Tag Archives: Global Warming

Heat And Death In India: Global Warming’s Direct Effect

May 26, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, India Heat WaveGreg Laden

The Earth is warming because of what humans have been doing to the atmosphere. Global Warming has a lot of effects many of which we’ve discussed here, but the most obvious one is, well, it gets warmer. At present, India is experiencing record breaking heat and people are dying.

It is very difficult to say how many people die from the heat in any region. We can use a standard approach used by epidemiologists to estimate this number. This involves simply looking at mortality rates as they change over time to try to detect a signal, an increase, associated with the variable in question. If all sources of mortality remain the same over a period of time, but a heat wave occurs during that period and with it comes an increase in mortality, then it is possible that those extra deaths are due to the heat. Nothing, of course, is that simple, but epidemiology has some fancy tools to try to tease out reasonable numbers.

I’m reminded of the Ituri Forest, where I worked for a few years. We kept track of births and deaths, and it became apparent that deaths tended to be seasonal. More people seemed to die during the annual “hunger season.” This season occurred around June, when the first wet season crops (there are two wet seasons) were not ready, and the previous wet season’s crops were mostly used up. At the same time, other crops were not abundant and wild foods (both plants and animals) tended to be hard to come by, as the forest experienced a coeval reduction in productivity of human edible foods. But the people who died during that period rarely seemed to die of hunger. They died of other things, such as infectious disease, but presumably these other causes of mortality were more effective when combined with food stress. One hunger season, two people died in a murder-suicide. An elderly couple lived in a small village, alone, with an orphaned grandchild. It was a bad hunger season for them since their village lacked the resources to produce enough food. It is believed the elderly woman, depressed by the hunger, harvested poisonous wild yams and made a meal of them, knowingly, and fed them to her family. She and her husband died, but the child vomited up the deadly meal and survived. Those were hunger-related deaths, but as is the case with many such deaths, were embedded in a much more complicated scenario.

Right now people in parts of India are dying of the heat, but many more than those known to die of heat stroke are also dying in this more complicated way. Indian heat waves are increasing in their frequency, being one third more common by the end of a study period covering 1961-2010, according to a 2014 study. The problem has become worse due to anthropogenic global warming, and it is made even worse in El Niño years. And, we seem to be entering an El Niño period. Changes in land use and urbanization are also probably contributing factors in India.

Heat wave related death spells produce numbers in the hundreds. Something like 500 people are known to have died directly of the heat over the last few days in India. But other deaths caused by multiple factors where heat is a sort of final straw would be in the thousands.

Right now, India is very hot, and some areas are expected to become even hotter over the next several days.

Fred Barbash at the Washington Post has a good writeup on the current situation there.

UPDATE: Jeff Masters has a current write-up of the heat wave in India. At present the death rate (which is certainly an underestimate) for India places it fifth in known historic deadly heat waves.

Arctic Sea Ice Decline in 2015

May 26, 2015Uncategorizedarctic sea ice, Arctic Sea Ice, Climate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global WarmingGreg Laden

The surface ice in the Arctic has been melting to historic low levels every year for the last several years. The graph above shows the first ten years in the National Snow & Ice Data Center records, meant to indicate what Arctic Sea Ice “normally” does as it melts off during the northern warm months. The thick black line is the average over 1981-2010, and grey shaded area shows two standard deviations above and below that line. The blue line tracking along the lower end of the 2SD shaded area is the ice extent this year. During the period when sea ice is at its maximum, this year’s ice was low. This does not reliably predict the ultimate September minimum, but it is interesting that the sea ice extent is following an extreme course.

I’m reluctant to say anything about what will happen this year. The melting rate could slow, storms that may play a role in diminishing sea surface ice in the Arctic may not play a big role. Or, the rate of melt could increase and all the various factors that determine a year’s minimum could drive the ice off the sea to the extent that we have a record low. It would be very hard to beat the 2012 minimum extent, as that was an extreme year. But, that extreme year, show on the figure below, was not as low at the present time as the current extent.

The volume of sea ice is in some ways more important than the area it covers, because this reflects the overall Earth’s surface heat imbalance resulting from the human-induced greenhouse effect. Volume includes both new ice (formed over the previous winter) and old ice that does not melt at all in a given year. This old ice probably serves the role of keeping some of the new ice stable so it melts less, so there is a feedback. The more the volume reduces, the more the surface area may reduce, depending on various conditions.

Andy Lee Robinson has created, and regularly updated, an amazing graphic showing the change over time in Arctic sea ice volume.

California Drought Caused By Climate Change

May 22, 2015UncategorizedCalifornia Drought, Climate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global WarmingGreg Laden

Human released greenhouse gas pollution changes the climatic system through a variety of mechanisms. Trade winds and jet streams change their patterns of movement, and the distribution of moisture in the air changes, with precipitation either lacking more than usual or being more abundant than usual. The patterns of movement of major air masses and the increased bifurcation of air masses into more wet than usual and more dry than usual can result in long periods where region experiences excess precipitation or a lack of precipitation. When the latter happens, there can be a drought.

Increasingly, the California drought is being seen as an effect of climate change. Air masses that should have contributed precipitation in the form of mountain snow, which in turn feed the western ground water system, have been kept away. Increased temperature has increased evaporation. Other factors related to climate change have contributed. The result is an historic drought over California that shows at present no sign of stopping any time soon. There was hope that last winter there would be additional precipitation, and there was some, but not enough.

A paper just out in Geophysical Research Letters uses modeling and historic data to confirm that the current California drought is very likely an effect of climate change. The paper is “Temperature Impacts on the Water Year 2014 Drought in California“, by Shraddhanand Shukla, Mohammad Safeeq, Amir Aghkouchak, Kaiyu Guan, and Chris Funk. Here is the abstract, which is pretty self explanatory and understandable:

California is experiencing one of the worst droughts on record. Here we use a hydrological model and risk assessment framework to understand the influence of temperature on the water year (WY) 2014 drought in California and examine the probability that this drought would have been less severe if temperatures resembled the historical climatology. Our results indicate that temperature played an important role in exacerbating the WY 2014 drought severity. We found that if WY 2014 temperatures resembled the 1916-2012 climatology, there would have been at least an 86% chance that winter snow water equivalent and spring- summer soil moisture and runoff deficits would have been less severe than the observed conditions. We also report that the temperature forecast skill in California for the important seasons of winter and spring is negligible, beyond a lead-time of one month, which we postulate might hinder skillful drought prediction in California.

The caption for the graphic above is: “Percentiles of potential evapotranspiration (ETo) during WY 2014 with respect to 1979 to 2012 climatology.”

I find the ancillary finding of the lack of skill of temperature forecasts in California. One would expect low skill in forecast models that are designed under a given climatology, when that climatology shifts as it seems to have done.

New Research: Antarctic Glaciers Destabilized

May 21, 2015UncategorizedAntarctic Glaciers Melting, Climate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, Sea Level RiseGreg Laden

A large portion of the glacial mass in Antarctic, previously thought to be relatively stable, is now understood to be destablizing. This is new research just out in Science. The abstract is pretty clear:

Growing evidence has demonstrated the importance of ice shelf buttressing on the inland grounded ice, especially if it is resting on bedrock below sea level. Much of the Southern Antarctic Peninsula satisfies this condition and also possesses a bed slope that deepens inland. Such ice sheet geometry is potentially unstable. We use satellite altimetry and gravity observations to show that a major portion of the region has, since 2009, destabilized. Ice mass loss of the marine-terminating glaciers has rapidly accelerated from close to balance in the 2000s to a sustained rate of –56 ± 8 gigatons per year, constituting a major fraction of Antarctica’s contribution to rising sea level. The widespread, simultaneous nature of the acceleration, in the absence of a persistent atmospheric forcing, points to an oceanic driving mechanism.

The paper is “Dynamic thinning of glaciers on the Southern Antarctic Peninsula” by B. Wouters, A. Martin-Español, V. Helm, T. Flament, J. M. van Wessem, S. R. M. Ligtenberg, M. R. van den Broeke, J. L. Bamber.

Here is a simulation of grounding line retreat in action from NASA:

Karl Mathiesen at the Guardian has a writeup on the research here.

