Frost On The Pumpkin - Cool Smack But No Arctic Punches In Sight

Old Man Winter Pulling His Punch Into November?

Autumnal chill is coming later than usual this year. September's soft afterglow spilled deep into October, but at some point the laws of physics catch up with you. The Earth is still tilted on its axis. Today's sun angle is equivalent to February 20. However reluctantly, the Northern Hemisphere is cooling off.

We will get to enjoy cold fronts and frozen water, but I see a mild bias into at least the first week of November.

NOAA's new winter outlook into January suggests temperatures and precipitation near normal for Minnesota, as a La Nina cool phase in the Pacific Ocean kicks in, flavoring weather downwind.

The growing season is over; another frost/freeze expected tonight, even for close-in suburbs. Blue sky Saturday gives way to more clouds and showers Sunday, with heaviest rain passing south/east of town. More rain arrives the middle of next week, but the pattern won't favor snow anytime soon.

In fact I'm fairly confident we'll see more 60s, and ECMWF hints at a non-terrifying Halloween this year with 50s. This cool front is just a feeble shot across the bow.

Chipping Away At The Drought. The latest drought report from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows a slight improvement in drought conditions up north - no exceptional drought anywhere in the state, but the MSP metro remains in moderate drought.

NOAA Winter Outlook: Mild Bias for Much of USA. Signatures of a La Nina are showing up in the winter forecast with warmer than normal temperatures predicted for much of the nation, and colder than average weather forecast for the Pacific Northwest. Wetter/snowier than average weather is predicted for the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes, with drier weather for the Gulf Coast and southwestern states. Stay tuned.

Generally Dry Into Saturday. A few showers and sprinkles are possible far northern Minnesota with a better chance of puddles across Wisconsin into Saturday evening.

Frost Potential Early Saturday, Then Slowly Mellowing Again. Today's cool correction lingers into Saturday morning, but (all) weather models show temperatures rising a few degrees above average next week. No harsh slaps of wintry air are brewing just yet.

Relatively Mild Into First Week of November. Long-range model guidance is fairly consistent, suggesting cold, stormy weather in the western U.S. and relatively mild weather east of the Rockies for the next 2 weeks. At some point we will see a cold, snowy swipe or two - my bet is closer to Thanksgiving.

National Weather Service Investigating Possible Tornado in the BWCA. KBJR6.com has an update on a very unusual event up north: "It is one of the rarest of Northland weather events, but the National Weather Service is investigating a possible tornado in the BWCA in Cook County. Recently, someone exploring the Boundary Waters near Clearwater Lake in Cook County stumbled onto major tree damage. The damage likely occurred on October 10th, which was the first time Cook County had ever been under a Tornado Warning in October. Joe Moore with the National Weather Service in Duluth said they did not go and survey the area in person due to its remoteness. But now, through the help of new satellite imagery and aerial photographs provided by the Forest Service, he said it looks like a tornado likely caused the damage..."

U.S. Highway Expansions Increase Traffic and Pollution, Environmental Groups Say. Reuters has the details: "U.S. policies of expanding highways to ease congestion are misguided and lead to an increase in traffic and pollution, environmental advocacy groups said, urging lawmakers to instead invest more money in public transit. Led by Colorado-based research group RMI, the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) and Transportation for America, the groups on Thursday released an online calculator to show the adverse effects of highway expansions across all U.S. states. The groups said decades of investments in highway infrastructure to alleviate congestion have only provided brief respite, eventually filling up with more cars in a phenomenon known as "induced demand..."

A Secretive Hedge Fund is Gutting Newsrooms. The Atlantic tells the sad tale; here's an excerpt: "The 21st century has seen many of these generational owners flee the industry, to devastating effect. In the past 15 years, more than a quarter of American newspapers have gone out of business. Those that have survived are smaller, weaker, and more vulnerable to acquisition. Today, half of all daily newspapers in the U.S. are controlled by financial firms, according to an analysis by the Financial Times, and the number is almost certain to grow. What threatens local newspapers now is not just digital disruption or abstract market forces. They're being targeted by investors who have figured out how to get rich by strip-mining local-news outfits. The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self..."

