2020 officially saw a record number of $1 billion weather and climate disasters.

Gaoth Laidir

It's a shame that, in an Atlantic hurricane season that has been well-communicated and hyped up to be an above-average one, very reassuring news like below never seems to make the headlines. Surely it would be nice for all the peoples to know that no multi-million dollar seafront homes in Florida were damaged in July, not to mention the huge carbon-footprint savings of not having several hurricane aircraft flying several recon missions per day into storms? Surely it's one more month ticked off the list and therefore the chances of such an active season coming to pass are reduced? Activity in the two months so far is already tracking well below average, with 0 hurricane days. Don't the people have a right to hear some good news in this time of "apocalyptic" climate disaster? I suppose not.

https://twitter.com/philklotzbach/status/1553073944164323329?t=cC2rSaomZHr1vJvAGXKV2g&s=19

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119412404#Comment_119412404

Trump is full of sh1t. When he was president what did he do to stop Russia?

He could have expanded NATO but all he did was whinge about NATO members not paying enough to the US arms industry

Akrasia

In more news. A paper published in PNAS yesterday urges us to consider the potential that climate change results in the extinction of humanity

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2108146119

Gaoth Laidir

Well, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that the Tonga volcanic eruption in January blasted so much water vapour into the stratosphere and higher that it may reduce methane levels.

The bad news is that this water vapour itself may cause global warming, being a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

The mediocre news is that it's too early to tell.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022GL099381?campaign=woletoc

The HT-HH eruption injected at least 146 ± 5 Tg of H2O into the stratosphere, not only surpassing the magnitudes of all other injections in the MLS record, but also eclipsing a theoretical estimate of 37.5 Tg from Pinatubo (Pitari & Mancini, 2002). This stratospheric H2O injection is unique in the satellite record (1979 to date). To put the HT-HH injection into perspective, the enhancement represents ∼10% of the estimated stratospheric H2O burden of 1400 Tg (Glaze et al., 1997). Further, the H2O plume injection height far exceeded that of any other injections in the MLS record (Figure 3).

In summary, MLS measurements indicate that an exceptional amount of H2O was injected directly into the stratosphere by the HT-HH eruption. We estimate that the magnitude of the injection constituted at least 10% of the total stratospheric H2O burden. On the day of the eruption, the H2O plume reached ∼53 km altitude. The H2O injection bypassed the cold point tropopause, disrupted the H2O tape recorder signal, set a new record for H2O injection height in the 17-year MLS record, and could alter stratospheric chemistry and dynamics as the long-lived H2O plume propagates through the stratosphere in the BDC. Unlike previous strong eruptions in the satellite era, HT-HH could impact climate not through surface cooling due to sulfate aerosols, but rather through surface warming due to the excess stratospheric H2O forcing. Given the potential high-impact consequences of the HT-HH H2O injection, it is critical to continue monitoring volcanic gases from this eruption and future ones to better quantify their varying roles in climate.

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119417896#Comment_119417896

Water Vapour is usually not considered a climate driver because it has a residency time in the atmosphere measured in hours. However, this may not be the case if the water has been blasted into the stratosphere where it may persist for a lot longer

It will be interesting to see what effect this has on the global climate over the next couple of years.

Akrasia

From my Link above

"Worst-Case Climate Change

Despite 30 y of efforts and some progress under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue to increase. Even without considering worst-case climate responses, the current trajectory puts the world on track for a temperature rise between 2.1 °C and 3.9 °C by 2100 (11). If all 2030 nationally determined contributions are fully implemented, warming of 2.4 °C (1.9 °C to 3.0 °C) is expected by 2100. Meeting all long-term pledges and targets could reduce this to 2.1 °C (1.7 °C to 2.6 °C) (12). Even these optimistic assumptions lead to dangerous Earth system trajectories. Temperatures of more than 2 °C above preindustrial values have not been sustained on Earth’s surface since before the Pleistocene Epoch (or more than 2.6 million years ago) (13).

