gallopinggertie

Looks like Phoenix’ Sky Harbor airport picked up 1.7” overnight and this morning. El Paso got over an inch last night. Salt Lake City also recently had one of their wettest days on record, and Las Vegas got 0.90” in thunderstorms a few days ago. So most of the major metro areas in the desert SW and Great Basin are lucking out lately on rainfall - with the exception of Tucson, which is still way below normal for the year to date.

Japan really lucking out with Typhoon Halong’s forecast track:

Yes, and unfortunately the mechanism of greenhouse gases isn’t something that alarms most people in the same way that acid rain or ozone depletion does. It seems like to get people to care about a threat that’s larger than them, it usually has to connect with them on an instinctive, gut level. So there’s that, even aside from our difficulty with this kind of long-term thinking, that makes the problem so hard to address as a group.

Typhoon Neoguri is a fully tropical 120-mph cyclone way to the east of northern Japan, at 38N/167.3N. SST’s in this area are up to 4C above normal. I’m not sure exactly what the records are for this area of ocean, but I can’t remember any typhoons reaching this far northeast without becoming extratropical. You can see how the northernmost outflow is barely touching the southernmost Aleutians, which I’ve definitely never seen before.

Not sure what intensity exactly Ragasa was at when it made landfall. Maybe a low-end Cat 3? According to Wikipedia, the Chinese coast saw impressively high wind speeds/gusts: ”At 12:00 CST on September 24 the coastal city of Jiangmen experienced its highest wind speed ever recorded at 67 m/s (220 ft/s), equivalent to 241 km/h (150 mph).”

Typhoon Ragasa looking powerful on satellite as it passes just south of Hong Kong.

He came back from the dead! I love when the NHC has a sense of humor lol

The North Pacific and Arctic are on fire. I find the giant area of 5C+ anomalies in the Kara Sea particularly unsettling. I’m not sure what marine ecosystems live up there, but I have a feeling that they’re probably in turmoil right now. The Sea of Japan is also scorching, which makes sense because Japan just had its warmest summer on record by a comfortable margin - 2.36C above average for the whole country above the 1990-2020 averages! That’s hard to fathom. https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2025/9/1/japan-and-south-korea-record-hottest-summers-in-history

It will almost definitely be too late, yeah. The current extinction rate of species is like 100 times above the typical background rate because of human activity (and honestly, climate change is just the tip of the iceberg). On some level, we like to think we’re separate from the rest of nature, but of course we aren’t…

Exactly this. We already are seeing events that are clearly tied to climate change. It might be even more useful to look at major ecological events than individual weather events - things like coral bleaching events, mass kelp forest dieoffs, and the recent unprecedented sargassum blooms in the Atlantic. (All due at least in part to rising SST’s in the world’s oceans). These are signs of shifting baselines that majorly effect which organisms and ecosystems thrive in a given place. And to be honest, I don’t have much patience for those who can see stuff like that happening and not make the connection to rapid climate change.

I saw that. It also sounds like there’s at least an outside chance of a TS landfall on the east side of the big island.

Hopefully tropical storm Lorena brings some rain to the desert southwest, most of that area is still in at least severe drought (D2).

It’s looking like this might only be the beginning of this particular hot period - here’s the new ECMWF forecast for Seattle and Portland, showing a two-week stretch that would average 10-15 degrees above normal for the region. Pretty wild. I’ve lived in western Washington and Oregon my whole life, and the summer climate has really changed over just the past couple decades. Like you posted about, heat waves used to last maybe two or three days - now they stretch on for a week, or longer. Here in Portland our climate averages have historically fallen in the Csb (warm-summer Mediterranean) range, but are on track to push into Csa territory (hot-summer Mediterranean) before too long, perhaps when the new 2000-2030-year averages become the new baseline. Seattle probably will follow a few decades later.

The current rate of global warming is pretty much unprecedented in the geological record. Wouldn’t the current amount of undersea volcanic activity then also have to be unprecedented to be the main driver of the warming? But it isn’t, is it? The Earth has gone through periods of volcanic activity way more intense than anything that’s currently taking place. The rate of CO2 increase on the other hand is also pretty unprecedented…just like the speed of this warming. Hmm. Really makes ya think, doesn’t it?