Sea Surface Warmer than Peak of 1997-98 Super El Niño

Sea-surface temperatures as determined by NOAA (Reynolds OIv2) are currently higher than even the peak of the 1997-98 super El Niño:

Patrick Moore's PhD - Is it In Chutzpah?.

Dr Patrick Moore, who is not a co-founder of Greenpeace, is back with his expertise in climate modeling to ensure us that

@latimeralder @davidappell @CColose @curryja @mtobis @BVerheggen Wrongness of models verified!!
— Patrick Moore (@EcoSenseNow) August 31, 2014

which reminds me: After Moore testified before the U.S. Congress earlier this year, I ripped into an odorous statement he made there:

"Then an Ice Age occurred 450 million years ago when CO2 was 10 times higher than today."

as if that proved CO2 wasn't a greenhouse gas. That's absurd for a several reasons, but one of the most obvious is that the Sun was about 4% less radiant back then (and also because the worldwide scientific community would have ground to a halt until they understood it).

I emailed Moore later and asked his why he didn't mention this in his testimony. Here's what he told me, on March 25th:

"If you had 5 minutes in the Senate I’m sure you would leave a few things out too."

That's right -- Dr. Moore's excuse is that while he had time to present a misleading statement, he didn't have time to mention it was bunk.

What can you say about that? Nothing, really -- you almost want to simply stand back and applaud the chutzpah.

Arctic Sea Ice Death Spiral Reversed (Yet Again)

In the Daily Mail, David Rose quotes the always reliable Judith Curry saying "the Arctic sea ice spiral of death seems to have reversed."

By my count, there's been 7 reversals of the death spiral since 1979, including the famous reversal of the mid-90s and the huge reversal in 2008. So many reversals that Arctic sea ice extent has spiraled up by average of -44,000 square kilometers a year since 1979.

That's some fancy spiraling. Any more spiraling like this and we're going to have a great abundance of negative ice in a few more decades. Where will we put it all?

Arctic Sea Ice Extent (JAXA), 1-year moving average, in standard deviations from the mean

Mark Steyn and the Expert Climatologist

A while back Mark Steyn said he's been out talking to people about the hockey stick. But it doens't appear to have made him any smarter.

On his blog yesterday, Steyn wrote that he knows what the scientific community thinks (wonder what journals he reads, and which conferences he attends), even if they won't admit it:

Actually, no. In public,"climate experts" rejected the notion. But in private - in fact - they well knew that "global warming has slowed or stopped".

which is nothing but Inhofeian conspiracy mongering. (Inhofe to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, 2012:  “I was actually on your side of this issue when I was chairing that [Senate Environment] committee and I first heard about this. I thought it must be true until I found out what it cost.”

But back to Steyn. His notion that global warming has stopped originates in this smug 2009 Washington Times essay:

I don't know how Mr. Friedman defines "young," but let's be generous: If you're 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you're graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None.

Let us count the problems with this:

1. Nine years is not a climateology relevant time period, and the statistical error bars are huge. With just rank-1 autocorrelation, 9-year trends are statistically significant only about 25% of the time. 
2. So Steyn is drawing conclusions about the noise in the climate system. That's his right according to the First Amendment (except insofar as it constitutes libel). Except climate scientists study the signal, not the noise. 
3. But let's play along with his obtuse 9-year period....and see what else was going on.
4. The top 700 meters of the ocean gained 54 zettajoules in the first nine years of the 21st century. That's 54,000,000.000,000,000,000,000 Joules. (I wonder how Steyn thinks that happened.)
5. That's an average of 210 trillion Watts. That's about 13 times the entire energy consumption of humanity. 
6. It's 0.40 Watts per square meter of the Earth's surface, just in the top 1/4th of the ocean. (Argo's 0-2000 m data had only come out in 2005, but had already gained a 31 ZJ in four years, but not statistically significant, though.
7. Average daily sea ice extent in the Arctic fell by 8% from 2000 to 2009. The yearly minimum was 31% smaller. Global sea ice extent dropped 4,000 km2. The daily Antarctic average gained 3%, and the yearly minimum gained all of 3%. 
8. Arctic sea ice (3-dimensional) declined by 4,400 cubic kilometers, or nearly the volume of Lake Michigan. 
9. The footprint of Greenland's ice area decreased by 355 square miles. Its volume of ice decreased by about 1.8 trillion tons, a number that then was already accelerating. 
10. Sea level magically raised almost an inch (24 mm), even though global warming had "stopped."

