raindancewx

For the past year, the precipitation patterns locally have behaved much more like older years than recent years. Will be real curious to see if that continues into the rest of Summer and Fall. The most similar years to July-June 2020-21 also produced a wet monsoon. Some of the early things I look at imply a reversion toward a neutral or positive PDO base state by late year too.

I probably come off as an asshole in a lot of these threads, but I am wealthy and I did buy and donate some air conditioning units to some friends who own hardware stores in the Northwest and Canada once this heat wave started to show up in the 5-7 day. I work with par sheets, math and statistics in a casino a lot for my job, including forecasting. So even if the odds for this event are 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 1,000,000 in a natural climate, the truth is I've seen award pays listed at 1 in 350,000 or lower odds happen on back to back pulls. The reason it happens in the casino is probably similar to why it happens in the climate. The odds may be super low for an event to happen, but even a place like SW Canada or the Northwest US is only a small portion of the Earth and so those odds are for each square mile of the Earth for each day of the year. The odds are not 1 in 1,000 for the entire Earth to be +50 on a given day. The odds are for one particular spot on the Earth. So the same thing happens with the games, with 1,000+ machines and several featuring multiple denominations, or multiple play options or multiple games within the game (Poker, Blackjack etc) the real world effect is we've given two $500,000+ awards (from the vendor fortunately, not the tribe) in just the past year, even though the machines are setup to pay that much - correctly - at extremely low odds comparable to the odds you see the scientists throw around.

Subsurface top matches for April-June 2021: Blend Apr May Jun 1987 0.31 0.58 0.37 1987 0.31 0.58 0.37 2004 0.21 0.30 0.04 2011 0.58 0.47 0.39 2014 1.41 0.95 0.27 Mean 0.56 0.58 0.29 2021 0.60 0.65 0.32 June 1987 is a pretty good match to June 2021. Not likely to be a good match in July though. Since the 1979 subsurface observations began, there has never been a June with the subsurface as warm as 2021 that went into a La Nina in winter. Years like 2000 were slightly positive in June, and then went into weak La Ninas though. Solar activity is also rapidly rising now. Monthly sunspot average was 16.2 from July 2020-June 2021. https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ocean/index/heat_content_index.txt Local precipitation patterns are a dead on match over the last year to some famous hurricane patterns for the US. Will be curious how that plays out this year.

I don't really a buy a La Nina this strong. But the trend toward a stronger La Nina is there on the Canadian for winter.

The western part of the tropical pacific is very similar now to 2013. Eastern areas? Not really. Not yet anyway. 05JUN2013 22.0-1.5 25.9-0.9 27.5-0.4 28.8-0.2 12JUN2013 21.9-1.2 25.9-0.7 27.5-0.3 28.8-0.2 19JUN2013 21.1-1.7 25.7-0.8 27.3-0.4 28.6-0.4 26JUN2013 20.5-2.0 25.6-0.7 27.4-0.2 28.8-0.2 02JUN2021 23.2-0.4 26.6-0.2 27.6-0.2 28.8-0.2 09JUN2021 23.2-0.0 26.7-0.0 27.8-0.0 28.9-0.1 16JUN2021 23.3 0.4 26.0-0.5 27.2-0.5 28.8-0.2 23JUN2021 22.9 0.2 26.3-0.0 27.6-0.0 29.0 0.0

The Omega Block giveth and it taketh away. Looks like the high was 66 here. That's the coldest high on record, tied with 7/15/1968 for the 1892-2021 period centered on 7/1, i.e. 6/16-7/15. Edit: 67 for a hot minute. Still very close to all-time record cold. Coldest high since 1997 for a June day.

The stuff in the Northwest is more impressive than any heat wave in the Southwest during the Summer. Phoenix had some record highs this June, but daily records. Not state or all time or anything like that. We have less physical capacity for highs to run above averages down here, so you end up with a lot of years when a few days end up relatively near the 122 all-time record in Phoenix. Hitting 110+ in Canada or the Northwest is way more impressive when you have less bunching and it takes everything going right (wrong) for a record to be broken so easily despite being 20-40 above average. I can say for Albuquerque, the all-time record high is 107 degrees. So from mid-April to mid-October, that means in 90 years of records it's never 35 above average for at least six months of the year, like some places in the Northwest were. The 107 is around 15 above average.

Salem, Oregon. Keep in mind, Phoenix also had ~14% humidity when it was also 117 on the 18th.

