A year’s weather in 8 minutes (and other things)

From the team at EUTMETSAT: all the weather of 2013 as seen from the world’s weather-watching satellites. It’s an HD video, so a slow download on my rural NZ treacleband internet connection, but worth every second of the wait. I strongly recommend clicking the full screen button (bottom right corner), and multiple viewings. Fascinating, with an informative commentary. And, because we haven’t had an open thread for a while, please take this opportunity to wax lyrical on any climate-related topic currently in the news…

10 thoughts on “A year’s weather in 8 minutes (and other things)”

  1. Ahem…testing, testing, 1 2 3

    This can be slightly off-climate topic but it’s all part of the fine mess we’ve got ourselves into. Apropos my comment in Keeping it Pure about a preference for something like an electric Piaggio Ape (TukTuk) rather than the 100mph trucks we all lust after, The Archdruid’s weekly blogspot has nailed it. As usual.

    Go to http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.nz and you’re looking for the Jan 29 posting “A Bargain with the Archdruid”. John Michael Greer is continuing his tracking of the slow-mo train-wreck we call ‘civilization’ and delves into the possible consequences or ways we can minimise the worst.

    The paragraph that caught my eye was thus:
    First is conservation. That’s the missing piece in most proposals for dealing with peak oil. The chasm into which so many well-intentioned projects have tumbled over the last decade is that nothing available to us can support the raw extravagance of energy and resource consumption we’re used to, once cheap abundant fossil fuels aren’t there any more, so—ahem—we have to use less. Too much talk about using less in recent years, though, has been limited to urging energy and resource abstinence as a badge of moral purity, and—well, let’s just say that abstinence education did about as much good there as it does in any other context.
    Read the column and report back. There will be a test.

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  3. Amazing video. Well worth full screen and watching one part of the world. Interesting to watch how landforms like NZ seem to ‘snag’ cloud systems. Gives you a great overview of how the world works. Life changing. Thanks. Off to show it to the kids.

    Kiwiano. Thanks for the reference to the archdruid site – I agree he absolutely nails the current predicament with honesty and foresight. Putting him on my watch list.

    And then this, from the English Met. Oh dear:

    “The latest decadal forecast, issued in January 2014, shows that global temperatures are expected to maintain the record warmth that has been observed over the last decade, and furthermore that it is possible that new record global temperatures may be reached in the next five years. Averaged over the five-year period 2014-2018, global average temperature is expected to remain high and is likely to be between 0.17 °C and 0.43 °C above the long-term (1981-2010) average. This compares with an anomaly of +0.26 °C observed in 2010, the warmest year on record.”

    http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/decadal-forecast-2014-2018

  4. “Expect to maintain the record warmth….”
    I’m waiting for the other boot to drop in the upstairs tent. We’ve been through a succession of cooling La Ninas or neutral ENSOs and must sooner or later swing into a full-blown warming El Nino. I fear things will not be pretty when that happens.

  5. More good news. Mike Mann’s lawsuit against the “National Review” is entering the discovery phase, and has the potential to destroy that far-right rag:

    National Review has a relatively small (but influential) circulation, and frequently loses money. Breaking even is a good year. Therefore, a large settlement with Mann, or a penalty handed down by a judge, could prove catastrophic.

    http://www.salon.com/2014/01/30/a_defamation_lawsuit_may_kill_national_review/

  6. Remember how Barry Brill of NZCSET accused a High Court judge of corruption after he ruled against them in their action against NIWA?

    Here’s Mark Steyn of National Review in a similar vein:

    We are now having to start all over from scratch, with a brand new complaint, brand new motions to dismiss, and a brand new judge — all thanks to the original judge’s remarkable incompetence and careless management of her case.

    As with Brill, I suspect this may not turn out to be a winning formula…

    http://www.steynonline.com/6017/slappstick-farce

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