Tag Archives: Global Warming

Global Temperature A Century Ago Vs. Today

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With what may be the warmest year in centuries about to close, I thought it would be fun to have a graphic comparing the march of global average temperature over several years about a century ago with the present state of affairs. This graphic is based on NASA’s data, using John Abraham’s estimate for the 2014 temperature (it might end up being a tiny bit different). There is more information about those sources here.

Global_Temperature_100_Years_ago_vs_today
[click on the graphic to get to a larger version]

Just to be clear on how to read the graph … the red dot is not anywhere in particular on the horizontal scale. The X and Y axis simply plot global average temperatures estimated for 1895 to 1933, a series of years that has 1914, a century ago, in the middle of it. This early sequence of data is meant to represent “pre-industrial” temperatures, and here that is compared using the single red to today, positioned correctly on the vertical scale (of temperature). Note, however, that 1895 to 1933 is not really pre-industrial. Human produced greenhouse gases were already being added to the atmosphere by then, though not to the same degree as more recent decades.

You will hear people say that even if 2014 is the warmest year on record, that it is not statistically significantly warmer than the next warmest year. That is absurd. One would have to have a very poor understanding of how statistics works to make such a statement non-ironically. But to make the point even more clear than I might if I explained why that is a dumb thing to say, statistically, I produced this graph which shows that today it is much warmer than it was not so long ago.

ADDED: A question has been raised as to whether or not I chose the proper scale on the Y-axis. I did. My intention was to show variation and average temperatures for several decades near the beginning of the industrial period, centering on 100 years ago, and to put the current year in context of that. This graph does that nicely, with no strangeness about axes other than the carefully explained fact that the clearly labeled 2014 datum is not scaled to the time scale on the bottom. The nature and variation of the entire instrumental curve is readily available and there are dozens of graphs here on this blog and elsewhere that show this (I placed one at the top of the post for your convenience). The point of this graph was to remove the ascending values and obviate the rather absurd question of statistical difference between the highest and second highest ranked years. As explained.

But the Y-axis problem emerges as a more general climate science denial meme (other than, and beyond, the relatively valid and honest question of how to best scale the Y-axis on a graph like this). And in relation to that, I’ve made a NEW ENTRY IN MY FAQ. Please have a look. There are some fun graphs.

Added:

To demonstrate two ways in which people get this wrong. First, an actual scientist type person simply believing (incorrectly) that all scales must start at zero (maybe they do in his field), and second, a climate science denialist actually arguing that the joke graph shown in the tweet is the best way to show global temperature change.

You might have to click on the pic to be able to read it:

EntrenchedIgnoranceDemonstrated

Bringing opinions on climate change closer to reality: Peter Doran

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Enough! That’s Peter Doran’s opinion on the “debate” about a scientific consensus on climate change. There clearly is one — a strong one. So why do the public and the politicians think otherwise? Why the big disconnect between what the vast majority of scientists know to be fact, and what the public thinks. Dr. Doran blames the way media reports on science, and he blames a few of the loud voices on the right. He presents an idea to change a lot of the minds of people who deny the scientific consensus on climate change which will hopefully lead politicians to action. Peter Doran is a professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has published over 80 articles in the academic literature about the polar regions, lakes, ecology and climate change.

Here’s his OpEd.

New Research on Tree Rings as Indicators of Past Climate

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A new study has recently been published that looks at the ecology of bristlecone pine growth at Sheep Mountain, and the tree ring signal those trees produce, at high altitudes in the Southwestern US. This is important because tree rings are an often used proxyindicator for reconstructing past climates. Those who keep track of the paleoclimate research will recall, for example, that tree rings were one of the proxyindicators used by Michael Mann and his team in constructing the famous “Hockey Stick” graph showing a dramatic increase in the Earth’s temperature since the onset of industrial times, when the instrumental record (of the last century plus) is put in context of previous centuries. Since then, tree rings have played an important role in past climate reconstruction.

I asked Malcolm Hughes, who was an author on that earlier hockey stick work and an author on the recent study discussed here, how his recent work informs us of the validity of Mann et al, especially in relation to bristlecone pine data used in that early seminal study. He said, “Back in 1999 we (Mann et al) made the best available choices with the information and data we had. Now, more than 15 years later, with a Bristlecone Pine record that extends back 5000 years, the original results hold up remarkably well.”

So, now, let’s discuss tree rings a bit and then see what the new paper offers.

Tree Rings And Past Climate

Past climates can be reconstructed by using proxyindicators of past conditions, much like more recent climate can be characterized by using instruments (thermometers, etc.) and data form satellites. One of these proxyindicators is tree ring width. Trees with seasonal growth may produce woody tissue at higher or lower rates depending on a limiting factor, such as available water or temperature. An individual tree may be limited by water availability if it is growing in a certain microhabitat, but a tree of the same species may be limited by temperature if it is growing in a different microhabitat. It is even possible for one limiting factor to control growth for a period of time, then, as conditions change, a different limiting factor takes over. Saplings and small trees growing in a forest may be limited by light, and later, as they grow tall enough (or gaps in the forest canopy open), they may be limited by moisture or temperature.

The tree rings from certain sites seem to properly reflect temperature variability up until around 1960, and after that, the usability of the signal from that proxy can be reduced. This pattern has been noticed in a number of different tree ring records; the phenomenon is widespread enough that it has a name. It is called the “divergence problem.”

Several explanations have been offered to explain the divergence problem, and there is a fair amount of literature on it. It is possible that the post industrial increase in atmospheric CO2 has affected tree growth (acting, essentially as airborne fertilizer) in such a way that the tree ring widths no longer reliably indicate temperature. Changes in the pattern of snow melt at high altitudes, which is where the temperature-sensitive trees are generally found, may affect growth patterns. Changes in minimum or maximum temperature distributions could be a cause. It is also likely that the amount of atmospheric dust (aerosols) has an impact on tree growth, so recent pollution could be a factor. The anomaly could also be an artifact of sampling large trees, in order to sample the longest time periods, if older trees have different growth patterns. In the case of one of the key proxy tree species, bristlecone pines, divergence may have to do with the fact that there are two different growth patterns at the tree’s surface, referred to as strip-bark and whole-bark.

