July is wrapping up with several unusual weather events.

Among them are several rainfall extremes, strange tropical cyclone interactions and out-of-season conditions.

Here's a look at what we've seen so far and what's to come.

1. A Rain Event That Had a 0.1-Percent Chance of Happening

Abundant tropical moisture fueled a rare rain event in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on the evening of July 23.

Harrisburg International Airport received 4.27 inches of rain in a single hour, from 5:56 to 6:56 p.m. EDT. A rainfall event of this magnitude in Harrisburg has just a 0.1-percent chance of happening in a given year, according to data from NOAA.

The total rain for the day at Harrisburg International Airport tallied up at 4.71 inches. This now stands as the wettest July day on record, and the fifth-wettest day overall for any month of the year at that location.

This downpour was extremely localized. Harrisburg's Capital City Airport, just a few miles to the northwest, saw less than a half-inch of rain during the same evening.

For the second year in a row Greenland's Summit station has broken all previous records. This newest record in July 2017 was even a Northern Hemispheric all time cold record for July @ -33C. When forecasting changes and intensification of the Eddy Grand Solar Minimum, I look for trends that are beginning to increase from 2015 forward as the cooling was postulated to begin at that time across the planet. Along with this increased volcanism and reawakening volcanoes dormant for 400, 800 or 1200+ years. With Greenland we see both data sets. I present to you my findings and also say that Greenland will slow significantly its summer melting from this year forward.


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Can't persuade people? Drug 'em.

Tony Thomas finds an academic (Matthew Liao) who suggests that given the climate change risk it might be more ethical to shrink our kids by 6 inches, or drug people with oxytoxin to make them more compliant. Jo Nova thinks it might be more ethical to fund skeptical scientists instead of unskeptical ones and figure out whether a man-made disaster is actually coming before we start shrinking kids.

The idea is that people would accept bizarre climate-saving imposts willingly if only we could give them the "love drug" oxytocin. He calls it "Pharmacologically induced altruism". Oxytocin increases altruism and empathy, but I would guess that only altruistic or empathetic people would willingly take it "for the sake of the planet". The rest of the population might be a little suspect that they might be more prone to being duped and conned while "under the influence".

The initial paper Human Engineering and Climate Change, came out five years ago. But in academic circles, Liao wasn't laughed out of town, and hasn't apparently issued a more comprehensive update.

Every single metric shows that summer maximum temperatures are cooling in the US, and that heatwaves are becoming shorter, less intense and covering a smaller area.

The polar blast affecting much of South America's Southern Cone has claimed its first mortal victims in Brazil, authorities said Wednesday.

A 45-year-old homeless man was found dead late Tuesday in Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city, where the temperature climbed only to 10 C (50 F) - the coldest daily maximum in four years - before falling to 8.3 C (47 F) after sunset.

Sao Paulo's lowest temperature ever is 7.3 C (45 F), recorded on July 12, 1988.

The other fatality reported Wednesday was also a homeless man, a resident of Curitiba, capital of the southern state of Parana, who died amid overnight temperatures of minus 1.3 C (30 F).

The Sao Paulo municipal government said that despite an increase in the number of beds at homeless shelters to 11,800, the facilities were unable to accommodate everyone seeking to come in from the cold.

Around 20,000 people, including families with children, are sleeping on the streets of Sao Paulo, according to the Rev. Julio Lancelotti, coordinator of homeless outreach for Brazil's Catholic bishops conference.

A number of towns in southern Brazil experienced record low temperatures on Wednesday and some areas had snow and frost.

Bom Jardim da Serra, a town in the mountains of Santa Catarina state, posted an overnight low of minus 8.8. C (16 F).

The weather forecast calls for the unusually temperatures to hang on for one more day.

The meteorological department of east China metropolis Shanghai recorded an air temperature of 40.9 degrees Celsius (105.6 degrees Fahrenheit) at around 2 p.m. Friday, the highest on record in the city in 145 years.

A red alert for high temperatures was issued by the Shanghai Central Meteorological Observatory on Friday.

The previous record high temperature in the city of 40.8 degrees Celsius was recorded on Aug. 7, 2013. A total of 13 high temperature red alerts have been issued since the new meteorological early warning system was adopted in 2007.

