Month: August 2020

Arctic Sea Ice Dancing with Record Low

Science Daily:

A new study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, supports predictions that the Arctic could be free of sea ice by 2035.

High temperatures in the Arctic during the last interglacial — the warm period around 127,000 years ago — have puzzled scientists for decades. Now the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre climate model has enabled an international team of researchers to compare Arctic sea ice conditions during the last interglacial with present day. Their findings are important for improving predictions of future sea ice change.

During spring and early summer, shallow pools of water form on the surface of Arctic sea-ice. These ‘melt ponds’ are important for how much sunlight is absorbed by the ice and how much is reflected back into space. The new Hadley Centre model is the UK’s most advanced physical representation of the Earth’s climate and a critical tool for climate research and incorporates sea-ice and melt ponds.

Using the model to look at Arctic sea ice during the last interglacial, the team concludes that the impact of intense springtime sunshine created many melt ponds, which played a crucial role in sea-ice melt. A simulation of the future using the same model indicates that the Arctic may become sea ice-free by 2035.

Joint lead author Dr Maria Vittoria Guarino, Earth System Modeller at British Antarctic Survey (BAS), says:

“High temperatures in the Arctic have puzzled scientists for decades. Unravelling this mystery was technically and scientifically challenging. For the first time, we can begin to see how the Arctic became sea ice-free during the last interglacial. The advances made in climate modelling means that we can create a more accurate simulation of the Earth’s past climate, which, in turn gives us greater confidence in model predictions for the future.”

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Another Deranged Trump “Windmill” Rant

Raw Story:

The leader of the free world ranted about windmills while calling into Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Monday.

“If you see a windmill and you hear a windmill, your home goes down by half, or less than half. It kills all the birds,” Trump falsely claimed.

“The whole thing is crazy, what they want to do, and they’ll destroy the country,” Trump argued.

“It is what it is.”: Derecho Hammers Corn Belt

“It is what it is.”

USAToday:

A derecho – a dangerous, ferocious wall of wind that’s like an inland hurricane – lashed 700 miles across the Midwest on Monday, flipping cars, downing trees, causing widespread property damage and knocking out power to hundreds of thousands.

The derecho lasted several hours, traveling through Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, a woman died at a hospital after firefighters pulled her from debris inside her mobile home after high winds rolled it onto its side Monday night.

A 63-year-old bicyclist also died after he was struck by one of several large trees that fell Monday on a bike trail outside of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, near Ely, the Linn County sheriff’s office said.

So far, dozens of injuries but no other fatalities have been reported. 

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Will Yet Another Hockey Stick Silence Deniers?

Of course not.

Nature:

An extensive new multi-proxy database of paleo-temperature time series (Temperature 12k) enables a more robust analysis of global mean surface temperature (GMST) and associated uncertainties than was previously available. We applied five different statistical methods to reconstruct the GMST of the past 12,000 years (Holocene). Each method used different approaches to averaging the globally distributed time series and to characterizing various sources of uncertainty, including proxy temperature, chronology and methodological choices. The results were aggregated to generate a multi-method ensemble of plausible GMST and latitudinal-zone temperature reconstructions with a realistic range of uncertainties. The warmest 200-year-long interval took place around 6500 years ago when GMST was 0.7 °C (0.3, 1.8) warmer than the 19thCentury (median, 5th, 95th percentiles). Following the Holocene global thermal maximum, GMST cooled at an average rate −0.08 °C per 1000 years (−0.24, −0.05). The multi-method ensembles and the code used to generate them highlight the utility of the Temperature 12k database, and they are now available for future use by studies aimed at understanding Holocene evolution of the Earth system.

Michael Mann in Newsweek:

Those of us on the front lines of the climate wars know how it feels. For decades, we’ve been under assault by politicians and fossil fuel attack dogs because of the inconvenient nature of our science—science that demonstrates the reality of climate change.

I have received death threats, and endured a multitude of attacks from conservative media outlets, Republican congressmen and attorneys general, all because of the “Hockey Stick” graph my co-authors and I published more than two decades ago. The Hockey Stick demonstrated the devastating effect burning fossil fuels has on our planet—and therefore threatened those profiting off them. So they sought to discredit my science and me personally, while orchestrating a campaign of vilification against climate scientists like me.

Now, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, represents a threat to Donald Trump. Fauci’s prescription (and that of the mainstream public health community)—continued social distancing to stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic—is undeniably in the best public interest, and the economy cannot recover until the virus is under control. Yet Trump believes he needs results fast to win re-election, and so he is ignoring Fauci’s advice and reopening the economy as the United States surpasses 5 million cases and 160,000 deaths.

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5 Lessons from the Pandemic to Tackle Climate Change

My number one – #FoxNews Kills.

COVID is the Quiz, Climate is the final exam.

CNN:

1. Science denial can be deadly

The danger of ignoring science is the top lesson from Michael Mann, director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center. “By rejecting what the leading health scientists were telling us, the current administration’s policies of inaction on Covid-19 have needlessly already cost us more than 100,000 lives,” he said.As the co-author of the famous “hockey stick graph,” Mann was among the first to confirm how levels of heat-trapping pollution have jumped with the burning of fossil fuels. As a result, he’s endured years of accusations, lawsuits and death threats — even as his work was repeatedly confirmed by other scientists.

Penn State climatologist Michael Mann says the peril of ignoring research has been put in stark relief by Covid.He sees a kindred spirit in Dr. Anthony Fauci, now facing similar attacks for simply speaking scientific truth to power. “If there is a silver lining, it is that the failure of the current administration to respond meaningfully to the pandemic lays bare the deadliness of ideologically motivated science denial,” Mann said. “This applies to the even greater crisis of human-caused climate change and the need to treat it as the emergency it is.”

2. The search for a cure is global but your chances of survival are local

In March, a group of governors joined a White House conference call, desperate for federal help in finding ventilators and PPE for their overflowing hospital ICUs. “Try getting it yourselves,” Donald Trump replied. Those words not only squandered the unique power of the presidency to focus the nation’s makers on a single mission, they also created the kind of frantic bidding wars between American states that can lead to corruption and waste.

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