In 2009, Matthew Salzar, Malcolm Hughes, Andrew Bunn, and Kurt Kipfmueller published a paper that looked at a possible divergence problem in bristlecone pines at three sites the American Great Basin. They looked at trees at the upper limit of elevation and found that “…ring growth in the second half of the 20th century … was greater than during any other 50-year period in the last 3,700 years.” This confirms that whatever the cause of divergence is, it is likely something going on during the most recent decades, which strongly suggests a cause related to Industrial Era pollution or warming. They were able to rule out changes in tree growth patterns and fertilization by added atmospheric CO2. They note that “[t]he growth surge has occurred only in a limited elevational band within ?150 m of upper treeline, regardless of treeline elevation,” and concluded that “[i]ncreasing temperature at high elevations is likely a prominent factor in the modern unprecedented level of growth for Pinus longaeva at these sites.”

A New Study On How Tree Rings Work

More recently an overlapping set of authors have published an important study (“Changing climate response in near-treeline bristlecone pine with elevation and aspect”) that looks at this problem in more detail. From the abstract:

In the White Mountains of California, eight bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) tree-ring width chronologies were developed from trees at upper treeline and just below upper treeline along North- and South-facing elevational transects from treeline to ~90 m below. There is evidence for a climate-response threshold between approximately 60–80 vertical m below treeline, above which trees have shown a positive growth-response to temperature and below which they do not. Chronologies from 80 m or more below treeline show a change in climate response and do not correlate strongly with temperature-sensitive chronologies developed from trees growing at upper treeline. Rather, they more closely resemble lower elevation precipitation-sensitive chronologies. At the highest sites, trees on South-facing slopes grow faster than trees on North-facing slopes. High growth rates in the treeline South-facing trees have declined since the mid-1990s. This suggests the possibility that the climate-response of the highest South-facing trees may have changed and that temperature may no longer be the main limiting factor for growth on the South aspect. These results indicate that increasing warmth may lead to a divergence between tree growth and temperature at previously temperature-limited sites.

Generally, trees from higher latitudes (farther north) and higher altitudes both make better temperature proxies, because the two factors (altitude and latitude) both have temperature as a common thread. You learned this in your middle school Earth Science class. Altitude and latitude mimic each other to a large degree, which is why mountain glaciers can be found on the equator (or, at least, were found there before global warming mostly melted them away). But this new research also shows that topographical position in relation to the sun (south facing vs. north facing) further modify the microenvironment the trees are growing in.

Three earlier studies by Salzer and others (in 2009, 2013, and 2014) show is that the 20th century growth increase at the very highest elevations is temperature related, so in that sense, there has not been a divergence problem in the bristlecone pine, although one may now be emerging on the south- facing slopes, but not on the north-facing slopes near treeline.

The importance of microenvironment is well illustrated in this figure:

Changing_Climate_Response_Treelines_Figure_5

This shows the tree ring values for two sampled sites from 1980-2009. Until the mid 1990s, the tree ring values correlate tightly. After this point in time, however, they demonstrate the divergence problem among the samples, in this case, caused primarily by the specific direction the locations are facing (north vs. south).

The most important conclusion of this paper (which is not a reconstruction of past climate, but rather, a study of the ecology of tree ring growth) has to do with how tree ring data are assembled and used. Multiple tree ring samples may be taken from a given site, with the assumption that that site has similar conditions for all the sampled trees, so the assembled and combined tree ring data will have a similar climate related signal. (Note that there is a fair amount of internal variability within a given tree that is hopefully erased when more than one sample from a given site is used). Salzer et al show that at high elevations bristlecone pines can vary from each other considerably if they are sampled form elevations that differ in several tens of meters, or in the aspect (direction) of the slope they grew on, and that this sensitivity is tied to the treeline at on a given slope. And, of course, the position of the samples (as noted above) affects the degree to which tree ring data reflect temperature as opposed to other factors.

We have shown that approximately 60–80 m of vertical elevation can be sufficient to create a change in the climate response of bristlecone pine. Trees below this elevation are not as effective temperature recorders as trees at treeline. Such fine-scale sensitivity, if present at other treeline sites around the world, would have important implications for chronology development and inferences of past climate variability. Treeline site chronologies should be constructed with this vertical heterogeneity in mind. Samples from upper treeline and from trees below treeline should not be mixed to avoid a ‘diluted’ or ‘mixed-signal’ site chronology, particularly at treeline sites that occur in relatively dry environments such as the White Mountains of California. Similarly, treeline samples from differing aspects should not be mixed to avoid problems and uncertainties related to potential ‘divergences’ and to ‘dilution’. Interpretations of existing bristlecone chronologies need to take this into account, particularly when these ring width chronologies are used in climate reconstructions.

I asked Malcolm Hughes and Matt Salzer, two of the study authors, how to best characterize this study. They told me that this paper is, for the most part, “…an ecological study. There are no climate reconstructions, rather mostly comparisons of growth from trees growing in different spots on the landscape. There are paleoclimate implications. We still find temperature sensitive bristlecone pine trees at upper treeline; they simply don’t extend down the mountain as far as we used to think. In addition, some of the treeline south-facing trees seem to be less influenced by temperature in recent years than they used to be. The location of the trees, and understanding what environmental variable is limiting growth at that location, is the key to developing accurate paleoclimatic reconstructions from tree rings. Science is a continuous process of improvement.”

Earlier research by an overlapping team also looked at topography. In “Topographically modified tree-ring chronologies as a potential means to improve paleoclimate inference” by Andrew Bunn, Malcolm Huges, and Matthew Salzer (2011) it is noted that

…a mean ring-width chronology from a particular site may be composed of trees from highly varied topographic positions. Such a “topographically-mixed” chronology can be confounded in terms of its climate signal. For example, ring widths of trees that are primarily recording summer temperature might be averaged with ring widths of trees that are primarily precipitation recorders.

That paper details how researchers can use topographic setting to separate different growth series to produce a cleaner sample for developing a temperature proxy. Like the more recent paper discussed here, Bunn et al is an effort to improve the methodology of using tree rings as a proxy.

Science Denialists Can’t See The Forest Through The Tree Rings

Even as the tree-ring proxyindicator expands in size (more samples) and is better understood (from the above mentioned studies) climate science denialists remain entrenched with their assertion that tree rings are bad proxies, or are being used incorrectly. These criticisms are not legitimate critiques of the science, but rather, combine obfuscation and misinformation to muddle and confound thinking about tree rings. An early example of this comes from the kerfuffle known at “climategate” in which electronic communications among climate scientist were stolen and mined for decontextualized quotes that could be used to lie about the science itself and the motivations and activities of the scientists who developed the Hockey Stick curve. Michael Mann chronicles these events in his book “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the front lines.”

