What’s worse than months or years without rain? Rain, after months or years, at least under some circumstances.
For instance … it gets try, plants become vulnerable to fire. Fires happen denuding the dry landscape. Then it rains, and you get more severe floods together with landslides. You know the story because for years this has been the pattern in California.
But there is another roughly similar, or at least analogous, problem that is now being discussed. The levees that are mean to keep floodwaters contained in California were already in fairly bad shape. Prior to the drought, a significant number of levees were known to be at risk of failure should they actually get used. Many are thought unable to handle earthquakes as well.
But with the drought, several factors have probably made the levees weaker. This is an ongoing process and will continue as long as the drought continues.
Prolonged droughts undermine the stability of levee systems by increasing water seepage through soil, soil cracking, soil strength reduction, soil organic carbon (SOC) decomposition, and land subsidence and erosion . The sand-clay mixtures, which form the body of the levees and consequently the entire structure, can lose a substantial amount of strength under dry conditions. Furthermore, levees in California are built on peaty soils, and the extreme drought leads to greater SOC decomposition in these soils. A large amount of the global carbon stock is found in peaty soils, and ~25% of this estimated stock is predicted to diminish under extremely dry conditions. Oxidation of SOC under a prolonged drought can also accelerate land subsidence. In fact, 75% of the land subsidence across California is accredited to oxidation of SOC. Land subsidence can increase the risk of water rising over the top of the levees.
This happened in Australia. Remember the big flooding a couple of years back? Some of that was made worse by levees failing, and those levees had been weakened by prolonged drought. So this is not theoretical.
We need to act urgently to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas pollution we humans create in order to slow down and eventually stop climate change. In the mean time we see case after case of something happening that seems unusual and that seems linked to global warming. We need not wait for the jury to return a verdict in every single case in order to act. We already know what many of the effects of climate change are, and we have a reasonably good idea of what effects will arise in the future. Even so, every now and then something happens that any reasonable person might guess is linked ultimately to greenhouse gas pollution, and we should pay attention to those cases.
Whales die, and sometimes their bodies wash up on shore. Over the last few months, the rate at which this happens seems to have increased about 300% in the Gulf of Alaska and maybe in other areas as well. One possible culprit is warming of northern waters (you may have heard of the Warm Blob), which in turn feeds the development of toxic microbes. Warming can also have other effects as well. This set of effects is thought to be a possible, maybe likely, cause of this alarming rate of whale deaths. Many of the whales are larger species.
From NOAA:
Since May 2015, 11 fin whales, 14 humpback whales, one gray whale, and four unidentified cetaceans have stranded around the islands of the western Gulf of Alaska and the southern shoreline of the Alaska Peninsula. To date, this brings the large whale strandings for this region to almost three times the historical average.
The declaration of an unusual mortality event will allow NOAA and federal, state, and tribal partners to develop a response plan and conduct a rigorous scientific investigation into the cause of death for the stranded whales.
“NOAA Fisheries scientists and partners are very concerned about the large number of whales stranding in the western Gulf of Alaska in recent months,” said Dr. Teri Rowles, NOAA Fisheries’ marine mammal health and stranding response coordinator. “While we do not yet know the cause of these strandings, our investigations will give us important information on the health of whales and the ecosystems where they live. Members of the public can greatly assist the investigation by immediately reporting any sightings of dead whales or distressed live animals they discover.”
Predation, starvation, or disease could be behind the deaths, but researchers say there have been few signs of physical trauma to the whales. The more likely culprit is unusual water conditions.
Over the past two years, a large mass of warm water that climatologists have dubbed “the blob” has persisted in the north Pacific, and El Niño 2015 is pushing more warm water into the region.
The unusually warm and calm seas are believed to be behind a series of toxin-producing algae blooms – record-breaking in size and duration – stretching from southern California to the Aleutian Islands. Clams sampled near the town of Sand Point, Alaska were found to have toxin levels more than 80 times what the FDA says is safe for human consumption, said Bruce Wright, a scientist who studies toxic algal blooms for the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands Association. The levels were ten times anything Wright had previously recorded.
How do you explain a person seemingly legitimately trained in science drifting off and becoming more and more of a science denier?
In the case of Judith Curry I was unwilling to think of her as a full on science denier for a long time because her transition into denierhood seemed to be going very slowly, methodologically. It was almost like she was trying to drift over into denier land and maybe bring a few back with her. Like some people seem to do sometimes. But no, she just kept providing more and more evidence that she does not accept climate science’s concensus that global warming is real, caused by human greenhouse gas polution, involves actual warming of the Earth’s surface, and is important.
And lately she has added to this slippery sliding jello-like set of magic goal posts yet another denier meme. She is certain, after a convoluted review of “evidence” that one of the classic examples of deniers lying, deniers making stuff up to confuse and mislead policy makers, reporters, and the public, is real.
It is not real but she says it is real. If you were looking for a last straw required to place Judith Curry plainly and simply and undoubtedly in the category of Climate Science denier, this straw has fallen heavily on the camelid’s aching overburdened back. If you were looking for that one last fact that determines the balance of argument in favor (vs. against) Judith Curry being either nefarious (as all those who intentionally deny this important area of science must be) or just plain (and inexcusably) stupid (the only alternative explanation for pushing climate science denialism) than that fact has arrived.
What the heck am I talking about? This.
I’ve talked about it here. Go read that and the 100+ comments on it. In that post I contextualize and quote the following words from this source:
One e-mail Phil Jones of CRU sent to my coauthors and me in early 1999 has received more attention than any other. In it, Jones both made reference to “Mike’s Nature trick” and used the phrase “to hide the decline” in describing a figure … comparing different proxy temperature reconstructions. Here was the smoking gun, climate change deniers clamored. Climate scientists had finally been caught cooking the books: They were using “a trick to hide the decline in global temperatures,” a nefarious plot to hide the fact the globe was in fact cooling, not warming! …
The full quotation from Jones’s e-mail was …, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” Only by omitting the twenty-three words in between “trick” and “hide the decline” were change deniers able to fabricate the claim of a supposed “trick to hide the decline.” No such phrase was used in the e-mail nor in any of the stolen e-mails for that matter. Indeed, “Mike’s Nature trick” and “hide the decline” had nothing to do with each other. In reality, neither “trick” nor “hide the decline” was referring to recent warming, but rather the far more mundane issue of how to compare proxy and instrumental temperature records. Jones was using the word trick [to refer to] to an entirely legitimate plotting device for comparing two datasets on a single graph…
The reconstruction by Briffa, (see K. R. Briffa, F. H. Schweingruber, P. D. Jones, T. J. Osborn, S. G. Shiyatov, and E. A. Vaganov, “Reduced Sensitivity of Recent Tree-Growth to Temperature at High Northern Latitudes,” Nature, 391 (1998): 678–682) in particular …
…was susceptible to the so-called divergence problem, a problem that primarily afflicts tree ring density data from higher latitudes. These data show an enigmatic decline in their response to warming temperatures after roughly 1960, … [Jones] was simply referring to something Briffa and coauthors had themselves cautioned in their original 1998 publication: that their tree ring density data should not be used to infer temperatures after 1960 because they were compromised by the divergence problem. Jones thus chose not to display the Briffa et al. series after 1960 in his plot, “hiding” data known to be faulty and misleading—again, entirely appropriate. … Individuals such as S. Fred Singer have … tried to tar my coauthors and me with “hide the decline” by conflating the divergence problem that plagued the Briffa et al. tree ring density reconstruction with entirely unrelated aspects of the hockey stick.
In hindsight, the way the Climategate emails was rolled out, after very careful scrutiny by the targeted bloggers, was handled pretty responsibly. Lets face it – “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” means . . . “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline.”
That statement by Curry is demonstrably wrong. That is a fact borne of logical and scientific examination of the information, and information is not lacking. Curry is wrong.
