Commentary and excellent perspective by Michael Mann, author of The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet (Amazon associates link*) interviewed on CNN:

Notice Mann’s comment on Russia (and Saudi Arabia). I’m not sure if people realize the extent to which Russia has made itself, under Putin, a specialized economy based almost entirely on fossil fuels. See Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth (Amazon associates link*), a must-read read, to read about that.

The opening of COP26:

See also this commentary in the Los Angeles Times.

An unexpected surge in global atmospheric methane is threatening to erase the anticipated gains of the Paris Climate Agreement. This past April NOAA posted preliminary data documenting an historic leap in the global level of atmospheric methane in 2018, underscoring a recent wave of science and data reporting that previously stable global methane levels have unexpectedly surged in recent years.

The scientific community recently responded to the surge into two high profile publications by calling for a reduction in methane emissions from the natural gas system…

It is not clear where this methane is coming from, but most bets are on wetlands that have shifted from being greenhouse gas sinks (or neutral) to being greenhouse gas emitters. Methane is a bad greenhouse gas while it lasts (decades) but eventually changes into CO2 and water. The CO2, of course, stays in the atmosphere for much much longer. So, this is really like CO2 release but with a giant kick in the gut right out of the gate.

See this for more.

Briefly, here is my version of the story. Originally it was called climate change, mainly because the people who studied it were looking at the long term, and warming was only one direction in which climate changed. Then a subset of people started looking much more closely at anthropogenic global warming, and started to use that term where appropriate. But even then, the basic theory and much of the empirical evidence related to the study of global warming came from the broader field of climate science, which studies change in climate and its causes (aka climate change). So, there are two axes of understanding here. One is the broader field of climate change of which global warming study is a part, and the other is the broader theoretical framework of climate change, of which global warming is a more narrowly defined application.

But that’s not what anybody else says, and most of the origin stories are much sexier, involving secret meetings and conspiracies to control the message pro or against the science of climate change, er, global warming. And I do not doubt that at least some of these stories are at least partly true. But they are not stories that accurately describe or explain the origin of the uses of either term. At best, they are stories about attempts to shape the narrative by emphasizing or choosing exclusive use of one term or another for one reason or another.

The term “climate change” clearly predates “global warming.” This is because paleoclimatologists and the like were studying climate change for a long time. In the Google Ngram view, below, you can see spikes in “climate change” that related to key events in this study, including mainly its use in official government publications. In my own memory, climate change was used in scholarly work because those studying it were often looking at long term natural change.

The term “global warming” rose in common use and out-did “climate change) from the late 1980s onward. Like this:

As noted, every culture seems to have its own origin stories. Note that most cultures have multiple origin stories. For example, the six days of creation is the Abrahamic origin story for all things, the Garden of Eden story is the origin of sin and key moral distinctions, while the story of Noah is the origin of geographical diversity, and the tower of Biblos is the origin of linguistic diversity, etc.

Those interesting in climate change have an origin story that refers to the terms “global warming” and “climate change.” The important and valid hierarchical relationship of those terms are not important, but rather, the way the terms were manipulated, in these stories. The most recent version I heard went like this:

Anthropogenic global warming can cause changes in the major air currents such as jet streams, which can then cause extremely cold conditions to encroach into North America, causing a severe cold snap. It is for this reason that we chose to the term “climate change” rather than “global warming.”

This is a nice origin story, but there are a couple of things wrong with it. For one, the recognition of the phenomenon mentioned in story is very recent, dating to just the last few years, so it can not possibly explain anything about the two terms’ use. Second, even the phenomenon itself, the rise of quasi-resonant rossby waves caused by arctic amplification, is recent, much more recent than all the different stories about the origin of these terms, or changes in their use.

It is often said that “climate change” was thought up by right wing science deniers of one sort or another, in order to defuse the notion of humans causing change in the weather. But as the ngrams above show, and my own experience attests, this simply isn’t true. Many of us who were looking at changes in climate were talking about “climate change” long before we even knew there were people denying it. I remember that my first for-the-public piece on this, years after my first foray into relating change in climate to human prehistory (I was doing that in the early 1980s) occurred in about 1990, as a piece for a local newspaper, and it was titled “Bla bla bla Global Warming bla bla bla” (cant remember the details). And, I remember choosing global warming because it seemed to be the emerging term of preference. I used the term “global warming” in my first major series of blog posts on the topic, in 2007. And, at the time, I explicitly distinguished between the terms on the basis of their actual scientific meaning, because they are different. I said (two quote myself):

So what is this an introduction to? I plan to systematically go through a number of topics related to Global Warming (and more broadly climate change, to some extent) and provide up to date information and description. What are the components of “forcing,” what are the greenhouse gases, and why do some matter more than others? Why is sea level so important, and so incredibly interesting? What is the link between overall climate pattern and important events such as hurricanes and tornadoes, or whether we have a lot of snow or very little in a given winter? And so on.

