Pirate's Cove

It would be a real shame, because the fog hides the poop and drug needles in the streets

A fog-free San Francisco? Scientists ponder California’s climate future

As most of the U.S. sweltered in mid-July 2022 ? when temperatures in many major cities reached the high 90s and even triple digits ? a national weather map showed San Francisco topping out at 65 degrees.

It was just a typical foggy summer day in the city by the bay, which averaged 62 degrees that month, about the same as the next two Julys.

Now the advent of climate change raises the question of whether summertime visitors will stop rushing out to buy sweatshirts upon arrival and instead feel perfectly comfortable in shorts and T-shirts.

The future of San Francisco’s iconic fog has been debated in media stories during recent years, and some experts note a diminished cloud cover along the California coast that could lead to a warming trend.

But few if any detect signs that San Francisco’s summer chill is going away like the once-celebrated Fog City Diner, which shut down at the end of May.

Um, what? What does the closing have to do with anything? The owners never gave a reason why they closed. It probably had something to do with being near the area of SF where everything was closing, because it was too filthy and too dangerous.

“From the data, I can’t foresee it any time soon,’’ said Rachel Clemesha, a project scientist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, who studies the state’s coastal climate. “There are years when there’s more or less cloud cover. The last couple of years have been within that range. It is a very foggy place, so it would be very dramatic to get you a fog-free city.’’

So, paragraph six says there was no need for the article at all.

Peter Weiss, a faculty researcher and lecturer at the UC Santa Cruz department of environmental sciences, said that despite a growing narrative of waning fog along the California coast, the data to support it is “very spotty,’’ with few academic studies in the past decade.

So, it’s all a big nothingburger

“Under climate change, we know the land is warming much faster than the ocean, so that temperature difference across the land and ocean interface is increasing, which could drive stronger winds, which could help preserve this cloudiness,’’ Faloona said. “So there are two arguments you could make about what we theoretically think should happen, and which one’s winning out I think is still an open scientific question.’’

Sara Baguskas, an assistant professor at San Francisco State University with a specialty in coastal fog, said the lack of conclusive evidence that it’s ebbing should not induce complacency but rather stimulate funding to study and predict its patterns.

No data, but, plenty of fearmongering.