First of all, I'm probably younger than you. Second of all, you never gave a solution for states like where I live where those mean old oil companies are literally paying for my infrastructure, or at least 45% of it. Do you have a way for the state to make up those revenues, or just some empty rhetoric? I'm trying to tell you that the type of taxation that would meaningfully make a difference for emissions would leave people worse off meaningfully. Nothing is free. The Democrats have had almost complete control of the state law making bodies and executive branch since statehood, if they had the slightest interest in changing policy, presumably they would have by now. This may shock you, but knowing about science doesn't make you a good economist or a good city planner. It doesn't even make you a good advocate for science really, since that involves communication. Politicians aren't the planners of society. The world is the culmination of hundreds of billions of decisions. My point is merely that the gist of these threads is that because scientists in the field are very concerned about Climate Change, but people like the book author, you know actual scientists, are not, it strikes me as insane to say "We should only listen to Climate Scientists on the Climate. Only they are experts. Oh, but they aren't experts in any of these adjacent fields like ethics, economics, international relations, but obviously we should still unquestionably accept their input unflinchingly". That's your position from the gist of your post. https://www.abqjournal.com/2403026/nm-oil-output-at-record-levels-after-crash.html Despite attempts to diversify New Mexico’s economy, the state currently gets nearly 45% of its total revenue – or more than $4 billion annually – from taxes and royalties on the oil and natural gas industries.

Nino1+2 Nino3 Nino34 Nino4 Week SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA 26MAY2021 23.4-0.5 26.7-0.3 27.6-0.3 28.8-0.1 02JUN2021 23.2-0.4 26.6-0.2 27.6-0.2 28.8-0.2 09JUN2021 23.2-0.0 26.7-0.0 27.8-0.0 28.9-0.1 16JUN2021 23.3 0.4 26.0-0.5 27.2-0.5 28.8-0.2 23JUN2021 22.9 0.2 26.3-0.0 27.6-0.0 29.0 0.0 About as neutral as you'll ever see this week. Subsurface is still slightly warm. Currently in Omega Block bliss here, with temperatures not topping the low 70s, rain, and no 90 degree readings in the forecast.

It's still kind of funny to me that this heat wave, which has a chance at setting all time (national and state) heat records is being compared to the heat down here earlier in the month. I think I had one record daily high in June on 6/14? I've got two potential all-time record low highs coming in the next four days. 120 in Phoenix is just very different from 110 in Portland Oregon. When you get the 600 decameter monsters down here, a lot of times they under-perform because any moisture in the air is destroyed, and you end up with a 67/102 day instead of a 75/105 day. In the Northwest you have actual oceans and bodies of water nearby to really juice the lows and allow for some nasty air-masses. When the map below happened last year, the lows were still around 70 each day, even with a ~2 degree urban heat island effect in Albuquerque for the lows on top of the 1.8F degree warming/century that is present in all other sites in NM. I can't even imagine a 112 degree day, +35F v. average, with a dew point in the 50s-60s all day like Portland had today, you just never have that oppressive stuff here. 104 with a dew point of 66 at 1pm is the type of the thing that would easily kill people not used to it. https://forecast.weather.gov/data/obhistory/KPDX.html

The look on the CFS for July has been fairly consistent with the big positive March WPO correlation to July for a while now. Not to mention the May -NAO correlation to July.

The big hints for next winter at this juncture are the periodic record WPO values, the first (net) -NAO winter in forever, and then how cold Nino 4 was in winter. Winters after negative NAO winters tend to be cold in the eastern 2/3 of the US, but signal is weak, with a Great Basin warm signal: Winters after a cold Nino 4 winter tend to be cold Southwest, WA, CA, warm east coast and south. Again, signal is weak. Winters after a very positive WPO winter tend to be warm eastern 1/3 of the US and Montana. Not a whole lot of -NAO, +WPO, very cold Nino 4 winter combinations either to get the transition to the 2021-22 winter. DJF WPO NAO Nino4 2020 1.40 -0.42 27.32 2008 0.91 -0.08 27.48 2000 0.44 0.04 27.46 1959 0.38 -0.91 27.70 1952 0.28 -0.20 27.93 2007 0.43 0.65 26.97 July 2009 had the prior hottest day in Seattle at 103 late month. So it's interesting to see that year pop up when the subsurface has been similar. 1959 0.38 -0.91 27.70 1959 0.38 -0.91 27.70 2008 0.91 -0.08 27.48 2007 0.43 0.65 26.97 Mean 0.52 -0.31 27.46 2020 1.4 -0.42 27.32 I actually had mentioned 1959-60 as a "C-tier analog" in the back of my outlook last Fall for the winter because I thought it would be an OK temperature match at times. It was an excellent match in December and then pretty decent in February, despite being a lousy January match. The weird years following the WPO/NAO/Nino 4 would be 1960, 1960, 2008, 2009. That blend has a spatial look somewhat resembling the first two correlation maps. But obviously it's too early for a real guess as to what winter will do. But I do think some years following the strong +WPO, -NAO, very cold Nino 4 combo will end up working for next winter, just because the three things individually (record +WPO winter, ~very cold Nino 4, most -NAO winter in ages) are rare enough even individually.

