New poll out of Stanford. Predictable response from one denialist blog: publish the pollsters phone number, invite trolls to heap threats, intimidation and abuse on him, and deny everything.(hint here as to who)
Even if the poll is too optimistic (from my perspective), it is spot on in terms of the direction this issue is moving.
Exhibit A: The President’s June address on climate, which you must know had to be thoroughly polled, focus grouped, and vetted months in advance. The hinge of history turned in 2012, and its not going back.
The vast majority of Americans in each of 40-plus states surveyed say global warming is real, serious and man-made, and the concerns tend to be slightly higher in coastal or drought-stricken areas, says an analysis out today.
At least 75% of U.S. adults say global warming has been happening, but the Stanford University research found that 84% or more took that view in states recently hit by drought — Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas — or vulnerable to sea-level rise: Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island.
Despite intense debate in Congress on global warming, the research found broad public agreement on the issue and its remedies. Most say past warming has been caused largely by human activities — ranging from a low of 65% in Utah to a high of 92% in Rhode Island. Most also back government curbs on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants — from 62% in Utah to 90% in New Hampshire.
“The consistency of findings across states was especially surprising to me,” says author and professor Jon Krosnick, director of Stanford’s Political Psychology Research Group, adding the analysis is likely the first to offer state-by-state breakdowns. He plans to release the findings today on Capitol Hill.
A new study by British and Canadian researchers shows that the global temperature rise of the past 15 years has been greatly underestimated. The reason is the data gaps in the weather station network, especially in the Arctic.If you fill these data gaps using satellite measurements, the warming trend is more than doubled in the widely used HadCRUT4 data, and the much-discussed “warming pause” has virtually disappeared.
Obtaining the globally averaged temperature from weather station data has a well-known problem: there are some gaps in the data, especially in the polar regions and in parts of Africa. As long as the regions not covered warm up like the rest of the world, that does not change the global temperature curve.
But errors in global temperature trends arise if these areas evolve differently from the global mean. That’s been the case over the last 15 years in the Arctic, which has warmed exceptionally fast, as shown by satellite and reanalysis data and by the massive sea ice loss there. This problem was analysed for the first time by Rasmus in 2008 at RealClimate, and it was later confirmed by other authors in the scientific literature.
The “Arctic hole” is the main reason for the difference between the NASA GISS data and the other two data sets of near-surface temperature, HadCRUT and NOAA. I have always preferred the GISS data because NASA fills the data gaps by interpolation from the edges, which is certainly better than not filling them at all. Continue reading “Fauxpause: Warming Underestimated by Half”
A remarkable warming of the sub-surface Pacific waters east of the Philippines in recent decades, due to a shift in atmospheric circulation patterns and ocean currents that began in the early 1990s, could be responsible for the rapid intensification of Super Typhoon Haiyan. Hurricanes are heat engines, which means they take heat energy out of the ocean, and convert it to kinetic energy in the form of wind. It’s well-known that tropical cyclones need surface water temperatures of at least 26.5°C (80°F) to maintain themselves, and that the warmer the water, and the deeper the warm water is, the stronger the storm can get. Deep warm water is important, since as a tropical cyclone tracks over the ocean, it stirs up cooler water from the depths, potentially reducing the intensity of the storm. When both Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita exploded into Category 5 hurricanes as they crossed over a warm eddy in the Gulf of Mexico with a lot of deep, warm water, the concept of the total heat energy available to fuel a hurricane–the Tropical Cyclone Heat Potential (TCHP)–became one that gained wide recognition.
Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average at a depth of 100 meters in the West Pacific Ocean during October 2013, compared to a 1986 – 2008 average. The track and intensity of Super Typhoon Haiyan are overlaid. Haiyan passed directly over large areas of sub-surface water that were 4 – 5°C above average in temperature, which likely contributed to the storm’s explosive deepening. Image credit: Japan Meteorological Agency.
