Y'all might want to look at this: Arctic warming linked to fewer European and US cold weather extremes, new study shows Suggesting that northern areas might not get colder in winter. Or colder they might; it's just a model and you know how we selectively discount models here. Here we can discuss anything similar. We also can discuss a looming ice age if there is any evidence for it. Whack on the global models because they miss oceanic heat transport. You know I hate that. Not that anyone should care
Thank goodness! Actually, the last two winters here have been quite nice really, more temperate it seems.
From the article: It seemed to me that the past winter's 'extreme cold' was a stronger marker of short term memory of individual humans, and youthful media voices who lack a long term personal history, than of actual unprecedented extreme cold. Really cold winters seemed to have happened much more frequently in my long term memory, and in the writings of the generations before me.
Speak for yourself! We went to Niagara falls a couple weeks ago, still ice on the bottom of the falls. I am having to learn owl calls to see if the Snowy is still hanging out here, which is strange.
RATS! Another study I'll have to buy. I'm a little concerned about injecting the "autumn" weather conditions into what appears to be a dead-of-winter phenomena. Also, the summary seems to invert cause-and-effect or I'm reading this 'review' of the paper. No, I'm not so paranoid as to claim the author of the review of the paper has anything other than a job to share his understanding of the paper. Rather, I prefer to read the source before commenting other than . . . "d*mn another paper to buy!" It isn't the cost it is the time spent reading and understanding what the paper's author is trying to share. Bob Wilson
Volcanoes inject CO2 to the atmosphere at average rates about 1% of the fossil fuel burn, although a really big one could briefly dominate the fluxes. Big ones also push sulfate aerosol into the stratosphere that can lead to several years of cool conditions. These things we already know. An improved timeline of volcanic sulfate over the last 2000 years has just been published: Insights from Antarctica on volcanic forcing during the Common Era, Michael Sigl et al., Nature Climate Change I just requested a free copy from the author, as could anyone. This would be of particular interest for the volcanic roles on the Little Ice Age; a big deal in Europe and probably elsewhere. That LIA was so recent that the record of temperature proxies (tree rings, cave carbonates, etc.) is potentially very complete. Solar output also, from the 14C and 10Be proxies, And, of course, CO2. When climate modeling reaches the level of being able to put those together and match regional T records (pretty well), then it would imply that they have 'the ocean thing' under control. Then we could have more confidence in the future projections. In other words, we know LIA happened and ought to be able to model it. On the high-T side, something similar could/should be done for that episode about 3 million years ago (Pliocene). Yes I know it has already been modeled, but not, um, impressively well. The 'box of proxies' contains less at that time, but work with what you got. In other news, typhoon Neoguri heading for Okinawa is generating a lot of media buzz. The models on Emanuel's website agree that it will weaken quickly after that though, so Japan will probably not get disassembled Still I should not want to be on a 'fishing boat' near any internationally disputed islands around there.
A very important matter, coming up any decade now, is feeding more people. Changing climates may interfere with that, increased fertilizer (energy) costs certainly will, and +CO2 might help. Any detailed study of the matter merits attention, ad this one appears to draw some optimistic conclusions How existing cropland could feed billions more -- ScienceDaily While paying the publisher for access is always an option, the corresponding authors almost always will email you a copy upon request.
I like this explanation best: Cosmos Blog | Neil deGrasse Tyson schools climate change deniers with an analogy about walking a dog - GlobalTV Bill the Engineer
"Soylent green is people!" Ok we were talking about old movies at brunch, and why charleston heston was part of so many of them. "Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!" I couldn't make it all the way through water world, I guess Costner or the script writers weren't as good at the distopian future. Soylent green, is the malthusian future, and some people want to claim ghg will cause it, but since malthus proposed his theory, a much smaller percentage of the planet has died of starvation than his time. In fact in recent years, eating too much is becoming a bigger problem than eating too little. Most starvation today is political, and that includes hunger in the US. Food versus People - when I went to a conference last year, two things seemed clear. As more of the world eats more meat, the carbon foot print and physical foot print (land use) gets bigger. The other thing is food waste is extremely high. Cut down on meat and reduce waste, and current land could probably produce twice the amount of food, if planted well. Climate changes may require different crops for various places, and the need for more of a surplus. We can hope education and government programs, like the one in china reduce the growth rate of population, so that its sustainable. Malthus was wrong, but it takes good politics and education and perhaps cultural changes to deal with food. Solar and wind can be used to make fertilzier 100 years from now, and we certainly have enough coal and natural gas to bridge it until then. We now know that water world is a huge exageration, but 100 years from now sea levels will be higher, and storm surges will reduce the land available for humans to live and grow crops.
a lot of people don't realize how much of their food comes from California's Imperial & Central Valleys. They may, REALLY soon. Not looking good .
