by Daniel J. Weiss.

Cross-posted from the Center for American Progress. This post was coauthored by Valeri Vasquez, special assistant for energy policy at the Center for American Progress, and Ben Kaldunski, a former intern with the Energy Team at American Progress.

“April is the cruelest month.” - T. S. Eliot

April 2011 has been a cruel month indeed for Americans due to extreme weather. The Weather Channel observed that:

It’s been a truly awful, record-setting, tornadic April. We’ve had eleven major severe weather events, some lasting multiple days.

These extreme events included supercell thunderstorms in Iowa, severe drought and record wildfires in Texas, and heavy rains across the United States. The recent Southeastern storms and tornados took at least 297 lives across eight states. And heavy rains in the Mississippi River valley could cause the most severe, damaging floods there in nearly a century.

This extreme weather, though record setting in some places, may be the new normal. Last year, unprecedented extreme weather led to a record number of disaster declarations by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The United States and the world were swept by flooding, severe winter storms, heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, and tornadoes.

The extreme weather of 2010 exacted a huge human and economic toll as well. More than 380 people died and 1,700 were injured due to weather events in the United States throughout the year. And the magnitude of these events forced the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to declare 81 disasters last year. For nearly 60 years, the annual average has been 33. In 2010, total damages exceeded a whopping $6.7 billion. As of April 2011, FEMA had dedicated more than $2 billion in financial assistance to those harmed by extreme weather in 2010.

A February 2011 special report from Reuters noted that it’s been rough going for the $500 billion U.S. property insurance business, explaining that “storms are happening in places they never happened before, at intensities they have never reached before and at times of year when they didn’t used to happen.”

It is precisely this uncertainty “associated with climate change that substantiates the risks to the economy and society,” says George Backus, of the Discrete Mathematics and Complex Systems Department at Sandia National Laboratories. This is bad news for a nation just emerging from the grips of the Great Recession. Per Backus, a 2010 report from Sandia estimates that “the climate uncertainty as it pertains to rainfall alone [puts] the U.S. economy is at risk of losing between $600 billion and $2 trillion, and between 4 million and 13 million U.S. jobs over the next 40 years.”

Evan Mills, a scientist in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, confirms that in the United States, “insured weather-related losses in recent years have been trending upward much faster than population, inflation, or insurance penetration, and far outpace losses for non-weather-related events.”

It is difficult, of course, to link or “attribute” individual extreme weather events in a single year to global warming. Climate factors—including human influences—shape weather patterns. According to Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurers, “the only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change.” And as Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, explained at the American Meteorological Society’s January 2011 meeting, “Given that global warming is unequivocal, the null hypothesis should be that all weather events are affected by global warming rather than the inane statements along the lines of ‘of course we cannot attribute any particular weather event to global warming.’”

In other words, says Trenberth, “It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.”

Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas pollutants are turning up the heat on our planet. Scientists agree that the string of disastrous weather extremes this past year are the types of severe weather that will become more frequent or ferocious as the planet continues to warm. For instance, in the “first major paper of its kind” tracking global climatic trends from 1951 to 1999, Scottish and Canadian researchers used sophisticated computer models to confirm a human contribution to more intense precipitation extremes with very high confidence.

This analysis is supported by a 2010 Duke University-led study that found, “Global warming is driving increased frequency of extreme wet or dry summer weather in southeast, so droughts and deluges are likely to get worse.”

A study published in the 2011 Journal of Climate presents “evidence of a significant human influence on the increasing severity of extremely warm nights and decreasing severity of extremely cold days and nights.”

Likewise, a report by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Climate Central, The Weather Channel, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that “if temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and lows being set each year would be approximately even. Instead ... record high temperatures far outpace record lows across the U.S.”

The recent extreme weather should not be a surprise. In 1999, Trenberth projected that global warming would lead to severe precipitation:

An increase in heavy precipitation events should be a primary manifestation of the climate change that accompanies increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Nine years later, the U.S. Climate Change Program under President George W. Bush came to a very similar conclusion. “Heavy downpours have become more frequent and intense. Droughts are becoming more severe in some regions.” These are some of the extreme weather events we experienced this April, and in 2010.

Because we have not brought carbon pollution under control, the weather events of 2010 will continue to revisit us—with a vengeance. We must act quickly and unequivocally to address climate change before the threat becomes insurmountable. This includes recognizing that global warming is already affecting us both domestically and internationally.

The purpose of our report [PDF] is to gather, condense, and synthesize some of the massive amount of data about extreme weather and its links to global warming. This summary of climate science can help provide context to the recent surge in extreme weather events. In this report, we will catalogue the extreme U.S. weather in 2010 and then examine the consequences on our health and economy.

As we note in the conclusion, conservatives remain eager to dismiss these weather extremes by claiming they are solely due to natural variability. What’s more, the House of Representatives voted to defund federal science programs that gather and analyze the data essential to understand changes in global weather patterns and other climate impacts. But all this denial cannot make this threat disappear. We must act before cruel Aprils occur every month.

Related Links:

The Climate Post: The aftermath in Japan

What will the Japan disaster mean for U.S. nuclear power?

Inaction on climate change is risky business

Last month, temperatures and precipitation in the contiguous United States averaged above normal, according to scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The average temperature in March was 44.0 degrees F, which is 1.4 degrees F above the long-term (1901-2000) average. March precipitation, while record dry in areas like Texas, was overall 0.22 inch above the long-term average. The January – March temperatures were near-normal, while average precipitation was below-normal.

Last month, temperatures and precipitation in the contiguous United States averaged above normal, according to scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

Wells Fargo downgraded reinsurer RGA today from overweight to market perform.

The key reason -- along with expansion risks and increased competition -- was expectation of "unfavorable mortality."

Analyst John Halls writes:

Excess Winter Mortality May Not Be Built Into Estimates. Data shows U.S. mortality rates peak in December and January and are at their lowest points from mid-July to mid-August (see Figure 2, below). We are not sure this fact is reflected in estimates, despite RGA missing Q1 consensus in each of the previous three years. The three-month period of December 2010-February 2011 ranked as the 39th coldest winter for the U.S. in the 116-year historical record, according to statistics released last month by the National Climatic Data Center.

According to a study authored by two University of California economists, fatalities in the continental U.S. climb for several weeks after severe cold spells, numbering up to 360 per cold day and 14,380 per year. According to the study, deaths linked to cold account for 0.8% of the United States’ annual deaths and outnumbers deaths from leukemia, murder and chronic liver disease combined. Cardiovascular and respiratory diseases are the top causes of death for those who die following severe hot or cold weather.

Here's a chart on when people die:

And the 2011 outlook for RGA:

For the latest investing news, visit Money Game. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Soon ships will be able to sail across an open Arctic Ocean during the summer months. The low humming of freight vessels will be a regular sound. The reduced presence of massive multi-year sea-ice is rapidly becoming a reality as the thicker and older ice is being exported from the region.

The thinner and more fragile seasonal sea-ice layer, partly replacing the old and thicker ice, is no match for modern icebreakers or even strengthened freight containers. A Norwegian cargo-ship has already traversed the Northeast Passage: faster than expected and without encountering any major challenges.

The increased shipping in the Arctic, tourism included, is just beginning. The escalation of the trend is certain. It is understandable: the distance saved by choosing the Northern Sea Route rather than the Panama strait shortens the journey between the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean by about one third (roughly 4,000 nautical miles) of the total.  

The implications will be profound. The opening of new shipping-routes has throughout modern history been followed by major cultural and political change. So will it be with the Arctic. A harbinger of this change is that as the summer sea-ice margin withdraws northward and opens up more space for shipping, the interests of the oil companies are also drifting northwards. The factors driving this shift are twofold: oil wells further south are drying up, and the Barents sea is becoming more accessible.  

The levels of political conflict over the Arctic are still low. But much is at stake, and the environmental question is but one of many. A European Union report says that there is “a range of disagreements on issues within the international law of the sea…” concerning the Arctic marine area. The reality of an Arctic pushed into disequilibrium is that the climatic and the political feedback of instability seem likely to be far-reaching, perhaps even global (see "The effects of sea ice loss on biodiversity", Arctic Council, 5 April 2011).  

The blue north

The resources of the Arctic are many and rich. The seabed contains considerable amounts of oil and natural gas. The prospect of minerals is frequently mentioned, especially rare-earth minerals that are in increasing demand now that China has announced that it will be reducing its exports. 

A United States Geological Survey (USGS) report released in 2008 says that the Arctic seabed contains nearly 20% of the world’s oil reserves and 30% of its gas reserves. Most of this is likely to be on the Russian side. But the uncertainties associated with these figures are large, because many of the areas have not yet been properly mapped. A detailed mapping of the seabed in the Barents Sea will reveal, if not the true potential, a more realistic picture.

An important development here is he Norwegian Oil Directorate’s announcement on 1 April 2011 that Statoil has made its biggest gas and oil discovery for twenty years. The field is located in the Barents Sea; preliminary analysis suggests that it contains 25-40 standard million cubic metres of high quality oil and 2-7 standard billion cubic metres.

The European mainland relies on steady gas exported from Russia and Norway, making the question of future energy delivery per se a security question. The question of how safe that delivery will be in the future is fundamental. This is but one of the emerging Arctic-related issues whose geopolitical ripples are being felt in Europe’s political core.

The fact that the European Union desires a stronger presence in the “high north” is no secret. The president of the European council, Herman von Rompey, delivered a speech in October 2010 - hosted by the International Polar Foundation (IPF) - in which he stated that the EU seeks observer status at the Arctic Council. This body - which currently consists of Denmark (including Greenland and the Faroe Islands), Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland Canada, the United States and Russia - is in demand; China is also eager to participate.

At the IPF meeting, von Rompey emphasised the strong research presence that the EU already has in the Arctic and wants to develop further. The EU’s aim for an increased role in the region is expressed in the report A sustainable EU policy for the High North (formally approved on 20 January 2011).  

The rising political interest in the Arctic is evident elsewhere. Norway’s foreign-affairs minister Jonas Gahr Støre has repeatedly stated that the question of the High North represents the most important area of interest for the Norwegian government, and that it will become a new geopolitical focus in the near future. Sweden will assume the chair of the Arctic Council in In June 2011, and is expected to launch an Arctic strategy some time during the year. This might speed up the process of getting the EU an observer status within the council.

But nature too will play a role in these calculations. It can interfere with, and even dictate, the course of politics, albeit in ways difficult or impossible to anticipate. The tsunami in Japan, with its huge impact on the domestic outlook as well as the international trade, is a case in point.

Yet nature’s frequent and powerful intervention in societies and the daily life of people is rarely factored in when accounting for major political and societal shifts. The case of the Arctic - a large area suddenly and unexpectedly made available for exploitation - has few if any historical parallels. It may be compared to the Klondike gold-rush in California or the scramble for Africa, and in contemporary terms to the prospective contest over Antarctica. In the latter respect, how the Arctic experience is managed will create some kind of precedent for the southern vastness.

The rich arena

The rich resources and security concerns embedded in the Arctic (related as these are) underpin the European Union’s interest in expanding its political presence in the region. The overlapping interests are significant here: Denmark, Finland and Sweden are members both of the Arctic Council and the EU, and Iceland may soon join the union).

The EU’s own position on Icelandic membership states that it “underlines the need for a coordinated Arctic policy at EU level and represents a strategic opportunity for the EU to assume a more active role and contribute to multilateral governance in the Arctic region”. The EU’s wider objective is to become more of an “insider” to the Arctic.

There are two plausible avenues here. The first is for the EU to fund the giant polar-research vessel Aurora Borealis. This ship can be present in the Arctic year-around and conduct research in areas hitherto impossible. Such a major investment would both provide the EU with a unique research platform and heighten its political presence. A final decision awaits.

The second and broader avenue is to launch a major, long-term cross-disciplinary Arctic research programme that encompasses natural and social science alike, including all aspects of the presence of indigenous people.

It should be kept in mind that much of the Arctic is, in scientific terms, still uncharted territory. Many of the biological and physical processes operating in the Arctic are poorly understood, a point highlighted in a report of the International Oceanographic Commission (IOC), entitled Why monitor the Arctic Ocean? These sciences will play a major role in transforming knowledge and understanding of the Arctic, and thus enabling new ways of managing it.

An equally large impact is likely to come from increased trade, especially between neighbouring states. Shtokman Development AG, a consortium of three major companies - Total S.A. (France), Statoil (Norway) and Gazprom (Russia) - is a prime example. The company aims to produce 23.7 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year in the first phase, planned to last twenty-five years. A border settlement between Russia and Norway in 2010, after forty years of we-agree-to-disagree, was clearly related to the Shtokman field. This has set in chain a series of bilateral trade and political deals between Arctic countries. This is another underlying reason for the EU and China to take a keener interest in the Arctic.

The race for the Arctic is one where science and trade are the forerunners, but where politics follows close behind. It represents a new ground for interactions that primarily, though but not exclusively, involve the eight countries claiming ownership. The scale of its oil-and-gas resources alone make it certain that it will develop into a centre of geopolitical gravity, where the environmental stakes will be huge.

The appearance of the Arctic, the desolate windswept icy landscape that resonates so profoundly with the idea of vulnerability and environmental sensitivity, is deeply ingrained in humanity’s self-awareness. The day that pristine look is gone will open the Arctic in another sense: to be treated just like any other ocean on Earth.

Sideboxes

'Read On' Sidebox: 

Arctic Council

International Polar Foundation

USGS

International Oceanographic Commission (IOC)

Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, University of Bergen, Norway

National Sea and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)

International Polar Year

Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University

European Union, A sustainable EU policy for the High North (20 January 2011)

Sidebox: 

Øyvind Paasche is an adviser in the department of research management at the University of Bergen, Norway. He previously worked as a scientist specialising in paleoclimates at the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research

Also by Øyvind Paasche in openDemocracy:

"After glaciers: a new climate world" (27 August 2009)

"Copenhagen: climate countdown" (17 December 2009) - with Sue Branford, Ian Christie, Andrew Dobson, John Elkington, and Oliver Tickell

"After climategate: forward to reality" (14 July 2010)

Related stories: 

Kazakhstan: glaciers and geopolitics

The politics of climate change

The politics of climate change: a debate guide

Climate change: a failure of leadership

Climate change: a question of democracy

Climate security: the new determinism

After climategate: forward to reality

After glaciers: a new climate world

OK: It’s getting closer and my blood pressure is rising. The winter solstice is a few days away (December 21 at 6:38 p.m. EST) and of course we have been hearing incorrect things in the media about this cold snowy December ,like “But it’s not even winter.” Or after the recent blizzard in Minnesota, “Winter doesn’t even officially begin for two more weeks.”

Folks, the solstice is an astronomical event. The sun at noon is at its lowest position in the sky, as seen in this great NASA time lapse sequence. It is not “official” anything other than the “official” winter solstice. I have been in Washington, D.C. a long time and have searched high and low for the assistant under-secretary to the associate administrator to the special presidential appointee to the council on seasons. No such person, administrator, council, department of government exists . . . at least that I can find.

If there is any “official” beginning of winter it was almost 3 weeks ago on December 1. The “official” weather records and averages for the seasons are kept under a unit of the U.S. Department of Commerce called the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. It is the world’s largest archive of weather data, and it defines the season of winter as December through February. Winter began December 1, and here is the good news: Spring is now only about 75 days away.

If we do get a break in this cold pattern as January arrives, maybe you’ll hear, “Back on December 21 it felt like the middle of winter.” And if you hear in a few days, “Today is the official beginning of winter,” it sure won’t be from me.

Articles in the Daily Mail show the same uncritical reliance on dodgy sources that caused his catastrophic mistakes about Iraq

You can divide people into two categories: those who learn from their mistakes and those who don't. There is no third category: we all mess up from time to time.

Journalism is a mistake waiting to happen. With tight deadlines, big rewards for shock and awe and small rewards for methodical, less spectacular work, with an inverse relationship between volume and truth in public life, reporters tend to stumble from one accident to another.

The only hope journalists have of retaining any kind of self-respect is to question themselves repeatedly, ask whether they are being manipulated and whether they are seeing the whole story. So where does this leave David Rose?

I don't want to credit the media with more power than it has, but from time to time it is pivotal to public policy. One such moment was the build up to the Iraq war. The UK might not have joined Bush's war if it didn't have broad support from the press, and particularly from sections of the

liberal press.

The Observer was more influential in the build-up to the war than any other outlet, as the position it took – strongly in favour – was so unexpected. Its editorial line caused huge ructions within the paper and plenty of conflict with journalists at its sister-paper the Guardian (I'm

painfully aware of this, having had a shouting match with the Observer's then political editor, Kamal Ahmed, in the building's stairwell). It also emboldened some wavering Labour MPs and helped Tony Blair make his case.

The Observer's position was strongly influenced by Rose's reporting. Though others warned that his sources should not be trusted, Rose's articles for the paper uncritically reported the claims made by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Chalabi later admitted that they were incorrect.

The chain of causality is a long one, and I don't want to pull on it too hard, but it is arguable that the Observer could not have sustained its position were it not for Rose's reporting; that Blair could not have contained the Labour revolt were it not for the Observer; and that Bush could not have gone to war were it not for Blair's support.

In May 2004, over a year after the war began, Rose, to his credit, admitted that he'd got it wrong. By then, of course, it was far too late to undo the damage. He wrote a partial apology in an article titled: "Iraqi defectors tricked us with WMD lies, but we must not be fooled again".

A vain hope. Admitting it, it seems, is one thing; learning from it quite another.

Since the Iraq debacle, Rose has latterly been writing articles attacking climate science for the Daily Mail. He has distinguished himself by the same uncritical reliance on dodgy sources that caused his catastrophic mistakes about Iraq. He has made a long series of basic errors and – far worse – has kept making them even after they've been exposed. Here are just a few examples:

• http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/01/rosegate.php

• http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/01/rosegate_scandal_still_growing.php

• http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/01/rosegate_david_rose_caught_mis.php

• http://climateprogress.org/2010/02/15/rosegate-dailymail-error-riddled-articles-misquote-credibility-science/

• http://deepclimate.org/2010/01/11/mojib-latif-slams-daily-mail/

But now he has published his longest list of errors yet, in an article in Monday's Daily Mail. Every one of them would have been easy to check and disprove, had he been inclined to do so. But the Mail pays well for this crap, and checking, under these circumstances, is likely to be an expensive pastime.

I don't have time to deal with every one of the mistakes his article contains – it takes 100 times as long to show why a claim is wrong as it does to make it - but here's a quick breakdown, beginning with the first sentence: (I've been able to pull this together with the help of the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, which put me in touch with the relevant scientists and pointed me to the primary datasets.)

Rose:

"A year ago tomorrow, just before the opening of the UN Copenhagen world climate summit, the British Meteorological Office issued a confident prediction. The mean world temperature for 2010, it announced, 'is expected to be 14.58C, the warmest on record' – a deeply
worrying 0.58C above the 1961-1990 average."

"A year ago tomorrow" would have been 7 December. The Met Office issued its forecast (not a "prediction") on 10 December.