Ancient Solar Storm Pinpoints Viking Settlement in Americas Exactly 1,000 Years Ago. National Geographic explains; here's an excerpt: "Since the discovery of a Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Canada's Newfoundland more than 50 years ago, most scholars accept that Viking sailors, who explored the seas beginning in the late 700s to around 1100, were the first Europeans to reach the Americas. The timing of the Viking forays to what they called "Vinland," however, remained unclear. Based on artifact finds, radiocarbon dating, and Viking sagas, the settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows was thought to have briefly thrived somewhere between 990 and 1050. Now, thanks to that cosmic storm in 993, researchers can assuredly say that Vikings were working away at their tiny outpost in the north Atlantic exactly 1,000 years ago, in 1021, according to a study published today in the journal Nature..."

51 F. Twin Cities high on Thursday.

55 F. average MSP high on October 21.

October 22, 1938: Sleet and wind cause damage along the Minnesota/Wisconsin border.

October 22, 1913: Long Prairie receives a record low of 8 degrees F.

FRIDAY Patchy clouds, sprinkle? Winds: NW 5-10. High: 49

SATURDAY: Partly sunny and brisk. Winds: NE 5-10. Wake-up: 33. High: 51

SUNDAY: More clouds, stray shower. Winds: E 10-20. Wake-up: 37. High: 53

TUESDAY: Some sun, a milder breeze. Winds: SE 10-15. Wake-up: 43. High: near 60

WEDNESDAY: Periods of rain. Winds: S 8-13. Wake-up: 43. High: 55

THURSDAY: Peeks of sun, cool breeze. Winds: NW 15-25. Wake-up: 46. High: 57

Climate Stories....

Climate Change Poses a Widening Threat to National Security. In DoD parlance: a "threat multiplier". The New York Times (paywall) reports: "Worsening conflict within and between nations. Increased dislocation and migration as people flee climate-fueled instability. Heightened military tension and uncertainty. The Biden administration released several reports Thursday on climate change and national security, laying out in stark terms the ways in which the warming world is beginning to pose significant challenges to stability worldwide. The documents, issued by the departments of Homeland Security and Defense as well as the National Security Council and director of national intelligence, form the government's most thorough assessment yet of these and other challenges, as well as how it will address them. The timing of the release seems intended to give President Biden something to demonstrate that his government is acting on climate change as he prepares to attend a major United Nations climate conference in Glasgow known as COP26..."

COP26: Document Leak Reveals Nations Lobbying to Change Key Climate Report. BBC News has details: "A huge leak of documents seen by BBC News shows how countries are trying to change a crucial scientific report on how to tackle climate change. The leak reveals Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia are among countries asking the UN to play down the need to move rapidly away from fossil fuels. It also shows some wealthy nations are questioning paying more to poorer states to move to greener technologies. This "lobbying" raises questions for the COP26 climate summit in November. The leak reveals countries pushing back on UN recommendations for action and comes just days before they will be asked at the summit to make significant commitments to slow down climate change and keep global warming to 1.5 degrees. The leaked documents consist of more than 32,000 submissions made by governments, companies and other interested parties to the team of scientists compiling a UN report designed to bring together the best scientific evidence on how to tackle climate change..."

Climate Change and Health. Climate Central takes a deep dive and examines the health implications of a warming planet; here's an excerpt: "Climate change threatens the health and well-being of people around the world and health impacts are expected to worsen with additional warming, according to the sixth annual report from The Lancet. Our warming climate exposes more people to hazardous conditions—including extreme heat, wildfire, drought, floods, and air pollution. These conditions can harm our health in many ways, including heat-related illness, lung and heart disease, infections carried by insects or polluted water, mental or physical trauma, and even death. Americans are already feeling these effects. The Lancet's global report is accompanied by a policy brief focused on the climate-related health risks of recent heatwaves, drought, and wildfires across the U.S. Unequal heatwave health risk - American seniors and infants were exposed to far more heatwaves in 2020 compared to the 1986-2005 average, accounting for population increases. Rural impacts of drought - The cascading health impacts of drought—from the spread of diseases like Valley Fever in dry conditions, to mental illness tied to economic losses in the agriculture sector—are acutely felt by farmworkers (nearly 65% of whom identify as Hispanic) and Indigenous communities in rural areas of the Western and Central U.S..."