The sheet’s thickness has remained stable since satellite observations began in 1992. But Professor Jonathan Bamber of Bristol university, who co-authored the study, said that around 2009 it very suddenly began to thin by an average of 42cm each year. Some areas had fallen by up to 4m.

“It hasn’t been going up, it hasn’t been going down – until 2009. Then it just seemed to pass some kind of critical threshold and went over a cliff and it’s been losing mass at a pretty much constant, rather large, rate,” said Bamber.

The estimate of ice loss by this research might be overestimated, according to Andrew Shepherd, who notes that some of the thinning of the glacier could be due to changes in snowfall amounts on tip, rather than melting from the bottom. It will be interesting to see how this works out.

Caption for the figure at the top of the post:

Fig. 2 Mass variations for the sum of basins 23 and 24, as observed by GRACE and modeled by RACMO2.3.
Basins 23 and 24 are defined in (21, 22). The faint blue dots are the monthly GRACE anomalies with 1? error bars (20), and the thick blue line shows the anomalies with a 7-month running average applied so as to reduce noise. Cumulative SMB anomalies from RACMO2.3 are shown in red, with the light red area indicating the 1? spread in an ensemble obtained by varying the baseline period (20). The dashed light blue line shows the estimated dynamic mass loss (GRACE minus SMB). The vertical dashed lines indicate January 2003, December 2009, and July 2010, the start and ending of the different altimetry observations. (Inset) The GRACE time series for the individual basins 23 (blue) and 24 (red), before (full lines) and after (dashed lines) applying the SMB correction.

The risk of hot and cold weather

May 21, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, Health Effects Of Cold, Health Effects Of HeatGreg Laden

A new paper is just out in The Lancet that examines the mortality risk of high and low ambient temperatures. The basic idea is that if it is either to hot or too cold, mortality may increase, possibly with the weather being a factor to augment the effects of other health problems, or as a direct result. The paper is methodologically reasonably well done but leads to conclusions that I think will be misinterpreted and misused. The paper implies that a shift to a warmer world would have lower mortality effects than a shift to a colder world might. Or, more significantly, that a shift to a warmer world will reduce ambient temperature related mortality by reducing the effects of cold. This is incorrect for a number of reasons.

Having said that, this paper does make a valuable contribution to public health, though here I’ll note that only in passing (see below).

First, I’ll give you the author’s viewpoint directly by quoting from the abstract, then I’ll tell you what I think about it.

The paper is “Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study,” by Antonio Gasparrini and a host of other authors. It says:

Summary
Background Although studies have provided estimates of premature deaths attributable to either heat or cold in selected countries, none has so far offered a systematic assessment across the whole temperature range in populations exposed to different climates. We aimed to quantify the total mortality burden attributable to non-optimum ambient temperature, and the relative contributions from heat and cold and from moderate and extreme temperatures.

Methods We collected data for 384 locations in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, UK, and USA. We fitted a standard time-series Poisson model for each location, controlling for trends and day of the week. We estimated temperature–mortality associations with a distributed lag non-linear model with 21 days of lag, and then pooled them in a multivariate metaregression that included country indicators and temperature average and range. We calculated attributable deaths for heat and cold, defined as temperatures above and below the optimum temperature, which corresponded to the point of minimum mortality, and for moderate and extreme temperatures, defined using cutoffs at the 2·5th and 97·5th temperature percentiles.

Findings We analysed 74225 200 deaths in various periods between 1985 and 2012. In total, 7·71% (95% empirical CI 7·43–7·91) of mortality was attributable to non-optimum temperature in the selected countries within the study period, with substantial differences between countries, ranging from 3·37% (3·06 to 3·63) in Thailand to 11·00% (9·29 to 12·47) in China. The temperature percentile of minimum mortality varied from roughly the 60th percentile in tropical areas to about the 80–90th percentile in temperate regions. More temperature-attributable deaths were caused by cold (7·29%, 7·02–7·49) than by heat (0·42%, 0·39–0·44). Extreme cold and hot temperatures were responsible for 0·86% (0·84–0·87) of total mortality.

Interpretation Most of the temperature-related mortality burden was attributable to the contribution of cold. The effect of days of extreme temperature was substantially less than that attributable to milder but non-optimum weather. This evidence has important implications for the planning of public-health interventions to minimise the health consequences of adverse temperatures, and for predictions of future effect in climate-change scenarios.

What could possibly go wrong?

Obviously, the main way this paper could derail is when climate change denialists make the claim that global warming is good because cold weather causes more mortality than warm weather, so we’ll have less mortality. This, however, is incorrect for several reasons.

Assume the paper has correctly characterized mortality effects of weather. From this we assume that there is a certain mortality profile with temperature as the cause. Medium temperatures don’t exacerbate population level mortality but above and below that, mortality increases. This is expected for any species where temperature matters. Key life history traits including maintainance (and thus, basic survival) may be linked to temperature, and if temperature is too high or too low, things go badly. The problem with the assumption that increasing temperatures will decrease mortality is that the more logical interpretation, which fits with what we know about the biology of warm blooded animals, is that any change, up or down, in the range and average of temperatures will have negative effects. In other words it is incorrect to assume that since there is less mortality at the upper end of the range that heading for that direction is good. There is increased mortality at both ends, movement in either direction should be assumed to increase mortality in that direction.

One result of the paper, only briefly touched on but clear from the data, is that the lower end of ambient temperature mortality effects has a long distribution, while the upper end (warmer temperatures) have a lower end. This means that the two phenomena, too cold and too warm, have different statistical characteristics. For this reason, comparing the two is a rather dicy affair. It is like comparing the negative effects of driving too slow and driving too fast. Either one can mess you up on the highway, but there is a lot more room at the lower end. Where the speed limit is 60, a very very fast speed is 20 miles an hour faster, but a very very slow speed might be 50 miles an hour slower. Not only are the statistics very different (and thus not comparable between the two ends) but the mechanisms are different. With respect to temperature, colder conditions probably exacerbate mortality by requiring that the body spend more energy on maintenance, thus taking away energy from immune response. At the upper end, added heat does something entirely different, requiring an entirely different mechanism (cooling) to kick in, and in more extreme cases, causing a direct pathological outcome, heat stress.

Human Evolution

I think it is helpful to put this paper in evolutionary context. Humans are primates, and as such, evolved in the tropics. We evolved, in other words, at the higher end of the temperature range discussed in this study, and should be adapted to warm conditions. Humans are hominoids (apes) which, among primates, evolved in the warmer end of that range, with extra humidity. We are hominins, a special kind of ape, that extended its habitat to include somewhat (but not too much) drier conditions. When our genus arose, we began to spread into novel habitats, including some that were cooler, but for nearly two million years various human ancestors were limited to tropical or sub tropical conditions. It was not until our species evolved that we fully adapted to the full range of conditions from very cold to very warm, from very dry to very wet. Indeed, technologically modern humans who rely on agriculutre have been excluded from the most extreme environments our foragering ancestors occupied thousands of years ago, and adapted to both physically and culturally.

In other words, from our evolutionary history we would predict that humans would suffer relatively low levels of heat related mortality and high levels of cold related mortality, and that many of our more recently developed, and limited, adaptations are to cold while our deeper and longer-term adaptations are to heat. We may even walk upright because of heat (that is one theory that has never been tossed out to explain why a chimp-like ancestor was selected to become more upright). Modern humans mostly have the physical form of a tropical African because we mostly come fairly recently from tropical Africa. Our heat related adaptations tend to be physical, long-evolved, built in. Our cold adaptations (with a few exceptions) tend to be cultural, technological, added-on. The range of temperatures that actually occur on Earth that heat stress us is limited, the range of temperatures that actually occur on Earth that cold-stress us is very large.

Our evolutionary biology predicts that we would have a higher mortality rate under cold than under heat, and this paper confirms that.

