Found on YouTube: vertigo inducing video of Russian daredevils climbing the Shanhai Tower, the still-under-construction second tallest building in the world.
Fun to watch, and instructive bird’s eye view of Chinese “air” quality.
Severe pollution in Beijing has made the Chinese capital “barely suitable” for living, according to an official Chinese report, as the world’s second-largest economy tries to reduce often hazardous levels of smog caused by decades of rapid growth.
As more research gives a clearer picture of global energy dynamics, we understand more clearly the gaps in our instrumental record. Recent papers have shed new light on what the surface temperature record has been telling us for the last decade. I’ve posted on one of those, now another.
The idea that global warming has “paused” or is currently chillaxing in a comfy chair with the words “hiatus” written on it has been getting a good run in the media of late.
Much of this is down to a new study analysing why one single measure of climate change – the temperatures on the surface averaged out across the entire globe – might not have been rising quite so quickly as some thought they might.
But here’s the thing.
There never was a “pause” in global warming or climate change. For practical purposes, the so-called “pause” in global warming is not even a thing.
The study in question was led by Professor Matt England at the University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre.
England’s study found that climate models had not been geared to account for the current two decade-long period of strong trade winds in the Pacific.
Once the researchers added this missing windy ingredient to the climate models, the surface temperatures predicted by the models more closely matched the observations – that is, the actual temperature measurements that have been taken around the globe.
Coal’s War on Water, and the climate changes exacerbating it, cross international boundaries. The Fossil Fuel industry continues its fight to make the world safe for unlimited burning, but pesky human beings, other living species and their confounded “needs” to eat, drink, and breath, keep getting in the way. We look forward to new technologies that will remove these obstacles.
There is a thread running thru this narrative, that includes unseasonable melt and warmth in Alaska, brutal drought in California and the West, Frigid air masses in the US East, and the constant pounding of rain and storms in the UK – all connected by a stubborn, “stuck” jet stream, that is behaving very much as we might expect if it is indeed responding to loss of arctic ice.
I’ve been talking to well informed observers on the ground in the UK, more on this later – but as one of them told me yesterday, it’s one thing to have a “one-in-150 year” event, that’s weather. But when you begin to have a string of “one-in-150 year” events, back to back, you begin to wonder if the dice are indeed loaded.
We are watching a globally significant environmental, and perhaps, political, event unfold.
The defence secretary, Philip Hammond, insisted the government has got a grip on the UK’s devastating floods as he tried to put an end to “recriminations” about whether more could have been done to prevent them.
The senior Tory cabinet minister argued that the military and emergency services have everything under control, as concern about the potential scale of serious flooding along the Thames Valley continues.
There are plenty of Olympic Games during which it would be no big deal to walk a few blocks from the teeming sporting venues and find dozens of locals sunning themselves on the beach, or a man taking a lazy dip in the sea. Those however, are typically of the Summer Olympics.
On Monday, that sun-splashed scene occurred on the shores of the Black Sea, a hard slap shot from the gleaming arenas of the 2014 Winter Games, where organizers were finding it challenging to keep the ice from melting. And it occurred perhaps 40 miles from the Sochi Games’ “mountain cluster,” where the warm weather forced organizers of the skiing events to cancel some training runs and shift others from day to night.
Through four days of competition, the 2014 Sochi Games are on track to be the warmest Winter Olympics in history, which actually is no surprise.
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But even that description doesn’t do justice to Monday’s weather along the coast, where — brace yourselves, Washingtonians — the high reached 61 degrees, which for comparison’s sake, was warmer than Monday’s forecast highs for Atlanta, Austin, Birmingham, Ala., and Myrtle Beach, S.C. After a brief cool-down Tuesday, with a forecasted high of 51, temperatures could be back in the low 60s Thursday.
The planet has warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1800s, and as a result, snow is melting. In the last 47 years, a million square miles of spring snow cover has disappeared from the Northern Hemisphere. Europe has lost half of its Alpine glacial ice since the 1850s, and if climate change is not reined in, two-thirds of European ski resorts will be likely to close by 2100.
The same could happen in the United States, where in the Northeast, more than half of the 103 ski resorts may no longer be viable in 30 years because of warmer winters. As far for the Western part of the country, it will lose an estimated 25 to 100 percent of its snowpack by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are not curtailed — reducing the snowpack in Park City, Utah, to zero and relegating skiing to the top quarter of Ajax Mountain in Aspen.
The facts are straightforward: The planet is getting hotter. Snow melts above 32 degrees Fahrenheit. The Alps are warming two to three times faster than the worldwide average, possibly because of global circulation patterns. Since 1970, the rate of winter warming per decade in the United States has been triple the rate of the previous 75 years, with the strongest trends in the Northern regions of the country. Nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000, and this winter is already looking to be one of the driest on record — with California at just 12 percent of its average snowpack in January, and the Pacific Northwest at around 50 percent.
