World Weather

Here in the Willamette Valley in Western Oregon, we have three seasons none are extreme for long.

Cold and Rainy (winter)

Warm and Rainy (Spring)

Hot and Humid (Summer and Fall)

In North Dakota we have winter and not quite winter, where its not as cold but it still can snow at any time.

However we are still collectively doing our best to bring about global warming but to this point we don't seem to be making any headway and are starting to think that it may have all just been another big business, big government, and environutter scam to make more money off of uneducated half wits again.

Climatologists say that global warming means increase in energy in the atmosphere which in turn will produce greater extremes of weather.

Areas that have never experienced tornados are seeing them now. We have plenty of such examples here in parts of the USA where tornados would have been unthinkable 50 years ago when I was a kid. Another thing we are seeing is increasingly powerful hurricanes forming along the Pacific coast of Mexico and occasionally hitting Baja California. I imagine that this is something that seldom gets reported over there in Mississippi.

The South is getting some pretty scary flooding; but sitting out here in CA I have no good visibility of whether the patterns of rainfall from storms has worsened there. One thing we've noticed is uncommon drought periods in Georgia and Florida that don't seem to have precedent in my lifetime.

Here in Northern CA the old familiar transitions from one season to another are getting pushed around and most noticeably those transitions appear to me to be more sudden and unpredictable. The rainy season out here continued all the way into early May. Usually it stops in early April. Rain throughout April with its longer days has resulted in plant growth, most noticeably annual weeds, unlike anything I've seen in 35 years.

Ed Weldon

I would have to say Ron, that I concur with you on that as today it reached 92 Deg F here on this the second day of summer. I have lived here all my life and this is the first time that I can remember it not being over 100 Deg F by this time. I grew up here and when I was a kid I can remember it being over 120 Deg F more often than not and it would average between 115-118 Deg F on a regular bases. Not that I am complaining you under stand, it's kinda like an extended spring one of my favorite times of year. And 3 Years ago I saw the coldest winter here that I have ever seen here in a place that typically hangs in the mid to high 20's during a cold spell and barely on the edge of freezing the rest of the time it went to -6 Deg F and boy were the plumbers busy for the next couple days.

In Utah we have two seasons to add to your list:

Winter and

Road construction.

Weather always is at extremes during democratic administrations...

ya.. during the last part of the election process, you had a cold twister blowing hot air all the way from alaska. it was very extreme.

_{^{I'm so glad Mr. Potatohead didn't get in.}}

This has been one of the wettest spring/summers (I know summer just started) that I can recall here in central Illinois.

Over the course of the last four weeks we have had a minimum of 4 storm warnings and or flood warnings per week.

The last two weeks, my weather radio has gone off in the middle of the night at least every other night.

I have talked to a few of the old timers (60+ years old) in my area and they agree that this has been unusual but not alarming.

You can drive for miles out here and EVERY field has ponding to some degree that I don't recall ever seeing.

My take on this is these recent weather events are just part of the natural cycle of weather.

In the following cited book Flannery, Tim; The Eternal Frontier, an ecological history of North America and its peoples; Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, NY; 2001 The following statements are made that I found to be very interesting on page 83, he states "North America's climate is strongly determined by its shape - a great, inverted wedge with a 6500 kilometer wide base deep in the sub-Arctic. To the south the wedge narrows until it is reduced to a peninsula just sixty kilometer wide, terminating eight degree north of the equator in a narrow isthmus boldly abutting an expansive South America. On its eastern side the wedge is reinforced by the Appalachians, while in the west the Rocky Mountains perform the same function. No other continent has this configuration." on page 86, he states "Temperature ranges in North America can vary incredibly over a brief period. The town of Spearfish in North Dakota holds the world's record from -18.9 degrees Celsius to 3.3 degrees Celsius in two minutes." And on page 86 he also states "Ninety percent of the world's tornadoes occur in North America - most originating between the Rockies and the Mississippi River."

Foreign weather patterns that I'm aware of include sirocco winds in the Mediterranean region (like California's Santa Ana winds) and the sand storms of Arabia.

Tornados are a distinctly American phenomenon. They occur elsewhere but with nowhere near the frequency or regularity of Tornado Alley. I'd love to stumble into a weather-related job sometime where I could learn the presumably many causes of this localization.

The Western US has a monsoon season, but it's much more subtle than in the tropics or Eastern Hemisphere. In Utah, it drives the humidity well into double digits. :)

Like AH asserts, it's hard to discern causative relationships between the activity of a short-lived species like us and climate. But I believe that there's something very real about civilization's impact on the global climate. When you have learned people predicting Arctic ice-out within a decade or two, it's utterly foolish to not be wary.

a solid rebuttal. ga.

Correcting for the effect you cite is pretty simple.

No doubt our sprawling population and technology contributes to weather awareness. We get cell phone video of floods in Manilla the same day they happen nowadays. I grew up in S. Dak. and weathered a few tornado warnings over the years, but now the TV weather reveals that there were probably severe storms all over the state every summer day all along. However, there are very real spikes in recent patterns.

We "always" knew where the ocean ice ended, for example. Boundaries are far removed from where they were 100-200 years ago, or even longer in isolated cases where our records are good enough. Comparison of archives with the current state of many natural places show noticeable differences. And of course really long-term analysis based on naturally occurring records is alarming.

Global temperatures set all-time records nearly as often as Exxon profits do. We had a tornado here ten years ago, for the first time that anyone could remember. There seems to be an uptick in severe hurricanes, droughts are longer, some areas are getting a lot wetter than they're used to, mountains are drying out and heating up. Species are being forced to move due to temperature or other changes not associated with people trampling their habitats.

Your conclusions are sketchy and reveal that we don't have sufficient data a determination to make. Our collective knowledge and understanding shift as often as the climate changes and we are maybe no closer to realizing the big picture.