China has a three-tier early warning system for high temperatures: a yellow warning is issued when high temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius are predicted for three consecutive days, orange indicates a predicted high temperature of 37 degrees Celsius in the next 24 hours, and a red alert is issued when the temperature is forecast to reach 40 degrees Celsius within 24 hours.

Heat waves have hit the city since the beginning of summer and are expected to linger until the end of July.

The photo above was taken by pilot Ágúst Arnbjörnsson on July 11, 2017 during a flight from Keflavik to Portland, from a height of approximately 34,000 feet. The location is 75 km from Kulusuk in Greenland.

The image appears to show three plumes of steam rising from cracks in the glacier, which according to the blog of volcanologist Haraldur Sigurðsson, is 1.5 to 2 kilometers thick. This may be a sign of powerful geothermal activity from below.

Earlier this year a team of NASA researchers observed an ominous crack growing in the Petermann Glacier along the northern coast of Greenland.

Recently Greenland recorded the coldest temperature ever in the northern hemisphere for July.

The Sun, now halfway through its life, might be slowing its magnetic activity, researchers say, which could lead to permanent changes in the sunspots and auroras we see.

The Sun has changed its figure, researchers say, and might keep it that way.

The structure of the Sun's surface, where sunspots live, appears to have changed markedly 23 years ago. That's when solar magnetic activity might have started slowing down, Rachel Howe (University of Birmingham, UK, and Aarhaus University, Denmark) and collaborators speculate in paper to appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (full text here). Such a structural change might help explain the Sun's mysteriously weak cycles in recent years.

The interior of the Sun pulsates as rhythmically as a human heart. But while the heart pulses at one fairly steady frequency, the Sun reverberates at thousands of different frequencies.

Pressure changes inside the Sun create these reverberations, just like pressure changes in the air create sound. The sound waves inside the Sun are outside the range of human hearing - they're too low frequency - but if we sped them up, we could hear them just like any other sound.

Record cold engulfs South America decimating crops and leaving a wake of frost destruction and hundreds of thousands with out power. All the while main stream media touts a few degrees over normal in NYC. They forgot absolute anomalous cold and frost event that crossed the entire continent of South America. It was -8C in areas where average temperatures for this time of year are 17C. Crop losses are in the same areas as cold damage to agriculture last year. The 2017 losses will be tallied over the next weeks and it looks at early estimations of nearly 100% losses for fruit inn Southern Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. Where is the coverage on this in the main stream media?????????


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The California state Assembly passed a $3-billion subsidy program for electric vehicles, dwarfing the existing program. The bill is now in the state Senate. If passed, it will head to Governor Jerry Brown, who has not yet indicated if he'd sign what is ostensibly an effort to put EV sales into high gear, but below the surface appears to be a Tesla bailout.

Tesla will soon hit the limit of the federal tax rebates, which are good for the first 200,000 EVs sold in the US per manufacturer beginning in December 2009 (IRS explanation). In the second quarter after the manufacturer hits the limit, the subsidy gets cut in half, from $7,500 to $3,750; two quarters later, it gets cut to $1,875. Two quarters later, it goes to zero.

Given Tesla's ambitious US sales forecast for its Model 3, it will hit the 200,000 vehicle limit in 2018, after which the phase-out begins. A year later, the subsidies are gone. Losing a $7,500 subsidy on a $35,000 car is a huge deal. No other EV manufacturer is anywhere near their 200,000 limit. Their customers are going to benefit from the subsidy; Tesla buyers won't.

This could crush Tesla sales. Many car buyers are sensitive to these subsidies. For example, after Hong Kong rescinded a tax break for EVs effective in April, Tesla sales in April dropped to zero. The good people of Hong Kong will likely start buying Teslas again, but it shows that subsidies have a devastating impact when they're pulled.

That's what Tesla is facing next year in the US.

In California, the largest EV market in the US, 2.7% of new vehicles sold in the first quarter were EVs, up from 0.4% in 2012, according to the California New Dealers Association. California is Tesla's largest market. Something big needs to be done to help the Bay Area company, which has lost money every single year of its ten years of existence. And taxpayers are going to be shanghaied into doing it.

To make this more palatable, you have to dress this up as something where others benefit too, though the biggest beneficiary would be Tesla because these California subsidies would replace the federal subsidies when they're phased out.