And there was nothing "confident" about it. The press release said that a record warm year "is not a certainty, especially if the current El Niño was to unexpectedly decline rapidly near the start of 2010, or if there was a large volcanic eruption." As it happened, El Niño did decline rapidly, and was replaced by a very strong La Niña.

Rose:

"Met Office officials openly boasted that they hoped by their statements to persuade the Copenhagen gathering to impose new and stringent carbon emission limits - an ambition that was not to be met."

Rose provides no source for this claim (or for any of the claims here). The Met Office tells me it was not trying to influence policy, simply to report the facts.

Rose:

"Climate science orthodoxy, as promulgated by bodies such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), says that temperatures have risen and will continue to rise in step with increasing CO₂ in the atmosphere"

I challenge Rose to find a single occasion on which these bodies have said that temperatures will rise "in step" with CO₂. As Professor Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research tells me: "One should not be misled by seizing on an individual value or year and citing trends for that, because natural variability such as from El Niño creates ups and downs all the time."

Does Rose expect warming to proceed along a straight line?

Rose:

"Last week at Cancún, in an attempt to influence richer countries to agree to give £20bn immediately to poorer ones to offset the results of warming, the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute warned that global temperatures would be 6.5C higher by 2100, leading to rocketing food prices and a decline in production."

I can find no evidence at all for this. The Institute did release a report last week, but it doesn't even mention 6.5C, let alone predict that temperatures would climb to that point. In fact it makes no predictions whatever about global warming: it simply explains what is likely to happen to agriculture at different temperature scenarios, none of which extend as far as 6.5C. It is not easy to see how Rose could have got this so wrong.

Rose:

"Actually, with the exception of 1998 - a 'blip' year when temperatures spiked because of a strong 'El Niño' effect (the cyclical warming of the southern Pacific that affects weather around the world) - the data on the Met Office's and CRU's own websites show that global temperatures have been flat, not for 10, but for the past 15 years."

All the datasets, including the Met Office/CRU figures show that the current decade is the warmest in the instrumental record.

Rose:

"They go up a bit, then down a bit, but those small rises and falls amount to less than their measuring system's acknowledged margin of error. They have no statistical significance and reveal no evidence of any trend at all."

Professor Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia (yes, the Phil Jones), tells me: "The error of estimate of global averages or the forecasts for subsequent years is completely unrelated to the trend of warming. This is comparing apples with oranges."

Rose:

"Last year it predicted that the 2010 average would be 14.58C. Last week, this had been reduced to 14.52C. That may not sound like much. But when one considers that by the Met Office's own account, the total rise in world temperatures since the 1850s has been less than 0.8C, it is quite a big deal. Above all, it means the trend stays flat."

In fact 14.52C (which means 0.52C above the long-term average) is equal to the record set in 1998. The Met Office figures show that - for January-October - 2010 is the equal warmest year on record. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Nasa databases, which record anomalies of 0.54C and 0.58C respectively, suggest that so far it's the warmest year on record.

Phil Jones tells me:

"The forecast of 14.58 for 2010 was well within the error range if the final number was 14.52. The difference is 0.06 and the error range is +/- 0.10 approx".

Rose:

"Meanwhile, according to an analysis yesterday by David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, 2010 had only two unusually warm months, March and April, when El Niño was at its peak."

This, again, is utter nonsense, and goes to show what happens when you rely on untrustworthy sources. As you can see from all three global datasets (CRU, NOAA and Nasa) all the months this year for which the data has so far been collated (January-October) were anomalously warm.

Phil Jones points out: "Looking at these, it is clear that they have used the land-only values!!!!!!"

Amazing. I can't imagine what the fuss would have been like if climate scientists had made the same mistake as the Global Warming Policy Foundation has done.

Rose:

"The data from October to the end of the year suggests that when the final figure is computed, 2010 will not be the warmest year at all, but at most the third warmest, behind both 1998 and 2005."

Perhaps Rose could explain how he has obtained the data from October to the end of the year. Is he employing Mystic Meg as his researcher?

Rose:

"Earlier this year, a paper by Michael Mann - for years a leading light in the IPCC, and the author of the infamous 'hockey stick graph' showing flat temperatures for 2,000 years until the recent dizzying increase - made an extraordinary admission: that, as his critics had always claimed, there had indeed been a ' medieval warm period' around 1,000AD, when the world may well have been hotter than it is now."

Rose, as usual, provides no reference for this paper, and none of the scientists I've contacted, including Mann, has any idea what he's talking about. But Mann points out that neither "we, nor any other researchers, have ever denied there was a period of relative warmth sometime during medieval for many regions. What we - and other competent researchers - have all found is that the warmth was far more regional than modern warmth, with some large regions, like the tropical Pacific, having been unusually *cold* at the time, and when you average over the globe, the warmth of the medieval warm period/medieval climate anomaly simply doesn't reach modern warmth. Every peer-reviewed scientific study of the matter comes to the same conclusions."

Rose:

"Other research is beginning to show that cyclical changes in water vapour - a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide - may account for much of the 20th-century warming."

Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M; University says: "I have no idea what "research" they are talking about." He recently analysed of all the data and showed that there is no evidence for such claims.

Dessler continues: "This is really a classic "sceptic" argument. When it was originally brought up in the early 1990s, it was a legitimate uncertainty in our understanding. Scientists, however, view uncertainty like a starving wolf views red meat, and so the problem was thoroughly attacked over the next 15 years. In particular, about eight years ago Nasa launched the atmospheric infrared sounder on board the Aqua satellite, which measures water vapour distribution with great accuracy. These data have really settled the question. However, just like the monster in a horror movie, this argument just won't die."

Anthony del Genio of Nasa also tells me: "I know of no evidence for the statement that cyclical changes in water vapour are responsible for much of the 20th-century warming, unless there is a new paper of which I am not aware that makes such a claim."

He continues: "The important thing is that the inter-annual changes of water vapour and everything else associated with El Niño are not systematic long-term variations, rather they go up and down every 2-5 years or so. So they don't cause a long-term trend. CO₂ changes, however, do cause long-term changes in CO₂. Because CO₂ is itself a greenhouse gas, it warms the atmosphere and surface of the planet, which causes more water to evaporate from the oceans and build up in the atmosphere. The resulting warming due to the water vapour is in fact larger than the initial warming due to the CO₂ that forced it to happen, and this is the point of the Lacis paper - yes, water vapour is a more important greenhouse gas than CO₂, but water vapour doesn't change systematically with time UNLESS CO₂ is changing and initiating a warming that sets into motion the surface and atmospheric processes that allow water vapour to systematically increase. So CO₂ changes are the root cause of whatever water vapour feedback winds up occurring."

Rose:

"Even Phil Jones, the CRU director at the centre of last year's 'Climategate' leaked email scandal, was forced to admit in a little-noticed BBC online interview that there has been 'no statistically significant warming' since 1995."

Phil Jones replies: "The key statement here is 'not statistically significant'. It wasn't for these years at the 95% level, but it would have been at the 90% level. If you add the value of 0.52 in for 2010 and look at 1995 to 2010 then the warming is statistically significant at the 95% level." [What this means is that the warming trend for the past few years previously met a lower test of statistical significance. With addition of the results so far for 2010, it now means the higher test.]

Rose:

"One of those leaked emails, dated October 2009, was from Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the US government's National Centre for Atmospheric Research and the IPCC's lead author on climate change science in its monumental 2002 and 2007 reports. He wrote: 'The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can't.'"

Here's what Trenberth says on his website:

"It is amazing to see this particular quote lambasted so often. It stems from a paper I published this year bemoaning our inability to effectively monitor the energy flows associated with short- term climate variability. It is quite clear from the paper that I was not questioning the link between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and warming, or even suggesting that recent temperatures are unusual in the context of short-term natural variability."

It is hard to believe that Rose was unaware of this explanation.

Rose:

"The question now emerging for climate scientists and policymakers alike is very simple. Just how long does a pause have to be before the thesis that the world is getting hotter because of human activity starts to collapse?"

The question now emerging for Rose is very simple. Just how many mistakes does he have to make before the thesis that these are innocent errors starts to collapse?

www.monbiot.com

A scientist at the National Climatic Data Center received the 2009 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for his work on temperature data collection.

This year likely to match 1998 temperatures as UN scientists predict more floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels

• World will warm faster than predicted in next five years – study
• Greenhouse gases at 'highest level' since pre-industrial times

This year is so far tied for the hottest year in a record dating back to 1850 in a new sign of a warming trend, the three major institutes which calculate global warming estimates told Reuters.

UN climate talks resume next week in Cancún, Mexico, where expectations are no longer for a comprehensive deal to slow warming, but smaller progress for example to curb deforestation, in a bid to agree a pact next year or later.

The previous conference in Copenhagen last year fell short of hopes, but about 140 countries have agreed a non-binding deal to try to limit warming to less than 2C above pre-industrial levels.

Temperatures are now about 0.8C above pre-industrial levels, and 2010 is about 0.5C above the 1961-1990 average, near the record, with two months' data still to collect.

Even with a possible cool end to the year, 2010 is expected to be no lower than third in a record where 1998 and 2005 are warmest. The UN panel of climate scientists says higher temperatures mean more floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels.

"I think it's too close to call. Based on these numbers it'll be second, but it depends on how warm November and December are," said Dr Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), at the University of East Anglia, which says 1998 was the record year so far.

By contrast, scientists at Nasa say surface temperatures through October were above the previous record year, which it says was 2005. Differences between years are only a few hundredths of a degree.

"I would not be surprised if most or all groups found that 2010 was tied for the warmest year," said Nasa's Dr James Hansen.

And the US National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said 2010 was a "dead-heat" for the record. "Our data show 2010 being virtually tied with 1998, through October," said Deke Arndt, from NCDC.

The three institutes use similar observations, but in slightly different ways. For example, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies takes greater account of Arctic weather stations, where warming has been fastest.

Some sceptics have argued that because the last temperature peak was in 2005 or 1998, that global warming must have stalled.

Most scientists reject that view, saying that whether or not 2010 is the hottest year is less important than the long-term trend, which is up, due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. The period 2000-2009 was the warmest decade on record.

Scientists also point to natural variation, and in particular the El Nino Pacific weather phenomenon associated with warm weather worldwide. 1998 was a strong El Nino year.

"The trend is overwhelming, particularly over the past 50 years," said Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN panel of climate scientists. "I wouldn't read these numbers for a particular year as very compelling, we have to take a historical view," he told Reuters.

In one of the biggest bets on climate change, James Annan, a climate scientist at the Frontier Research Centre for Global Change in Japan, has a $10,000 wager made in 2005 with two Russian solar physicists who are sceptical about global warming.

He will win if average world temperatures are higher from 2012-17 than they were from 1998-2003. "Things are progressing smoothly," he said.

The UN's World Meteorological Organisation will publish an estimate on 2 December of where 2010 ranks. It compiles data from a wider range of sources, both measured temperatures and climate models. It lists 1998 and 2005 as the warmest years. "We have indications that it would match one of the three warmest years," said Omar Baddour, head of climate data management operations in Geneva.

Over on the discussion list I'm on, Science Matters, a "discussion" has broken out about global warming. A correspondent has posted an graph of satellite data claiming that
a) the satellite records are more reliable than ground records
b) the "trendlines" show the world is cooling and
c) the dip cannot be explained as a statistical anomaly.

Unfortunately for our correspondent, the data he showed ended in 2008, and there is much more recent data that falsifies his claims. The graph on the left is the most recent satellite data from the University of Alabama at Hunstville (UAH lower troposphere data here, middle troposphere data here).

I've plotted the raw data (dots), the linear fit (black line), the 5 year rolling average (red line) and a polynomial fit (colour I can't describe because I'm red-green colour blind). I've also done the same plot with one year averages, rather than raw data (here the polynomial fit is the blue line). You can click on all images to embiggen.

You can see immediately that the temperature is not falling, but relentlessly increasing. Indeed the increase from the UAH satellite data (0.14 degrees per decade), is very similar to the ground based increase (0.18 degrees per decade) and the RSS satellite data (0.17 degrees per decade).

You can use the data plotter at Wood for the Trees to overlay the latest ground and satellite data, an overlay with trendlines is here.

I've also indicated on the raw data graph some major climatic events; volcanic eruptions (Pintabo, El Chichon) and El Nino and La Nina events. 2008 was a strong La Nina event which produced a temporary downswing. The downswing in 2008 was not a statistical blip, but a well understood temporary effect of the La Nina/El Nino phenomena. in contrast 2009 tied for the hottest year on record in the land based data set, and 2010 looks to be not far behind.




Left image, my plot of middle troposphere temperatures to October 2010, the blue line is the polynomial fit zooming upwards, right image, the plot of middle troposphere temperatures to mid 2008, the polynomial (NOT a trend), zooms down. This is why you don't trust polynomial fits

One amusing effect is what happens to the polynomial fit. The correspondent claimed the "trendline" showed a downward swing, but its a polynomial fit, not a trendline. As I've written before polynomial fits are very misleading, because they exaggerate end effects (see also here). With the most recent data, the polynomial fit skyrockets, by our correspondents logic, we are in for sustained catastrophic warming.


Image credit Real Climate. Showing how the satellite record of temperatures follows the surface temperatures.

As well, the correspondent sees satellite data as more reliable than surface station temperature records, the surface station records are infact pretty good. Satellite measurements have a wide variety of problems of their own, form reconciling different satellite instrumentation, to changing orbits, to instrumental calibration to the fact the senors peer through a cooling stratosphere. This compendious (and very large 145 page) paper gives a long list of the calibration problems and their attempted resolution.

The main point is that satellite data confirms the land based data.


The major issues are comprehensively covered at http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php , see also New Scientist's Climate Change a Guide for the Perplexed and Climate Change myths. If you are not happy with NASA or the IPCC how about Australia's own flagship research organisation, the CSIRO. The advice of the CSIRO that the world is warming, with humans largely responsible.

And don't try and rabbit on about climategate, I won't enter into any correspondence about that as it's a nontroversy with the CRU exonerated. See this article on the one year anniversary of the CRU hack and this one. It was all an egregious beat-up. (Oh yeah, and there is this on alleged IPCC "errors"). Oh, and a list of publicly accessible data sources for climate data and code is here, this is the stuff that "skeptics" keep saying hasn't been released.

My list of climate change posts is here.

by Seth Shulman.

You’ve probably seen pictures of stranded polar bears and heard that global warming is causing the melting of Arctic sea ice—that is, floating ice formed from freezing ocean surface water. But you may imagine, as most people do, that this distant phenomenon is unfolding gradually over a centuries-long time frame.

Julienne Stroeve, a climate scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., has compiled detailed measurements that melt away any such misconceptions. Stroeve is closely monitoring the extent of Arctic sea ice, and her research shows that dramatic changes are occurring right now—far faster than most experts anticipated and with enormous consequences for the whole planet, not just the Arctic region.

For instance, during the warmest part of 2010, the total amount of Arctic sea ice—the so-called “seasonal minimum”—was the third-smallest ever recorded. The smallest and second-smallest seasonal minimums were measured in 2007 and 2008, respectively. Natural variability, including factors like cloud cover, can easily explain differences in melting from year to year, Stroeve notes. But the big news is that the smallest amounts of Arctic sea ice ever measured have all occurred in recent years. “Basically, ever since 2002, we’ve had one pronounced record minimum after another,” she says. “The data all point to a strong warming signal.”

Stroeve explains that highly reliable data on the extent of Arctic sea ice has been collected since 1978. From then until now, she has found clear evidence of a 30-year melting trend, which, she says, “cannot be easily explained away by natural variability.” But her work is even more notable for its findings about the speed of the change. Over this same 30 years, a relatively brief period, Stroeve has found that some 40 percent of the region’s summer (or more precisely, September) ice has melted.

The fast pace of melting is seen even more dramatically, she explains, when one considers the age of the Arctic ice. Many parts of the Arctic Ocean freeze each year during the coldest months. But only ice that lasts throughout the year gradually becomes thicker over the course of consecutive seasons. “In the 1980s, the Arctic contained roughly 386,000 square miles of ice that was determined to be at least five years old,” she says. Now, “at the end of the melt season in September, only 22,000 square miles of such older, thicker ice remains.” In other words, the region has already lost more than 97 percent of the thicker year-round ice that existed just three decades ago. As she explains, “all the climatic processes seem to be pushing rapidly toward a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean.”

Stroeve says that initially she was as surprised by the data as anyone else. “I didn’t think global warming was even happening in the early 1990s when I began this work,” she says. Back then, some climate models were projecting that carbon emissions would lead to a pronounced warming trend at the poles. But Stroeve was always more interested in actual measurements than in climate modeling. “I think I was lured into studying the poles by the prospect of adventurous fieldwork in Greenland or the Alps,” she says with a laugh.

The daughter of an aerospace engineer, Stroeve had always exhibited a strong aptitude for math and science and an adventuresome spirit. From childhood through her high school years, her dream was to be an astronaut, she says, and she might have continued on that track if she hadn’t realized that her susceptibility to motion sickness was a serious impediment to working in space.

Her love of adventure continues in her work today, in which she makes regular research trips to the Arctic and Greenland to measure ice thickness and other snow and ice measurements. It might not be space travel, but Stroeve says her fieldwork has been as exciting as she could have hoped. “When I first visited Greenland, it was the most stunning landscape I had ever seen,” she says.

Along with her research in the polar regions, much of the data Stroeve analyzes comes from satellites that detect passive microwave radiation. As she explains, the higher brightness of ice in the microwave part of the spectrum can be seen by satellites even through cloud cover. “In the often-cloudy polar regions, that makes it an incredibly useful tool, providing data in which we have a high degree of confidence,” she says. These detailed satellite measurements of Arctic sea ice led Stroeve to shed her initial doubts about global warming. “My views changed as I studied the emerging data,” she says. “With record low sea-ice extents year after year, it became clear that a significant warming trend was underway.”

Looking closely at the data, Stroeve realized that a phenomenon called Arctic amplification, a form of positive feedback, is accelerating the warming trend, causing it to occur many years sooner than most climate models had projected. Arctic amplification occurs primarily because water absorbs far more heat than ice does. On average, Stroeve explains, water absorbs almost 93 percent of all the incoming solar radiation, whereas the white surface of snow-covered ice reflects about 80 percent of incoming solar radiation back into space.

As more and more of the Arctic Ocean sea ice melts over the summer months, it hastens further warming, Stroeve explains. She and her colleagues at the National Snow and Ice Data Center have measured the effect, showing that in areas where summer ice has disappeared, local autumn air temperatures have been more than 5 degrees F higher than the long-term average.

The potential of such feedbacks to cause abrupt climate change as the Arctic Ocean becomes nearly ice-free in the warm season drew widespread attention to Stroeve’s work in 2007. In that record-breaking warm year, the Arctic Ocean lost more than one-quarter of its remaining ice. “Because new ice can’t get very thick in one season, it is more vulnerable to annual temperature changes, as we saw in 2007,” she says.