This isn’t your great great great great grand daddy’s planet

The problem arises when we leave the Earth in which we evolved and arrive on a hot new planet. Most of the physical evolution (our exact ratio of body parts, our respiratory adaptations, skin and hair related adaptations, fat distribution, etc.) and our cultural adaptations (fire, clothing, shelter, mobility, diet) that related to temperature, cold or hot, arose over the last two million years, which is coincident with the Pleistocene. During this period atmospheric CO2 levels ranged around an average of about 250ppm, rarely going above 300ppm, and never approaching 400ppm. CO2 levels correlated well with the surface temperatures in which we live, and the current atmospheric CO2 level is 400ppm and rising. It will take time (a few more decades) for the new temperature regime, the one human greenhouse gas pollution is causing, to be realized. But when that happens we’ll be living on a planet with temperature characteristics not seen during the entire course of human evolution. Some regions will have temperature ranges that go well beyond the ranges explored in this paper. Extrapolating the effects of high ambient temperatures from the last several decades to the middle of the 21st century is difficult at best.

Normal human body temperature is 98.6 degrees F. That is higher than the average daily temperature for most places humans have lived over the last 2 million years, but within the range of the highest daily temperatures. The problem is, when ambient temperatures are higher than this amount, our brains are at risk, and cooling adaptations have to kick in. If average ambient temperatures in a warm region go too high, these adaptations will not be adequate, and heat spells may become routinely fatal. If, on the other hand, in other regions of the world, average ambient temperatures went way down (like, if Florida became like Minnesota) we would adapt by changing the geographical distribution of the use of existing and well established technologies.

Putting this another way, humans can adapt, and in the past have adapted, to cooling. We can not adapt, in the warmest regions, to heating. There is not a mechanism that allows this, and there is no practical technology other than air conditioners, and it is not really practical, ore even possible to create air conditioners that would allow survival in tropical regions for anyone other than the elite and ex patriots.

Another factor, already implied above but I’ll underscore it, is the fact that moving towards warmer conditions does not remove colder conditions. The mortality induced by cooler ambient temperatures discussed in this paper is not from people freezing to death on ice flows. It is from ambient temperatures mostly above freezing, which in the absence of a technological fix, cause added stress. Even with increased surface temperatures caused by global warming, these conditions will still persist. The range of temperatures over which this cold induced stress occurs is, as stated, very large and even if overnight temperature minima rise with global warming in a given region, most of those temperatures will still be regularly represented.

From the paper:

Despite the attention given to extreme weather events, most of the effect happened on moderately hot and moderately cold days, especially moderately cold days. This evidence is important for improvements to public health policies aimed at prevention of temperature-related health consequences, and provides a platform to extend predictions on future effects in climate-change scenarios.

This is an important and valid point. This cold related mortality can be addressed with some simple technological fixes, including even a modest amount of insulation or other improvements in constructions in homes in tropical or subtropical areas where it is warm enough that many people at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum (i.e., almost everybody) does not typically bother with such things. This is an important result of the paper that has nothing to do with global warming but should be paid attention to.

A potential bias

The paper relies on mortality data for cold vs. hot ambient temperature periods. However I question the ability to obtain data on heat related deaths that are comparable to cold related deaths. In the more extreme cool areas, the northern countries, there are good data on mortality. In the more extreme warm areas, along the equator, the mortality data one would ideally use are virtually non existent. Of the seven billion people who live on the earth, the one billion that are most unlikely to show up in any systematic data of any kind live along the equator, and very few (some reindeer herders in Siberia, for example) live in the cooler climates. I don’t think the authors address this kind of bias adequately.

It’s about time

The study period ranges from the 1980s to recent. This is the period of time during which about half of the surface warming experienced during the 20th century has occurred, and at a high rate. The authors do not examine change over time in mortality at either end of the temperature range. Since the key variable, ambient surface temperature, changes dramatically over the study period, this should have been addressed. It may be that due to the nature of the data this could not be done, but the paper explicitly makes assertion about change over time in the future without addressing change over time during the study period. This makes me sad.

In summary, shifting to a warmer world will have more negative effects than shifting to a cooler world, when it comes to human health related response to ambient conditions. The paper implies that warming is not as bad as cooling might have been, and this will be used by those who deny the very existence of, or human fingerprint on, or importance of, or ability to address, climate change. The paper lacks contextualization of the problem in terms of well known human adaptations. There may be significant biases or problems with respect to reported mortality an change through time during the study period in the key variable, ambient surface temperature.

Why is FOX News Anti-American?

May 21, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, fox news, Global Warming, Global Warming, National SecurityGreg Laden

It is a fiction that the right wing, and the Republican party, and their primary philosophical guru (Rush Limbaugh) and mouthpiece (FOX News) are more American, more security-savvy, and more patriotic than Liberals, Progressives, and Democrats. This fiction is part of a common bully tactic you already know about because you were either bothered by the bullies, or you were a bully, in middle school. The bully takes his nefarious trait and projects it on his victim. And now, we see yet another piece of evidence for this, one among many. FOX News has attacked President Obama for his acknowledgement of what the United States Military has been saying for some time now: Climate change is a national security issue.

President Obama made mention of this problem yesterday in his Commencement Address at the National Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. Then, according to the watchdog organization Media Matters for America, “Fox personalities criticized President Obama for calling climate change ‘an immediate risk to our national security’ during his U.S. Coast Guard Academy commencement address. But security experts agree with the president that global climate change does threaten U.S. national security.”

FOX’s Lou Dobbs in what was labeled as a “news alert” but amounts to little more than editorial Koch sucking-up-to:

FOX’s Charles Krauthammer substituted scare mongering over North Korea for addressing the existential issue of our time, climate change:

FOX’s Eric Bolling dismisses global climate change as a threat, despite what the military says. Another commenter asks if Bill Nye and President Obama are the same person. Bolling misses the point that ISIS as a phenomenon arose largely because of climate change:

And it goes on. What does the Department of Defense say? From Media Matters:

“Climate Change Will Affect The DOD’s Ability To Defend The Nation And Poses Immediate Risks To U.S. National Security.” The Department of Defense’s 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap warned that “a warming climate ‘poses immediate risks to U.S. national security’ and could trigger anything from ‘infectious disease to terrorism.'” As Mic noted, this was not the first time those in the military community have sounded the alarm on climate change:

A May report by 11 retired commanders cautioned that installations in Virginia could experience up to 7 feet of sea rise by the end of the century. The Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick argued earlier in 2014 that “water and climatic conditions have played a direct role in the deterioration of Syria’s economic conditions,” helping aggravate the country’s political divisions and spawn the ongoing civil war that now involves U.S. bombing runs. And Retired Navy Rear Adm. David Titley argued that climate change will be “one of the driving forces in the 21st century” and says that inaction could result in massive and lethal extreme weather events that do damage on the level of major wars.

“Water shortages in the Middle East could benefit terrorist organizations, who can exploit hunger and unrest to tighten their grip on locals,” McDonnell wrote. “Increased shipping traffic in the melting Arctic could spark political tension between polar nations. Increasing prevalence and severity of natural disasters worldwide will become a more significant burden for military-led relief efforts.”

Retired Army Brig. Gen. Chris King told Responding to Climate Change that the threat posed by a rapidly changing planet “is like getting embroiled in a war that lasts 100 years” with “no exit strategy.” He pointed to poor countries like Afghanistan, Haiti, Chad and Somalia as likely participants in climate-triggered conflict. [source]

FOX and the right wing: Bad for America.

Climate Change as a National Security Threat

May 20, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, National SecurityGreg Laden

The White House has issued a press release noting that President Obama will address climate change as a national security threat in a speech later today in Connecticut. Here is the press release.

White House Report: The National Security Implications of a Changing Climate
Today, President Obama will travel to New London, Connecticut to deliver the commencement address at the United States Coast Guard Academy. During his speech, the President will speak to the importance of acting on climate change and the risks to national security this global threat poses. The White House also released a new report on the national security implications of climate change and how the Federal government is rising to the challenge.

As the President has made very clear, no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change, as we are already seeing these threats in communities across the country. We know that climate change is contributing to extreme weather, wildfires, and drought, and that rising temperatures can lead to more smog and more allergens in the air we breathe, meaning more kids are exposed to the triggers that can cause asthma attacks.