I’ve always viewed this whole issue as a major distraction, but one I’ve always wanted to do a quick blog post on. So there it is.

A much more important point than all of this is to use, in developing messages, clear, strongly worded, scientifically accurate phases with action words in them. Like, “human-caused climate chaos” and “greenhouse gas pollution, released by humans, causing our planet to overheat” and so on.

Feel free to suggest your own ideas in the comments below!

But there is one thing that is found common to most scientific endeavors, and without this thing science would not progress very quickly or very far:

The honest conversation.

Scientist talk to each other about their work. You see it best in lab meetings or seminars. Perhaps a visitor comes to a lab and presents on his or her research, research of interest to the lab group hosting the talk. Everybody listens. Everybody hears the scientists questions and concerns, and maybe finds problems of their own in the research being presented. Then they sit down for a meeting and talk. Turns out the magnetics expert has something to say about the sampling procedure, the the isotope person has some as yet unpublished insight on fractionation, the taphonomist knows of an old and nearly forgotten study of pollen rain dynamics in the tundra. Next think you know, the visiting scientist has a list of things to do with their lake cores that will help make sense of the as yet enigmatic results showing an increase in salinity as the lake level goes up (it should decrease) or some other thing.

A lot of these conversations happen by email these days. That is why email exists. The Internet was invented to extend the conversation among scientists across time and space, to fill in the gaps between visits and conferences. Email emerged as one of the better ways to use that resource. A great deal of science advances at the leading edge of wave after wave of emails.

Several years ago, nefarious science deniers intent on stopping action on climate change, presumably funded by the Koch Brothers or the likes, got their hands on a bunch of emails sent back and forth among climate scientists. They took lines out of the emails, and thus out of context, and made up fake stories about what the scientists were actually communicating about. You can read about that event and all that accompanied it in Michael Mann’s book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. Professor Mann was one of the victims of that attack on science. (See also: The Serengeti Strategy.)

More recently, David Schnare, a science denier who gets paid to do this sort of thing, running a fossil fuel funded anti-science group, attempted to get even more emails out of Michael Mann, but lost in that effort in the Virginia Supreme Court. After losing that battle, Schnare went after other emails, in Arizona. According to scientist and anti-science victim Michael Mann, he

…targeted two other prominent climate scientists at the University of Arizona, Jonathan Overpeck and Malcolm Hughes (the latter being one of my longtime co-authors), seeking a total of 13 years of emails from them, including correspondence with or about me or my research.

…

I have spent much effort in the years since “Climategate” explaining why scientists’ research correspondence needs to be protected from legal bullying. Anyone who truly cares about the research can and should review the published papers and underlying data, directly evaluating a study’s methodologies, analyses, and conclusions. But seeking thousands of emails serves only to stifle collaboration and discourage the frank, creative exchange of ideas, and chill the candor needed during the confidential peer review process.

…

E&E Legal will no doubt post the Arizona emails once they receive them, distributing them online with a series of misleading and disingenuous mischaracterizations, choosing a few phrases here and there to misrepresent me and other scientists and to falsely accuse us of all manner of misdeeds.

Consequently, I am sharing my emails here (enter “mail_guest” for both username and password). Moreover, a group of independent climate science experts have gone through the emails providing context for interpreting the exchanges and discussions contained within.

So, at least some of the emails currently under attack are now available. Some of these emails, released by Michael Mann preemptively, have notes added to them to provide context. Some time later today (Friday) Schnare is expected to do his own release of all of the Arizona emails.

Do read his biographical notes at DeSmogBlog. And stay tuned.

See also: “But their emails!” by David Kirtley.

Click through to read the entire thread!

The Fourth US National Climate Assessment was released on Friday. Since then, a number of politicians + pundits have made statements about it that are not accurate. As an author, I'm here to set the record straight. Here we go! (thread) https://t.co/4qV9ss3Tr3

— Katharine Hayhoe (@KHayhoe) November 27, 2018

To me, the reasons are obvious. A ballot initiative does two things. First, it is probably a lousy way to actually legislate, in a rational world where legislatures are honest actors. So if we delude ourselves into believing the latter, maybe the former will be the logical conclusion. Second, and probably much more important, a ballot initiative that guarantees loss of profit to Big Petroleum or Big Coal will be targeted and taken down like a Pheasant in South Dakota on a sunny fall weekend.

