Cliff Mass

            My VIP for this week is Cliff Mass, a scientist who dares to go up against the mainstream media to destroy its claims that Hurricane Harvey was stronger and had greater effects because of human-caused climate change. The University of Washington atmospheric scientist published a new blog post that demolished the stories published by “dozens of media outlets.” He says that the idea has no basis of truth.

Most of the stories were not based on data or any kind of quantitative analysis….

This blog will provide a careful analysis of the possible impacts of global warming on Hurricane Harvey. And the results are clear: human-induced global warming played an inconsequential role in this disaster….

The proximate cause of the disaster is clear: the extreme rainfall was the result of a hurricane/tropical storm that pulled in huge amounts of water vapor off the Gulf of Mexico (and beyond), and which came into the Texas coast and then stalled for days. All tropical storms/hurricanes bring large amounts of rain during landfall. What was different here was the stalling and sitting over the same region for days.

            Mass has a clear answer to “two important questions” about the storm. The questions are: “Did global warming juice up Hurricane Harvey, producing unusually heavy precipitation?  Did global warming cause the storm to stagnate for days? His clear answer to both questions is “no.” After offering many scientific explanations and charts, Mass comes to this conclusion.

The bottom line in this analysis is that both observations of the past decades and models looking forward to the future do not suggest that one can explain the heavy rains of Harvey by global warming, and folks that are suggesting it are poorly informing the public and decision makers….

One does not need global warming to explain extreme weather – sometimes the factors come together to produce an unusual event… think of it as a meteorological royal flush.

            Mass has support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The mainstream media does not seem to care about scientific facts because truth does not sustain their agenda.