Happy new year, such as it is..
I’m taking it slow for a few days, and binge watching Game of Thrones (again, this time with my wife, who finally relented and is now addicted).
Now officially being reported in mainstream media, 2014 will be listed as the hottest year in the instrumental record.
UPDATE:
Now watch the item below, as newscasters from a small station in the southern US grapple with reporting the news to what is, one suspects, a conservative and scientifically challenged audience. First, you’ll see them introduce the NBC network piece above, which plays, then the local broadcasters try to parse the news, starting at 1:52, where one of them notes that “..everyone that believes in global warming can take this and run with it if they want..”
Here is a look at five places that will help push 2014 into the global warming record books.
- Australia: For the second year in a row, Australians saw heat records topple from the Gold Coast to the Coral Coast. The country kicked off January with an extreme heat wave; temperatures soared higher than 120 F (49 C). Heat waves in the autumn (March to May) and spring (September to November) also drove temperatures into the record books.
- Eastern Pacific Ocean: Toasty temperatures developed in the eastern Pacific Ocean, despite an El Niño that never appeared. The heat was especially notable off the western coast of the United States. Fishing boats spotted species well north of their range, such as a giant ocean sunfish offshore of Alaska. For the global ocean, the September to November sea surface temperature was 1.13 F (0.63 C) above the 20th century average of 60.7 F (16.0 C), surpassing the previous record by 0.11 F (0.06 C), according to NOAA.
- Siberia: Central Siberia defrosted in spring and early summer under temperatures more than 9 F (5 C) above its 1981 to 2010 average. Ice on the Ob River began to break up two weeks earlier than normal. The heat may have unleashed methane gas trapped in previously frozen permafrost, triggering underground explosions that formed spectacularly deep holes.
- California: The long-running drought in California was made worse in 2014 by record heat. The first 10 months of 2014 were the warmest in California’s history since 1895, further burdening the state’s water demands.
- Northern Europe: The same weather pattern that froze North America in early 2014 brought an unusually warm spring to countries including Denmark, Norway and Turkey. The sultry spring was the warmest in a century or more in these countries. In addition, January to October was the warmest 10-month period on record for Central England since 1659, and the warmest such period for the Netherlands since 1706.
I’m predicting this ‘warmest year’ record will stand for a whole 365 days…
NBC News has been focusing more on this issue recently–I’ve tweeted about their clips several times in the past couple of months. Nice to see.
The Washington Post is doing better lately also, and that’s nice to see too. Perhaps having Chris Mooney on board helped bring that about. The WashPost is the main paper that is delivered to Congress’s doorstep, as well as the lobbyists, congressional staffers, and corporate execs that are sucking at the government teat. Maybe some will pay attention.
They had something similar on the United Airlines TV in the airport terminals the other day. Usually they just play CNN stuff. But between CNN segments there was a global temp update, comparing the preindustrial baseline to today, and it seemed to be funded by some local Chicago group (I was at ORD airport). It almost felt as if i were in a movie, where the ‘ominous message’ is bled out onto the public through televisions in public spaces.
You would put a southern state on their. I mean you really have just as much lunatics in your location as we do here.
FYI: this will be the first year in 52 years (full record) that Anchorage Alaska will have no dates below 0°F.
At climate.gov, there’s an article on the Georgia seashore dealing with sea level change. Apparently Georgia is no North Carolina!
happy to post any similar vids from any other location. Plenty of moronic broadcasters out there. this one popped right up on a google news search.
When it comes to sheer obnoxiousness combined with stupidity, many may match, but few can top, San Diego’s own John Coleman.
If you haven’t treated yourselves to a big enough helping of stupid this morning, check out John Coleman’s twitter feed @johncolemanmrwx.
Here are a few recent Coleman tweets:
https://twitter.com/JohnColemanMRWX/status/550185768237694977
https://twitter.com/JohnColemanMRWX/status/550379521258430464
https://twitter.com/JohnColemanMRWX/status/550515313502998528
San Diego is the proud home of the one of the world’s leading climate-research institutions (the Scripps Institution of Oceanography) *and* the not-so-proud home of one of the world’s most hapless climate-denying weathermen (Coleman). Go figure.
No, we don’t have as many lunatics.. Lenar Whitney and James Inhofe have NO equals in any state above the mason-Dixon line.
The North has its share of lunatics, though. The big difference between the North and South is that the South tends towards majority conservative in greater percentages, so the lunatics have political cover to speak crazy openly and with frequency.
This has an interesting chart:
http://scorecard.lcv.org/
My main takeaway is that environmental issues aren’t really a North vs. South thing as much as they once were. Scroll the slider from 2013 to 1971, and the demographics change. It’s really more a Heartland (or however one wants to call it) vs. Coasts thing now.
New England (with the exception of New Hampshire) has stayed consistently pro-environment.
There’s another interesting chart. Go to the ‘Charts’ section and look at the ‘Average National Environment Score’. It also fluctuates while staying within a mid-range (never fluctuating too anti- or pro-environment), but if you look closely there’s a discernible trend toward anti- during Democratic Presidencies and pro- during Republican Presidencies. It’s a sort of backlash effect played out in Congress.