Here are two opinions about this year’s failed initiatives, from two entirely different sources, as reported by the Washington Post:

The Energy Industry brownnoser:

“What we learned from this election, in states like Colorado, Arizona, and Washington, is that voters reject policies that would make energy more expensive and less reliable,” said Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, an industry-backed free-market advocacy group.

vs

The worthy environmentalist:

Richard Newell, president of the nonpartisan think tank Resources for the Future, drew a different conclusion.

“The complexities and politics of the clean energy transition are best navigated through a legislative process, which has been the basis for virtually all significant state level climate and renewable energy policy,” Newell said in an email. “I would not take this as a repudiation of public desire to address climate change, including through carbon pricing or clean energy standards, but rather that the details and who is engaged in the policy formulation matter, a lot. That’s tough to do through a ballot initiative.”

I have been discussing on this blog for a few years not the problem of quasi-resonant amplification (QRA) of the jet stream. Let me quickly review what that is, then tell you about the new research.

The Earth is encircled by giant twisting donuts of air. The two main donuts lie side by side along the equator. Air warmed at the point where the sun is strongest (a climatological equator that moves north and south with the seasons) rises. It traverses, at altitude, either north or south, towards the polls, then drops and then circles back towards the equator. This drives wetness at the equator as moist air hits cold air aloft and thunderstorms are everywhere.

These primary giant twisting donuts, called Hadley Cells, set up a second set of twisting donuts to the north and south. These donuts, called mid-latitude cells, tend to cause a dry zone to form. Look at a map of the planet, and you can trace the dry zone across the northern hemisphere from the deserts of Central Asia, to the deserts of the US Southwest. In the south, the deserts of Namibia, Botswana and South Africa line up with dry regions of South America and, pretty much all of Australia.

There is a third cell, the Polar cell, north and south of the mid latitude cells.

These cells, as they move around the spinning earth, are the trade winds. Near junctures of the cells, at latitude, air molecules face an interesting mathematical problem. Air pressure, temperature, cell-driven winds, and all the various factors set up a situation where those air molecules sitting between the upper parts of the cells are supposed to be somewhere where they are not, pretty much all the time. In order to solve that problem, the air has to move very rapidly in one direction. This is a bit like nature abhorring a vacuum, large scale. That rapidly moving river of air is the jet stream.

A combination of trade wind effects and the jet stream tends to move storm systems around the planet in the mid latitudes. Under pre-climate change conditions, a low pressure system might ride along just south of the Jet Stream, moving across the planet at a few tens of km an hour, bringing rain followed by fair weather. But if the jet stream either slows or changes direction somewhat, that conveyor belt effect can get kinked up, and the low pressure system can sit in a giant meteorological kink, causing a large region to experience wet conditions for days or weeks at a time. Meanwhile, on the other side of the jet stream, in the counter-kink that a curved jet stream might cause, you can get a stalled high pressure system bringing dry conditions for longer than normal, causing what meteorologist Paul Douglas calls a “flash drought.”

Go back to the beginning a second. This entire process is controlled by the global process of heat accumulated in abundance at the equator moving to the north and south poles. But in recent years, the arctic has warmed considerably. Lack of snow cover in northern Canada and Siberia, loss of sea ice, and, probably, darkening of glacial ice in Greenland, combine to cause the Arctic to warm to a much greater degree than the rest of the planet.

This is a little like putting your refrigerator too close to the wall and building a cabinet around it without proper ventilation. The heat pump that runs your refrigerator will stop working. The behavior of the giant twisting donuts and the jet streams changes.

What occurs is this: The jet stream gets wavy, and that waviness can form a standing wave, like a swirl you see in a running brook that sits in one place because of an underwater obstruction like a rock or log. The wave, in a sense, resonates with the circumference of the earth, so you get a regular number of waves around the planet, and they tend to move only very slowly, or not at all, for months at a time.

There are two phenomena that have caused the plethora of wild and wicked weather we have been experiencing across the globe for the last five or six years. One is the increase in strength and possibly frequency of various storm systems as a nearly direct effect of warming. The other is this QRA system causing major weather patterns to pan out abnormally.

These two problems can interrelate, by the way, but that is a subject of a different essay, perhaps.

The result of quasi-resonant waves? The California drought, massive multi day rainfall events in Calgary, Boulder, Minnesota, China, Japan, Mediterranean Europe, and on and on and on.

Two questions arise from the research showing this effect. One: is it real, is there really a QRA effect? Two: will this persist, get worse, or get better, over time?