One e-mail Phil Jones of CRU sent to my coauthors and me in early 1999 has received more attention than any other. In it, Jones both made reference to “Mike’s Nature trick” and used the phrase “to hide the decline” in describing a figure … comparing different proxy temperature reconstructions. Here was the smoking gun, climate change deniers clamored. Climate scientists had finally been caught cooking the books: They were using “a trick to hide the decline in global temperatures,” a nefarious plot to hide the fact the globe was in fact cooling, not warming! …

The full quotation from Jones’s e-mail was …, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” Only by omitting the twenty-three words in between “trick” and “hide the decline” were change deniers able to fabricate the claim of a supposed “trick to hide the decline.” No such phrase was used in the e-mail nor in any of the stolen e-mails for that matter. Indeed, “Mike’s Nature trick” and “hide the decline” had nothing to do with each other. In reality, neither “trick” nor “hide the decline” was referring to recent warming, but rather the far more mundane issue of how to compare proxy and instrumental temperature records. Jones was using the word trick [to refer to] to an entirely legitimate plotting device for comparing two datasets on a single graph…

The reconstruction by Briffa, (see K. R. Briffa, F. H. Schweingruber, P. D. Jones, T. J. Osborn, S. G. Shiyatov, and E. A. Vaganov, “Reduced Sensitivity of Recent Tree-Growth to Temperature at High Northern Latitudes,” Nature, 391 (1998): 678–682) in particular …

…was susceptible to the so-called divergence problem, a problem that primarily afflicts tree ring density data from higher latitudes. These data show an enigmatic decline in their response to warming temperatures after roughly 1960, … [Jones] was simply referring to something Briffa and coauthors had themselves cautioned in their original 1998 publication: that their tree ring density data should not be used to infer temperatures after 1960 because they were compromised by the divergence problem. Jones thus chose not to display the Briffa et al. series after 1960 in his plot, “hiding” data known to be faulty and misleading—again, entirely appropriate. … Individuals such as S. Fred Singer have … tried to tar my coauthors and me with “hide the decline” by conflating the divergence problem that plagued the Briffa et al. tree ring density reconstruction with entirely unrelated aspects of the hockey stick.

Note that there wasn’t a “divergence problem” in Mann et al in the sense of Briffa et al. Mann et al match the observational record very well through 1980, which is the end of the calibration interval (owing to the fact that many proxies drop out after 1980). This is something else the deniers tend to get wrong; they try to conflate the Briffa et al post-1960 divergence problem Mann et al’s hockey stick work. There is no such issue with that work, in that there was no detectable divergence through the end of the calibration interval.

Related to this, there was a correction of the Bristlecone Pine data for inflated 20th century increase (which was attributed to CO2 fertilization at the time) in MBH99. So we actually applied a downward correction of the trend in those data. McIntyre doesn’t want people to know that. So need to make sure that is crystal clear.
More recently, climate science denialist JoNova took the new paper by Salzer et al to task using equally mind numbing arguments. JoNova notes that “after decades of studying 800 year old tree rings, someone has finally found some trees living as long ago as 2005. These rarest-of-rare tree rings have been difficult to find … The US government may have spent $30 billion on climate research, but that apparently wasn’t enough to find trees on SheepMountain living between the vast treeless years of 1980 to now.”

I’m sure the scientists involved in tree ring research would like to know where their $30 billion dollars went, but that’s another story. I asked Malcolm Hughes about JoNova’s implication that there has been next to zero research on or with bristlecone pines over these many years. He said, “This post makes a big deal about the lack of updating of bristlecone pine chronologies since 1980. This is simply wrong. She fails to acknowledge that in 2009 we published on bristlecone pine growth rates in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) and put tree-ring data from Sheep Mountain out to the year 2005 in a publicly accessible archive.”

JoNova also implies that the lack of tree ring proxy use for periods after 1980 is somehow suspicious, but as detailed at length above, the divergence problem is, well, a problem. Also, further work such as that reported here is likely to revive some of that data and allow it to be used, eventually. At the very least, future work with high altitude/latitude tree ring data will be improved by these methodological and ecological studies.

Climate science denialist Steve McIntyre has also weighed in on Salzer et all’s research. His post is truly mind numbing, as he treats Salzer et al as a climate reconstruction paper, and critiques it as such, but the paper examines the methodology of tree ring proxy use and the ecology of tree rings. McIntyre shows the same figure I show above (Figure 5 from that paper) and critiques the researchers for failing to integrate that figure or its data with Mann et al’s climate reconstructions. But they shouldn’t have. That is not what the paper is about. Another very recent paper by the same team is in fact a climate reconstruction study (published in Climate Dynamics) but McIntyre manages to ignore that.

Science writer and failed banker Matt Ridley has also applied his abysmal understanding of paleoclimate science with a critique of some of this research.

I’m sure you find these esoteric details of tree ring chronologies fascinating, but there is a point that needs to be made that is even more interesting.

Ever since Mann et al published the famous “hockey stick graph” those in the business of denying or (inadequately) refuting the growing consensus of climate science have made much hay out of both the divergence problem and a sense of suspicion of the tree ring record. For examples of this, read through the comments on this post. If you read comments by those who seem bent on the idea of refuting the reality of global warming, you’ll get the impression that there are only a few tree ring chronologies, we have no idea how they work, they don’t work, that climate scientists pretend they stop working at some point when really they are working but show cooling (which we know didn’t happen because we have thermometers) and, generally, that tree ring science is some sort of exercise in voodoo.

What has really happened, however, is that tree ring data have behaved pretty much as any other paleoclimate proxy behaves. There are conditions under which any given proxy works, and there are conditions under which the proxy can’t be trusted and should not be used. Decades ago, when the Hockey Stick was first formulated, the loss of signal in the tree ring record was somewhat mysterious, though numerous good ideas explaining it were out there. Subsequently, there has been a considerable amount of research adding new tree ring data, and some of that research has focused on teasing out the methodological and ecological details of this particular proxy. Interestingly, the last 10 years or so of tree ring research has failed to force the conclusion that tree rings are not good sources of past temperature data; the divergence problem is replicated in other records showing it again to be a recent phenomenon; change in regional (and global) temperature is increasingly implicated as the cause of the divergence problem; and much finer details of how this all works, at the scale of tens of meters elevation and at the level of details of topography have been worked out.

References and related items

2014 may be the warmest year on record

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In early December I wrote a post called “2014 will not be the warmest year on record, but global warming is still real.” The very first thing I said in that post is that I was going out on a limb. I also discussed whether or not one year mattered, and I discussed the nature of the phrase “X is the Yth warmest year on record,” going into details on what “the record” is and how we measure this.

I want to reiterate something very important that I mentioned then. Here, we are talking about a combination of measurements from the sea surface and the air just over the land (about where your head is when you are walking around). Changes in this surface measurement over time reflect less than about 5% of the overall changes in temperature experienced by the Earth because of the addition of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere (or reduction of “sinks” of those gasses, or of heat) by human activity. Most of the additional heat goes into the ocean.