Beyond that, I think, as implied above, she is either doing something here that is morally wrong (lying to slow down action on climate change) or stupid (she is not smart enough to understand what she is looking at). Here, I want to be clear. The argument that Curry is wrong is logical. Ends there. She’s wrong. The idea that she is either immoral or stupid is both my opinion and NOT an argument about her wrongness. I am not making an ad hominem argument. If you think that is an ad hominem argument then you don’t know what an ad hominum argument is (and isn’t).
And yes, I understand that this is a rather insulting thing to say, that one is either immoral or a dumbass. But it is my children’s future that is at risk here. Expect insults.
Cherry-pickin’ a bit of temperature data
And tryin’ to claim that climate change is in hiatus
It’s not, the trends are still going straight up
But they ain’t tryin’ to change their minds once they’re made up
In 1992 my mama’s thesis
Was about CO2 and Svante Arrhenius
So if you try to tell me that climate change isn’t serious
You’re dissin’ my mama, yup I’m kinda cliquish
Climate models employ piles of data and sophisticated computational techniques to predict what will happen in the future. Sometimes they predict what happened in the past as well. That is important to test the models (because we might know what happened in the past), or to fill in the blanks (we don’t always know exactly what happened in the past) or to understand complex climate systems better.
If you glance at the science denier rhetoric (mainly on blogs, you won’t find much in the peer reviewed literature because it isn’t good science) you’ll see repeated claims that climate models that try to predict global warming don’t match the actual observations of global warming. Most of the time, this claim is simply wrong. Perhaps an improper measurement of warming (like temperatures up higher in the atmosphere where we actually expect cooling rather than warming) is being used, which constitutes a lie. In other cases observed warming is within the model projections, but tracks off to one side (usually the low side) of the average expectation, but remains within the margin of error. This is either a misunderstanding of how the science works, or a willful misrepresentation. (Again, a lie.) But there are actually two legitimate areas where certain climate models seem to overstate observed warming. A recent post by John Abraham at the Guardian explores these areas.
First there is the question of where the warming is observed. We measure warming in several parts of the Earth’s surface. (See “What does “Global Warming” Mean?) One is surface temperatures at about head height, over land, via a gazillion weather stations many of which have been in operation since the 19th century. The other is at the surface of the sea, using a combination of older measurements taken from ships and more recent satellite observations. In addition, we have measurements of the deeper ocean itself, usually averaged out over some depth such as the top 700 meters, or the top 2,000 meters. This combines older and new ship our buoy measurements but tend to not go back in far in time as the land and sea surface measurements.
John Abraham has spent a lot of effort looking at ocean temperatures at depth. He and I recently published this item, and he’s done a lot of additional work on it. The total amount of heat added to the Earth’s surface from anthropogenic warming (caused mainly by greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide) is divided between the ocean and the surface, with the ocean taking up much of that heat. I liken the system to a dog with a wagging tail. The ocean is the dog, the surface temperatures, making up a small part of the overall system and being much more variable, is the tail.
We separated the world’s oceans into the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian. All three of these oceans are warming with the Atlantic warming the most. We also calculated the ocean heating by using 40 state-of-the-art climate models. Over the period from 1970, the climate models have under-predicted the warming by 15%.
And here you can see a number of climate models superimposed over the observed heating in the top 700 meters of the ocean (the red line):
In a more recent post, Abraham asks the question, “ how have the models done at predicting the changes in air temperatures?”
As noted, global surface temperature is estimated in part from a bunch of thermometers around the globe, but these thermometers were not placed there for this purpose. They are weather stations set up to help track the weather, not to address questions of climate change. They are not evenly distributed, and there are huge gaps in the surface coverage, most notably in the Arctic and interior Africa, both regions where recent warming has probably been greater than elsewhere. In order for these temperature data to be used, they have to be carefully employed in a computational system that helps fill in the gaps. There are other complexities beyond our scope here. Suffice it to say that when a bunch of different groups of scientists (i.e., the British meteorology office, NASA, NOAA, the Japan Meteorological agency, and various university based groups) take on the task of estimating surface temperatures, they all do it a bit differently and thus turn up with slightly different curves.
This is true as well with sea surface temperatures. There is more than one way to measure sea surface temperature, or more exactly, to take existing data and turn it into a useful estimate of sea surface temperatures.
In addition, the data are cleaned up over time as mistakes are found, the basic computational approach used may be updated to make it more precise, and the overall approach to computation may be changed to make it more accurate.
Over time, two clear patterns have emerged. First, if you take all of the different measurements of surface temperature over time spanning from the 19th century to the present, lay them all out in front of you and step back about two meters and squint slightly, you can’t see the difference among them. They all look the same, they all tell the same story. They all have a handful of notable ups and downs along the generally upward march of surface temperatures with industrial pollution. You have to look at the graphs all on the same axes, together, to see the differences, and the differences are minor. This tells us that all the different approaches to processing a largely overlapping set of data end up with the same basic result. So many smart minds working with the best available science all produce the same result. How boring. But also, how reassuring that the science is being done right.
The second pattern emerges when we look at these graphs as they are produced over time. Various groups have said, “hey wait a minute, we’re missing this” or “we’re missing that” factor. Urban heat island effects may change the data! What about the Arctic! Interior Africa! Our satellites were recalibrated what does that do? Etc.
Over time, and honest, well informed, diligent effort by many groups to improve the measurement of the Earth’s surface temperature has resulted in a series of slightly different graphs, and in each and every case of which I’m aware, the resulting, more recent and better done graphs show more warming, and various periods of relative flatness have become steeper (going upwards).
So, what John Abraham has done is to take some of the more recently processed, better quality data and compared it to the usual models to see how well the models have done. They did well.
He based his discussion on a comparison of the most recent climate model simulations with actual global surface temperature measurements as numerically summarized by NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, shown here:
John has superimposed 2015 so far (the star).
This shows the most current computer model results and five current temperature data sets. The dark line is the average of the models, and the various colored lines are the temperature measurements.
The dashed line is slightly above the colored markers in recent years, but the results are quite close. Furthermore, this year’s temperature to date is running hotter than 2014. To date, 2015 is almost exactly at the predicted mean value from the models. Importantly, the measured temperatures are well within the spread of the model projections.
Too Hot
This is the year of the heatwave. We’ve had heat waves off and on for the last few years, but it seems that there are more now than ever before. While some have tried to argue that global warming can’t really cause warming (sometimes expressed as heat waves), it does.
Climate Scientist Stefan Rahmstorf has a blog post, in German, about a current heat wave in Europe. He notes (rough translation):
Europe is currently experiencing the second major heat wave this summer. On 5 July, according to the German Weather Service , a never before measured in Germany temperature reached 40.3 ° C in Kitzingen. But a month later, on August 7, this century record has been revised…One might speculate that a single heat wave could be simply due to chance. If you look at the temperature data, however, in their entirety it is immediately clear that extreme heat has become more common over several decades. (Apologies for errors in translation.)
And he shows this graph:
Percentage of global land area where the temperatures over a month were two or three standard deviations above the average from 1950 to 1980. Two standard deviations (orange) could be described as “very hot”, three standard deviations (dark red) as “extremely hot”. Source: Coumou and Robinson 2013
Egypt’s state news agency says 21 more people have died due to a scorching heat wave, raising this week’s death toll to more than 60.
The official MENA news agency said Wednesday that the latest deaths are from the previous day, mostly elderly people. It says 581 people are in hospital for heat exhaustion.
The Mideast has been hit by a heat wave since late July. Egyptian summers are usually hot, but temperatures this week soared to 46 degrees Celsius (114 degrees Fahrenheit) in the south.
At least 40 people had died on Sunday and Monday, including detainees and patients in a psychiatric hospital, according to officials. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Tuesday’s death toll includes a German national living in the southern city of Luxor who died from heatstroke.
Bill Maher and Penn State meteorology professor Michael Mann discuss the “settled science” of climate change and the lack of public engagement on the issue. Dr. Mann is the co-author of “Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change.”
There are two new scientific research papers looking at variation over the last century or so in global warming. One paper looks at the march of annual estimates of global surface temperature (air over the land plus sea surface, not ocean), and applies a well established statistical technique to ask the question: Was there a pause in global warming some time over the last couple of decades, as claimed by some?