The answer to the first question has been getting more and more solid with the publication of research paper after research paper. There isn’t any longer a doubt, in my view, that this phenomenon is for real and seroius. The second question is harder. The paper that came out today on this topic says that the degree of extra warming in the Arctic is probably the biggest factor affecting the future of QRA effects. The research also suggest that it could get worse and it could persist. But there still is some uncertainty.

Real Climate has a detailed article on the QRA phenomenon, and concludes, in part:

We find that the incidence of QRA events would likely continue to increase at the same rate it has in recent decades if we continue to simply add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. But there’s a catch: The future emissions scenarios used in making future climate projections must also account for factors other than greenhouse gases. Historically, for example, the use of old coal technology that predates the clean air acts produced sulphur dioxide gas which escapes into the atmosphere where it reacts with other atmospheric constituents to form what are known as aerosols.

These aerosols caused acid rain and other environmental problems in the U.S. before factories in the 1970s were required to install “scrubbers” to remove the sulphur dioxide before it leaves factory smokestacks. These aerosols also reflect incoming sunlight and so have a cooling effect on the surface in the industrial middle-latitudes where they are produced. Some countries, like China, are still engaged in the older, dirtier-form of coal burning. If we continue with business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels, but countries like China transition to more modern “cleaner” coal burning to avoid air pollution problems, we are likely to see a substantial drop in aerosols over the next half century. Such an assumption is made in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s “RCP 8.5” scenario—basically, a “business as usual” future emissions scenario which results in more than a tripling of carbon dioxide concentrations relative to pre-industrial levels (280 parts per million) and roughly 4-5C (7-9F) of planetary warming by the end of the century.

As a result, the projected disappearance of cooling aerosols in the decades ahead produces an especially large amount of warming in middle-latitudes in summer (when there is the most incoming sunlight to begin with, and, thus, the most sunlight to reflect back to space). Averaged across the various IPCC climate models there is even more warming in mid-latitudes than in the Arctic—in other words, the opposite of Arctic Amplification i.e. Arctic De-amplification (see Figure below). Later in the century after the aerosols disappear greenhouse warming once again dominates and we again see an increase in QRA events.

Author Michael Mann notes, “Most stationary jet stream disturbances will dissipate over time. However, under certain circumstances the wave disturbance is effectively constrained by an atmospheric wave guide, something similar to the way a coaxial cable guides a television signal. Disturbances then cannot easily dissipate and very large amplitude swings in the jet stream north and south can remain in place as it rounds the globe.”

From the abstract of the original paper:

Persistent episodes of extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere summer have been associated with high-amplitude quasi-stationary atmospheric Rossby waves, with zonal wave numbers 6 to 8 resulting from the phenomenon of quasi-resonant amplification (QRA). A fingerprint for the occurrence of QRA can be defined in terms of the zonally averaged surface temperature field. Examining state-of-the-art [Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5)] climate model projections, we find that QRA events are likely to increase by ~50% this century under business-as-usual carbon emissions, but there is considerable variation among climate models. Some predict a near tripling of QRA events by the end of the century, while others predict a potential decrease. Models with amplified Arctic warming yield the most pronounced increase in QRA events. The projections are strongly dependent on assumptions regarding the nature of changes in radiative forcing associated with anthropogenic aerosols over the next century. One implication of our findings is that a reduction in midlatitude aerosol loading could actually lead to Arctic de-amplification this century, ameliorating potential increases in persistent extreme weather events.

Here is Michael Mann discussing the research:

Bleak.

Global warming is already upon us, but when was the last time you had a proper chat about it?? For Green Great Britain Week, ClimateAdam speaks to a climate communication expert (Steve) to take his conversation skills from amazing to brilliant.

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Landfall would be expected in about 48 hours, and the actual bull’s ey could be anywhere between Pensacola and Cedar Key, with areas well outside of that (including Mobile, Alabama) being affected.

The thing about this storm is that just a few hours ago, it was projected to be a Category 1 storm, but is now expected to be a (weak?) Category 3 storm. And, it is coming in fast.

It is too early to say what the storm surges may be, or exactly where it will come ashore. Unlike Florence (or Harvey), Michael is not expected to linger on or near the coast, but rather, will plow through the US Southeast as a storm, probably passing over Atlanta, coming into the Atlantic not far from where Florence went, possibly menacing Washington DC and Philadelphia, the home of the Eagles, recently defeated by the Minnesota Vikings. There could be areas with 6-10 inches of rain in the Florida Panhandle and Georgia.

The two big climate change related stories with Michael may end up being: 1) It formed fast and got strong fast and moved fast, like Patricia (Mexico, a few years ago) and Maria (2017); and 2) Michael is passing over anthropogentic-climate-change-superheated waters (at least somewhat superheated) in the Gulf.