Long-term global warming trend sustained in 2013

[macdoc]

Digging in...to move the conversation to what to do about it.....

Climate science
Inescapable truths
Feb 27th 2014, 15:12 by O.M.



THE National Academies of Science (NAS) and the Royal Society—the elite scientific fellowships of America and Britain, respectively, respectively—released today a rather handy “Frequently Asked Questions” resource on climate change. It seems designed to act as a sort of counterbalance to op-ed pieces like this one by Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, which take aim at “those scientists who pretend to know exactly what [carbon-dioxide emissions] will cause in 20, 30 or 50 years.”

The scientists of Mr Krauthammer’s scorn don’t actually exist: No one pretends to such precision. But no matter, Mr Krauthammer’s real complaint is more general. His target is anyone who believes that “science is settled”—a belief he tries to ascribe to Barack Obama. “There is nothing more anti-scientific,” he says, “than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge.”

This sounds good in a Popperian way; but it is not really true. While science is more unsettled than some feel comfortable admitting, it nevertheless depends on some things being settled irrevocably. The earth has a crust, a mantle and a core. Plants photosynthesise. Air is made of molecules. All these things were once not known and are now accepted as fundamental
And it was in among such fundamentals that the president put climate change when he said during his state-of-the-union speech that“The debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.”

more
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democrac ... te-science

[Gallstones]

It has been snowing nearly everyday for three weeks. We are running out of room to put the snow just shoveling the sidewalks. The county had to hire several contractors to use their large dump trucks to haul away snow from the streets. People have been getting stuck left and right. It went below zero (F) at about 1730 today and we are entering our third below zero cold snap. There was an avalanche in the city of Missoula late this afternoon--3 people rescued, two houses turned to rubble by the snow. I look at the hillside a block away and hope the snow doesn't all come down all at once. We have been breaking 35 year old records for snow and cold. Just a little of that global warming would be nice about now.

[FBM]

Between 1996, when I first came to Korea, and now, I would say that this year gave us the least snow and fewest really cold days. The first several years, there would be weeks when the snow wouldn't melt or would semi-melt and refreeze, leaving layers of ice 3~5 inches thick for a week or so at a time. Winter days now are rarely so cold as to be uncomfortable. The only time I put on gloves was a couple of times when I was outside for several hours after midnight, taking photos of stars and meteors. Not once did I even have to put the car in 4WD or use the snow chains I bought last year and also never used.

[macdoc]

Just a little of that global warming would be nice about now.

just move over a state or two...

Record High Temperatures Broken in California as Drought Worsens
http://www.wunderground.com/.../califor ... drough...‎
Record Warm Temperatures ... Santa Maria, Calif. also set an all-time January record high of 89 degrees on Thursday. ... Coast Highway is jammed in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2014, after a fire threatened ...

or go north

Arctic ‘Heat Wave’ to Rip Polar Vortex in Half, Shatter Alaska’s All-Time Record High for January?
62 Degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the all time record high for anywhere in the state of Alaska for the month of January. 57 Degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the temperature measured earlier this week in southern Alaska.

And forecasts call for warmer weather from Friday through Monday…

Across Alaska, temperatures are as much a 30 degrees above average for this time of year. This record winter warmth has pushed Alaska’s average temperature, according to reports from Anchorage, to 24 degrees Fahrenheit. By comparison, the lower 48, hundreds of miles to the south, is experiencing average temperatures of 22 degrees Fahrenheit. Though 24 degrees is not typically seen as a heat wave, readings in the upper 50s and lower 60s for Alaska in January may as well be. If these same temperature extremes were occurring during summer, some parts of Alaska would be experiencing a 90+ degree scorcher.

Mangled Jet Stream, Anomalous 10 Month Blocking Pattern to Blame

What we are witnessing is what amounts to a ten month long warm air invasion of the Arctic, with Alaska at ground zero. Human-caused global warming has resulted in an amplification of polar temperatures well above the typical average. Now the region is experiencing readings that range of 15-30 degrees warmer than normal.

http://robertscribbler.wordpress.com/20 ... r-january/

this is why

[macdoc]

Climate Change: Evidence & Causes
The Royal Society & National Academies of Science
Have produced a new report entitled: Climate Change: Evidence & Causes.
(there is an accompanying webcast as well).