The answer is, no, there wasn’t.
The paper is open access, is very clearly written so it speaks for itself, and is available here. One of the authors has a blog post here, in German.
The other paper looks at the so called global warming “pause” and interrogates the available data to see if the pause is supported. It concludes that it isn’t. The paper is written up in a blog post by one of the authors, here.
I’ll give you an overview of the findings below, but first, a word from the world of How Science Works.
It’s the variation, stupid
No, I’m not calling you stupid. Probably. I’m just paraphrasing Bill Clinton to underscore the importance of variation in science. The new paper examines variation in the global surface temperature record, so this is an opportunity to make this point.
Much of the time, science is about measuring, understanding, explaining, and predicting variation. This is a point non-scientists would do well to grasp. One of the reasons non-scientists, especially those engaged in policy making (from voter to member of Congress to regulatory agent to talking head) need to understand this better is because variation is one of the most useful tools in the denier tool kit. If your objective is to deny or obfuscate science, variation is there to help you.
Global warming, the increase in the Earth’s surface and ocean temperatures caused by the human caused increase in greenhouse gas, is a system with plenty of variation. The sources of variation are myriad, and the result is that the measurement of air temperature, sea surface temperature, and deeper ocean temperature appears as a set of squiggly lines.
In many systems, variation exists at more than one scale.
So, at the centennial scale, we see global surface temperatures not varying much century by century for a thousand years, then the 20th century average is higher than the previous centuries, and the 21st century average, estimated by 15% of the years of a century, is higher still. That is the effect of industrialization, where we shift from using energy from human and animal work, together with a bit of wind and water power, to using energy stored in carbon bonds in fossil fuels. This combined with population increase and increasing demands to support a consumer-driven comfort-based lifestyle have caused us to release fossil carbon into the atmosphere at an alarming rate.
At the decadal scale, we see a few recent decades that stick up above the others, and a few that are lower than others or at least don’t go up as much as others. Over the last 100 years, the decadal average temperatures have gone up on average, but with variation. The primary explanation for this variation is two fold. First, there is an increase in the absolute amount of greenhouse gas, and the rate at which we are adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, so over time, greenhouse gasses have become the main determinant of temperature change (causing an increase). Earlier on, when greenhouse gas concentration was lower, other factors had a bigger impact. The second (and related) explanation is variation in aerosols, aka dust, in the atmosphere from various industrial processes, volcanoes, and such. Decadal or multidecadal variation over the last century has been mainly caused by aerosols, but with this effect diminishing in its importance as it gives way to the increasingly important role of greenhouse gas.
At a finer scale, of a year or a few years, we see variation caused mainly by the interaction of the surface (the air and the sea surface) and the upper ocean (this is sometimes examined for the top, say, 700 meters, other times, for the top 2000 meters, etc.) When we look at just ocean temperatures or just surface temperatures, we see a lot of squiggling up and down on an ever increasing upward trend. When we look at both together, we note that the squiggles cancel out to some extent. The ocean warmed considerably during recent years when the surface warmed more slowly. This is because heat is being exchanged back and forth between the surface and the deeper sea in a away that itself varies.
That is the simple version. In reality things are more complex. Even though ocean and surface temperatures vary from year to year, with the major variations caused by El Nino and La Nina events in the ENSO cycle, there are longer term variations in how this exchange of heat trends. This time scale is in the order of several decades going in one direction, several decades going in the other direction. (see this post) Then, this sort of variation may have much larger scales of change, at century or even millennial time scales, as ocean currents that facilitate this exchange, undergo major changes, which in turn alters the interaction of the surface and the sea. And, of course, both sea and ocean temperature can affect the major ocean currents, so there is a complex causal interaction going in both directions between those two sources of variation.
This is not a digression but it is annoying
Have you ever been annoyed by someone who makes a claim about the health benefits, or negative effects, of some kind of food or other ingestible substance? You know, one of those totally non-scientific “findings” from the usual internet sources. Here is a little trick you can do if you want to challenge such a claim.
In order to truly evaluate a health related claim, and have that evaluation be credible, you have to be able to do one of the following things, depending on the claim. Being able to do this is not enough to validate your expertise, but it is a starting point. It is a gate-keeper thought experiment. If you can’t do this, then you can’t really make the claim you are making with any credibility.
Name all the parts of a cell and what they do (for many health claims, especially those that have to do with diet, energy, metabolism, etc.)
Name all the different components of the immune system and explain how they work in detail (for many disease or illness related claims).
Describe, in detail, the digestive process, i.e., the process of food sitting on a plate being ingested and eventually being used by a human body, at the molecular level (for many claims about the beneficial or negative effects of certain foods, or the benefits of various dietary supplements).
You might be a climate scientist if …
All that stuff I said above about variation is the very simple version of what happens in the climate with respect to global surface temperature imbalance and global warming. If you read what I wrote and the whole time were thinking things like “yeah, but, he’s totally glossing this” or “no, it isn’t that simple, what really happens is…” then you might be a climate scientist.
If, on the other hand, this extensive tl;dr yammering on variation seemed senseless or a waste of time, or you didn’t find it interesting or don’t get the point, the you may not be prepared to evaluate claims like the one about the so-called “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming. More importantly, there is a good chance that a person making the claim that there has been such a pause is unprepared to do so, just as the person claiming that wearing a $50 fragment of a discarded circuit board around their neck will protect them from EMF can not really make that claim because they are a total dumb-ass when it comes to energy fields and cell biology.
Or, the person making the claim (most common in the area of global warming) is just trying to fool somebody. They are like the person who sells the fragment of the discarded circuit board.
Change Point
The first paper is “Change Points of Global Temperature” by Niamh Cahill, Stefan Rahmstorf and Andrew Parnell, published in IOP Science Environmental Research Letters.
A long series of data may demonstrate the outcome of a set of variables where all the variables act in similar ways over time, and any trend plus or minus variation will be clear. But if the variables change in their level of effect over time, it may be that parts of the long term data series need to be treated separately. This requirement has led to the development of a number of statistical techniques to break a series of data up into different segments, with each segment having a different statistical model applied to it.
The statistical approaches to this problem initially arose in an effort to better understand variation in the process of making key electronic components in the telecommunications industry. An early method was the “Control Chart” developed by Walter A. Shewhart at Bell Labs. The method allowed engineers to isolate moments in time when a source of variation contributing to mechanical failure changed, perhaps because some new factor came into play.
More recently, the statistical method of “Change Point Analysis” was developed to provide a better statistical framework for identifying and assessing the statistical significance of changes in sources of variation. The process involves determining whether or not a change in the sources of variation has occurred, and also, estimating if multiple change points have occurred. The process is pretty complicated, numerically, but is automated by a number of available statistical tools.
The new paper attempts to assess the reality of a “pause” or “hiatus” in global surface temperature increase using change point analysis. The change point analysis used four of the major commonly used data sets reflecting surface temperature changes. In each case, they found three change points to be sufficient to explain the medium to long term variation in the data. Most importantly, the most recent detectable change point was in the 1970s, after which there is no detectable change in the trend of increasing global temperature.
The results of the analysis are summarized in this graphic:
Figure 1. Overlaid on the raw data are the mean curves predicted by the three CP model. The grey time intervals display the total range of the 95% confidence limits for each CP. The average rates of rise per decade for the three latter periods are 0.13 ± 0.04 °C, ?0.03 ± 0.04 °C and 0.17 ± 0.03 °C for HadCRUT, 0.14 ± 0.03 °C, ?0.01 ± 0.04 °C and 0.15 ± 0.02 °C for NOAA, 0.15 ± 0.05 °C, ?0.03 ± 0.04 °C and 0.18 ± 0.03 °C for Cowtan and Way and 0.14 ± 0.04 °C, ?0.01 ± 0.04 °C and 0.16 ± 0.02 °C for GISTEMP.