The possibility of sudden shifts in the region’s climate, and thus the planet’s climate, is the most frightening implication of her research, Stroeve says. The quick and volatile changes in Arctic sea ice remind us that the geological record contains clear evidence of abrupt climatic changes in the planet’s history. “We know that Arctic ice has historically helped keep the Northern Hemisphere cool,” Stroeve says. “Without it, given atmospheric circulation, the planet will certainly warm more quickly. But we don’t know enough about the system to fully project how swift the changes might turn out to be.”

The prospect of sudden climate change is certainly scary, Stroeve says. But she adds that, because the stakes are so high, her decision to study Arctic sea ice has proven a more exciting choice than she ever imagined. As she puts it, “Not a lot of people were looking at sea ice when I began my research. But especially after 2007, which took everyone by surprise, it has become something that climate scientists are intensely interested to know about.”

This is the fifteenth installment of America’s Climate Scientists: A series from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Click here to read all the climate scientist profiles.

The Union of Concerned Scientists is currently leading a campaign to elevate the voices of climate scientists and educate the public about the overwhelming scientific evidence for human-caused global warming. Learn how you can get involved at www.ucsusa.org/evidence.

Related Links:

Melting glaciers make it more likely the coasts will be toast

Global communications industry has similar global warming effect as aviation

Spill cleanup plans for Arctic ripped as ‘thoroughly inadequate’

• William Greider:

  Given the election results, the question Barack Obama has to decide for himself is whether he really wants to be president in the fullest sense. Not a moderator for earnest policy discussions. Not the national cheerleader for hope. Not the worthy visionary describing a distant future. Those qualities are elements in any successful presidency, and Obama applies them with admirable skill and seriousness.

  What's missing with this president is power—a strong grasp of the powers he possesses and the willingness to govern the country with them. During the past two years, this missing quality has been consistently obvious in his rhetoric and substantive policy positions....

  People who still have great hope for Obama can help revive his presidency, but only if they toughen up themselves. Stop holding his hand (he's an adult) and start building a people's agenda that compels the president to change his. Obama won't like this at first—his own supporters talking back—but he can learn to draw strength from their courage. If people fail to step up with their own message, the president will likely fail with his.

• The Los Angeles Times:

  Three days after the midterm elections, senior Obama aides suggested to a gathering of liberal groups at the White House that they might need to scale back their expectations. In the wake of the big Republican win, there would be no new major legislative pushes from President Obama in 2011.

  The mood, according to some participants at the meeting, was dour. Although the White House advisors said job creation would be a central goal, they did not lay out a concrete plan for putting more people to work. "There was an undercurrent of, 'Hey, folks. We're going to have to play some defense,'" said one attendee.

  As opposed to?

  Meanwhile, 2010 is not yet over...

• Federal Reserve Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin says the foreclosure outlook remains "grim."
• Science Daily:

  At the current pace of research and development, global oil will run out 90 years before replacement technologies are ready, says a new University of California, Davis, study based on stock market expectations.

• The Republicans will love this British conservative plan. Class warfare is fun.
• A Republican in Tennesee:

  During a hearing Tuesday, Tennessee state Rep. Curry Todd (R) asked a health official if a state health program that helps pregnant women checks the immigration status of its patients before offering benefits. After he was informed that the federal government doesn’t allow citizenship tests for prenatal care because all children born in the U.S. are automatically American citizens, he warned that without status checks, immigrants will “go out there like rats and multiply.” Watch it:

• A Republican in Kentucky:

  Kentucky Senate President David Williams declared himself "a Tea Partyer" on Wednesday and called for repeal of a constitutional amendment that took the power to appoint U.S. senators away from state legislatures and gave it to voters.

• And two nitwit Republicans who will be foist upon us for bigger things:

  U.S. Sen.-elect Rand Paul, R-Ky., is among a small cadre of politically well-connected freshmen who raised large sums from donors who live outside the states the lawmakers were elected to represent.

  Paul, the son of former presidential candidate and U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, ranks second behind U.S. Rep.-elect Ben Quayle, R-Ariz., the son of former Vice President Dan Quayle, in individual contributions raised out of state, according to an analysis of federal campaign data by the Center for Responsive Politics.

• It will surprise you to learn that in addition to being a reprehensible hatemonger, Glenn Beck also is an idiotic hypocrite.
• Ireland may soon become the next Greece.
• From a new study published in Science (firewalled):

  The long-term warmth of the Eocene (~56 to 34 million years ago) is commonly associated with elevated partial pressure of atmospheric carbon dioxide (pCO2). However, a direct relationship between the two has not been established for short-term climate perturbations. We reconstructed changes in both pCO2 and temperature over an episode of transient global warming called the Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum (MECO; ~40 million years ago). Organic molecular paleothermometry indicates a warming of southwest Pacific sea surface temperatures (SSTs) by 3° to 6°C. Reconstructions of pCO2 indicate a concomitant increase by a factor of 2 to 3. The marked consistency between SST and pCO2 trends during the MECO suggests that elevated pCO2 played a major role in global warming during the MECO.

  Science Daily has more.

• Bayern Munich striker Mario Gomez redefines the meaning of "sports hero."

Who knew Al Gore didn't invent man made global warming created by greenhouse gases as part of a scheme to destroy America and mach himself and a few greedy scientists rich? Well, Scientists back in the 1950's knew, that's who. When Al Gore was 8 years old this news recording was made demonstrating a John Hopkin's physicist, Gilbert Plass, was already speaking out about global warming as a result of industrial activity. Here's a GE radio show explaining Plass' research:

As the video shows, Plass, had already pinpointed carbon dioxide as the primary culprit. Plass was no crank. He was a respected physicist who was hired by the Defense Department to work on the development of heat seeking missiles.

Here's a brief discussion of Plass's career as a physicist at Wikipedia:

Plass worked most of his life as a physicist in the United States. He graduated from Harvard University in 1941 and earned a Ph.D in physics from Princeton University in 1947. He worked as an associate physicist at the Metallurgical Laboratory (Manhattan District) of the University of Chicago from 1942 to 1945. He became an instructor of physics at Johns Hopkins University in 1946, and eventually became an associate professor there. In 1955, leaving academics, he held a job for a year as a staff scientist with Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He then joined the advanced research staff at the Aeronutronic division of the Ford Motor Company. In 1960, he became manager of the research lab at Ford’s theoretical physics department and a consulting editor of the journal Infrared Physics (now called Infrared Physics and Technology). In 1963, he accepted a position as the first professor of atmospheric and space science at the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies (now the University of Texas at Arlington), where he remained for five years. In 1968, he arrived at Texas A&M; University, where he served as professor of physics and head of the department.

In 1956 and onwards Plass published a series of articles on the effects of CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and the potential implications of an increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for global warming. The articles were partly based on advanced calculations of the absorption of infrared radiation, and Plass made use of early electronic computers. He predicted that a doubling of CO2 would warm the planet by 3.6ºC, that CO2 levels in 2000 would be 30% higher than in 1900 and that the planet would be about 1ºC warmer in 2000 than in 1900. In 2007 the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report estimated a climate sensitivity of 2 to 4.5ºC for CO2 doubling, a CO2 rise of 37% since pre-industrial times and a 1900-2000 warm-up of around 0.7ºC

Plass' prediction of warming as a result of CO2 in the 1950's was amazingly prescient considering he worked at a time when the computing power of a single microchip exceed the then existing room sized mainframe computers on which IBM made its fortune. So, the science of Climate change isn't the creation of a worldwide conspiracy of lying liberal money grubbing anti-capitalists who want to steal your freedoms. It was well known fact that the earth was warming and that increased carbon emissions by human activity was the likely culprit. As the GE program demonstrates, trhe theory of greenhouse gases creating warming and climate change was a well respected theory in the very year I was born.

Here's a discussion of Plass's work from Real Climate:

Gilbert Plass was one of the pioneers of the calculation of how solar and infrared radiation affects climate and climate change. In 1956 he published a series of papers on radiative transfer and the role of CO2, including a relatively ‘pop’ piece in American Scientist. ... Some of the intriguing things about this article are that Plass (writing in 1956 remember) estimates that a doubling of CO2 would cause the planet to warm 3.6ºC, that CO2 levels would rise 30% over the 20th Century and it would warm by about 1ºC over the same period. The relevant numbers from the IPCC AR4 are a climate sensitivity of 2 to 4.5ºC, a CO2 rise of 37% since the pre-industrial and a 1900-2000 trend of around 0.7ºC.

To understand if Plass should get full credit, we need to see his workings. These are mainly outlined in two more technical papers in Tellus and QJRMS earlier that year. In today’s parlance, Plass calculated the change in top-of-the-atmosphere (TOA) radiative fluxes given a doubling (or a halving) of CO2 while everything else stayed the same. He then took that number and using someone else’s estimate of the sensitivity of the TOA radiation to the surface temperature, he calculated the temperature change that would be necessary to compensate. Converting from the units he used, the radiative flux values for a doubling of CO2 were 8.3 W/m2 and 5.8 W/m2 for clear-sky (no clouds) and averagely cloudy conditions (all-sky) respectively (and slightly larger and of opposite sign for a halving). The sensitivity of the TOA flux to surface temperature he used was around 2.3 W/m2 per ºC (equivalent to a temperature sensitivity of 0.4 ºC/(W/m2)). However, this is a ‘no-feedback’ estimate (allowing only the surface temperature to change with a constant lapse rate, but with no changes to water vapour, albedo or clouds).

Today, our current best guess for the forcing due to 2xCO2 is around 4 W/m2, and the ‘no-feedback’ sensitivity is around 0.3 ºC/(W/m2), giving an expected no-feedback temperature change of about 1.2 ºC, a factor of 3 smaller than the number Plass quoted, though since our number is for ‘all sky’ conditions, it would be a little better to compare it to his averagely cloudy number 2.5 ºC (so a factor of two higher). Note that Plass was a little casual in how he described his numbers and the ‘clear sky’ designation for the 3.6ºC number was not always made clear. However, Plass was well aware that the ‘no-feedback’ case was unrealistic and estimated that the water vapour, cloud and ice-albedo feedbacks would be amplifying, although he was not able to quantify them.

Moving now to the rate of change of CO2 in the atmosphere, Plass made a very good estimate as to how much human emissions of CO2 were increasing. His estimate was (again, in modern units) that then-current emissions were 1.5 GtC based on earlier estimates from Callendar, which actually was an underestimate. Our current best estimate for the anthropogenic emissions in 1956 is about 2.2 GtC. Given the increasing nature of the emissions, Plass then estimated that concentrations would rise about 30% by the end of the 20th Century. This however needs an estimate of how much of the emissions would be absorbed by the oceans and biosphere. Here, Plass has another impressive insight that the ocean chemistry would prevent quick uptake of the human CO2, a concept that wasn’t fully worked out until Revelle and Suess’s paper in 1957 (though possibly he may have been aware of some informal communications earlier). Plass actually assumed that none of the CO2 would be taken up in the short term. So his 30% growth estimate (the actual rise was 36%) was derived from an underestimate in emissions (and emissions growth) combined with an overestimate of the ‘airborne fraction’ (which is roughly 40% of total emissions).

I suppose that Plass would be called an alarmist today, but his back of the envelope, pre-supercomputer predictions regarding the increase of man-made CO2 and its effect on climate were quite extraordinary considering how much more data and evidence we have today to support his theory. Certainly he was considered a prominent and respected scientist considering his academic career and his recruitment by Lockheed and the Defense Department in the early to work on the national defense issues.

What is truly frightening is that here we are today, more than fifty years later, and still a few highly paid "skeptics" still denying what Gilbert Plass knew and fairly accurately predicted back in 1956, the year I was born. Plass was not a genius on the scale of an Einstein, but he knew enough from the historical record that existed over 54 years ago that mankind was playing with matches by continuing to rely on the burning of coal and oil the primary fossil fuels we continue to consume at ever increasing rates.

Of course, he wasn't a lone voice in the wilderness before Al Gore suddenly appeared on the scene. When Gore was 31 years old, a young Stephen Schneider in 1979 predicted an exponential increase in carbon emissions from humanity's use of fossil fuels.

Schneider went on to have a distinguished career as a climate scientist and died only recently. Here is a eulogy of him as a man and a scientist by Ben Santer:

Steve had the rare gift of being able to explain the complexities of climate science in plain English. He could always find the right story, the right metaphor, the right way of distilling difficult ideas and concepts down to their essence. Through his books, his extensive public speaking, and his many interactions with the media, Steve did for climate science what Carl Sagan did for astronomy.

But Steve was not only the world’s pre-eminent popularizer of climate science. He also made remarkable contributions to our scientific understanding of the nature and causes of climate change. He performed pioneering research on the effects of aerosol particles on climate. This work eventually led to investigation of how planetary cooling might be caused by the aerosol particles arising from large-scale fires generated by a nuclear war. This clear scientific warning of the possible climatic consequences of nuclear war may have nudged our species onto a different – and hopefully more sustainable – pathway.

Steve was also a pioneer in the development and application of the numerical models we now use to study climate change. He and his collaborators employed both simple and complex computer models in early studies of the role of clouds in climate change, and in research on the climatic effects of massive volcanic eruptions. He was one of the first scientists to address what we now call the “signal detection problem” – the problem of determining where we might expect to see the first clear evidence of a human effect on global climate.

After spending many years at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Steve moved to Stanford in 1996. At Stanford, Steve and his wife Terry Root led ground-breaking research on the impacts of human-caused climate change on the distribution and abundance of plant and animal species. More recently, Steve kept intellectual company with some of the world’s leading experts on the economics of climate change, and attempted to estimate the cost of stabilizing our planet’s climate. Until his untimely death, he continued to produce cutting-edge scientific research on such diverse topics as abrupt climate change, policy options for mitigating and adapting to climate change, and whether we can usefully identify levels of planetary temperature increase beyond which we risk “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the climate system.

Steve Schneider helped the world understand that the burning of fossil fuels had altered the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere, and that this change in atmospheric composition had led to a discernible human influence on our planet’s climate. He worked tirelessly to bring this message to the attention of fellow scientists, policymakers, and the general public. His voice was clear and consistent, despite serious illness, and despite encountering vocal opposition by powerful forces – individuals who seek to make policy on the basis of wishful thinking and disinformation rather than sound science.

It should be noted that he served as a science adviser for every President since Nixon, which includes every Republican President. Sadly, none of them, despite his warnings and the threat posed to our national security from America's reliance on fossil fuels, never effectively put into practice a plan to limit our dependence on them as our nation's primary energy source.

When you have Republicans like Joe Barton apologizing to BP for Obama's criticism of BP's reckless and dangerous off shore well operations that cost us billion of dollars and devastated the ecosystems upon which the lives of people in the seafood and fishing economy of the Gulf Coast depended, that should come as no surprise.

When Republicans tout their objective to hold hearings to investigate "scientific fraud" in the field of climate science, and Republican James Inhofe calls on the Department of Justice to begin a criminal investigation of the leading scientists in the field, that also should come as no surprise.

When Republicans push an energy policy that is heavily reliant on increasing off shore drilling and hydrofracking despite the risks to our environment on land and sea, that again, is not a shock.

That respected scientists were pointing to CO2 as the principal culprit in global climate change more than half a century ago, though, belies their nonsense and exposes their hypocrisy. They depend on the corporate money of Big Oil and Big Coal. They could give a rat's ass about what is happening to this planet because of their corporate paymasters activities. As long as the money keeps flowing into their political campaign and they can become rich lobbyists when they resign from Congress they could care less what happens to us and our children and grandchildren. They have sold their souls and sold them cheaply for paltry sums compared to the profits the fossil fuel industry makes every year.

For more than fifty years they Big Oil and Coal, and their many minions, have lied to us (and perhaps in rare instances lied to themselves) that the real villains are not a TRILLION DOLLAR industry and the numerous billionaires that industry has created at the expense of our health, our drinking water, our lives and our planet. As Bill Moyers stated: Welcome to the Plutocracy and among our Corporate Overlords none is bigger than the Fossil Fuels Industry.

I wonder if Gilbert Plass predicted that back in 1956, too.

Discuss

Our suit, CEI vs. NASA (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia), followed on the heels of ClimateGate, and a December 2009 Notice of Intent to Sue if NASA did not turn over certain records withheld since CEI sought them in August 2007 and January 2008 requests. That Notice was eleven months ago and, despite NASA offering some documents and admitting — temporarily — that certain others relating to the advocacy site used by NASA scientists, RealClimate.org were “agency records”, NASA then ceased its brief steps to comply with the transparency statute FOIA.

Despite NASA stonewalling CEI has already learned, for example, that NASA does not, contrary to widespread media and pressure group claims, have an independent temperature data set. Instead, as NASA told USA Today in an email, despite its serial, breathless press releases trumpeting some new temperature high, it actually is just a modeling office, which also (for unknown reasons, possibly extra attention and importance, or mere advocacy) cobbles together some US data from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) with that of the Climatic Research Unit’s temperature history. You may recall how CRU withdrew its claim to a temperature history data set after ClimateGate led to an admission it actually lost its data.

by Gary Nabhan.

The Driftless region in southwestern Wisconsin is renowned for its apples, with their intense flavors favored in marketplaces as far away as Detroit. But when I arrived there in late September to search with friends for heirloom apple varieties, we had trouble finding any apples left on the trees at all.

“This has been the strangest year for apple growing within my memory,” orchardist Dan Bussey conceded. The apple crop ripened nearly two weeks ahead of time, and due to a late frost, several late-season windstorms and most orchards, the crop in southern Wisconsin was quite sparse, he said. “Most orchards I know ran low or even out of apples by early October,” he wrote to me a few weeks later.

Bussey and his family have been using the same cider press in their community of Edgerton, Wis., for decades; ever since he purchased it in 1989, he has pressed cider for as many as 16 neighboring apple orchards during the harvest season. This year he’s run the press weekly, but for only a small fraction of what he normally does.

No wonder. Wisconsin not only had the wettest summer on record, but growers in the state have already suffered 40 tornadoes in 2010—twice the average annual number that have been experienced since detailed records began to be taken.

All hail Nature

When I returned home from Wisconsin to the grape-growing region of southeastern Arizona, I sat in on a meeting between wine makers and congressional legislative aides hoping to assist them with disaster relief. A mid-August hail storm wreaked a half-million dollars of damage to grape-laden vines in less than two hours, resulting in a projected loss of more than $2 million of income among 10 of the area’s vintners. My neighbor Kent Callaghan of Callaghan Vineyards in Elgin, Arizona, called the damage “unprecedented,” but nevertheless reminded me that the August tempest was not the first hail storm that had hit his vines.

“We’ve had nine hail storms in the last six years. But get this—in the previous 19 years, we didn’t have a single one ... Go figure that one out for me!”

Not long after that last hail storm, I called up another neighbor of ours, Mark Douglas, who has tenaciously maintained a mixed orchard of dozens of varieties of fruits and nuts for more than a quarter-century. The hail had defoliated most of his fruit and nut trees. Then, in late August and September, many of them broke into bloom, months after their normal season of blossoms!

The weather anomalies that North American farmers and orchard keepers have experienced over this past growing season may be part of what journalist Thomas Friedman has dubbed global weirding, a far better catch-all term than global warming.

