Researchers at the Global Monitoring Division of NOAA recently released a report that the atmosphere has for the first time in modern history maintained 400ppm for an entire month.
The Arctic Ocean usually reaches its maximum sea ice extent about this time of year, and we as start observing the annual spring/summer sea ice melt up north the sea ice extent is about 1,000,000 square kilometers below the 1981-2010 average. Wow!
This has also been a wild winter ride, and it's not over for people in the midwest. As I type this entry schools including universities across that region are closed or running on a weather-impacted schedule. Out here in the mountain west though it looks and feels like spring has already sprung. We did have a dose of snow over the weekend...I had to shovel twice on Saturday and once on Sunday, but later on Sunday temperatures shot back up to 40+oF and it's headed back there today.
Normally where I live in SE Idaho is only starting the annual spring snow melt by now, but this year the snow is already all gone, except for small patches along the north sides of homes and buildings. Wild!
Other signs of spring around here include daffodils and crocuses pushing up through the soil, motorcycles appearing in parking lots, and students walking wearing sweatshirts and even short-sleeved shirts.
Why the early Spring-like conditions? Well, the radical swing of the jet stream this winter has stayed north of us while it's swung far to the south over the Great Plains and Midwest.
The map below shows the current jet stream track. Idaho is south of it, and the entire eastern part of the USA, except for the Everglades and Miami are north of it and still freezing. Yikes!
It's been a while since I posted anything about the state of the Arctic, but when I checked the National Snow and Ice Database website this morning I thought it was worth a few words.
The graph below shows the Arctic sea ice extent between Nov 2013 and Feb 12, 2014. There are a couple of notable things here. First, the ice extent has been between 250,000 and 500,000 square kilometers below the 1981-2010 average the entire time. This doesn't come as a shock to anyone who follows the Arctic, but it's just an ongoing confirmation of a warming Arctic.
BTW, did you know that according to the National Climactic Data Center (NCDC) of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that the last time that an annual global average temperature was cooler than the 20th century average was in 1976? Yep, that's 37 years ago (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/). I shared this with one of my classes of university students yesterday and realized as I said it that all of them were born well after 1976, so they have known only a warming world. That's a sobering thought.
The second thing the graph shows that's interesting, though not yet significant is what happened over the last week or two. If you notice the average sea ice extent usually reaches its maximum coverage around the end of February or early March. The extent does show some ups and downs, as clearly shown in the 2011-2012 (dotted) line. This year's data are shown on the blue line. Anyway, so what? Data of the last week or two show a leveling off and then decline in sea ice cover. If this continues, and I'd be extremely surprised if it did this early in the season, we could really be in for a doozie of a sea ice loss year in the Arctic. It's much more likely that this is just a temporary blip.
It's been a while since I posted anything about what's happening in the Arctic Ocean. In a word, the summer 2013 sea ice melt is "on". So far this spring/summer, sea ice cover has declined from a winter maximum ice extent of just over 15 million km2 down to 10.5 million km2 as of yesterday (6-30-2013).
The maps below shows that sea ice melt is progressing much faster than the 1981-2010 average in Hudson Bay, the Barents Sea, Baffin Bay, and other areas around the Canadian Archipelago. Sea ice melt in the Bering and Chukchi Seas are right on the historical average.
The graph below courtesy of NSIDC.org shows the relationship between the 2013 Spring/Summer melt and that of the 1981-2010 average and the 2012 all time record low sea ice melt. The current melt is currently about midway between the historic average melt and the record melt for this time of year. The rate of sea ice melt has really increased (as indicated by the steep downward turn in the blue line on the graph below) over the past week or so. The rate of sea ice melt will really have to speed up, though, if it's going to have a chance of catching last year's record pace.
If you follow these kinds of data on a regular basis, like I do, you might be surprised to see the current rate of sea ice melt is as close as it is to the historic rate of sea ice melt. That's because NSIDC recently updated their baseline data for comparisons from a 22-year average (1979-2000) to a 30 year average (1981-2010), since that is standard practice for baselines whenever possible. You can read more about that change by clicking this link: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2013/06/updating-the-sea-ice-baseline/. FYI, the NSIDC made this change on June 18, 2013.
