This past Monday evening, I photographed the above image after I noticed the normally flat-bottomed cumulus cloud had these predominantly rounded protrusions below. I recognized them as mammatus.
Mammatus is a cellular pattern of pouches hanging underneath the base of a cloud, typically a cumulonimbus raincloud, although they may be attached to other classes of parent clouds.
I remember from my days as a commercial instructor pilot that these cloud formations were to be avoided. There can be up/down drafts, microbursts, wind shear and possible other airborne hazards.
Not long after the photo was taken, we got some steady rain for about fifteen minutes. The ground got a good soaking with little runoff. Last night, however, several thunder cells rolled through the area and left plenty of rain. There was no evidence of flooding afterward.
Now, speaking of weather, I saw a couple of interesting articles on the topic of the Farce of Anthropogenic Climate Change. The first one “Greenhouse Gases Are a Scientific Myth” from American Thinker, discusses, as the title indicates, “climate stupidity” with regard to so-called “greenhouse gasses.”
The most recent climate stupidity suggests that American factories report their greenhouse gas emissions. As we learned from our country’s first cap-and-trade rule in California, reporting led to required reduction of clean-burning natural gas. Most factories in California have closed because of that rule. It required a 75-percent reduction of natural gas — the factories’ only heat source — over five years.
The next article, from long-time blogger “GREENIE WATCH,” discloses a study debunking CO2’s adverse effect on the weather.
A powerful peer-reviewed scientific study delivers substantial evidence that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the atmosphere have zero impact on the Earth’s global temperatures. The study concludes that even though most publications attempt to depict a catastrophic future for our planet due to an increase in CO2, there is serious doubt that this is, in fact, the case. Instead, the study authors deduced that their research unequivocally means that the officially presented narrative that human activity is causing a detrimental CO2 increase on Earth’s climate is merely a hypothesis rather than a substantiated reality.
We’ve long known that the notion of man-made climate change is as follows:
We get some pretty impressive Cumulonimbus clouds East of here. I used to joke that “It’s downhill all the way to Chicago”, and the Great Plains really flatten out about 15 miles East of here. Some of them top out at 70,000′! Guaranteed light shows in the distance at night!
Damsel and I enjoy watching the light shows here as well. I can’t say exactly how high the storms get here, but I bet it’s way up there. Thank the Lord above that AZ only gets tornadoes rarely.