Major fruit-growing states such as Virginia and North Carolina did indeed experience their warmest summer on record, while many other states had subnormal temperatures. Wine regions on the West Coast experienced the latest, coolest, and most peculiar vintage in nearly 50 years, but vintners near the East Coast—from the Finger Lakes to Niagara—had one of their earliest and best vintages on record.

The hallmark of global weirding is increasing extremes in variability, which scientists evaluate with a metric called “the coefficient of variation.” Wine geographer Greg Jones has observed that week to week, variability in temperatures in wine regions globally has increased. “The coefficient of variation over vintages has gone up in nearly every wine region I have analyzed. There’s much greater variability around the mean than at any other time in the past data record.”

There’s another measure of climatic instability that’s far more telling for the North American continent as a whole. The Climate Extremes Index (CEI) integrates the occurrences of several types of extreme weather, such as dry spells, torrential rains, and unusually warm nighttime temperatures. The National Climatic Data Center recorded that for the summer of 2010, the CEI was roughly 1.5 times its historic average.        

Predictable unpredictability

Most food producers intuitively understand that it is these extreme events—and not more general trends averaged over a season—that knock down crop yields. Violent winds, hail storms, flash floods, and heat waves are far more difficult to predict and adapt to than gradual warming or drying trends.

Producers of perennial food crops like grape vines and fruit trees have a peculiar vulnerability to the extreme weather events that may be associated with global weirding. If such an event levels your annual seed crop, you plow it under, and start over the next season. But what do you do when violent storms not only strip the leaves off your trees, but prune back several years’ worth of woody growth of their fruit-bearing branches? And what do you do when 15- to 50-year old trees no longer receive the required threshold of chill hours in the winter to stimulate spring flowering, or exceed their threshold of summer temperatures required to keep sugar content and flavor in balance within their fruits?

The growing concern among horticultural scientists is that global weirding will be radically reshuffling the areas in which once-favored tree varieties can be grown for optimum quality of their fruits, but where and when these shifts will happen remains difficult to predict. Meteorological studies from Oregon and California across the continent to Pennsylvania suggest that climatic uncertainty is likely to cause a turnover in the varieties that can be grown at any particular site. But there are few physiological and genetic studies to suggest just which fruit and nut varieties may have the greatest resilience in the face of rapid change.

Horticulture has remained an art as much as a science. As such, its capacity to guide farmers in their efforts to adapt to climate change has, until recently, been extremely limited. 

Nevertheless, as America’s fruit crops suffered from several weather anomalies during their harvests late this summer, more than two dozen scientists met in Portugal and presented their ideas on how vine growers and orchard keepers can adapt to shifting climates. Many of the International Horticultural Congress attendees were brought together into sessions facilitated by geographer Jones, whose family has roots in the Oregon wine industry. He noted that up until the last decade, warming trends have allowed many regions to produce better wine, but that future climate projections suggest a far more mixed bag.

Many wine- and fruit-growing regions will face earlier onset of the frost-free season, greater summer heat accumulation, later fall frosts, and pole-ward shifts in the optimal production zones for these perennial crops. Within any given region, varieties now grown across inland valleys may need to be transplanted closer toward coastal zones, to higher elevations, or toward the poles.

As Jones has suggested elsewhere, we may be entering an era where much of our current notions about memorable terroir—the taste of place embedded in wines, fresh fruits, or even grass-fed meats—will become geographically scrambled. Within a few more decades, the most intensely flavored maple syrups may come from Ontario instead of Vermont, and California’s Sonoma County may no longer offer an optimal climate for the expression of the distinctive taste and texture of its Gravenstein apples. Already, maple sap is running three to four weeks earlier in New England than its historic onset, diminishing yields and shifting flavor profiles.

While it is not very likely that many American food producers will adopt terms such as global weirding and climatic destabilization into their daily vocabulary, more and more farmers and ranchers I speak with are groping for ways to deal with all the uncertainty they face for their crops and livestock. Many rural residents are consummate observers of shifting weather patterns on a local or seasonal scale, but a much larger homework assignment is being foisted upon them.

Put simply, the problem is how can they, their seeds, and breeds further adapt to uncertainty itself, rather than to just assuming that their future will surely be hotter and drier. And how will they market the taste of their place, as many locavores now wish them to, when the parameters of that place—the prevailing patterns of weather, soil moisture, and temperature—  are shifting more rapidly than we had ever imagined they could? What will these shifts mean in terms of food security for the rest of us? What are the chances that at least some us might be facing fruitless falls?          

 

 

Related Links:

Art Pope’s millions fund climate change denial

Environmentalists Need to Reclaim Economics

Can Congress make a food-safety omelet without breaking the wrong eggs?

By Meteorologist Tom Skilling

Powerful winds roar across Chicago and the entire Midwest a second consecutive day Wednesday, the product of a mammoth autumn storm which continues to be draped across a huge swath of North America. The system---2,100 miles across and covering an astounding 4.4 million square miles---has proved one for the books, generating central barometric pressures never before seen across Minnesota and Wisconsin while fueling the country's largest severe weather outbreak Wednesday since August.
   
 
Windy storm produces nearly 300 reports of severe weather; largest U.S. outbreak since August 5
 
By nightfall Wednesday, the number of U.S. severe weather reports filed with NOAA's Storm Prediction Center had reached 291 and was still climbing. It was the largest storm tally since 397 severe weather reports were logged on Aug. 5. The figure included two dozen reports of tornadoes, including three rare late season twisters which occurred early Tuesday as an early morning squall line raced across the Chicago area at speeds of up to 65 mph.

Severe weather records retained since 1950 by the National Climatic Data Center, reveal only 6 of the 317 twisters on record---less than 2 percent of the Chicago area's tornado touchdowns since 1950--- have occurred in October. It's a stat which underscores just how unusual Tuesday's three twisters were. They dipped from thunderstorms  south of Chicago between Peotone and Beecher, and from storms near Elburn in Chicago's far western suburbs and in Porter County, Indiana to the east. A fourth twister hop-scotched across Kenosha and Racine Counties in southeast Wisconsin.

A National Weather Service survey team determined the Peotone area storm, which remained on the ground nearly a mile and destroyed farm buildings while ripping the roof off at least one home, was the strongest of the 4---assigning it an EF-2 (Enhanced Fujita Scale-2) designation indicating winds ranging from 111 to 135 mph.

A Chicago October barometer reading for the books

The windy storm produced an all-time low October Chicago barometric pressure reading of 28.99 inches---well below the previous low of 29.11 inches. Pressure readings are directly related to a storm's wind production and therefore offer an effective benchmark for the comparison of storm intensity.

To the north in Superior,Wisconsin, the powerhouse fall storm managed a 28.38 inch reading---a new all time low for the Badger State.  And near International Falls on the U.S./Canadian border, the system's 28.23 inch (956 mb) reading established a new all-time Minnesota low pressure. That reading was the equivalent of pressures found in a Category 3 hurricane.
    
Huge temperature spread fuels the record storm's development
 
Record breaking mid-90-degree highs baked the Gulf Coast Tuesday---including 95-degrees at McAllen and 92-degree highs at Houston---both in Texas---and at Orlando, Gainesville, Tampa and Daytona Beach in Florida. The readings were in stark contrast to the snowy 30s reported amid howling 60+ mph winds in sections of Montana and North Dakota. The huge temperature disparity helped generate a powerhouse 180 mph jet stream which played a key role in enhancing the atmospheric "lift" which set in motion the stunning barometric pressure falls behind the formation which led to the late October storm which continues to grip much of the nation's mid-section.

Powerful west winds pile lake water against the Michigan shoreline resulting in reduced Illinois/Wisconsin lake levels
 
Tuesday wind gusts hit 74 mph just off Chicago's shoreline at the Harrison-Dever Crib and 70 mph at DuPage County Airport where the winds flipped aircraft. Gusts reached 61 mph at Algonquin, Naperville, Kankakee and Lloyd Elementary School in Chicago. 60 mph gusts were clocked at Hinsdale while top winds reached 58 mph at Lombard and 55 mph at Flossmoor and East Chicago, Indiana.

The persistence and strength of Tuesday's westerly winds literally piled the waters of Lake Michigan along the Michigan shoreline. It's a development which led to declines in lake levels exceeding a foot on the Illinois and Wisconsin side of the lake according to an analysis of data from NOAA lake level sensors by National Weather Service Oak Brook COOP observer Patrick Skach . Lake levels increased by as much as 2 feet at gauges on the Michigan shoreline.

Wind damage, cuts power to 76,000 customers at its peak Monday
 
Commonwealth Edison estimates Tuesday's powerful winds knocked out electricity to an estimated 76,000 customers for a time. By evening, electricity had been restored to all but 16,000. 

At the end of its ninth month, 2010 is still tied with 1998 as the warmest year on record for the same period when land and sea surface temperatures are combined. A report from the National Climatic Data Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows the combined global average temperature was 58.67 Fahrenheit, [...]

At 9 months, 2010 still tied for hottest year is a post from: OC Science

Facts be damned, ain't democracy grand?  That's Ross Douthat's response to recent commentary on the fact that the GOP is virtually alone among the world's major political parties in opposing the science of global warming.

Here's the sequence of events. In the National Journal, Ronald Brownstein wrote last Saturday "GOP Gives Climate Science A Cold Shoulder", about the GOP's unique situation. He lead off by noting the position of the British Conservative Party Foreign Secretary:

When British Foreign Secretary William Hague visited the U.S. last week, he placed combating climate change near the very top of the world's To Do list.

"Climate change is perhaps the 21st century's biggest foreign-policy challenge," Hague declared in a New York City speech.

and went on to note:

His strong words make it easier to recognize that Republicans in this country are coalescing around a uniquely dismissive position on climate change. The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones....

Of the 20 serious GOP Senate challengers who have taken a position, 19 have declared that the science of climate change is inconclusive or flat-out incorrect. (Kirk is the only exception.) With sentiments among rank-and-file Republicans also trending that way, it's no coincidence that two Republicans who affirmed the science -- Rep. Michael Castle in Delaware and Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska -- were defeated in Senate primaries this year....

Indeed, it is difficult to identify another major political party in any democracy as thoroughly dismissive of climate science as is the GOP here. Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, says that although other parties may contain pockets of climate skepticism, there is "no party-wide view like this anywhere in the world that I am aware of."

Douthat led off by citing Brownstein's piece, then wrote:

What's interesting, though, is that if you look at public opinion on climate change, the U.S. isn't actually that much of an outlier among the wealthier Western nations. In a 2007-2008 Gallup survey on global views of climate change, for instance, just 49 percent of American told pollsters that human beings are responsible for global warming. But the same figure for Britain (where Rush Limbaugh has relatively few listeners, I believe) was 48 percent, and belief in human-caused climate change was only slightly higher across northern Europe....

There's a reasonably large Western European constituency, in other words, for some sort of climate change skepticism.... But the politicians haven't been responding. Instead, Europe's political class, left and right alike, has worked to marginalize a position that it considers intellectually disreputable, even as the American G.O.P. has exploited that same position to win votes.

The debate over climate change isn't unusual in this regard. On issues ranging from the death penalty to (at least until recently) immigration, America's major political parties generally tend to be more responsive to public opinion, and less constrained by elite sentiment, than their counterparts in Europe. Overall, I much prefer the American approach, populist excesses and all. (It helps in this case, of course, that I'm deeply skeptical about the efficacy of climate change legislation anyway.) But there's no denying that its left the G.O.P. on the wrong side?- and increasingly so?- of a pretty sturdy scientific consensus.

As usual with Douthat, there are problems galore with his reasoning.  
For one, the Gallup Poll wording and results are not sufficient to really support his argument. Large numbers of people remain unsure about global warming, so similar numbers who say they're certain it's caused by human activities does not necessarily translate into similar levels of popular opposition.  Moreoever, the GOP's opposition is of a certain conspiracist flavor (also seen here at Open Left recently, displayed by metamars).  The views expressed by the GOP are not simply that man-made global warming isn't real, but that it's a liberal fascist hoax, with the scientists in on it, and Gallup simply didn't ask if people believed that.  So Douthat actually has no data that even in America--much less Western Europe--there's actually a populist position to drive such views.

There is, however, a fair amount of collaborative evidence to indicate that American "conservatives" are different. Indeed, Bill McKibben, takes a hard look at this in a New Republic article ("Hot Mess: Why are conservatives so radical about the climate?") that Douthat also mentions--but doesn't discuss. After zeroing in on the conspiracist element, McKibben writes:

The odd and troubling thing about this stance is not just that it prevents action. It's also profoundly unconservative. If there was ever a radical project, monkeying with the climate would surely qualify. Had the Soviet Union built secret factories to pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and threatened to raise the sea level and subvert the Grain Belt, the prevailing conservative response would have been: Bomb them. Bomb them back to the Holocene-to the 10,000-year period of climatic stability now unraveling, the period that underwrote the rise of human civilization that conservatism has taken as its duty to protect. Conservatism has always stressed stability and continuity; since Burke, the watchwords have been tradition, authority, heritage. The globally averaged temperature of the planet has been 57 degrees, give or take, for most of human history; we know that works, that it allows the world we have enjoyed. Now, the finest minds, using the finest equipment, tell us that it's headed toward 61 or 62 or 63 degrees unless we rapidly leave fossil fuel behind, and that, in the words of NASA scientists, this new world won't be "similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted." Conservatives should be leading the desperate fight to preserve the earth we were born on.

This is a very crucial point. Western conservatism has two distinct main branches.  The "intellectually respectable" branch derives from Burke, while the gut-wrenching reactionary conspiracist branch derives from de Maistre--or at least was first pioneered by him. American conservatives almost never talk about de Maistre, but it's his mode of thinking that they predominantly follow.  While McKibben is quite correct in noting the disconnect between Burkean conservatism and global warming denialism, he's overlooking the role of reactionary conspiracism pioneered by de Maistre.

In Europe, the post-WWII expression of this split has generally been between center-right Christian Democratic parties of government (either ruling, or forming the establishment opposition), and neo-fascist nationalist fringe parties, such as the British National Front, or the much more successful French example of Jean Marie La Pen. But in America, the dynamic has been quite different for a number of reasons, not least is the legacy of Nixon's "Southern Strategy." In America, the fringe forces of Europe have taken over the conservative party of government, and it is the takeover of the party apparatus that we are seeing reflected in the GOP's virtually unanimous hostility to global warming, rather than any sort of democratic responsiveness.  The difference between the party-takeover explanation and Douthat's fuzzy-minded populist narrative can easily be seen in the fact that unified party hostility to global warming contrasts sharply with underlying polling data.  

We don't have a super-abundance of such data, but what we do have shows a sizeable segment of Republican believers in global warming who are entirely unrepresented by the supposedly representative democratic process that Douthat dotes on.  In some polls they are a sizeable minority, in others, a clear majority. For example:

ABC News/Washington Post Poll. June 3-6, 2010. N=1,004 adults nationwide.
"Do you think the federal government should or should not regulate the release of greenhouse gases from sources like power plants, cars and factories in an effort to reduce global warming?"

              Should    Should Not   Unsure
                 %         %           %
6/3-6/10        71        26           4
Democrats       81        16           2
Republicans     55        39           5
Independents    69        27           3

Boy, those GOP senators really know how to represent their base, now don't they?  Populism roolz!

Douthat's explanation is further weakened by the obvious role that vast sums of corporate money have played in shaping conservative opposition to global warming. And his "democratic" "populist" thesis is further undermined by the solid Republican rejection of the notion that such money should have such influence. On Thursday, Greg Sargent reported on Plum Line (and Rachel Maddow repeated), an overwhelming majority of Republicans believe voters have a right ot know who's paying for ads.  But you don't exactly see GOP Senators lining up to vote for the DISCLOSE Act, now do you?  Here's Greg:

It has become an article of faith among certain Beltway inside-game commentators that there's no way the Dem attack on secret money funding elections could ever have a prayer of working. Surely the issue is too esoteric, too process-y, and too removed from voter concerns about the economy to resonate.

But a new poll commissioned by MoveOn, and done by the respected non-partisan firm Survey USA, strongly suggests that the issue may indeed matter a good deal to voters after all.

The poll finds that two thirds of registered voters, or 66 percent, are aware that outside groups are behind some of the ads they're seeing....

What's more, an overwhelming 84 percent say they have a "right to know" who's bankrolling the ads....

Here are other key findings from the poll, which was provided to me by a MoveOn official:

* An overwhelming 84% of voters polled, including 80% of Republicans and 81% of Independents, believe voters have a right to know who is paying for ads for a particular candidate.

What this example shows--beyond the sheer bogosity of yet another Douthat scribble--is the profound degree to which conservative elites in America get to define what counts as "populist sentiment".  As Sargent begins, "It has become an article of faith among certain Beltway inside-game commentators that there's no way the Dem attack on secret money funding elections could ever have a prayer of working."  And it's almost a dead certainty that no one would ever have thought to even ask the American people, except for a group like MoveOn, which is not just progressive, but was born out of spontaneous disgust with Versailles consensus.

Warming weather combined with increased rain have expanded the northern boundaries of the area where corn, soybeans and other crops can be grown in the Midwest. "Bruce Babcock, an Iowa State University agriculture economist, said soybean production is expanding north and the cornbelt is expanding north and west because of earlier planting dates and later freezes in the fall," Michael J. Crumb of The Associated Press reports. Jay Lawrimore, chief of climatic analysis for the Asheville, N.C.-based National Climactic Data Center, points to a seven percent increase in average U.S. rainfall over the last 50 years as a key factor in the shift.

"The storm tracks are moving northward as the climate warms," Lawrimore told Crumb. Data from NCDC shows "Earth's temperature has risen about 1.3 degrees since the late 1800s with the warming greatest over North America, Europe and Asia," Crumb writes. "Seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001, data from the center shows." The expansion has been further accelerated as successful seed company efforts to adapt to the changes are coupled with warmer and wetter weather. "Plant seed companies are making more productive, short-season varieties," Babcock said. "It's both climate change but also technology change."

Excessive rains have hurt some farmers. "Jerry Main, who grows corn near Fairfield in southeast Iowa, said repeated deluges this spring prevented him from planting one-third of his 600 acres, making it one of the worst years he's seen," Crumb writes. Babcock explained, "It all depends how that comes about. In general, more rainfall means less irrigation and more ability to produce crops. Getting 4-inch rainfalls on a regular basis, that's not good for crops." (Read more)

By Meterologist Tom Skilling

Once-cool October 2010 has turned over a new leaf meteorologically, warming dramatically in recent days. Though the passage of a cool front late Wednesday has shifted winds from the northwest temporarily, a development which in combination with the predicted onset of northeast lake breezes Thursday afternoon is likely to clip several degrees off daytime highs, Chicago's late season warm weather bonanza isn't over yet. Highs in coming days--particular from Friday through Sunday--are likely to flirt with 80-degrees over large sections of the Chicago area.

Temperatures at such levels are more than 15-degrees above early-October norms.  Readings soared to 78-degrees at Midway and O'Hare Wednesday--the warmest in the nearly two weeks since September 24 and the 145th time a 70-degree or higher reading has occurred in the city this year. It's a tally which eclipsed the 139-year average of 130.  And, with additional warmth in our forecast, this year's list is likely to grow even longer.