So as of now, the 2013 sea ice melt is not threatening to break last year's record minimum sea ice extent. But the only way to know what is going to happen is to be patient and keep checking back.
Have a great summer, but I hope that not too much sea ice melts!
Many people (almost entirely non-scientists or non-climatologists) inaccurately claim that the scientific community either has not or cannot reach consensus on the topic of anthropogenic climate change (i.e., global warming). This claim has become a worn and weary diatribe used by some people, yes, I will even go as far as to say "conspiring men" who are trying to muddy the waters on a topic that is accepted nearly universally by the practicing scientific community.
Why do people believe these conspiring men? Because it happens to fit their pre-existing notions or opinions on climate, economy, religion, or plays to their benefit in terms of vested interest (e.g., oil industry).
The bottom line is that the scientific community has near unanimous consensus on the topic of climate change. By the way, what proportion of scientists would it take to constitute a consensus? 50.1%, 60%. 75%, 80%, 90%, 95%, 98%, 99%, 100%?
I think that we can all agree that reaching a 100% consensus on any scientific theory is nigh unto unattainable, but was exactly what was discovered in a study carried out in 2004, and consensus has continued to strengthen since then.
In 2004, a study by the well-resepcted UC San Diego sociologist Naomi Oreskes was published Science, America's most prestigious scientific journal (http://leisureguy.wordpress.com/2007/09/04/the-scientific-consensus-on-global-warming/). Results described in that study showed that NONE of the 982 peer-reviewed scientific papers on the topic of climate change published between 1993 and 2003 disputed the conclusion of anthropogenic climate change.
Be advised that the formatting and layout of these kinds of papers are intended to make them appear to be credible sources of information, but they are not comparable to peer-reviewed publications in professional scientific journals.
Back to the Heartland Institute paper...it reported moderate agreement on some topics, but significant disagreement on others. There are, however, several points of concern related to this report and others like it. The most important concern is that this report cannot be considered verifiable scientific information since it was never subjected to peer-review and was not published in a reputable scientific journal. Another note of concern is the source of the paper itself. It is a product of "The Heartland Institute". Investigative research into public records shows that this institute and others like it are engaged in carrying out an active campaign to cloud the public's perception of well-documented scientific conclusions regarding climate change. If you have questions about this I strongly recommend that you take a look at the book "Merchants of Doubt" by Naomi Oreskes (http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/)
Getting back to the original point of the posting. There is clearly near unanimous consensus among climate scientists (98%+) that climate change is happening and more than 90% confident (IPCC report, 2007) that the current trend of global warming is being driven mainly by anthropogenic forcing factors, including greenhouse gas emissions and land-use changes, among other activities.
So what does scientific lack of consensus on verifiable scientific observations on this topic look like? It looks like this:
Every year, groups of climatologists working independently in the USA, Great Britain, Japan, and other locations around the world, collect temperature data and generate average annual observed temperatures. They can then plot their data onto one graph, as shown above, and see where differences and variations among their results are. If there is any lack of consensus it is that some data show slightly warmer temperatures some years, while others show slightly cooler ones, but within a range of acceptable statistical variability, all the data produce the same long-term trends. In other words - consensus.
Similar work is done by climatologists investigating causes (also referred to as climate forcing factors), and they also nearly universally conclude that without human-produced effects, we would not currently be experiencing a warming trend. Instead we would be experiencing a gradual cooling trend.
So whenever you hear someone parroting some out of date or completely unsupportable fallacy that there is no scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, ask them about their source of information. It will inevitably originate in some non-scientific think tank or media outlet that clearly has an agenda that benefits if people do not understand that there is scientific consensus on climate change and that we had better get busy doing something about mitigating the effects of climate change.
I know, I know, ANOTHER posting on Arctic sea ice!? No, it's more than that.
I guess I just can't help myself, plus the sea ice melt is currently on record pace. The all time record Arctic sea ice melt so far occurred in 2007, but right now there is somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 square kilometers more open water in the Arctic today than there was at this time in 2007!
The melt is really taking off north of Siberia, in Baffin Bay west of Greenland, and in the Beaufort Sea north of the Canadian Yukon, Northwest Territories, and eastern Alaska. Plus Hudson Bay will soon be ice free, well ahead of historical average melt dates. If this keeps up we will see a new record for ice melt in the Arctic later this summer.