The reason I was conservative in my earlier post was to avoid a situation where we (climate scientists, climate science communicators, etc.) made statements about 2014 that turned out to be wrong in a subset of the records, of which there are several. That is still possible, I suppose. But, now that we are past the middle of December, it is possible to estimate December’s overall temperature, add that to the prior 11 months, and say with much more certainly that 2014 will be the warmest year.

My friend and colleague John Abraham has been doing just this. He’s been collecting data on daily temperature estimates (I helped a bit, covering that task when he was overseas and unable to do so himself). He then took this information and, essentially, asked himself the same question every day: “Do I have enough data to call this?” Over the last several days NASA and NOAA have updated their temperature records for November, and NOAA came out with an analysis showing how difficult it would be for 2014 to NOT be the warmest year in their records. When John Abraham combined his analysis with the data through November, he decided, yesterday, that it was time to call it.

…2014 will be the hottest year ever recorded.

I can make this pronouncement even before the end of the year because each month, I collect daily global average temperatures. So far, December is running about 0.5°C above the average. The climate and weather models predict that the next week will be about 0.75°C above average. This means, December will come in around 0.6°C above average. Are these daily values accurate? Well the last two months they have been within 0.05°C of the final official results.

The graph above shows the NASA data by year, in standard units (0.01 Celsius anomaly using a base period of 1951-1980) with John’s estimate for 2014 added to the end. This will change slightly after NASA gets the December data out.

Remember, this is the instrumental record, which goes back into the 19th century. But when we look at proxyindicator data for previous centuries or millennia, we don’t see any evidence suggesting that there were any, or if there were any, that there were many, years that would have been warmer for a very long time. That goes back through the entire Holocene. Before that, it is harder to make that claim. There is a good record over the last several glaciations, say bout 800 thousand years or so, for which we can say that the present level of global surface temperature is in the range of the warmest periods, or at the top end of the range. This becomes less likely as we go back in time, as there has been a general cooling of the earth (with a lot of ups and downs) since some time in the Miocene (over 5 million years ago).

However, paleorecords together with basic physics tell us that the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere should associate with a much higher temperature than we experience now. This is why the Earth’s surface temperature is going up. The added CO2 is a little like adding fire to the bottom of a pot f water. The water will eventually reach boiling point, but it will take some time. Because of the way heat (and to some extent, added CO2) circulate among the various reservoirs on the Earth’s surface, a process that might take a geological instant on a simpler planet (rocky surface, no significant water including no significant oceans, simple Nitrogen atmosphere) takes much longer. We are not sure how warm the Earth will get with 400ppm CO2, which is about where we are now, but it is quite a bit more than the present temperature. That number, even if it is on the low end of the possible range, likely exceeds ancient temperatures for very long time. The fact that we are continuing to add CO2 to the atmosphere, and even them most intense efforts to reduce this are going to take time, means that we can expect a much higher concentration of CO2, and thus, an even higher eventual level of warming. Over coming decades, we will be recording “warmest years” that are warmer than anything in millions of years.

Also, there are at least two additional factors that must be taken into account. One, perhaps most important, is that the rate of change we are currently experiencing is high, perhaps unprecedented in many millions of years. Rapid rates of change is bad. Second, and in part a subset of the first (but not perfectly) is the problem of circumscription of our agriculture and infrastructure, as well as natural preservation areas. When they build roads in Mississippi vs. Minnesota, they build them differently because of the climate. As the climate warms, the old roads turn out to be built wrong and have to be redone to handle a different range of temperatures. That’s a small problem, because we rebuild our roads now and then anyway. Because of changes in temperature and rainfall patterns, the irrigation infrastructure for agriculture will become inappropriate to the task in some regions. That is a larger problem. As warming occurs, parasites from southerly areas move north, and find populations of plants and animals that are not adapted to them. Forests die, large mammals go locally extinct, etc.

Slowly slowly, we are getting to the point where it might be safe to bring back some of the dinosaurs! (Except they would starve because the plants the herbivores eat are rare or extinct. The carnivores could find food, though, I suspect…)

So, go read John Abraham’s post.

Matt Ridley, Anti-Science Writer, Climate Science Denialist

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Matt Ridley is a British journalist whom some in the science community are now quietly referring to as an “anti-science writer.” He has taken up the cause of denying the widely held and deep scientific consensus on climate change. He has a recent blog post he seems to have been compelled to write in response to a new study on the use of tree rings as a proxyindicator for past temperatures. I’ll be writing about that research in a day or two. Ridley’s post is embarrassing, and especially annoying to me because for several years I used his book on evolutionary biology as a recommended (or sometimes required) reading in my courses on human evolution. Here, I’d like to present a simple Fisking of his post. He begins,

As somebody who has championed science all his career, carrying a lot of water for the profession against its critics on many issues, I am losing faith.

Any time I hear someone identify themselves as a champion of science, I check my wallet. Self proclaiming one’s position on an imagined high ground is often the prelude to anti science yammering. Let’s see if that is the case here. He goes on,

Recent examples of bias and corruption in science are bad enough. What’s worse is the reluctance of scientific leaders to criticise the bad apples. Science as a philosophy is in good health; science as an institution increasingly stinks.

This assumes facts not in evidence. Ridley’s assertion looking at science from the outside is that there are bad apples. But his examples of bad apples are bad examples.

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics published a report last week that found evidence of scientists increasingly “employing less rigorous research methods” in response to funding pressures. A 2009 survey found that almost 2 per cent of scientists admitting that they have fabricated results; 14 per cent say that their colleagues have done so.

Remember, Ridley is ultimately speaking here of climate science. But over 83% of the respondents in that survey done by an institution that looks at biomedical ethics were in biomedical or health related areas. A mere 2% were in geosciences. This study has little do do with climate science research or how it is conducted. A champion of science should really be more careful with the data.

Also, that report notes that

Fifty-eight per cent of survey respondents are aware of scientists feeling tempted or under
pressure to compromise on research integrity and standards, although evidence was not collected on any outcomes associated with this. “

We all would like to see the way research dollars are distributed be evaluated, critiqued, and where possible, improved, but there is a large difference between recognizing pressure and showing it has an effect. But, again, any effects shown in that report are utterly irrelevant to any consideration of climate science. Ridley continues,

This month has seen three egregious examples of poor scientific practice. The most recent was the revelation in The Times last week that scientists appeared to scheme to get neonicotinoid pesticides banned, rather than open-mindedly assessing all the evidence. These were supposedly “independent” scientists, yet they were hand in glove with environmental activists who were receiving huge grants from the European Union to lobby it via supposedly independent reports, and they apparently had their conclusions in mind before they gathered the evidence. Documents that have recently come to light show them blatantly setting out to make policy-based evidence, rather than evidence-based policy.