Q & A addressed:
Is the climate warming?
How do scientists know that recent climate change is largely caused by human activities?
CO2 is already in the atmosphere naturally, so why are emissions from human activity significant?
What role has the Sun played in climate change in recent decades?
What do changes in the vertical structure of atmospheric temperature — from the surface up to the stratosphere — tell us about the causes of recent climate change?
Climate is always changing. Why is climate change of concern now?
Is the current level of atmospheric CO2 concentration unprecedented in Earth’s history?
Is there a point at which adding more CO2 will not cause further warming?
Does the rate of warming vary from one decade to another?
Does the recent slowdown of warming mean that climate change is no longer happening?
If the world is warming, why are some winters and summers still very cold?
Why is Arctic sea ice decreasing while Antarctic sea ice is not?
How does climate change affect the strength and frequency of floods, droughts, hurricanes, and tornadoes?
How fast is sea level rising?
What is ocean acidification and why does it matter?
How confident are scientists that Earth will warm further over the coming century?
Are climate changes of a few degrees a cause for concern?
What are scientists doing to address key uncertainties in our understanding of the climate system?
Are disaster scenarios about tipping points like ‘turning off the Gulf Stream’ and release of methane from the Arctic a cause for concern?
If emissions of greenhouse gases were stopped, would the climate return to the conditions of 200 years ago?
http://nas-sites.org/americasclimate...ce-and-causes/

A well put together information brochure designed to help address a lot of common questions and explain the basics of the scientific understandings about climate change while laying our the more compelling evidences supporting these understandings. It uses common language and is designed to help feed into public policy debate and discussions.

Additionally, the following NAS site links to a variety of other National Academies of Science pages dealing with a large variety of climate science studies and findings.
http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/

[macdoc]

To counter those that claim no predictive power.....
This nine year old analysis is spooky....look at the model and the reality

Climatologist Who Predicted California Drought 10 Years Ago Says It May Soon Be ‘Even More Dire’
BY JOE ROMM ON MARCH 7, 2014 AT 12:26 PM

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/0 ... a-drought/

and she says it's gonna get worse.

snip

First, though, as I’ve reported, scientists a decade ago not only predicted the loss of Arctic ice would dry out California, they also precisely predicted the specific, unprecedented change in the jet stream that has in fact caused the unprecedented nature of the California drought. Study co-author, Prof. Lisa Sloan, told me last week that, “I think the actual situation in the next few decades could be even more dire that our study suggested.”
Back in 2004, Sloan, professor of Earth sciences at UC Santa Cruz, and her graduate student Jacob Sewall published, “Disappearing Arctic sea ice reduces available water in the American west” (subs. req’d). They used powerful computers “to simulate the effects of reduced Arctic sea ice,” and “their most striking finding was a significant reduction in rain and snowfall in the American West.”
“Where the sea ice is reduced, heat transfer from the ocean warms the atmosphere, resulting in a rising column of relatively warm air,” Sewall said. “The shift in storm tracks over North America was linked to the formation of these columns of warmer air over areas of reduced sea ice.” In January, Sewall wrote me that “both the pattern and even the magnitude of the anomaly looks very similar to what the models predicted in the 2005 study (see Fig. 3a [below]).”
Here is what Sewall’s model predicted in his 2005 paper:

Figure 3a: Differences in DJF [winter] averaged atmospheric quantities due to an imposed reduction in Arctic sea ice cover. The 500-millibar geopotential height (meters) increases by up to 70 m off the west coast of North America. Increased geopotential height deflects storms away from the dry locus and north into the wet locus

and what actually is occurring ....the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge



Wow .....good science.....nasty outcome...interesting times.

[mistermack]

When you've got tens of thousands of climatologists, constantly spouting bollocks, you're bound to get some that are right, not by design, but by the law of averages.

When the ''science'' is able to predict the world climate, it might be worth listening.
At the moment, ten thousand monkeys with typewriters could do as well.

[macdoc]

Just because you choose to be deaf doesn't mean the rest of us are.

The 1981 prediction was about as good as it gets and your prescription is assinine as we cannot predict what fuck head humans will emit in terms of C02 so only ranges can be given. And we are nicely in those ranges and suffering the consequences as above that were predicted, wilder weather, more extremes and a warming world.