I've been impressed with the semi-constant 47-day cycle repeat since roughly last Fall in the US temperature profile. It's not exactly the same of course. Much more extreme and the cold and hot sources are in slightly different places. But the timing does line up and the look is similar when adjusting for the season. I've always figured part of the reason some heat waves and cold snaps are extreme now is that we are starting to get Spring/Fall type anomalies (+/- 20-40, instead of 10-20) in the shoulder/transitional months of Winter/Summer, when it used to be much harder for that to happen. I've had very warm highs transition to very cold highs transition at the same part of these 47 day cycles since September when near record heat (96) went to near record cold (47) in two days or so. Same thing in October. Current transition from low or mid-90s to low or mid 70s on Sunday or Monday is kind of the June version of it. Low or mid 70s would be near cold highs here for the time of year after hitting 103 earlier in the month, which is relatively close to record warmth (107 in June 1994).

I was looking the other day. Since the last big heat wave in the Northwest, Seattle has gone from 30% to 40% or so of homes with air conditioning. You can compare that to 86% of homes in Phoenix with air conditioning. That's why I actually think you may see some deaths from the heat in the Northwest in the coming days. One nice trade off for the synoptic changes happening now is the heat wave is over here, and we're getting a lot of rain the next few days. Any day with a high under 80 is a victory this close to the solstice here. I'll probably head up to one of the mountain towns to experience some early Summer 60s-low 70s.

Since March, with a major exception for April, the US temperature profile has resembled 2016 at a decent clip. The fierce heat is in a similar location this month for instance. For May, you can see 2016 was pretty cold too. March was very hot with less heat West. Going forward, Nino 3.4 is likely to move toward where it was in 2016. Will be worth watching to see how July and August behave.

The proposals you see from a lot of the advocacy groups would more than offset any 3% GDP hits. If you taxed oil companies heavily enough, with something like a wealth tax or special income tax, they would pass on the cost to consumers. My personal view is that scientists should stay in their lane, focus on improving your field, and leave social policy to better thinkers. A state like New Mexico gets 40% of tax revenue from an oil. You really want to confiscate that money from a school or a road to lower the temperature of the Earth by a fraction of a degree over a 100 years? It's bad ethics. There are actually states with far more share of their budget coming from oil companies than here. It's not just "states" either, there are entire countries reliant on oil money for their economic development, and their not domestic companies, so the taxes from us, or Biden's proposed "global taxes" would hit them pretty hard. Telling people that they are losing the high paying oil job because a scientist is concerned that the Earth will be hotter in a 100 years is also insane to do politically. We're supposed to be a country where the society at large decides how to proceed. This non-sense with a few people getting to dictate how the entire country is ripe with ethical issues and political illegitimacy. You can see it with COVID too, the governors all magically decided they could do emergency orders without consulting the "people" via the state law makers. I always like the wisdom of the masses, if you asked a bunch of barbers how to come up with solutions for any negative impacts from the climate warming, you'd have a much better solution that stripping states of their oil money, which seems to be your solution via taxing externalities. This obsession with oil companies is also bad ethics and bad economics, since we as a people who drive cars and fly on airplanes demanded that the oil companies provide their product as cheaply as possible. It's the same bullshit as when people talk about how much they care about human rights and they spend three hours on their Chinese slave labor produced Iphone yelling at people on Twitter who won't even pretend to agree. Apple could produce Iphones in the US if you were willing to spend thousands of dollars per phone. The modern world is built on people getting what they want even if they have to make some difficult decisions. It's not always pretty, but the foundation is grounded well. Europe is also far less dynamic than the US with $7-$9 per gallon oil costs per gallon. That type of cost would destroy the US economy. Gas is a low percentage of costs for wealthier people but it would hit poor people and rural people hard. Frankly $640 billion is an irrelevant number and I don't particularly like their method for calculating it either. For a person making $40,000 a 3% hit per year, it's $100 a month. I would call that irrelevant next to the benefits that have been accrued via the processes that warmed the Earth - cars, airplanes, computing power increases, electrical grids, better buildings, and so on. The type of re-invention of society that is proposed to reduce greenhouse gasses would be extremely destabilizing, if for no other reason than it punishes people innocent of any major wrong doing for past mistakes. You're trying to make a moral argument that because of a culmination of past poor lifestyles, modern people have to live less luxuriously to save the Earth. It's the same ethical issue as slave reparations, or when modern Christians attack modern Jews for killing Jesus, or for calling young Germans in 2021 Nazis over something like an EU trade dispute. You're punishing people in the modern world for something you don't like that mostly happened in the past. It doesn't matter if changing the system would solve some of the issues, you're still advocating for a "two wrongs make a right" type of setup. Ethically, the solutions that tell people they can't have the lifestyle they want because of a culmination of mistakes from prior generations amounts to hot garbage in both practical and political terms.

