I’m going to make this simple. The primary season has not started yet. It starts in a few weeks. Everything we are doing now is pre-Primary. Not one person has put pen to checkmark in a voting booth.
Once that process starts, everything changes. Suddenly there is more polling in downstream states. Starting before the first primaries, but then ramping up as we head towards states that matter (and no, Iowa and New Hampshire don’t matter despite what you may have been told). Same with campaigning. We’ve seen a few debates, there’s been a lot of speeches, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. And other things (fund raising, more endorsements, etc.)
I thought I’d start out a discussion on the historic context by producing the simple graphic above. This is the course of polling (from Real Clear Politics) for the Clinton-Obama race in 2008 up to about now in the process, along side the Clinton-Sanders race this year. The graphic is rough, I just threw it together, but it kind of speaks for itself.
But in case the meaning is not clear, it means this: The primary season has not started yet. It starts in a few weeks.
I made a new graphic to underscore the meaning of the graphic above. Here, I took the 2008 primary season and the 2016 primary season RCP polling data for the two main candidates and ROUGHLY scaled them together. That moment when everything changes for 2008 is about now, or about the beginning of the actual primaries. Will that be what happens this year?
The Nevada state government has just ruined solar energy in their state. From here,
Although Nevada is one of the sunniest places in the world, there has recently been a dark cloud hovering over the rooftop solar industry in the state. Just before Christmas, Nevada’s public utility commission (PUC) gave the state’s only power company, NV Energy, permission to charge higher rates and fees to solar panel users – a move that immediately shattered the rooftop solar industry’s business model.
In addition to the new monthly fee, … customers … will get less back from the utility for energy their solar panels capture and feed into the main power grid. Whereas previously they received full retail value for their surplus electricity, soon NV Energy will only pay a third of that price for exported electricity.
Now, if you live in one of the sunniest states in the US, it is no longer worth it to put solar panels on your roof.
This is part of a national fight over solar energy. In some states, nefarious forces are working toward making it a bad idea to put solar panels on your home or business. In other states, forces for the good are working to make home or business rooftop solar a good idea.
There is a larger scale political divide in this country, with Republicans, Libertarians, and Tea Partiers (overlapping groups) on one side and Democrats and environmentalists on the other. The former is against shifting to clean energy and addressing global climate disruption. The latter is working towards shifting away from fossil fuels and addressing climate disruption.
But a big part of this makes no sense. Those solar panels you may choose, as in individual or small business owner, to put on your roof constitute your way of utilizing your sun. Yes, that sun that falls on your house is not the property of the government, or big corporations, or politicians bought and paid for by big corporations. That is your sunlight, and THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT INTERFERE WITH YOUR USE OF IT TO POWER YOUR OWN HOME.
Public utilities are there to serve the public, and you are part of the public. Those entities, and the state government agencies that regulate them, should not be conspiring to take away your volts. Your Freedom Volts. They should not be stopping you from installing your solar panels … your Patriot Panels … on your own roof.
So why have the Libertarians and their kin not been fighting this? Why have self described “Patriots” not taken up arms, figuratively one would hope, against the nefarious forces that seek to control YOUR access to your OWN ENERGY?
I suspect that eventually they will. Among those who do put up solar panels there must be some who do so to for their own sensible financial reasons. There must be some people who benefit from rooftop solar who are not Democrats or environmentalists, but rather, sensible Republicans or Libertarians who are in it for the FREEDOM, the financial savings, and also, just because it is cool to make your own energy. Perhaps we will see the KINDLING OF FREEDOM among these self sufficient patriots. Perhaps we will see a demand from the right, not just the left, toLEAVE OUR FREEDOM VOLTS ALONE!
A new paper just published in Nature has made a bit of a stir because it has been interpreted as suggesting that global warming has the benefit of avoidance of an Ice Age that was just about to happen. However, the paper does not actually say that, and we already knew that we may have avoided the next ice age, possibly by human activities dating back to the 19th century or before. Also, the paper actually addresses a different question, an important one, but one that may be a bit esoteric for may interested parties.
First, the esoteric question. Simply put, over the last two million years or so, the Earth has gone through a couple of dozen cycles that have ice ages at one end and very warm periods (such as the one we were in in the 19th century) at the other end. The first several cycles were modest, but the most recent have been extreme, with the cold periods involving the growth of major continental glaciers big enough, for example, to cover most of Canada and a chunk of the US. The current warm period, enhanced by anthropogenic global warming, is probably already warmer than the previous really warm periods, and over the next couple of decades will certainly be what has been called a “super-interglacial” with temperatures consistently being above anything during this entire glacial-interglacial cycle.
This cycling of climate is linked to a cycle of how much of the Sun’s energy falls on the earth, when, and where. The simple version of this arises from the fact that land masses, where continental glaciers can form, are concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere. Continental glaciers have their own cooling system (by being bright and reflecting away sunlight, mainly) so once they form they tend to be self sustaining. But it is difficult for then to form to begin with because, well, the Earth is usually too warm. But, if Northern Hemisphere summers are chilled down sufficiently several years in a row, these glaciers can start to form, and this can be part of the onset of a new glacier.
____________ Current and recommended books on climate change.
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The Earth wobbles as it rotates. The elliptical orbit of the Earth around the Sun varies in how elongated it is. The location of the Earth on this elliptical orbit during a particular moment in the seasonal round changes over time (so every now and then the solstice, for instance, happens when the Earth is maximally distant from the sun). These three factors change in a regular cycle over different time periods. Every now and then all three factors cause the following thing to be true: late June, the longest and thus sunniest period of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, is also the time when the Earth is farthest from the sun on an elliptical orbit that is as elongated as it ever gets, but the Earth has wobbled up so that the Northern Hemisphere is not as pointed towards the Sun as it could be. When this happens, Northern Hemisphere summers have a minimal amount of the Sun’s energy.
But that difference is probably not enough to start an ice age, and the opposite times, when the Northern Hemisphere’s summers are maximally sunlight, are probably not enough warmer than other periods to kill off an ice age.
During the 1970s and early 80s, the cycles of Sun’s energy variation caused by these orbital quirks were reconsidered (it was a 19th century observation) and correlated with recently obtained isotope data from sea cores indicating glacial cycles. They matched. More NH summer extra sunlight happened during interglacials pinned down by the isotopic data, and NH summer reduced sunlight matched in time with the glacial periods. But, over subsequent years, research tended to show that the changes in sunlight and glacial activity did not correlate exactly. Rather, other causes of the onset or melting of glaciers seemed to be other things.
Over time we have come to realize that the orbital effects, known as Milankovitch Cycles, probably determine the potential for the Earth to be in a glacial period vs. an interglacial period, but other factors actually push the climate system into these new states.
