Western Wildfire Acreage Doubled by Climate Change

Here's a rather stunning chart from the US National Climate Assessment 2018, Chapter 25.

It shows that since 1984, climate change has doubled the total wildfire acreage in the US west.

Note: the acreage is zero in 1984 because that's when they started counting. Results come from an ensemble of climate models.

This additional acreage comes to about 12 million acres, or 19,000 square miles. That's a little more than the area of Vermont and New Hampshire combined.

Frequent Flyers the #6 CO2-Emitting Country

I don't know what "Bitcoin territory" means here -- perhaps the same level of CO2 being produced by Bitcoin mining -- but the stats on flying are telling nonetheless.

Only 3% of the world's population flies each year. Half of those people fly once a month or more.

Together, the 1.5% of people who are frequent fliers would be the 6th largest emitting country in the world—just by their aviation emissions alone. This is Bitcoin territory here. https://t.co/vk2DQSrM1t

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) July 26, 2019

125 Year Heat Waves

Some people complain that this is the hottest summer in the last 125 years, but I like to think of it as the coolest summer of the next 125 years! Glass half full!

— Carter Bays (@CarterBays) July 20, 2019

Yet Another Hockey Stick

There's another hockey stick in the scientific literature, this one from the PAGES 2k Consortium in Nature Geoscience. It used over 700 proxies from around the world and shows that climate is warming faster now than at any time over the last 2000 years. As Michael Mann wrote on Twitter, it re-re-re-re-re-...-re affirms the hockey stick, and we can add it to the list. Let's go to the figure:

The reconstruction only goes to the year 2000 -- we've now at 1.0 C of warming, and pushing higher.

Here's a different form of the results, presented in a phys.org news release:

More from the press release:

The results suggest that volcanic activity was responsible for variations before about 1850. After that, greenhouse gases became the dominant influence on global climate. By removing these influences in their analysis, the researchers also identified the magnitude of the random changes that cannot be traced to a specific cause. The team's data-based reconstructions also agreed with model simulations when evaluating these random changes.

As I've written before, it's easy to show that hockey stick is the expected result in the absence of significant natural forcings:

1. temperature change = (climate_sensitivty)*(change in forcing)
2. CO2 forcing = constant*log(CO2/initial_CO2)
3. Atmospheric CO2 has been increasing exponentially since the beginning of the industrial era.
• So if CO2 isn't changing, there is no temperature change -- the flat handle of the hockey stick.
• If CO2 is increasing exponentially, its forcing is changing linearly and hence so is the temperature – which is the blade of the hockey stick.
4. The initial curve upward from the shaft was when CO2 was increasing superexponentially.

It'd be far more surprising is there wasn't a hockey stick in the last 2,000 years.

**

Added 1:40 pm - PAGES 2k's calculations of 51-year trends, from the same paper:

**

Added 5:10 pm - Here's a map and proxy count of PAGES 2k's network, from their Supplementary Information. In all they used "...nearly 700 separate publicly available records from sources that contain indicators of past temperatures, such as long-lived trees, reef-building corals, ice cores, and marine and lake sediments. The data are sourced from all of Earth's continental regions and major ocean basins."

Memorializing a Lost Glacier

I wonder if this will become a thing. Researchers are going to put a plaque in Iceland memorializing the first lost glacier in that country.

It will be at the site of the now-extinct Okjökull glacier — nicknamed the “OK” glacier — in Borgarfjörður, Iceland. The hillside will be known as "Mt OK."

Deglaciation in Iceland occurs at a rate of about 40 square kilometers per year. Glaciers cover about 1/10th of the Earth’s dry land. Wikipedia says "The 13 largest glaciers [in Iceland] have an aggregate area of 11,181 km² (out of about 11,400 km² for all glaciers of Iceland).

Hey, that's 285 years worth of glaciers in Iceland. Nothing to worry about.

People in the distant future will wonder what a glacier was. They'll wonder what it was like to have a stable coastline. They'll wonder how we could have been so stupid. Maybe the Baby Boomer generation will become known as the Baby Doomers.

Warmest June

You've probably heard by now that June 2019's global mean surface temperature (GMST) was the warmest June in the records, according to both Japan's JMA and NASA GISS.

GISS was especially notable, breaking the old record (2015) by a whopping 0.09°C.

According to GISS, the northern hemisphere had its warmest June in the records, at 1.17°C above the 1951-1980 baseline. That was a record by 0.08°C. That's 1.47°C above a baseline of 1880-1909. 2.64°F. Starting to seem warm....

The southern hemisphere saw only the 6th highest June.

Land-only was also a record high, at 1.07°C above the baseline.

These are notable temperatures, given how small the recent El Nino was compared to 2015-16. (The recent El Nino is now over.)

NOAA announces their GMST tomorrow Thursday.

That Kauppinen and Malmi Paper is Junk

I am seeing lots of citations to the Kauppinen and Malmi preprint that came out two weeks ago:

"NO EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FOR THE SIGNIFICANT ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE," Kauppinen and Malmi, June 29, 2019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.00165.pdf.

