Dr. Andrew Dessler has been one of the most valuable players on the climate research team for some time. On thursday he testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Barbara Boxer’s domain.
I pulled this screen recording off the Senate EPW website, a little herky jerky but the sound is there. Written pdf here.
Key points:
The mainstream science of climate change has met the gold standard of science in that it allows scientists to make predictions that are accurate, example, stratospheric cooling/tropospheric warming, polar amplification mainly in the arctic, water vapor feedbacks,
These points fit into a more general context about how science works. Making successful predictions is the gold standard of science. If a theory successfully predicts phenomena that are later observed, one can be confident that the theory captures something essential about the real world system. The standard model has done that. For example, climate scientists predicted in 1967 that the stratosphere would cool while the troposphere warmed as a result of increasing greenhouse gases. This was observed 20 years later. Climate models predicted in the 1970s that the Arctic would warm faster the Antarctic. This has also been subsequently confirmed.
Was global warming a conspirator in causing Canadian player Frank Dancevic to hallucinate a cartoon dog shortly before collapsing on court six?
As the Australian Open continues in Melbourne, so does the heat wave and the scorching temperatures of 41C and over.
Today will likely be the third day straight that the Olympic Park thermometer gets above 41C. The forecast today for Melbourne is a ball-dropping 44C.
Dancevic said it was “inhumane” to ask players to continue in the relentless heat. British star Andy Murray commented it was a bad look for the sport to have ball boys and girls, players and spectators collapsing.
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Blair Trewin, a senior climatologist at the Bureau of Meteorology’s National Climate Centre, told me that over the long term, Melbourne experiences 1.3 days above 40C every year.
But he says that between 2001 and 2013, the average across all those years was 1.9 days above 40C.
“Despite what people would have you believe, 40-degree days in Melbourne are not particularly common, and the city has gone as long as five years (1968 to 1973) without having any,” he told me by email.
Wind power alone could provide electricity for all of China if the country overhauls its rural grids and raises the subsidy for wind energy, a new study finds.
China has rapidly become a global leader in wind energy and now ranks fourth in the world in installed capacity. But coal-fired power plants continue to supply most of the country’s rising electricity needs – a development path that scientists predict will lead to dangerous levels of climate change.
New models of China’s wind resources suggest that coal is not the only cost-effective energy option for the country. The winds blowing in China are powerful enough to generate low-carbon electricity that eliminates “much, if not all” of the power sector’s future greenhouse gas emissions, according to researchers from Harvard University and Beijing’s Tsinghua University.
“We are trying to cut into the current defined demand for new electricity generation in China, which is roughly a gigawatt (GW) a week – or an enormous 50 GW per year,” said Michael McElroy, lead author of the study published in the current issue of Science,in a statement. “China is bringing on several coal-fired power plants a week. By publicizing the opportunity for a different way to go we will hope to have a positive influence.”
As China’s demand for electricity increases an estimated 10 percent each year, the country is projected to need an additional 800 GW of coal-generated electricity during the next 20 years. With current wind energy payments of 0.4 RMB (US$0.059) per kilowatt-hour, wind energy could displace 23 percent of coal-generated electricity. If so, China would eliminate as much as 0.62 gigatons of annual carbon dioxide emissions, or 9.4 percent of the country’s current annual emissions, the study said.
Wind energy could supply all of China’s 2030 electricity demands, however, if wind contract prices were increased to 0.516 RMB (US $0.076) per kilowatt-hour, the study said.
Climate change, and resultant sea level rise, are becoming impossible to ignore in South Florida, one of the world’s most vulnerable urban areas. This documentary by South Florida Public Media depicts very matter of factly the hard facts of sea level rise, from the point of view of those whose job it is to keep up with the changes, and clean up the ever messier effects.
It’s a truism that Washington politicians are much more prone to preening and grandstanding than state and local pols, as Washington can be a bit removed from common concerns of working people who are just trying to get through their day.