This October's temperature trend is in stark contrast to October a year ago when Chicago's official observation sites failed to log a single 70-degree high.

If current forecasts verify, eight 70s will be on the books by the close of next Tuesday.
 

Many Chicago area observation sites report 80-degree Wednesday highs
 
While the city's official highs fell just short of 80 Wednesday, many weather stations across the greater metropolitan area not only reached 80---they topped it!  Among the area's warmest readings Wednesday were 82-degrees at Buffalo Grove, 81 at Oswego, Itasca, Freeport, Rockford and Morris and an 80-degree reading at western suburban Geneva. 

 Seasonal changes make it progressively harder to warm to such levels this time of year. Sunlight arrives bearing less than half (48%) the energy it once delivered in June.  And by Thursday's close, the area will have bid farewell to 227 minutes of sunlight (that's 3.78 hours) in the three months since June 21, the year's longest day and the astronomical open of summer. 

June 21's 8:31 p.m. sunset is but a memory. The sun will set at 6:23 pm here Thursday evening.

While seasonal factors are fighting the warmth, there appear to be meteorological factors helping send Chicago and mid-U.S. temperatures to unseasonably mild September levels. Midwestern weather appears to be indirectly benefiting from the effects of two U.S. storm systems, one far to the east and the other finally beginning to lift out of the West. The latter is behind wind and hail-producing thunderstorms which have swept sections of Arizona and Utah in recent days.

The two storms, which have been slowed over the past week by a massive North American atmospheric blocking pattern, have been pounding areas to Chicago's east and west with waves of rainfall--and, in the case of Arizona and Utah, with abnormally vigorous thunderstorms responsible for whitening the ground with hailstones while unleashing a rare late season tornado outbreak.

Air rises on a massive scale in such storms and vents out the top of these system's rain clouds and thunderstorms. The outflowing air travels away from the storms then sinks--compressing, warming and drying in the process. With subsidence from two systems combining or "coupling" over the nation's Heartland, it warmer than normal temperatures have been observed.


Rare tornadoes rake northern Arizona

Twisters dipped from northern Arizona skies with such frequency Wednesday, the Flagstaff National Weather Service office, which had issued only 3 tornado warnings in the 3 years since the open of 2007, was forced to issue 28 such warnings Wednesday alone to keep up with the rash of tornadic storms.

Tornadoes in October are hardly regular features of Arizona's meteorological landscape. According to NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, only 20 of the 218 twisters on the books statewide since 1950 have occurred in October.  That's just 9 per cent of the Grand Canyon State's reported tornadoes.
 

Chicago temps since June have averaged 14th warmest of past 140 years
 
Despite October's initially chilly open, the warmer than normal Chicago temperature regime, which has overwhelmingly dominated the 127 days since meteorological summer began on June 1 and averaged 71.9-degrees, ranks 14th warmest here of the past 140 years. Seven years have recorded comparably warm temperatures during that period and what's followed in those years may prove relevant to the months ahead--not only to what remains of the autumn season but to the upcoming winter as well.

In a majority (4 of the 7) of the October 8 through November 30 periods which followed those warm summers, Chicago's weather turned cooler than normal. A majority of meteorological winter season temperatures finished colder than normal as well. 

Of interest to area snow enthusiasts, the snow seasons which followed produced an average of 14 percent more snow than than the long term average.
 

Global Science & Technology, Inc. (GST) is proud to announce it will support the Climate Data Record (CDR) Program for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) located in Asheville, NC.

read more

On May 6, 2010, Christopher Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley, was invited by the Republican members of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming to present testimony that contradicted over 100 years of established chemistry, physics, and climatology. Monckton, a non-scientist who has a long history of making erroneous claims, was seated as and equal beside four scientists with PhDs in their respective climate-related fields.

Earlier this month, a group of climate scientists submitted a detailed rebuttal of Monckton’s testimony to the House.

The rebuttal was organized by five scientists (two of whom are members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences) who broke Monckton’s testimony down into nine different assertions and invited 21 scientists who are experts in their climate-related fields to respond to the assertions. The nine assertions fit into three broad categories: carbon dioxide (CO₂) doesn’t cause warming, CO₂ is not bad for us, and we can afford to wait even if CO₂ does cause warming and it turns out to be bad.

Five of Monckton’s assertions fall into this category. Monckton’s first claim is that prior “Snowball Earth” geologic eras prove that CO₂ can’t be the cause of global warming. His second assertion is that natural climate variation in the past demands that modern climate variations are also natural. Monckton’s third claim is that scientists have over-estimated the sensitivity of climate to changes in energy balance by a factor of four. His last two assertions are that recent warming was a result of so-called “global brightening” and that global climate has been cooling since 2001.

Monckton’s first assertion rests on the observation that the Earth’s surface is believed to have been mostly frozen in the geologic past when atmospheric CO₂ was very high compared to today’s levels, while the Earth is not frozen today with a much lower CO₂ concentration. David Archer, Professor in the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, said that “Monckton is mixing the two different intervals in time, using a theory that relies on CO₂ as a greenhouse gas to argue that it proves the opposite,” referring to the theory that the Snowball Earth period ended because of greenhouse warming due to high atmospheric CO₂ concentration. Lee Kump, Professor of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, agreed with Archer and wrote that “the driver for these climate shifts is large variations in atmospheric CO₂.” And Jeffrey Kiehl, Senior Scientist for the Climate Change Research Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), said that Monckton got order of events wrong – the Earth froze first, then volcanism volcanism raised the atmospheric concentration of CO₂, and then the very high atmospheric CO₂ concentration caused the Earth to thaw out again.

Monckton’s second assertion was essentially the starting point for any climate change analysis, namely that if climate changed in the past due to natural variations, then it’s probably changing due to natural variations this time too (aka a “predictive appeal to history” genetic fallacy). The problem is that this is the starting point for a scientific investigation into the causese of climate disruption rather than the conclusion. Gavin Schmidt, Climate Scientist for the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, pointed out that decades of investigation into the causes of climate change has systematically eliminated most of the natural variations that caused past periods of climate change as being responsible for modern warming. For example, Schmidt said that “orbital configurations… cannot explain any of the recent warming trends” because the Earth is not oriented correctly for them to apply, and he points out that trends in solar radiation also cannot be responsible because “the output from the sun has been flat since around 1950″ and that the flat trend “inconsistent with the accelerating warming since [1950].” James Hurrell, Chief Scientist for Community Climate Projects at NCAR and one of the other panelists at the May 6, 2010 House hearing, said that “[d]ecades of field and laboratory research developing paleoclimate records has resulted in global networks of well-replicated data” including evidence that orbital variations were known to be the cause of a warmer period 125,000 years ago when “[g]lobal average sea level was… likely 13-19 feet higher” and that “polar temperatures… started to rise several centuries before atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations rose.” this is in contrast to the modern warming period where atmospheric CO₂ conctrations rose before polar temperatures.

Monckton’s third assertion is that scientists have overestimated the sensitivity of the Earth’s climate to changes in energy balance by a factor of four. James Annan of the Global Change Projection Research Program at the Research Institute for Global Change, affiliated with the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, pointed out that the sensitivity value Monckton rejects is based upon “empirical estimates” from “observed responses to various forcings” such as the climatic effects of the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991. Michael MacCracken, Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs at the Climate Institute and former president of the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences, said that Monckton’s numbers rely on a logical error, namely that

for Monckton’s value of the climate sensitivity to be correct, the further 60% rise in CO₂ concentration to reach a doubling would have to have no warming effect on the climate.

In other words, 0.8 °C over a 40% increase in atmospheric CO₂ concentration equals a 2 °C increase for a 100% increase in concentration. Furthermore, MacCracken pointed out that “Monckton’s much lower value [for climate sensitivity] would not explain how the Earth’s climate has changed” as observed in the geologic record. Kevin Trenberth, Senior Scientist and Head of the Climate Analysis Section at NCAR focused his rebuttal on addressing the many flaws of the paper Monckton used as the basis for this assertion. According to Trenberth, the paper calculated sensitivity based exclusively on tropical data instead of global data, neglected the fact that tropical heat moves poleward due to weather patterns, and that the paper’s conclusions could be reversed by choosing slightly different endpoints for the statistical analysis.

Moncton’s fourth assertion was that “global brightening,” defined as a small increase in the amount of solar energy hitting the Earth’s surface due to lower cloud cover and less global pollution, was responsible for the observed global warming. Trenberth wrote that, contrary to Monckton’s claim, the actual data shows that “brightening” occurred on land, largely near urban areas, and that the global ocean (70% of the Earth’s surface) appears to have darkened rather than brightened. Norman Loeb, one of the principle investigators for the CERES and co-investigator for the CALIPSO radiation budget-measuring satellites indicated that the global scale of the brightening was “questionable in its own right.” Bruce Wielicki, Senior Scientist in Radiation Sciences at the NASA Langley Research Center, further pointed out that Monckton was using noisy data from an uncalibrated instrument instead of using the more accurate data from calibrated instruments that happened to be contrary to his assertion. Finally, Benjamin Santer, Research Scientist for the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory claimed that global brightening could not explain warming oceans and land surface, rising humidity, retreating glaciers, rising sea level, less snow and ice in the Northern Hemisphere, stratospheric cooling, tropospheric warming, and an increased height of the tropopause. Instead, Santer said

[i]ndividually, all of these changes are consistent with our scientific understanding of how the climate system should be responding to anthropogenic forcing. Collectively, this behavior is inconsistent with the changes that we would expect to occur due to natural variability alone.

Monckton’s fifth assertion was that the Earth has been cooling since 2001 while atmospheric CO₂ concentrations continued to rise and therefore CO₂ couldn’t be the cause of rising temperatures. Hurrell said that natural variations in year-to-year weather due to factors such as El Nino can be expected to drive “occasional, but temporary, slowdowns in the rate of warming even while greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase.” David Easterling, Chief of the Scientific Services Division at the National Climate Data Center, made this point even more strongly, saying “[t]he fact that the globally averaged surface air temperature has shown no trend or even slight cooling… is meaningless in regards to climate change due to increasing CO₂.” This point was also echoed by James Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), and Reto Ruedy, also of GISS, excerpted their response from a paper where they wrote that “it is possible to find almost any trend for a limited period via judicious choice of start and end dates of a data set that has high temporal resolution, but that is not a meaningful exercise (emphasis added).” All of these scientists felt that a mere nine years didn’t qualify as a statistically valid period from which to draw any conclusions.

Three of the assertions identified by the rebuttal fall into this category. First, Monckton asserted that high CO₂ concentrations weren’t a threat to corals because corals evolved in a period of high atmospheric CO₂. Second, he rejected that increased CO₂ concentration is responsible for ocean acidification and even questions whether acidification is actually happening. And third, Monckton directly stated that CO₂ is good for plant life and human society.

Monckton’s assertion that the evolutionary history of corals means modern CO₂ concentrations are not dangerous rests on a number of factual errors. John Veron, professor at the University Center for Marine Studies at the Univeristy of Queensland, Australia, and former Chief Scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, said that “[i]t is not possible for me to make any sense of Mr. Monckton’s assertions as they are not based on any scientific data or views that have ever been published” and that, contrary to Monckton’s claim, “[t]here were no corals in the Cambrian, symbiotic or otherwise: they had not evolved then.” Veron also pointed out that Monckton’s CO₂ estimate for the Jurassic (~6000 ppm) is three times greater than the accepted value and that the CO₂ “spike immediately before the Jurassic caused the third great mass extinction.” Nancy Knowlton, Sant Chair in Marine Science at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and former director of Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego, responded that Monckton’s assertion showed ignorance of the fact that “the seawater chemistry and the buffering capacity of seawater were very different during the [Cambrian and Jurassic] from what they are today” and that “for hundreds of years ocean organisms will be affected by abnormally high acidity (low pH)” due to modern CO₂ emissions. Kump’s rebuttal pointed out that “[o]ne must carefully distinguish between conditions that were acquired and sustained over millions of years” like what Monckton described and “abrupt events such as fossil-fuel burning that disturb these longer-term equilibria.” Kiehl expressed the same sentiment as Kump, but put it this way instead:

The concern about the future is that the rate of warming that is occurring and will continue to occur over the next century is unprecedented in the deep past. It took over 30 million years for CO₂ levels to drop from 900 ppmv to their present levels, we are returning Earth back to this level in a mere 90 years.

Monckton’s second assertion was that that ocean acidification might not be happening at all, and even if it were, CO₂ could not be the culprit. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Director of the Global Change Institute and professor of Marine Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia, emphatically rejected this assertion:

[t]he claim that ocean acidification cannot be due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is at oddswith experimental results, field observations, and our fundamental understanding of physical chemistry going back over 100 years.

Hoegh-Guldberg also pointed out that the problem isn’t that seawater could fall below neutral (pH of 7.0), but rather that the ocean’s pH is dropping (which is the scientific definition of “acidifying”) to the point that it will have “demonstrable impacts on important biological systems from phytoplankton to coral reefs.” Knowlton’s rejection of this assertion was similar:

There is no question of “if”. Changes in pH have already been observed in many different parts of the ocean, and the chemistry driving short-term acidification is elementary and unavoidable.

Ken Caldeira, Senior Scientist in the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution and Professor in the Department of Environmental Earth System Sciences at Stanford University, pointed out that Monckton had got his ocean chemistry wrong, and Pieter Tans, Senior Scientist at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory agreed. Tans said that Monckton’s detailed discussion was “not relevant in this case – it is just a measure of acid-base equilibria, just like a thermometer gives a measure of temperature, but thermometers do not drive the climate.” Tans also said that Monckton’s dismissal of CO₂ as the culprit was “demonstrably wrong” because

CO₂ is an acid, acidification has been measured in the surface oceans, and agrees with expectations based on well understood chemistry. CO₂ is the only possible culprit. There are not enough emissions of anything else that could cause the observed acidification. (emphasis added)

Monckton’s third assertion was that high CO₂ would be beneficial to plant life and to human civilization. Peter Reich, Regents Professor and Distinguished McKnight University Professor for the University of Minnesota’s Department of Forest Resoruces took issue with Monckton’s assertion about plants, writing that “state-of-the-art free-air carbon dioxide enrichment experiments” show that crop yields are increased by no more than 13% for any crop (instead of the 40% claimed by Monckton) and that, when the temperature, precipitation, and ozone effects were included, the effect on crops was expected to negative and worsen with increased CO₂ emission. Furthermore, Reich said that soil fertility, soil water, and changes in vegitation are likely to limit the ability of forests, savannas, and grasslands to adapt to higher atmospheric CO₂ concentrations in the future. Kump’s response focused on how “the geologic record tells us… that rates of change [in CO₂] are what matter most” rather than the total amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere. Specifically, “[l]ife flourished when rates of change were slow and the Earth system had time to adjust,” a point that Caldiera agreed with when he implied that Monckton’s failure to understand this demonstrated Monckton’s lack of an “elementary understanding of geochemical cycles.“ MacCracken gave a long list of reasons that high atmospheric CO₂ wasn’t good for either life or civilization: ocean acidification, sea level rise forcing mass migrations of people inland, changes in the timing and location of storms, greater incidence of both drought and flooding, and more people living in heat-stressed parts of the world.

Monckton’s final assertion was that, even if CO₂ does cause climate disruption, humanity can afford to wait for decades before addressing it. MacCracken’s list of reasons above provide some examples of why Monckton is clearly wrong about this, but MacCracken went beyond that list in response to this allegation. Specifically, MacCracken said that Monckton ignored “the warming influence of other human activities,” “the emissions of black soot and changes in land cover,” and “the warming influence of the decreases in sulfur dioxide,” all things that added to the warming effects of CO₂. MacCracken also pointed out that Monckton’s suggestion of delay contains an implicit assumption that humanity will somehow be able to instantly transition to a carbon-free society, something that is absurd even without considering the multiple-decade lifespan of modern fossil fuel-burning power plants. Schmidt said that Monckton got his science wrong again:

the potential temperature rise with no action on emissions is far greater than 1 °F. Upper estimates for 2100 are over 10 times as much. Therefore the potential reduction in anticipated warming is also far greater than 1 °F.

Furthermore, Schmidt indicated that Monckton’s cost estimate neglected the “benefits of forestalling much greater climate change than we have thus far seen.” Hurrell took Schmidt’s point one step further, saying

[e]conomists have analyzed the costs of various policy responses and they tell us that the most cost-effective emission trajectories involve starting now to control emissions. Further delay will be costly.

Finally, David Karoly, professor in the University of Melbourne’s School of Earth Sciences and member of the Australian Academy of Science’s National Committee on Earth System Science, pointed out that the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere five years ago had already committed the Earth’s climate to exceed the widely accepted “safe warming” threshold of 2 °C (3.6 °F) above pre-industrial levels and that “any delay in global greenhouse gas emission reductions will lead to greater exceedence of that temperature level” and lead to “increased frequency of heat waves and associated increased deaths, and sea-level rise and coastal inundation.”

S&R asked two of the scientists who organized this rebuttal what motivated them to do it and what they hoped to accomplish. Barry Bickmore, Associate Professor of Geological Sciences at Brigham Young University, responded that it was his goal to “shine a very bright light on how this important issue is handled by some of our representatives in Washington” because “some of our politicians have studiously avoided listening to the overwhelming consensus of the experts.” Bickmore added that it was his hope that this response would “encourage members of Congress to promote an honest, rational debate about what we should do about climate change.” John Abraham, Associate Professor of Engineering at the University of St. Thomas, replied that the fact that legislators had placed a non-expert like Monckton under oath and on equal footing with actual climate scientists meant that Monckton’s many errors demanded correction. Abraham said that this rebuttal should serve notice to the public, his fellow scientists, and to legislators that real experts were prepared to push back on errors and distortions wherever they occurred. Abraham added that it was his hope that the rebuttal would remind other climate scientists that they had a responsibility to engage in the public debate and to correct the many climate science fictions perpetrated by Monckton and others like him.

Other voices discussing Climate Scientists Respond:

• John Cook at Skeptical Science
• Bert Verheggen at Our Changing Climate
• Joe Romm at Climate Progress
• Leo Hickman at The Guardian

I’ve mentioned more than once in the past how the Tom Karl managed National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) team has taken to using my data without my permission. They even ignored my letter sent direct to Tom Karl. I’d written … Continue reading →

OK the autumnal equinox occurs this evening (or tonight depending on when you go to bed) at 11:09 PM. Yes this is the official blog of Bob Ryan on the official tbd.com site and posted on this official middle day of the week. Once I finish this it will be official to officially publish. The official time of the official equinox is interesting because it is also the first official time the official Full Moon, the famous official Harvest Moon also rises on the official day of the official equinox since the official year of 1991.