This graph shows the comparison between the area of sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean between historical averages (1979-2000 - dark gray line), the 2007 record sea ice melt year (dotted green line) and current sea ice cover (blue line).
OK, so what? What can we do to mitigate what is going on with global climate change. While I encourage everyone out there to drive less, walk or bike more, and emit as little carbon as possible, the bottom line is that as individuals we can do little to mitigate the problem. What is desperately needed NOW is for everyone to put pressure on their local, state, and national leaders to take steps to mandate change. It's clear that the small grassroots effort that has been going on for the past few decades is not going to do the job. We need large-scale investment in cleaner, more efficient energy, reductions in carbon emissions, and transportation options.
The science is in, and no matter how much nay-sayers or skeptics want to think or say otherwise, humans are driving the current trend of global warming.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administrations's Climatic Data Center just released data showing that the months of January through June of 2012 was the warmest ever in the 118 year history of national weather statistics.
This map shows state-by-state rankings of average temperature compared to all other years of Jan-June temperature averages since the late 1800s. A score of "1" means it was the coldest average temperature in the record. A score of "118" means it was the warmest in the temperature record.
This map shows that only two states, Washington and Oregon, showed near normal average temperatures, while the rest of the country experienced above normal to record warmest temperatures. In fact, 30 states reported record warmest temperatures for this 6-month period.
Washington and Oregon were kept cool by Pacific storms that moved onshore, brought cooler temperatures, and much higher than average precipitation. The rest of the country baked.
The national average for precipitation for Jan-June 2012 scored a "16", which means that it was the 16th driest Jan-June on record. A few areas had near record precipitation, such as Coastal Washington, Oregon, northern California, and Minnesota. The Pacific storms explain the rainfall in the NW, and if you recall, there were torrential rainfalls and massive flooding in MN in June. Nevada, the four-corners states, and Wyoming in the meantime experienced near record low precipitation. That's not that surprising - it's an arid part of the country anyway, but look at the Ohio River Valley. These states routinely enjoy storm front after storm front bringing rain needed for agriculture, etc. This Jan-June, however, rainfall was WAY down.
When are we going to wake up? The individual action of a few people here and is simply not enough to make a difference when it comes to mitigating climate change.
This is our time. This is our watch. I believe that our children and grandchildren will rightly hold us responsible for our lack of action, regardless of what any other country or people do.
Carbon emissions are a responsibility of the rich. The rich are the only ones with enough wealth to emit significant amounts of carbon. And when I say rich, I mean people who earn more than $40-50K per year. Where did this number come from? This threshold was identified by two researchers, Pacala and Socolo, of Princeton University. You can learn more about their work by watching this seminar by Dr. Pacala, given a few years ago at Stanford University. It's about an hour long, but it's incredibly fascinating, and their conclusions bear consideration.
The people above the $40-50K personal wealth mark are the people rich enough to own a car, own a house, be materialistic consumers, etc. This is not something we want to hear or like to hear, but it's a serious reality. Economists looking at the emissions of anthropogenic carbon have discovered that the richest 500 million people on the planet, and that the poorest half of the global population (now over 3.5 billion people) are so poor that they emit almost nothing.
Carbon emission is a problem generated by the rich. It is a problem that needs to be shouldered by the rich.
I am sadly convinced that based on what we are doing and on what we are not doing right now, we will not be heroes in future history books. We will be branded as the generation(s) who were more concerned with short-term profits, personal wealth, and lavish lifestyle (i.e., greed) than we were with taking responsibility to be worthy stewards and caretakers of the planet for the benefit of future generations.
Is it global warming? Is it an isolated temperature spike? Whatever it was, it was amazing! March 2012 was the warmest March in the lower 48 states since we started collecting temperature data - 118 years ago.
Click on the link below to watch a report on this story from Weather.com:
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed the new monthly record high. How warm was it? March 2012's average temperature was over 8oF warmer than the historical average for March. That's huge!
