writeaboutwarming

July 27, 2015 - It's great to be sitting in my very own office, and writing to you from Washington state. We've been here for 3 months now, and feel very much as though we've wound up in paradise.  The views of Mt. St. Helen's, Mt. Adams, and Mt. Hood are spectacular, the Columbia River Gorge is incomparable, and Portland is a very fun town, albeit one that suffers from horrible traffic.  We're feeling very blessed these days, and humbled by our good fortune. The weather here is quite different from what much of the country has endured.  Unlike the rain which has flooded so much of the middle and the south of the country, Washington is in the midst of a drought, along with Oregon and California, of course.  While our situation is nothing like California's, which is dire, there have been a number of wildfires this summer.  Farmers are getting by using irrigation, and the fruit crops look abundant to my inexperienced eyes.  I, for the first time, am the pro...

February 18, 2014 – A new El Nino prediction method is stirring up controversy.   Developed by researchers from Germany, Russia, Israel and the U.S., they maintain they can predict El Nino events with 76% accuracy up to a year in advance.   The current method has yet to surmount a so-called ”spring predictability barrier,” thereby limiting forecasts to a six month lead time. As a reminder, El Nino’s begin in the Pacific Ocean, off the equatorial coast of South America, which includes the countries of Ecuador and Peru.   The water of the ocean in this location heats up.   They have increased in severity over the years, causing climatic chaos around the world.   Hot, humid weather in the U.S. and South America, along with heavy rain, often leads to flooding on these two continents.   The opposite effect takes hold in southeast Asia and Australia, where intense drought has lead to greatly extended wildfire seasons.   El Nino’s are actually p...

July 5, 2009 – Have you ever heard of something called El Nino Modoki? I learned about it for the first time this week. El Nino is the weather phenomenon which, in the United States, causes us to have very wet summers. (La Nina causes them to be cool and dry.) In Peru, where this climatological aberration was first observed, the waters of the Pacific coast of Peru become warmer than usual. This aberration, astonishingly enough, affects weather all over the world. One effect of El Nino is a calmer-than-usual hurricane season. This year, however, has been – and, according to some experts, will be - different. I’ve written about the weather this year from time to time. It’s been an exceptionally rainy year. Much of the rain seems to fall in torrents, the result of violent storms. Temperatures in much of the Midwest were lower than normal during most of the spring. Lately, they’ve become much higher, accompanied by very high humidity. But this is El Nino with a twist. We’re now ...