Sparkling and debonair, James Taranto – the Wall Street Journal’s self described “Tarantosaurus Sex” holds forth above – ladies, – he’s single! Don’t rush – line forms to the left…..
His take on the battle of the sexes is as refreshingly insightful as his climate science below:
“The contentious ‘pause’ in global warming over the past decade is largely due to unusually strong trade winds in the Pacific ocean that have buried surface heat deep underwater,” London’s Guardian reports. This is supposed to explain away the absence of warming:
The findings should provide fresh certainty about the reasons behind the warming hiatus, which has been claimed by critics of mainstream climate science as evidence that the models are flawed and predictions of rising temperatures have been exaggerated.
But wait. Why are the Pacific trade winds so strong? An Australian climate scientist “said it was unclear what has caused the increase in Pacific trade winds, although warming in the Indian Ocean has been cited as a potential trigger.”
Another way of formulating that hypothesis is that global warming causes global cooling, which has canceled out global warming. In other words, maybe the world’s climate regulates itself in ways the climate scientists have yet to figure out.
Above, reposting Dr. Stanton Glanz comparing the anti-science movement of the lead industry, the tobacco industry, and the fossil fuel industry – the time-tested fundamental practice of the ‘..what about this, what about that?” whack-a-mole gish gallop.
Anthony Watts has a post which mocks scientists who are trying to explain “the pause.” It oozes ridicule because so many possible explanations have been explored, which he dismisses as “hand-waving.”
His list is reasonably long:
Too much aerosols from volcanoes, ENSO patterns, missing heat that went to the deep ocean, ocean cooling, low solar activity, inappropriately dealt with weather stations in the Arctic, and stadium waves, to name a few. So much for consensus.
Setting aside whether the list is even right — what Willard Tony doesn’t realize is that he has put the spotlight on the real difference between skeptics and deniers:
When scientists who are genuinely skeptical see something they don’t understand, they try to understand it. When deniers see something scientists don’t understand, they use it as an excuse to claim that “natural variation has been in control, not CO2.” Continue reading “The Trouble with Quibbles”
While the rate of surface temperature warming has slowed in recent years, several studies have shown that the warming of the planet as a whole has not. This suggests that the slowed surface warming is not due as much to external factors like decreased solar activity or more pollutants in the atmosphere blocking sunlight, but more due to internal factors shifting the heat into the oceans. In particular, the rate at which the deep oceans have warmed over the past 10 to 15 years isunprecedented in the past half century.
Research led by Masahiro Watanabe of the Japanese Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute suggests this is mainly due to more efficient transfer of heat to the deep oceans. Consistent with model simulations led by GeraldMeehl, Watanabe finds that we sometimes expect “hiatus decades” to occur, when surface air temperatures don’t warm because more heat is transferred to the deep ocean layers. A paper published last year by Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that accounting for the changes in Pacific Ocean surface temperatures allowed their model to reproduce the slowed global surface warming over the past 10 to 15 years. However, the mechanism causing these Pacific Ocean changes has remained elusive.
The new study published by Matthew England’s team helps explain how and why more heat is being funneled into the deeper ocean layers. The study indicates that a dramatic acceleration in equatorial trade winds, associated with a negative phase of a cycle called the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) has invigorated the circulation of the Pacific Ocean. This has caused more heat from the surface to be mixed down into deeper ocean layers, while bringing cooler waters to the surface. The combination of these two processes cools global surface temperatures. Like the rate at which heat is accumulating in the deep oceans, the recent strengthening of the trade winds is unprecedented, as the bottom frame in the figure below shows.
Top frame: Global surface temperature anomalies. Bottom frame: Pacific wind stress anomalies. From England et al. (2014).
Electricity passes through a heating coil which is heated to over 1000 °F (538 °C) which then heats the water. This process means that a tremendous strain is placed on the coil which frequently burns out or breaks in as little as 12 months. Most units also contain a flow switch, which is inherently unreliable technology. The flow switch creates a “flutter” of alternating hot and cold water at low flow rates, which is frustrating and uncomfortable, but also unsafe due to excessive heating of water which can cause scalding. HEATWORKS MODEL 1’s graphite electrodes use the resistance of the water to heat it, and so they never get hotter than the surrounding water. This ensures a long life while heating the water reliably and consistently, even at low flow rates. Plus, the MODEL 1’s technology heats the water instantly where any other electric tankless unit take a minimum of 30 seconds to heat the water, which wastes the water that goes down the drain until the hot water arrives.
