Debunked: Completely Engineered Extremes In Weather (Temperature Probability Charts)

Mick West

Administrator
Staff member
An article on Rense.com by Dane Wigington claims that the following two charts show a highly artificial and unusual change in the weather in less than a week.


This is described as:
http://www.rense.com/general96/condition.html (http://archive.is/1J73Z)
The two NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) maps below should be shocking even to a layman of meteorology. The map on top is for the period from February 19-23, the map below is for the period immediately after, February 24-28. These maps are polar opposites and show with clearing clarity the degree to which the weather makers are "forcing" the climate system. Record cold in some regions flips to record warm, and the exact reverse scenario occurs in other zones. All of this in the space of less than a week?
Content from External Source
Unfortunately it seems the writer has misinterpreted the maps. Firstly these are not actually descriptions of what happened, they are forecasts of six days in the future. But most importantly they are not actually temperature maps. They are forecasts of the the probability of the temperature being above or below the normal range.

The maps just show if the temperature is likely to be above or below normal, it does not show how much above or below. And because this is the six day forecast, it's very rough. What he really should be looking at is the actual temperature.

Here's the temp forecast for feb 21th (tomorrow). This is in the middle of the date range for the first chart from Rense.
http://preview.weather.gov/graphical/


And here's five days later.


Note this is the exact same time periods as used in the Rense article. However what you see looks vastly different. This is because the Rense charts don't show temperatures, just higher/lower probabilities.

Yes, some regions of the country experience swings in temperature. Tennessee for example goes from 76°F to 46°F. But this is not really that unusual. Temperature variations are largely governed by the movement of air masses. Warm air from the south, and cold air from the north. So when the weather systems move, you get swings in temperature. To determine how unusual these are, we need to look at a historical record.

Here's a chart of temperature for 2013, Macon, Georgia, US.
http://weatherspark.com/history/30840/2013/Macon-Georgia-United-States^

Notice the overall trend with the seasons, but then the wild swings in both high and low temperatures, and much as 30°F (or more) at times. These swings are both normal, and expected. Here's the chart for Los Angeles, in 2011:

Notice the bar across the top of the above chart. It shows red, white and blue regions. This is similar to what is being forecast in the original NOAA charts. These are periods when the temperature is above average (red), normal (white), or below average (blue)

And these variations are not a new thing. Here's the chart for 1950 Georgia:

http://weatherspark.com/history/30840/1960/Macon-Georgia-United-States (http://archive.is/C9sFk)


1950 Los Angeles:
http://weatherspark.com/history/30699/1950/Los-Angeles-California-United-States (http://archive.is/eyNgF)


1960 Los Angeles:


1970 Los Angeles:


Large variations in temperature are not unusual.


Here's an interesting chart from the Washington post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/hot-hot-hot/2012/07/07/gJQA5CcnSW_graphic.html (http://archive.is/7PQRq)



It shows the high temperature each week for the last 17 years (up to 2012). You can see that significant changes in temperature are not uncommon. The daily temperature is not a smooth up and down curve from winter to summer. It's really rather random.

And these variation in temperature from week to week are really not even that incredible if we look at history. One of the most dramatic swings in temperature came on November 1911, in Oklahoma City, when the temperature went from a high of 83°F to a low of 17°F in just 12 hours^! And that's simply the biggest temperature change, not the fastest. On Jan 22 1943, in Spearfish Dakota, the temperature went from -2°F to 45°F in just two minutes^!
^

This change happened for the same basic reason as the other swings in temperature in the US charts above - but on a much more local scale - it's the shift in boundary between a warm and a cold air mass:



The 1923 incident, or course, was just some wildly unusual, but natural weather. But imagine if it had happened today (and it will certainly happen again, at some point). Unfortunately people have short memories, and don't often look at history.

The most dramatic changes in US weather come from the meandering jet stream - the boundary between warmer air in the south, and cold air in the north. This is naturally variable, and always has been. Some years it is more variable than others.





There's some suggestion that global warming might make the jet stream a bit more variable, but also slower. But it's not clear yet.

What is clear is that the larger US variations in temperature are historically normal.
 
Last edited:
After the recent cold streaks, we are enjoying the low 70s here in North Georgia today. Very typical for the temp to fluctuate like this. I had to turn my AC on in my room, mostly because it is on the top floor and get hotter quicker than the rest of the house.
 
