extremes – Page 4

Signing up to nonsense: denialists plot letter to UN secretary general

People send me stuff. Imagine my surprise when this morning’s mail included the text of a round robin email from Tom Harris — the Canadian PR man who heads the Heartland-funded denialist lobby group the International Climate Science Coalition [full text here]. It gives an interesting insight to how these groups work behind the scenes. Here’s Harris appealing for signatures to a letter to UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon:

Time is short if we are to mount a significant counterpoint to the scientifically invalid assertions already being broadcast by the 1,500 journalists and 7,000 environmentalists attending the UN climate conference now underway in Qatar.

Please find below our “Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations” to which we are inviting your endorsement. We have 61 qualified endorsers as of 9 pm EST, about 19 hours after we started to ask people.

Because we have an agreement with a major media outlet to publish the open letter on Thursday, I will need to know of your support within the next day if possible, please.

The denialist spin machine in action. The usual suspects queuing to sign up to a letter that’s going to be published — where? My guess would be the Wall Street Journal. Even more interesting is the nonsense these luminaries are so keen to endorse…

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Going to Extremes

Amidst the scarcely believable frenzy of climate change denial which has taken hold in sectors of American politics, to say nothing of the equally scarcely believable silence from the White House, we need to be reminded that there are sane and steady political voices in that country, however difficult it is for them currently to gain a hearing. Representatives Edward Markey and Henry Waxman recently had the minority staffs of the Committee on Natural Resources and the Committee on Energy and Commerce prepare a report for them Going to Extremes: Climate Change and the Increasing Risk of Weather Disasters (pdf here). It’s now available as a Kindle edition and in short compass reports the scientific case that global warming is shifting the odds towards extreme events.

Evidence is mounting alarmingly. Over the last several years a barrage of extreme weather events in the US and the world has been consistent with what scientists have been predicting from global warming. “Indeed this summer US weather was almost apocalyptic.” The introduction mentions some of the events of the past two years, noting that NOAA has recently concluded after looking through 50 years of weather data that droughts like the recent 2011 Texas drought are roughly twenty times more likely because of global warming. “Global warming has stacked the deck with extra jokers.”

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Why Arctic sea ice shouldn’t leave anyone cold

In this guest post Neven Acropolis, the man behind the excellent Arctic Sea Ice blog, looks at the reasons why we need to pay attention to the rapid loss of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.

Arctic sea ice became a recurrent feature on planet Earth around 47 million years ago. Since the start of the current ice age, about 2.5 million years ago, the Arctic Ocean has been completely covered with sea ice. Only during interglacials, like the one we are in now, does some of the sea ice melt during summer, when the top of the planet is oriented a bit more towards the Sun and receives large amounts of sunlight for several summer months. Even then, when winter starts, the ice-free portion of the Arctic Ocean freezes over again with a new layer of sea ice.

Since the dawn of human civilisation, 5000 to 8000 years ago, this annual ebb and flow of melting and freezing Arctic sea ice has been more or less consistent. There were periods when more ice melted during summer, and periods when less melted. However, a radical shift has occurred in recent times.

1 kinnard2011

Ever since satellites allowed a detailed view of the Arctic and its ice, a pronounced decrease in summer sea ice cover has been observed (with this year setting a new record low). When the IPCC released its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007, it was generally thought that the Arctic could become ice-free somewhere near the end of this century. But changes in the Arctic have progressed at such speed that most experts now think 2030 might see an ice-free Arctic for the first time. Some say it could even happen this decade.

2 albedofeedback What makes this event significant, is the role Arctic sea ice plays as a reflector of solar energy. Ice is white and therefore reflects a large part of incoming sunlight back out to space. But where there is no ice, dark ocean water absorbs most of the sunlight and thus heats up. The less ice there is, the more the water heats up, melting more ice. This feedback has all kinds of consequences for the Arctic region.

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State of the climate 2011: extreme heat our fault

This year’s State of the Climate report [PDF], covering 2011, was published yesterday, and has made headline news around the world because of its focus on weather extremes. Can we blame some of the extremes of heat and heavy rain on continued warming? The answer — based on a new global effort to look at attribution of six of 2011’s extreme events — is yes. However, Dr Peter Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, and one of the lead authors of the extremes research said:

… we didn’t find evidence that climate change has affected the odds of all the extreme weather events we looked at, [but] we did see that some events were significantly more likely. Overall we’re seeing that human influence is having a marked impact on some types of extreme weather.

The UK Met Office summarised some of the key findings:

December 2010 was the second coldest and November 2011 the second warmest in the Central England temperature record dating back to 1659. The extreme warm average temperature in November 2011 is 60 times more likely to have occurred than in the 1960s. The change in odds of the extremely cold December was considerably less, however, being only about half as likely. Even without climate change, unusual circulation patterns can still bring very cold winter months.
In 2011, Texas had its hottest and driest summer in records dating back to 1895. While the heat wave was associated with La Nina conditions in the Pacific Ocean, the heat wave was 20 times more likely in such conditions than it would have been only 50 years ago.
There were some remarkable temperatures across Western Europe in 2011. Comparisons to the temperatures previously associated with the weather patterns seen in 2011 reveal the year was almost 1.5 deg C warmer than can be attributed to weather patterns alone.

The paper dealing with the attribution exercise, Explaining Extreme Events Of 2011 From A Climate Perspective, by Peterson et al (BAMS, July 2012, pdf here) is well worth a read.

Below the fold: the full abstract of the State Of The Climate 2011 report – an excellent short form overview of the year…

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Welcome to the rest of our lives

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Here’s an excellent new video from Peter Sinclair, contrasting the recent weather disasters in the USA with the “we’ll adapt” line recently run by ExxonMobil boss Rex Tillerson. It’s a powerful message, to which I would only add one thought: this is only the beginning.