The Los Angeles Fires

I haven't written anything about the fires in Los Angeles, particularly with respect to climate change, because, well, the causes and problems of the fires are highly complex and not due to any one thing. It's clear that the fires were not caused/exacerbated by (a) the mayor being abroad, (b) the state's desire to protect smelt, a fish, (c) water and reservoir shortages. The nearby reservoirs have ample water. What I've read says that there was a water shortage in places like Pacific Palisades because there was massive demand that ran the water system there dry. Not surprising when fighting a major wildfire in major suburbs. (d) it's not due to cuts in any fire department budgets, which were on the order of $20 million out of about $900 million. 2%. Fire departments don't live and die on such budget changes. They don't suddenly collapse because women have some very high positions in the department, or because of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs. The right-wing in this country, who can no longer be called "conservatives," now uses trolling as a significant political weapon, without regard for the truth, and it's really ruining the country. Trump is, needless to say, useless, calling the California governor juvenile names and expressing little-to-no interest in what's happening to people and their homes. And so on. A large group in this country is far more interested in assigning blame than in understanding and empathizing with those who lost their homes and possessions and everything. It's almost unbelievable the things "they" say.

The latest number of deaths I've seen is 24. The fires are still raging. Sometimes it looks like all of Los Angeles is going to burn down completely. As of this morning the Palisades fire was only 17% contained. Police are arresting drone pilots. It's now possible (!!!) to place bets on Polymarket on parameters of the fires--how many acres will the Palisades fire burn in total, when will the Palisades fire be contained, etc. There is something really sick about that. Only in America (I suppose. I hope.).

As for how climate change is affecting the fires, I trust this blog post by Andrew Dessler on The Climate Brink. The whole thing is worth reading. Here's part:

Climate change does not “cause” extreme events, but it can amplify them. In fact, it is certain that climate change affects every weather event by altering the baseline conditions in which they occur.

Thus, the real scientific question is not whether climate change influenced the fire — of course it did. Rather, the real question is quantifying the impact: how much did climate change increase this specific event’s intensity or likelihood? We don’t know the answer yet, but I’m sure scientists are already working on it.

The entire post is well worth reading.

Meanwhile, the true heroes are those fighting the fire on the ground and in airplanes and helicopters, especially when put to rebellious music. Wish I had a job that made a difference in people's lives.

https://youtube.com/shorts/jSNy8nYg8yw

Sorry, not embeddable. 

There is more than I expected I had to say about the fires. Comments welcome.

The Execrable Patrick Moore

Perhaps you remember this vomitous piece of feculence.

 
In an article published two days ago by the Western Standard (whoever they are) titled "Guilbeault, CTV publish fake news about 2024 'hottest year ever' as LA burns," they quote Patrick Moore:

According to Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, supported by multiple data sets, the overall trend in Earth's temperature is actually decreasing — debunking a claim by CTV, posted to social media by federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault — that 2024 was the "hottest year ever."

"Here is the record of global temperatures going back 5 million years, as the Earth sank into the Pleistocene Ice Age which began 2.6 million years ago," said Moore in a statement.

"Note that it is still getting colder over the long term."

That's what this hypocrite denier has been reduced to: a deceiver by any means possible, a clown, a fool, a mummer. The worst of the worst. 

Remember, in a 2006 op-ed in the Washington Post, Moore warned of "catastrophic climate change." Somebody different was paying him then. It's warmed 0.6°C since then. 1/10th of an ice age.

Dirac on Oppenheimer's Poetry

Paul Dirac's comment on Robert Oppenheimer's interest in poetry:

"The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible."

P.A.M Dirac developed an equation that made quantum mechanics compatible with special relativity (at least for spin ½ particles like the electron).

While a superlative physicist, Dirac was a bit of an oddball; more stories here.

Dolphin Stampede

Here's a "dolphin stampede" off the coast of Dana Point in Southern California, posted two weeks ago on YouTube.

 
I don't know what it is about dolphins, but they seem to exude the very idea of freedom. Also here.

    

Rankings of 2024 Climate Variables

I had higher ambitions, but this started to become tedious. As always, click the image for a clearer view.

Is Global Warming Speeding Up?

From Nature magazine. (Might be paywalled, I get free access so I'm not sure what permissions are set for me.)

"Earth shattered heat records in 2023 and 2024, with temperatures rising further than expected on the basis of previous trends and modelling. A mysterious reduction in cloud cover, combined with an El Niño weather pattern, could be responsible for temperature increases in 2023. However, scientists expected temperatures would decrease again in June 2024 when the El Niño subsided, which didn’t happen. Now they are racing to work out whether this sudden spike is just a blip in the climate data, or an early indicator that the planet is heating up at a faster pace than they thought.

"...Some scientists argue that the spike can be mostly explained by two factors. One is the El Niño event that began in mid-2023 — a natural weather pattern in which warm water pools in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, often leading to hotter temperatures and more-turbulent weather. The other is a reduction over the past few years in air pollution, which can cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space and seeding low-lying clouds. Yet neither explanation fully accounts for the temperature surge, other researchers say.