This is like so many other things in nature. You have the right genes to develop perfect pitch, but that does not make you a musician. Growing up in an environment that would encourage one to be a musician is not sufficient to make you a great musician. Having perfect pitch and a music-friendly environment and a few other things, all together in for the same person, might create a David Bowie. Or not. But given millions of people, there will be hundreds of great musicians, and most of them will have most of these factors in place.
The current research is a study that relates atmospheric CO2 changes and Milankovitch changes, and it may be an important contribution to understanding this complex system. I’ve not thought about the paper enough to say this (or not say it), but that is what the paper is about.
Meanwhile, years ago, back in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, paleoclimate experts like John Imbrie and JM Mitchell and others pointed out that greenhouse gasses would likely bring on a “super interglacial” that would obviate an ice age that might otherwise occur very soon. They also noted that after thousands of years following the burning of the last available fossil fuel, or the curtailment of this insane practice, the CO2 added to the atmosphere would likely cycle back into solid form, and the next time orbital geometry matched up with other stuff, we could have our ice age again.
More recently, Bill Ruddiman looked at human activities in recent history and suggested that land clearing practices associated with agriculture, and the early burning of fossil fuels, was sufficient to put off an ice age.
Today we know that the cycling in and out of Ice Ages over the last million years or so is associated with atmospheric CO2 levels well within the range of 200ppm to 300ppm. So, I would guess that once we passed around 300ppm we left the likelihood of an ice age behind. Indeed, it is possible that had we not done that, we might have eventually figured out that we should do it, to avoid an ice age.
But enough is enough. The fact that you like your hamburger cooked does not mean that therefore you should cook it at 10,000 degrees C for a year. You cook it the right amount. More than that ruins it. We might benefit from “cooking” the Earth just a little bit to avoid an ice age (and yes, we do want to avoid an ice age), but we don’t want to overcook the Earth. We passed annual an average CO2 concentration of 400ppm a few months ago. The hamburger, and our goose, is being overcooked.
One outcome of the new research is to suggest that without human perturbation of the climate, we would have skipped this ice age anyway. This assertion is the reason I’m reserving judgement on this paper. I wonder if all the appropriate factors have been taken into account, because I find this assertion difficult to believe. But, I’m not going to make an argument based on incredulity. I’ll just note my incredulity, as someone who has studied Pleistocene climate change, and consider getting back to you on this at a later time.
The paper further suggests that current burning of CO2 will extend that period of time to the next Ice age by double, and that “Our simulations demonstrate that under natural conditions alone the Earth system would be expected to remain in the present delicately balanced interglacial climate state, steering clear of both large-scale glaciation of the Northern Hemisphere and its complete deglaciation, for an unusually long time.”
So, when media report that this study suggests that anthropogenic global warming has put off an ice age, they are talking about shifting a 50,000 year delay to the next ice age (without human effects) to a 100,000 year delay. This would be a new idea, because we were thinking that we had put off an ice age that was just about to happen (over the next centuries). So, the paper actually says nearly the exact opposite of what the press says it says. How could this happen? Can’t imagine…
The Paper:
Ganopolski, A. R. Winkelmann,& H. J. Schellnhuber. 2016. Critical insolation–CO2 relation for diagnosing past and future glacial inception. Nature 529, 200–203 (14 January 2016) doi:10.1038/nature16494.
According to Jeff Masters at Wunderblog, “The earliest named storm on record in the Central Pacific, Hurricane Pali, formed on January 7.”
The storm is out in the middle of the ocean, west of Kiribati:
The reason this storm formed off season is a combination of high sea surface temperatures because of global warming and, on top of this, extra high sea surface temperatures because of El Nino. In a sense, this year is preview of what things will be like all the time, more or less, as an “average” globally-warmed year catches up to an El Niño year.
Tropical Storm Alex has formed in the Atlantic ocean. It is not entirely unprecedented to have a tropical storm form totally off season like this, but it is very rare. This happened mainly because of record high sea surface temperatures in the region.
The sea surface temperature is not enough to make a hurricane. But you know what they say about the weather — under conditions of global warming — wait a few years and that will happen.
Increasingly the world’s oceans are losing track of their tropical storm seasons. Expect a future where tropical cyclones (hurricanes, etc.) can form over a much larger area and across a much longer range of time.
I usually don’t post this until June or so, but since the first storm of the year happened about six months early … this is the list of storm names for the Atlantic Basin, staring with the one currently in use.
Alex (active)
Bonnie (unused)
Colin (unused)
Danielle (unused)
Earl (unused)
Fiona (unused)
Gaston (unused)
Hermine (unused)
Ian (unused)
Julia (unused)
Karl (unused)
Lisa (unused)
Matthew (unused)
Nicole (unused)
Otto (unused)
Paula (unused)
Richard (unused)
Shary (unused)
Tobias (unused)
Virginie (unused)
Walter (unused)
Wainer is a statistician, formerly with the famous Educational Testing Service, and a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is well known for his work in statistics and data presentation.
You know what “truthiness” is. It is a term coined by Stephen Colbert in 2005 to refer to assertions that are clearly true because of how they look, feel, smell, but that are in fact, not true. But they are truthy. You get the point.
Wainer’s book is an exploration of cases that demonstrate the difference between truth and truthiness, with an eye towards training oneself to tell the difference, and in some cases, develop arguments about the true and truthy. Does Fracking really cause earthquakes? Are school children in the US over tested? Is tenure what it is claimed to be? For these and other questions, one needs to have evidence, and to know how to evaluate that evidence.
This is a good book, and it is fun. You can read many of the various chapters independently to follow your own interests. To give you an idea of what is included, here is the table of contents:
Part I. Thinking Like a Data Scientist:
1. How the rule of 72 can provide guidance to advance your wealth, your career and your gas mileage
2. Piano virtuosos and the four-minute mile
3. Happiness and causal inference
4. Causal inference and death
5. Using experiments to answer four vexing questions
6. Causal inferences from observational studies: fracking, injection wells, earthquakes, and Oklahoma
7. Life follows art: gaming the missing data algorithm
Part II. Communicating Like a Data Scientist:
8. On the crucial role of empathy in the design of communications: genetic testing as an example
9. Improving data displays: the media’s, and ours
10. Inside-out plots
11. A century and a half of moral statistics: plotting evidence to affect social policy
Part III. Applying the Tools of Data Science to Education:
12. Waiting for Achilles
13. How much is tenure worth?
14. Detecting cheating badly: if it could have been, it must have been
15. When nothing is not zero: a true saga of missing data, adequate yearly progress, and a Memphis charter school
16. Musing about changes in the SAT: is the college board getting rid of the bulldog?
17. For want of a nail: why worthless subscores may be seriously impeding the progress of western civilization.
A worthy Kickstarter science related project is afoot.
