La Nina Weather Continues Pt 2
With today’s Fruit Grower Report, I’m Bob Larson. The La Nina weather trend we’ve seen for the past couple of years is something that comes and goes, along with El Nino and neutral weather patterns.But this year, University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor, Cliff Mass says La Nina is hanging around a bit longer than expected …
MASS … “Yes, La Nina’s not going away. In fact, it may even hang into next fall. Originally, we thought it was going to weaken rapidly, but now it doesn’t look like it’s doing that. So, it’s certainly now we have La Nina in place.”
And while it’s here, Mass says …
MASS … “Well right now, the latest forecast is that it’s definitely wetter than normal in the west, and right now it looks near-normal in the east. So, near-normal in the east and then it really depends where you’re talking about in the east, because not all the east is the same.”
And despite what some suggest, Mass says this weather, including last year’s “heat dome,” are not the result of climate change …
MASS … “Climate change is all about trends. The climate is all about trends. One-offs have nothing to do with climate. I mean, that’s just basic science, that if you want to see the effects of climate change you have to see something progressive, you know, us getting progressively warmer or, you know, progressively getting drier, or something like that. But not some extreme one-off thing.”
Mass says our temps have indeed risen a degree or two over the past century, and bear watching, but we have not seen any trends … so far.