This is one of the largest weather forums in the US, and yet we have literally no active members from the deserts of California or Arizona. Presumably...they just don't care that much. Extreme warmth or not, there is something of a diminishing return to all of this. If you're used to 110 degrees, 115 or 120 doesn't seem like much more. Going from 80 to 90 in May always feels much worse than the 90 to 100 jump for me in June. The warmth forecast in the Northwest is actually much more impressive in that regard. It's hard to argue Phoenix is becoming unlivable or something akin to that when it keeps seeing such rapid population growth. Historically, a lot of strongest western heat waves are bunched together in brief 3-5 periods. So it doesn't really shock me to see another warm period. On net, with the cooler May, it's still easily possible (and likely) we'll have a much colder warm season overall than last year in the Southwest, which was nearly wall to wall hot late April to early September.

The trend on the Euro plume for June actually reminds me a lot of 2012. Although it doesn't "look right" to me either. An El Nino tried to form in Summer 2012. Died in the Fall. That's what the Euro has. I consider 2012-13 a cold-Neutral though for winter, not a La Nina. Against 1951-2010 averages, it was around -0.4C at the coldest point late winter, -0.3 overall. Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec DJF 2012 25.67 26.08 26.67 27.32 27.61 27.75 27.54 27.32 27.10 26.98 26.86 26.34 26.20 2021 25.54 25.75 26.49 27.10 27.44 60 yr 26.45 26.65 27.13 27.55 27.67 27.47 27.04 26.65 26.54 26.50 26.49 26.45

One way I think of the climate models that incorporate human behavior for future outcomes is in terms of precision and accuracy. You can have an accurate model that predicts warmth...because it will probably be warmer. But there is so much that happens unexpectedly when humans are involved, that you'll never have much more than a setup where the model says "it should be warmer" and "it is warmer". I wouldn't expect these things to happen, but would someone in 2000 have forecast planes flying into sky scrapers, the following endless wars, and massive pandemic deaths for the next 20 years? This is just a run down of basic things that could impact climate as a system in the next century: - Nuclear/Chemical/Biological War - Population growing faster or slower than expected, or declining. - Pandemic that is less controllable than COVID with a 5 or 10 year period for a vaccine or cure instead of a year. Think 10s of millions of deaths, with a second Great Depression. - Meteor/Space Debris hitting the Arctic / Antarctic and melting a lot of ice. - Massive increase or decrease in green house gasses that is not expected currently. - Major volcanic eruptions in succession in the tropics to offset the current quiet period since 1991 or so. - Ability to remove green house gasses from the air. - Commercial space travel to keep human population at a sustainable level could begin. - Unexpected "unknown unknown" technologies. There is a rock, Peridotite that mostly is in the mantle of the Earth that shows up in Oman that removes Carbon Dioxide from the air. You could remove an enormous amount of it with enough of the material. Enough to offset huge amounts of emissions. You can also get into the weird science fiction-y stuff - time travel (doubt it), alien contact (doubt it), or even some kind of movement away from technology as a way of life, think of it as people getting sick of looking at their phones all day. Short of the White House being under 100 feet of water in 2050, I don't think you'll see much change from the past 30 years regarding how people behave in the next generation or two.