You don't read the science MM so you flounder in a bewildering fog of misconceptions of your own devising.

Evaluating a 1981 temperature projection
Filed under: Climate modelling Climate Science Greenhouse gases Instrumental Record — group @ 2 April 2012
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Guest commentary from Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and Rein Haarsma, KNMI

Sometimes it helps to take a step back from the everyday pressures of research (falling ill helps). It was in this way we stumbled across Hansen et al (1981) (pdf). In 1981 the first author of this post was in his first year at university and the other just entered the KNMI after finishing his masters. Global warming was not yet an issue at the KNMI where the focus was much more on climate variability, which explains why the article of Hansen et al. was unnoticed at that time by the second author. It turns out to be a very interesting read.

They got 10 pages in Science, which is a lot, but in it they cover radiation balance, 1D and 3D modelling, climate sensitivity, the main feedbacks (water vapour, lapse rate, clouds, ice- and vegetation albedo); solar and volcanic forcing; the uncertainties of aerosol forcings; and ocean heat uptake. Obviously climate science was a mature field even then: the concepts and conclusions have not changed all that much. Hansen et al clearly indicate what was well known (all of which still stands today) and what was uncertain.

Next they attribute global mean temperature trend 1880-1980 to CO2, volcanic and solar forcing. Most interestingly, Fig.6 (below) gives a projection for the global mean temperature up to 2100. At a time when the northern hemisphere was cooling and the global mean temperature still below the values of the early 1940s, they confidently predicted a rise in temperature due to increasing CO2 emissions. They assume that no action will be taken before the global warming signal will be significant in the late 1990s, so the different energy-use scenarios only start diverging after that.


The first 31 years of this projection are thus relatively well-defined and can now be compared to the observations. We used the GISS Land-Ocean Index that uses SST over the oceans (the original one interpolated from island stations) and overlaid the graph from the KNMI Climate Explorer on the lower left-hand corner of their Fig.6.



Given the many uncertainties at the time, notably the role of aerosols, the agreement is very good indeed. They only underestimated the observed trend by about 30%, similar or better in magnitude than the CMIP5 models over the same period (although these tend to overestimate the trend, still mainly due to problems related to aerosols).

To conclude, a projection from 1981 for rising temperatures in a major science journal, at a time that the temperature rise was not yet obvious in the observations, has been found to agree well with the observations since then, underestimating the observed trend by about 30%, and easily beating naive predictions of no-change or a linear continuation of trends. It is also a nice example of a statement based on theory that could be falsified and up to now has withstood the test. The “global warming hypothesis” has been developed according to the principles of sound science.

- See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... deuiT.dpuf

So MM - you still denying AGW??

[mistermack]

So MM - you still denying AGW??

Of course. I don't read realclimate.org, as I've told you many times.

Why would I waste my time reading such biased material? You have a love of these loony blogs, that doesn't mean they are worth a tenth of a turd. All it means is you are just as loony as them.
Or incredibly gullible. Take your pick.

[Jason]

Nostradamus foretold global warming.

[Tero]

When you've got tens of thousands of climatologists, constantly spouting bollocks bla bla bla

Did you have anything to say? Have you read a book on the subject yet?

[macdoc]

Of course. I don't read realclimate.org, as I've told you many times.

Why would I waste my time reading such biased material?

So the top climate scientists on the planet are not worth reading ????


......well at least we know now why your arguments are so bullshit laden.

[mistermack]

So the top climate scientists on the planet are not worth reading ????


......well at least we know now why your arguments are so bullshit laden.

All I need to know is, can they between them produce one correct forecast for the climate.

The answer is most definitely no. And that is a fact.

So good luck to them. By all means keep studying the subject. When you've got it cracked, let me know.
Till then, don't bother me with all the bullshit.

All I want to see is one single agreed climate prediction. Not thousands of wild guesses. And not for fifty years in the future.
For next year. Something we can test by measurement.

[Tero]

It's not thousands of wild guesses. Take 10 models and average them for the year to be predicted. Use the spread as standard deviation. Done.

[macdoc]

I don't think MM even understands what climate is, error bars are or the idea that you cannot predict WHAT THE FUCK AMOUNT OF CARBON WE WILL EMIT.

Like talking to a recalcitrant toddler.....I want I want......and claims he understands science....horsepucky - neck deep.