Actress-singer, and atmospheric science expert, Barbra Streisand declared on Monday that President Donald Trump should be the first “climate denier” removed from office.
“Last week it was 114 in Paris and Guadalajara was buried in 3 feet of ice from a hailstorm,” Barbra Streisand said in a tweet, linking to a Washington Post article about the hail storm that left the Mexican city of Guadalajara under several feet of snow over the weekend. “Climate change is here now and it is time for voters to remove the climate deniers from office. Starting with Trump.”
Missing from Streisand’s sermon — and, oddly the Washington Post piece — was any context or facts about hail storms, specifically that they are quite common during the summer months.
Writing in Forbes, Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd, Director of the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Atmospheric Sciences Program, points to a study by climatologist Stan Changnon, Jr. to explain why location, perfect conditions, and timing all helped create the atmosphere for the hail storm that hit Guadalajara:
Legendary climatologist Stan Changnon, Jr. published a paper on the climatology of North American hail in the Journal of Applied Meteorology. This 1977 study found that hail is most likely to occur in the Spring or Summer primarily in the Central Plateau and high mountains. His study also found hail to be less common in coastal Mexico or the Yucatan Peninsula. Most places averaged 3 to 4 hail days per year, but higher elevations could experience more hail days.
To be clear, Washington Post writers Jason Samenow and Jeff Halverson noted that Guadalajara’s elevated location made it ripe for such a storm:
Hail is somewhat unusual in southern areas during the summer because the distance between the freezing layer in the cloud and the hot land surface is large so the ice can melt before reaching the ground. But, because Guadalajara sits near the mountains at an elevation over 5,000 feet, this distance is reduced and hail is more common.
Barbra Streisand is perhaps to busy shedding tears over Hillary Clinton’s election loss to realize she’s guilty of denying science.
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