This is a manufactured controversy, and is not related to climate science. The problem with nicotinoid issue is a case of an industry opposing some researchers findings, and there is a good chance that the sources Ridley relies on did not get the story right. (See this for example.) Ridley’s comments are really just another example of him taking sides in a debate that pits industry interests against researchers.

Second example: last week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a supposedly scientific body, issued a press release stating that this is likely to be the warmest year in a century or more, based on surface temperatures. Yet this predicted record would be only one hundredth of a degree above 2010 and two hundredths of a degree above 2005 — with an error range of one tenth of a degree. True scientists would have said: this year is unlikely to be significantly warmer than 2010 or 2005 and left it at that.

No one has suggested that if we have the warmest year it will be by much. The increase in global warming is steady and medium to long term. Also, it is a complicated issue, as pointed out by Ridley. I discuss this in detail here: 2014 will not be the warmest year on record, but global warming is still real.

In any case, the year is not over, so why the announcement now? Oh yes, there’s a political climate summit in Lima this week. The scientists of WMO allowed themselves to be used politically. Not that they were reluctant. To squeeze and cajole the data until they just crossed the line, the WMO “reanalysed” a merger of five data sets. Maybe that was legitimate but, given how the institutions that gather temperature data have twice this year been caught red-handed making poorly justified adjustments to “homogenise” and “in-fill” thermometer records in such a way as to cool down old records and warm up new ones, I have my doubts.

I tend to agree that one should not characterize the global average surface temperature of a year before the year is over, and then some, to allow for proper updates and adjustments to the data. The fact that there has been so much reporting and blogging on this was likely forced by MSM starting to report on “the warmest year”, because MSM tends to finish all their “year events” reporting before the holidays. (Though WMO has regularly come out with commentary this time of year on the meteorological year, which is not the same as the calendar year.) In any event, this is not a problem in science, it is a problem in MSM and other agents. All the climate science based reporting or blogging on the global average surface temp that I have seen post dates CNN and other media breaking the news, which forced everyone’s hand. (Again, see this.)

In one case, in Rutherglen, a town in Victoria, a recorded cooling trend of minus 0.35C became a reported warming trend of plus 1.73C after “homogenisation” by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. It claimed the adjustment was necessary because the thermometer had moved between two fields, but could provide no evidence for this, or for why it necessitated such a drastic adjustment.
Most of the people in charge of collating temperature data are vocal in their views on climate policy, which hardly reassures the rest of us that they leave those prejudices at the laboratory door. Imagine if bankers were in charge of measuring inflation.

Climate science denialists such as Ridley tend to howl about imperfections in data and methodology. They then howl some more when honest attempts are made at making sure the data are good, or efforts are made to improve methodology. This is a pretty run of the mill denialist tactic.

Ridley’s criticism of the ABM vis-a-vis the Rutherglen data has been addressed in Remember the weather at Rutherglen? BoM was right all along, of course!. See also this.

Third example: the Royal Society used to be the gold standard of scientific objectivity. Yet this month it issued a report on resilience to extreme weather that, in its 100-plus pages, could find room for not a single graph to show recent trends in extreme weather. That is because no such graph shows an upward trend in global frequency of droughts, storms or floods. The report did find room for a graph showing the rising cost of damage by extreme weather, which is a function of the increased value of insured property, not a measure of weather.

There have been numerous studies showing trends in extreme weather. Having said that, the nature of the link between climate change and extreme weather is both complex and the subject of mostly very recent research. It will take a while for the dust to settle on this. If anything, the larger scientific societies involved in this work are behind in addressing and incorporating new research. See for example, NOAA Report Misses Link Between California Drought and Human-Caused Climate Change and Explaining Extreme Events of 2013: Limitations of the BAMS Report.

The Royal Society report also carefully omitted what is perhaps the most telling of all statistics about extreme weather: the plummeting death toll. The global probability of being killed by a drought, flood or storm is down by 98 per cent since the 1920s and has never been lower — not because weather is less dangerous but because of improvements in transport, trade, infrastructure, aid and communication.

Asked and answered in the same statement. First, comparing a time before radar, satellites, advanced communication technology, warning systems, and computers to predict weather with recent times is bogus. Second, both property damage and mortality/morbidity resulting from extreme weather events is very likely to drop as pre-event upgrades, which may sometimes be very costly but that are not counted in the cost of a particular storm, are implemented. This of course applies more to industrialized nations than to other areas. This is expected. But, there is probably a limit to what can be done even in industrialize areas. Not much infrastructure improvement has helped with the California Drought, and all the work done since Katrina or currently planned is likely to provide additional mitigation of the effects of the next Katrina in the gulf.

The Royal Society’s decision to cherry-pick its way past such data would be less worrying if its president, Sir Paul Nurse, had not gone on the record as highly partisan on the subject of climate science. He called for those who disagree with him to be “crushed and buried”, hardly the language of Galileo.

I suppose Ridley could not resist a Galileo reference. Also, when one wants to disagree with scientific consensus, in the absence of a scientific argument, it is convenient to declare the issue partisan.

In any event, Nurse was talking about the very problems Ridley, as a Champion of Science, should be concerned with. I asked Dana Nuccitelli, who follows these things, what he thought about Ridley’s comments on Nurse. He pointed out this post, and noted that “Nurse was actually saying that about influential figures who distort scientific evidence to support their own political, religious, or ideological agendas. Nurse did cite those who distort climate science as one example, but he was speaking in general terms about ideologically-based science distortions (he cited GM crops as another example). Ironically, Ridley distorts Nurse’s comments about distorting evidence in order to attack him.”

Three months ago Sir Paul said: “We need to be aware of those who mix up science, based on evidence and rationality, with politics and ideology, where opinion, rhetoric and tradition hold more sway. We need to be aware of political or ideological lobbyists who do not respect science, cherry-picking data or argument, to support their predetermined positions.”

If he wishes to be consistent, he will therefore condemn the behaviour of the scientists over neonicotinoids and the WMO over temperature records, and chastise his colleagues’ report, for these are prime examples of his point.

That assumes he agrees with Ridley, which he probably doesn’t.