The outlook for the rest of summer looks even worse: U.S. Monthly Drought Outlook U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook
Anyone here gonna miss those beautiful green 18 holes of golf out there in the Vegas area? On a paltry smaller note - our 450sq' of fake Costco lawn gets installed in just a couple more weeks. Pic's to follow ....
I will. When more attempts arise to steal more water from other water basins, I use these as glaringly visible evidence of more widespread insufficient conservation. But if the golf courses brown up, there are plenty of other heavily irrigated lawns -- some even with mandatory watering ordinances -- to point to as evidence. Is this better than some other low- or no-water solutions? I still prefer rocks and sagebrush to plastic grass, but admit to not having seen the modern choices. I also haven't acquired this cultural norm that grass needs to be green year round. Having grown up in a dryland farming area, it still feels 'normal' to me for lawns and hay fields and natural grasslands to be brown and dormant part of the year. They will green up again when the weather gods say so. Drip irrigation on the garden and a few other plants provides plenty of greenness.
Both of these seem worth looking at Ancient shellfish remains rewrite 10,000-year history of El Nino cycles -- ScienceDaily A global temperature conundrum: Cooling or warming climate? -- ScienceDaily The former suggests that ENSO has been flip-flopping along for 10,000 years - at variance with earlier studies. The latter suggests that global T has been inching up over the same time scale - at variance with earlier studies including a famous hockey stick. Unfortunately the second is not yet available on Science magazine website. So I can't see if the most recent 150 years of +T is much faster than the earlier. This of course is what I would expect but let's read the paper when it comes.
"Yet, the bio- and geo-thermometers used last year in a study in the journal Science suggest a period of global cooling beginning about 7,000 years ago and continuing until humans began to leave a mark, the so-called "hockey stick" on the current climate model graph, which reflects a profound global warming trend." This refers the Marcott 2013 study which Marcott himself confessed was "Not Robust" Lui was a coauthor of that hockey stick fiasco. Ive got news for you.Climate science is not robust.
Read Liu et al (conundrum, which is in PNAS not Science as I said above) first paragraph at least to see what they have done. Where models (or models and paleo proxies) disagree, they try to figure out why. I would say that science generally works like that, trying to find the most likely explanations for the entire range of detectable patterns. Was gonna paste in their Figure 1 but I decided not to. Doing so might imply that all the answers are in hand. Better for interested readers to just read the thing and judge for themselves whether progress is being made.
Indirect effects of a (slightly) brighter or dimmer sun Sun's activity influences natural climate change -- ScienceDaily Have requested the article from corresponding author, not read it yet. But indirect effects such as described in this press release are where one would look for solar/climate effects. Don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves on this. But if there are stronger (than realized) feedbacks on solar forcing, then it would not require such a strong CO2 effect to get earth into (or out of) an ice age. Weaker CO2/climate effects would be totally good news. Because as y'all know the current plan is to increase CO2 nearly as fast as possibly can be done.
Several recent publications talk about reasons why air temperature has increased slowly (if at all) in recent years. The latest is in Science, today. They publish every Friday. Maybe excluding Christmas (I forgot). One of the links: Science Magazine: Sign In Anyway the claim that each year air T will be warmer than the previous is not supported by data. I am not sure that claim came from the scientific literature, but it exists at least as an internet straw man. The claim that each decade is warmer than the previous is still doing OK. It might be even better stated as each 11 year solar cycle will have air T higher than the previous. A tip of the hat to solar variability. It is no more trouble to calculate from the various public datasets
Ooops sent you to a paywalled page. Here is a step before Is Atlantic holding Earth's missing heat? which may get you interested enough to use one of the several free work arounds I have previously described.