Even if anthropogenic GHG emissions start to decline soon, this does not rule out high future GHG concentrations or extreme climate change, particularly beyond 2100. There are feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high GHG concentrations (14) that are often missing from models. Examples include Arctic permafrost thawing that releases methane and CO2 (15), carbon loss due to intense droughts and fires in the Amazon (16), and the apparent slowing of dampening feedbacks such as natural carbon sink capacity (17, 18). These are likely to not be proportional to warming, as is sometimes assumed. Instead, abrupt and/or irreversible changes may be triggered at a temperature threshold. Such changes are evident in Earth’s geological record, and their impacts cascaded across the coupled climate–ecological–social system (19). Particularly worrying is a “tipping cascade” in which multiple tipping elements interact in such a way that tipping one threshold increases the likelihood of tipping another (20). Temperature rise is crucially dependent on the overall dynamics of the Earth system, not just the anthropogenic emissions trajectory.......

....There are even more uncertain feedbacks, which, in a very worst case, might amplify to an irreversible transition into a “Hothouse Earth” state (21) (although there may be negative feedbacks that help buffer the Earth system). In particular, poorly understood cloud feedbacks might trigger sudden and irreversible global warming (22). Such effects remain underexplored and largely speculative “unknown unknowns” that are still being discovered. For instance, recent simulations suggest that stratocumulus cloud decks might abruptly be lost at CO2 concentrations that could be approached by the end of the century, causing an additional ∼8 °C global warming (23). Large uncertainties about dangerous surprises are reasons to prioritize rather than neglect them.

Recent findings on equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) (14, 24) underline that the magnitude of climate change is uncertain even if we knew future GHG concentrations. According to the IPCC, our best estimate for ECS is a 3 °C temperature rise per doubling of CO2, with a “likely” range of (66 to 100% likelihood) of 2.5 °C to 4 °C. While an ECS below 1.5 °C was essentially ruled out, there remains an 18% probability that ECS could be greater than 4.5 °C (14). The distribution of ECS is “heavy tailed,” with a higher probability of very high values of ECS than of very low values."

Gaoth Laidir

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119417859#Comment_119417859

Wow, some real drama there by the PNAS. They don't like that the IPCC and climate scientists are not being dramatic enough.

Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe. Analyzing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanize action, improve resilience, and inform policy, including emergency responses. We outline current knowledge about the likelihood of extreme climate change, discuss why understanding bad-to-worst cases is vital, articulate reasons for concern about catastrophic outcomes, define key terms, and put forward a research agenda. The proposed agenda covers four main questions: 1) What is the potential for climate change to drive mass extinction events? 2) What are the mechanisms that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity? 3) What are human societies' vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk? 4) How can these multiple strands of evidence—together with other global dangers—be usefully synthesized into an “integrated catastrophe assessment”? It is time for the scientific community to grapple with the challenge of better understanding catastrophic climate change.

The potential for catastrophic impacts depends on the magnitude and rate of climate change, the damage inflicted on Earth and human systems, and the vulnerability and response of those affected systems. The extremes of these areas, such as high temperature rise and cascading impacts, are underexamined. As noted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there have been few quantitative estimates of global aggregate impacts from warming of 3 °C or above (1). Text mining of IPCC reports similarly found that coverage of temperature rises of 3 °C or higher is underrepresented relative to their likelihood (2). Text-mining analysis also suggests that over time the coverage of IPCC reports has shifted towards temperature rise of 2 °C and below https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022EF002876. Research has focused on the impacts of 1.5 °C and 2 °C, and studies of how climate impacts could cascade or trigger larger crises are sparse.

Maybe there's a reason for this. Maybe that's how they see the more likely outcome.

I also like the bit where they say that "poorly understood cloud cloud feedbacks might cause runaway warming. Might. They might go the other way either. They're really reaching here.

There are even more uncertain feedbacks, which, in a very worst case, might amplify to an irreversible transition into a “Hothouse Earth” state (although there may be negative feedbacks that help buffer the Earth system). In particular, poorly understood cloud feedbacks might trigger sudden and irreversible global warming.

All just more hyperbole.

Akrasia

1 in 5 chance that ECS is more than 4.5c

We're on track for a doubling of our CO2 concentration between 2050 and 2070 under basically all of the RCP scenarios

We do not know the exact threshold for unlocking these feedbacks, but every bit of additional warming makes it more likely that we will see abrupt changes

Gaoth Laidir

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119417927#Comment_119417927

I'm sure that if there is a warming effect the likes of the Guardian, etc. won't be too quick to mention this natural cause but will lump it in with anthropogenic sources.