Face it. Most science is done on the command line. When it is not, we call it “science by spreadsheet” or name it by some other epithet.
Much of that is done on Linux or Linux like computers, but that actually includes Macs, and if you must, it can be done on Windows.
Bioinformatics, climate simulations, basic statistics using the r language, fancy math things using the appropriate python library, making graphs with gnuplot, and even producing nice looking results for dissimnation to our geeky peers using LaTex. Science-related engineering uses the command line too, if it involves any programming of controllers or sensor equipment.
This is not to say that all science is done this way. Quite a bit isn’t. But there are many tools used in science that are best handled with the command line or something like the command line.
Brian Hall, a computer science guy, is developing an on line training class to teach the methods of command line science. He is developing the class using Kickstarter, which is fairly unique as far as I know. He isn’t even asking for that much money, and is over half way to his goal. Visit the Kickstarter site to see what you get if you donate. He has a nice video explaining the project.
This video course is designed for scientists with little or no programming experience. It’s okay if you’ve never even touched the command line (or if you did once but it felt icky).
You’ll have fun learning a new, powerful way of communicating with your computer. Along the way, you’ll acquire access to a whole world of amazing open source data and software. Who knows what you’ll do next?
The project home will be at Udemy, here. You can go there and see a draft of the course, which will give you a very good idea of what it entails.
The class will probably cost $199, but Brian is considering discount rates for teachers.
Here’s the press release for Brian’s project:
Crowdfunded Video Course to Boost Scientists’ Computational Skills
“Learn the Command Line … for Science!”
Nearly every field of science has a significant computational component but few working scientists have been trained as programmers. Universities are adapting, but not nearly as fast as the sciences are exploding with new applications. Simulation, data mining, bioinformatics these are the fields that are driving innovation in physics, astronomy, biology, and medicine. New tools and techniques are being developed every day, but we need more scientists with the interdisciplinary skills necessary to harness them.
A new video course called “Learn the Command Line … for Science!” is calling for backers on the crowd funding site Kickstarter.com. This class will walk trained scientists through the basics of using the command line interface, an absolute requirement to run scientific applications and take advantage of high performance computing resources. It’s also great preparation for learning to code, and eventually contribute new and novel tools to computational science.
The class is being developed by Brian David Hall, a Computer Science instructor with experience doing bioinformatics for the USDA. The course is upbeat, fastpaced and targeted at the needs of working scientists. It goes into detail where necessary for example, covering how to install software and download datasets from the command line but it skips topics which are less relevant to scientists, such as the system administration tasks emphasized by other command line courses.
Kickstarter campaigns operate under an “allornothing” funding model, so if “Learn the Command Line … for Science!” doesn’t reach its funding goal of $1,500 after 30 days then Brian gets no funding, and nobody gets to take the course! Be sure to follow him on Twitter (@_bruab_) to stay up to date on the project’s progress, and help spread the word to your social media networks. Just $5 is enough to become a backer of this project. For Science!
Remember the Democratic and Republican party debates that were held just before that major international meeting about climate change, participated in by every country in the world? Of course you do. Do you remember the candidates’ responses to the questions about climate change posed during those debates? No, you don’t. Not a single question about climate change, or any other big science issue, was asked.
When we think about the big science issues, climate change is often one of the main topics that comes first to mind. But there are many other big science issues that should be more openly and full discussed by candidates in the ongoing US Presidential election, as well as other state and federal elections. ScienceDebate.org has been collecting questions by interested citizens. Here is a sampling (go HERE to see all the questions and submit your own).:
How would you reduce our pollution from fossil fuel combustion and encourage more American jobs in energy efficiency?
Will you support science-based tobacco product regulation, and so stop FDA ban of e-cigarettes, a low-risk alternative that reduces smoking?
How should we manage global population growth?
What policies will you put forth to ensure scientific literacy?
How do we ensure adequate clean fresh water for the US in years to come?
Will you support substantial funding for high capacity energy storage and enhanced long distance electrical grids?
Will you support a person’s right to obtain genetic information about them that has been collected by government funded projects?
Will you bring back the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA)?
How would you address the world’s aging nuclear arsenals?
What steps will you take in dealing with the threat that current agricultural monocultures pose towards biodiversity?
What policies will best ensure that America remains a world leader in innovation?
How would you ensure that government policy is based on evidence and science rather than ideology or personal opinion?
What actions would you support to enforce vaccinations in the interest of public health, and when should exemptions be allowed?
Do you believe that basic research should receive government funding, or should it all be left to the private sector?
Given states’ rights, do you justify a ban on stem cell research in states that support it?
We lack cyber security, from voting machines to governmental systems. How would you address cyber security?
There is a distinct correlation between “fracking” and increased seismic (earthquake) activity. What are your views on fracking?
How would you make the NIH a more efficient funder of government health efforts?
What steps should the United States take to protect our population from emerging diseases?
What would you as US president do to harden the American electrical grid against severe EMP events?
What Will You Do to Reduce The Human and Economic Costs of Mental Illness?
As Shawn Otto recently pointed out, science is central to a large number of our policy challenges, but there are almost no scientists in Congress (about a half dozen during any given term). In fact, we don’t necessarily need a lot more scientists in Congress, but we do need to have science savvy people in elected office. What better way is there to ensure a higher level of science awareness than to make science policy a normal part of our election cycles, through debates, policy statements, and the journalism that covers those elections?
ScienceDebate.Org has been pushing for an actual science debate for a few POTUS elections now. They have had great success in getting their message out … most people have heard of the organization by now. And, there have been some successes in getting the candidates to address science. For example, when President Obama was challenged by Governor Mitt Romney, the two of them produced science policy statements.
This year is different from previous years. For the first time, climate change, one of the big science issues, is part of several national level campaigns. Oddly, the US press seems to be moving very slowly in addressing the fact that more and more citizens are concerned about this and other science issues. But with a bit of a push, the big networks and major journalistic outlets can be convinced to press candidates to address these issues.
Look again at the list of science policy questions above. My impression is that when a lot of people hear about a science debate, they imagine something different, where the candidates are asked science questions, to test their science literacy. That is not what the sciencedebate.org project is about. Candidates for national office, as well as state and local office, are expected to understand economics, crime, international relations, health care, and all sorts of other academic areas. They are not tested on their ability to write the equation for Pareto Efficiency, tactical strategies for dealing with a hostage situation, to speak widely spoken foreign languages, or demonstrate that they can conduct a liver transplant. They are asked about policy, like those science questions listed above. Not only should candidates be able to do that, but the people who are considering voting for them (or not) should have a good idea of how a given candidate will address these issues, or at least, to have evidence that the candidates have more than a vague idea of what these issues entail.