How widespread was the warming? The number in each state on the map below shows how March 2012's average temperature ranked among the 118 monthly averages we've got between 1894 and now. A "118" means it was the warmest March ever...a "117" means it was the the second warmest ever, and so on. Twenty-five states had all time high average monthly temperatures. Washington, Oregon, and California were the only states NOT at least in the upper half of their historical averages. Wow!
(Image credit: NOAA)
If that's not enough to blow your mind, over 15,000, yes, that's fifteen THOUSAND record high temperatures were tied or broken last month! Double wow!
(Image credit: NOAA)
Each of the red dots (15,292 of them) show the 7,775 daytime highs and the 7,517 nighttime high temperatures that tied or exceeded previous records! According to NOAA, 21 of the nighttime high temperatures exceeded the former daytime high temperatures on those dates! Yow!
The March average annual temperatures for the past 118 years are shown below. There is a lot of variability (also called noise) in the data. FYI - The flat black line is the average of all data in the set, so about half of the observations will be below the line, and half will be above the line. The blue dots and lines represent individual average March temperatures. The green line represents a rolling average of the data (well, sort of, it's a filter that smooths the data so we can see longer-term trends), and the red line shows the overall trend in the entire data set.
If you look at the green rolling average again, you'll see that between the late 1800s and the 1970s there was a lot of variability, but if anything a very slight cooling trend. Then between 1970 and today you can see a more or less steady rise in the average temperatures.
(Image credit: NOAA)
All right. The elephant in the room, i.e., the big question is this, "Was the observed extreme high average temperature in March 2012 caused by global warming?"
That's a tough call. It is difficult statistically to connect an isolated weather event, like a high monthly average temperature, with global warming. But, given the warming trend that started in the 1970s and that we see continuing today, it is fair to say that as the planet continues to warm it is more likely that these types of warming events will take place. That's about as far as we can go in answering that question.
It'll be interesting to see what April brings. As for where I live, the forecast high temperature for today is 74oF, 18oF higher than the monthly average for April.
If you are like me you know at least a few people who have extremely strong opinions about climate change but don't understanding much about climate science. When someone like this enters into a casual conversation about climate change the discussion can quickly turn into an emotionally charged argument. This, in my experience, is both uncomfortable and unproductive.
In order to understand climate change we don't need opinion, we need an understanding of scientific principles and have access to empirical observations. As I hope you read in my earlier posting "On Science 2: Limitations of Science", science can address only questions that are objective and empirical. This means that an objective question has an actual answer that is not based on personal bias or opinion, and that answer can be discovered via empirical evidence.
My goal in sharing these postings on climate change is to provide you with the background and empirical information (observations) you can use to develop your own scientific understanding of this extremely complex and important part of the natural world. I will do my best to emphasize scientific principles and observations and minimize personal bias as I do so.
OK, let's start with some fundamental scientific principles and some definitions that apply to climate (and lots of other things).
Climate is affected by a large variety of factors, but two of the most important ones relate to matter and energy, so let's start there.
The Law of Conservation of Matter:
This law states that matter cannot be created or destroyed, and that changes in matter affect only the form or chemical condition of the matter involved. This means that if matter goes through any kind of change, that you will end up with the same total amount of matter as you started with. For example, If you weigh something before you burn it, and you add the weight of the ash and gases that are released (yeah, gases have mass) you will discover that the total mass before and after the burning is the same. Plus, if you put something in your garbage can and someone picks up your trash and hauls it away, you do not see the trash any more, but it still exists...someplace.
What does this have to do with climate? Climate, as you will see, is all about the movement of matter and the energy it contains around the planet, and the length of time between when energy enters our planet system (atmosphere, ocean, land) and when it leaves. OK, about energy...
The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics:
(FYI - There is ongoing discussion about whether there are three or four laws of thermodynamics, but I will refer to the two laws that are most applicable to questions about climate.)
The first law of thermodynamics: This law is also known as the law of conservation of energy. It states that there is no change in the total amount of energy in a closed system, even if energy within the system changes from one form to another. This law also states that heat will move from a location higher heat/energy to one of lower heat/energy until the closed system reaches thermal equilibrium.
If, however, you observe an open system, such as our planet which has energy coming and going, then energy will either flow into or out of the system depending on the the energy state of the connected systems, e.g., space, the sun, etc.