But as the President will stress, climate change does not respect national borders and no one country can tackle climate change on its own. Climate change poses immediate risks to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters and resulting in humanitarian crises, and potentially increasing refugee flows and exacerbating conflicts over basic resources like food and water. It also aggravates issues at home and abroad including poverty, political instability and social tensions – conditions that can fuel instability and enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence.

The Department of Defense (DOD) is assessing the vulnerability of the military’s more than 7,000 bases, installations and other facilities to climate change, and studying the implications of increased demand for our National Guard in the aftermath of extreme weather events. Two years ago, DOD and DHS released Arctic Strategies, which addresses the potential security implications of increased human activity in the Arctic, a consequence of rapidly melting sea ice.

But we also need to decrease the harmful carbon pollution that causes climate change. That is why, this summer, the EPA will put in place commonsense standards to reduce carbon pollution from power plants, the largest source in the United States. Today, the U.S. harnesses three times as much electricity from the wind and twenty times as much from the sun as we did since President Obama took office. We are working with industry and have taken action to phase down HFCs and address methane emissions in the oil and gas sector. By the middle of the next decade, our cars will go twice as far on a gallon of gas, and we have made unprecedented investments to cut energy waste in our homes and buildings. And as the single largest user of energy in the United States, DOD is making progress to deploy 3 gigawatts of renewable energy on military installations by 2025.

Live Blogging Climate Denial 4: The Best Week So Far

May 19, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change Denial; EdEx course, Global WarmingGreg Laden

… because it is Paleo!

Paleo data, models, expectations, observations, about the past and to some extent the future. The Little Ice Age. The Hockey Stick. And, what people get wrong about it all.

Denial101x Making Sense of Climate Science Denial goes paleo (and Medieval) this week. Here is a sample video, Andy Skuce on the Little Ice Age:

Peter Jacobs employs a great analogy of encountering a dangerous bear in the woods to help us understand palaeoclimatology.

Professor Tim Osborn, Professor Michael Mann, Professor Katrin Meissner, Professor Dan Lunt and Professor Isabella Velicogna get down with a lot of details about past climates, proxies like ice cores and corals, and how this all gets linked to more recent thermometer data. Michael Mann talks about development of the the Hockey Stick research. The nature of climate variability over time.

Robert Way on the Medieval Warm Period aka the Medieval Climate Anomaly. Lots of great denialism about this topic!

What does the term “Hide the decline” really mean? Get the real story from the real scientists, Michael Mann and Tim Osborn:

Dana Nuccitelli explains what models are all about. Professor Dan Lunt of the University of Bristol, Professor Andrew Pitman of the University of New South Wales and Professor Katrin Meissner of the University of New South Wales also talk about climate models.

OMG the 1970s Ice Age Myth!!!! Daniel Bedford explores what really happened in climate science in that decade:

Denial 101x Week 3

May 18, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change Denial, EdEx, Global Warming, Global WarmingGreg Laden

A few notes from Week 3 of Denial 101x: Making Sense of Climate Science Denial. These notes are mainly about the science and not the denialism part (unlike my last post, which addressed the central theme of the course, denialism, more.)

The Carbon Cycle

Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have gone up by about 40%. Simple explanation: Humans are releasing Carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel. More complex explanation: Humans are affecting the Carbon Cycle in a number of ways, releasing Carbon (burning fossil fuels) as well as affecting natural Carbon sinks.

This became known, observed, ca 1958. About half of the CO2 we release contributes to the extra atmospheric CO2. Myth: Since the amount of Carbon that cycles naturally through the system is so large, human influence must be negligible. Good analogy using a bank account. Nature has been a net Carbon sink over the last 50 years, but we are still seeing atmospheric CO2 going up.

A video by Gavin Cawley:

Andy Skuce discussed the role of volcanoes in comparison to human effects. Great discussion of the big picture for volcanoes. Did you know that most of the volcanoes are under the sea? But on balance the way undersea volcanoes work actually results in a lot of CO2 being consumed there. Mt Etna is one of the more prolific CO2 producers, but is still smaller than human fossil fuel burning in nearby Sicily. Also, 1/3rd of land based volcano CO2 is off set by weathering of volcanic surfaces. Humans release 60-100 times more Carbon than volcanoes.

Gavin Cawley talks more about the Carbon Cycle, asking the question, how long would it take the Carbon Cycle to return CO2 to pre-industrial levels is humans got out of the game today. Myth: CO2 has a short lifespan in the air. A given CO2 molecule may have a short lifespan but the amount of CO2 does not change quickly. Jelly Beans are invoked in a helpful analogy. Answer: It is a slow process that will take 50-200 years for much of it to return, but the total adjustment time is a long time, thousands of years. Also, Gavin Cawley and his wife need to talk more about heir checkbook and their private jelly bean stash.

Dr Joanna House, Corinne Le Quéré, Professor Tim Osborn, Professor Dan Lunt, Professor Lonnie Thompson, Professor Pierre Friedlingstein and Professor Mauri Pelto talk about the Carbon Cycle. Seasonal cycles, longer term cycles. Plants, ocean, etc. Natural fluxes are roughly in balance, human emissions provides a rapid positive flux. We have not had this CO2 level in 800 thousand years. NOTE: That does not mean that 800K years ago CO2 was at 400ppm. It is just that we have a good ice core record 800K long. To reach 400ppm you have to go back much farther in time, millions of years. The time scale for ocean mixing is thousands of years. About 65 – 80% of the human released CO2 will go away (if humans go away) in between 2 to 200 years. The remaining 35 percent (on average) will take thousands of years.

Greenhouse Effect

Mark Richardson: Pig picture, i.e., different planets. Good description of how the greenhouse effect works. Cool infrared camera demonstration. A pygerometer.

Mark Richardson: Looking at the first ever greenhouse effect myth, dates back to 1900. “Knut Ångström and his assistant did an experiment.” It seemed to show that the effects of CO2 could saturate. It does but not at actual relevant levels in the atmosphere.

Sarah Green about reinforcing feedback. Chicken-egg problems, causality. What do Ice Cores say about changes in the Carbon Cycle over long periods of time. Does warming increase CO2, or does increased CO2 cause warming? Yes. False dichotomy myth. This is pretty important and a bit complex, so I’ll just put the video here:

From the experts, Professor Naomi Oreskes, Dr Ed Hawkins, Professor Mike Mann, Professor Simon Donner, Professor Richard Alley, Professor Eric Rignot, Professor Jonathan Bamber and Professor Lonnie Thompson talk about the greenhouse effect, the history of research on the greenhouse effect, etc. Excellent video to show Uncle Bob:

Fingerprints

Mark Richardson examines the fingerprint of changing structure of heat distribution in the atmosphere, (including the famous Tropical Hotspot, not a real fingerprint, though may be it is like a partial print). (See this recent post on a related topic.)

Sarah Green on Satellite measurements of outgoing radiation. This is a key fingerprint of changes in energy balance.

Are you taking the course? You should check it out, here.

A Global Warming Expectation Confirmed: Upper Troposphere Warming

May 14, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, Tropospheric Hot SpotGreg Laden

Note: The original title of this post was “A Global Warming Fingerprint Confirmed: Upper Troposphere Warming” because I was thinking that upper troposphere warming was a fingerprint. John Cook contacted me to let me know that he didn’t think it was. The reason it is not is that more than one thing can cause upper tropospheric warming, not just AGW. However, it does turn out to be more complicated than that. Various people claiming that a lack of UT warming was evidence of no warming have now been shown wrong, but even a lack of warming is not, if you will, an anti-AGW fingerprint. In the end it turns out to be a very complicated phenomenon and it would probably take me five blog posts to adequately related the conversation I’ve had over the last 24 hours with various climate scientists about the details.

John Abraham will be having something on this in the Guardian very soon, I’ll put a link here. An now, back to the original post:

Global warming is real, and caused by the release of human generated greenhouse gas pollution. We can measure the greenhouse gas concentrations (mainly CO2) and we can measure surface warming and upper ocean warming. But global warming should have a number of additional indicators, predicted by modeling or other aspects of climate science, and identifying those indicators both confirms the overall idea of global warming and helps us understand its effects.

