Category: environment and ecology

Bob Carter: untroubled by hobgoblins

It is always a privilege to follow the development of a great man’s thinking, and the Australian public — or at least that portion of it that listens to the ABC’s AM news show (“sets the agenda for the nation’s daily news and current affairs coverage”) — was lucky enough to witness evolution in action last Friday, when the programme chose to “balance” a report on the World Meteorological Organisation’s announcement of record temperatures in 2010 by talking to Bob Carter. Readers with long memories will recall that Carter has been louder than most in insisting that the planet’s been cooling for the last ten years, so the programme had a marvellous opportunity to make the great man squirm. Sadly, they blew it.

Here’s what he had to say in April 2009:

First, there has been no recent global warming in the common meaning of the term, for world average temperature has cooled for the last ten years. Furthermore, since 1940 the earth has warmed for nineteen years and cooled for forty-nine, the overall result being that global average temperature is now about the same as it was in 1940.

So how did he cope with the bad news that warming continues? Here’s the transcript & podcast:

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McEwan on climate: at war with ourselves

Readers of Ian McEwan’s novel Solar, which I reviewed here last year, will be interested in a short video on the Guardian website in which McEwan talks with Matt Ridley about the book. A little ironic that it should be Ridley, who vigorously aligns with deniers, but his views thankfully do not figure in the clip.

It opens with a discussion in general terms on the work of the novelist by comparison with the work of the scientist, during which McEwan speaks of literature as an investigation of human nature. He then traverses the difficulties of writing a novel about climate change, concerned as it is with hard science and also touching on virtue which carries dangers of preaching for the novelist.  However Solar was sparked when McEwan was invited to attend a Nobel Laureates’ conference on global sustainability. He thought of a character who “lived in his own shadow” as a consequence of Nobel prize-winning work done 20 or 30 years earlier, and saw this as a possible way into a novel which had climate change “as its background noise”.

There follows a fascinating short reflection on the Copenhagen conference which he relates to the novel. It’s why I decided on this post. My transcription follows:

“When the climate change conference in Copenhagen happened, by the time it ended I thought, well, crucial aspects of human nature have been demonstrated for us.  Possibly for the first time in diplomatic history and in international politics rationality in the form of science had summoned every last country on earth to one place. That’s one side of our nature, and on the other side everything that happened as soon as they got there. Not only did God send a blizzard descending on those queuing up to get into a building to discuss global warming, but also very soon there was all kinds of short term thinking, cabals.  Obama, rather disgracefully I think, came and played things up to the American networks, the Chinese were devious beyond belief, the Europeans sulked in their tents, and the whole thing ended in farce and great disappointment.  And I thought with no real pleasure that the whole spirit of my novel and of Michael Beard was at Copenhagen. I mean I’m trying to really render a sympathetic account of us in the west as privileged consumers unable really to ever pause in our delicious lives and trying to relate this a little to Michael Beard’s gluttony.”

The clip finishes with McEwan reading a memorably comic extract from Solar chronicling Michael Beard succumbing yet again to his appetites after perfunctory token resistance.

The years are rolling by and climate change, in spite of its obvious seriousness and urgency, remains largely extraneous to the central business of our societies. It becomes increasingly apparent that the reasons for delay in tackling the issue lie deep in aspects of human nature against which plain rationality struggles to prevail.  As McEwan’s “privileged consumers unable really to ever pause in our delicious lives” we are finding it extremely difficult as societies to stand apart from what we know and enjoy long enough to appraise and heed the danger.  There are many useful analyses of how this avoidance operates. Gareth’s recent post on George Marshall provides one good example. However McEwan’s “rationality in the form of science” does, as he says, represent one side of our nature. It remains our best hope in the battle with ourselves.

2010 Greenland ice sheet melt sets new record, 2011 starts warm

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The 2010 ice melt season on the Greenland ice sheet (see video) set new records, according to Marco Tedesco, director of the Cryospheric Processes Laboratory at the City University of New York. The melt season was “exceptional”, Tedesco said. Melting in some areas lasted as much as 50 days longer than average, starting very early at the end of April and ending later than usual in mid-September. During the summer, temperatures over large parts of Greenland were as much as 3ºC above average, snowfall was below average, and the capital, Nuuk, had its warmest spring and summer since records began in 1873.