Oneiric 3

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119417927#Comment_119417927

Water vapour is very much a climate driver. Currently, we are going through our equal highest 12 month period on record, and this is driven, in no small part, by warmer, more humid nights, which are no doubt driven by the currently very warm north Atlantic ocean. Increased water vapour in the atmosphere = the inability of the atmosphere to cool sufficiently.

Oneiric 3

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119417849#Comment_119417849

Talk of expanding NATO is the very reason eastern Europe is at war today.

On many things, he was full of ****, but regarding Germany's blind and arrogant dependance on Russian fossil fuels, he was spot on. But so brainwashed they were by the corporate media, the dumb and the arrogant laughed in his face. Not because they necessarily would have disagreed with him, but because it was the most fashionable thing to do at the time.

https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1044991995171590144

But this is all a side issue now because right now, we in Europe have a real opportunity to embrace a totally cut off from fossil fuels by the end of the year, and we need our leaders, who have for years pontificated to us about 'climate neutrality', to embrace this now very real prospect.

Don't you agree?

Gaoth Laidir

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119417956#Comment_119417956

Recent findings on equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) (14, 24) underline that the magnitude of climate change is uncertain even if we knew future GHG concentrations. 

I know I've harped on about this before, but really, when you think about it, it's scandalous the fact that the fundamental basis for all of the climate discussion is ECS, yet even still today we are, in effect, no closer to knowing it to any more degree of accuracy than we were 30 years ago. All the decades, trillions of dollars in funding, millions of hours of airtime, countless hyperbole headlines in the Guardian, etc., have brought us no closer to an answer. When you break it all down, nothing else really matters until we accurately know what ECS is (by accurately I mean by within ± 0.2). Until that happens then I'm afraid the science on this is far from settled.

Banana Republic 1

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119418852#Comment_119418852

They laughed in his face cause of this kind of stuff.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xgQvul27_aw

Oneiric 3

They laughed in his face because it was expected of them. That's what stupid, arrogant know-it-alls do.

Still, my question remains unanswered. So busy talking of 'the science' that there is no sense of grasp of a possible very real impending reality.

M.T. Cranium

I think to be realistic, Russia waited for a weak U.S. president to launch phase two of their Ukraine invasion, phase one was back in 2014 when they took over Crimea. All the blather about "de-Nazifying" Ukraine is a cover for their naked ambition to have full control of potentially lucrative oil and gas reserves in eastern Ukraine and once underway this process begins to open up doors towards taking over the entire economic structure. The only end result that will satisfy Russia would be the removal of the current Ukraine government and re-installation of their puppet or a clone as pre-Maidan. Then that puppet will sign a peace agreement on very favourable terms to Russia, end of story.

The propaganda about fearing encirclement by NATO is just so much b.s., why would anybody fear encirclement by the woke armies of Brussels? Unless of course they didn't want to be woke themselves. Not much danger of that under Putin. In the first few years he was president of Russia, Putin sought NATO membership for Russia as well as Ukraine and Belarus. He was turned down mainly because of fears in some NATO countries that it would lead to a leaking out of military secrets and technology that some later Russian regime could employ against NATO after leaving the alliance. But if we had gone down that road perhaps none of these things would have happened.

The problem there as with climate scenarios is that we don't have the luxury of an alternate earth to test out theories so we have to use best judgement. These scare stories about extinction of the human species are a long way from best judgement. A warmer earth might pose significant challenges to some parts of humanity, but it would not wipe out the human race. A much colder climate could do that, in theory.

