Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Above, aftermath of Post-Tropical Cyclone Fiona in Nova Scotia. In a previous post, we heard Dr. Jason Box talk about Fiona’s path and how it will continue on to have impacts on the Greenland Ice sheet.

Below, I spoke to Paleoclimatologist Jeffrey Kiehl in 2015 at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
I was reminded of his remarks this week as we saw an outburst of tropical storms, Typhoon Merbok and Hurricane Fiona, strengthening and having severe impacts in regions well north of where we usually expect.

Yale Climate Connections:

Update (8 p.m. EDT): A suddenly dire situation has developed in the Northwest Pacific, where what was a tropical storm just a day earlier has explosively intensified into Super Typhoon Nori less than 18 hours before landfall. Nori is now predicted to strike the Philippines at category 5 intensity on Sunday night local time. See the end of this post for more details.

Post-tropical cyclone Fiona – the strongest storm in Canadian history, as measured by central pressure – crashed into the coast of eastern Nova Scotia early Saturday. More than 500,000 customers had lost power by midday Saturday according to poweroutage.com, and countless trees have been brought down across wide stretches of Atlantic Canada. It’s too soon for a solid assessment of damage, but Fiona clearly gave several provinces their worst night of wind, water, and damage in decades, and perhaps in their modern history.

Especially hard hit were eastern stretches of the Cape Breton Peninsula, including Glace Bay, as well as Port aux Basques, on the southwestern tip of Newfoundland, which experienced a full-force hit from the front right-hand quadrant of Fiona. A number of coastal homes in Port aux Basques have been damaged or destroyed by storm-surge flooding, leading to an emergency evacuation order for the town on Saturday morning. Washed-out roads were making evacuation even tougher.