From Cradle to Grave. Climate change is transforming much of the Middle East, including the birthplace of civilization, according to a story at The Washington Post (paywall): "No one lives here anymore. The mud-brick buildings are empty, just husks of the human life that became impossible on this land. Wind whips through bone-dry reeds. For miles, there's no water to be seen. Carved from an ancient land once known as Mesopotamia, Iraq is home to the cradle of civilization — the expanse between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where the first complex human communities emerged. But as climate change produces extreme warming and water grows scarcer around the Middle East, the land here is drying up. Across Iraq's south, there is a sense of an ending..."

Your Green Credentials May Be Linked To Your Genes, Study Says. The Guardian has a summary of new research: "Some people are more environmentally conscious than others, and scientists say the reason could be in their genes. A study has found that identical twins have more similar views on conservation and environmentalism than non-identical twins. The researchers say this suggests there could be a link between people's genetic makeup and their support for green policies. "The goal is to understand why people are different, and such differences come from the combination of genes and environments," said Chia-chen Chang, a research fellow at the National University of Singapore and lead author on the paper, published in the journal BioScience..."

Greater Than 99% Consensus on Human Caused Climate Change in Peer-Reviewed Scientific Literature. Here is the abstract from a new paper summarizing the consensus on man-made warming, courtesy of IOPscience: "While controls over the Earth's climate system have undergone rigorous hypothesis-testing since the 1800s, questions over the scientific consensus of the role of human activities in modern climate change continue to arise in public settings. We update previous efforts to quantify the scientific consensus on climate change by searching the recent literature for papers skeptical of anthropogenic-caused global warming. From a dataset of 88125 climate-related papers published since 2012, when this question was last addressed comprehensively, we examine a randomized subset of 3000 such publications. We also use a second sample-weighted approach that was specifically biased with keywords to help identify any skeptical peer-reviewed papers in the whole dataset. We identify four skeptical papers out of the sub-set of 3000, as evidenced by abstracts that were rated as implicitly or explicitly skeptical of human-caused global warming. In our sample utilizing pre-identified skeptical keywords we found 28 papers that were implicitly or explicitly skeptical. We conclude with high statistical confidence that the scientific consensus on human-caused contemporary climate change—expressed as a proportion of the total publications—exceeds 99% in the peer reviewed scientific literature..."

Expansion of Wind and Solar Power Too Slow to Stop Climate Change. Here's the intro to a post at Phys.org that caught my eye: "The production of renewable energy is increasing every year. But after analyzing the growth rates of wind and solar power in 60 countries, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology and Lund University in Sweden and Central European University in Vienna, Austria, conclude that virtually no country is moving sufficiently fast enough to avoid global warming of 1.5°C or even 2°C. "This is the first time that the maximum growth rate in individual countries has been accurately measured, and it shows the enormous scale of the challenge of replacing traditional energy sources with renewables, as well as the need to explore diverse technologies and scenarios," says Jessica Jewell, Associate Professor of Energy Transitions at Chalmers University of Technology..."

Police Increasingly Cite Climate Disasters When Seeking Military Gear, Documents Show. HuffPost has the story; here's an excerpt: "...There are a few reasons for law enforcement's shifting rhetoric. Across the country, climate change is fueling more destructive and deadlier catastrophes. The U.S. has not invested in large-scale disaster preparedness, forcing local governments and law enforcement to prepare for disasters ― and pay for it ― largely on their own. But the bigger reason may be that the Defense Department has also started to cue local police and sheriffs to make a big deal out of their role in disaster response. Within the past few years, on the forms that police and sheriffs must submit to justify their requests for armored vehicles, the Pentagon began to list natural disasters as an example justification. (The 1033 Program was created in 1996.)..."