Those who claim that there was a pause in global warming point to certain dates as the origin of that pause. The authors tested that idea by forcing the change point analysis to assume that this was correct. The alleged starting points for a global warming hiatus failed the statistical test. They are not real. The authors determined that the change point analysis “…provides strong evidence that there has been no detectable trend change in any of the global temperature records either in 1998 or 2001, or indeed any time since 1980. Note that performing the CP analysis on the global temperature records excluding the 2013 and 2014 observations does not alter this conclusion.”
In addition, even though the alleged starting points for a global warming hiatus were found to be bogus, they were found to be more bogus in one of the four data sets, that developed by Cowtan and Way, which in turn is generally thought to be the data set that eliminates most of the biases and other problems found in this sort of information. In other words, using the best representation available of global surface temperature increase, the so called hiatus is not only statistically insignificant, it is even less significant!
But that wasn’t enough. The authors took it even a step further.
Finally to conclusively answer the question of whether there has been a ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’ we need to ask: If there really was zero-trend since 1998, would the short length of the series since this time be sufficient to detect a CP? To answer this, we took the GISTEMP global record and assumed a hypothetical climate in which temperatures have zero trend since 1998. The estimated trend line value for 1998 is 0.43 °C (obtained by running the CP analysis on the original data up to and including 1998). Using this, we simulated 100 de-trended realizations for the period 1998–2014 that were centered around 0.43 °C. We augmented the GISTEMP data with each hypothetical climate realization and ran the four CP model on the augmented data sets. This allowed us to observe how often a fourth CP could be detected if the underlying trend for this period was in fact zero. Results showed that 92% of the time the four CP model converged to indicate CPs in approximately 1912, 1940, 1970 and a fourth CP after 1998. Thus, we can be confident that if a significant ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’ in global temperature did exist, our models would have picked up the trend change with a high probability of 0.92.
Climate change deniers are always trying to make the graphs go down. The graphs do not cooperate.One is forced, sadly, to think about what deniers might say about any new climate change study. In this case, I think I know what they might say. Look again at the graph shown above. We see two periods when temperatures seem to be going down, and two periods when temperatures seem to be going up. So, half the time, they are going down and half the time they are going up, right? So, what happens if, as suggested by some climate deniers, we are due for a downward trend? Maybe there will be enough multi-decadal downward trends over the next century or so to significantly attenuate the overall trend. Hey, we might even see cooling. Right?
Well, no. For one thing, as mentioned above, the overall pattern has been an increase in the importance of greenhouse gasses as the variable controlling surface temperatures. Whatever factors caused the flattish or downward trends many decades ago may still be in place but are relatively less important from now on, even if we quickly curtail CO2 output. Also, one of those factors, aerosols, is reduced permanently (we hope). Industrial pollution, in the past, caused a lot of aerosols to be released into the atmosphere. This has been reduced by changing how we burn things, so that source attenuation of surface temperatures is reduced. Also, as noted above, there are multi-decadal changes in the relationship between the surface (air and sea surface) and the ocean, and at least one major study suggests that over coming decades this will shift into a new phase with more surface heating.
I asked author Stefan Rahmstorf to comment on the possibility of a future “hiatus.” He told me that one is possible, but “I don’t expect that a grand solar minimum alone could do it (see Feulner and Rahmstorf ERL 2010). Maybe an exceptionally large volcanic eruption could do it but it would have to be far bigger than Pinatubo, which did not cause one.” He also notes that some IPCC climate models have suggested a future slowdown, and the possibility of cooling in not non-zero. The key point, he notes, is “it just has not happened thus far, as the data analysis shows.”
Author Andrew Parnell noted, “I think anybody who claims that these current data demonstrate a hiatus is mistaken.”
Think there is a global warming hiatus? Slow down a second…
The second paper is “Lack of evidence for a slowdown in global temperature” by Grant Foster and John Abraham. Foster and Abraham start out by noting that there is a widely held belief, even among the climate science community, “…that the warming rate of global surface temperature has
exhibited a slowdown over the last decade to decade and a half.” They examine this idea “…and find no evidence to support claims of a slowdown in the trend.”
The authors note that most of the discussion of global warming involves reference to “ the relatively small thermal reservoir of the lower atmosphere” (what I refer to above as the “surface”), but since this is only a small part of the planets heat storage, this can be misleading. When the ocean is taken into account, we see no slowdown in warming. The paper by Foster and Abraham refers to the above discussed paper on change point analysis, so I’ll skip that part. The remaining thrust of the paper is to apply some basic statistical tests to the temperature curves to see if there is a statistically valid slowdown.
They derived residuals, using the GISS data set, for the last several decades, indidating the divergence of each year from an expected value given an upward trend. This looks like this:
They then took sets of adjoining residuals, and tested the hypothesis “This set of numbers is different from the other numbers.” If there was a statistically significant decrease, or increase, in temperature change for several years it would show up in this analysis. The statistical test of this hypothesis failed. As beautiful as a pause in global warming may seem, the idea has been killed by the ugly fact of ever increasing temperatures. To coin a phrase.
Then…
As a last attempt to find evidence of a trend in the residuals, we allowed for models in which not only the slope (the warming rate) changes, but the actual value itself. These are discontinuous trends, which really do not make sense physically … but because our goal is to investigate as many possible changes as is practical, we applied these models too. This is yet another version of change-point analysis, in which we test all practical values of the time at which the slope and value of the time series change. Hence it too must be adjusted for multiple trials.
Again, no statistical significance. If you look at the global temperature curve, and see a pause, what you are really seeing is noise.
Foster and Abraham conclude:
Our results show that the widespread acceptance of the idea of a recent slowdown in the increase of global average surface temperature is not supported by analytical evidence. We suggest two possible contributors to this. First, the natural curiosity of honest scientists strongly motivates them to investigate issues which appear to be meaningful even before such evidence arrives (which is a very good thing). Second, those who deny that manmade global warming is a danger have actively engaged in a public campaign to proclaim not just a slowdown in surface temperature increase, but a complete halt to global warming. Their efforts have been pervasive, so that in spite of lack of evidence to back up such claims, they have effectively sown the seeds of doubt in the public, the community of journalists, and even elected officials.
Men and women are different, on average, in a number of ways. It all probably starts with who has the physiology to have babies and who doesn’t, and the differences spread out from there, affecting both the body and the mind. Decades of research show us that many of the body differences (but not all) are determined by developmental processes while many of the mind differences (but maybe not all) are determined by culture, but culture still has men and women as being different, so those differences tend to be persistent and predictable, on average.
One of the differences which seems to meld body and mind, in the West anyway, is the tendency for women to be cold while men are comfortable across a certain range of temperature. It turns out that many decades ago a study was done that developed standards for installing and running air conditioning systems that, typically, set ambient in-room temperature levels to accommodate men. Damn the patriarchy, one more time. Since men are more comfortable on average at lower temperatures, this means a) air conditioners are set relatively low (which means high, in terms of energy use) and, b0 on average, women are doomed to wear sweaters or carry around blanket like objects while at work, at movies, at the mall, or anywhere where sexist air conditioning is operating.
This is important not only for comfort of half the population, but also for climate change. A large amount (about 30%) of the CO2 emmissions in the West are the result of energy use in the buildings we live and work in, and a good part of that is heating and cooling. A new study, just out in Nature Climate Change, addresses this issue. The study is by Boris Kingma and Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt, and is called “Energy consumption in buildings and female thermal demand.” The authors point out that not only is a large amount of our energy used to heat and cool buildings, but that about 80% of the variation in that energy use is account for by variation in the behavior of the humans that live and work in those buildings.
The standard for setting ambient building temperatures is set by ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers).
ASHRAE founded in 1894, is a global society advancing human well-being through sustainable technology for the built environment. The Society and its members focus on building systems, energy efficiency, indoor air quality, refrigeration and sustainability within the industry. Through research, standards writing, publishing and continuing education, ASHRAE shapes tomorrow’s built environment today. ASHRAE was formed as the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers by the merger in 1959 of American Society of Heating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHAE) founded in 1894 and The American Society of Refrigerating Engineers (ASRE) founded in 1904.
ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 55 (Thermal Environmental Conditions for Human Occupancy) is a standard that provides minimum requirements for acceptable thermal indoor environments. It establishes the ranges of indoor environmental conditions that are acceptable to achieve thermal comfort for occupants. It was first published in 1966, and since 2004 has been updated periodically by an ASHRAE technical committee composed of industry experts. The most recent version of the standard was published in 2013.
According to the new study, the standard overestimates the “female metabolic rate by up to 35%” which “may cause buildings to be intrinsically non-energy-efficient in providing comfort to females.” The study suggests using actual metabolic rates to set the standard, and provides information on how to approach this. “Ultimately, an accurate representation of thermal demand of all occupants leads to actual energy consumption predictions and real energy savings of buildings that are designed and operated by the buildings service community.”
So, let’s turn the air conditioners up. Meaning down. Depending on what you mean when you say that.
Ultimately sea levels will rise several feet, given the present levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. We already knew this by examining paleo data, and finding periods in the past with similar surface temperatures and/or similar atmospheric CO2 levels as today.
I put a graphic from a paper by Gavin Foster and Eelco Rohling at the top of the post. It does a good job of summarizing the paleo data.
If we keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at current, or even somewhat reduced, levels for a few more decades, the ultimate increase in sea levels will be significant. Find the 400–500 ppm CO2 range on the map and notice that the average sea level rise in times past, indicated by the horizontal orange-reddish line, is 14 meters.
Let me rephrase that to make it clear. We have already caused something like 14 meters of sea level rise. Like the horrifically sad words uttered by a movie or TV character who has received a fatal wound and turns to the killer, uttering “You’ve killed me” (then they die), we’ve done this. It is just going to take some time to play out. But it will play out.
A conservative estimate is that likely sea levels will rise 8 meters or more, quite possibly considerably more. But generally, people who talk about sea level tend to suggest that this will take centuries. Part of the reason for that is that it takes a long(ish) time for the added CO2 to heat up the surface, then it takes a while for that heat to melt the ice sheets. However, there is no firm reason to put a time frame on this melting.
A new paper that is making a great deal of news, and that is still in peer review, suggests that the time frame may be shorter than man have suggested. We may see several meters of sea level rise during the lifetime of most people living today.
What is not known
We don’t really how long this will take. Looking at the paleo record, we are lucky to get two data points showing different ancient sea levels that are less than a thousand years apart. There are a few moments during the end of the last glaciation where we have data points several centuries apart during which sea levels went up several meters. We don’t have a good estimate for the maximum rate at which polar ice caps and other ice can melt.
The current situation is, notably, very different from those periods of rapid sea level rise. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is approximately double the Pleistocene average, and the rate at which CO2 levels and temperatures have gone up has not been seen in tens of millions of years. Whatever rate of sea level rise over the last several tens of thousands of years must be regarded as a minimum, perhaps a very low minimum.
What is new
The new paper argues for more sea level rise, ultimately, than many others have suggested, but it is still within the range of what we had already guessed from the paleo record. Most current research on the rate of glacial melting show relatively slow levels compared to what the new paper suggests. In particular, the new paper suggests that this is wrong, and that we may see three meters of sea level rise over the next fifty years.
The paper is very complex and covers a lot of ground that I will not attempt to address here. The tl;dr is that the researchers model the current melting of ice, and finds that the rate is accelerating over time. This means that current rates are a gross underestimate of the rate of sea level rise.
Here are twointerviews with Michael Mann on the new work.
Mann talks about some of the effects of sea level rise, including global effects. We are already seeing food prices being affected now and then by climate catastrophes. Consider the fact that much of the rice grown in southeast Asia is grown on land that will be inundated by this sea level rise. This applies to the US as well. This combined with increased drought in places that are not flooding, and social unrest such as occurred in Syria when crops fail – causing further agriculture in those areas to simply stop happening – will cause a major food crisis in the near future. Our children and grandchildren will be hungry, at war, living in a post-civilization world. That is the world those who deny climate science and stand in the way of taking action are causing.
Here is the abstract of the paper:
There is evidence of ice melt, sea level rise to +5–9 meters, and extreme storms in the prior interglacial period that was less than 1°C warmer than today. Human-made climate forcing is stronger and more rapid than paleo forcings, but much can be learned by combining insights from paleoclimate, climate modeling, and on-going observations. We argue that ice sheets in contact with the ocean are vulnerable to non-linear disintegration in response to ocean warming, and we posit that ice sheet mass loss can be approximated by a doubling time up to sea level rise of at least several meters. Doubling times of 10, 20 or 40 years yield sea level rise of several meters in 50, 100 or 200 years. Paleoclimate data reveal that subsurface ocean warming causes ice shelf melt and ice sheet discharge. Our climate model exposes amplifying feedbacks in the Southern Ocean that slow Antarctic bottom water formation and increase ocean temperature near ice shelf grounding lines, while cooling the surface ocean and increasing sea ice cover and water column stability. Ocean surface cooling, in the North Atlantic as well as the Southern Ocean, increases tropospheric horizontal temperature gradients, eddy kinetic energy and baroclinicity, which drive more powerful storms. We focus attention on the Southern Ocean’s role in affecting atmospheric CO2 amount, which in turn is a tight control knob on global climate. The millennial (500–2000 year) time scale of deep ocean ventilation affects the time scale for natural CO2 change, thus the time scale for paleo global climate, ice sheet and sea level changes. This millennial carbon cycle time scale should not be misinterpreted as the ice sheet time scale for response to a rapid human-made climate forcing. Recent ice sheet melt rates have a doubling time near the lower end of the 10–40 year range. We conclude that 2°C global warming above the preindustrial level, which would spur more ice shelf melt, is highly dangerous. Earth’s energy imbalance, which must be eliminated to stabilize climate, provides a crucial metric.
Every month NASA GISS comes out with the new data for the prior month’s global surface temperature, and I generally grab that data set and make a graph or two. In a way this is a futile effort because the actual global surface temperature month by month is not as important as the long term trend. But at the same time it is a worthy exercise because it is news, and especially lately, we seem to be breaking records of one kind or another every month.
This month I was out of town and actually traveling sans computer, when the NASA GISS data became available. So, for me to produce the graphs and report the news at this point is not that interesting. But, I do want to keep you updated.
June was, it turns out, a warm month. But also, there were corrections to the original data set this month that may cause some confusion. There are often, nearly monthly, but generally tiny corrections in the data, but this month the corrections were more extensive and involved changes in the way the monthly temperature anomalies are calculated.
June 2015 turns out to be the hottest June on record, at a whopping 0.80 degrees C above the 1951-1980 baseline used by NASA. That baseline is, of course, already well above the pre-industrial baseline. We are clearly above 1 full degree C above that.
The highest anomaly this year is now March at 0.90°C, which makes it the third hottest March after March 2010, at 0.92°C and March 2002 at 0.91°C.
2015 is still hottest on record so far. With the adoption of ERSST v4, some of the temperatures are higher. So are those of some other years, particularly in 2010, temperatures have been upped quite a bit. But all have changed.
April and May are still relatively cool, unlike in some other data sets. By cool I don’t mean cold. May was 0.76C above the 1951-1980 mean. It’s just that most people thought it would be among the hottest of Mays, particularly since ERSSTv4 was very high in May this year.
The lowest anomaly was in April this year, at 0.74°C above the 1951-1980 mean.
The progressive year to date average up to and including June is 0.82°C above the 1951-1980 mean. In June 2010 it was 0.78°C above. (In June 2014, the hottest full year to date, it was 0.72°C above.)
Sou also has an update of her famous month to date chart, here. Go have a look.
The main change in the NASA GISS data is the use of ERSST v4 data for sea surface temperature. This changes all the NASA GISS data and requires that we throw out all our old graphs and make new ones. I’ll do that eventually. NOAA has also made this change.
One of the most important features of the new, and improved, data is that the so called “pause” in global warming looks a lot less like a pause than it did before, and it didn’t look much like a pause anyway. This of course has got the denialosphere all in a tizzy. And about that, we should really care not one bit. So that’s all I’ll say about it.
