Our popular but controversial weatherperson Cliff Mass warns that we are now entering "a period of extraordinarily active weather with the potential for heavy rain, flooding, and a highly dangerous windstorm with the potential to be an historic event." But why is there all of this history-making weather all of a sudden? Where was it when I first moved to Seattle in 1992? Has something changed in the climate? Last year, Mass told his readers not to connect the exceptionally powerful windstorm that happened around this time with global warming. His own words: "I know some folks will say this is due to global warming, represents the 'new normal', or was due to the BLOB (the warm water off our coast). At this point, there is no reason to expect that any of these hypotheses are true." The problem is not that this statement is wrong, but that he made it. Why? Who benefits from this display of scientific skepticism? And, more to the point, how useful is to say something as obvious as the fact that exceptional weather events may not be related to global warming? Nothing is indeed 100 percent in this universe. You can count on that. Are you feeling me? This time, however, he said nothing about global warming in his post on the coming storm.