None of this sounds like a world where global warming had stopped. Yes, the average global surface temperature was essentially unchanged in that time (though not on land, where we live and farm, where it was up by 0.09 C), and down in the lower troposphere (UAH: -0.06 C; RSS: -0.18 C, already a big difference that, until it's sorted out, suggests skepticism about both).

But then, short-term intervals are for suckers, and the thin surface sliver of the atmosphere is just about the worst place to diagnose the planetary energy balance created by AGW.

Steyn thinks this statement by Phil Jones supports his claim

The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn't statistically significant.

which is fine until you ignore the last two words of the second sentence. Otherwise, not so much.

Here's an attempt at a clever switch of time periods, from 9 years to 30 years:

Steyn in 2009: I don't know how [New York Times climate alarmist Thomas] Friedman defines "young" but let's be generous: If you're 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you're graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None. Admittedly the 21st century is only one century out of the many centuries of planetary existence, but it happens to be the one you're stuck living in.

Steyn yesterday: Consider, for example, the context in which I made my 30-year-hot-30-year-cool observation half-a-decade back. I'd written a column in which I remarked en passant.

and the dopey (and dishonest) implication that 9 years with no (global surface) warming represents the entire 21st century. (It's hard to believe any editor would let him get away with that, except at the Washington Times.)

And this statement:

In the mid-nineties, which climatologist and which model predicted the cooling trend of the turn of the century and the oughts? And, if they didn't, on what basis do you trust their claims for 2050 or 2100?

which shows yet again (see Barry Bickmore, who noted that Steyn called the hockey stick a "climate model") {snort}, that Steyn doesn't know what a climate model is, what they aren't (magical foreseer of future ENSOs, volcanoes, changes in solar irradiance and shifts in the big ocean cycles) or how they work.

And finally, Steyn again quoted what he wrote in 2009 (since blogger lacks puke green, I'll put the mindless parts in pink):

For the last century, we’ve had ever-so-slight warming trends and ever-so-slight cooling trends every 30 years or so, and I don’t think either are anything worth collapsing the global economy over.

Things warmed up a bit in the decades before the late Thirties. Why? I dunno. The Versailles Treaty? The Charleston?

Then from 1940 to 1970 there was a slight cooling trend. In its wake, Lowell Ponte (who I believe is an expert climatologist and, therefore, should have been heeded) wrote his bestseller, The Cooling: Has the new ice age already begun? Can we survive?

From 1970 to 1998 there was a slight warming trend, and now there’s a slight cooling trend again. And I’m not fussed about it either way.

The part in red is especially inane; Ponte was a gadfly, not a scientist. Here is what Reid Bryson: (one of the first notable contrarians about manmade global warming) wrote in the preface of Ponte's book:

"...There are very few pages that, as a scientist, I could accept without questions of accuracy, of precision, or of balance..."

In the freaking preface! Regarding the "expert climatologist" Ponte:

Lowell Ponte's diverse background includes being a reporter in Washington, D.C., a legislative aide in the California Assembly, one of two co-owners of a successful Hollywood public relations firm, a consultant and speaker for various corporations and trade associations, and dean of a distance-learning university.

Ponte even asserted that the strength of the gravitational force was weakening, because the Moon moves 4 cm/yr away from the Earth. What an "expert!"

Did Steyn intentionally misrepresent Ponte's credentials in order to give his own writing the appearance of authority? If so, is that fraudulent?

Luckily, Steyn has the privilege of writing for conservative rags that aren't exactly known for their fact checking; they're happy as long as he ladels out reddish, half-spoiled meat with a side of Islamophobia for readers who mainly want affirmation for their selfishness, no questions asked and no facts expected.

Steyn should stick to the rags, because he's clearly not going to make it as a science writer. (He doesn't have much going as a defendant, either.)

P.S.: In the preface!

Quote of the Day

“Terri believes we need to keep an eye on it; but she doesn’t believe we should put a meter on the business end of a cow, like the EPA does.”

- Heather Swift, spokeswoman for Republican Terri Lynn Land, who is running for a Senate seat in Michigan, when asked how much of climate change is caused by humans

Her opponent, Democrat Gary Peters, is making climate change an issue in their race, says Politico.

Note: It's really the burping that is the problem with cows, not the flatulence. Gizmodo: "According to researchers at New Zealand's largest Crown Research Institute, AGResearch, up to 95 percent of the emissions comes from the cow's mouth rather than its behind."