For the average Republican Congressman, the tether to reality can be still more tenuous. He/She can still ignore climate change, for instance, owing to his/her residence in an alternative, Fox-ified universe.
For the average Mayor, that is not an option.
Local administrators have to actually fill the potholes, clean up the mess, and make sure people can get to work.
“While climate change deniers were babbling on the airwaves, we were quietly going about our work of becoming a more resilient community with better transit, more energy efficient government buildings, improved bicycle facilities and green infrastructure to address storm water runoff. Every city is, or should be, looking at the impacts of climate change now and into the future. Future generations of Grand Rapidians will look back on this time with gratitude for the far-sightedness of our city.”
Toronto’s top bureaucrat is warning that the city is unprepared to handle the effects of climate change, and badly needs help from higher levels of government to cope with increasingly frequent bouts of extreme weather.
At a special meeting Friday to discuss the pre-Christmas ice storm that left one million people without power, City Manager Joe Pennachetti predicted it won’t be long until Canada’s biggest city is walloped by another major storm.
“We all know that these ‘hundred year storms’ are happening every two years and at the end of the day they’re not going away. It’s probably going to get worse,” he said.
The meeting adjourned at 3:30 p.m. Friday but when it resumes on Monday councillors are expected to vote on a motion asking the provincial and federal government to pick up some of the cost of both last month’s ice storm as well as the July downpour that caused flash floods across the city.
The summer deluge cost $65 million and the winter blast $106 million, for a total of $171 million. City staff are recommending council ask the other levels of government to split the bill evenly three ways, at $57 million each.
Pennachetti stressed that all levels of government not only need to address the cost of the 2013 storms, but also start preparing for fierce weather to visit the region on a regular basis. A recommendation before council calls on Ottawa and Queen’s Park to devise programs to address the long-term affects of climate change on cities.
“We have to work together as partners on solutions for extreme weather. It’s time now to sit down and do that,” he told reporters. “We’ve been highlighting in reports that we know that this is becoming an issue, and we’re finally there. We’re at the point.”
Remember how the climate deniers went after Stephen Chu, Obama’s first Energy Secretary, when Chu described Climate Change’s threat to California agriculture? Given the importance of California agriculture in supplying the fruits and vegetables that Americans have come to expect all winter long, the current drought is something that could have significant impact on American’s pocket books.
Chu warned of water shortages plaguing the West and Upper Midwest and particularly dire consequences for California, his home state, the nation’s leading agricultural producer.
In a worst case, Chu said, up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.
“I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen,” he said. “We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.” And, he added, “I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going” either.
A pair of recent studies raise similar warnings. One, published in January in the journal Science, raised the specter of worldwide crop shortages as temperatures rise. Another, penned by UC Berkeley researchers last year, estimated California has about $2.5 trillion in real estate assets — including agriculture — endangered by warming.
As California struggles through a run of historically dry weather, most residents are looking at falling reservoir levels, dusty air and thirsty lawns.
But meteorologists have fixed their attention on the scientific phenomenon they say is to blame for the emerging drought: a vast zone of high pressure in the atmosphere off the West Coast, nearly four miles high and 2,000 miles long, so stubborn that one researcher has dubbed it the “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge.”
Like a brick wall, the mass of high pressure air has been blocking Pacific winter storms from coming ashore in California, deflecting them up into Alaska and British Columbia, even delivering rain and cold weather to the East Coast. Similar high-pressure zones pop up all the time during most winters, but they usually break down, allowing rain to get through to California. This one, ominously, has anchored itself for 13 months, since December 2012, making it unprecedented in modern weather records and leaving researchers scratching their heads.
“It’s like the Sierra — a mountain range just sitting off the West Coast — only bigger,” said Bob Benjamin, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Monterey. “This ridge is sort of a mountain in the atmosphere. In most years, it comes and goes. This year it came and didn’t go.”
