Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
“Unprecedented” is an overused meteorological buzzword, but in the case of the June 2021 Pacific Northwest Heatwave, it is absolutely warranted. This heatwave shattered meteorologist’s preconceptions of what the upper-limit to temperatures is in the Willamette Valley and Pacific NW as a whole. The map of high temperatures recorded on Monday 6/28 defies superlatives. My […]
There has been a lot of talk about climate change, and how we need to do everything we can to mitigate it. At the same time, there has been a lot of talk about how the climate is “always changing,” and that there’s nothing we should or even can do about decreasing our carbon emissions. […]
On Wednesday, the New York times came out with an alarming article. It said that a new, high-resolution model was showing that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), a massive ice sheet west of the “Transantarctic Mountains” that divides the continent into eastern and western sections, could melt far faster than previously thought, with sea […]
Wednesday, January 20, 2016 12:24 pm Charles Dudley Warner once said that “everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” That time has come and passed, as we now have some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world running millions of lines of code and assimilating terabytes of data to make […]
Thursday, January 28, 2016 1:44 pm Credit: NOAA National Center for Environmental InformationRetrieved from www.resilientdesign.org 2015 was destined to be the warmest year on record. In terms of ocean temperatures, we had one of the strongest El Niños on record brewing in the Tropical Pacific, a mighty “Blob” of warm water in the Northeast Pacific, and abundant […]
Wednesday, September 23, 2015 3:52 pm Albuquerque Tea Party, April 2009 Global warming deniers come in all shapes and sizes. Some are quite bold in their statements, denying any reasonable scientific claim, and instead claiming that global warming is a ‘socialist scam.’ Others are more subtle, claiming that evidence […]
Monday, October 5, 2015 2:49 pm The Pacific Northwest is no stranger to flooding. I believe that Washington has had the most federal disaster declarations of any state, which may be surprise you due to our seemingly-mundane weather. But we get these massive floods from time to time, and we also have a tendency to get […]
Tuesday, March 31, 2015 11:27 am Why do people deny global warming? While it is a hypothesis and not a scientific law, this hypothesis has verified since the dawn of the industrial revolution, with the Earth warming nearly 1 degree Celsius since then. Take a look at the picture below, which shows the increase in […]
Thursday, May 22, 2014 4:19 p.m. “Cosmos” has always been a fantastic show, but it, and its host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, seem to have gained even more popularity recently. The thing I love about Mr. Tyson is that he’s not only a fantastic science educator, but he’s not afraid to call out those who don’t […]
Tuesday, January 7, 2014 12:14 a.m. I don’t know how many of you watched the Packers-49ers game on Sunday, but it looked absolutely frigid. The grass was brown. The surface temperature was 3 or 4 degrees. Green Bay actually got down to -18 that day, which is a record. That’ll freeze cheese. My cousin Colleen […]