The troposphere is the lower layer of the Earth’s atmosphere, where about three quarters of the air and most of the water vapor resides, and it is about 7 to 20 kilometers thick, thickest in the tropics and thinest near the poles. Climate models and thermodynmaic calculus predict that the upper troposphere in the tropics should experience warming. Temperatures at this altitude are measured using radiosonde technology. This is a package of instruments sent aloft on a weather baloon. But there are a lot of problems with the data. Instruments that measure temperature are ideally situated in one spot and properly enclosed. Such instruments dangling off the end of a balloon flying through the air are subject to heating and cooling from various uncontrolled effects, such as sunlight (vs. not), air movements, etc. Given the low quality of the data, it has been hard to observe upper troposphere temperatures.

Satellite measurement of temperature variation in the troposphere are not as useful as one might hope, because those instruments tend to average out temperatures over a much larger area of air than suitable for measuring the expected warming.

The new study, Atmospheric changes through 2012 as shown by iteratively homogenized radiosonde temperature and wind data (IUKv2), by Steven Sherwood and Nidhi Nishant, takes a new approach. From the Abstract:

We present an updated version of the radiosonde dataset homogenized by Iterative Universal Kriging (IUKv2)…This method, in effect, performs a multiple linear regression of the data onto a structural model that includes both natural variability, trends, and time-changing instrument biases, thereby avoiding estimation biases inherent in traditional homogenization methods. One modification now enables homogenized winds to be provided for the first time. ..Temperature trends in the updated data show three noteworthy features. First, tropical warming is equally strong over both the 1959–2012 and 1979–2012 periods, increasing smoothly and almost moist-adiabatically from the surface (where it is roughly 0.14 K/decade) to 300 hPa (where it is about 0.25 K/decade over both periods), a pattern very close to that in climate model predictions. This contradicts suggestions that atmospheric warming has slowed in recent decades or that it has not kept up with that at the surface. Second, as shown in previous studies, tropospheric warming does not reach quite as high in the tropics and subtropics as predicted in typical models. Third, cooling has slackened in the stratosphere such that linear trends since 1979 are about half as strong as reported earlier for shorter periods.

This graphic shows the relative warming of the upper troposphere in the tropics:

This is not the first study showing this, but rather, a significant update clarifying the observations.

Several modifications have been introduced, which have not had a large effect on estimated long-term trends in temperature but have enabled us to present a homogenized wind dataset in addition to that for temperature.

The warming patterns shown in the revised dataset are similar to those shown in the original study except that expected patterns now appear somewhat more clearly. These include a near-moist-adiabatic profile of tropical warming with a peak warming rate of 0.25–0.3 K/decade near 300 hPa since either 1959 or 1979. This is interesting given that (a) many studies have reported less-than-expected tropospheric warming, and (b) there has been a slowing of ocean surface warming in the last 15 years in the tropics. We support the findings of other recent studies … that reports of weak tropospheric warming have likely been due to flaws in calibration and other problems and that warming patterns have proceeded in the way expected from models. Moreover our data do not show any slowdown of tropical atmospheric warming since 1998/99, an interesting finding that deserves further scrutiny using other datasets

Another outcome of this research is the observation of increased winds in the Southern Hemisphere. This increase may be related to Ozone depletion at the southern end of the planet, a phenomenon that may also account for increasing extent of winter sea ice around Antarctica. Quoted in PhysOrg, author Steve Sherwood notes, “I am very interested in these wind speed increases and whether they may have also played some role in slowing down the warming at the surface of the ocean.”

John Abraham has also written up this research, here.

Since we were talking about “fingerprints” I thought you might like to watch this video by John Cook discussing global warming fingerprints. The video is from the MOOC “Denial101x Making Sense of Climate Science Denial”

Bjorn Lomborg’s WSJ Response to Nixing of Australian Project

May 14, 2015Uncategorizedaustralia, Bjorn Lomborg, Climate Change, Climate Change, Copenhagen Con census Center, Denialism, Energy, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Luke Warmers, University of Western AustraliaGreg Laden

Bjorn Lomborg has written an Op Ed in the Wall Street Journal lamenting the decision of the University of Western Australia (UWA) to nix previously developed plans to accept a $4 million dollar payment from the conservative Australian government, to be matched by university money, to implement a version of Lomborg’s Copenhagen Institute there, to be known as Australia Consensus.

See: Bjorn Lomborg Is Wrong About Bangladesh And Sea Level Rise

See: Bjørn Lomborg WSJ Op Ed Is Stunningly Wrong

See: Are electric cars any good? Lomborg says no, but he’s wrong.

Lomborg’s scholarship in the area of climate and energy related policy has been repeatedly criticized and often described as far less than adequate. A typical Bjorn Lomborg missive on climate or energy policy seems to include instance after instance of inaccuracies, often taking the form of a statement of fact with a citation, where that fact or assertion is not to be found in the citation. Many regard his policies as “luke warm.” From the highly regarded Sketpical Science web site:

…examples of Luckwarmers include Matt Ridley, Nic Lewis, and Bjorn Lomborg. The University of Western Australia has been caught up in a major Luckwarmer controversy, having taken federal funds to set up a center from which Lomborg was expected to argue that the government’s money would be better spent on issues other than curbing global warming. In a sign that even Stage 3 climate denial is starting to become untenable, the resulting uproar forced the university to cancel plans for the center.

The UWA project received a great deal of critisim, and was seen by many as a move by Big Fossil to water down academic and government response to the critical issue of climate change. Graham Readfearn, writing for The Guardian, notes:

Danish political scientist and climate change contrarian Bjørn Lomborg says the poorest countries in the world need coal and climate change just isn’t as big a problem as some people make out.

Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott says “coal is good for humanity” and there are more pressing problems in the world than climate change, which he once described as “crap” but now says he accepts.

So it’s not surprising then that the latter should furnish the former with $4 million of taxpayer funds to start an Australian arm of Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Centre (CCC) at the University of Western Australia’s business school.

The Australian project was shut down after severe criticism from the global academic community as well as students and faculty within UWA. Predictably, Lombog had characterized this as an attack on free debate. From the Op Ed, “Opponents of free debate are celebrating. Last week…the University of Western Australia canceled its contract to host a planned research center, Australia Consensus, intended to apply economic cost-benefit analysis to development projects—giving policy makers a tool to ensure their aid budgets are spent wisely.

While Lomborg blames “activists” for shutting down the center, it is more widely believed that the project was criticized because, based on prior work done by Lomborg, any ensuing “cost-benefit analyses” would be academically weak and policy-irrelevant.

Central to the difference in overall approach (aside from allegations of poor scholarship) between Lomborg and many others is how poor or developing nations should proceed over coming decades. Lomborg seems to advocate that these nations go through the same economic and technological evolution as developed nations, building an energy infrastructure based mainly on fossil fuels, in order to industrialize and reach the standard of living presumed desired by those who live in those nations. The alternative, of course, is that development in these regions be done with lessons learned from the industrialized and developed world. We don’t ask rural Kenyans to install a wire-based analog phone system before using modern digital cell phone systems. With respect to energy, developing regions should implement clean energy with smart distribution rather than building hulking coal plants and committing for centuries to come to expensive and extensive electric grid systems that are now generally regarded as outdated.

Lomborg says enough about mitigating climate change effects, and developing green energy technologies, to be able to suggest that he supports these ideas when he is pushed up against the wall, as with the nixing of the Australian project. But his regular statements on specific policy points, frequent and well documented, tell a different story.

Lomborg claims that much of the policy development of the Copenhagen Institute is not even about climate change. To the extent that this is true, it may be part of the problem. As development occurs, energy is key. With development of energy technologies, climate change is key. Lomborg’s approach that the Copenhagen projects are mostly not about climate change is not an argument that he is doing something right. It is evidence that he is doing something wrong, and at the same time, is apparently unaware of this.

It is very important to remember, as this conversation unfolds, that the objections to Lomborg’s work, and to spending vast sums of money to support it, are only partly because of differences in approach. These objections also come from two other things. One is a sense that Lomborg is detached from scholarship and good analysis.

Graham Readfearn has documented academic response to Lomborg’s work. Here is one example:

Dr Frank Jotzo, director of the Centre for Climate Ecnomics and Policy at the Australian National University, was once invited to write a paper for Lomborg’s centre in 2008, which was sharply critical of how the cost of the impacts of climate change were treated.

