Global Climate Change Science News

[Seth]

Wyoming, guns. Solution to all!


Move 41 million Liberians to Wyoming: no more ebola. Well, if there are any, just shoot them.

Don't need guns. Move them to Wyoming about now and by spring they will all be frozen to death.

[macdoc]

Quite a string of record months ....2014 must on track for hottest none El Nino tho I swear it's a Nino weather pattern just now.

NASA saying hottest 6 months

The hottest six months in history? April to September 2014 were the warmest since records began, Nasa claims

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... z3GBTWLGFO

Good article covers off the drought status in California as well. Better than usual for the Mail

The April anomaly in Siberia is astonishing....no wonder methane caverns are popping their corks...



7.9 C above normal !!!

[Seth]

Quit worrying about "global warming" because Ebola is going to kill you long before AGW could possibly do so.

[Tero]

No, only 70% of us. Might as well get infected now Seth. Adapt or die!

[macdoc]

Got love Seth's risk management sense.

[Seth]

No, only 70% of us. Might as well get infected now Seth. Adapt or die!

I am adapting. I understand sterile procedure and infection control and I have the equipment to do everything possible to avoid getting infected.

What have you done so far?

[Tero]

I avoided travel. My vacation days are used up, so only a road trip for a weekend. I take no precautions touching door handles or gas pumps.

[Seth]

I avoided travel. My vacation days are used up, so only a road trip for a weekend. I take no precautions touching door handles or gas pumps.

Too bad, because your risk for catching something is significantly higher because you don't think about pathogen transmission when touching heavily-used public surfaces.

My policy is if I can avoid touching a door altogether, I will. If I can't, I try to open it using an unusual (high or low) spot using the non-dominant hand and as few fingers as possible. If I can't do that, I go ahead and open the door and then make note that I need to sanitize my hands as soon as possible and I consciously avoid touching my face or clothing as much as possible until I have.

It's not paranoia, it's rational risk analysis and mitigation. I'm not pulling a Howard Huges, I'm just trying to remain cognizant of the potential for disease transmission in everyday objects and I avoid unnecessary exposure when it's reasonable to do so.

If you don't learn it now, when it becomes critical to preventing you from getting Ebola, you'll fuck it up.

[macdoc]

and you live where??

Right in the middle of hantavirus turf and you are worried about ebola....

Now lets ask the nice mod to move the OT comments to the existing Ebola thread and leave this for climate science....

[Seth]

and you live where??

Right in the middle of hantavirus turf and you are worried about ebola....

And you don't think I don't know that and act accordingly?

Now lets ask the nice mod to move the OT comments to the existing Ebola thread and leave this for climate science....

Or not.

[macdoc]

Buffalo’s Climate Change Driven Mega Snow-Flood
Earlier this week something rather interesting and disturbing happened to the Jet Stream.

In the extreme northwest, a large heat pool over Alaska and the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean kept temperatures in the range of 10 to 36 degrees Fahrenheit above average. To the south, a powerful super typhoon, gorged on Pacific Ocean waters ranging from 1-2 C hotter than normal, raced into the extratropical region of the Central and Northern Pacific. And to the north and east, the cold core that normally resides over the North Pole began slipping south.

Arctic Anomaly Map



(Massive warm air invasion of the Arctic earlier this week led to a major polar vortex disruption driving cold air out of the Arctic and setting off record snowfall in the region of Buffalo, New York. Image source: Climate Reanalyzer.)

As the supertyphoon’s remnants hit the warm weakness in the Jet Stream near Alaska, it bombed out into a monster extra-tropical low. This kicked warm air even further north, causing a whiplash in the Jet and driving the cold air core south over Canada.

Cold air rocketed down over the relatively warm waters of the Great Lakes. These waters, having soaked up the heat of yet another hotter than average American October and early November, squeezed an epic amount of moisture and storm feeding energy out into the air. Over the past two days, the result was as kind of thundersnow storm that parked itself in one location, dumping foot after foot of snow. By the time the final tally was counted this morning, as much as 8 feet had fallen over Buffalo New York. A record amount never before seen in so short a time span and yet so far ahead of winter.

More than seven deaths, multiple building collapses, a paralyzation of transportation, and extraordinary damages prompted the New York State governor to declare a state of emergency.

Yes, Climate Change Has Put the Weather on Steroids

All these events occurred in the context of a climate increasingly distorted by human-caused warming. The Northern Hemisphere during this week has averaged over 1 degree C hotter than normal. And the Arctic has averaged at around 2.5 degrees C hotter than normal.

In this mix of climate change driven extreme weather soup, that warming Arctic is critical. It provided the weakness in the Jet Stream for a supertyphoon’s remnants to exploit. It provided a wobbly polar vortex all too ready to make another charge south over North America. And the super-hot equatorial waters of the Pacific added yet more energy to this stoked and building climate fire.

Cold Snow to Turn to Warm Flood

But the tale of climate change driven extreme weather isn’t over by a long shot. The cold dipole which drove over the Great Lakes earlier this week was anything but stable. Now, warmth is surging north over the US heartland springing up from the hot pools of the Gulf of Mexico and the Eastern Pacific. It is producing a warm frontal boundary that is now driving across the US heartland. By Saturday and Sunday, it will dump a warming rain over Buffalo’s 7-8 feet of snowpack.

