The potentially record-shattering extreme heat weather forecasts for the Pacific NW are pretty shocking, but some folks keep getting the climate change connection wrong.
This guy for instance:
He states as a supposed ‘golden rule’ that “the bigger the temperature extreme the SMALLER the contribution of global warming”. This is nonsense - but it’s worth thinking about why.
Any extreme event can have both ultimate and proximate causes. The proximate cause could be a frontal system, a jet stream meander, a hurricane etc. which are not unique. But this all takes place within the climatology, which as we know, is changing.
The Mass claim is based on a naive accounting of the proximate and ultimate causes. He takes the weather-related anomaly (large) and compares it to climatological anomaly (smaller) and concludes that the climate change fraction gets smaller if the weather anomaly grows.