Where I am writing, in the central interior of British Columbia, during the last 24 months we have experienced four weather extremes that seemed almost biblical in their impact.
One major weather forecaster described B.C.’s weather in 2021 as the “Year Through Hell.” If you look at 2020 and 2021, the result is more analogous to the Apocalypse than Hades.
According to the biblical story of the Apocalypse, aka the end of the world, there are Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The first horseman is Pestilence. In British Columbia, the first horseman was a polar vortex in early 2020 with cold temperatures that broke 100-year-old thermometer records.
The second biblical rider is War; in B.C during the summer of 2021, a heat dome crushed 100-year-old record-high temperatures.
The third rider from the book of Revelation is Famine. British Columbia’s third horseman was massive, but not record-breaking forest fires.
The fourth horseman of the Apocalypse is Death; and later in the fall of 2021, storms called atmospheric rivers broke 100-year-old rainfall records. All this at the same location in less than 24 months.
Climate change activists, the media, and politicians were quick to blame each event on human-caused climate change. But was it climate change? And if so, was it human-induced climate change?
The common denominator of these four extreme weather events is not human emissions of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the common denominator is the jet stream.
Changes to the jet stream were instrumental in setting up the polar vortex and heat dome. The heat dome intensified conditions for wildfires, and the landfall location and duration of the atmospheric rivers were influenced by the jet stream.
The schematic below shows that under normal conditions, the jet stream air current 10 km above our heads follows a mostly smooth, circular polar path that helps contain cold arctic air in the north and warm tropical air in the south.
In both polar vortex and heat dome conditions, the jet stream is not straight, but wavy. At the same ground location, you could experience Arctic cold by being on the north side of the wavy jet stream, and later experience tropical warmth by being on the south side.
This waviness is called a Rossby wave, named after the discoverer Carl Rossby in 1939. The waves can exist on any rotating planet with an atmosphere, as they do on Venus, and can also exist in oceans.
Atmospheric Rossby waves are created by the temperature difference between the air columns in the troposphere (the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere) on each side of the jet stream, and this temperature difference sets up a pressure difference between the two air columns when measured at the height of the jet stream.
The pressure on the ground under the cold Arctic air and the warm tropical air is approximately the same, but because the cold air is denser, the pressure drops faster as altitude increases.
The resulting pressure difference 10 km above us between the warm side (which has a higher pressure) and the cold side (which has a lower pressure) causes the wavy bulges (atmospheric Rossby waves) of the jet stream. The Rossby waves rotate around the globe in the same direction as the jet stream.
There is an educational short video on the jet stream by the UK Meteorological Office (Met) at What is the jet stream? – Met Office.
Global warming has caused the Arctic to warm up much faster than the rest of the globe. That means the temperature difference across the jet stream boundary between the Arctic side and the tropical side is less than it was before; therefore, the pressure differential is less, and the waviness should also be less.
While there are many other factors that affect Rossby waves in the jet stream, global warming should result in smaller Rossby waves.
Some solar researchers hypothesize that the changing magnetic field of the sun is altering the jet stream and amplifying the Rossby waves.
The 20th century was dominated by a period of high solar activity and a strong solar magnetic field. We have recently entered a new solar phase—the weakest solar activity in 200 years and a weaker solar magnetic field. This explanation is only theoretical and deserves more research.
The first extreme weather event, the polar vortex with 100-year record cold temperatures, cannot be adequately explained by normal Rossby waves.
The temperatures in B.C. were also influenced by the overlapping 2020 La Nina event (see graph below), which caused further cooling. If you would like to know more about La Nina and El Nino there is another short video by the UK Met at What are El Niño and La Niña? – Met Office.
B.C.’s 2020 polar vortex can be explained by a large Rossby wave which was stationary for a long period and then made colder by La Nina.
The second extreme weather event, the heat dome, was initiated by being on the warm side of a Rossby wave. We also know that El Nino events cause hotter weather in B.C. and an overall warmer global average temperature.
That did not happen in the summer of 2021; we had neutral conditions between La Nina and El Nino. What may have amplified a warm front into the heat dome is the stalling of the Rossby wave above B.C. for a protracted period of time.
The stalled heat wave evaporated water from the soil, and when that moisture was exhausted the soil absorbed the sun’s energy, which has only about one-quarter of the ability of water to absorb heat.
Under drought conditions the soil temperature increased quickly, which then radiated into the air, causing the heat dome. This is exactly what happened when Canada’s previous record-high thermometer temperature was set in 1937 at Yellow Grass, Saskatchewan.
