More Heat Waves Happen When Greenhouse Gases Are Reduced!

Adapted from the chapter Extreme Weather Craze and Death Valley Days in

Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism, by Jim Steele.

The recent heat wave and near record-breaking temperatures in Death Valley provides a superb teaching moment to show why CO2 has nothing to do with heat waves whether the record is ever broken or not.

1. Most heat waves are associated with dry conditions. Water vapor contributes between 80 and 94% of the greenhouse effect. But during a dry heat wave, greenhouse gases are reduced, and that fact should alert people that other more critical factors are governing heat waves. The dryness lowers the soil’s heat capacity and allows temperatures to rise more rapidly. The dryness also creates clear skies that increase incoming solar radiation. The winter drought set the stage for this west coast heat wave as well as Europe 2003 and Russia 2010.

2. All heat waves are caused by stationary high pressure systems. Always! High pressures systems are driven dry descending air currents. In addition to the dryness amplification mentioned above, Highs cause 2 other critical weather events.

a. High pressure systems force the jet stream northward and prevent cooling air from moving southward.

b. Most importantly descending air currents adiabatically generate a thermal ceiling that prevents rising convection currents from carrying away surface heat. Models have demonstrated that if convection stops, the global temperature could rise by an additional 100°F. Adiabatic heating means no heat is added. Temperatures rise because the air is compressed and the constrained molecular motion releases heat. (Many cultures in southeast Asia used "fire pistons" to adiabatically start fires by simply squeezing air in a tube.) When adiabatically heated air reaches the ground we get foehn storms, and when it hovers a few hundred feet above the ground we get heat waves. Air only rises if it is warmer than its surroundings. When rising air reaches a layer of adiabatically heated air the rising convection currents stop and the surface heat is trapped just like the raised windows in your car trap the heat.

Descending air currents of High pressure systems are also the reason we have deserts and why the world’s records for hottest temperatures on each continent are not at the equator but about 32 to 36° North as seen in the above diagram. The reason for this pattern is the Hadley Cells. At the equator despite the greatest heating by the sun, convection currents carry away the heat.  Those rising currents are balanced by descending currents that are most powerfully focused in the regions that hold the world’s high temperature records. Those dry descending currents also cause the pattern of the world deserts. Those descending currents also create the quasi permanent high pressure system in the Pacific and the Bermuda High in the Atlantic.

Finally heat waves are caused by stationary blocking highs and all research shows that blocking highs are most common during the cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or North Atlantic Oscillation. The PDO cool phase occurred from about 1900 to 1920, again from 1946 to 1976, and we have currently been in the cool phase since about 2003. I bet most heat wave records for the western half of the USA occurred during those time periods. Death Valley’s record was 1913. However nearly every single model driven by CO₂ failed to predict the cooling in the eastern Pacific Ocean

The CO₂ advocates simply predicted heat waves in the future, but anyone can do that and be right eventually. However, the mechanisms of every heat wave contradict nearly every aspect of the global warming theory. Less water vapor is associated with heat waves not more, so the greenhouse effect is lessened. Advocates argue increasing CO₂ stores more heat, making heat waves more likely but Death Valley’s maximum temperatures have not exceeded the 1930s suggesting heat is not being trapped. Similarly most the recent heat waves have occurred in regions where maximum temperatures have not exceeded the 1940s. These heat waves are good examples of how natural weather dynamics cause extreme heat independently of the sun or CO₂.

Adapted from the chapter Extreme Weather Craze and Death Valley Days in

Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism, by Jim Steele.

Essay first posted to Watts Up With That as

Heat Waves Validate the Skeptics, guest post by Jim Steele,

guest post by Jim Steele Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University