(Yes, their title is in all caps.) Anthony Watts posted it but couldn't be bothered to read it ("I didn't vet this"). Infowars has an article with no skepticism whatsoever. Someone just sent me an email saying "this journal article by some Finnish scientists would change our entire understanding of global warming."

If you even glance through the article, you see that they assumed a CO2 climate sensitivity value of just 0.24°C (top of page 4). That's an absurdly low value, given that we've already had 1°C of warming and atmospheric CO2 hasn't even increased by 50% yet. Climate models put CO2's climate sensitivity at 2-4°C.

The authors themselves justify this claim by citing three articles of their own work(!) -- one which appeared in Energy and Environment (enough said), The International Review of Physics (clearly amateurish), and another unpublished preprint. They also made the Ed Berry Bullshit Error:

If we pay attention to the fact that only a small part of the increased CO2 concentration is anthropogenic....

In fact, all the CO2 increase in the atmosphere is anthropogenic (and the part that's due to the 1°C temperature rise is also anthropogenic because that warming is anthropogenic.)

They also assume that almost all temperature change is the result of low cloud cover changes:

In Figure 2 we see the observed global temperature anomaly (red) and global low cloud cover changes (blue). These experimental observations indicate that 1 % increase of the low cloud cover fraction decreases the temperature by 0.11°C.

and assume all that cloud cover change is "natural." And so on and so on.

Deniers: Don't believe everything you read. Especially when it supports your preconceived notions. Especially when it supports denialism. Especially when you haven't even read the paper.

(Triple this when it comes from WUWT or Infowars.)

Added 7/14: The scientists at Climate Feedback came to the same conclusion, with more detail. It's worth reading.

River Gauges in New Orleans

It's hard to believe that New Orleans could be inundated again just 14 years after Hurricane Katrina and subsequent fixes. If it's as bad it's going to raise questions of "when do you give up on a city," which might be the first city to face this of what will be many more this century. Surely New Orleans as a city won't be abandoned after this flood, but you have to wonder at what point another exodus occurs and at what point that feedbacks and causes more still people to leave. It's population doesn't seem to have yet fully recovered from Katrina, so clearly there was some feedback already:

This says 2014 population was down 7.7% post-Katrina.

I found two sites which are recording the level of the Mississippi River in New Orleans, from weather.gov and the US Army Corps of Engineers. These screenshots are of the most recent results:

And here's a nice storm track.

CNN says

Much of the area around New Orleans is now 1½ to 3 meters (4.92 to 9.84 feet) below mean sea level, according to a 2003 study by the US Geological Survey. Scientists found that the ground in the area was sinking at a rate of 1 centimeter a year.

That continual sinkage, combined with rising global sea levels due to the climate crisis, meant New Orleans would probably be between 2½ and 4 meters (8.2 to 13.12 feet) below sea level by 2100.

9 ft of SLR by 2100??

Rosanna Xia wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

In the last 100 years, the sea rose less than 9 inches in California. By the end of this century, the surge could be greater than 9 feet.

Oh come on. The 21st century is almost 20% gone. There is no evidence that this scale of sea level rise is in the future.

Yes, sea level rise is accelerating. Yes, this acceleration can increase and probably is increasing. But enough to get 9 ft (2740 mm) of sea level rise in 81 years? I'm very skeptical.

Every year that doesn't see a big jump in SLR takes a bite from this century's remaining SLR budget and makes this more improbable.

Even the scientists who are studying Antarctic sea-flowing glaciers -- which definitely do seem to be a problem -- are barely sure of the order of magnitude of the SLR they'll cause.

I would like to see journalists like Rosanna Xia have some skepticism -- or any at all -- instead of writing down the most extreme upper limit that anyone mentions to them.

Pollution Controls and Economic Growth

Of course, we all know this, but it's good to see the Trump administration admit that cutting pollution is not incompatible with economic growth: 

"From 1970 to 2018, the combined emissions of the most common air pollutants fell 74 percent while the economy grew over 275 percent."

-- White House press release, 7/8/19.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-promoting-clean-healthy-environment-americans/

Eva Kor

This is a remarkable video of someone I found completely captivating. It speaks for itself.

Eva Kor just died at the age of 85.

I Am Now Too Old to Use the Internet

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Trump is Behind Obama in Job Gains

Job gains during Trump's first 28 months: 5.61 M.

During Obama's last 28 months: 6.42 M.

Sources:
FRED USPRIV, FRED USGOVT

Medium: “‘Climategate’ Email Hacking was Carried out from Russia, in Effort to Undermine Action…”

This is interesting, but it's not really a surprise that shadowy Russians/Eastern Europeans would be the hackers. I hope the journalist, Iggy Ostanin, can eventually publish the name of the climate scientist he says in involved.

Exclusive: "Climategate" Email Hacking was Carried out from Russia, in Effort to Undermine Action… by Iggy Ostanin

Russian hacking, quote-unquote, seems to be more and more of a problem anymore. Is there really nothing that can be done?