NEW DATA: Ocean Continues Above Average Warming

The April-June 2014 numbers are up for Ocean Heat Content: 0-700 meter and 0-2000 meters.

Compared to a year ago, the 0-700 m region has gained 8.6 zettajoules, and the 0-2000 m region has gained 23 ZJ.

In more comfortable units, those are 0.53 W/m2, and 1.43 W/m2.

Compared to the averages of the last 8.5 years (because that's one year after the 0-2000 m data begins), these are 160% and 210% higher, respectively.

NOAA's graphs aren't updated yet, so here's my plot:

Someday I will do this right and turn these into anomalies.

This Isn't Going to Help

Oh, Geez. I don't think this was a good idea. At all.

Tim Flannery

What follows are several portraits, all seemingly taken in a studio under controlled lighting, of scientists who are concerned about climate change -- one especially because of species extinction, another about an increase in extreme weather events, or, in the case of Tim Flannery, "DISRUPTION OF GLOBAL CIVILIATION."

I can understand their concerns. But the scientists obviously posed for the pictures, "OK, Dr. Flannery" said the photographer, "let's see you look worried.... Maybe a little more scrunch in your forehead?... A little more squint... There, that's perfect (CLICK).

It looks as fake as it is, and it also comes across as emotional manipulation. Probably we should be emotional about climate change, but come on, no one sits around all day looking worried, as if their checking account is low and the rent's past due.

Look for this to be widely mocked. I can't honestly blame anyone if they do.

Study: Cutting Emissions Pays for Itself

A study just published in Nature Climate Change finds that cutting carbon emissions has significant health and economic benefits. From an MIT press release:

“Carbon-reduction policies significantly improve air quality,” says Noelle Selin, an assistant professor of engineering systems and atmospheric chemistry at MIT, and co-author of a study published today in Nature Climate Change. “In fact, policies aimed at cutting carbon emissions improve air quality by a similar amount as policies specifically targeting air pollution.”

and

"The researchers found that savings from avoided health problems could recoup 26 percent of the cost to implement a transportation policy, but up to 10.5 times the cost of implementing a cap-and-trade program. The difference depended largely on the costs of the policies, as the savings—in the form of avoided medical care and saved sick days—remained roughly constant: Policies aimed at specific sources of air pollution, such as power plants and vehicles, did not lead to substantially larger benefits than cheaper policies, such as a cap-and-trade approach."

The numbers:

CAT = Cap-and-Trade
TRN = transportation sector
CES = Clean Energy Standard (electricity generation)

"Savings from health benefits dwarf the estimated $14 billion cost of a cap-and-trade program. At the other end of the spectrum, a transportation policy with rigid fuel-economy requirements is the most expensive policy, costing more than $1 trillion in 2006 dollars, with health benefits recouping only a quarter of those costs. The price tag of a clean energy standard fell between the costs of the two other policies, with associated health benefits just edging out costs, at $247 billion versus $208 billion."

Including the benefits of better health makes a big difference:

“If cost-benefit analyses of climate policies don’t include the significant health benefits from healthier air, they dramatically underestimate the benefits of these policies,” says lead author Tammy Thompson.

Of course, most U.S. Republicans don't care enough to help their constituents get health insurance, so why would they do anything about potential health benefits for them? Watch for the "I'm not a doctor" replies.

Twenty Minutes After Nagasaki

Via Slightlywarped.com

Where Solar Parity is Here Already

From an article in The Independent: "Oil industry on borrowed time as switch to gas and solar accelerates":

Citigroup said solar already competes in the growing regions of the world on "pure economics" without subsidies. It has reached grid parity with residential electricity prices in Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Australia and the US southwest. Japan will cross this year, Korea in 2018. It forecast that even Britain will achieve grid parity by 2020, a remarkable thought for this wet isle at 51 or 52 degrees latitude....

Roughly 29pc [%] of all electricity capacity added in America last year came from solar. The story is by now well-known. A McKinsey study found that installed solar power in the US across all sectors has dropped from $6 a watt to $2.59 in four years, largely due to the collapse in the cost of solar cells.

It's starting to look obvious that those regions of the world where electricity is scarce, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, will get electricty via distributed solar energy, instead of building up an entire infrastructure of roads and pipelines to deliver fossil fuels. Which will obviate the "we can't stop using fossil fuels because the poor need cheap energy" argument. (That argument also does not prove that the wealthy OECD countries should get a pass on fossil fuels. They're rich enough now to switch to cleaner energy, and subsidize it for their country's poor if need be.)