Oh and by the way did I mention that the autumn equinox is not officially anything? It is not more the “official” beginning of fall than Labor Day is the official end of summer. If anything, since Labor Day is an official government holiday, come to think of it that could be closer to being the official end of summer. The official weather records and climate data are kept at the National Climatic Data Center in Ashville, NC. NCDC is a unit of NOAA, a part the U.S. government and the climate and weather data for “summer” is June 1 thru August 31. So if there is any “official” end of summer it is August 31. There is nothing official about the any equinox but it is an interesting astronomical event, especially this year as the Full Moon does rise (it just rises it doesn’t need official permission) on the evening of the Autumn Equinox for the first time since 1991.

The other neat thing about the equinox (both spring equinox and autumn equinox) is that is the only day (twice a year) that the sun rises exactly in the east and sets exactly in the west. Check it out and remember, before you argue, that the lines of latitude are parallel and on the equinox the sun is directly over the equator. Here is a neat link (not official of course) with much more about the equinox. That’s it for now . . . it’s official, I’m done.

Bob Ryan

by Climate Central.

New numbers released by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center confirm what residents of countries around the world already may have suspected: 2010 has been no average year. In fact, the first nine months of the year tie 1998 globally as the hottest on record. And this hurricane season is trending above average, with increased activity coming as we enter the last half of the season.  Climate Central has a video illustrating this and other highlights from the report:

Related Links:

Obama: Rebuild America by slashing oil tax breaks

Does anyone take science seriously?

Giant underwater plume in Gulf challenges optimism

A new report from the National Climatic Data Center shows temperatures soared across the globe in the summer of 2010, but it's not clear whether global warming was the cause.

by David A. GabelAs September begins to bring cooler temperatures, Americans can look back objectively at the past summer (June-August). The above average temperatures in the contiguous states combined to make it the fourth warmest ever. Only seven of the lower 48 states had normal temperatures, and 29 were much above normal. This news is detailed in the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) State of the Climate report issued on September 8, 2010. The analysis of climatic factors - temperature, precipitation, storm patterns - has been conducted since 1895, and all current recordings are compared to the historic long-term average (1901-2000). The report is compiled in Asheville, NC, at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. The following are highlights from the summer in the United States. The Southeast experienced their warmest summer ever, the Central states had their third warmest, and the Northeast had their fourth warmest. The Pacific Western states experienced near-normal temperatures. The unusual warmth mostly dominated the eastern half of the country. The following states set records for the warmest summer ever: Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Particular cities that set summer temperature records include the following: New York City (Central Park), Philadelphia, Trenton NJ, Wilmington DE, Tallahassee FL, and Asheville NC. The hot summer also brought about abnormal precipitation trends for parts of the country. Heavy rainfall dominated the Upper Midwest, making up for the precipitation deficits of the first five months of the year. Wisconsin had its wettest summer on record, with 6.91 inches of rainfall above average. Other states in the top-ten wettest summers include Michigan and Iowa (third wettest), Illinois and Nebraska (sixth), South Dakota (ninth), and Minnesota (tenth). Conversely, the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic suffered a persistent lack of rainfall. A lingering high pressure system and lack of tropical weather activity contributed to below average levels of precipitation. This caused severe drought in several states such as Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia. However, the heavy precipitation in the Upper Midwest helped pull the national precipitation level above average for this summer. The following are year-to-date highlights. The Northeast has experienced its warmest year, with temperatures 3.4 degrees F over the norm. Only two states had below normal temperatures: Florida and Texas. As for precipitation, the drought in the south offset the deluge in the north, leading to near-normal precipitation levels for the year. Other weather highlights include tornado activity, particularly in Minnesota. The state is set to break its own record of 74 tornadoes, set in 2001. Also, wildfire was much lower than average, thanks to milder weather in the Western states. The acreage burned during August was the lowest in 11 years, and year-to-date, it was less than half the long-term average. To view NOAA's Climate Services, go to: http://www.climate.gov/#climateWatch Photo by TheBusyBrain/flickr/Creative Commons Reprinted with permission from Environmental News Network

The Earth’s land areas sizzled to their warmest summer ever recorded, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Climatic Data Center.

read more

Washington - Het jaar 2010 is op weg om wereldwijd het warmste jaar ooit te evenaren. De gemiddelde temperatuur in de eerste acht maanden komt overeen met het record voor dezelfde periode in 1998, verklaarde het US National Climatic Data Center woensdag. (07:25, 16-09-10)

Het jaar 2010 is op weg om wereldwijd het warmste jaar ooit te evenaren. De gemiddelde temperatuur in de eerste acht maanden komt overeen met het record voor dezelfde periode in 1998, verklaarde het US National Climatic Data Center woensdag.

While much of the nation baked under hot temperatures in August, the Bay Area was wrapping up one of its coldest summers in history, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center reported on Wednesday.

Mining the Truth on Coal Supplies

No matter how bad coal might be for the planet, the conventional wisdom is that there is so much of it underground that the world’s leading fuel for electricity will continue to dominate the energy scene unless global action is taken on climate change.

But what if conventional wisdom is wrong?

A new study seeks to shake up the assumption that use of coal, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel, is bound to continue its inexorable rise. In fact, the authors predict that world coal production may reach its peak as early as next year, and then begin a permanent decline.

Tom Whipple: Politics In The Great Transition

Someday there will be thousands of scholarly books on how political systems coped or failed during the transition from fossil fuel-sustained civilizations to that which is to come. For now, however, there are practically none as only a relative handful of the 6.7 billion on earth today have even a glimmer that the great transition is underway.

Indeed, it will be many years before we begin to appreciate the dimensions of how the various forms of government, (parliamentary democracies, theocracies, military dictatorships, "Communism" etc.) that have evolved around the world will cope with the great multi-decadal transition to civilizations that can function with little or no fossil fuel. Some already are predicting anarchy as industries, businesses, and monetary system crumble without their accustomed sources of energy; some talk of the great wars that will be fought over dwindling energy resources; and some foresee a return to pastoral towns akin to life in the 18th and 19th centuries - albeit after much social turmoil.

Easy to be complacent about energy until it's too late

David Suzuki warns us about complacency with the story of the pond where the lily pad population doubles every week. Starting with one plant, a corner of the pond starts filling up. But the week before the lily pads smother the whole pond, half the water is still open, so choking from overcrowding still seems a long way off.

That's an apt metaphor to illustrate a report recently released by two highly respected United Kingdom institutions: Lloyd’s of London and Chatham House Royal Institute of International Affairs. The report dives headfirst into the doomsday pool by predicting "catastrophic consequences" for businesses that fail to prepare for a world of increasing oil scarcity, higher oil prices, and disrupted energy supplies. They're all on the way, says the report, because of soaring energy demand in China and India (40 percent growth projected in the next two decades in China), constraints on production resulting from the BP oil spill, and moves to cut carbon dioxide emissions to slow down global warming (and mitigate floods like the one now ravaging Pakistan).

The Crisis Papers

Place a few fruit flies in a bottle with a layer of honey at the bottom, and they will quickly multiply to an enormous number, and then, just as quickly, die off to the very last, poisoned by their wastes. Similarly, add a few yeast cells to grape juice, seal the bottle, and the cells will consume the sugar and turn it into alcohol. When the alcohol rises to 12.5% it will kill off all the yeast, and the wine will be ready for the table.

Fruit flies and yeast in a bottle are embarked upon suicidal endeavors. They can’t help it. They don’t know any better, lacking the cognitive equipment to “know” anything at all.

Human beings, we are told, are different. Humans can utilize their accumulated knowledge, evaluate evidence and apply reason, and with these skills and accomplishments they can imagine alternative futures and choose among them to their advantage.

Crude Rises on Speculation U.S. Inventory Growth Fell Short of Estimates

Oil rose for a second day on speculation that a government report today may show a smaller increase in crude inventories than previously forecast.

U.S. crude stockpiles fell 7.31 million barrels last week, the industry-funded American Petroleum Institute reported yesterday, which may lead traders to revise expectations for U.S. Energy Department data due today. A Bloomberg survey earlier this week forecast that the government report will show that crude supplies climbed by 1 million barrels.

“The API drawdown was massive,” said Thina Saltvedt, a commodities analyst at Nordea Bank AB in Oslo. “The DOE and API often go in the same direction but the sizes are different. But there’s more than enough oil in the market.”

OPEC Trims 2011 Demand Forecast as Production Outside the Group Advances

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries trimmed the outlook for demand for its members’ crude in 2011 as production from outside the group grows.

OPEC, responsible for about 40 percent of global supplies, predicted in a monthly report today that the world will need 28.8 million barrels of oil a day from its 12 members next year. That’s about 100,000 barrels a day less than in last month’s report. The organization left its forecast for global oil demand in 2011 unchanged at 86.56 million barrels a day.

Refiners Cut Oil Output in U.S. to April Low, Survey Shows

U.S. refiners probably cut crude- processing rates to the lowest level since April as they began seasonal maintenance, a Bloomberg News survey showed.

Refineries operated at 86.5 percent of capacity last week, down 0.5 percentage point from a week earlier, according to the median of 14 analyst estimates in the survey. The Energy Department is scheduled to release its weekly supply report at 11 a.m. today in Washington, a day later than usual because of the Labor Day holiday on Sept. 6.

Saudi Aramco to Supply Full Contracted Volumes for October to Asian Buyers

Saudi Arabian Oil Co., the world’s largest state-owned oil company, will supply full contractual volumes of crude to Asia for loading in October, according to refinery officials in Japan and South Korea.

Saudi Aramco, as the company is known, will provide 100 percent of cargoes sold under long-term contracts for an 11th month, according to a survey of refinery officials, all of whom asked to remain unidentified, citing confidentiality agreements with the Middle East producer.

Tropical Storm Igor drifting north in the Atlantic

MIAMI -- Tropical Storm Igor is drifting northward in the Atlantic off the coast of Africa near the Cape Verde Islands.

Maximum sustained winds for the storm Thursday are near 40 mph (65 kph). The National Hurricane Center in Miami says the storm could begin strengthening some on Friday.

British MPs to grill BP CEO Hayward

LONDON (Reuters) – British Members of Parliament (MPs) will next week grill outgoing BP Plc Chief Executive Tony Hayward, as part of an investigation into risks around deepwater drilling in the North Sea.

BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill has raised concerns globally about the dangers of drilling in ever-deeper waters.

US government sends oil clean-up bill to BP

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US government Wednesday sent a sixth bill to BP for clean-up costs related to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, bringing the total to date to 389.9 million dollars, officials said.

BP has already spent eight billion dollars trying to contain the disaster and has forecast that it will eventually cost the group more than 32.2 billion dollars.

Wednesday's 128.5-million-dollar bill covers costs incurred by federal, state and local governments involved in the massive response effort, US officials said.

Should $10 a Barrel Be the Real Price of Oil?

I have been in the investment business for 30 years. Oil peaked at monthly average prices around $40 per barrel in 1980-81. It bottomed around $11/barrel in 1999. Oil peaked in 2008 at a monthly average around $126/ barrel and stands today somewhere around $73/barrel. Like many other investors we at Smead Capital Management have been conscious of “Peak Oil” theory. In his book, “The Prize”, Daniel Yergin points out that “Peak Oil” theory has popped up every ten to twenty years since oil was first discovered in Pennsylvania in 1855. Whether “it’s different this time” doesn’t matter to us because we see a dramatically quicker transition away from gasoline to electric and hybrid automobiles than the average portfolio management firm does. We believe the transition to electric/hybrid vehicles is a 10-15 year process. If you spend much time in Los Angeles or Seattle, you can see the speed of the transition with your own eyes. If you cut demand for gasoline by 25-50% in twenty years, you chop off the “lack of supply” argument which “Peak Oil” is all about.

Resource Investing with Exchange Traded Funds Part 2

Recently John Stephenson, senior vice president and portfolio manager with First Asset Investment Management Inc., shared his thoughts on the marketplace rapid structural changes around the world “setting the stage for a massive bull market in commodities as smart investors know that after a decade of decline, stocks aren’t where the big money will be made.”

Selecting one particular asset class, Mr. Stephenson was bullish on oil, “If it’s just one, then you would have to pick oil. It’s a miracle fuel, costs less than orange juice on a volume-weighted basis, we’ve reached peak oil and China has just become the largest car market on the planet.”

On Clean Energy, China Skirts Rules

The booming Chinese clean energy sector, now more than a million jobs strong, is quickly coming to dominate the production of technologies essential to slowing global warming and other forms of air pollution. Such technologies are needed to assure adequate energy as the world’s population grows by nearly a third, to nine billion people by the middle of the century, while oil and coal reserves dwindle.

But much of China’s clean energy success lies in aggressive government policies that help this crucial export industry in ways most other governments do not. These measures risk breaking international rules to which China and almost all other nations subscribe, according to some trade experts interviewed by The New York Times.

Metro Vancouver unveils draft regional food system strategy

A long-time farmer and Richmond city councillor is predicting a time when B.C. beef is no longer sent to Alberta for processing.

As a case in point, Harold Steves told the Straight that, with his help, his son Jerry’s Cache Creek farm already “direct-markets” much of its beef to Lower Mainland customers.

Hollywood star in north Queensland

She lives in a house powered by solar panels, drives a vehicle that runs off used cooking fat and grows most of her own food.

Yet Hollywood star Daryl Hannah isn't convinced she's doing enough for the environment.

The 1980s pin-up girl is in far north Queensland for a two-week course on permaculture, which aims to mimic the principles of natural eco-systems in human settlements and agriculture.

Ms Hannah says she's searching for "a more sane way of living in harmony with our environment".

Murphy examines cars, consumption

Electric cars may not be the answer to reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, says local author Pat Murphy in his recently-released book, Spinning Our Wheels.

Instead, Murphy proposes, we should share rides to increase transportation’s efficiency and reduce the number of total cars on the road.

Traffic deaths at lowest in 60 years

Traffic deaths in the USA are at a 60-year low despite a slight uptick in miles driven, and the chances of dying on the road are the lowest ever, the Department of Transportation says.

An exclusive first drive of a Tesla-powered electric Mercedes

CALIFORNIA -- I got an unexpected treat during a recent visit to Tesla Motors' headquarters near San Francisco: They let me be the first journalist, ever, to drive the electric version of the Mercedes A-Class.

Let me say up front, I was totally captivated by this car, a product of the growing collaboration between Tesla and Daimler. Some 500 will be built, likely for delivery to "hand raisers," probably mostly in Europe.

Automakers still making a date with the powerful V-8 engine

Just when its future looked to be in doubt, automakers are putting some new life in the old V-8.

Despite pressure from federal gas mileage rules ratcheting up, makers are selectively peppering their lineups with the iconic engine — known for smooth, high-torque power — that many thought was an endangered species. These days, however, it likely is reserved for luxury or performance models.

Vestas Wind Tumbles After Reporting That Blade Broke on Turbine Prototype

Vestas Wind Systems A/S fell to its lowest in almost two years in Copenhagen trading after the world’s largest wind turbine maker said a blade snapped on a prototype and Danske Bank A/S downgraded the stock.

Alex Salmond unveils plan to turn Scotland into 'world's first hydro-economy'

Proposed legislation would allow state-owned Scottish Water to use vast landbank and pipe network for renewable energy projects.

To Go Where Compact Fluorescents Cannot

Mention “new lighting technology” and what leaps to mind is probably a compact fluorescent curlicue. Shaped like a soft ice cream cone, it is viewed as a replacement for the ubiquitous 60-watt incandescent light bulb, which looks almost like it did 90 years ago.

But a profusion of light-emitting-diode lamps is about to hit the market, many of them in applications that are awkward or impossible for compact fluorescents.

Federal Agency Sues LED Bulb Maker

Even as lighting companies report advances in LED technology, consumers are being warned that some LED lighting products do not live up to the hype.

The Federal Trade Commission announced on Wednesday that it had sued Lights of America, a light bulb manufacturer based in California, for misrepresenting the light output and life expectancy of its LED bulbs. It is the first F.T.C. case challenging LED marketing claims.

China may relax its one-child rule

"In the past, we only focused on slowing population growth," says Peng Xizhe, a professor at Shanghai's Fudan University. "It's much more complicated than we earlier thought."

The National Population and Family Planning Commission, which enforces the "one-child policy," refused interview requests. The policy has prevented 400 million births in China, which has a population of 1.3 billion, according to the family planning agency. But a dramatic decline in birth rates and improved longevity over the past two decades have caused China's population to age at one of the fastest rates ever recorded, says the Population Reference Bureau, a demographic firm.

Also, a traditional preference for boys has led to the abortion of many girls. In 2009, the ratio of newborn boys to newborn girls was 119 to 100, according to China's National Bureau of Statistics.

U.S. names Asian carp czar

The White House has tapped a former leader of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and the Indiana Wildlife Federation as the Asian carp czar to oversee the federal response to keeping the invasive species out of the Great Lakes.

This summer really was hotter than others

The intense heat this summer wasn't a mirage for the tens of millions of people in the eastern and southern USA. Every state east of the Mississippi River recorded one of its 10 warmest summers since records began, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

Obama's Climate Image Blurs as He Nears Last Half of Presidential Term

Barack Obama was considered a climate change savior 20 months ago, rushing into the White House with promises to price carbon, accelerate renewable energy technology and participate in a worldwide effort against global warming.

He was a champion to environmentalists and sometimes described the atmospheric impacts of unregulated emissions as a threat to his own family. Global warming, he said in 2007, is not "a someday problem; it is now."

But the legislative remedy would have to wait. Now, nearly two years into Obama's term, the president's climate image has changed. He is no longer a champion to some, and others are astonished at his administration's unenthusiastic support of a climate bill in the Senate this year. It failed without a vote.

Climate Forecasters Should Share Studies More to Help, Science Body Says

Climate researchers need to do a better job of sharing their studies to raise the effectiveness of their findings for insurance companies and farmers, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences said.

The research community should increase collaboration with the public by holding workshops and through researcher exchanges with weather centers, The National Academy of Science said in a report on its website. Establishing public archives of forecasts would improve transparency, it said.

Study: Irrigation affecting global warming

NEW YORK (UPI) -- Expanding irrigation is helping feed the world's billions of people and may even mask global warming, but the future could bring problems, scientists say.

Columbia University researchers say some major groundwater aquifers, a source of irrigation water, will dry up in the future hitting people with the double blow of food shortages and higher temperatures, an article in the journal Geophysical Research says.

"Irrigation can have a significant cooling effect on regional temperatures, where people live," Michael Puma, a university hydrologist, says. "An important question for the future is what happens to the climate if the water goes dry and the cooling disappears? How much warming is being hidden by irrigation?"

Help your young child cope with their fear of tornados. Living at the end of tornado alley, this is a very real and valid fear for children to have.  Being calm yourself is the best way to help your child remain calm during storms. Planning ahead so that you know what you will do in event of a tornado in your area will help you to remain calm. Know where you will go and make sure all family members are aware of the plan. Have supplies on hand ahead of time.  The National Climatic Data Center has a searchable database if you would like to research the storm history of the area you...