On Wednesday we’ll watch another Republican presidential debate, but how much do you expect to hear about topics like mental health and climate change? Funding for biomedical research and energy? Research innovation and global leadership? Given these are the issues that will impact the way all Americans live for decades to come, why are they so often the exception in debates, rather than the expectation?
ScienceDebat.org has produced a very compelling commercial that makes this point, and if you agree (and you know you do!) please pass this around on the usual social media for people to see. Here it is:
Here is something you should know: “ScienceDebate.org and Research!America, a group that advocates for medical research, commissioned a national poll that showed that 87% of likely voters think the candidates ought to be well-versed on these issues. The group held online exchanges between President Obama and his opponents in 2008 and 2012, each time making nearly a billion media impressions. “This cycle, we’d like to see one on national television,” said the group’s chair, science writer Shawn Otto. ”
As noted above, you can submit questions to Science debate, and you can support the effort in other ways as wall (like, for example, giving them money!).
Others who are joining the call for a science debate are talking about this commercial:
Last December, the United States Senate subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, headed by Ted Cruz, held a hearing to which they invited a gaggle of climate change deniers and one good guy to testify about how the science on climate change is all wrong. I wrote about it here. The strangest aspect of this hearing was probably shock jock Mark Steyn’s use of the venue to argue his case in a civil law suit pertaining to his apparently libelous behavior. But there was another feature of this hearing worth noting. Both the deniers, in particular John Christy, and Senator Cruz focused on a set of data that they construed to indicated showed that global warming is not really happening.
The oceans are warming significantly. The Earth’s surface, as measured by thermometers as well as direct and indirect measurements of the sea surface, is warming significantly. The only people who doubt this are those who are either very badly misinformed or politically or financially motivated to deny reality.
But among the data are satellite based measurements of the troposphere. These data also show warming if properly analyzed, but some forms of these data can be used to make a graph that might give the impression that the warming we clearly see is not happening, or at least, not happening much.
So what is going on here? Are these satellite data telling the Real Truth, contrary to what all the other data show, or is this just a bad data set, or are these data being abused by contrarians?
Most of the satellite data in question come from a set of birds that are deployed for use in weather prediction, but secondarily measure the temperature of the Troposphere. They have sensors that collect microwave energy emitted by Oxygen molecules to estimate temperature. This technique has certain advantages and certain disadvantages, and is fairly easy to deploy.
How one goes from these microwave signals to a temperature measurement is actually very complicated. This has been further complicated by the failure of some of the instruments, and the fact that over time the satellites, in a polar orbit, lose altitude over time, which changes how the readings must be calibrated. Also, the satellites are supposed to pass over the Earth at nearly noon and nearly midnight (on opposite sides of the planet) as the Earth rotates beneath. But this synchronization goes off over a period of time as well.
And that is the simple version.
There have been many studies of these data, and attempts to adjust for all of the problems in this methodology. The experts do not all agree on how to correct the data. There are two approaches commonly used to produce potentially usable data (known as RSS and UAH) and each has advantages and disadvantages.
Skeptical Science has a set of three discussions, couched in less or more technical terms, of how this all works. If this is of interest to you, check it out.
Tamino, at Open Mind, addressed Ted Cruz’s misuse of the satellite data and concludes,
When Ted Cruz said that both satellites and balloon data fail to show warming, he was just plain wrong. When he said these data sets were the best evidence of whether warming is occurring, he was just plain wrong. Together, those two claims make up point number 4 of the 7 things he called “facts” — but he was wrong about their being facts. They’re just claims, claims which are just plain wrong.
Ted Cruz also didn’t seem able to keep straight how many of his so-called “facts” he listed. There were 7, but he repeatedly referred to 8. I guess when it comes to counting anywhere near as high as 10, Ted Cruz is again likely to be just plain wrong.
The Time Scales of Political and Climate Change Matter
The US is engaged in the laborious process of electing a new leader, who will likely be President for 8 years. Climate change has finally become an issue in US electoral politics. The climate policies of the next US President, and the Congress, will have a direct impact on the climate, because those policies will affect how much fossil carbon is put into the atmosphere over coming decades. So it is vital to consider what the climate may do during the next administration and the longer period that will include that administration’s effective legacy period, more or less the next decade starting now.
There is evidence that the ongoing warming of the planet’s surface is likely accelerate in the near future. Recent decades have seen the Earth’s surface temperatures go up at a relatively slower than average rate compared to earlier decades. The best available science suggests that this rate is about to increase. We can expect a series of mostly record breaking months and years that will add up to an alarmingly warm planet.
(The graphic showing continued global warming through 2015 at the top of the post is from here.)
The recent slowdown in global warming has brought into question the reliability of climate model projections of future temperature change and has led to a vigorous debate over whether this slowdown is the result of naturally occurring, internal variability or forcing external to Earth’s climate system. … we applied a semi-empirical approach that combines climate observations and model simulations to estimate Atlantic- and Pacific-based internal multidecadal variability (termed “AMO” and “PMO,” respectively). Using this method [we show that] competition between a modest positive peak in the AMO and a substantially negative-trending PMO … produce a slowdown or “false pause” in warming of the past decade.
Cyclical changes in the Pacific Ocean have thrown earth’s surface into what may be an unprecedented warming spurt, following a global warming slowdown that lasted about 15 years.
While El Niño is being blamed for an outbreak of floods, storms and unseasonable temperatures across the planet, a much slower-moving cycle of the Pacific Ocean has also been playing a role in record-breaking warmth. The recent effects of both ocean cycles are being amplified by climate change.
Why Does The Rate of Global Warming Vary?
This is pretty complicated, and even those who are on the cutting edge of this research are cautious in making links between their models and the on the ground reality of warming in the near future. The long term rise in surface temperature, which is what we usually refer to when using the term “Global Warming,” is not steady and smooth, but instead, it is rather squiggly. But the ups and downs that accompany the general upward trend are mostly caused by things that are known.
The sun provides the energy to warm the Earth’s surface, and this contribution changes over time, but the sun varies very little in its output, and thus has less influence than other factors. The sun’s energy warms the Earth mainly because our atmosphere contains some greenhouse gasses. The more greenhouse gas the more surface warmth. As humans add greenhouse gas (mainly CO2 released by burning fossil fuel) the surface temperature eventually rises to a higher equilibrium. But the variation in the sun’s strength is hardly observable.
Aerosols, also known as dust or in some cases pollution (or airborne particles) can reduce the surface temperature by intercepting some of the Sun’s energy on its way to the surface (I oversimplify). These aerosols come mainly from industrial pollution and volcanoes. The addition of a large amount of aerosol into the atmosphere by a major volcanic eruption can have a relative cooling effect but one that lasts for a short duration, because the dust eventually settles.
