Inflation's Inferno & Nature's Inferno: One is Up, One is Down. What's the Truth?

Two major heat-ups dominate the news.

Two big stories have long dominated the headlines about two massive global infernos. One is climate change, which has a lot of records being busted right now and some pretty serious looking threats … or, at least, appears to. The other is inflation, which, while still scorching in many nations, appears to be cooling back down in the US.

The debate on climate change is not likely to cool, no matter what the weather does. We saw this in the news today when a story broke out at a fundraising dinner for RFK Jr. that got seriously thrown out of whack by methane insults. The methane in this case was not likely to change any climate other than the climate in the room because it was one loud room-ripping fart forced out on purpose by the enraged millionaire host who wanted to express his opinion to a guest who started ripping on about the dangers of climate change. The atmosphere in the room changed both physically and politically for the rest of the night as the argument took the whole meeting off its intended course. Such is the level of political debate these days.

In the real weather, I found my own search for the truth clouded by Accuweather’s “RealFeel” gauge. While these meteorological maestros love to claim they are the accurate weather forecasters with the most detail, I have noticed for a long time now they also LOVE a great clickbait headline and will do all they can to heat up a weather story to turn it as hot off the press as possible. One way they do this is by sometimes putting their “RealFeal” temperature in the headline, as if it is the actual temperature.

RealFeel has its place. It is, I believe, an honest attempt to factor in how humidity, wind, and the angle of the sun, where atmosphere filters the sun’s radiant heat, affect how humans feel the heat versus how the ambient temperature of the air would feel without those effects to humans. For generations, weather services have reported shade temperature because radiant heat can build up a lot in your own bodies containment of it, and for other reasons, such as building up inside a glass (therefore greenhouse-like) thermometer more than in the air, etc. So, what has traditionally been reported is just the forecast for the temperature of the air at ground level with a note about wind chill. RealFeel is a gauge that says here is what that air temp will feel like to you based on all those other factors.

That is helpful as a note. However, when humidity is up, Accuweather sometimes likes to headline its RealFeel temp as if that is the actual temperature to make things sound lot worse in the headline, and you have to figure out from within the story whether that is the ambient air temperature or not. When it is cold, if the wind is howling, Accuweather likes to report the RealFeel temp in the headlines because fierce wind strips the heat away from your body and makes you feel much cooler than still air of the same temperature. Its all clickbait — using whichever number is most extreme to get people to click on the story.

With all of that said, it appears to me that Accuweather’s headlines right now are reporting actual (the old-fashion-way) temperatures when they predict Phoenix will hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit by Sunday and Death Vally, 130. That is because the actual weather is worse than the RealFeel temp. I say that because I see their RealFeel temps, noted on the side in those stories, are actually a a degree or two lower than the extremes in the headlines.

Those record-breaking temperatures for this time of year will be deadly if they hold as long as the various meteorological agencies and sites are predicting this heat dome will last. It is not just how hot, but how long the heat dome is predicted to hang around that is supposed to be quite dangerous. Accuweather warns that, while hurricanes and tornados and floods grab people’s attention the most because of the spectacular imagery, the most deadly weather of all is enduring extreme heat. Weather events like the one that has formed in the US Southwest now kill more people than any other kind of weather event.

One might say a similar dome is building in the ocean along the coast of Florida. Surface temperatures of the ocean are nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Technically, they are now at 97, but that is about three degrees above normal for this early in the summer. If they rise as much in the next month or two as they normally do, surface temps could pass 100 degrees. That sounds pretty dang hot and unusual to me, just as weather agencies say it is. The ocean’s surface water nearing the temperature of a hot tub? I can only stay in a hot tub so long, so that practically sounds like boiled fish.

I’m sure it won’t be as bad as I’m hyperventilating about, but it’s certainly not good. It probably won’t boil all the coral in the ocean to death. (Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has already recovered in many large areas from its coral bleaching.) However, one writer who is popular in the Doomosphere, Micheal Snyder, claims this is the weather of the end times! I’m as leery as many of such claims because I’ve heard that kind of stuff since the last “blood moon” prophecies and “super moon” prophecies, and the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse and, well, for a long time whenever the weather looks rough, including from Snyder for a good ten years; however, Michael does create a good list of the serious weather events that are now impacting the earth that is worth reading as a survey, regardless of whether his weather review is right about it being the end times.

Now, I would not be surprised, in the least, if we are entering the end times, the world being as absolutely weird as it has become in so many ways in the last three years; but it is a claim repeated most of my life and not just in religious circles. The climate-change crowd also has their own secular dogma that this will be the end-times for human history as we have known it if we don’t steer a different course. Just as I am open to Michael’s argument, I have always been open to theirs. And, just as I am also skeptical of Michael’s apocalyptic imprimatur on this month’s weather, I am skeptical of theirs.

For example, I would note that, if climate change is truly causing serious global warming, we should not be having widespread droughts across the earth. “Hold it!” the priests and priestesses of Global Warming will scream. “We have told you over and over that climate change will cause pockets of one kind of extreme in some places and the opposite in others.” OK, but drought seems to be in the news all over the place right now, and drought is not what you should expect from a warmer “greenhouse” earth.

Have you ever noticed greenhouses drip with moisture? Average warmer temperatures globally in the oceans and in the atmosphere should cause a lot more evaporation of the oceans and ice sheets (the latter also being recently reported), and that should result in a lot more clouds and a lot more rains (like we saw as a rarity in California this past winter.) It should not result in widespread desertification, but in the jungles of the Jurassic period when earth was much warmer than it is today — a time that was not good for humans but was great for a lot of other things. Plants LOVE greenhouses, and many animals love to eat plants — the bigger the animal is, the more and the bigger are the plants it needs.

Well, that is my common-sense view. I could be wrong, and you are certainly free to disagree ardently in the comments below or just fart out your opinion as done at high-end social functions by their hosts these days. Maybe the rains of the past winter will become the new norm for CA, but I’m just saying you cannot play it both ways convincingly, claiming that the past years of drought in CA were proof of global warming and now claiming that the severe floods and “apocalyptic” snows are proof of global warming, too. In that case, everything is proof of global warming. OK. I suppose the priestesses would argue it is just extremes, in and of themselves, that are proof. Well, the religious prophets of the apocalypse would say that, too.

That said, the climate certainly seems weird to me in the last year or so; therefore, I remain open to either possibility. I’m not saying either is wrong. I’ll also note that cooling could have been a minor trend in the last few years, taking a little heat off the the subject, because of reduced solar flairs that may have a cyclical impact on earth’s temperature. However, the sun has just swung back into its active solar-storm phase, and we already have a real doozie of a sunspot streaming our way in today’s news. Expect a lot more of those for, oh, about another eleven years of the cycle. Maybe this will become the hottest and spottiest sun-spot cycle on record.

What I’ll report in The Daily Doom headlines is the news about the extremes in weather and politics and economics and war and health policies and events, because it all looks more extreme these days than at any time in my life; and that, by itself, seems worth paying attention to.

In this editorial, I’ve focused on the climate-change inferno because understanding the inflation firenado that appears to be pulling away from the earth and going back to its clouds requires the kind of careful parsing with data and thinking that I can only do in a “Deeper Dive.” I’ll be working on that content this afternoon and emailing it to all my paying supporters hopefully before the end of the day. There is not enough time as I write my morning editorial to give it accurate analysis. It’s complex. In short, though, some are saying the Fed’s war on inflation is nearly over, and we need to look at whether or not such rapid hope-taking is reasonable.

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