Nino1+2 Nino3 Nino34 Nino4 Week SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA 05MAY2021 24.1-0.7 26.8-0.5 27.5-0.4 28.7-0.2 12MAY2021 23.9-0.6 26.8-0.4 27.6-0.3 28.8-0.1 19MAY2021 23.5-0.7 26.7-0.4 27.7-0.2 28.9-0.0 26MAY2021 23.4-0.5 26.7-0.3 27.6-0.3 28.8-0.1 02JUN2021 23.2-0.4 26.6-0.2 27.6-0.2 28.8-0.2 09JUN2021 23.2-0.0 26.7-0.0 27.8-0.0 28.9-0.1 16JUN2021 23.3 0.4 26.0-0.5 27.2-0.5 28.8-0.2 Subsurface has warmed up a bit this week. I've liked 2012-13 as a good precipitation analog for a while. It's pretty close on Levi's site too. The heat wave timing out here is fairly similar to June 2013, prior to a very wet July. GFS and to some extent Euro have been showing a pretty good wet period coming up soon here. CPC has it too now in the 6-10.

The science for greenhouse gasses impacting the climate has been around for over 100 years in a mathematical sense. It's not terribly complicated. How long do scientists need to convince the public that it will have effects on their lives? Another 100 years? 1,000? The position that one day people will wake up, take the streets, demand action and all will be well is beyond idiotic to me, it's naive. One way to evaluate science for usefulness is to look at what problem facing humanity has been solved by the scientific research. So...what problem has been solved with climate science? We have nuclear scientists here, it's a bit ironic, but their work has contributed to a peaceful world and because countries with a-bombs don't attack either other. No war between powerful countries is a pretty big get. Meteorologists have mostly solved forecasting in short term time-frames I would say. You'll never die from a tornado or a flash flood if you have a weather radio. Engineers and scientists have solved countless communication problems with radio, tv, internet, cell phones, cars, and so on. A lot of climate science looks like curve fitting to me, or to put it another way, fudging some of the more basic physics math with assumptions about how human behavior will change. Say you'd like to think the Earth's albedo would change in predictable ways in 100 years based on the sea ice changes in the past 100 years and you used a simple static or linear model....but what if it doesn't, you know if you were just to pick on this equation as the basis for a really over simplified climate model? I can't think of a way my life is meaningfully worse from the climate being warmer than 100 years ago because the rate of human adaption is much faster than the rate of climate change, and since I never lived through that climate I never had to adapt fully anyway. I like the heat. When I don't, I have air conditioning. If we keep seeing brief severe cold like we've had in recent Februaries in Western economies when people expect warmth all the time you're going to continue to see massive destruction to poorly planned infrastructure. Most of what you focus on is places like Phoenix that are at the edge of climate zones in Koppen classification sense, and so the results in those places are going to be far more dire than in most places that are not moving to a new climate zone, like Boston or New York. The climate of 50 years from now will be normal to young people growing up in that era. They won't have to adapt, it will be their normal, and I'll be dead. I saw someone said that you have water crisis for farmers and ranchers in the West. That's certainly true to some extent, but it's not new. There are ancient irrigation systems all over the state to attempt to draw water from different sources that were designed hundreds of years ago by the tribes here. Mark Twain is famous for saying that "Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river". New Mexico if you study hydrology has a "great lake" sized body of water that has been drained by stupid farming practices and other poor planning underneath. That has as much to do with the issues in the West as anything. You guys in the East always act like if we go through three to 18 month dry periods, it's the end of the world. We have cool places for water storage, on the mountain tops, and then underground thanks to all the prominent mountain ranges above the valley floor. The other issue locally is that the Rio Grande Compact was largely based on precipitation patterns during some extremely wet El Ninos, including 1940-41, which shows up on every hike I've ever taken with huge tree rings on the tree trunks and has something like top-annual rain in the last 300 years locally. The general view in the small towns in the West is that whenever a drought comes, the liberals will divert water to the cities if they are in charge, because that's their power base and the small towns and farmers will run out. There are certainly stories locally about small towns out of water already this Summer, while Albuquerque doesn't even have water restrictions. These are not climate problems, just poor planning problems. The old research I've seen implies something like 20 billion acre feet of water in New Mexico alone underground, it just can't be extracted mostly. Presumably, someone will come up with an innovation to grab it because necessity is the mother of invention. https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1987/0741/report.pdf https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2019/08/07/groundwater-levels-are-on-the-rebound-in-albuquerque/