There are many other important factors. Changes in land use patterns that cause changes in effectiveness of carbon sinks – places where atmospheric carbon (mainly CO2) is trapped in solid form by biological systems – increase atmospheric CO2. Melting glacial ice takes up heat and influences surface temperatures. And so on.
A famous, and now perhaps infamous, example of this interaction between ocean and air is the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Here’s the simple version (see here for more detail). The equatorial Pacific’s surface is constantly being warmed by the sun. The surface waters are usually blown towards the west by trade winds. (Those trade winds are caused in part by the rotation of the Earth, and in part by the ongoing redistribution of excess tropical heat towards the poles). This causes warm water to move west, where it is potentially subducted into the ocean, moving heat into the sea. That heat eventually may work its way out of the ocean through various currents.
During many years, the ins and the outs are similar. During some years, La Niña years, the amount of heat moving into the ocean is larger, which can cause a small cooling influence on the planet. Every now and then, the reverse happens. This involves complicated changes in trade winds and ocean currents. A good chunk of the heat that has been stored in the Pacific now emerges and is added very abruptly, over a period of several months, to the atmosphere. This is an El Niño event. We are at this moment experiencing one of the strongest El Niño events ever recorded, possibly the strongest (we won’t know until it has been going a while longer.)
ENSO is one, in fact the biggest, example of atmosphere-ocean interaction that influences surface temperatures. But, ENSO is only one part of the interaction between the Pacific and the atmosphere. There is also a phenomenon known as the Pacific Multidecadal Oscillation (PMO). For its part, the Atlantic has the AMO, a similar system. These phenomena are characterized by a general transfer of heat either into or out of the ocean, with several years in a row seeing more heat move into the ocean, followed by several years in a row of more heat moving out of the ocean.
Though ENSO and the PMO are distinct processes, they may be related. I asked climate scientist Michael Mann if he views El Nino as part of the larger scale system of PMO, or if El Niño essentially rides on top of, or acts independently from PMO. He told me, “I would say the latter. At some level, the PMO really describes the long-term changes in the frequency and magnitude of El Niño and La Niña events, i.e. change in the behavior of ENSO on multidecadal timescales, and it will appear as multidecadal oscillation with an ENSO-like signature with some modifications due to the fact that certain processes, like gyre-advection and subduction of water masses, act on longer timescales and do they are seen with the PMO bot not El Niño or La Niña.”
Here, the surface temperature anomaly is shown from the late 1960s to the present. The annual values are classified into years during which ENSO was neutral, or neutral with volcanic influences, La Nina years, and El Niño years with or without volcanoes. A separate trend line is shown for years that should be relatively warm (El Niño), relatively cool (La Niña), and years that should be about average.
The influence of the PMO is also apparent.
This graphic shows the measurement of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the surface temperature anomalies. The data are averaged out over a two year cycle (otherwise the PDO would be way too squiggly to be useful visually). Notice that during periods when the PDO is positive (adding heat to the atmosphere) there tends to be a stronger upward trend of surface temperature, and when the PDO is negative, the surface temperature rises more slowly. Remember, a lot of other factors, such as aerosols, are influencing the temperature line, so this relationship is quite imperfect.
Also notice that both lines trend dramatically upward near the end of the graph. This reflects the last couple of years (including right now) of dramatically increasing surface temperatures, and an apparent positive shift in the PDO. Just as interesting is the negative PDO associated with a reduced upward trend in the surface temperatures, fondly known by many as the “Hiatus” or “Pause” in global warming, during the first part of the 20th century. Indeed, it is likely that this slowdown (not really a pause) in warming is largely a result of a higher rate of excess heat being plowed into the oceans, and less coming back out. This is also a period during which the ENSO system produced no strong El Niños.
But the PDO is, as noted, part of a larger phenomenon of ocean-atmosphere interaction. The study noted above by Steinman, Mann, and Miller takes a broad view of these oscillations and their impact on climate. In RealClimate, Mann writes,
We focused on the Northern Hemisphere and the role played by two climate oscillations known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation or “AMO” … and the … Pacific Multidecadal Oscillation or “PMO”… The oscillation in Northern Hemisphere average temperatures (which we term the Northern Hemisphere Multidecadal Oscillation or “NMO”) is found to result from a combination of the AMO and PMO.
…Our conclusion that natural cooling in the Pacific is a principal contributor to the recent slowdown in large-scale warming is consistent with some other recent studies…
…the state-of-the-art climate model simulations analyzed in our current study suggest that this phenomenon is a manifestation of purely random, internal oscillations in the climate system.
This finding has potential ramifications for the climate changes we will see in the decades ahead. As we note in the last line of our article,
Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse with internal variability, instead adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.
That is perhaps the most worrying implication of our study, for it implies that the “false pause” may simply have been a cause for false complacency, when it comes to averting dangerous climate change.
What Will Global Warming Do During The Next Decade?
Have political leaders and representatives been lukewarm on climate change over recent years in part because the climate change itself has been less dramatic than it could be? And, conversely, is it the case that the next couple of decades will see a reverse in both? I asked Michael Mann if his research indicated that the indicators such as the PMO, AMO, or the derived NMO, show that the oceans are about to contribute to a speedup in warming. He told me, “…both PMO and AMO contribute to NMO, but in recent decades PMO has been the dominant player, and yes, I would expect to see the recent turn toward El Nino-like conditions and enhanced hemispheric/global warming as an apparent upturn in the NMO, though it is always difficult if not impossible to diagnose true change in the low-frequency signal right at the end of a time series.”
Let’s have a closer look at the influence of the PDO on global surface temperatures. Since the human influence on the atmosphere has grown over time, we want to focus on more recent decades when the input of additional greenhouse gases had already risen to a high level. This graphic shows the NASA GISS surface temperature anomaly values (the dots) from 1980 to the present, but with some trend lines added in.
(The NOAA GISS data are a running 12 month mean using the monthly data. Note that the trend lines added to this graph are meant to visually underscore the differences between time periods in the overall trend, and have no special statistical value.)
The black dots and the curvy trend line to the left represent a period of time when the PDO was positive, but also includes a depression in surface temperature because of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo. I made the trend line a “second order polynomial” instead of a regular straight line. A polynomial equation can capture internal curviness of a series of data.
(A polynomial equation that is of the same “order” as the number of points in the data set would, theoretically, zig and zag back and forth to account for each data point’s position which would be absurd. One must be careful with poylnomials. But a second order polynomial can honestly reflect a modest curviness in a series of data, and in this case, helps the line do its job at visually presenting a short term pattern.)
