Author: Gareth

Richard Alley: what we know now…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_-8u86R3Yc&w=480]

In this talk, recorded at the American Geophysical Union’s Chapman Conference on Climate Communication in Colorado recently, Richard Alley gives his overview of what we know about the state of the climate. As you might expect, he covers the cryosphere in some detail (why Greenland may not be as big a worry as West Antarctica), but he also has interesting things to say about climate sensitivity (same as it ever was), food production, and the possibility that chunks of the planet may become too hot for humans. Well worth watching…

Check out the other talks from the conference, all up at the AGU’s Youtube channel. I’m planning to catch up with the talks by Mike Mann, Steve Lewandowsky, Jeff Masters and Gavin Schmidt — when I can find the time.

[Hat tip to Greenland’s very own videographer, Peter Sinclair — who also gave a talk at the conference.]

Planet waves, and the big heat

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY0RdXmLGdU&w=480]

It’s certainly hot in the southwestern USA at the moment — a dome of heat has established itself under a persistent high pressure ridge, and temperatures are pushing up towards all-time highs. Wildfires are running out of control. One caused the tragic death of 19 firefighters at Yarnell Hill in Arizona yesterday. One more extreme weather event to add to this year’s growing list, and as with most of the others, there’s a clear sign of a link with rapid climate change. That heat dome is being held in place by a large, slow-moving northward loop in the jetstream — and that jetstream pattern is beginning to look very much like the characteristic fingerprint of rapid warming in the northern hemisphere, as Jennifer Francis explains in this video, recorded at a Climate Desk event in Washington last month. It’s just about the clearest explanation of what’s going on that I’ve encountered — particularly in her description of why the jetstream exists in the first place, and why warming is changing the way it behaves. If you want to understand what’s going on, you have to watch this.

There’s a full recording of the Climate Desk event here, including a talk by Weather Channel meteorologist Stu Ostro. Ostro used to be a confirmed sceptic, but began to see changes in weather patterns that he traced back to the effects of warming — specifically, an increase in the “thickness” of the atmosphere, the very thing that’s driving the changes in jetstream behaviour.

The Climate Show #34: four Hiroshima bombs a second

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKK8Xc-N_oA&w=480]

It’s been almost half a year since Glenn, Gareth and John last met over the intertubes to discuss climate news — but we’re 97% sure we’re back, catching up on all the recent climate news. John discusses the recent Cook et al (where al is the Skeptical Science team) paper on the 97% consensus on climate science and the accompanying Consensus Project web site, “sticky” facts like using Hiroshima bombs as a unit of warming. Plus all the news on recent weather extremes — flooding in India, Canada, and Europe, climate impacts on the wine business, and Gareth’s recent interview with Bill McKibben. Show notes below the fold…

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TDB Today: Tim Groser’s utter nonsense

At the National Agricultural Fieldays earlier this month, climate change minister Tim Groser claimed that including agriculture in the emissions trading scheme would be “utter environmental and economic madness”. At The Daily Blog today, I explain why Groser is talking utter nonsense, and agriculture needs to be included in the ETS as soon as possible. Comments at TDB, please…

I think it’s going to rain today (when it’s wet, it’s very very wet)

I took Rosie the truffle machine for a walk around the farm just before dark yesterday. We were both a bit stir-crazy after four days of cold, cold rain and a couple of days of screaming southerlies that brought snow to our hills. The ground passed field capacity at the beginning of last week, when an atmospheric river brought torrential downpours and flooding to much of the South Island. Now the soil is sodden, quivering with water and oozing mud at every footstep. Every drop of extra rain is taking that mud and sluicing it down to the river. A stream runs through my black truffle plantation. I spent this afternoon digging a drainage trench. Truffles don’t enjoy sitting in water. My crop might rot. The Waipara is roaring along at the bottom of our cliff at about 50 cumecs ((Cubic metres per second.)), an impressive sight for a river that normally dribbles down to the sea at under a cumec. It peaked last week at about 110 cumecs. The riverbed will have been reshaped. But we got off lightly.

Over the last couple of days the New Zealand news has been dominated by extreme weather. The southerly storm that soaked us also battered Wellington and brought deep snow ((The Mt Hutt ski field got 2.8 meters of snow — just over 9 feet in the old money — a record start to the season. Take a look at the green line on their snow graph to get some sense of the context.)) to much of the South Island. It made for compelling pictures. But what’s going on elsewhere in the world is even more dramatic:

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