Mann is primarily a statistician by background, I think it matters a lot that a proposed statistical explanation is not correct, especially since he went out of his way to insist on it from the prior "consensus" about volcanoes. None of these proposed 30-year oscillations like the AMO or PDO really behave in that manner if you look at the data or the maps with any level of detail, it shouldn't have escaped the eyes of a smart person. The AMO is a major indicator of snow patterns, drought, and heat waves, among others. So knowing it isn't really a 30-year cycle is not a big deal to me, as a guy with no power. But it makes the entire concept broadly useless to someone like Mann trying to advocate social policy change to help with climate change. What are you supposed to do if you are Biden, and Mann tells you all these indexes exist and can predict outcomes well, but the indexes themselves are slow and irregularly changing, and subject to constant revision by their inventors? I don't have a problem with the Earth warming as an idea or the evidence for it. I had atmospheric physics, thermodynamics, hydrology and other pretty intensive math in college and high school. I just think as a field it is kind of useless. I can't imagine many scientists are attracted to something that is "settled", i.e. that the outcome will be changed weather and warmer temperatures, for decades. The settled science thing to me is classic double speak though. Things that are actually settled are not controversial or subject to hundreds of billions of dollars of research. The research and controversy exists because it is less clear what happens to the trends at a regional and seasonal level, which means it isn't settled, not really. People know the Earth is round. People know where babies come from. Surely these were state of the art scientific findings at some point. But they aren't now, so we don't argue about them or research them in meaningful ways. To me science is about discovery. The truth is, the climate can only change in a hand full of ways. It can move toward more/less for moisture/heat in a given spot or overall, or more/less for entropy if the way heat is input into the system gets screwed up. So it's not actually that interesting. You'll never see rain fall up or snow turn blue. It's not like quantum mechanics or something where you're looking for a grand unified theory of everything, which is actually interesting. Climate science is mostly about social policy. But the public has literally no use for knowing that the oceans are forecast to rise, given record populations in coastal areas. The public doesn't care about slow changes in hurricane activity or tracks, or about tornado activity or tracks since we just build better homes and issue better forecasts. I live in the West. It's undoubtedly somewhat warmer than even recent prior hot/dry periods like the 1950s, and water is scarce. But each time we need more water, another water source is found, whether it is a river or a lake that gets diverted. The same thing will inevitably happen in the future, even if it has to be through more extreme measures like cloud seeding, desalinization, or whatever the new method is.

Nino1+2 Nino3 Nino34 Nino4 Week SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA 12MAY2021 23.9-0.6 26.8-0.4 27.6-0.3 28.8-0.1 19MAY2021 23.5-0.7 26.7-0.4 27.7-0.2 28.9-0.0 26MAY2021 23.4-0.5 26.7-0.3 27.6-0.3 28.8-0.1 02JUN2021 23.2-0.4 26.6-0.2 27.6-0.2 28.8-0.2 09JUN2021 23.2-0.0 26.7-0.0 27.8-0.0 28.9-0.1 Subsurface has cooled recently. But still neutral overall. I've always been high on the idea of a Neutral or an El Nino. At this point, Neutral seems possible. Certain things in the northern oceans have looked like 2013 at times since last Fall. The blazing mid-June heat here is certainly reminiscent and ties in well to near identical precipitation patterns in the SW to the 2012-13 cold season. Year over year, the subsurface is still much warmer than last year, and the surface will be too if it isn't currently. Should be a much different Summer than last year.

A lot of the climate stuff is treated as factual, in the way that a sperm and egg make a baby is factual, when it is in large part as good as the assumptions built into the models. It's much more akin to economics and social sciences that use math to help arrive at the truth, with the caveat that you can never really get replication or clean control groups to test the ideas because we can't ever have the same Earth with less greenhouse gasses, to compare to the current Earth, the way you could have near identical populations of humans split it half to test something like a COVID vaccine. Without those more rigorous methods to test ideas impacting the Earth's climate, you have the potential for massive systemic biases, and much of the research can't be proven/dis-proven or falsified. My point is that 20 years is a pretty short time for Mann to be giving up on one of his major ideas. No one is ever right about everything, but you have to expect he's probably wrong about many other things.