What all these scenarios fail to envisage is that humanity always adapts and changes, there is no particular reason why the climate of 1931 to 1960 was some ideal that should always be maintained at all costs. The biggest failure of the political left is to ignore the human tendency to innovate and respond to challenges, preferring instead to direct all these forces from some central reservoir of acceptable ideological puritans. This always fails, and usually on a horrific scale. People think of the fascist regimes as far-right but really they were just variants of the far left, using very similar methods and assumptions. A "far right" regime would be a fully libertarian state with very small government. We are never going to see that on this earth, because there are always too many people around hoping to be in control and in charge. The idea that people left to their own devices would do better than a centrally directed population is like a heresy in almost all political parties nowadays. The closest we ever came to a fully libertarian state was not very close at all, but perhaps under Reagan. He was labelled a "warmonger" by his ideological adversaries but I don't remember him invading any other country than Grenada. Trump also was often called "militaristic" but wanted to get out of entanglements, perhaps in a more rational way than we ended up doing under President Demento.

It would be difficult to imagine a worse government than the U.S. has right now, even its own enemies would not design one quite as bad as this one has turned out to be.

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119418808#Comment_119418808

Water vapour is a feedback.

The cause of increased humidity is the the warmer atmosphere and oceans. Which are a result of the CO2 we have emitted. Unfortunately water vapour seems to be an overall positive feedback as many scientists had hoped increased Albedo from more clouds would offset some of the greenhouse effect from water vapour

Oneiric 3

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119421221#Comment_119421221

I'm not sure it has the positive feedback that you describe. Increased cloud cover may limit the rise of daytime temps (usually but not always) but it also help to keep minima well up because they trap in surface heat and prevent that heat radiating away from the earth. Look at the stats from our own country, minima in general shows a bigger overall rise than maxima over long timescales.

Oneiric 3

Yes, one wonders what Putin was 'blathering' on about regarding his 'de-nazification' claims.

Just your average military funeral getting sympathetic coverage by the average western corporate press

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1550549509230530561

Nothing to see here..

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119413593#Comment_119413593

Its not the science I disagree with. I know Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and I know that reducing it will have an impact on global climate, but the lower hanging fruit is tackling the needless venting of methane directly into the atmosphere by the coal, oil and gas industry

The Oil and Gas industry should be made to plug the leaks and capture the methane rather than just venting it

The IEA said this could be done at no net cost to the industry given the economic value of this gas.

https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022

"The energy sector – including oil, natural gas, coal and bioenergy – accounts for around 40% methane emissions from human activity. Tackling methane emissions from the energy sector represents one of the best near-term opportunities for limiting global warming because the pathways for reducing them are well known and often cost-effective. The oil and gas sector in particular has the know-how and resources to take quick action. The Global Methane Tracker details the available abatement measures and lays out the state of methane reduction policies and regulations across major emitters."

Fossil fuel companies making ludicrous profits should be forced to clean up their act immediately. And then we can focus on getting cows to burp cleaner gasses

Gaoth Laidir

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119422828#Comment_119422828

Absolutely. That should all happen before bovine belches are taxed.

Danno

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119422828#Comment_119422828

First sensible proposition I've heard from you.

Reducing waste is always good.

Orion402

" That's all this is about, really. It has nothing to do with weather, seasons or anything much at all. There is no train wreck or massive error, and it never had any influence on meteorology."

The sidereal day or RA/Dec modelling was a late 17th century misadventure with timekeeping that seemed to give experimental theorists the priority to model solar system structure based on referencing all observations off the Earth's daily rotational characteristics -

It didn't matter to the proponents of this scheme that projecting the Earth's daily rotation into solar system structure includes a celestial sphere geometry with no reference to the previous framework where the Sun moves directly through the constellations on which the original solar system researchers reached their conclusions through Ptolemy. It also defies the major linkage between the 24 hour and Lat/Long systems.-

Nowadays it is possible to view the central/stationary Sun and watch the changes in the annual position of the stars as a function of the Earth's orbital motion alone-

https://sol24.net/data/html/SOHO/C3/96H/VIDEO/

I don't mind those who try to bluff and make no effort to appreciate how timekeeping links to planetary dynamics in much the same way as planetary dynamics relate to conditions on the Earth's surface from the seasons to planetary climate but only the most indifferent could accept the terrible way these modellers connect their so-called sidereal day modelling with the cause of the seasons-

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210922.html

Contributors to this forum can work it out individually depending on the effort made. If they decide that the Earth doesn't turn once every 24 hours and that the light/half hemispheres tilt off the Equator then they have bigger problems than climate change modelling and so does the rest of humanity.