I don't know if this belongs in this topic, but I was reading up on Contrails on Wiki and found an interesting fact. It deals with climate, more specifically our day/night temperature variations. Immediately after 9/11 the US had a rare 3 day window to do a study on the effects of Contrails and our temps because all flights were grounded.
September 11, 2001 climate impact study[edit]
The grounding of planes for three days in the United States after September 11, 2001 provided a rare opportunity for scientists to study the effects of contrails on climate forcing. Measurements showed that without contrails, the local diurnal temperature range (difference of day and night temperatures) was about 1 °C (1.8 °F) higher than immediately before;[7] however, it has also been suggested that this was due to unusually clear weather during the period.[8]

Condensation trails have been suspected of causing "regional-scale surface temperature" changes for some time.[9][10] Researcher David J. Travis, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, has published and spoken on the measurable impacts of contrails on climate change in the science journal Natureand at the American Meteorological Society's 10th Annual conference in Portland, Oregon. The effect of the change in aircraft contrail formation on the three days after the 11th was observed in surface temperature change, measured across over 4,000 reporting stations in the continental United States.[9] Travis' research documented an "anomalous increase in the average diurnal temperature change".[9] The diurnal temperature range (DTR) is the difference in the day's highs and lows at any weather reporting station.[11] Travis observed a 1.8 °C (3.24 °F) departure from the two adjacent three-day periods to the 11th–14th.[9] This increase was the largest recorded in 30 years, more than "2 standard deviations away from the mean DTR".[9]

The September 2001 air closures are deeply unusual in the modern world, but similar effects have provisionally been identified from Second World War records, when flying was more tightly controlled. A 2011 study of climate records in the vicinity of large groups of airbases found a case where contrails appeared to induce a statistically significant change in local climate, with a temperature variance around 0.8 °C, suggesting that examination of historic weather data could help study these effects.[12]
Content from External Source
So ultimately, contrails (not chemtrails) do have an effect on our climate and Earth's radiation balance.
 
Last edited:
Minor update. Here's what actually happened (i.e todays forecast)



- not too different from the original 6-day forecast.:
 
Geoengineeringwatch.org continues to misrepresent (or misunderstand) these charts.
http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/manipulating-the-climate-manipulating-the-data/

Dane Wigington
geoengineeringwatch.org

Take a good look at the latest NOAA "forecast" map below, the radical temperature anomalies it shows are meteorologically unprecedented. Each color band represents 2-3 degrees of temperature escalation or decline depending on the color shading. Blues are below normal, reds and oranges are above. In summary, the NOAA map shows three distinct extremely hot zones with one below normal zone of cooler than normal. How can there be such anomalies? Radical and highly destructive climate manipulation is how.
Content from External Source


It's worth looking at the real explanation of the NOAA maps to get sense of how wrong the Geoengineeringwatch.org article is:

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/erf_info.php?outlook=610&var=t

The 6-10 day Outlook gives the confidence that a forecaster has, given as a probability, that the observed temperature, averaged over upcoming days 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 will be in the range of one of three possible categories - below (B), normal (N), or above (A). For any calendar 5-day period, these categories can be defined by separating the 30 years of the climatology period, 1981-2010 (30 years), into the coldest 10 years, the middle 10 years, and the warmest 10 years.

Because each of these categories occurs 1/3 of the time (10 times) during 1981-2010, for any particular calendar 5-day period, the probability of any category being selected at random from the 1981-2010 set of 30 observations is one in three (1/3), or 33.33%. This is also called the climatological probability. The sum of the climatological probabilities of the three categories at any point on the map is 100%.



Graphical Information
The colored shading on the map indicates the degree of confidence the forecaster has in the category indicated, where "B" and blue colors indicate "below-normal" and "A" and orange-red colors indicate "above normal". The darker the shading, the greater is the level of confidence. The numbers labeling the contours separating different shades gives the probability that the indicated category (A, B, or N) will occur.

The probabilities of all three categories are implied on the map, and sum to 100%. The forecast probabilities given on the map generally fall far short of complete confidence (100%) in any single category. When the probability of the above (A) or below (B) category is greater than 33.33% by some amount, the probability of the opposite category declines by that amount, while the probability of the middle category remains at 33.33%. In the event that the "N" category is greater than 33.33%, the probabilities of both the "A" and "B" categories is each reduced by 1/2 the amount that the "N" category exceeds 33.33%. When the probability of "A", or "B" reaches 63.33% or higher, the odds of the opposite category reach a minimum allowed value of 3.33%, while the odds of the middle category are allowed to drop below 33.33%.

The dashed contours on the map give the average of the temperature over the set of 30 observations for the calendar 5-day period during 1981-2010, in degrees Farenheit.

Content from External Source
Or more briefly, the map shows the degree of confidence that a given area will fall in to "Above", "Below" or "Normal", which are calculated so they have historically occurred 33% of the time at that location. In other words, these conditions happen all the time. There's nothing at all unusual about them. Wigington is simply misreading a probability graph as a temperature graph.
 