"Clouds clearly played a part, according to a study published in Science in December, just before the AGU meeting1. A research team identified a reduction in low-lying cloud cover across parts of the Northern Hemisphere and the tropics that, combined with El Niño, was large enough to explain the temperature spike in 2023. But the cause of this decrease — and whether it can be chalked up to normal climate variations — remains a mystery, the authors say. Decreased air pollution alone doesn’t seem to explain it. They suggest that global warming itself could be causing some reduction in cloud coverage, creating a feedback loop that could accelerate the rate of climate change for decades to come.

"'I would be very careful about saying this is clear evidence [of acceleration], but there might be something going on,' says co-author Helge Goessling, a climate physicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany.

"Another reason is that last year was also much warmer than expected. Scientists projected that early 2024 would be hot owing to El Niño. But they also anticipated that temperatures would fall after the weather pattern subsided and conditions in the equatorial Pacific returned to normal last June.

"'That didn’t happen,' says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a non-profit organization in California that tracks global temperatures. Instead, global temperatures remained elevated, shattering more records and probably making last year the warmest on record by a sizeable margin. “All of us who made projections at the start of the year underestimated just how warm 2024 would be.'"There's more, including about a possible decrease in shipping aerosol emissions."

2025 will be interesting. But then all years are interesting now.

 

The Trump Dystopia Begins

Note added: Oh, yeah--Trump says he want to ban all construction of new wind turbines, because they're "ugly" and something about whales.

Temperatures vs ENSO Category

 Here's NOAA's 12-month average temperature as a function of the ENSO category of that season:

El Nino seasons keep getting hotter, La Nina seasons keep getting hotter, and neutral seasons keep getting hotter.

The trends for each category, since 1950-1951, are almost equal:

El Ninos:  +0.15°C/decade

La Ninas:  +0.17°C/decade

neutral:     +0.16°C/decade

Data sources:

NOAA monthly temperature anomalies
ONI (Oceanic Nino Index)

Messi's Florida Residence is in Danger from Land Subsidence

Land subsidence in Florida has been in the news lately, as a study from the University of Miami came out last month. From El Futbolero:

The southern coast of Florida, a paradise of sunny beaches and imposing skyscrapers, hides a secret that worries engineers and geologists: subsidence. This phenomenon, a slow but constant sinking of the land, is affecting numerous buildings along the coast, from Miami Beach to Sunny Isles Beach. A recent study by the University of Miami has revealed that at least 35 buildings are experiencing this gradual settling, raising questions about the long-term safety of these structures and, in particular about the well-being of their most famous residents.

"Drama": Lionel Messi's Florida residence may be in danger!

Among the celebrities who reside in these buildings is Lionel Messi, the star of Argentinian football, along with his family. The news that his home could be affected by subsidence has generated a wave of concern among his fans and the community in general. The idea that such a beloved figure could be living in a building with structural problems raises serious questions about the safety measures and construction control in the area.

I guess if worry about Messi's building gets the message across a little bit better, that's a good thing. 

The concern for the Messi family and the rest of the residents affected by subsidence should serve as a catalyst for action. It is crucial that concrete measures are taken to protect people and preserve the future of the Miami coast. The safety and well-being of everyone must be the top priority.

Here is Messi's residence in Florida; he bought it 2023 for $10.75 M. (Note: that's about when he started playing for a Florida team in the US Major Soccer League, where all global superstars are put out to pasture.)

 

PS: I have nothing against Messi. Just the excessive concern about someone who can surely get his house directly studied and retooled if he and his family need it.

Where Are The....

Seems Musk is mostly a narcissistic drug addict.

Maybe he thinks he's doing his part by impregnating any woman who will put up with him (put up with his billions).

Stuff I've Read or Heard (in some cases, both)

Last month was the lowest Arctic sea ice extent (among Decembers) in the record. [it's an Excel file]

For the year, Arctic SIE ranked at 7th lowest, according to the NOAA data. Antarctica SIE ranked as 2nd lowest, above only last year (but 5.5% above).

Two-thirds of the world’s food comes today from just nine plants: sugar cane, maize (corn), rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, oil-palm fruit, sugar beet, and cassava. (Atlas Obscura)

Finland has more saunas than cars. (Between the Benches, YouTube 8:50)

Never knew this: the Mediterranean Sea was dry when the Strait of Gibraltar closed off 6 million years ago due to tectonic activity. It stayed dry for about 500,000 years until the Strait opened back up again.

Today I heard on a podcast that the EU allows 300 additives to its foods, while the US allows 10,000.

On this same podcast the name Nicholas Scarfetta Scafetta came up, the well-known climate denier (by every means possible). It was about a paper he wrote, I don't know when, showing that, while the income distribution by percentile follows a power law (something like this), it's apparently not true at the lowest percentiles. I think. I haven't found the paper yet. But the economist who mentioned it seemed to think it was good and important work. (It may have been a physics-like paper using a model of people, somehow like Brownian motion or an Ising model, I'm still not sure, but want to look it up.

