Cliff Mass

The county is Multnomah, which is where Portland is. So this type of activist lawsuit is no surprise. It’s amazing to me that officials are spending time and money on this ideological fight instead of focusing on the real problems that affect Portland citizens and businesses every single day such as drug abuse, encampments, property crime, physical assaults, and general blight. It’s also strange, or maybe purposeful, that the city does nothing about political violence in the city, particularly from groups like Rose City Antifa. The city used to be beautiful, safe, and was very attractive, but things have changed and they need to be fixed ASAP.

Regarding the 2021 ‘heat dome’ event - there isn’t convincing science that attributes climate change for that one-off event. The subsequent few years have not had something similar. UW Atmospheric Science professor Cliff Mass wrote about this previously (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/was-global-warming-cause-of-great.html) and demonstrated that it is most likely a rare event caused by a mix of overlapping factors and not causally linked to climate change. Other studies have claimed in their title or abstract that this event was caused by climate change, but when you read the actual paper, you’ll see them admit that they’re making a probabilistic guess and that it is also possible that it is just a rare event. Unfortunately journalists have recycled those headlines without any critical thought around it.

All that said, I do…

for anyone unfamiliar with Cliff Mass, he's a meteorologist here in the Seattle area, and a professor at UW, who has pivoted almost [0] entirely to this sort of "soft" climate change denial.

quite predictably, every time there's a major weather event in the news, he will chime in to give reasons why he thinks it shouldn't be blamed on climate change:

> 2018: Northwest Wildfires: Are We Seeing a "New Normal" Due to Climate Change or The "Old Normal"? [1]

> 2021: Is the Texas Cold Wave Caused By Global Warming? [2]

> 2021: Was Global Warming The Cause of the Great Northwest Heatwave? Science Says No. [3]

> 2022: Misinformation about Sea Level Rise [4]

> 2025: Why the LA Wildfires Have Little to do With Long-Term Drought or Climate Change [5]

> 2025: Seattle Times Climate Lab Misinforms about Climate Change, Sea-Level Rise, and Seattle Flooding [6]

the overall takeaway across all his reporting seems to be that everyone but him is over-exaggerating the effects of climate change.

and his "no connection to climate change" message often gets repeated beyond his blog, for example [7]:

> Mass also emphasized that the floods had no connection to climate change.

> “The climate change connection is non-existent. There is no trend in heavier precipitation in this region. There is no upward trend in floods,” he explained.

0: when he's not comparing the George Floyd protests in Seattle to Kristallnacht (https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/article244800747.html)

1:…

Cliff Mass is a skilled meteorologist, and I owe my interest and knowledge of local Puget Sound weather to his excellent blog.

However, readers ought to know that he has an unpleasant (and dangerous) habit of using his meterologically-derived platform to opine about issues that he has no knowledge about, such as the recent anti-racist protests [0]. These posts have led to two public radio stations in Seattle terminating his segments (KUOW and KNKX).

He obviously has the right to these kinds of posts, but his skill in delivering these largely poorly-researched messages to a general public audience is incredibly amateurish, especially given the trust he's garnered as a scientist.

As a scientist myself, I take particular issue with the way he presents topics regarding climate change. He makes very reasonable academic critiques about atmospheric models that are entirely un-interpretable by an untrained public (e.g. without the formal context required to understand that a scientist's job is to provide specific critique, and that those critiques don't always invalidate an entire research effort). These posts are picked up by climate deniers and suddenly "UW Scientist Says Climate Change is a Hoax!". Here's an example [1].

[0]: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/08/seattle-city-in-fear-can-be-restored.html

[1]:https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/08/is-global-warming-existential-threat.html

At least a few of the people dead set against these methods are college professors seeing new students come in with no math skill whatsoever. See: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-good-are-uw-students-in-math.html

The 'classic' methods are algorithims. They work. They aren't any more complicated than the various other methods, but at least they work in all situations. The other methods, while they may be useful for fermi problems, don't always have a clear way to progress when the problems become harder. And the kicker is, they're no simpler when you account for all the 'non-easy' numbers. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI

Whatever the reason, there's a dramatic decline in the understanding of basic math by students at reasonably good universities over the last 20ish years. I've done the math, and I think I was on the tail end of a conservative swing. There's been one new math swing in that time, and I think we're heading back again.

(This as the parent of small kids who's done way too much reading about the various curricula that are available, and how even the best ones used in classrooms pretty much suck. Jump and Singapore are the two that I know of that are pretty good, but they're not not USAian, so they don't get used in the schools. It is kinda funny going over problems in Jump and seeing the canadian cultural content.)

as a grad student in atmospheric science, I am a little skeptical of the applicability and robustness of these approaches. There are people in our group who apply machine learning ideas for prediction, and I use them for data analysis, so I am not against data-based approaches. however, the partial differential equations which govern the atmosphere are known, can be approximated in a computer, and have been done so for decades. It seems silly to pretend otherwise, and the best/current weather predictions use data and physics.

This report make some pretty intense statements about the "limited success" of "analytical techniques", but in the end, they only claim to make an improvement of 1-2%. The kicker is that they make this comparison to the NOAA model, which is one of the crappiest models out there. The model the europeans use is about 5-10% more skillful, and it is generally recognized that the USA has fallen behind in this regard: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2012/03/us-fallen-behind-in-numerical-weather.html.

A usual counterpoint to this is to organize people to do a pop-up street - the Better Block project evangelized this several years ago starting in Forth Worth TX http://betterblock.org https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntwqVDzdqAU

Also, it doesn't have to be for biking. Seattle has a parklets program where businesses can apply and fund to have parking spaces removed for additional sitting room: http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/permits-and-services/permits/parklets-and-streateries-permits

Seattle (along with other cities like) does road diets to see if reducing lanes will change habits - I'm generally for this though it can sometimes get some criticism (e.g. Cliff Mass https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2017/04/fixing-seattles-traffic-mess.html ). Perhaps the method of informing & preparing commuters in advance of road diets could be improved, alongside making sure there's plans in place to ensure transit frustrations (e.g. crowded busses, bus bunching, last-mile problems) don't occur.