He told me:

Within the research community, particularly within the economics community, the Bjorn Lomborg enterprise has no academic credibility. It is seen as an outreach activity that is driven by specific set of objectives in terms of bringing particular messages into the public debate and in some cases making relatively extreme positions seem more acceptable in the public debate.

And, regarding energy policy vis-a-vis the Big Fossil,

…we had a look at Lomborg’s claims that the world’s poorest were crying out for more fossil fuels which, Lomborg argued, were the only real way they could drag themselves out of poverty…the positions Lomborg takes on these issues are underpinned by a nasty habit of picking the lowest available estimates of the costs of climate change impacts.

Last year, when Lomborg spoke to a coal company-sponsored event in Brisbane in the shadow of the G20 talks, Lomborg suggested that because the International Energy Agency (IEA) had developed one future scenario that saw growth in the burning of coal in poor countries, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa, that this somehow meant that fossil fuels were just what they needed.

Yet Lomborg ignored an important rejoinder to that assessment, which had come from the IEA itself, and which I pointed out at the time.

The IEA said its assessment for Africa was consistent with global warming of between 3C and 6C for the continent by the end of this century.

Lomborg’s prior written works could be, and actually have been (I am told), used in coursework on analytical approaches to policy as bad, not good, examples. And, although Lomborg often associates himself with Nobel Prize Winners (and rarely fails to note that) he is not known as a high powered, influential scholar in his area. A recent citation analysis of Lomborg’s work backs up that concern:

…I combed through his Google Scholar entries and dumped all the duplicates, I ignored all the magazine and newspaper articles (e.g., you can’t count opinion editorials in The Wall Street Journal as evidence of an academic track record), I cut out all non-articles (things Lomborg hadn’t actually written), omitted any website diatribes (e.g., blog posts and the like) and calculated his citation profile.

Based on my analysis, Lomborg’s Google Scholar h-index is 4 for his peer-reviewed articles. If I was being particularly generous and included all of Lomborg’s books, which have by far the most citations, then his h-index climbs to 9. However, none of his books is peer-reviewed, and in the case of his most infamous book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, it has been entirely discredited. As such, any reasonable academic selection committee would omit any metrics based on opinion-based books.

So, the best-case scenario is that Lomborg’s h-index is no more than 4. Given his appointment to Level D (Associate Professor) at a world-class university, the suggestion that he earned it on academic merit is not only laughable, it’s completely fraudulent. There is no way that his academic credentials had anything to do with the appointment.

Even a fresh-out-of-the-PhD postdoc with an h-index of only 3 or 4 would have trouble finding a job. As a rule of thumb, the h-index of a Level D appointment should be in the 20–30 range (this would vary among disciplines). Despite this variation, Lomborg’s h-index is so far off the mark that even accounting for uncertainty and difference of opinion, it’s nowhere near a senior academic appointment.

The other problem people see with Lomborg’s efforts is the sense that the Copenhagen Institute is a bit of a sham, and that Lomborg is not selling informed expertise, but rather, snake oil. From a recent analysis of the status of the Copenhagen Consensus Center:

Copenhagen Consensus Center is a textbook example of what the IRS calls a “foreign conduit” and it frowns strongly on such things. It may also frown on governance and money flows like this…

…more than 60% went directly to Lomborg, travel and $853K promotion of his movie. According to Wikipedia it grossed $63K…

Even in a simple US charity, poor governance and obvious conflicts of interest are troublesome, but the foreign element invokes stringent extra rules. Legitimate US charities can send money to foreign charities, but from personal experience, even clearly reasonable cases like foreign universities require careful handling. It is unclear that Lomborg himself is a legitimate charity anywhere, but most of the money seems under his control. One might also wonder where income taxes are paid.

CCC seems to break many rules. Foreign citizen Lomborg is simultaneously CCC founder, president, and highest-paid employee. Most people are a little more subtle when trying to create conduits…

This is apparently the Copenhagen Consensus Center, Copenhagen Consensus Center USA, 262 Middlesex St, Lowell MA .

Both the flow of money and sources matter when thinking about a non profit research or policy institution. From DeSmog Blog:

A billionaire “vulture capitalist” and major backer of the US Republican Party is a major funder of the think tank of Danish climate science contrarian and fossil fuels advocate Bjørn Lomborg, DeSmogBlog has found.

New York-based hedge fund manager Paul Singer’s charitable foundation gave $200,000 to Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Center (CCC) in 2013, latest US tax disclosures reveal.

That was about a third of the CCC’s donations for the year 2013.

Lomborg, who claims to not be a climate skeptic, is the author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and the book and movie “Cool It”

Global Surface Temperatures Continue To Rise

May 13, 2015UncategorizedApril 2015, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global WarmingGreg Laden

Global warming is typically measured at the surface, with data from thermometers all across the land areas and sea surface temperatures combined. That isn’t the whole story, of course. Much of the added heat, an effect of human generated greenhouse gas pollution, goes into the upper 2,000 meters or so of the ocean. But we use the surface measurements to track global warming because we have the data for a long period of time, and those data in turn have been linked to longer running but less precise paleo data.

Almost every month for way over a year now has been warm, and April 2015 is no exception. The official NASA GISS surface temperature data is out for the month. April came in at an anomaly value of 75. That’s 0.75 degrees C above the base period for that data set.

That makes April the fifteenth warmest month in the database, which starts in 1880. March was warmer (fifth) and I’m pretty sure May is going to be warmer too (maybe as warm as March, we’ll see).

If we start in April and work backwards 12 months, we can get a one year long average. And, we can go back to the beginning of the data set to look at a 12-month running average for the entire thing. When we do that, we see that the current 12 month period, the one just ending, was the warmest ever in the data set, which makes it likely the warmest one year period in thousands and thousands of years. We have had several record breaking 12-month periods in a row. Here’s what that looks like:

Another way of looking at this is for the calendar year only. This is a graph of the average temperature for the first four months of the year for the entire NASA GISS data set, to give you an idea of where our Year-To-Date stands:

Will 2015 end up being a very warm year? Almost certainly. Unlike last year, we will see significant enhancements of surface heat from El Nino. This is probably already happening. Using only the year to date data to estimate 2015, it is a good sight warmer than any other calendar year on record. As noted, May will be warm (over 0.80) and subsequent months are likely to be even warmer if El Nino does pan out.

The following graphic indicates where the remaining months of the year will have to fall (on or above the horizontal red line) for 2015 to break the record set by 2014.

The #FauxPause is Faux

May 6, 2015Uncategorized#FauxPause, Climate Change, Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Warming, Hiatus, PauseGreg Laden

The Earth’s climate is warming. The upper oceans are warming, the sea surface temperatures are elevated, the air in the lower Troposphere, where we live, is warming. This warming is caused almost entirely by the increase in human generated greenhouse gasses and the positive (not positive in a good way) feedbacks caused by that. The effects that increase the global heat imbalance and the effects that decrease it (such as greenhouse gas increase and aerosols — dust — from volcanoes, respectively) vary over time in their effect, which causes some variation in the upward march of global surface and ocean temperatures. Meanwhile heat is going back and forth between the surface (atmosphere and sea surface) and the deeper (but still upper) ocean, which causes either of these parts of the Earth system to wiggle up and down in temperature. There are other effects causing other wiggles.

See: The Ocean Is The Dog. Atmospheric Temperature Is The Tail

Every now and then the wiggling results in a seemingly rapid increase in temperature. Every now and then the wiggling results in a seeming slowdown in increase in temperature. When the latter happen, those who wish you to believe that climate change is not real point, jumping up and down, giddy, and say, “See, there is a pause in global warming, therefore global warming is not happening!” They are wrong for the reasons just stated.

Dana Nuccitelli (author of this book), over at the Guardian, has written a blog post that nicely summarizes current scientific thinking on the so-called pause (or so-called hiatus) which has been named by witty climate scientists as the #FauxPause. Because it is faux.