The second series of data, in blue, shows a period of mostly negative PMO, again, with a second order polynomial line drawn on it. This is the period of time that includes the so-called “hiatus” in global warming, when the upward trend of increasing surface temperature was somewhat attenuated. That attenuation was probably caused by a number of factors, and in fact, at least one of those factors had to do with inadequacies of the data itself, in that the measurements fail to account for extreme warming in the Arctic and parts of Africa. But the negative PMO, and likely, according to Steinmann, Mann and Miller, a larger scale relationship between atmosphere and ocean, seem to have somewhat flattened out the line.
But then we come to the third part of the data, in red. The ocean-atmosphere relationship has switched the other way. The PMO has been positive since the last part of 2013, and over a smaller and more recent time frame, we have been experiencing a strong El Niño.
This graphic does a nice job showing how short and medium term upward and downward trends eventually cancel out to produce a single upward trend in global surface temperature. Very short term shifts such as a given El Niño event or a given Volcanic eruption cause the most obvious squiggles. Somewhat longer term, multi-decade trends such as the PDO cause longer parts of the series of measurements to rise more or less quickly. But over nearly 40 years shown here, and longer periods, all the ups and downs average out to a single trend that can be reliably projected for a reasonable period of time.
Will More Rapid Global Warming Spur A More Effective Policy Response?
These ups and downs in the rate of warming are not important to the long term trend, but they are important because of their immediate effects on weather. And that is all that should matter. But these short and medium term trends, as well as even more immediate events such as individual storms, take on a greater importance that has nothing to do with the science of climate change itself. These changes affect the way politicians, advocates, and the general public, regard climate change, and serve to motivate or attenuate action on one side of the false debate or another.
We have known enough about climate change and its causes to have started the shift from fossil fuels to alternative strategies for producing energy long before 1980, but have in fact done very little to solve this problem. Initially, climate change seemed more like a thing of the future, and in fact, had relatively little impact on the most influential and powerful nations and people. Disruptions of weather patterns started to become more apparent around or just before 1980, but for the next few decades anti-science forces were well organized, and their efforts were enhanced, at the beginning of the 21st century, by the unthinking and unknowing process of air-sea interactions that reduced the rate of surface temperature increase even while weather patterns continued to become more and more chaotic.
But the truth is, a widespread flood in the American bottomlands defeats a snowball in the hands of a contrarian Senator. Eventually, more and more people in the US have been affected by inclement weather, and the frequency with which destructive storms of various kinds hammer the same subpopulation again and again has gone up. The symbolic snowball melts under the cold hard stare of voters who wonder how they are going to rebuild their lives after floods, severe storms, and droughts have taken away their property, in some cases their loved ones, and raised their insurance rates.
So the question emerges, will the next decade or so be a period of increased, or of attenuated, motivation from Mother Nature to act on climate change? The rational actor will act now, because we know that the greenhouse gas we pump into the atmosphere today changes the climate for decades to come. The reactionary actor with little capability or interest in thinking long term (i.e. most people) will be mollified by a decade with few severe storms, not much flooding, a seemingly secure food supply, and a snowball or two.
I left the projection of the future as a single estimate based on the past several decades (all the data shown on the graph). I could have imposed a more upward trending line, maybe a nice curve like these polynomials show, as an extension to the blue line. But since the graphic is going out a couple more decades, and the ups and downs average out over several decades, I think it is fair enough to use the linear projection shown by the red dotted line.
I’m not actually making a prediction of future global surface temperatures here. What I’m showing instead is that two things seem to be true. First, long term (over decades) global warming has happened and will likely to continue at about the same pace for a while. This has been going on long enough that by now we should viscerally understand that the squiggles are misleading. Second, the last couple of decades have been a period of reduced warming, but that period is likely over, and we are likely to experience an increased rate of warming.
Will surface temperatures during the term of the next POTUS squiggle about mostly above that red dotted line on this graph, or will those temperatures squiggle up and down above and below the line, or even below it? Based on the best available science, that first choice is most likely. Whomever ends up being POTUS, and the corresponding Congress, will be enacting (or failing to enact) policy during a period of surface temperature increasing at a rate higher than we have in recent years.
A vitally important known unknown, is what will the effects of such a rise in surface temperature be. We have various levels of confidence that storminess, changes in the distribution of rainfall, drought, and through the melting of glacial ice, sea level rise, are all important forms of climate disruption we are currently experiencing, and we should expect more of the same. The unknown is whether or not we should expect a dramatic acceleration of these changes in the short term future.
How will the insurance industry address an increase in widespread catastrophic damage caused by storms and floods? Will the government have to underwrite future losses, or will disaster insurance simply become something we can’t have? Will there be damage to our food production system that ultimately results in less certainly in the food supply, and how will we deal with that? The well known “reugee crisis” is a climate refugee crisis. But it may be a small one compared to what could happen in the future. Will we need to restrict development in mountain areas more subject to fires, and withdraw settlement from low lying areas along major rivers? How will we address more widespread and more severe killer heat waves?
The battle to preserve the use of fossil fuels exists at the state level in the US. Should we have a national effort to stop the legislatures in red states from putting the kibosh on local development of clean energy sources, either by energy utilities or individual home owners?
Sea level rise has already had several negative effects, but it is also is a longer term issue, and is perhaps among the most serious consequences of human greenhouse gas pollution. At some point, American politicians in some areas will be faced not with the question, “Will this or that Congressional district be represented by a Democrat or a Republican,” but rather, “Where the people who lived in this district go now that the sea is taking it?”
Over time, I think the social and political will to address climate change has grown, though very slowly. It might seem that the effects of climate change right now are fairly severe, with floods and fires and all that being more common. But while these effects are real and important, they have been minor compared to what the future is likely to bring. The anemic but positive growth of willingness to act has occurred in a political and physical climate that is less than nurturing of dramatic and effective action.
Whoever is elected president this time around, and the Congress, will serve during a period when the people’s will to act will transform from that inspired by activists pushing for change, to outcries of a larger number of desperate and suffering newcomers to the rational side of the climate change discussion.
Expect a sea change in the politics of science policy.
The Arctic has, of course, been warming in step with anthropogenic global warming, plus more. This phenomenon has probably increased disruption to global weather systems, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, over the last decade or so.
But something somewhat novel is happening this year, presumably as a result of global warming combined with a strong El Nino. Storms are bringing extra warm conditions to the Arctic. A few days ago, the North Pole was above freezing, and over the next few days we are expecting more warm conditions in the Arctic Circle. See this post by Eric Holthaus.