And as fossil fuels are pushed out of the marketplace, their (cooling) aerosol pollution and the -1.9 W/m² of cooling will go too.

Deep Atlantic Has Stored More Heat that the Rest of Oceans Combined

From Science magazine, on the Chen and Tung paper that finds the missing heat is in the deep Atlantic:

Covering 24 depths from the sea surface down to 1500 meters, the data suggest that over the last decade or so the Atlantic has been absorbing heat (red in the graphic above) that would have otherwise warmed the surface. Over the past 14 years, the authors write, water below 300 meters in the North and South Atlantic oceans has stored more energy than the rest of the global oceans combined. “We found the missing heat,” says one of the authors, oceanographer Xianyao Chen of the Ocean University of China in Qingdao. He and co-author Ka-Kit Tung of the University of Washington, Seattle, postulate that the mechanism is the “conveyor belt” current that moves salty tropical water to the North Atlantic, where it sinks, carrying heat with it.

Bringing Peace to the Hiatus War

A letter in Nature Geoscience says the hiatus and climate models can be reconciled by looking carefully at what changes in forcings have taken place in the last 15 years and running models with those changes:

Natural variability, radiative forcing and climate response in the recent hiatus reconciled, Markus Huber & Reto Knutti, Nature Geoscience (2014) doi:10.1038/ngeo2228, Published online 17 August 2014.

I'm at a conference and don't have a lot of time to blog today, so I'll just give their abstract and nut graph; their numbered references can be found here.

Greenland -- On Its Way to being Green Again

A new paper in The Cryosphere finds some big numbers for ice melt.

Using satellite measurements of ice elevation in Greenland and Antarctica for 3 years -- January 2011 to January 2014 -- they found a combined melt rate for the two ice sheets of 503 ± 103 km³/yr. That's the fastest rate ever recorded.

75% of this comes from Greenland.

That's in line with the earlier results I wrote about a month ago (the number there was 537 km³/yr). And Greenland's melt is accelerating fast; from the numbers here and here I find the acceleration is roughly 30 km³/yr², or a speedup in the melt rate of about 8% per year. That's a doubling in less than 10 years.

Why does it matter? Ask these people.

Today's YCC Radio Feature ... El Nino

Yale Climate Connections - August 21 2014

TODAY'S CLIMATE CONNECTION RADIO FEATURE   El Niño. Scientists are concerned that the next strong El Niño -- when it occurs and not if it occurs -- may pack a greater wallop and more widespread and costly damages across North America.

 

Other Recent Postings

 

Today's Solar Power 'Revolution': Powerful Insights from Energy Experts (VIDEO)

Neighbors Helping Neighbors to Pay Costs for Solar (Sara Peach)

 

visit our youtube channel | follow on twitter | like on facebook

 

---

Yale Climate Connections (formerly The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media) is published by Yale Center for Environmental Communication, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, 195 Prospect St., New Haven, CT 06511.

Copyright © 2014 Yale University
School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
All rights reserved.

Unitz

Via Imgur.

Why Now is a Good Time to Buy a New Pair of Waders

A NOAA report shows the large increase in "nuisance" flooding in the last 50 years.

"Nuisance flooding" means "public inconveniences as frequent road closures, overwhelmed storm drains and compromised infrastructure." Like that time you couldn't get to your grandma's for Easter dinner, so you returned home and made do with a Spam sandwich.

This nuisance flooding, caused by rising sea levels, has increased on all three U.S. coasts, between 300 and 925 percent since the 1960s.

The chart gives the top ten areas where such flooding has increased. Increased not just a little bit, but by 4 to 10 times. Most are near the Atlantic hot spot, but Port Isabel, Texas and San Francisco made the list. (The misery must be spread around a little bit.)

Of course, it will only get worse:

“As relative sea level increases, it no longer takes a strong storm or a hurricane to cause flooding,” said William Sweet, Ph.D., oceanographer at NOAA’s Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS) and the report’s lead author. “Flooding now occurs with high tides in many locations due to climate-related sea level rise, land subsidence and the loss of natural barriers. The effects of rising sea levels along most of the continental U.S. coastline are only going to become more noticeable and much more severe in the coming decades, probably more so than any other climate-change related factor.”  