Courtesy of NOAA The combined global land and ocean surface temperature made this July the second warmest on record, behind 1998, and the warmest averaged January-July on record. The global average land surface temperature for July and January-July was warmest on record. The global ocean surface temperature for July was the fifth warmest, and for January-July 2010 was the second warmest on record, behind 1998. The monthly analysis from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which is based on records going back to 1880, is part of the suite of climate services NOAA provides government, business and community leaders so they can make informed decisions. Global Temperature Highlights The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for July 2010 was the second warmest on record at 61.6°F (16.5°C), which is 1.19°F (0.66°C) above the 20th century average of 60.4°F (15.8°C). The averaged temperature for July 1998 was 61.7°F (16.5°C). The July worldwide land surface temperature was 1.85°F (1.03°C) above the 20th century average of 57.8°F (14.3°C) — the warmest July on record. Warmer-than-average conditions dominated land areas of the globe. The most prominent warmth was in Europe, western Russia and eastern Asia. Cooler-than-average regions included central Russia, Alaska and southern South America. According to the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Finland set a new all-time maximum temperature on July 29 when temperatures soared to 99.0°F (37.2°C), surpassing the previous record set in July 1914 by 2.3°F (1.3°C). Western Russia was engulfed by a severe heat wave during much of July. On July 30, Moscow set a new all-time temperature record when temperatures reached 102°F (39°C), exceeding the previous record of 99.0°F (37.2°C) set four days earlier. Before 2010, the highest maximum temperature recorded in Moscow was 98.2°F (36.8°C), set nine decades ago. According to the Beijing Climate Center, the July 2010 average temperature across China was 73.0°F (22.8°C), which is 2.5°F (1.4°C) above the 1971-2000 average and the warmest July since 1961. The worldwide ocean surface temperature was 0.97°F (0.54°C) above the 20th century average of 61.5°F (16.4°C) and the fifth warmest July on record. The warmth was most pronounced in the Atlantic Ocean. La Niña conditions developed during July 2010, as sea surface temperatures (SST) continued to drop across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. According to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, La Niña is expected to strengthen and last through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2010-2011. For the year-to-date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 58.1°F (14.5°C) was the warmest January-July period on record. This value is 1.22°F (0.68°C) above the 20th century average. Polar Sea Ice and Precipitation Highlights Arctic sea ice covered an average of 3.2 million square miles (8.4 million square kilometers) during July. This is 16.9 percent below the 1979-2000 average extent and the second lowest July extent since records began in 1979. The record low July was set in 2007. This was the 14th consecutive July with below-average Arctic sea ice extent. July 1996 was the last year that had above-average sea ice extent. Antarctic sea ice extent in July was above average, 4.8 percent above the 1979-2000 average — resulting in the largest July sea ice extent on record. According to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, the continent received an average of 34.4 mm (1.35 inches) of precipitation during July 2010 — this is 55 percent above the 1961-1990 average and the highest value since 1998. Source: NOAA

by Climate Central.

After a scorching summer thus far, this year remains on track to be one of the hottest on record, according to the latest analysis from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center. The global land and ocean surface temperature data show that this July was the second warmest on record, and the period of January-July was the hottest since records began in the 1880s.

The combined global land and surface temperature for July came in at 61.6 degrees F, more than a degree warmer than the 20th century average, and only 0.1 degree F cooler than the warmest July on record, set in 1998. For land surface temperatures alone, it was the warmest July on record. The warmer-than-average global temperatures seen this year to date suggest 2010 could go into the history books as either the warmest, or at least one of the warmest, years on record.

According to one relevant measure, it already has. According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “The 12-month running mean of global temperature achieved a record high level during the past few months.” NASA’s analysis of global surface temperatures is in close agreement with NOAA’s data, finding that July was the fifth-warmest month on record, with the warmest January to July period. 

The exceptionally warm global temperatures seen through the first part of 2010 were maintained in July in spite of the presence of La Nina. which has brought cooler than average sea surface temperatures to the tropical Pacific. As La Nina continues through the second half of 2010, it could cool global average surface temperatures just enough to prevent this year from eclipsing 1998 as the hottest year since instrumental records began.

So far this year, 17 countries have set new national records for warmest-ever recorded temperatures, including Finland, Belarus, Columbia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, which saw the mercury rise to 128.3 degrees F on May 26. If verified, Pakistan’s record would stand as the warmest temperature on record in the continent of Asia.

NOAA’s report of global July temperatures was released just over a week after a similar report of U.S. national temperatures for July was made public. The U.S. also experienced above average temperatures last month, and it was ranked as the 17th warmest July on record for the country. The states of Delaware and Rhode Island, as well as a number of cities across the East Coast, experienced their hottest ever month during July, although some western regions of the country experienced below average July temperatures.

The release of the July and year-to-date information also comes in the midst of a number of extreme weather events occurring around the planet. In particular, the ongoing heat wave in Western Russia and the floods in Pakistan brought on by unusually intense monsoonal rainfall. Though these extreme weather events cannot be solely attributed to the climate’s long-term warming trend, studies show that the warming climate increases the odds of such extreme events.

“What we can say is that global warming has an effect on the probability and intensity of extreme events,” says the NASA press release. “This is true for precipitation as well as temperature, because the amount of water vapor that the air carries is a strong function of temperature.”

How weather patterns play out through the rest of the year remains to be seen. As evident in the comparison of the planet’s 10 warmest recorded years, however, 2010 is off to a remarkably warm start.

Related Links:

If killer weather is in our future, can we get better at predicting it?

Will BP and the White House become strange bedfellows in the Gulf?

2010’s extreme heat: A window on our future

WASHINGTON -- Earth is still feeling the heat, with last month the second-hottest July on record, and 2010 on track to be the hottest year ever. Globally, July's average temperature was 61.6 degrees, the National Climatic Data Center reported yesterday. Only July 1998 was hotter since record-keeping began...

WASHINGTON (August 13, 2010)--Last month was the second warmest July on record, and so far 2010 is on track to be the hottest year. Worldwide, the average temperature in July was 61.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the National Climatic Data Center reported Friday. Only July 1998 was hotter since recordkeeping ...

WASHINGTON — The Earth continues to feel the heat. Last month was the second warmest July on record, and so far 2010 remains on track to be the hottest year. Worldwide, the average temperature in July was 61.6 degrees Fahrenheit (16.5 Celsius), the National Climatic Data Center reported Friday ...

Trend continues with second hottest July on record WASHINGTON ? The Earth continues to feel the heat. Last month was the second warmest July on record, and so far 2010 remains on track to be the hottest year. Worldwide, the average temperature in July was 61.6 degrees Fahrenheit (16.5 Celsius), the National Climatic Data Center reported Friday. Only ... Read the original article on Gaea Times at : World experiences second hottest July on record, hottest first 7 months of year.

STOCKHOLM — An island of ice more than four times the size of Manhattan is drifting across the Arctic Ocean after breaking off from a glacier in Greenland.

Potentially in the path of this unstoppable giant are oil platforms and shipping lanes – and any collision could do untold damage. In a worst case scenario, large chunks could reach the heavily trafficked waters where another Greenland iceberg sank the Titanic in 1912.

It's been a summer of near biblical climatic havoc across the planet, with wildfires, heat and smog in Russia and killer floods in Asia. But the moment the Petermann glacier cracked last week – creating the biggest Arctic ice island in half a century – may symbolize a warming world like no other.

"It's so big that you can't prevent it from drifting. You can't stop it," said Jon-Ove Methlie Hagen, a glaciologist at the University of Oslo.

Few images can capture the world's climate fears like a 100-square- mile (260-sqare-kilometer) chunk of ice breaking off Greenland's vast ice sheet, a reservoir of freshwater that if it collapsed would raise global sea levels by a devastating 20 feet (6 meters).

The world's newest ice island already is being used as a powerful emblem in the global warming debate, with U.S. Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts suggesting it could serve as a home for climate change skeptics.

Researchers are in a scramble to plot the trajectory of the floating ice shelf, which is moving toward the Nares Strait separating Greenland's northwestern coast and Canada's Ellsemere Island.

If it makes it into the strait before the winter freeze – due to start next month – it would likely be carried south by ocean currents, hugging Canada's east coast until it enters waters busy with oil activities and shipping off Newfoundland.

"That's where it starts to become dangerous," said Mark Drinkwater, of the European Space Agency.

The Canadian Ice Service estimates the journey will take one to two years. It's likely to break up as it bumps into other icebergs and jagged islands. The fragments would be further ground down by winds and waves and would start to melt as they move into warmer waters.

"But the fragments may still be quite large," warned Trudy Wohlleben, a Canadian ice forecaster, who first spotted the massive chunk of ice on satellite images last Thursday.

The chunks of ice could be large enough to threaten Canada's offshore platforms in the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, said Wohlleben.

And, while it's possible to redirect smaller icebergs, by towing them or spraying them with water cannons, "I don't think they could do that with an iceberg this large," she said. "They would have to physically move the rig."

Moving an offshore platform is time-consuming and expensive – and very complicated in cases where they are fixed to the ocean floor.

While Greenland's glaciers break off thousands of icebergs into Arctic waters every year, scientists say this ice island is the biggest in the northern hemisphere since 1962.

It contains enough freshwater to keep the Hudson River flowing for more than two years, said Andreas Muenchow of the University of Delaware.

The drifting ice sheet is likely to remain at the heart of the global warming discussion during its journey.

While experts say it's difficult to directly tie the giant ice island to climate change because there are so many factors that affect glaciers in the area, the unusual event coincides with worrisome signs of warming in the Arctic.

Since 1970, temperatures have risen more than 4.5 degrees (2.5 degrees C) in much of the Arctic – much faster than the global average. In June the Arctic sea ice cover was at the lowest level for that month since records began in 1979, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The retreat of Greenland's glaciers, which has accelerated in recent years, is one of the least understood pieces of the climate puzzle.

A team of climate scientists who visited the Petermann glacier last year, expecting it to crack then, is now planning another trip within weeks.

"We did leave behind a couple of time-lapse cameras and 11 GPS (devices). Now we are scrambling to get up there and recover the data," said Jason Box, an expert on Greenland glaciers from the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University.

Box and two British researchers traveled to the glacier last year with Greenpeace activists who offered space aboard their ship, the Arctic Sunrise, to scientists studying climate change.

They were hoping to capture the event with cameras rolling, which would have been a powerful image just months before the Copenhagen climate talks that failed to produce a binding treaty to reduce heat-trapping gas emissions.

"It would have been nice if it had broken off last year," said Melanie Duchin, who led that Greenpeace expedition. "I mean ice melting, it doesn't get any simpler than that."

Still, she finds it ironic that the Petermann breakup coincides with another catastrophe linked to fossil fuels. The Arctic Sunrise is now in the Gulf of Mexico, surveying the massive oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

___

Associated Press Writer Rob Gillies in Toronto contributed to this report.

More on Climate Change

Global warming heats up a nuclear energy renaissance: Global warming and the BP oil spill have helped rehabilitate nuclear energy in the eyes of the public – and some environmentalists.

Public and political acceptance of nuclear power as a logical large-scale alternative to fossil fuel is higher than it has been in a generation. Once mainly associated with mishaps like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl – not to mention bumbling nuclear plant worker Homer Simpson – the energy source now has support from 62 percent of Americans, a Gallup Poll found in March. That's the highest since Gallup began asking about the topic in 1994.

Even former foes like Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and an alternative-energy crusader, and Mark Udall, a member of the Udall family Democratic political dynasty that has stewarded natural resources, are rethinking the nuclear energy option. They're influenced more by the immediately tangible environmental consequences of greenhouse gases than by possible radiation disasters.

U.K. to Open First New Nuclear Power Station in 2018, Secretary Huhne Says

Britain’s first new nuclear power station will open in 2018, Energy Secretary Chris Huhne said, denying the country will miss its own carbon-reduction targets because of delays over planning permission.

“We’re on course,” Huhne told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” show. “We have very clear signals from investors that they are going ahead. I’ve absolutely no intention of the lights going out on my watch.”

Oil Rises First Time in Four Days on Optimism Over U.S. Economic Recovery

Crude oil rose for the first time in four days as advancing equity markets buoyed confidence that the economic rebound will stimulate fuel demand.

Hedge funds last week boosted their holdings of crude oil futures and options to the highest level in 13 weeks in a bet that Tropical Storm Bonnie would delay imports to states along the Gulf of Mexico, reducing supplies. The dollar traded close to a three-month low against the euro, enhancing the appeal of commodities for hedging against inflation.

Atlantic Low Pressure Area Has 70% Chance of Becoming Cyclone in 48 Hours

A low pressure area about 1,100 miles (1,770 kilometers) east-northeast of the Leeward Islands has a 70 percent chance of becoming a tropical cyclone during the next 48 hours, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Iran Sanctions Make China, Russia Winners While Reliance Loses

Sanctions punishing Iran for its nuclear program are deepening the country’s ties with China and handing Russia opportunities to sell more gasoline while hurting suppliers in Europe and India.

ENOC patent ensures smooth flow of revenue

Scientists at Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC) have catapulted the government-owned oil and gas outfit to the cutting edge of invention, leading to its first US patent.

ENOC was awarded the patent for a pioneering method of preserving jet fuel that is designed to save airlines and refineries billions of dollars.

Peak Oil – the Chinese Contribution PT 3

But this is only the start of the troubles to come. Like the west, China cannot serve its own energy needs without importing energy (oil and coal) from elsewhere. In the case of oil, we are now at the peak of production – in the next few years, supplies will start to drop, and this drop will accelerate. China, with its booming economy, will be demanding more and more of what is becoming less and less. Some people may remember the 1973 oil crisis, when Americans were coming to Canada to fill up their tanks because of the gas shortages at home. Imagine this on a world scale, where the gas shortages are coming from North America and China, who together want more than the market can supply. Each party, quite naturally, wants “energy security.”

Currently the US is trying to achieve energy security. Thousands of its young people have died in an unwinnable fight to the death called Iraq. The worst case is that the US will continue its fight for energy security, not only in Iraq, but also in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, possibly even Alberta. The Chinese, meanwhile, would invent a “need” to liberate the Iranians and their neighbours. The result: two concurrent Gulf Wars. The cost, both in human lives and the materials we need to live with: don’t even ask. And the winner: nobody, even assuming that the Chinese and the Americans don’t go to war with each other directly.

Testing to begin on burst oil pipe to fouled Kalamazoo River

The National Transportation Safety Board took possession Sunday of pieces of a damaged crude oil pipeline whose rupture caused a massive spill into the Kalamazoo River.

The federal agency is investigating the cause of the July 25 spill at its labs in Virginia but is not likely to release a report for 12 to 18 months, said Susan Hedman, the regional administrator with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Chicago.

BP oil spill response costs hit $6.1 bln

LONDON (AFP) – BP has spent 6.1 billion dollars in response to the huge Gulf of Mexico oil spill, it said on Monday, but the amount is set to spiral on expected massive compensation payouts.

"The cost of the response to date amounts to approximately 6.1 billion dollars (4.6 billion euros)," the group said in an official statement.

Hurricane could bring bureaucratic delays to Gulf

WASHINGTON – If a hurricane hits the Gulf Coast and whips up oil from BP's massive spill, cleanup workers will not be able to swoop into action to fix the mess. A new Obama administration edict requires that the oil be tested before it can be cleaned, according to a response plan obtained by The Associated Press.

The extra step is supposed to make it easier for the government to get reimbursed if a hurricane slings oil from the Gulf of Mexico into backyards, neighborhoods and wetlands.

But it also could cause frustrating additional delays and prevent residents from returning to their homes while the government figures out who pays the bill.

Deep-water drilling ban is hurting related businesses

GALVESTON, Texas — The effect of the government's moratorium on deep-water oil and gas drilling is evident here at an almost deserted boat dock.

Normally, two or three boats that service offshore oil rigs would be here, getting equipment or repairs. On a recent Saturday, there was one. Craig Marston, general manager of the 80-employee Malin International Ship Repair, didn't have any oil-related clients scheduled to come in. Instead, he's bracing for a 30% to 40% drop in business in the next few weeks as the full impact of the moratorium, in its third month, sets in.

US urges more study of sea damage after BP spill

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US officials urged further study of the damage to sea life wreaked by BP's broken well in the Gulf of Mexico, and warned that the energy giant would face a "large financial penalty."

White House energy chief Carol Browner declined to say if criminal charges could be brought, as the US Justice Department continues to investigate the causes of the spill that unleashed the worst maritime oil disaster in history.

Washington vows no slack-off in Gulf oil cleanup

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The government vowed on Sunday that operations to completely clean up BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill and compensate those affected would not slacken off despite the success in halting the leak.

Some Gulf Coast beaches and fisheries were reopening after the world's worst offshore oil accident, as optimism grew for a final kill of the blown-out BP well this month, the top U.S. spill response official said on Sunday news shows.

Crabs provide evidence of oil tainting Gulf food web

BARATARIA, La. — To assess how heavy a blow the BP (BP) oil spill has dealt the Gulf of Mexico, researchers are closely watching a staple of the seafood industry and primary indicator of the ecosystem's health: the blue crab.

Weeks ago, before engineers pumped in mud and cement to plug the gusher, scientists began finding specks of oil in crab larvae plucked from waters across the Gulf coast.

The government said last week that three-quarters of the spilled oil has been removed or naturally dissipated from the water. But the crab larvae discovery was an ominous sign that crude had already infiltrated the Gulf's vast food web — and could affect it for years to come.

Insurance Companies Find There Is Money to Be Made in Green Technology

HONG KONG — Every day, national and local officials, municipal utilities, corporations, homeowners and consumers are weighing the risks and rewards of adopting renewable energy. The up-front costs can be daunting.

Sure, putting solar panels on my house might be good for Mother Earth and could save me money in the long term, but what if they break in two years and I’m out $5,000 before I have recouped my investment?

Unfortunately, good karma points are not going to pay the power bill. But insurance might.

Increasingly, insurers are stepping in to bridge the gap between green intentions and actual capital outlays on green technology.

Australia: What's black and white and green all over?

Even as political parties waver on setting targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a unique Green Magpies program is helping small and medium enterprises (SME) take the lead by adopting sustainable practices to save costs and expand their enterprise.

Airports handled fewer passengers worldwide in 2009

Air traffic worldwide fell 1.8% last year to 4.8 billion arriving and departing passengers, according to a report last week by the Airports Council International. The decline was more pronounced in North America (down 5.2%) and Europe (down 5.4%). But the emerging markets in the Middle East (up 7.7%), Asia-Pacific (up 4.9%) and Latin America-Caribbean (up 1.5%) maintained growth.

Intra-country traffic was flat around the world, but international traffic dropped 3.9%, ACI says, based on data from 1,350 airports.

Dubai peak demand for power rises

Dubai’s peak electricity demand last month was 9.6 per cent higher than in July of last year, despite sluggish economic growth.

Smart grid to recharge electricity industry

The Abu Dhabi Government’s efforts to transform the emirate’s electricity industry will create a multibillion-dollar market for goods such as solar panels and new computer software, power companies said yesterday.

The Abu Dhabi Distribution Company (ADDC), the emirate’s main electricity retailer, will by the end of the year install advanced electricity meters in every home in the capital and surrounding areas, said Abdulrahman al Dhaheri, the deputy managing director. At the same time, he said, the company had proposed a subsidy system for rooftop solar panels that was now under consideration by the Executive Council.