Figuring that interesting things might be happening in the Arctic, I had a look at the National Snow and Ice Data Center interactive graphic showing Arctic Sea ice cover now and over time. The graphic is at the top of the post. It turns out that Arctic Sea ice is at an historic low for this date, and in fact, looks to be flatlining, at least for now. I presume the ice will expand again shortly when the current influx of warm air to the region subsides, but it will be interesting to see if we end up with a new minimal maximum of sea ice.
Warm waters around Florida have resulted in a growth of the population of Portuguese Man-of-War, or should that be Portuguese Men-of-War, an organism commonly confused with jellyfish (because they look just like jellyfish).
The PMOWs have a sting, roughly equivalent in pain level to a bee sting, and best treated at such. Do not urinate on your PMOW sting (save your urine for an actual jellyfish sting).
There are reports of many PMOWs washing up, with numerous swimmers suffering stings. The stinging tentacles, even after they fall off, are a hazard, and barefoot beachcombers can accidentally step on them. Many Florida beaches have warnings in effect.
Sea Surface temperatures in florida are high:
And relatively high compared to historical data (images from Google Map with Climate Reanalyzer overlays):
Photograph above by Julia Laden, taken this morning.
By now you are probably aware of the major flooding that happened over the last several days in Missouri. Larry Lazar gave us a guest post detailing his personal experiences in Eureka, where the flooding was extensive. This flooding is not over, but is simply moving down stream in the Mississippi watershed. It will take several days before this is over.
We are long past the days when one can honestly say “you can’t attribute a given weather event to climate change.” Climate is weather long term, and weather is climate in the here and now. Climate has changed because of anthropogenic global warming. It is simply incorrect to say that the two are unrelated.
With a warmer atmosphere, there is more water vapor aloft. Changes in the relationship between the tropics and the Arctic, that relationship being a key determinate in how weather works, have changed how weather patterns develop. These changes cause precipitation to clump up, so some areas get more than the usual amount of rain while other areas experience less. These changes have also slowed down the movement of storms, so wet weather hangs around longer in one area.
More rain, clumped, and slowed down, means more frequent and more severe flooding, and we have seen plenty of that this past year, and a general increase over the last couple of decades. The increase in severity and frequency of flooding that was manifest just now in Missouri is the result of human caused disruption of atmospheric systems and this chaotic weather literally rains down on us from that atmosphere.
Tim Jones is no longer in elected office, yet continues to indicate that he is on his Twitter page.Now we turn to an irony, and an exemplar of an important and troubling phenomenon. The irony is that one small piece of the loss of property this flooding caused in Missouri was severe damage to the campaign headquarters of former Missouri House representative (District 110) Timothy Jones. Jones is a long time climate science denier. He is no longer in elected office, by his own choice, but Jones wrote that as he plans “… to continue my public service in the future, I am keeping all options open for 2018 and beyond to serve our state and our nation.” That facility is also used, according to Jones and others, to host Republican political meetings and events.
That is the irony, obviously, but I’ll develop the ironic nature of this small event more in a bit. The phenomenon that is so troubling is the concerted effort of politicians and others to work against addressing climate change. This is not a new thing. The fossil fuel industry, large players such as the Koch brothers, and famous politicians such as Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe have been working to discredit climate science and stop the shift towards clean (non-fossil) fuels for decades. Tim Jones has been and is a local player in that effort.
Let me be clear. We knew about climate change decades ago. In the 1970s, we also learned how precarious our national security and economic system can be in its reliance on fossil fuels.
There was a brief time back in the 70s when efficiency in fuel use was seen as a good thing, even a necessary thing. There were changes in zoning laws, speed limits on our interstates, automobile efficiency standards, appliance efficiency ratings, and all that. But around the same time and subsequently, “green” approaches to energy, slower speed limits, efficiency in building practices, and the development of solar and wind energy became conservative (read: Republican) issues but not in a good way.
As our nation transformed into not just a two party system, but a two ideology system, the right has taken up the challenge, effectively, of putting the kibosh on pretty much every move an individual, company, industry, public agency, or government might make to meaningfully reduce the use of fossil fuels and, in so doing, reduce our contribution to ever-increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in our atmosphere.
Imagine for a moment what might have happened if we treated both energy and climate change using that good old fashioned American approach that gave us victory over fascism in World War II, the Manhattan Project (for better or worse), and several trips to the moon. After 40 years of effort, leading the world in similar efforts, we would not be at 400+ parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. Simply put, had we stepped up back when we first realized the need and benefits of so doing, we would not have be experiencing the climate disruption we are now experiencing.
Today’s climate disruption was underwritten by, enhanced by – really, caused by – climate change science deniers and green energy opponents like Tim Jones and his ilk. They didn’t just question the science or make a fair stab at supporting oil and coal interests. They made disruptive climate change happen.
So, when Tim Jones finds his vaguely labeled headquarters destroyed by a flood that would have been unlikely decades ago but that today is virtually inevitable, and that will repeat frequently, it is all about chickens. What kind of chicken? The kind that occasionally come home. To roost.
I would not have even noticed that Jones’ headquarters had been destroyed had he not done something that is astonishingly insensitive and inappropriate. Jones is a popular and powerful Republican, statewide, in Missouri. He has raised a lot of money. As of January 2015 Jones had nearly one million dollars in his campaign coffers. Given the ruined status of his headquarters, it would be a simple matter to fund repair and renovations beyond whatever insurance coverage he had on the place. But instead of simply paying the piper that he himself helped invite to the party, he started a Go Fund Me campaign so that his supporters, who had suffered through this flood, could pay for those repairs.
Tim Jones’ Go Fund Me campaign is a poignant reminder of the situation. He has denied the human role in climate, he now denies that the flood that destroyed his offices is related to climate change, and now he is denying responsibility for the fiscal loss.
He is asking his former constituents and current supporters, who themselves have lost about two dozen loved ones and family members to flood related deaths and as yet uncounted millions of dollars in property, to buy him some new drywall. What a guy.
But wait, there’s more. Tim Jones has left public office for now, though he may return. But what is he doing exactly?
At the time that he announced he would no longer be seeking election, Jones accepted a job as a senior policy fellow with the Hammond Institute for Free Enterprise, housed at Lindenwood University. Lindenwood announced, within a day of Jones’ announcement that he would be joining Hammond, the award of a $2 million grant from … wait for it … the Charles Koch Foundation.
Meanwhile, since the flood, Jones has been making quite a stink on his Twitter feed, calling people who understand that climate change is real and important various names such as “Eco-Nazi,” “Libnuts,” etc. These offensive tweets are not important … that’s what people do on twitter. But seeing them interspersed with tweets begging for donations to fix up his headquarters is more than a little annoying, knowing that he has about a million bucks in the bank.