The post is here, go read it: Pause needed in global warming optimism, new research shows

I’m pretty sure Dana and I were looking at the same information recently. While Dana focuses on the #FauxPause, I recently penned this: Global Warming Getting Worse

Global Warming Is Happening: DENIAL101.x

May 5, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Denial, Denial101x, Global Warming, Global Warming, Lies and DenialGreg Laden

I’m auditing the EdEx course “Denial101x: Making Sense of Climate Science Denial.” This is Week 2: Global Warming ins Happening. The course is covering indicators of warming, what is happening in the Cryosphere, and related matters.

Here is an example lecture segment:

A central theme of this week is the relationship between climate and weather, and how this relationship becomes fodder for the development of myths in service of denial about climate change. The climate is a cherry orchard. Weather is the cherries. Don’t pick the cherries!

There are many dimensions the climate system that allow cherry picking. You can look at local temperature records and see very little warming in some placs. You can look at different levels of the atmosphere, and you can ignore the oceans. Don’t ignore the oceans, that is where most of the heat imbalance caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas pollution plays out.

At one point in this week’s course, you get to play with a really cool data tool. Like this:

Playing around with that tool is very fun and informative, and the process is backed up with some excellent information about how the data set(s) work(s).

Notes:

Cherry Picking, Setting False Expectations, How records are made and tracked (we are setting hot records more often than cold records over recent decades, in the US and elsewhere). Global warming is analogous to rigging the climate dice.

Sea level rise, thermal expansion of the global ocean, melting glacial ice. Glaciers are losing about 150 billion tonnes of ice a year, accelerating. Many mountain glaciers have disappeared or shrunk a great deal. Annual mass balance. Tracking glacier history. Myth: Some glaciers are growing therefore there is no global warming (cherry picking, there are a few growing glaciers due to warming causing more snow locally).

Greenland ice loss: Over 300 billion tonnes per year, or 6 meters of ocean if all melted. Moulins. Ice shelves as corks. Gaining ice in interior. Greenland is already at 2 degrees C surface air increase. Largest individual contributor to sea level rise. Myth: Since ice is building up in the interior (ignoring the rest of the region) global warming is not real. Note: Most of the accelerated melt is very recent, mass balance has been negative for about 15 years, and this is increasing. Get waders.

Antarctica, west and east (largest, oldest). Total contribution to global sea level if all melted = 72 meters. Recently discovered that WAIS is more sensitive to climate change than previously thought. Melt started in recent decades and is accelerating, in WAIS. EAIS relatively stable. (But this is questionable, may be changing.)

Antarctic sea ice: Seasonal, does not influence climate much. Myth: sea ice increase means global warming not real. Winds may blow sea ice outwards, so open water freezes, and the winds blow colder water. Fresh meltwaters easier to freeze. Snow fall increased.

Land and sea ice are totally different things. Myth of sea ice discounting global warming is cherry picking and error of omission.

Excellent in depth interview with several ice experts. It is worth looking at these longer interviews even if they are not on the quiz!

Building the temperature record (How do we measure global warming). Myths: Thermometers not reliable, insufficient in number. Jumping to conclusions … scientists estimate error, the error is way smaller in magnitude than the temperature increase signal. Multiple methods of measurement agree with each other.

Urban heat island effect. Neat: Compare light pollution with heat island effect. They don’t match up, suggesting HIE is very local and not strong. NASA matching of paired rural/urban stations: effect is small. Other studies support this. Fallacy: Jumping to conclusions. Going from a reasonable hypothesis to the conclusion, meanwhile actual scientists examined the hypothesis and found it wanting. Myth: “Corrections” are bogus (jumping to conclusions). Truth: Corrections are proper adjustments to data. Ie when you change instruments or move instruments an adjustment or calibration may be necessary. Comparing adjusted vs. non adjusted data shows that the adjustments, while justified, don’t change the numbers much.

Wavy Jet Streams. How hey work. Myth: “It’s cold out, so much for global warming!” Cherry Picking, that. GLOBAL warming.

How jet streams form and why they get wavy. Arctic amplification (positive feedback from ice/snow cover changes, etc.). So tropical/polar temp gradient (and thus pressure gradient) reduces, waves and slower jet streams result.

“Climate Change” vs. “Global Warming.” Myth: Some bogus story about how scientists are playing a fast one. Personally, I prefer Obamacare over the Affordable Care Act. (FLICC type: Conspiracy Theory. Over Simplification.)

Global Warming: Getting worse

May 4, 2015UncategorizedClimate Change, Climate Change, Climate Sensitivity, Extreme weather, Glacial Melt, Global Warming, Global Warming, Sea Level RiseGreg Laden

I recently noted that there are reasons to think that the effects of human caused climate change are coming on faster than previously expected. Since I wrote that (in late January) even more evidence has come along, so I thought it was time for an update.

First a bit of perspective. Scientists have known for a very long time that the proportion of greenhouse gasses in the Earth’s atmosphere controls (along with other factors) overall surface and upper ocean heat balance. In particular, is has been understood that the release of fossil Carbon (in coal and petroleum) as CO2 would likely warm the Earth and change climate. The basic physics to understand and predict this have been in place for much longer than the vast majority of global warming that has actually happened. Unfortunately, a number of factors have slowed down the policy response, and the acceptance of this basic science by non scientists.

A very small factor, often cited by climate contrarians, is the consideration mainly during the 1960s and 1970s, that the Earth goes through major climate swings including the onset of ice ages, so we have to worry about both cooling and warming. This possibility was obviated around the time it was being discussed, though people then may not have fully realized it at the time, because as atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased beyond about 300ppm, from the pre-industrial average of around 250–280ppm (it is now at 400ppm), the possibility of a new Ice Age diminished to about zero. Another factor mitigating against urgency is the fact that the Earth’s surface temperatures have undergone a handful of “pauses” as the surface temperature has marched generally upwards. I’m not talking about the “Faux Pause” said to have happened during the last two decades, but earlier pauses, including one around the 1940s that was probably just a natural down swing that happened when there was not enough warming to swamp it. A second pause, shorter, happened after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, in 1991.

Prior to recent anthropogenic global warming, the Earth’s surface temperature has squiggled up and down do to natural variability. Some of these squiggles were, at least reionally large enough to get names, such as the “Medieval Warm Period” (properly called the “Medieval Climate Anomaly”) and the “Little Ice Age.” When the planet’s temperature started going distinctly up at the beginning of the 20th century, these natural ups and downs, some larger and some smaller, caused by a number of different factors, eventually became imposed on a stronger upward signal. So, when we have a “downward” swing caused by natural variation, it is manifest not so much as a true downturn in surface temperatures, but rather, less of an upward swing. Since about a year and a half ago, we have seen very steady warming suggesting that a recent attenuation in how much temperatures go up is reversing. Most informed climate scientists expect 2015 and even 2016 to be years with many very warm months globally. So, the second factor (the first being the concern over the ice age as possibly) is natural variation in the Earth’s surface temperature. To reiterate, early natural swings in the surface temperature may have legitimately caused some scientists to wonder about how much greenhouse gas pollution changes things, but later natural variations have not; Scientists know that this natural variation is superimposed on an impressive long term upward increase in temperature of the Earth’s surface and the upper ocean. Which brings us to the third major factor delaying both non-scientists’ acceptance of the realities of global warming, and dangerous policy inaction: Denialism.

The recent relative attenuation of increase in surface temperatures, likely soon to be over, was not thought of by scientists as disproving climate models or suggesting a stoppage of warming. But it was claimed by those denying the science as evidence that global warming is not real and that the climate scientists have it all wrong. That is only one form of denialism, which also includes the idea that yes, warming is happening, but does not matter, or yes, it matters, but we can’t do anything about it, or yes, we could do something about it, but the Chinese will not act (there is little evidence of that by the way, they are acting) so we’re screwed anyway. Etc.