 

Tedesco is lead author of a paper published today, The role of albedo and accumulation in the 2010 melting record in Greenland(*), which integrates weather, satellite and ground data with modelling to build a detailed picture of the melt season. Here’s the abstract:

Analyses of remote sensing data, surface observations and output from a regional atmosphere model point to new records in 2010 for surface melt and albedo, runoff, the number of days when bare ice is exposed and surface mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet, especially over its west and southwest regions. Early melt onset in spring, triggered by above-normal near-surface air temperatures, contributed to accelerate snowpack metamorphism and premature bare ice exposure, rapidly reducing the surface albedo. Warm conditions persisted through summer, with the positive albedo feedback mechanism being a major contributor to large negative surface mass balance anomalies. Summer snowfall was below average. This helped to maintain low albedo through the 2010 melting season, which also lasted longer than usual.

Jason Box will be posting more on the extraordinary warmth of last summer in Greenland at his meltfactor.org blog soon.

Meanwhile, the summer warmth seems to be persisting through the depths of winter — even become more extreme — as this temperature anomaly map for the last month from an excellent article by Bob Henson of UCAR discusses. Those positive anomalies (in red) are as much as 21ºC above average for the time of year:

Here’s Henson:

[…]Let’s take a look at Coral Harbour, located at the northwest corner of Hudson Bay in the province of Nunavut. On a typical mid-January day, the town drops to a low of –34°C (–29.2°F) and reaches a high of just -26°C (–14.8°F). Compare that to what Coral Harbour actually experienced in the first twelve days of January 2011, as reported by Environment Canada […].

After New Year’s Day, the town went 11 days without getting down to its average daily high.
On the 6th of the month, the low temperature was –3.7°C (25.3°F). That’s a remarkable 30°C (54°F) above average.
On both the 5th and 6th, Coral Harbor inched above the freezing mark. Before this year, temperatures above 0°C (32°F) had never been recorded in the entire three months of January, February, and March.

The unseasonal warmth is associated with what Henson describes as ” a vast bubble of high pressure” which formed near Greenland in mid-December. The high was associated with record-breaking 500mb heights, a measure of the “thickness” of the atmosphere and associated with warmth below. This high helped to direct the atmospheric flows that brought Europe’s December cold spell.

With the delayed freeze-up in Hudson Bay and a warm winter on the fringes of the Greenland ice sheet, it may that 2010′s record for ice melt will not last long. And that’s not good news.

(*)Marco Tedesco, X Fettweis, MR van den Broeke, RSW van de Wal, CJPP Smeets, WJ van de Berg, MC Serreze, and Jason Box, The role of albedo and accumulation in the 2010 melting record in Greenland, Environmental Research Letters DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/6/1/014005. My thanks to Jason Box for the details.

 

The Climate Show #5: on a hot wet green roof

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The Climate Show returns with the first show of the new year, and it’s a cracker. Our guest is Dr Brad Bass, an expert in “green” roofing who joined Glenn in the Auckland studio to discuss the many advantages of growing things (even trees!) on our buildings. John Cook from Skeptical Science gives us an eye-witness account of the Queensland flooding, and explains the climate and weather background to the event. We also discuss last year’s record setting temperatures, the fakery of Don Easterbrook, and an interesting breakthrough in solar power technology.

Watch The Climate Show on our Youtube channel, subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, or listen direct/download here:

The Climate Show

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Show notes below the fold.

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Why dealing with climate change is difficult (spinach tarts and ice cream)

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Let’s be clear about this: the failure to take adequate action to reduce emissions is not because of any weakness in our understanding of the science of climate. It has its roots instead in human psychology and sociology, as George Marshall explains in this series of three videos — The Ingenious Ways We Avoid Believing In Climate Change — a recording of a keynote address he gave to a conference in 2009. Marshall is a good presenter — he illustrates his points well (spinach tarts and ice cream feature prominently) — and provides a very good and concise overview of why many people prefer to ignore the climate problem. Whatever your views on the seriousness of the climate problem or how we should act to deal with it, you’ll find something in his talk to challenge your preconceptions. Parts two and three are below the fold…

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