John Abraham, who has been making highly accurate predictions among his friends of what each month’s NASA GISS data will look like (I occasionally help him with this) has some bad news about the ocean:
As I have said many times on this blog, if you want to know how much “global warming” is happening, you really have to be able to measure “ocean warming”. That is because more than 90% of the excess energy coming to the Earth from greenhouse gases goes into the ocean waters. My colleagues and I have a new publication, which better characterizes this heating and also compares climate model predictions with actual measurements. It turns out models have under-predicted ocean warming over the past few decades. …
We separated the world’s oceans into the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian. All three of these oceans are warming with the Atlantic warming the most. We also calculated the ocean heating by using 40 state-of-the-art climate models. Over the period from 1970, the climate models have under-predicted the warming by 15%.
I’ve put the graphic from that study above, and it has this caption:
(a) Upper (0–700 m) OHC, calculated using 40 CMIP5 models (gray lines; black line is the ensemble mean). The CMIP5 results are compared with the observation-based estimate using the strategies presented in this study (red line) and NODC mapping (dashed blue line). Two major volcanic eruptions are marked by the black arrows. (b) Annual global-averaged upper ocean warming rates from the CMIP5 model results (gray lines; red line is the ensemble mean) and from observations (blue line), computed from the first differences of OHC at 700 m (units: °C yr?1). Source: Institute of Atmospheric Physics.
A new paper has just been published. This paper is going to cause an uproar in the science denialist community. Mud will be thrown. Tin hats will be donned. Somebody better check the oil pressure.
Conspiracies everywhere
I see conspiracies everywhere. It’s true.
Look at any internet site that talks about health, disease, diet, or anything related. Some of those sites will be legit science based sites. The majority will be sites feeding you woo. The anti-Vaxers, the anti-Milkers, the Homeopaths, man of the “natural food” sites. Now look more closely at those sites to find out what they provide as proof of their main arguments. In there with that proof you will find, each and every time, a reference to somebody conspiring with somebody to keep the truth away from you.
There is an interesting research project by Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, and others, that has emerged in written form in a few places, that looks at conspiracy ideation in relation to science denial. An earlier version of this research was subjected to significant and somewhat effective attacks (effective as in a monkey is effective at getting attention when it throws poop at you) against this research by conspiracy driven anti science activists involved in some sort of conspiracy! Against the people studying conspiracy!
Now, there is a brand new paper by Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer, Scott Brophy, Elisabeth A. Lloyd, and Michael Marriott, called
Recurrent Fury: Conspiratorial Discourse in the Blogosphere Triggered by Research on the Role of Conspiracist Ideation in Climate Denial, in the current or upcoming issue of the Journal of Social and Political Psychology. The abstract reads:
A growing body of evidence has implicated conspiracist ideation in the rejection of scientific propositions. Internet blogs in particular have become the staging ground for conspiracy theories that challenge the link between HIV and AIDS, the benefits of vaccinations, or the reality of climate change. A recent study involving visitors to climate blogs found that conspiracist ideation was associated with the rejection of climate science and other scientific propositions such as the link between lung cancer and smoking, and between HIV and AIDS. That article stimulated considerable discursive activity in the climate blogosphere—i.e., the numerous blogs dedicated to climate “skepticism”—that was critical of the study. The blogosphere discourse was ideally suited for analysis because its focus was clearly circumscribed, it had a well-defined onset, and it largely discontinued after several months. We identify and classify the hypotheses that questioned the validity of the paper’s conclusions using well-established criteria for conspiracist ideation. In two behavioral studies involving naive participants we show that those criteria and classifications were reconstructed in a blind test. Our findings extend a growing body of literature that has examined the important, but not always constructive, role of the blogosphere in public and scientific discourse.
The authors note that there are generally two reasons someone would reject established consensus climate science. One is their politics (climate change is truly, an inconvenient truth for them). The other is conspiracist ideation, or “…person’s propensity to explain a significant political or social event as a secret plot by powerful individuals or organizations.” They point out that there is a sensible link between rejecting an area of science and believing in a conspiracy. In essence, a significant conspiracy is required in order for thousands of research scientists working in hundreds of institutions across dozens of countries to all be saying essentially the same thing about a major area of science. Conspiracy is not enough. Massive conspiracy is required. “In the case of climate change, several qualitative analyses have shown that denial is suffused with conspiratorial themes, for example when dissenters are celebrated as “Galileos” who oppose a corrupt scientific “establishment”.” Consider this:
Smith and Leiserowitz (2012) found that among people who reject the findings from climate science, up to 40% of affective imagery invoked conspiracy theories. That is, when asked to provide the first word, thought, or image that came to mind in the climate context, statements such as “the biggest scam in the world to date” would be classified as conspiracist.
The authors describe two previous studies that form the basis for the current project.
The first study, which took its sample from visitors to climate science blogs, is known as LOG13. A pre publication version of the paper along with the data was made available in Summer 2012. The second paper is known as GLO13.
These papers replicated prior research, identifying a link between preferences for laissez-faire free market economics and the rejection of climate science. Conspiracy played a role in a different group.
Conspiracist ideation, measured by endorsement of items such as “A powerful and secretive group known as the New World Order are planning to eventually rule the world” constituted another but lesser contributing factor. Notably, notwithstanding the rather different pools of participants and differences in methodology, the size of the effect of conspiracist ideation on rejection of climate science … was virtually identical across both studies.
LOG12 caused a great deal of discussion on anti-climate change science blogs.
It wasn’t just conversation. There were intensive efforts to stop the publication of LO12. In fact, a real life conspiracy was organized by nefarious conspirational (is that a word?) individuals who tried very hard to keep a paper about conspiratorial ideation from being published in a peer reviewed journal. It got really nasty and if it wasn’t for the rather scary nature of some of the kooks who carried out this activity it would have been really funny. It is also worth noting that the publisher that was attacked by the conspiracy to stop the conspiracy paper from being published had apparently had their cojones removed at birth and totally caved. That was not their only problem. The paper, widely known as “Recursive Fury,” was eventually withdrawn, though made available elsewhere by agreement with the publishers.
To our knowledge this article, called Re- cursive Fury from here on, became the most-read article in psychology ever published by that journal (approximately 65,000 page views and 10,000 downloads at the time of this writing). Recursive Fury also received some media attention, including in the New York Times (Gillis, 2013). After the journal received a barrage of complaints from a small number of individuals, the article was eventually withdrawn (in March 2014) for legal, but not academic or ethical reasons. The publisher deemed the legal risk posed by a non-anonymized thematic analysis too great.
There was fallout. Editors resigned. Other bad stuff happened. Other publishers of scientific journals around the world will not do what the Recursive Fury paper publsihers-withdrawers did because of lessoned learned. That particular kerfuffle changed the world a little.
From Recursive Fury to Recurrent Fury
Anyway where was quite a conversation over Recursive Fury, and the current paper, Recurrent Fury, is a study of that conversation.
This paper consists of three separate but related studies, and is best summarized by Stephan Lewandowsky in a blog post:
In a nutshell the new article applies criteria from the scholarly literature on conspiracist ideation to the public discourse in the blogosphere in response to the publication of LOG12. The first study reports a thematic analysis that establishes the presence of various potentially conspiracist hypotheses in the blogosphere in response to LOG12. The second study shows that when “naïve” judges (i.e., people who are not conversant with any of the issues and are blind to the purpose of the study) are given the blogosphere content material, they reproduce the structure of hypotheses uncovered in our thematic analysis. In a final study, naïve participants were presented with a sample of anonymized blogosphere content and rated it on various attributes that are typical of conspiracist discourse. This final study found that blogosphere content was judged extremely high on all those attributes. For comparison, the study also included material written by junior scholars who were instructed to be as critical as possible of LOG12. This comparison material was rated lower on all conspiracist attributes than the blogosphere content, but it was rated higher on an item that related to “reasonable scholarly critique”—in a nutshell, the blogosphere discourse was identified by blind and naïve participants as being high on conspiracism but low on scholarship.