The slowdown in global warming is not real, but a decades-long slowdown in addressing global warming at the individual, corporate or business, and governmental levels is very real, and very meaningful. There is no doubt that had we started to act aggressively, say, back in the 1980s when any major hurdles for overall understanding of the reality of global warming were overcome, that we would be way ahead of where we are now in the effort to keep the Carbon in the ground by using clean energy. The precipitous drop we’ve seen in photovoltaic costs, increases in battery efficiency and drop in cost, the deployment of wind turbines, and so on, would have had a different history than they have in fact had, and almost certainly all of this would have occurred faster. Over the last 30 or 40 years we have spent considerable effort building new sources of energy, most of which have used fossil Carbon. If even half of that effort was spent on increasing efficiency and developing non fossil Carbon sources, we would not have reached an atmospheric concentration of CO2 of 400ppm in 2015. The effects of greenhouse gas pollution would be less today and we would not be heading so quickly towards certain disaster. Shame on the denialists for causing this to happen.

I should mention a fourth cause of inappropriate rejection of the science of climate change. This is actually an indirect effect of climate change itself. You all know about the Inhofe Snowball. A US Senator actually carried a snowball into the senate chamber, a snowball he said he made outside where there has been an atypical snowfall in Washington DC, and held it aloft as evidence that the scientists had it all wrong, and that global warming is a hoax. Over the last few years, we have seen a climatological pattern in the US which has kept winter snows away from the mountains of California, contributing significantly to a major drought there. The same climatological phenomenon has brought unusual winter storms to states along the Eastern Seaboard that usually get less snow (such as major snow storms in Atlanta two winters ago) and persistent unseasonal cold to the northeastern part of the US. This change in pattern is due to a shift in the behavior of the Polar jet stream, which in turn is almost certainly caused by anomalous very warm water in parts of the Pacific and the extreme amplification of anomalous warm conditions in the Arctic, relative to the rest of the planet. (The jury is still out as to the exact process, but no serious climate scientists working on this scientific problem, as far as I know, doubts it is an effect of greenhouse gas pollution). This blob of cold air resting over the seat of power of one of the more influential governments in the world fuels the absurd but apparently effective anti-science pro-fossil fuel activism among so many of our current elected officials.

Climate Sensitivity Is Not Low

The concept of “Climate Sensitivity” is embodied in two formulations that each address the same basic question: given an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, how much will the Earth’s surface and upper ocean temperatures increase? The issue is more complex than I’ll address here, but here is the simple version. Often, “Climate sensitivity” is the amount of warming that will result from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from pre-industrial levels. That increase in temperature would take a while to happen because of the way climate works. On a different planet, equilibrium would be reached faster or slower. Historically, the range of climate sensitivity values has run from as low as about 1.5 degrees C up to 6 degrees C.

The difficulty in estimating climate sensitivity is in the feedbacks, such as ice melt, changes in water vapor, etc. For the most part, feedbacks will increase temperature. Without feedbacks, climate sensitivity would be about 1.2 degrees C, but the feedbacks are strong, the climate system is complex, and the math is a bit higher level.

As time goes by, our understanding of climate sensitivity has become more refined, and it is probably true that most climate scientists who study this would settle on 3 degrees C as the best estimate, but with wide range around that. The lower end of the range, however, is not as great as the larger end of the range, and the upper end of the range probably has what is called a “fat tail.” This would mean that while 3 degrees C is the best guess, the probability of it being way higher, like 4 or 5, is perhaps one in ten. (This all depends on which model or scientist you query.) The point here is that while it might be 3, there is a non-trivial chance (one in ten is not small for an extreme event) that it would be a value that would be really bad for us.

Anyway, Dana Nuccitelli has a recent post in The Guardian that looks at climate sensitivity in relation to “The Single Study Syndrome.”

There have been a few recent studies using what’s called an “energy balance model” approach, combining simple climate models with recent observational data, concluding that climate sensitivity is on the low end of IPCC estimates. However, subsequent research has identified some potentially serious flaws in this approach.

These types of studies have nevertheless been the focus of disproportionate attention. For example, in recent testimony before the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology, contrarian climate scientist Judith Curry said,

Recent data and research supports the importance of natural climate variability and calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change: … Reduced estimates of the sensitivity of climate to carbon dioxide

Curry referenced just one paper (using the energy balance model approach) to support that argument – the very definition of single study syndrome …

…As Andrew Dessler told me,

There certainly is some evidence that climate sensitivity may be below 2°C. But if you look at all of the evidence, it’s hard to reconcile with such a low climate sensitivity. I think our best estimate is still around 3°C for doubled CO2.

So there is not new information suggesting a higher climate sensitivity, or a quicker realization of it, but there is a continuation of the consensus that the value is not low, despite efforts by so called luke-warmists or denialists to throw cold water on this hot topic.

Important Carbon Sink May Be Limited.

A study just out in Nature Geoscience suggests that one of the possible factors that may mitigate against global warming, the terrestrial sink, is limited in its ability to do so. The idea here is that as CO2 increases some biological activities at the Earth’s Surface increase and store some of the carbon in solid form as biomass. Essentially, the CO2 acts as plant fertilizer, and some of that Carbon is trapped in the detritus of that system, or in living tissue. This recent study suggests that this sink is smaller than previously suspected.

Terrestrial carbon storage is dependent on the availability of nitrogen for plant growth… Widespread phosphorus limitation in terrestrial ecosystems may also strongly regulate the global carbon cycle… Here we use global state-of-the-art coupled carbon–climate model projections of terrestrial net primary productivity and carbon storage from 1860–2100; estimates of annual new nutrient inputs from deposition, nitrogen fixation, and weathering; and estimates of carbon allocation and stoichiometry to evaluate how simulated CO2 fertilization effects could be constrained by nutrient availability. We find that the nutrients required for the projected increases in net primary productivity greatly exceed estimated nutrient supply rates, suggesting that projected productivity increases may be unrealistically high. … We conclude that potential effects of nutrient limitation must be considered in estimates of the terrestrial carbon sink strength through the twenty-first century.

Related, the Amazon carbon sink is also showing long term decline in its effectiveness.

Permafrost Feedback

From Andy Skuce writing at Skeptical Science:

We have good reason to be concerned about the potential for nasty climate feedbacks from thawing permafrost in the Arctic….research bring good news or bad? [From recent work on this topic we may conclude that] although the permafrost feedback is unlikely to cause abrupt climate change in the near future, the feedback is going to make climate change worse over the second half of this century and beyond. The emissions quantities are still uncertain, but the central estimate would be like adding an additional country with the unmitigated emissions the current size of the United States’ for at least the rest of the century. This will not cause a climate catastrophe by itself, but it will make preventing dangerous climate change that much more difficult. As if it wasn’t hard enough already.

Expect More Extreme Weather

Michael D. Lemonick at Climate Central writes:

disasters were happening long before humans started pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but global warming has tipped the odds in their favor. A devastating heat wave like the one that killed 35,000 people in Europe in 2003, for example, is now more than 10 times more likely than it used to be…. But that’s just a single event in a single place, which doesn’t say much about the world as a whole. A new analysis in Nature Climate Change, however, takes a much broader view. About 18 percent of heavy precipitation events worldwide and 75 percent of hot temperature extremes — defined as events that come only once in every thousand days, on average — can already be attributed to human activity, says the study. And as the world continues to warm, the frequency of those events is expected to double by 2100.

Melting Glaciers Are Melting

This topic would require an entire blog post in itself. I’ll give just an overview here. Over the last year or so, scientists have realized that more of the Antarctic glaciers are melting more than previously thought, and a few big chunks of ice have actually floated away or become less stable. There is more fresh water flowing from glacial melt into the Gulf of Alaska than previously thought. Related to this, as well as changes in currents and increasing sea temperatures, sea level rise is sparking sharply.

The Shifting Climate

I mentioned earlier that the general upward trend of surface temperature has a certain amount of natural variation superimposed over it. Recent work strongly suggests that a multi-decade long variation, an up and down squiggle, which has been mostly in the down phase over recent years, is about to turn into an upward squiggle. This is a pretty convincing study that underscored the currently observed month by month warming, which has been going on for over a year now. It is not clear that the current acceleration in warming is the beginning of this long term change … that will be known only after a few years has gone by. But it is important to remember that nothing new has to happen, no new scientific finding has to occur, for us to understand right now that the upward march of global surface temperatures is going to be greater on average than the last decade or so has suggested. We have been warming all along, but lately much of that warming has been in the oceans. Expect surface temperatures to catch up soon.