The current high-pressure ridge is even stronger and more persistent than a similar ridge that parked over the Pacific Ocean during the 1976-77 drought, one of the driest in the 20th century.
Scientists know that changes in temperature cause high- and low-pressure zones around the world. In many ways, air works like water. The deeper you swim in the ocean, the stronger the water pressure, because the weight of the water above is pressing down on the water below. Air in the atmosphere also has weight, and as temperatures of the ocean and land fluctuate, the atmospheric pressure also changes, helping drive much of our weather.
This last worry – about property value loss — appears unfounded, according to a study released Friday by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the University of Connecticut. After analyzing more than 122,000 home sales in urban areas near 26 wind farms in Massachusetts, the researchers concluded that there was no statistical evidence that wind farms impact the value of nearby urban properties.
Interestingly, researchers found that in some cases, the announcement of a new wind farm may have contributed to a drop in some home prices. But after construction was completed, home prices appeared to be unaffected, according to the study.
That’s good news for the wind industry.
U.S. wind power capacity is likely to grow by 9% in 2014 to about 66,000 megawatts, and jump an additional 15% to 75,000 megawatts by the end of 2015, according to a Tuesday forecast by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Wind farms aside, the Lawrence Berkeley study found that Massachusetts home prices did appear to suffer if a property was near a landfill, power transmission line, highway or prison. Conversely, home values tended to be higher for properties near a beach or park, according to one of the study’s less-surprising findings.
“Although there have been claims of significant property value impacts near operating wind turbines that regularly surface in the press or in local communities, strong evidence to support those claims has consistently failed to materialize in all of the major U.S. studies conducted so far,” said Ben Hoen, the report’s co-author and a researcher at the Berkeley Lab.
Tropical storms have occurred during every month in the Atlantic, but January storms are rare. Today, Subtropical Storm Arthur could be forming about 2,000 miles east of the Bahamas.
The official Atlantic hurricane season spans June 1 through November 30, but nature does not always obey our arbitrary boundaries. On average, about 97% of tropical cyclone activity falls within the official hurricane season, while the remaining 3% is spread out among the six off-season months. Looking back to 1851, only two known storms have formed during January: Hurricane #1 in 1938 (formed January 3), and Subtropical Storm #1 in 1978 (formed on January 18).
I just want to highlight this illuminating infographic by James Powell in which, based on more than 2000 peer-reviewed publications, he counts the number of authors from November, 2012 to December, 2013 who explicitly deny global warming (that is, who propose a fundamentally different reason for temperature rise than anthropogenic CO2). The number is exactly one. In addition Powell also has helpful links to the abstracts and main text bodies of the relevant papers.
It’s worth noting how many authors agree with the basic fact of global warming – more than nine thousand. And that’s just in a single year. Now I understand as well as anyone else that consensus does not imply truth but I find it odd how there aren’t even a handful of scientists who deny global warming presumably because the global warming mafia threatens to throttle them if they do. It’s not like we are seeing a 70-30% split, or even a 90-10% split. No, the split is more like 99.99-0.01%.
I have brought my previous study (see here and here) up-to-date by reviewing peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals over the period from Nov. 12, 2012 through December 31, 2013. I found 2,258 articles, written by a total of 9,136 authors. (Download the chart above here.) Only one article, by a single author in the Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, rejected man-made global warming. I discuss that article here.
My previous study, of the peer-reviewed literature from 1991 through Nov. 12, 2012, found 13,950 articles on “global warming” or “global climate change.” Of those, I judged that only 24 explicitly rejected the theory of man-made global warming. The methodology and details for the original and the new study are described here.
Anyone can repeat as much of the new study as they wish–all of it if they like. Download an Excel database of the 2,258 articles here. It includes the title, document number, and Web of Science accession number. Scan the titles to identify articles that might reject man-made global warming. Then use the DOI or WoS accession number to find and read the abstracts of those articles, and where necessary, the entire article. If you find any candidates that I missed, please email me here.