These results add to a growing body of research on the nature of internet discourse and the role of the blogosphere in climate denial. It also confirms that conspiratorial elements are readily identifiable in blogosphere discourse, which should not be altogether surprising in light of the fact that a U.S. Senator has written a book entitled The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.
The new article goes beyond Recursive Fury in two important ways:
(1) All content is anonymized and all quotations have been extensively paraphrased to prevent identification of authors. Similarly, the corpus of text underlying the analysis is no longer publically available. These step was undertaken to guard against intimidation of the journal, even though Frontiers’ own expert panel had confirmed our right to subject non-anonymized public speech to scholarly analysis, and even though the initial article was written and conducted with ethics approval from the University of Western Australia.
(2) In the new paper, the thematic analysis is confirmed by two behavioural studies involving naïve participants who were blind to the identity of all parties involved and unaware of the source of the statements they were processing.
Lewandowsky, S., Cook, J., Oberauer, K., Brophy, S., Lloyd, E. A., & Marriott, M. (2015). Recurrent fury: Conspiratorial discourse in the blogosphere triggered by research on the role of conspiracist ideation in climate denial. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 3 (1). doi: 10.5964/jspp.v3i1.443.
Focusing on Earth, but also a few tidbits on wind, fire, and ice, some current news and observations about global warming.
Earth
As humans release greenhouse gas pollutants (mainly CO2) into the atmosphere, the surface of the Earth, and the top 2000 meters of the ocean, heat up. But some of the CO2 is absorbed into plant tissues and soil, as well as in the ocean or other standing water. Historically, about 30% of the extra CO2 is absorbed into the ocean, and another 30% converted into (mainly) plant tissue. We hope that enough CO2 is absorbed that the effects of greenhouse gas pollution is attenuated, at least a little. Unfortunately, there are two things that can go wrong. First, these “Carbon sinks” — places where the CO2 is either stored or converted into Carbon-based tissue, could stop working. Second, some of these Carbon sinks could reverse course and start releasing, rather than absorbing, Carbon.
The CO2 released in the atmosphere during any given time period starts a process of warming that takes years to finish. We know how much CO2 we have added to the atmosphere (we went from the mid 200’s ppm, parts per million, before this all started to 400ppm). We know how much we are currently releasing and we can estimate how much we will be releasing in coming years. Putting this all together with some very fancy physics and math, we can estimate the amount of surface warming over coming years. This calculation includes the Carbon sinks. If the Carbon sinks stop sinking Carbon, or worse, start releasing previously trapped Carbon, then future warming (next year, next decade, over the next century) will be greater than previously expected.
And there is now evidence that this is happening.
Andy Skuce has written up two pieces, here and here, that explain this. It is also written up here, and the original research is here.
This research suggests that some natural Carbon sinks are slowing down in the amount of Carbon they take in, or perhaps switching to releasing Carbon.
The problem is actually very simple to understand. In order for CO2 to be converted to O2 (free oxygen) and some combination of C and other elements (to make plant tissue), the other elements have to be available in sufficient quantity. For many terrestrial ecosystems, CO2 was a limiting factor (keeping water and sunlight out of the picture or constant). So, adding CO2 means more plant growth. But at some point, the other elements that are required to make plant tissue, such as Nitrogen and Phosphorous (otherwise known as fertilizer) are insufficient in abundance to allow plants to use that CO2. This would reduce or flatten out the amount of extra CO2 that can be trapped in solid form. At this point, the terrestrial biomass starts to release, rather than absorb, CO2.
Why would the terrestrial Carbon sink not simply stop absorbing Carbon, and start to release it? Well, because I as fibbing a little when I said this is simple. The more realistic version of the system has Carbon going in and out of the different parts of the system (atmosphere, ocean water, plant tissue, etc.). With warming temperatures, we expect the release of Carbon from terrestrial systems to increase in rate. So, before nutrient limitation is released, there is Carbon going in and Carbon going out, but on average, mostly going in. With Nutrient limitation on the system, when there isn’t enough Nitrogen or Phosphorus to match up with the CO2, the release continues while the absorption stops. But because of warming, the release not only continues, but increases. So, in coming decades, the net effect is that parts of the terrestrial ecosystem contributes to atmospheric CO2.
At present, climate scientists (mainly in the context of the IPCC) have estimates of future warming that involve estimates of how much CO2 we add to the atmosphere. All the known factors have been taken into account, including the Carbon cycle (which includes Carbon moving between the atmosphere, the ocean, and the plant and soil system at the surface. This research indicates that the numbers have to be changed to account for nutrient saturation.
This graph shows how it works. The black line is the increase in plant growth as originally modeled under a “high-emissions” scenario. This shows a 63% increase in plant growth by the end of the century owing to CO2 fertilization. The red line indicates the amount of extra plant growth that would actually happen due to limitations of Nitrogen. The blue lie indicates the amount of plant growth due to the limitation of Phosphorus. These are 29% and 20%, respectively.
If we include the increase in release of Carbon due to warming conditions (basically, more and faster rotting of dead plant tissue), the existing models produce the black line in the graph below. There is still an increase in plant growth, and the plant-based Carbon sink is still working. If limitations on nitrogen and phosphorus are considered, we get the red and blue lines.
This amounts, approximately, to adding about 14 years of human greenhouse gas pollution (at the current rate) to the time period under consideration (from now to 2100).
So that’s the news when it comes to climate change and the Earth. But what about the wind?
Wind
No new research here, just an observation. Where does wind really matter? Where do you really feel the wind? Wind is the expression of the large scale climate system (modified by local conditions) which is in turn the result of the spinning of the Earth and the heating of the planet unevenly by the sun, like it does. A valid rule of thumb is more heat, more wind, but that is a gross oversimplification. At a more complex level, more heat equals more wind doing different things in different places than usual, and also more water vapor in the air, and all this has to do with those times and places where we really feel the wind the most: Storms.
Tenney Naumer (of Climate Change: The Next Generation fame) came across an amazing graphic of the Earth, looking mainly at the Pacific, showing some wind.
The graphic is from here, and I added the “Storm World” just for fun. Except it isn’t really fun. The date of this graphic is, I think, July 5th or 6th.
Your homework assignment is to identify the named tropical storms shown in the graphic.
Fire
A few years ago there were some big fires. Australia burned, there were fires in California, Texas, Arizona, various parts of Canada, etc. Climate change and fire experts noted that there is an increase in fires because of global warming, but others argued that there was no significant increase, and we had had periods of abundant fires in the past. In truth, there was evidence of an increase, though maybe not very convincing to some. Also, past inclement conditions are a thing … recent global warming did not invent bad weather or extensive wildfires. But some of those past periods, like the 1930s in the US, are not evidence against current climate change, but rather, evidence of what to expect with climate change. Those periods are only barely as severe as the present state, are usually regional and not global, happened after greenhouse gas pollution was very much a thing and between periods of suppression of warming by aerosols (from volcanoes or industrial pollution). So they matter, but not because they disprove climate change (they don’t) but rather because these past events are windows into the future. But I digress.
The point is, a few years ago, those who are rightfully alarmed about climate change were pointing out the problem of increased wild fires referring mainly to research indicating a dramatic increase in wildfire potential, along with some evidence of actual increased wildfires. And others argued that until there were a lot more flames, there was not a problem.
Well, now we have the flames.
Yesterday (anecdote warning, this is not data) I went outside to check the mail and was assailed by a bank of smoke moving through my neighborhood. It smelled really bad. Assuming there was a house on fire, I dashed back into the house to grab my cell phone, in case I had to dial 911. Returning outside, I walked around and did not see anything obvious burning, but the smoke was coming in from the north. That ruled out a burning oil tank train (the tracks are from the south) and the local munitions dump on fire (that is to the west). But I still couldn’t see where the smoke was coming from. So, I hopped in the car and drove north a couple of blocks, and by the time I got to the nearby Interstate, it became clear that the smoke was simply everywhere, pretty uniformly.