Ridley uses his expertise and experience from the banking industry to criticize climate science and scientist. Is this expertise and experience valuable? Andy Skuce wrote about Ridley’s involvement in the collapse of the British bank, Northern Rock in The Ridley Riddle Part Three: Like a Northern Rock, in 2011:

Matt Ridley was the non-executive Chairman of Northern Rock, a British bank that, in 2007, was the first in over a century and a half to experience a run on its deposits. British banks had all survived two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the end of the British Empire, until Northern Rock failed. Ridley had served on the Northern Rock board of directors since 1994 and was appointed Chairman in 2004. …

Northern Rock’s business model was a very aggressive one, centered on rapid growth of its mortgage business. Before 1997, Northern Rock was a building society, a co-operative savings and mortgage institution. Like many other British building societies, it transformed itself into a bank and was listed on the stock exchange. This led to rapid growth for Northern Rock, which grew its assets at an annual rate of more than 23% from 1998 to 2007. Before its crisis, Northern Rock had assets of about $200 billion and was the fifth-largest bank in Britain. The bank’s retail deposits did not grow at the same rate as its mortgage assets; the difference was made up with funding from capital markets. When the credit crisis hit in 2007, Northern Rock saw its funding vanish. Northern Rock’s debts were more than fifty times its shareholder common equity, making the bank an outlier even among the many other highly-levered financial institutions at that time…. The bank was unable to pay its creditors and had to turn to the Bank of England for help in September 2007. These events led to panic among its depositors, who formed huge queues outside its branches to withdraw their savings.

According to Skuce, financial experts and institutions saw the problems that took Norther Rock down, but apparently Ridley did not.

…the events leading to the credit crunch, the bursting of the housing bubble and the collapse of financial markets, were not entirely unforeseen, especially by commentators outside the banking sector. … In 2006, Robert Shiller of Yale University wrote: “there is significant risk of a very bad period, with slow sales, slim commissions, falling prices, rising default and foreclosures, serious trouble in financial markets, and a possible recession sooner than most of us expected.”…

Matt Ridley has been highly critical of the IPCC reports and of the Chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, mainly for the overblown stories about the Himalayan glaciertypo and the poorly-referenced but correct accounts of the Amazon Basin’s vulnerability to drought. Yet for all the accusations that the IPCC has exaggerated impacts of climate change and “sexed-up” summaries for policy makers, its track record is solid compared to the rosy business outlook that Ridley portrayed in the Northern Rock Annual Report 2006, and published in early 2007, just a few months before the company failed.

Two senior officers of Northern Rock—the Deputy Chief Executive and the Managing Credit Director—were heavily fined in April 2010 by the UK Financial Services Authority for hiding the decline in the performance of the company’s mortgage assets in early 2007. There’s no suggestion that Ridley played any role, or, at the time, was even aware of this misrepresentation of important financial data. All the same, the transgressions happened under his watch as Chairman and, as far as I know, he has not since expressed any regret for the incident. Nevertheless, a few months after his former colleagues had been sanctioned, Ridley had the audacity to write an article for the Times in which he referred to the “discredited Dr Pachauri” in “shut-eyed denial”. Yet none of the contributors to Chairman Pachauri’s reports has ever been shown to have deliberately misrepresented any data.

For Ridley, in business as in climate, prudent precautionary measures are rejected as ruinous, whereas warnings that real disasters may be lurking are dismissed. As the Northern Rock experience showed, being dazzled by the power of virtuous circles can blind you to the fact that, if spun too hard, they can quickly turn vicious.

Now, back to Ridley:

I am not hopeful. When a similar scandal blew up in 2009 over the hiding of inconvenient data that appeared to discredit the validity of proxies for past global temperatures based on tree rings (part of “Climategate”), the scientific establishment closed ranks and tried to pretend it did not matter.

This is a key statement by Ridley. After multiple investigations and a thorough raking over of the evidence, it has been clearly established that “climategate” was unfounded. Ridley believing that climategate refers to real nefarious events is all you need to know to pretty much ignore everything else he says. He might as well be talking about chemtrails.

Last week a further instalment of that story came to light, showing that yet more inconvenient data (which discredit bristlecone pine tree rings as temperature proxies) had emerged.

This is an abysmal misreading of the peer reviewed research and an uncritical acceptance of criticism of that research that was very badly done. I’ll be posting something about the tree ring research soon, but for the time being read this post and the comments. I’ll be done with my new post in a day or so, which is probably about the same time you’ll be done reviewing all ~500 comments!

The overwhelming majority of scientists do excellent, objective work, following the evidence wherever it leads.

Yes. Yes, they do.

… It’s hard for champions of science like me to make our case against creationists, homeopaths and other merchants of mysticism if some of those within science also practise pseudo-science.

Ridley declares himself a champion of science (check your wallet!) and in the same breath attempts to link the scientific consensus on climate change with creationism. I’m shocked to see no reference here to Hitler.

In all the millions of scientific careers in Britain over the past few decades, outside medical science there has never been a case of a scientist convicted of malpractice. Not one. Maybe that is because — unlike the police, the church and politics — scientists are all pure as the driven snow. Or maybe it is because science as an institution, like so many other institutions, does not police itself properly.

Or, there could be another reason.

How scientists unraveled the El Niño mystery

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The Road to Paris is a web site created by the ICSU, “…a non-governmental organization representing a global membership that includes both national scientific bodies (121 National Members representing 141 countries) and International Scientific Unions (30 Members),” founded in 1931. If the ICSU had not existed when the UN was formed, the UN would have formed it. Think of the ICSU as the UN of Science. More or less.

(Follow Road to Paris on Twitter.)

Anyway, Road to Paris refers to the 2015 international meetings on climate change, and the purpose of the web site is to provide excellent information about climate change, up to date, so those engaged in that process, either as direct participants or as onlookers, will be well informed.

“Fishing in pink waters: How scientists unraveled the El Niño mystery” is an amazing piece of work written by Daniel Gross (I made minuscule contributions), looking at the history of the science of the El Nino Southern Oscillation, which is one of the most important climate or weather related things on this planet. This is timely, because we are expecting an El Niño to form over the winter. Maybe. Well, eventually we will have an El Niño. (It has been an unusually long time since the last strong one.)

Please visit this web page, read it, enjoy it (it is highly interactive), and spread it around.

2014 will not be the warmest year on record, but global warming is still real.

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I’m going out on a limb here. 2014 has been a very warm year. We’ve had a number of record setting months. But, a couple of months were also coolish, and November was one of them. December started out cool (like November ended) globally, but actually over the last few days the global average temperature has been going up. But, unless December gets really warm really fast, is is probably true that we will break some records but not all. This entire discussion, however, is problematic for a number of reasons.

How much does one year matter?