Oneiric 3

Nice little article here on the effects of water vapour in the atmosphere:

It's Water Vapor, Not the CO2 - American Chemical Society (acs.org)

"There is also a possibility that adding more water vapor to the atmosphere could produce a negative feedback effect. This could happen if more water vapor leads to more cloud formation. Clouds reflect sunlight and reduce the amount of energy that reaches the Earth’s surface to warm it. If the amount of solar warming decreases, then the temperature of the Earth would decrease. In that case, the effect of adding more water vapor would be cooling rather than warming. But cloud cover does mean more condensed water in the atmosphere, making for a stronger greenhouse effect than non-condensed water vapor alone – it is warmer on a cloudy winter day than on a clear one. Thus the possible positive and negative feedbacks associated with increased water vapor and cloud formation can cancel one another out and complicate matters. The actual balance between them is an active area of climate science research".

However, it does not mention the negative impacts on temperature of increased cloud cover by night, where a good deal of the current warming phase in most prominent. Consider last winter. Very anticyclonic, but very cloudy. Near average daytime temps, but much warmer than average nights with barely even a frost recorded throughout the season.

Nabber

good too see Russia cutting gas and saving the world? Is that the narrative, I forget what I need to follow.

Nabber

We are in another pause of temperature raise.

id like to see how the energy is stored and then released back as heat all in one go.

we can’t predict when there will be a pause nor when it will end, but we can predict 2100 😂😂😂

Makes the elevator of increases a tough theory to accept.

https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v4/GLB.Ts%2BdSST.txt

adjusted data, all lowered for past records.

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119423406#Comment_119423406

Atmospheric scientists are fully aware that Water Vapour is the dominant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. But CO2 is the primary driver of climate change (changes in methane is about 30%)

The reason is persistence. Water Vapour has a residence time in the atmosphere measured in hours to days, Methane has an adjustment time measured in Years to decades, and CO2's adjustment time is half centuries to centuries

Water vapour is a big driver of weather and short term temperature spikes, but in climactic scales, it follows rather than leads temperature changes driven by other factors that can persist over multiple seasonal and circulation cycles (AMO, ENSO etc)

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119424082#Comment_119424082

There are naturally varying cycles that have always existed, Global warming doesn't mean these stop, it means that the cooler parts of these cycles are warmer now than they used to be in the warm part of the cycle, and warmer parts of the cycles are hotter than we have ever measured.

AMO, PDO, ENSO etc

Gaoth Laidir

I still feel that solar can't not have had a large part to play in the warming since pre-industrial times. After a very low 17th century of flat 1365 W/m2 its been up around 1366 +/- 0.5 since the 1950s, an increase of around 0.1%. Doesn't sound like much, but it's of the order of the alleged CO2 forcing. There may be latent delays in ocean feedbacks that are still manifesting themselves during this period or relative flat solar constant. Add to this the fact that the different instrumental data being included today (non-Stevenson Screen AWS, satellite "near-surface" air estimations, etc.) and in increasing percentage in non-ideal sites (airports, etc.) and we have a considerable source of non-anthropogenic signal in the official temperature graph.

Gaoth Laidir

But what I find really amazing is that I can pull up a whole station dataset of windspeeds for Phoenix Park up to 2021, a station that doesn't even have an anemometer! They're simply using data from Dublin Airport, 8 km away, with just a few slight differences (e.g. ~2008). How can this be acceptable?

http://climexp.knmi.nl/showmetadata.cgi?TYPE=weca&WMO=121&station=DUBLIN_PHOENIX_PARK&id=b66e609e68868673f87d8209228a27c5

Oneiric 3

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119427321#Comment_119427321

Water vapour is a constant, because what is washed out of the atmosphere in a few days is very quickly replaced and the cycle goes on. CO2 may be the main driver for increased water vapour in the atmosphere, but water vapour itself has a far bigger impact on daily temp fluctuations, and a lot of dailys eventually add up to climate scales.

I've mentioned this more than one, but look at the influence that cold bank of north Atlantic water had our summer back in 2015. Much lower daily humidity and temps at the end of July close to freezing. I actually recall waking up to a grass and car frost! Which is more than what I seen during the bulk of last winter.