The Pacific Ocean east of the Philippines has the largest area of deep, warm water of anywhere on Earth, and these waters have historically fueled the highest incidence of Category 5 storms of anywhere on the planet. Super Typhoon Haiyan tracked over surface waters that were of near-average warmth, 29.5 – 30.5°C (85 – 87°F.) However, the waters at a depth of 100 meters (328 feet) beneath Haiyan during its rapid intensification phase were a huge 4 – 5°C (7 – 9°F) above average, judging by an analysis of October average ocean temperatures from the Japan Meteorological Agency (Figure 1.) As the typhoon stirred this unusually warm water to the surface, the storm was able to feed off the heat, allowing Haiyan to intensify into one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever observed.
Figure 2. Trend in sea level from satellite altimeter measurements in 1993 – 2010. Black lines are the Sea Surface Height (SSH) in cm from Rio et al. (2009.) Image credit: Qiu, B., and S. Chen, 2012, “Multidecadal sea level and gyre circulation variability in the northwestern tropical Pacific Ocean”, Journal of Physical Oceanography 42.1 (2012): 193-206.
Figure 1 | Analysis and model results of satellite-derived tropical cyclone lifetime-maximum wind speeds. a, Box plots by year. Trend lines are shown for the median, 0.75 quantile, and 1.5 times the interquartile range. b, Trends in global satellite-derived tropical cyclone maximum wind speeds by quantile, from 0.1 to 0.9 in increments of 0.1. Trends are estimated coefficients from quantile regression in units of metres per second per year. The point-wise 90% confidence band is shown in grey, under the assumption that the errors are independent and identically distributed. The solid red line is the trend from a least-squares regression of wind speed as a function of year and the dashed red lines delineate the 90% point-wise confidence band about this trend.
A leading oceanographer referred me to this study, from 2008, which he says remains accurate – graph above. I include the caption for those who speak stats.
Takeaway for the rest of us – its a graph of wind speeds in tropical cyclones –
and it’s going up.
Atlantic tropical cyclones are getting stronger on average, with a
30-year trend that has been related to an increase in ocean temperatures
over the Atlantic Ocean and elsewhere1–4. Over the rest
of the tropics, however, possible trends in tropical cyclone intensity
are less obvious, owing to the unreliability and incompleteness
of the observational record and to a restricted focus, in previous
trend analyses, on changes in average intensity. Here we overcome
these two limitations by examining trends in the upper quantiles
of per-cyclone maximum wind speeds (that is, the maximum
intensities that cyclones achieve during their lifetimes), estimated
from homogeneous data derived from an archive of satellite
records. We find significant upward trends for wind speed quantiles above the 70th percentile, with trends as high as 0.36 0.09ms21 yr21 (s.e.) for the strongest cyclones. We note separate
upward trends in the estimated lifetime-maximum wind speeds of
the very strongest tropical cyclones (99th percentile) over each
ocean basin, with the largest increase at this quantile occurring
over the North Atlantic, although not all basins show statistically
significant increases. Our results are qualitatively consistent with the hypothesis that as the seas warm, the ocean has more energy to convert to tropical cyclone wind.
Tropical cyclones run on heat, and much of that heat comes from the sea surface. If the surface of the ocean is below a certain temperature, about 82 degrees F, about 28 degrees C, a hurricane or typhoon is very unlikely to form. Above that temperature, if other conditions are right, it may form. Warmer seas can make bigger or stronger storms, and as the storm passes over the ocean, the temperature of the sea surface has a strong influence on whether the storm increases or decreases in strength . As the storm moves over the sea, the interface between the windy storm and the roiling ocean becomes something of a mess, as though the surface of the ocean was in a blender, and there is a lot of exchange of heat across that interface. Also, deeper, cooler water is mixed with warmer surface water. A powerful storm moving across the ocean will leave in its wake a strip of cooler water. This sometimes causes subsequent storms moving along the same path to be weaker or to downgrade in strength more quickly. Continue reading “Haiyan: Is This a Trend?”
A Georgia splinter group known as the Green Tea Coalition, which is part of the broader anti-big-government movement, is reviving the Republican link with the Sierra Club that dates back more than a century to President Theodore Roosevelt’s work to protect the environment. Its influence is being felt in other states, from Arizona in the West to North Carolina on the East Coast.