First I wanted to know if Larry had any inkling as to why Jones, if he is not in office, still uses the title “speaker” as part of his Twitter handle. Larry told me that a friend of his opined, “He doesn’t want to relinquish the title just as a President doesn’t lose his/her title. I saw this in a twitter conversation with him and someone else months ago.” This makes sense given some of his tweets today, in which he announced the development, at his flooded headquarters, of a sort of “Tim Jones Library.” Imagine that.
In one of his Tweets, Jones suggested that those concerned with climate change quiet down and go away, noting that the flood had happened five days ago and was no big deal. I asked Larry how he felt to learn that the state rep who formerly represented him indicated that the flood was not an important event. He told me,
My immediate thought upon seeing his flood damaged office was “What will it take for him to get it?” Tim has been an outspoken denier of climate science since he has been in office. While he has no expertise in climate science he has shared his views in opposition of climate science for many years via conservative radio and social media like Twitter and Facebook.
I should be shocked, but I know Tim’s opposition to climate change science all too well as he has been very active on conservative radio and social media – like twitter. I was?still surprised that he could be so insensitive given all of the devastation that our community and many others in Missouri have experienced. Most of these folks are uninsured and don’t have financial resources available to them like the wealthy do. I thought he could at least pretend to be concerned ?about the folks, many of whom have voted for him and supported him financially, that?have?may have lost their homes and?other property.
Let’s look at the bigger picture for a moment. Missouri is a pretty red state. How well a clean energy project does in a given state has a lot to do with the legislature and prevailing powerful interests. I was wondering what was going on in Missouri in this area. I asked Larry if the Missouri state government, where Tim Jones and a lot of similar minded Republicans have served or do serve to represent the people, has been doing what it needs to do to make it easier for individual citizens and companies to use cleaner energy sources. Larry gave me a long and thoughtful answer to that question, which I’ll pass on in its entirety.
Missouri gets 80% of our energy from dirty coal – which is imported from Wyoming. Neighboring states like Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska are harnessing renewable energy sources at much higher rates than Missouri. I often wonder if the fact that St. Louis is the world headquarters for 5 coal companies, including Peabody, the world’s largest coal company, contributes to our continued reliance on coal. Peabody, as well as Ameren, which is Missouri’s largest energy utility, are both large contributors to political campaigns – for both parties. The result of this unholy alliance is that Missouri has very few incentives, both at the individual, and corporate levels, to switch to cleaner energy.
I wish Missouri could lead on climate. If only Missouri leaders would recognize the great economic opportunities that exist for entrepreneurs, businesses and individuals by leading on climate change instead of clinging to denial that, frankly, is absurd. We have outstanding scientific expertise in our universities and businesses as well as hard-working and intelligent people. Why not leverage these resources and put Missouri in a leadership position on climate? Let Missourians go to work on climate. We can solve this – and Missouri should lead.
I would also ask Missouri leaders to reflect on what their legacy will be. In 20, 30 or 50 years what will their children and grandchildren say about them? What will be in the history books about what actions they took, or didn’t take, on climate change and other issues back in the early decades of the 21st century? Did they act upon what many scientists say is humankind’s greatest challenge or did they persist in denial and delay, apparently for the benefit of a few exceptionally wealthy contributors to their campaigns?
Thanks to Larry Lazar for his help in figuring this all out, and thanks to Tim Jones for being such a great example of what is wrong with this country.
Oh by the way: Republican Politics in Missouri
Not directly related to the issue at hand, but very relevant to the state of Republican politics in the Show Me state, is this pair of suicides and related political intriquge, antisemitism, and as Rachel Meadow calls it, Shakespearian Tragedy. This is the first story in the March 30th, 2015 Rachel Maddow Show:
The year that just finished, 2015, was the warmest year recorded in the instrumental record. The actual data for December is not officially available yet, but my friend and colleague John Abraham keeps track of the global surface temperature daily and has done an amazing job at estimating the final temperature anomaly value that is eventually reported in each of several databases. He has provided a graph using his estimated value, above.
There are two major contributing factors, maybe three depending on how you count everything, to 2015 being the warmest year. The main factor is, of course, global warming. The Earth’s surface temperature is going up because of the Greenhouse Effect, and along with that, we are seeing remarkable climate disruption, including floods, other inclement weather, and a host of problems. On top of this, the last part of 2015 saw a strong El Niño, the strongest recorded in historic documents. This weather event, which involves the departure of ocean-stored heat in the Pacific into the atmosphere, is continuing, though it will likely peak soon and begin to decline (but see below). That is all we need, really, to explain 2015, but there may be a third factor that overlaps with those two worth singling out. Some areas of the world’s oceans, including parts of the Atlantic and the Pacific (outside the usual Pacific El Niño warming effect), have been exceptionally warm on the surface. This is really just part of the whole anthropogenic global warming thing, but seems more extreme this year. In other words, it seems as though the ocean is putting more stored heat into the atmosphere than just that part that El Niño contributes, and the surface temperature measurements include sea surface temperature.
How warm will 2016 be? Playing the odds, it would always be a good bet that the next year will be warmer than the current year, on average, because global warming continues. However, even as the surface temperature trends upwards over time, the actual measurements from year to year wiggle up and down a fair amount owing to a number of factors. So, on average, if you bet on warming for each subsequent year you would overall win, but you might lose that bet during some years. (In fact, you could lose your shirt if warming happens to occur with infrequent large spikes interspersed among years that see modest cooling, so be careful!)
However, 2016 is actually more than 50-something percent likely to be warm compared to 2015. One reason is that El Nino will continue for the first part of 2016, and the effect that El Niño has on surface temperature is delayed. The peak effect occurs several months after the peak of the El Niño itself. So, if El Niño peaks in February, for example, we will have global warming + El Niño enhancement through early summer. So at least half of the months of 2016 will be very warm. There is a very good chance, then, that 2016 will be warmer even than 2015.
Mark Boslough, a physicist who writes quite a bit about Global Warming, has made a bet along these lines. He is not betting that 2016 will be warmer than 2015, but he is betting on the long term upward trend of the Earth’s surface temperatures. He’s really putting his money where his mouth is, by the way, to the tune of 25,000 US dollars. The details of his bet are here. So far, as far as I know, none of those in the climate science denial world have taken him up.
). These elements have been “known” for a long time, but are only now being added for reasons explained in the video below.
, or 
? Great books. Not current, but then again, the Periodic Table has been around for quite a while.
is a new book by Howard Wainer that can serve as a manual for how to be a good skeptic.
, science is central to a large number of our policy challenges, but there are almost no scientists in Congress (about a half dozen during any given term). In fact, we don’t necessarily need a lot more scientists in Congress, but we do need to have science savvy people in elected office. What better way is there to ensure a higher level of science awareness than to make science policy a normal part of our election cycles, through debates, policy statements, and the journalism that covers those elections?