The drought led to the third extreme weather event: the forest fires of 2021. As the extended “stuck” heat dome persisted the existing fuel in the forests became tinder in areas of high human activity.
The final extreme weather event, the atmospheric rivers, is the normal way 90% of water vapor is transferred from the tropics to the higher latitudes.
A brief overview can be found at Atmospheric Rivers | Global Hydrometeorology Resource Center (GHRC) (nasa.gov). What was unusual about the atmospheric rivers that hit B.C. in the fall of 2021 is that they were made more severe by three contributing factors.
These were analyzed by meteorologists Tyler Hamilton and Chris Scott at The Weather Network – The year through hell: Fingerprints of a changing climate in B.C.
The first is that in the fall of 2021 La Nina returned with its typical extra moisture pushed to the Pacific Northwest (which is good for skiers!).
It also was a time that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (another natural weather pattern similar to El Nino but slower and in the north Pacific) was negative, which also contributes to a wetter B.C.
And as with the three previous weather events, the atmospheric rivers got stalled over B.C. for a prolonged period of time.
Hamilton and Scott attributed the excessive rainfall at individual locations to the duration that the storms were stationary, not to the amount of total rainfall. They called it “extremely bad luck” that the rainfall was not spread out over a larger area.
Hamilton offered a fourth reason these atmospheric rivers were more severe: Global warming increases the capacity of air to carry water. When you re-examine Roy Spencer’s graph (above), there is minimal global warming since 1980 and none since 1998; the increased moisture effect had already been built in for decades and was not increasing.
That would put a two-to-four-decade delay between global warming as the cause and increased rainfall as the effect.
Each of the four horsemen of extreme weather events in B.C. during 2020 and 2021 was significantly amplified by natural weather patterns determined by the combination of Rossby waves, La Nina/El Nino, and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
The common denominator of why they were amplified to biblical levels is that the Rossby waves of the jet stream stalled over central British Columbia. We don’t know why this happens, but it is not linked to carbon dioxide or global warming.
As pointed out in Climate Change Nexus, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls this stalling “atmospheric blocking” but does not see any trends linking atmospheric blocking to climate change (IPCC AR6: Atmospheric Blocking, Unspun Edition | Climate Discussion Nexus).
Without any scientific backing, our politicians and media have already decided it was human-induced climate change. The victims were part of the collective responsibility for their own suffering.
Maybe something natural is changing the jet stream, such as the changing magnetic field of the sun, or maybe it was just extremely bad luck. But to claim that increasing carbon taxes and mandating electric vehicles will prevent extreme weather doesn’t add up.
You can lead the four horses to water, but you can’t make them drink.
Ron Barmby (www.ronaldbarmby.ca) is a Professional Engineer with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree, whose 40+ year career in the energy sector has taken him to over 40 countries on five continents. He recently published “Sunlight on Climate Change: A Heretic’s Guide to Global Climate Hysteria” (Amazon, Barnes & Noble) to explain in understandable terms the science of how both natural and human-caused global warming work.
Have you done any investigations into the HAARP Weather manipulation technology? Apparently there are 5 installations on Earth, 2 in North America. Check it out!
I will check it out. Thanks!
Ron, a very good summation indeed.
I follow Cap Allon at electroverse.net and what you say fits well with his anaylsis of current weather conditions.
Colin; Thank you very much. I appreciate it. If you have colleagues in Canada, please send them the link!
We’re seeing something today that was prevalent in biblical times; the sermons from the pulpits, that we bring these plagues on ourselves. We’re paying sin taxes at the pump.
Sonnyhill; the sin taxes at the pump are also similar to the medieval cash indulgences that were paid to the church to forgive sins or to release souls from purgatory. The costs were immediate and painful to the masses while the benefits flowed to the elites.
Climate change to AGW is really scary. We are now seeing 1000 year events happening. The frequency that they can happen is becoming less and less. 1000 year events might happen every 500 years. 100 year event might happen every 50 years. But what is more scary if this not caused by AGW. If the cause is a wandering Jet stream caused by a week sun, these events will be happening much more frequently. That means were are entering an era when we can see these events happen every few years. We need to get the word out. Thank you for your great article.
Len, thanks for the compliment on the article. In Canada, we need to be fixing 100-year old flood control dikes that have been neglected, a national emergency response agency, and raising our construction standards for infrastructure. We don’t need government subsidized wind power for mandated EV’s.
Question for Ron Barmby. Do you consider yourself a “climate change denier”? Certain article I have read have me wondering!!