Temperatures are expected to climb into a much warmer than normal range of 50 degrees F by Saturday. By Sunday, the heat will build to 15-20 degrees above average reaching as high as 60 degrees F in the forecast.

Buffalo Warm Up



(Sunday GFS model forecast shows temperatures at +15 to +20 degrees Fahrenheit above average for the Buffalo region. The added high temperatures are expected to coincide with rainfall and potential major flooding from the melt of a massive 8 feet of snow in some areas. Image source: Climate Reanalyzer. Note that global temperatures in both maps are in the range of 0.39 to 0.51 C above the already hotter than normal 1979 to 2000 average.)

The snow pack is first expected to ripen, then flood away under the rising heat and a half inch to two inches of rainfall. The impact to Buffalo’s infrastructure could again be quite extraordinary. Between 9 and 15 inches worth of liquid water are locked in all that snow. Its sudden release into a landscape of clogged storm drains and choked roads is expected to provide an extraordinary flood risk. And massive piles of snow over buildings collecting more water will increase further risk of building collapse.

As of now, the National Weather Service has posted a Flood Watch — which means extreme conditions may begin in as little as six hours.

Conditions in Context

Radical swings between weather extremes like those experienced by Buffalo this week are exactly the type of climate alterations we would expect as a result of human caused warming. These impacts occur in the context of a world that is now experiencing its hottest year on record globally. A place of increasingly intense droughts, rainfall, and snowfall events. A world in which the Northern Hemisphere Jet Stream is increasingly distended as air over the Arctic warms much faster than the rest of the globe.

Such extremes in weather have been predicted by climate scientists to result from human-caused warming. And we are beginning to see the start, the milder outliers, of these predicted extremes set off by the human heat forcing now. Further heightening Arctic warming, or worse, increasing cold water outflows from melting ice sheets over Greenland, will almost certainly set off far more extreme weather than what we are seeing now.

Message to climate change deniers — this serves as a warning to you. Turn back.

just for you Jerome....the massive forces at play don't give a damn about your muddled thiniking and only react to what you and the rest of us do.
Burn fossil fuels and alter the radiative balance of the planet.....

Move on.....

[Seth]

Buffalo’s Climate Change Driven Mega Snow-Flood

Oh gosh! Oh dear! Time to panic because Buffalo, NY got snowed on...not.

Record, epic snowfall? Yup. So what? Snowfall records mean very little in the microenvironment. Ten miles away, on either side of the lake-effect snow band, it was no biggie.

One record snowfall in one area does not prove anthropogenic global warming.

Sorry. Try again.

[cronus]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 120514.php

Study finds early warning signals of abrupt climate change

A new study by researchers at the University of Exeter has found early warning signals of a reorganisation of the Atlantic oceans' circulation which could have a profound impact on the global climate system.

The research, published today in the journal Nature Communications, used a simulation from a highly complex model to analyse the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), an important component of the Earth's climate system.

It showed that early warning signals are present up to 250 years before it collapses, suggesting that scientists could monitor the real world overturning circulation for the same signals.

The AMOC is like a conveyor belt in the ocean, driven by the salinity and temperature of the water. The system transports heat energy from the tropics and Southern Hemisphere to the North Atlantic, where it is transferred to the atmosphere.

Experiments suggest that if the AMOC is 'switched off' by extra freshwater entering the North Atlantic, surface air temperature in the North Atlantic region would cool by around 1-3°C, with enhanced cooling of up to 8°C in the worst affected regions.

The collapse would also encourage drought in the Sahel - the area just south of the Sahara desert - and dynamic changes in sea level of up to 80cm along the coasts of Europe and North America.

"We found that natural fluctuations in the circulation were getting longer-lived as the collapse was approached, a phenomenon known as critical slowing down," said lead author Chris Boulton.

(continued)

[PsychoSerenity]

Vast methane 'plumes' seen in Arctic ocean as sea ice retreats

Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane - a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.

The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.

[cronus]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30456869

Arctic ground squirrels unlock permafrost carbon

Arctic ground squirrels could play a greater role in climate change than was previously thought.

Scientists have found that the animals are hastening the release of greenhouse gases from the permafrost - a vast, frozen store of carbon.

The researchers say it suggests the impact of wildlife on this area has been underplayed.

The findings are being presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco.

Dr Sue Natali, from Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, US, said: "We know wildlife impacts vegetation, and we know vegetation impacts thaw and soil carbon.

"It certainly has a bigger impact than we've considered and it's something we will be considering more and more going into the future."

The Arctic permafrost, where deep layers of soil remain frozen all year round, covers nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere and contains a great deal of carbon.

Dr Natali explained: "Carbon has been accumulating in permafrost for tens of thousands of years. The temperature is very cold, the soils are saturated, so that when plants and animals die, rather than decompose, the carbon has been slowly, slowly building up.

"Right now the carbon storage is about 1,500 petagrams (1,500 billion tonnes). To put that in perspective, that's about twice as much as is contained in the atmosphere."

The fear is that as the planet warms, the permafrost will thaw, releasing even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and causing temperatures to rise further still.

However, Dr Natali said that until now there had been little research into the effect that animals could have on this system.

(continued)