I then guessed at the cause, and returned to my computer where I checked the Wundermap and some other sources. Yup: it was Canada and Alaska, thousands of miles away, pretty much on fire. Here are two graphics to illustrate this.
Glacial ice is melting, and it is melting faster every year. Earlier in the year we learned that Alaska (on fire, see above) has been losing mountain glacier and ice sheet water at an alarming rate. Now, we are seeing an amazing spike in melting on the surface of Greenland. From here:
The graph is of ice melt extent so far this year. The blue dotted line is the average over recent decades as in dicated. The grey area is 2 standard deviations around that average. The vast majority of observations (nearly 100%) would be in that grey area. The red line is this year. This is what you call unprecedented melting.
Why is this melting happening? Because Greenland is unusually warm, but as expected under global warming. Some of this melted ice will refreeze in the winter. Much of it, however, is going into the sea.
Humans have been releasing greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere for a long time now, and this has heated up the surface of the planet. This, in turn, has caused a number of alarming changes in weather. Several current weather events exemplify the effects of climate change.
Record High Temperatures Being Shattered
South Asia recently experienced a number of killer heatwaves, and that is still going on in the region. More recently, we’ve seen long standing record highs being broken in the American West. The Capital Climate group recently tweeted this list of records:
Hot Whopper puts this in some context and adds some other sources, here.
The extreme heat has even surged north into Canada. Cranbrook, in far southeast British Columbia at an elevation of about 3,000 feet, set a new all-time record high of 98 degrees (36.8 degrees Celsius) Sunday, according to The Weather Network.
Even Revelstoke, British Columbia – 130 miles north of the U.S. border, about 1,500 feet above sea level and better known for skiing – reached an amazing 103 degrees (39.5 degrees Celsius) Sunday.
As temperatures reached 36.7 °C at Heathrow, commuters were facing difficult journeys on the London Underground. One platform at Kings Cross underground station recorded 33 °C however the temperature on tubes is believed to be even hotter.
Charlotte Dalen, originally from Norway but now living in London, said: “It was pretty warm and very smelly. People were waving pamphlets to keep cool but it didn’t look like it was helping.”
The map at the top of the post of current heat anomaly estimates across the globe is from Climate Reanalyser.
An Unprecedented Tropical Cyclone
Raquel is a Pacific Tropical Cyclone (hurricane) which is the earliest to form in the region (The “Queensland Zone” as tracked by the Australian meteorologists) in recorded history. From the Bulletin:
TROPICAL Cyclone Raquel has formed in the south-west Pacific near the Solomon Islands, triggering the earliest cyclone warning on record issued for the Queensland zone.
“Certainly it’s a unique scenario,” Jess Carey, a spokesman from the bureau’s Queensland office, said. “Since we’ve been tracking cyclones with satellite-based technology, we haven’t seen one in July.”
The storm became a category 1 cyclone early on Wednesday morning and had a central pressure of 999 hPa about 410 km north of the Solomon Islands’ capital of Honiara as of just before 5am, AEST, the Bureau of Meteorology said. It is forecast to strengthen to a category 2 system on Thursday.
“The cyclone is moving southwest at about 16 km per hour and should gradually intensify over the next 24 hours as it approaches the Solomon Islands,” the bureau said in a statement. “The system will remain very far offshore and does not pose a threat to the Queensland coast.”
The official cyclone season runs from November 1-April 30. Any cyclone after May or before October is considered unusual.
Wildfires Gone Wild
Over the last several days and continuing, there have been extensive and unprecedented fires in the west as well. Drought in California has increased fire danger, and now things are starting to burn. This year the fires started earlier, with one of the largest fires having burned during a normally low-fire month, February. Also, fires are burning where they are normally rare. According to Will Greenberg at the Washington Post..
Cal Fire has already responded to 1,000 more incidents this year than they see on average annually. The agency reached that same landmark last year as well — but in September.
By the end of June, officials had fought nearly 3,200 fires.
In total, Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service have responded to fires stretching over 65,755 acres so far this year.
And this is just the beginning for California’s 2015 wildfire season.
Meanwhile, in Washington, where it has been dry and hot, hundreds have been forced to flee from some amazing wildfires. From the Guardian:
The wildfires hit parts of central and eastern Washington state over the weekend as the state is struggling with a severe drought. Mountain snowpack is at extremely low levels, and about one-fifth of the state’s rivers and streams are at record low levels.
Eastern Washington has been experiencing temperatures into the 100s, and last week Washington governor Jay Inslee issued an emergency proclamation that allows state resources to quickly be brought in to respond to wildfires.
The number of Alaska’s active wildfires is literally off the charts, according to a map recently released by the state’s Division of Forestry.
Over 700 fires have burned so far this summer, the most in the state’s history, and that number is only expected to get bigger as the state is experiencing higher temperatures, lower humidity and more lightning storms than usual, said Kale Casey, a public information officer for the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center, which serves as a focal point for state agencies involved in wildland fire management and suppression.
I want to quickly mention two interesting items that crossed my desk. First is a study in Nature that looks at changes in extreme weather patterns between 1979 and very recently, the other is a study of how media has been addressing climate science denial among presidential candidates.
Evidence that global warming is intensifying extreme weather
First, the changes in weather. Human caused greenhouse gas pollution has resulted in important changes in key factors that affect the weather. The simplest (but not complete) explanation is probably this. Overall patterns of air circulation (including the moisture that is in the air) are patterned by two major facts. One, is that the Earth is spinning, the other is that the Sun’s energy is effectively greater near the Equator than on the poles. These factors cause the Earth’s atmosphere to be organized in a system of trade winds and jet streams. As the Earth has heated up, the Arctic, for various reasons, has heated up more than most other regions. This has caused a reduction in the difference between tropical (equatorial) heat and polar heat, which in turn, has changed the trade winds and jet streams. The most obvious change seems to be a slowing down of the Polar jet stream, an increase in the waviness of that jet stream, and also, a stalling of those waves, so they sit in one place for a long time. These changes have resulted in things like Alaska being extraordinarily warm, the so-called “Polar Vortex” freezing out the US east of the Rockies two years in a row, extreme rain events such as those that affected Calgary, Boulder, and other areas, snow in Atlanta, etc. Similar effects have occurred across Eurasia as well.
…the authors focused on pressure levels up into the atmosphere (heights of approximately 5 km) from 1979 onwards. Those patterns gave information about atmospheric circulation…
…What they found is that most regions have seen increases in summertime warm temperatures in the past three decades. Furthermore, they found that in some regions, a large part of this trend is due to the increases in anticyclonic circulation and atmospheric blocking. The blocking that has been associated with extreme swings of weather (bringing very warm weather to the Western USA and simultaneous cold weather to the east for instance).
The authors show that … in some cases the circulation changes has led to extreme cold outbreaks in some regions. What has happened is that the arctic front, which typically confines cold weather to the Arctic region, has undulated sufficiently to allow cold-air breakouts to the south. Think of the polar vortex from last year.
These findings support the commonly-heard term that has emerged in the past few years of “weather whiplash – wild swings from one extreme to another. Importantly, the authors show that the trends are “statistically significant” and are unlikely just random occurrences.
This work supports a number of other recent studies suggesting that the “Storm World” we have been expecting with global warming is here, and increasing in its storminess.
How The Media Is Covering Presidential Candidates’ Climate Science Denial
The second item is from Media Matters. The report indicates that the media frequently fails to fact check presidential candidates when they say incorrect things about climate change. Media Matters paints this situation in a very negative light, noting that a large percentage of the time major media outlets fail to call these candidates when they get climate change wrong. I put a graph from their report at the top of the post.
I understand why Media Matters puts this in a negative light, because it is in fact appalling that the media are so bad at this. But when I saw the numbers I saw a glass that was (about) half full rather than half empty. Going back just a year or so, major media wasn’t even doing this much fact checking, preferring rather to use the sensationalism that derives from a false balance than to actually look at what elected officials are saying. So when Media Matters says, “43 Percent Of Newspaper Coverage Failed To Note That Candidates’ Climate Statements Conflict With Scientific Consensus,” I think, “wow, that’s an improvement!
