperatures ever recorded after 23 October 2017 in Southern California (along with the Weather Underground forecast for Tuesday) were:
- 105°F Riverside, 10/28/1915 (WU forecast for Tuesday: 100°F)
- 101°F LAX Airport, 11/1/1966 (WU forecast for Tuesday: 96°F)
- 101°F Long Beach, 11/1/1966 (WU forecast for Tuesday: 100°F)
- 100°F Downtown Los Angeles, 11/1/1966 (WU forecast for Tuesday: 101°F)
- 100°F Burbank/Glendale/Pasadena, 10/26/2003 (WU forecast for Tuesday: 99°F)
- 100°F San Diego, 11/4/2010 (WU forecast for Tuesday: 91°F)
- 99°F Bakersfield, 10/27/1906 (WU forecast for Tuesday: 90°F)
The heat wave and Santa Ana winds will be caused by a large near-record-strength dome of high pressure expected to settle in over the Great Basin, a few hundred miles northeast of Los Angeles. The difference in pressure between this high-pressure system and lower pressure over Southern California will drive gusty northeast winds over Southern California. Since these winds will originate over desert areas, they will be hot and dry. As the air descends from the mountains to the coast, the air will get hotter and drier, due to adiabatic compression—the process whereby the pressure on a parcel of air increases as it descends, decreasing its volume, and thus increasing its temperature as work is done on it. [more]
New Fire Danger Threatens to Worsen Most Disastrous Wildfire Season in California History
Ten Comandments for Climate Skeptics
1. Global climate is always changing in accordance with natural causes and recent changes are not unusual.
2. Science is rapidly evolving away from the view that humanity's emissions of carbon dioxide and other 'greenhouse gases' are a cause of dangerous climate change.
3. Climate models used by the IPCC* fail to reproduce known past climates without manipulation and therefore lack the scientific integrity needed for use in climate prediction and related policy decision-making.
4. The UN IPCC Summary for Policymakers and the assertions of IPCC executives too often seriously mis-represent the conclusions of their own scientific reports.
5. Claims that ‘consensus’ exists among climate experts regarding the causes of the modest warming of the past century are contradicted by thousands of independent scientists.
6. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant – it is a necessary reactant in plant photosynthesis and so is essential for life on Earth.
7. Research that identifies the Sun as a major driver of global climate change must be taken more seriously.
8. Global cooling has presented serious problems for human society and the environment throughout history while global warming has generally been highly beneficial.
9. It is not possible to reliably predict how climate will change in the future, beyond the certainty that multi-decadal warming and cooling trends, and abrupt changes, will all continue, underscoring a need for effective adaptation.
10. Since science and observation have failed to substantiate the human-caused climate change hypothesis, it is premature to damage national economies with `carbon' taxes, emissions trading or other schemes to control 'greenhouse gas' emissions. -skeptics.html
These are indeed the claims of people who deny the results of climate science, and every one is wrong in detail and wrong in substance. Rather than refute them point by point, interested readers can check out the excellent Skeptical Science site, created and maintained by the estimable John Cook.