This might be a good time to buy a new pair of waders, while supplies last.

Or at least put another round of waterproofing on your boots.

Warmest summer on record for parts of Oregon and SW Washington

Just to counter all the " Record Cold in West Virginia" stories:

http://www.oregonlive.com/weather/index.ssf/2014/08/warmest_summer_on_record_for_p.html






Here's the data from the National Weather Service:

Someone Call Isaac Newton

Today's feature in the category of bad headlines is from the UK's The Independent:

So now it looks like we have gravity deniers to deal with....

The Carbon Footprint of the Ferguson Riots

How will what's going on in Ferguson affect the climate?

That's a dumb question, obviously.

But what is going on there is a real crackdown on freedom and First Amendment rights. The police are militarized and they look ready for war. Rand Paul wrote yesterday:

Given these developments, it is almost impossible for many Americans not to feel like their government is targeting them. Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.

I'd just like to point out to American climate contrarians that this is the real threat to your freedoms, as is NSA spying on its own citizens, racism (in Ferguson the guns are pointing at the protesters; at Clive Bundy's ranch it was the protestors pointing the guns, without consequence), donors making unknown and unlimted payoffs contributions to politicans, attempts to suppress voting, and the press doing less and less investigative reporting because no one will buy a subscription.

It's not how the electricity that comes into your wall socket is generated. It's not the expectation that you should pay the damage costs of your choice of energy, or leave the planet in the shape you found it (if not better). These are just common sense.

So get your head in the game, and keep your eye on the ball.

Via: http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2014/07/climate-connections-radio-series-to-begin-airing-on-august-18

'Climate Connections' Radio Series to Begin Airing on August 18

—  July 31, 2014

• Post to Twitter
  4

  4

  4

  4

  4

  4

  4

  4

  4
• Post to Facebook
• Post to Google+
• Add to Reddit
• Add to LinkedIn
• Print with PrintFriendly

A 'solutions' based approach to climate change and its impacts, with a focus on actions being taken by individuals and entities to help reduce associated risks.

Yale Climate Connections — formerly The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media — in mid-August begins radio and online distribution of a new daily 90-second radio series, "Climate Connections." The broadcasts will be provided at no cost to public, university, community, and alternative radio stations and others interested in regularly airing it.

Initial broadcasts and website access to the individual stories are to begin August 18.

"Climate Connections" aims to help radio listeners understand how climate change is impacting our lives and what diverse people and organizations are doing to reduce the associated risks. The series "connects the dots" between climate change and energy, extreme weather, public health, food and water, jobs and the economy, national security, the creative arts, and religious and moral values, among other themes.

Many of the broadcasts will include the voice of an individual affected by or helping to solve the challenges posed by a changing climate: the voice of a farmer or rancher describing the impacts of the Great Plains drought on their livelihood; a homeowner describing the benefits of rooftop solar; or a rabbi explaining how the concept of tikkun olam ("repairing the world") applies to climate change. Consistent with the scientific evidence, each of these and many other voices will help translate climate change from an abstract and psychologically distant problem into a concrete story about how climate change is affecting our lives.

Two sample "Climate Connections" broadcasts are available here and here.

The new radio series and the written news stories will continue to be reported by the same team of freelance reporters who have been writing for the Yale Forum over the past several years, along with several new reporters who bring specific broadcast experience to the effort.

This companion website — yaleclimateconnections.org — will be updated over the next several months to highlight the radio broadcasts and our continuing original features on climate change. Some written news stories will derive from the radio broadcasts, while others will be stand-alone features.

As the individual radio stories are distributed and aired, radio listeners and others will be able to access podcasts and transcripts of each story, along with additional resource materials, through this website.

Yale Climate Connections is edited by veteran environmental journalist and educator Bud Ward, and the "Climate Connections" radio broadcasts are hosted by Anthony Leiserowitz, Ph.D., Director of the Yale Center for Environmental Communication.

Financial support is provided by The Grantham Foundation for Protection of the Environment and the Yale Center for Environmental Communication. The radio series is produced by ChavoBart Digital Media of Ithaca, N.Y., whose staff have more than two decades of short-form environmental media experience for the general public.

Radio news directors and programmers wanting to learn more about accessing the daily broadcasts can click here for further information and can direct questions to Erika Street Hopman at Erika@ChavoBart.com (607-269-5062) or Bridgett Ennis at Bridgett@ChavoBart.com (847-261-4593).