(I’m not claiming this source is scientifically rigorous. Just a rough barometer.)
The 60 degree average difference in Siberia seems really high. Can someone verify that?
Actually. I found this on Livescience:
“Siberia: Central Siberia defrosted in spring and early summer under temperatures more than 9 F (5 C) above its 1981 to 2010 average. Ice on the Ob River began to break up two weeks earlier than normal. The heat may have unleashed methane gas trapped in previously frozen permafrost, triggering underground explosions that formed spectacularly deep holes.”
I don’t think NBC reported that very accurately at all at 1:16 into the video from the Louisiana feed.
What NBC reported at 1:16 was that temperatures in Oymyakon (known as the coldest town on earth) averaged around +9 degrees in February 2014 as opposed to the normal February average of -51 degrees (a 60 degree difference).
That may or may not be “accurate”, but it has nothing to do with what you found about what went on in spring and early summer. You’re comparing apples and oranges.
OK, thanks. I just don’t want to post anything that I may bot be accurate, so I will pass on posting it for now.
*may not be accurate
The Real News Network has an article up on the 3 biggest climate news stories of 2014:
http://tinyurl.com/q6qgwj9
Excellent – thanks for sharing
And a cartoon for the remedy
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cartoon/2014/dec/31/united-nations-climate-change-talks-world-leaders-2015-cartoon
That these two attempt to pontificate on the issue is ludicrous. there goal obviously is to try to alay any fears viewrs might have but in the process they cast dispersions on the whole field of climate science. typical of most local broadcasters in this country. I have a shoebox full of rocks that offers up better explanations then most local broadcasters.
A good clip from RNN via Ray. Not new news to Crockers but maybe it will reach some new ears.
I have just finished reading “The Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth”, by Curt Stager, 2011, Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s. Stager is a scientist with excellent creds, and he has written a great book. He spends 250 very readable pages looking at climate change and global warming from a perspective that I have only seen touched upon briefly in the past.
He even argues a bit that carbon pollution may be a good thing in that global warming has cancelled out the effects of the Milankovitch cycles and the next Ice Age will now likely not appear in ~50,000 years and the one that should follow in ~130,000 years may not either. Ice ages are tough on humans too, and sea levels dropping by 200 or 300 feet and mile thick sheets of ice scraping away northern cities may be an even bigger challenge than sea level rise caused by global warming. Do you want to move everything back from rising oceans or towards receding ones? A sort of two-edged Hobson’s choice dilemma.
Sager is the typical conservative scientist, and speaks mainly of a deep future in which we follow the “low emissions” scenario and get CO2 under control in time to avoid the worst case. In his view, things will get quite messy, but we can return to a semblance of normalcy in a few hundred years or a couple of millennia at most.
He does raise the specter of what the deep future will look like if we go the BAU high emissions route. In his view, it may take many hundreds of thousands of years for balance to return. He does see mankind surviving in any event, and makes the slightly mind-blowing (to me) suggestion that a good reason to keep the fossil fuels in the ground now is that we will need to burn them in the deep future to counter future ice ages, at which time we will WANT to increase the greenhouse effect.
All in all, a stimulating read, and I recommend it highly. (Found it and the following book in the used book store for $5 each).
I am in the process of reading “Waking the Frog: Solutions for our Climate Change Paralysis”, by Tom Rand, ECW Press, 2014. Rand is a Canadian entrepreneur and now activist who says it all as well as anyone ever has. I am tempted to quote long passages—-his introduction alone is worth it. A good commentary on the book:
http://hot-topic.co.nz/waking-the-frog/
It’s my understanding that Svant Arrhenius, who discovered AGW in 1896, was happy about it, because it would warm the planet and help keep us from the next Glacial Period. He just didn’t anticipate how we’d subsequently go crazy with burning through the stuff.
After that Louisiana waffle show Climate Central has some interesting numbers:
Seventeen U.S. Cities on Track for Hottest Year
“A number of U.S. urban areas will also join in the record-setting festivities while not a single major urban area will be raising a glass to record cold. In fact, it’s been nearly 30 years since a major U.S. city had a record cold year.”
and
“The 17 metro areas that will set records in 2014 have a population of 28.5 million, or about 9 percent of the U.S. population. In comparison, the metro areas that set a cold record this year are home to a population of exactly zero.”
There you are ‘waffle duo’ some more numbers for you.
Media here were reporting 2014 was probably going to be the hottest year on record quite a few weeks ago.
The fact that so many years of this century have been so much hotter than others – that 2014, 2010 and 2005 are the hottest years of all practically speaks for itself. One year could be a fluke. Three (Or fifteen or twenty!) so close together? Not so much.
Also I think this graph and item via Greg Laden’s blog is worth sharing and noting here :
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/12/22/global-temperature-a-century-ago-vs-today/
In case you haven’t already seen that. Hope that’s interesting / useful for you Greenman3610.
In Australia nationally – specifically the State of South Oz, FWIW.
Where it has been over 40 – actually 43 degrees (109 F) celsius maximum here (Adelaide) today and is still around 40 (104 F) as I type.