Wigington is simply misreading a probability graph as a temperature graph
Yes, but the probability is related to the temperature. If I'm 90% confident that the temperature will be above normal then it will probably be well above normal. The probabilities can probably be translated to predicted temperature anomalies in some way. See e.g. this temperature anomaly prediction:
 
Yes, but the probability is related to the temperature. If I'm 90% confident that the temperature will be above normal then it will probably be well above normal. The probabilities can probably be translated to predicted temperature anomalies in some way. See e.g. this temperature anomaly prediction:

That would be a better chart to use - but then even that would be misused, as he's attempting to show that the temperature variations could only come via climate engineering. I think perhaps it's a misunderstanding of the word "anomaly" which he seems to interpret as something that is bizarre and unprecedented. Really all it means is "not average". And on a daily basis, the weather is rarely average - and certainly not everywhere in the country.
 
Sure, although the persistent Warm West/Cold East dipole in North America, associated with what is called the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge is indeed an anomaly.

It's unfortunate that there's not a better word usage here though. The RRR is a significant anomaly. However the high temperature being 95° instead of 88° today is also an anomaly, just not significant.
 
You would think that a world famous climate scientist like Dane (he is actually only a High School graduate) would eventually realize his mistake, or that someone, even a friend might correct him. Instead he doubles down on his error?

Probably he can't tolerate the slightest hint that he could be wrong and has insulated himself from correction. But by doing so he has set the stage for making the exact same error a year later.
 
That would be a better chart to use - but then even that would be misused, as he's attempting to show that the temperature variations could only come via climate engineering. I think perhaps it's a misunderstanding of the word "anomaly" which he seems to interpret as something that is bizarre and unprecedented. Really all it means is "not average". And on a daily basis, the weather is rarely average - and certainly not everywhere in the country.

This (bolded) is the crux of the matter. Dane seems to expect that the temperature should be "about average" across the whole country at the same time. For a country the size of the USA, that is not only unlikely, it is almost impossible. You will generally have a series of high and low pressure systems around the northern hemisphere, and on the western side of each high pressure ridge it will generally be hotter than average, while on the eastern side it will be cooler than average. The size of typical high pressure systems around the northern hemisphere mean you will generally have at least one ridge-trough system, so somewhere is generally going to be on the hot side and somewhere on the cool side.

Eg the forecast pressure chart to go with that temperature forecast for next Thursday:



The trough centred over the Great Lakes means there is cooler air coming down over the Midwest and generally keeping things cool in the eastern US.
 
As an example, the forecast chart for a week's time suggests a very intense plume of hot air coming up towards the UK:



If that happens then the temperature could reach 32-35C here (90-95F) which is pretty unusual.

This chart shows how much above average the temperature could be in London (the red line is long-term mean, the coloured lines are the various model runs, and the temperature is the upper air temperature at 850 millibars, or about 1 mile above sea level. The spikes at the bottom show rainfall.)



And the flip side of that is that further east there will be a cooler plunge of air, such that when London gets hot, Moscow will be considerably cooler than average:

 
Last edited:
I think perhaps it's a misunderstanding of the word "anomaly" which he seems to interpret as something that is bizarre and unprecedented. Really all it means is "not average". And on a daily basis, the weather is rarely average - and certainly not everywhere in the country.


Seems like he is simply misinterpreting or not recognizing climate and/or weather history. I mean aren't "anomalies" the norm? Isnt climate history- and in fact basic daily weather- filled with variations and extremes that then get computed into "averages" ?

A scenario like the RRR has likely occurred many times over the last 10,000 yrs, why is the only explanation GE?
 
It seems to me that the color palette used in the NOAA map is its most important feature for geoengineeringwatch.org followers. Red means "bad" and that is really just the extent of it. Complicated examination takes them away from simple, easy distinctions.

The anomaly portion of the RRR is interesting. This might stray into the psychology of CT believers, but it might be that it is easier for them to understand weather subject to an omnipotent authority (Wigington's "global power structure") than admit that sometimes nature simply defies prediction, like many other things in the world.
 
This might stray into the psychology of CT believers, but it might be that it is easier for them to understand weather subject to an omnipotent authority (Wigington's "global power structure") than admit that sometimes nature simply defies prediction, like many other things in the world.

IMHO that is the root cause of a lot of conspiracy theories. People prefer to believe that bad things are being done deliberately (and therefore could potentially be stopped from happening if we could do away with the Bad Guys), than to believe that bad things happen randomly and thus will always happen.
 
Back
Top