How warm or cold a given year is does not matter much for the overall trend. The upward march of global surface temperature is squiggly, but on average upward. Expect variation. Decadal trends are more important and more relevant. Global warming is continuing at the surface (sea surface and land based thermometers).

The graph above is a quick and dirty depiction of warming, using NASA’s GISS temperature record. The Y axis scale is anomaly in hundreds of degrees C, the X axis is months since the beginning of a 12 month moving average from January 1980. The point is just to show a) the increase in temperature just over the last few decades and b) how it squiggles up and down. We appear to be in an upward squiggle at the moment.

There are multiple temperature records

There are multiple “records” and they are assembled in slightly different ways and thus have slightly different data. They all show the same long term warming, and they all tend to correlate with each other. But they are slightly different. Some databases probably under-sample certain regions, for example. If we have a year that is very warm in relation to the most recent “hottest” year, it is unlikely to be so much warmer that it blows the previous record away by a huge number. Actually, that could happen, but it is more likely that some of the data sets are going to break the record while others do not.

Warmest year since when?

Not so much related to this specific year but important to keep in mind: This is the instrumental record. When we speak of record breaking years, we are usually comparing a particular year (like 2014) to each and every other year in a database that has been assembled from instrumental measurements. These databases variously go back in time to some point in the 19th century. They all start after CO2 was being release into the atmosphere at levels that probably matter, but way before the huge increase that has caused our present climate crisis. So, the instrumental records do measure, and as it turns out, demonstrate global warming. When we try to extend this record back in time, we lose track of variation in two ways. First, the proxyindicators (indirect measurements) used to estimate what the instruments would say were there instruments (and a time machine, presumably) have their own variation, so a number from ancient times is not perfectly comparable to a measurement from, say, 2013. Second, there is variation and conflation across time. We generally can’t point to a particular datum on a long term squiggle of global temperature from ancient times and say it represents a particular year.

What we can say is that for a particular period of time in the past the likely range of annual temperatures then was such that a given number (like, for example, this year’s annual global average) would likely be outside that range. When we do this, all of the recent years of global surface temperature are very very unlikely to have been exceeded by any actual annual temperature since the last interglacial (over 100,000 years ago). Most of the last one to two million years have seen mostly glacial and occasional interglacial conditions, but with the difference between those to climate settings increasing more recently and being less in the more distant past. It is possible that some years during interglacials over the last one or two million years exceeded our current warm temperatures (of the last couple of decades) but not many. As you go back in time, the chances of that increase because it was a bit warmer. For various reasons we are more confident about the last 800,000 years or so (as having few if any warmer years). When you get back to two to three million years there were time periods that may well have had lots of years warmer than the 21st century to date average. To get to consistent temperatures, for most years, warmer than present, you probably have to go back father.

So, we have this sentence: “2014 is the first or second warmest year since _______ .” That will likely be what we can say in a few weeks, after the data are measured, collected, processed, and made available. Or, we may be able to change that sentence to “2014 is the warmest since _____ in all of our instrumental records” or perhaps “2014 is the warmest since _____ in X out of Y of our instrumental records.”

Filling in the blank involves inserting the first year of the relevant instrumental records (such as “1880”) but it can also be filled in with older dated depending on how we feel about variation in the older, proxyindicator records. But it should also be rewritten a bit to include the probabilistic component.

This is just the surface temperature and does not reflect the totality of planetary warming

Personally, I think we should try to refer to these numbers as “surface warming” or the “surface temperature” and continuously remind people that this is only part of the story. How do you measure your body temperature? A thermometer stuck in an orifice will do. Or one of those magical strips on the forehead. Or an ear thermometer. But these are all surface measurements of your body and are subject to error or variation. The better measurement is the one the medical examiner uses in estimating time of death; stick the thermometer into the liver (they have special pointy thermometers for this purpose, and only do it on dead people.)

The Earth’s liver is the ocean. Well, not exactly, but the majority of extra heat that happens because of the increased greenhouse effect caused mainly by human added CO2 ends up in the top 2,000 meters of the ocean (see this for a recent paper on the topic). At medium scales of time, the surface temperature does a good job of tracking the Earth’s temperature, but heat moves, to different degrees at different times, between the air and the sea, so on a year to year basis it is a rougher approximation. But it is the best approximation we’ve got, so we use it.

El Niño

Some of my colleagues have been snarking about changing the name “El Niño” to “El Annoyingo” or something like that. We are expecting an El Niño. We’ve been expecting it off and on for months. It has been a long time since a major El Niño, perhaps longer than we’ve ever had since good records have been kept. The Pacific Ocean looks very El Niño like in some ways but it is not an official El Niño. Whether or not you have an El Niño is something of a continuum.

It is generally felt that the effects of a coming El Niño are not particularly influencing the 2014 average global temperature, but if a real live El Niño emerges over the next few months, next year will be the record breaking year, as opposed to this year. Or both, one right after the other.

Other commentary

Most of the climate bloggers and publicly conversing scientists I know were probably planning to not talk about 2014 as a “warmest” or “second warmest” or “record breaking” year until after the data are in. But a couple of major news outlets have started talking about it, so now we are seeing some conversation on the topic and I’ve posted links below to some of that. I probably wouldn’t have written this post (until January) had major media not started to chime in a bit prematurely. I think it was a mistake for major media to start talking about 2014 as a warmest year when close to 10% of the data were not in, the journos were looking only at one or two data sets, and to a large extent we are talking about weather not climate. Mark my words: If 2014 turns out to be second warmest in the majority of data sets, climate science deniers will make the claim that “they claimed it would be the warmest year, but it wasn’t. Checkmate, climate change!”

CNN’s premature claim: NOAA: 2014 is shaping up as hottest year on record
BBC’s premature claim: UN climate talks begin as global temperatures break records
Reuter’s premature claim: U.S., British data show 2014 could be hottest year on record
Sensible blogging on the topic:

  • 2014 Headed Toward Hottest Year On Record — Here’s Why That’s Remarkable
    • <li><a href="http://climatecrocks.com/2014/12/03/tallying-2014-closing-in-on-a-record/">Tallying 2014: Closing in on a Record?</a></li>

<li><a href="https://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_1009_en.html">2014 on course to be one of hottest, possibly hottest, on record Exceptional heat and flooding in many parts of the world</a></li>

<li><a href="http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/12/04/a-pause-or-not-a-pause-that-is-the-question/">A pause or not a pause, that is the question.</a></li>

    The Polar Vortex Is Dead. But that does not mean it isn't cold out

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    The term “Polar Vortex” was thrown around a lot last year, in reference to the persistent mass of very cold air that enveloped much of southern Canada and the US. As you will remember, Rush Limbaugh accused climate scientists and librul meteorologists of making up the polar vortex to scare everyone into thinking climate change is real. You may also remember Al Roker pointing out on national TV and on Twitter that the term “polar vortex” has been in meteorology textbooks for decades.