What does the first law have to do with climate? For one thing, if Earth became a closed system it would eventually reach a state of thermal equilibrium that would be MUCH colder than we experience today. If this happened, there would be no outside energy to drive things like winds, currents, the water cycle of evaporation and precipitation, photosynthesis, and so one. It would be VERY boring to be a weather forecaster or climatologist, because everything would end up being thermally and climatically static.
The second law of thermodynamics: This law states that when energy is transformed from one form to another the amount of energy available to do work unavoidably decreases, and the balance of energy is called entropy. Entropy is typically released as low-grade heat. For example, an internal combustion energy runs by burning chemical energy in the form of gasoline. The chemical energy in gasoline is converted into mechanical energy that drives the pistons up and down inside the engine. Not all energy that is released when gasoline burns drives the pistons; the balance of energy (entropy) is released as waste heat that you can feel when you touch the engine block.
What does the second law have to do with climate? The energy to run almost all processes on Earth are driven directly or indirectly by sunlight. Sunlight is extremely high quality energy, but when sunlight is absorbed by something, say the seat of your car, that high quality energy is released as low quality heat (I'll discuss this in a later posting in more detail). This means that we need an ongoing supply of high quality energy to keep the planet running. If we didn't have that, entropy would increase until all energy exists only in extremely low-quality forms, and life as we know it could not exist.
ON TO OTHER THINGS
Before we go farther with this discussion about climate, we should cover a couple of definitions...
Climate and Weather
I routinely hear people talking about the weather and think that they are talking about climate and vice versa. Since this is the case I think we should take a little time and think about the difference between climate and weather, as well as how they are related to each other.
In doing this I agree with Jack Handey of Saturday Night Live fame who quipped in one of his Deep Thoughts when he said:
"Sometimes I think the so-called experts actually are experts."(1)
So, what do some experts - The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and The National Snow and Ice Data Center - say about these terms?
Weather:
NOAA defines weather this way:
“Weather is the state of atmosphere-ocean-land conditions (hot/cold, wet/dry, calm/stormy, sunny/cloudy) that exist over relatively short periods like hours or days. Weather includes the passing of a thunderstorm, hurricane, or blizzard, a persistent heat wave, a cold snap, a drought. Weather variability and extreme events may respond unpredictably in response to climate change.” (2)
The NSIDC defines weather this way:
“Weather is the day-to-day state of the atmosphere, and its short-term (minutes to weeks) variation. Popularly, weather is thought of as the combination of temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloudiness, visibility, and wind.” (3)
Both of these definitions refer to short-term descriptions of atmospheric conditions that are subject to change locally on a minute-to-minute basis.
Climate:
NOAA defines climate this way:
"Climate is the weather pattern we expect over the period of a month, a season, a decade, or a century. More technically, climate is defined as the weather conditions resulting from the mean, or average, state of the atmosphere-ocean-land system, often described in terms of"climate normals" or average weather conditions. Climate Change is a departure from the expected average weather or climate normals." (4)
The NSIDC defines climate this way:
"Climate is defined as statistical weather information that describes the variation of weather at a given place for a specified interval. In popular usage, it represents the synthesis of weather; more formally it is the weather of a locality averaged over some period (usually 30 years) plus statistics of weather extremes. We talk about climate change in terms of years, decades or even centuries. Scientists study climate to look for trends or cycles of variability (such as the changes in wind patterns, ocean surface temperatures and precipitation over the equatorial Pacific that result in El Niño and La Niña), and also to place cycles or other phenomena into the bigger picture of possible longer term or more permanent climate changes." (5)
These definitions refer to a long-term average (usually at least decades long) of the same atmospheric factors we consider when we refer to weather, and can be used to determine whether there is any deviation from long-term averages. These long term shifts or changes are what we refer to as climate change. In addition, some types of climate change can be observed globally, and others can be observed regionally.
Now that we have covered some basic scientific principles and a few definitions, you are ready to move on to the next topic - an introduction to the physical structure and geologic history of the atmosphere, land, and oceans. This information is also an essential component of the foundation of information you will need to understand data about the climate, but this will have to wait until next time - this posting is already too long.
References:
1. Handey, J. 1994. Deepest Thoughts - So Deep They Squeak. Hyperion Press, NY.