Capital to mark gains in meters

Electricity meters could start running backwards as soon as next year in Abu Dhabi as the Government lays the groundwork for a more advanced power grid and weighs incentives for rooftop solar panels.

The new infrastructure, disclosed yesterday by the emirate’s main electricity supplier, will allow owners of buildings and homes to sell power back to the grid at a guaranteed price and paves the way for Abu Dhabi to host one of the most advanced, or “smart”, electricity grids in the world, experts said.

Deregulated electricity prices lead to conservation

David Case says energy conservation has become a priority in his Upper Gwynedd home. The bedroom air conditioning units, operated less than usual, are turned on at night while the living room units are turned off.

The procedure reverses itself during the day, according to Case. He said the family has purchased several low wattage light bulbs, and has gotten into the habit of turning off lights that are not in use. They only do full loads of laundry, as well.

Case and his family are bracing for an electricity rate hike in less than five months. Beginning Jan. 1, a projected 10 percent increase for all PECO clients will add approximately $8 to the monthly bill for the average residential customer, according to Karen Muldoon Geus, the company's director of communications.

Collapsible bike enjoys resurgence

After a brief heyday, collapsible bicycles largely disappeared - mercifully, say many. But they are having a revival of sorts in some European metropolises because they are a convenient mode of transport. But today’s models bear little similarity to their predecessors. At the same time, they have yet to achieve the popularity of the first collapsible bicycles.

State laws kill buzz of home brews

When the 2010 Oregon State Fair opens on Aug. 27, there won't be an amateur beer-brewers competition for the first time in 22 years.

An overlooked, 80-year-old statute that says Oregon home-brewed beer can't leave the home has forced fair organizers to cancel the competition, which had 335 entrants last year, says Oregon Liquor Control Commission spokeswoman Christie Scott.

Green living: Off the grid families pioneer sustainable energy lifestyles

Once on the fringe, about 750,000 off the grid American households pioneer green living by tapping sustainable energy from the wind, sun, and earth.

Green living: Sustainable design is Big Thunder's big payoff

This was the year the dream finally came completely true at "Big Thunder," the house that John Sagebiel and Mary Cablk built.

Seven years after moving in, they figure the $40,000 they invested in sustainable architecture and solar energy has finally been recouped in the savings they've had in heating, cooling, and powering their two-story, 3,200-square-foot home outside Reno, Nev.

Green living: tapping geothermal energy for a home HVAC system

Even after several decades working with geothermal-energy pioneer James Bose at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Gerald McClain sounds like a kid in a candy shop as he describes his new home's geothermal heating and cooling system.

"It's exciting. It's like you're discovering something new," he says.

Thanks in part to Dr. Bose's influence, Oklahoma has become a national leader in geothermal heating and cooling (not to be confused with geothermal power generation).

Green living: This solar home is completely off the grid

During the long, frigid winters of Michigan's remote Upper Peninsula, the sun makes a frail arc low in the sky for only about seven hours – hardly ideal for a solar-powered house in the woods. But when Bob and Cynthia Pryor decided to build a home here in 1993, the local utility company told them there was "no way," in Cynthia's words, they'd extend a line to the cabin off a tiny dirt road. The only option was to go off the grid with solar or wind power.

Green living: Wind turbines power a Bronx apartment complex

Like many New Yorkers who live cheek by jowl in rented concrete spaces many times removed from the energy sources that power the city, plumber Ivan Crespo says he used to "look the other way" when confronted with news about environmental issues and climate change. But since moving into the Eltona Apartments in the Bronx last fall, he feels he's finally taken a stake in the environment. That's largely because of the 10 eight-foot-tall wind turbines mounted on parapets atop the five-story building – an experiment in urban wind power that developers hope could become a national model.

Greens push for passenger rail

The Australian Greens are pushing for more southern Tasmanians to have access to rail as a means of public transport.

The State Government is already considering a business case for a light rail system between Hobart and the northern suburbs.

Reducing New Mexico’s carbon emissions = economic sense

Recovering and restoring local food and energy production requires a conscious transformation and set of ecological and economic leaps for our communities. In recognizing the links between health, food, fuel scarcity and poverty, energy, and green jobs, we can address the global challenge of climate change and peak oil and the economic and health challenges afflicting New Mexico. I urge you to support the carbon cap as an effective economic and policy stimulus.

Peak Oil? Yes! Peak Food? I Don’t Think So!

How do you know that the stories were not planted in the corporate media so that people would be scared into accepting the Monsanto "solution" for food crises? So often, corporations/governments create the problem e.g. 9-11, so they can propose their solution e.g. global war on terror and clamp down of dissent. And you know that so much of the media is under corporate control that the fact that so many stories came out at the same time should be a big RED flag.

I believe Peak Oil because oil is a finite resource whose decline has been measured over time. Food is not the same beast that oil is. Production levels are variable; a potato field can yield more a season after a bad harvest, whereas once an oil field is in decline, it won't produce at higher levels later on. We have ready alternatives for food production: We can go back to the organic production methods we had before WWII. No need to invent anything new.

How Will Small Businesses Survive Peak Oil?

From Yahoo to Virgin, big business is waking up to the threat of peak oil. So much so, that Virgin bross Richard Branson believes we should be mobilizing for peak oil as if for war. But what about the little guy? It's often assumed that because peak oil will make global shipping a challenge, that we'll just transition back to smaller, more local economies. I suspect the truth will be a little more complicated than that.

Finding New Life (and Profit) in Doomed Trees

A four-year-old business in Seattle is beating the recessionary odds by building furniture from trees doomed by development, disease or storms.

Russia’s climate problem is our problem

This is a story of unfolding extremes. Extreme high and lows, heat and cold, rain and drought – however you want to measure it. So as central Russia and Ukraine (and earlier India) burn, we have Pakistan and parts of China dealing with the worst flooding in 80 years.

That’s just in parts of the northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere, Argentina, Peru, Brazil and Chile are experiencing record cold and snowfall.

But even with these cooler temperatures in the south, 2010 is on track to surpass 1998 as the world’s hottest year on record. This has been confirmed by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Spaces Studies and the U.S. National Climatic Data Center. Who knows what the rest of the year, or the new few years, will bring now that the sun is entering a period of higher solar activity?

China, Pakistan Brace for Rain Amid Floods, Landslide as Russia Fires Rage

“Weather patterns are becoming more extreme,” said Greg Smith, founder of Global Commodities Ltd. with A$200 million ($184 million) under management. “You would expect these events to be rarer -- they tend to be clustering more often,” he said from Adelaide, Australia today.

King Coal's Pyrrhic victory

The US experience has wider implications. If it proved impossible to introduce a moderate carbon tax in a rich economy, it is certain that no commitment will be forthcoming for the next generation from China, which remains much poorer and depends even more on indigenous coal than the US. And, after China, India looms as the next emerging coal-based industrial superpower.

Africa: Mass Migration As a Result of Environmental Changes

Climate change is provoking mass human migration. According to scientists, 50 million people worldwide will be displaced this year because of rising sea levels, desertification, dried up aquifers, weather-induced flooding, and other severe environmental changes.

A joint study by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre shows that in 2008 climate-related natural disasters forced 20 million people out of their homes. Research conducted by the Red Cross shows that more people today migrate due to environmental disaster than because of violent conflict.

AFRICA: Adaptation strategy hit parade

JOHANNESBURG (IRIN) - Crops that mature faster and are tolerant of more frequent and intense droughts top the list of how most countries adapt their food production to climate change, says a new paper.

Global warming may require higher dams, stilts

WASHINGTON (AP) — With the world losing the battle against global warming so far, experts are warning that humans need to follow nature's example: Adapt or die. That means elevating buildings, making taller and stronger dams and seawalls, rerouting water systems, restricting certain developments, changing farming practices and ultimately moving people, plants and animals out of harm's way.

Adapting to rising seas and higher temperatures is expected to be a big topic at the UN climate-change talks in Copenhagen next week, along with the projected cost, hundreds of billions of dollars, much of it going to countries that cannot afford it. That adaptation will be a major focus is remarkable in itself.

Until the past couple of years, experts avoided talking about adjusting to global warming for fear of sounding fatalistic or causing countries to back off efforts to reduce emissions.

Do you have a passion for graphic art and communicating science? Have worked with a government agency? This may be the job for you!

 

Our position of Lead Designer may be in Silver Spring, MD or Asheville, NC and would serve the Communication and Education (CommEd) team of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Program Office, based in Silver Spring, MD. Asheville, NC is home to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, the world’s largest climate data archive, hence the opportunity to work from Asheville.

 

This job would entail:

 

·        Guiding the evolution of CommEd’s visual style in collaboration with the Visualization Project Manager and CommEd Director.

·        Developing media—primarily visual—for climate.gov, a web site and portal. The portal provides unique interfaces for distinct audiences based on information-seeking behavior.

·        Working with the layout of each section and visual style of component elements paying attention to the varied interests, expectations, and ability of each audience type to comprehend climate concepts.

·        Formulating a consistent look and feel to maps, information graphics, rendered visualizations, virtual globes, and visualizations designed for spherical display systems such as Science on a Sphere®.

 

The ideal candidate would have:

 

·        Experience with 3d and 2d rendering, audio and video editing, preparing video for web streaming, video compression, and scripting languages for large data processing.

·        5 years work experience and an M.A. in graphic art or demonstrated professional equivalent required.

·        Experience and a portfolio highlighting layout, design, and media production for the web.

·        Demonstrated aptitude and experience working with scientific data.

·        Demonstrated experience working in diverse groups to design and produce media.

 

2020 Company is an innovative and fast paced government and IT consulting firm with an impressive roster of clients. 2020 Company was recently nominated by Washington Technology as being one of the Top 10 fastest growing government contractors in the area - 3 years in a row.

2020 Company takes pride in a positive and friendly atmosphere with the drive to succeed. We are looking for people who will contribute to our culture with a positive attitude and the ability to multitask and problem solve. We offer competitive salaries and unbeatable benefits. Come join us!

 

To learn about our company history, goals and team members go to www.2020llc.com.

 

Please visit http://jobs-2020llc.icims.com/jobs/1673/job to view this job description. To apply, scroll to the bottom of the screen and create a profile.

We look forward to speaking with you!

From the National Climatic Data Center at the Department of Commerce report State of the Climate in 2009, the opening paragraph of the Report at a Glance:

A comprehensive review of key climate indicators confirms the world is warming and the past decade was the warmest on record. More than 300 scientists from 48 countries analyzed data on 37 climate indicators, including sea ice, glaciers and air temperatures. A more detailed review of 10 of these indicators, selected because they are clearly and directly related to surface temperatures, all tell the same story: global warming is undeniable. [emphasis added]

Let's be honest, though. This is just the conclusion. Any (and I mean this sincerely) curious person has to ask some questions about that paragraph, if only to fill in the blanks. The report mentions 10 "key indicators." What sorts of "indicators" are we talking about? And what's the evidence for each?

The ten indicators are:

• Air Temperature Near Surface (Troposphere). Seven data sets.
• Humidity. Three data sets.
• Temperature Over Oceans. Five data sets.
• Sea Surface Temperatures. Six data sets.
• Sea Level. Six data sets.
• Ocean Heat Content. Seven data sets.
• Temperature Over Land. Four data sets.
• Sea Ice. Three data sets.
• Glaciers. Four data sets.
• Snow Cover. Two data sets.

If you click on the links you'll find a multi-colored graph that describes the data as well as a reference to the source of the data itself. The report goes on to say that the first seven of these are increasing and the last three are decreasing.

But isn't it possible for the data sets for each indicator to, you know, overlap? Because if six sets all copy the seventh and the seventh is flawed, then you really only have one flawed set masquerading as seven that all conveniently corroborate each other.

That's correct, my young Jedi, it is possible. Only in this case, the text on the page summarizing all the graphs reads:

The panels on this page show changes in climate indicators over several decades. Each of the different colored lines in each panel represents an independently analyzed set of data. The data come from many different technologies including weather stations, satellites, weather balloons, ships and buoys. [emphasis added]

Now before someone from the Trib screams Climategate!, let me quote something Chapter 2 of the full report, titled How Do We Know The World Has Warmed?

Although the IPCC AR4 concluded that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” public debate over the evidence for global warming continues. However, it is often confined to a small set of reiterated disputes about Land Surface Air Temperature (LSAT)records, diverting attention from the broader evidence basis.

The methods used to derive the principal estimates of global sur face temperature trends — HadCRUT3 (Brohan et al. 2006), NOA A (Smith et al. 2008), and NASA/GISS (Hansen et al. 2001)—are largely independent. So, the spread of the three estimates indicates the likely degree of uncertainty in the evolution of the global mean surface temperature.

And then a little bit later:

The IPCC conclusion (Alley et al. 2007) that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” does not rest solely upon LSAT records. These constitute only one line of evidence among many, for example: uptake of heat by the oceans, melting of land ice such as glaciers, the associated rise in sea level, and increased atmospheric surface humidity. If the land surface records were systematically flawed and the globe had not really warmed, then it would be almost impossible to explain the concurrent changes in this wide range of indicators produced by many independent groups. The observed changes in a broad range of indicators provide a self-consistent story of a warming world. [emphasis added.]

Undeniable.

WASHINGTON — Scientists from around the world are providing even more evidence of global warming, one day after President Barack Obama renewed his call for climate legislation.

"A comprehensive review of key climate indicators confirms the world is warming and the past decade was the warmest on record," the annual State of the Climate report declares.

Compiled by more than 300 scientists from 48 countries, the report said its analysis of 10 indicators that are "clearly and directly related to surface temperatures, all tell the same story: Global warming is undeniable."

Concern about rising temperatures has been growing in recent years as atmospheric scientists report rising temperatures associated with greenhouse gases released into the air by industrial and other human processes. At the same time, some skeptics have questioned the conclusions.

The new report, the 20th in a series, focuses only on global warming and does not specify a cause.

"The evidence in this report would say unequivocally yes, there is no doubt," that the Earth is warming, said Tom Karl, the transitional director of the planned NOAA Climate Service.

Deke Arndt, chief of the Climate Monitoring Branch at the National Climatic Data Center, noted that the 1980s was the warmest decade up to that point, but each year in the 1990s was warmer than the '80s average.

That makes the '90s the warmest decade, he said.

But each year in the 2000s has been warmer than the '90s average, so the first 10 years of the 2000s is now the warmest decade on record.

The new report noted that continuing warming will threaten coastal cities, infrastructure, water supply, health and agriculture.

"At first glance, the amount of increase each decade – about a fifth of a degree Fahrenheit – may seem small," the report said.

"But," it adds, "the temperature increase of about 1 degree Fahrenheit experienced during the past 50 years has already altered the planet. Glaciers and sea ice are melting, heavy rainfall is intensifying and heat waves are becoming more common and more intense."

Last month was the warmest June on record and this year has had the warmest average temperature for January-June since record keeping began, NOAA reported last week.

And a study by Princeton University researchers released Monday suggested that continued warming could cause as many as 6.7 million more Mexicans to move to the United States because of drought affecting crops in their country.

The new climate report, released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and published as a supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, focused on 10 indicators of a warming world, seven which are increasing and three declining.

Rising over decades are average air temperature, the ratio of water vapor to air, ocean heat content, sea surface temperature, sea level, air temperature over the ocean and air temperature over land.

Indicators that are declining are snow cover, glaciers and sea ice.

The 10 were selected "because they were the most obviously related indicators of global temperature," explained Peter Thorne of the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, who helped develop the list when at the British weather service, known as the Met Office.

"What this data is doing is, it is screaming that the world is warming," Thorne concluded.

___

Online

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/bams-state-of-the-climate

More on Climate Change

(AP) Scientists from around the world are providing even more evidence of global warming, one day after President Barack Obama renewed his call for climate legislation.

"A comprehensive review of key climate indicators confirms the world is warming and the past decade was the warmest on record," the annual State of the Climate report declares.

Compiled by more than 300 scientists from 48 countries, the report said its analysis of 10 indicators that are "clearly and directly related to surface temperatures, all tell the same story: Global warming is undeniable."

Concern about rising temperatures has been growing in recent years as atmospheric scientists report rising temperatures associated with greenhouse gases released into the air by industrial and other human processes. At the same time, some skeptics have questioned the conclusions.

The new report, the 20th in a series, focuses only on global warming and does not specify a cause.

"The evidence in this report would say unequivocally yes, there is no doubt," that the Earth is warming, said Tom Karl, the transitional director of the planned NOAA Climate Service.

Deke Arndt, chief of the Climate Monitoring Branch at the National Climatic Data Center, noted that the 1980s was the warmest decade up to that point, but each year in the 1990s was warmer than the '80s average.

That makes the '90s the warmest decade, he said.

But each year in the 2000s has been warmer than the '90s average, so the first 10 years of the 2000s is now the warmest decade on record.

The new report noted that continuing warming will threaten coastal cities, infrastructure, water supply, health and agriculture.

"At first glance, the amount of increase each decade - about a fifth of a degree Fahrenheit - may seem small," the report said.

"But," it adds, "the temperature increase of about 1 degree Fahrenheit experienced during the past 50 years has already altered the planet. Glaciers and sea ice are melting, heavy rainfall is intensifying and heat waves are becoming more common and more intense."

Last month was the warmest June on record and this year has had the warmest average temperature for January-June since record keeping began, NOAA reported last week.

And a study by Princeton University researchers released Monday suggested that continued warming could cause as many as 6.7 million more Mexicans to move to the United States because of drought affecting crops in their country.

The new climate report, released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and published as a supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, focused on 10 indicators of a warming world, seven which are increasing and three declining.

Rising over decades are average air temperature, the ratio of water vapor to air, ocean heat content, sea surface temperature, sea level, air temperature over the ocean and air temperature over land.

Indicators that are declining are snow cover, glaciers and sea ice.

The 10 were selected "because they were the most obviously related indicators of global temperature," explained Peter Thorne of the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, who helped develop the list when at the British weather service, known as the Met Office.

"What this data is doing is, it is screaming that the world is warming," Thorne concluded.

• added by: TimALoftis  
• 4 comments

Dr. David Easterling of the NOAA's National Climatic Data Center explains why the current heatwave afflicting the United States and elsewhere may be an accurate indicator of things to come.

NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) posted its State of the Climate, Global Analysis report for June last week. The news? It was hot , hotter than it should be, hotter than anyone (who doesn’t believe in climate change) could have ever guessed it would be, and it continued to break major heat records . (more…)

NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) posted its State of the Climate, Global Analysis report for June last week. The news? It was hot, hotter than it should be, hotter than anyone (who doesn’t believe in climate change) could have ever guessed it would be, and it continued to break major heat records.

Read more of this story »

June 2010 has gone on record as the hottest June since temperatures have been documented, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The scientific body’s National Climatic Data Center records go back to 1880 and also show the January-June and April-June periods to be the warmest ever recorded.

Though temperatures were warmer than average throughout much of the globe, Peru, central and eastern US and both eastern and western Asia experienced the most markedly hotter temperatures. Southern China, Scandinavia and the northwestern US were actually cooler than average, as was Spain.

READ MORE HERE

...