    This year, with a new wave of cold air arriving unseasonably in the upper middle part of the US, the term is being used again. I was amused to see the term being used on accuweather such that it was placed on each of several graphics used to show that this year’s cold snap is not actually the polar vortex, unlike last year.

    It turns out that while the polar vortex is a real thing, it really is not the correct term to apply to either last year’s cold incursion or the current cold spell. The polar vortex is a thing that gets going in a big way during the norther Winter, and swirls around all vortexy at high altitude over the pole. It can become more or less compact, more or less well defined, and it certainly has a relationship to the weather. But the proper term for a huge bundle of cold air heading south and freezing us out would not be “polar vortex” but rather, something like “cross-polar flow with low-level winds advecting frigid air southward from polar regions” (see this for a great discussion of what the polar vortex is and isn’t). At least in some cases; other descriptions may apply in other cases.

    The unseasonable cold air is potentially important, especially if large scale bending of the jet streams that can cause these “troughs” of cold air to move farther south than typical are more common because of global warming (see this).

    Anyway, I was wondering exactly how the term was originally introduced into the conversation last winter, so I used google to narrow down its occurrence and found these:

    AP, on January 3rd 2014:

    Temperature records will likely be broken during the short, yet forceful deep freeze that will begin in many places on Sunday and extend into early next week. That’s thanks to a perfect combination of the jet stream, cold surface temperatures and the polar vortex — a counterclockwise-rotating pool of cold, dense air, said Ryan Maue, of Tallahassee, Fla., a meteorologist for Weather Bell.

    “All the ingredients are there for a near-record or historic cold outbreak,” he said. “If you’re under 40 (years old), you’ve not seen this stuff before.”

    New York Mag, January 4th, 2014:

    … there’s something happening in the country called a “polar vortex” or, as Weather Bell meteorologist Ryan Maue called it, a “frigid air blanket.”

    Maue said the cold air system is caused by a “counterclockwise-rotating pool of cold, dense air, once piled up at the North Pole, and pushed down to the U.S.” It’s expected to arrive Sunday.

    Huffington Post, January 3rd, 2014:

    Temperature records will likely be broken during the short, yet forceful deep freeze that will begin in many places on Sunday and extend into early next week. That’s thanks to a perfect combination of the jet stream, cold surface temperatures and the polar vortex — a counterclockwise-rotating pool of cold, dense air, said Ryan Maue, of Tallahassee, Fla., a meteorologist for Weather Bell.

    “All the ingredients are there for a near-record or historic cold outbreak,” he said. “If you’re under 40 (years old), you’ve not seen this stuff before.”

    So, the common ingredient in the misuse of the term “polar vortex” is a meteorologist Ryan Maue, of Weather Bell. He’s the one that screwed this up originally and the press kind of took off with it.

    You can’t totally blame the press. Given the choice between “polar vortex” and “advecting cross polar flow yadayada” it isn’t a hard choice. If they were both right, and they just didn’t know.

    Ryan Maue, by the way, is a climate change science denier. I checked my twitter list of climate change deniers and he is on it. That means he annoyed me on twitter with his climate change science denial yammering. So a science denier came up with this bone headed misuse of a term and the press more or less blindly went along with it.

    As my friend Paul Douglas notes, in speaking of the polar vortex problem vis-a-vis our current cold snap “For me the bigger question is will it last? What made last winter’s polar displacement so unusual was its persistence. The bitter blob all but stalled for the better part of 3 months.”

    Long term predictions for this winter suggest an average winter, but for many parts of the US a bit warmer than average. So far the weather is not cooperating with the prediction. I predict that the prediction will be wrong because I suspect the models used to make these predictions don’t properly account for the increased frequency of formerly rare phenomena related to the jet streams. But, on the other hand, eventually there is supposed to be a shift to official El Nino conditions. (The Pacific is already El Nino warm, just not acting El Nino-ish in other ways). So, really, I’m predicting a warmer than average winter in the Northern Hemisphere but with the 5% or so of that hemisphere occupied by the largest concentration of climate science deniers, Americans, colder than average. It is like Climate Change doesn’t want to be believed in by Americans. It wears an invisibility cloak.

    Global Warming Means More Lightning

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    A new study just out in Science suggests that we will have an increase in lightning strikes of about 12 percent for every degree C of global warming. That could add up. From the abstract:

    Lightning plays an important role in atmospheric chemistry and in the initiation of wildfires, but the impact of global warming on lightning rates is poorly constrained. Here we propose that the lightning flash rate is proportional to the convective available potential energy (CAPE) times the precipitation rate. Using observations, the product of CAPE and precipitation explains 77% of the variance in the time series of total cloud-to-ground lightning flashes over the contiguous United States (CONUS). Storms convert CAPE times precipitated water mass to discharged lightning energy with an efficiency of 1%. When this proxy is applied to 11 climate models, CONUS lightning strikes are predicted to increase 12 ± 5% per degree Celsius of global warming and about 50% over this century.

    This is the paper:
    Projected increase in lightning strikes in the United States due to global warming. David M. Romps, Jacob T. Seeley, David Vollaro, and John Molinari. Science 14 November 2014: 346 (6211), 851-854. [DOI:10.1126/science.1259100]

    Warmest October On Record GISS NASA

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    The data for October has just been added to the NOAA GISS instrument record, which runs from 1880 to the present.

    October was the warmest on record, just beating out 2005.

    Overall, it is looking increasingly likely that 2014 will tie or beat the record for warmest year in the instrumental record, in terms of surface temperature. This does not count the ocean warming which is substantial. But we tend to look at the surface record as an approximation of global warming.

    Here’s the graph:

    Screen Shot 2014-11-14 at 12.16.17 PM

    Just looking at the daily values (but from a different database) for November, this is turning out to be a pretty warm month as well, though here in Minnesota at the moment, it doesn’t feel like it.

    Ironically, it was a large tropical storm slamming into the northern regions that ultimately pushed this cold air down over the US.

    Keep in mind that there are numerous different data bases of surface temperatures, and they may not all show October as the warmest ever. Some may be lower than the GISS database, some may be higher. ADDED: Japan Meteorological Agency has also come out with October data. Look here.

    The image at the top of the post is from Climate Reanalyzer, and shows the anomaly of temperature over part of the globe. Notice the blob of anomalously cold air over the US, causing Americans to stop “believing in” global warming.