“Some people have called this an unholy alliance,” said Debbie Dooley, founder of the coalition and a co-founder of the Atlanta Tea Party Patriots. She’s working with the Sierra Club to fight for solar and against nuclear power in Georgia. “We agree on the need to develop clean energy, but not much else.”
What’s uniting the environmental and Republican groups is the view that plunging prices for solar panels may mean consumers don’t need to buy all their electricity from utilities and their giant centralized generation plants.
“The free market approach works well in Republican circles, so I can understand how these strange bedfellows come together,” said Frank Maisano, an energy specialist at the Washington law firm Bracewell & Giuliani LLP. “It becomes an economic argument.”
Solar panel prices have fallen 57 percent since the start of 2011 to about 86 cents a watt as of Nov. 4, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That means solar power costs an average $143 a megawatt-hour worldwide now, down from $236 in the first quarter of 2011, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Nuclear costs about $101 and natural gas $70, by comparison.
In the movie “Weekend at Bernie’s”, the protagonists try to maintain the fiction that the corpse of a dead gangster is in fact quite alive, and the life of the party. It’s been that way for climate deniers trying to maintain the fiction that cosmic rays have something to do with obviously human caused climate change.
But that thing has been stinking up the room lately. Think anyone will notice?
LONDON – Changes in solar activity, sunspots and cosmic rays, and their effects on clouds have contributed no more than 10 percent to global warming, according to two British scientists.The findings, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, reconfirm the basic science that increasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are causing most climate change. They also reexamine the alternative case made by climate deniers: that it is the Sun’s changing activity and not us that is causing the Earth to heat up. –
By comparing the small oscillations in cosmic ray rate and temperature with the overall trends in both since 1955, Sloan and Wolfendale found that less than 14 percent of the global warming seen during this period could have been caused by solar activity.
To check their findings they reviewed their own previous studies and all the other work they could find on the subject, to see whether they could find other evidence of a link between solar activity and increasing global temperatures.
Their findings indicated that, overall, the contribution of changing solar activity, either directly or through cosmic rays, was even less and cannot have contributed more than 10 percent to global warming in the 20th century.
For climate skeptics trying to find an alternative explanation for the global warming that’s occurred over the past century, the sun and galactic cosmic rays have become a popular hypothesis. However, several recent scientific papers have effectively put the final nail in the cosmic rays-global warming coffin.
Galactic cosmic rays are high energy particles originating from outside our solar system. Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Institute is the main proponent of the hypothesis linking them to globalclimate change. The hypothesis goes like this:
1) Cosmic rays may be able to seed cloud formation.
2) If so, fewer cosmic rays reaching Earth means less cloud formation.
3) Fewer clouds reflecting sunlight means more solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, and thus warming.
The sun’s magnetic field deflects galactic cosmic rays, so if the sun is in a phase of high activity with a strong magnetic field, fewer cosmic rays will reach Earth. Hence if this hypothesis is correct, galactic cosmic rays will act to amplify the solar influence on the global climate, whether it be a cooling effect from low solar activity or warming from high solar activity.
This is a relatively new and interesting hypothesis, so it’s become popular amongst climate contrarians as an alternative explanation to human-caused global warming. However, it’s also been the subject of extensive scientific research over the past few years, and the hypothesis simply has not held up to scrutiny.
First, there’s the obvious fact that cosmic rays cannot explain the recent global warming because solar activity and the amount of cosmic rays reaching the Earth’s surface have remained flat on average over the past 60 years. The sun and cosmic rays could only be causing global warming if there were a long-term upward trend in solar activity and downward trend in cosmic rays reaching Earth. In fact, the number of cosmic rays reaching Earth has increased since 1990, and reached record levels in 2009 (one of the hottest years on record).
Annual average cosmic ray counts per minute (blue – note that numbers decrease going up the left vertical axis, because lower cosmic rays should mean higher temperatures) from the Neutron Monitor Database vs. annual average global surface temperature (red, right vertical axis) from NOAA.
Philippines delegate Naderev (Yeb) Saño, announces his decision to go on hunger strike on the first day of the COP19 Climate Change Summit in Poland, 11 November 2013.
Making an impassioned plea for action by the conference, he said that he would be fasting in solidarity with his country-folk until action to prevent climate change is forthcoming.