How cats say Happy New Year:

https://www.facebook.com/reel/2241518019552267

"They haven't started, and we're almost done."

What the US Government Spends on Health Care

Data sources:

• monthly national health care spending from the Altarum Institute
• Medicare and Medicaid US government spending via FRED

Medicare is for people 65 years or older. Medicaid is for poor people. 

It can't get high enough, as far as I'm concerned.

La Nina Enters the Realm

I hadn't checked the Nino3.4 sea surface temperature in several weeks, and was surprised to see this:

This is from tropicaltidbits.com.

An ENSO has to have the Nino3.4 temperature below -1.5°C for five months to be considered an El Nino or La Nina.... And now our watch begins. Winter (or at least La Nina) is coming. "Protect the weak and uphold the good," as the knights use as a motto. And never forget, "valar morghulis." 

The Autobiography of Kevin Trenberth

I didn't know that Kevin Trenberth, the long-time climate scientist at NOAA in Boulder, published an autobiography in 2023. It's titled A Personal Tale of the Development of Climate Science: The Life and Times of Kevin Trenberth. I can't find it for sale (maybe it wasn't published in book form), but here's an online version, and you can download a PDF there.

He retired in 2020 and in 2021 moved to New Zealand (his native country) with his wife. I haven't started to read his book fully yet, just jumped around. This is about his life after retirement, from page 128:

In 2018 I began a phased retirement that included a visit to New Zealand. Following the election of Donald Trump as President and denier-in-chief in 2017, my daughter Annika, with two young children, was ahead of most, and with strong support from her husband, Matt, took advantage of her New Zealand citizenship to plan to and then move her family to New Zealand in September 2018. This was a remarkable and courageous act. With my own retirement looming, there was a strong incentive for my wife and me to follow.

The foremost reason for leaving the U.S. was family, and the timing was determined by retirement. But Trump, the Republicans and U.S. society were also major factors. The latter included guns, school shootings, and the covid-19 response. The ineptitude of the U.S. in handling all of these is evident....

I'm seeing more and more people say or write that the US is no longer a country worth living in, it's a country worth escaping from. I even see video clips of younger Americans saying that. And clips from Americans who have moved abroad talk about how much better life is where they went, especially the escape from constant work, too little vacation, affordable health care, a gain of peace and the lack of constant political turmoil.

Trenberth never had a formal retirement gathering at NCAR. It was planned for March 16, 2021 but NCAR in Boulder closed on March 13, 2021 due to the pandemic. On March 22, 2001 there was a mass shooting in a grocery store in Boulder, with 10 killed. Surely that only reinforced their decision to leave. And of course the massacre that started this era of mass shootings happened just down the road in Columbine in 1999.

America's decline into dystopia might well have started with Columbine in 1999, 9/11 in 2021, and Bush Jr's lies that started the first Iraq War. The trend has been downward since, and with Trump II the chaos is just getting started and will undoubtably be worse than Trump I. Last month a majority of Americans voted to move up to the 20th floor, because the 10th floor apparently wasn't high enough for a decent suicide. It's very likely the elevator only goes in one direction.  

Al Gore Getting Angry: "We Are Not Winning"

Gore turns it on at about 4:30 into the video, with the word "but." This is from the World Economic Forum December 9, 2023.

 
As Andrew Dessler wrote last year, "Out-of-control corporate power is the real cause of climate change." 

Is a Kim Stanley Robinson solution the only thing that will work? Maybe Luigi Mangione has made a few fossil fuel CEOs wonder.... 

Cheaper Than Therapy*

* once you buy the boat.

via The New York Post.

Earth's Albedo is Decreasing Due to Fewer Low Clouds

This is from a paper in Science last week, "Recent global temperature surge intensified by record-low planetary albedo," Goessling et al, Science 6-Dec-2024. [Link] 

I can only make this chart so big, so expand it if you want a bigger picture. Same since Blogger insists on publishing fuzzy pictures (for me anyway). 

Top graph A is surface temperature; the relevant graph as a cause is the bottom graph F, low cloud cover, and to a lesser extent total cloud cover E. The units for both E and F are percentages relative to 2001-2022 (viz., the entire interval).

Then in Table 1 (below) they give their numbers: among them, the planetary albedo (reflectance) has decreased by about -0.4% (negative change => smaller albedo => less reflectance of sunlight => warmer temperature). What's causing reduced lower cloud cover? 

"Utilizing satellite and reanalysis data, we identify a record-low planetary albedo as the primary factor bridging this gap. The decline is apparently caused largely by a reduced low-cloud cover in the northern mid-latitudes and tropics, in continuation of a multi-annual trend. Further exploring the low-cloud trend and understanding how much of it is due to internal variability, reduced aerosol concentrations, or a possibly emerging low-cloud feedback will be crucial for assessing the current and expected future warming."

So if the planetary albedo was the canonical 0.30 (30% reflectance), it is now 0.2988. (Round that however you like.) Not much, but enough to matter.