Senior meteorologist with 20 years of experience at AccuWeather. [ Bio ]
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Open forum on climate change today. Feel free to speak your mind on anything that is related to the science of climate change or policies.
Keep in mind, name calling and obscenities will not be tolerated.
The floor is yours today!
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Update
Joe Bastardi just gave me a heads up about this story. Supposedly, the Climate Research Unit (CRU) was hacked and many files/emails were released. I will stop there for now, since there are still a number of unanswered questions in regards to what was released and whether some of the emails are legit. We will not be posting any of the emails on this site, since they were illegally distributed.
Anthony Watts (Climate change skeptic) is closely following this story and you can read about it for yourself on his "Watts Up With That?" website. He posted some links as well. Climate Audit was also following the story, but I was unable to get into their site today.
Update #2
Real Climate (AGW scientist blog) has a response to this story.
Mini-ice ages can happen fast. Maybe not as extreme as a recent Hollywood movie, but close enough, according to new research.
A slowdown of the Gulf Stream led to a sudden "Big Freeze" across Europe about 12,800 years ago. This event was known as the Younger Dryas Mini Ice Age.
Climate changes associated with the Younger Dryas, highlighted here by the light blue bar, include (from top to bottom): cooling and decreased snow accumulation in Greenland, cooling in the tropical Cariaco Basin, and warming in Antarctica. Also shown is the flux of meltwater from the Laurentide Ice Sheet down the St. Lawrence River. Image courtesy of NOAA.
New Greenland ice core research from the University of Saskatchewan suggests that this mini ice age took just months, instead of a decade to take hold over Europe.
Analysis of carbon and oxygen isotopes show that at the start of the Big Freeze, temperatures plummeted and lake productivity stopped within months, or a year at most. "It would be like taking Ireland today and moving it up to Svalbard" in the Arctic, says William Patterson, lead author of the study.
The Younger Dryas mini ice age was brought about when a glacial lake covering most of north-west Canada burst its banks and poured into the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. The huge flood diluted the salinity-driven North Atlantic Ocean mega-currents, including the Gulf Stream, and stalled it. Two studies published in 2006 show that the same thing happened again 8200 years ago, when the Northern hemisphere went through another cold spell, according to the NewScientist article.
Some climate scientists have suggested that the Greenland ice sheet could have the same effect if it suddenly melts through climate change, but the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded this was unlikely to happen this century.
The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing mass at an accelerating rate, according to the University of Bristol study which used satellite observations and a regional atmospheric model to come to the conclusion.
Greenland from above. Image courtesy of NASA.
During the period from 2006 to 2008, the ice sheet experienced an accelerated mass loss to 273 Gt per year (1 Gt is the mass of 1 cubic kilometer of water). This is equivalent to 0.75 mm of global sea level rise per year, according to the EurekAlert article.
The combination between increased iceberg production, driven by acceleration of Greenland's fast-flowing outlet glaciers, and increased meltwater production at the ice sheet surface led to this mass loss.
According to the report, the surface melting started to increase around 1996, but an increase in snowfall at the same rate on the ice sheet for a decade masked the surface mass losses for nearly a decade. Without this moderating effect, the mass loss would have been double than what is observed now.
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This study was published in the Journal Science.
The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has just released their combined, global land(actual surface stations)/ocean temperature anomaly data for October 2009. To no surprise, the month was warmer than normal, with a global temperature anomaly of +0.66 C or +1.19 F. The last time GISS had a global land/ocean temperature anomaly that was colder than normal was back in February of 1994. Satellite measurements of the lower troposphere that I recently blogged about put October 2009 at +.28 C or +.50 F. Keep in mind, the satellite record only goes back to 1979, while GISS goes back to 1880.
Here is a visual look at the GISS October 2009 land/ocean anomalies. Note most of the warm anomalies were from Asia up through the Arctic region, while much of North America was chilly.
The map below shows the latest annual land/ocean temperature anomaly for the November 2008-October 2009 period.
The figure below shows the global land/ocean temperature anomaly plot (red line) going back to 1996. Looking at this alone, you can see that even though the temperatures are still clearly above normal, they pretty much leveled off between 2001 and 2009.
But, when you open up the range and go back all the way to 1880, the graph tells a different story.
All images are courtesy of GISS and updated as of 11/13/2009.
A new study from the University of Bristol suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO2 than had been previously expected.
Popular, scientific opinion has been stating that the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO2 should start to diminish as CO2 emissions increase, letting greenhouse gas levels skyrocket.
The research, which is based on measurements and statistical data, not complex climate models, show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now, according to the University of Bristol press release.
This study was published in the Geophysical Research Letters
Daily record high temperatures have occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental U.S., according to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and NOAA.
NCAR states that the increase in record highs has been spurred by a warming climate and that the ratio of record highs to lows will likely increase in the coming decades if greenhouse gas emissions keep climbing.
Personally, I am not so sure that you can come to that conclusion so early (spurred by a warming climate) based on 10 years of data over a very small portion of the globe. They may be right, but let's see what the next 10-20 years of data brings.
It was also noted in the story that most of the warming over the past decade was with nighttime temperatures, which could also be a reflection of increasing urbanization (heat island effect) across the lower 48 and more cloud cover. Right here in State College, there has clearly been a lack of record lows over the past decade and I think a part of that reason is the fact that the weather station (which has not moved) has been getting more an more surrounded by large buildings over the past 15-20 years. The tuition also keeps on rising here at PSU yet they keep building and expanding here at PSU. (Sorry, just a little rage here).
Anthony Watts had a quick response to this story in his blog.
It should be noted, however, according to the UCAR News story, the readings, collected at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center, undergo a quality control process at the data center that looks for such potential problems as missing data as well as inconsistent readings caused by changes in thermometers, station locations, or other factors.
"If the climate weren't changing, you would expect the number of temperature records to diminish significantly over time," says Claudia Tebaldi, a statistician with Climate Central who is one of the paper's co-authors. "As you measure the high and low daily temperatures each year, it normally becomes more difficult to break a record after a number of years. But as the average temperatures continue to rise this century, we will keep setting more record highs."
October 2009 will go down as the 3rd coolest October on record for the United States, according to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). Records go back to 1880.
October 2009 was also the wettest October in the United States, going back 115 years!
NCDC has not yet released their global analysis for October, but we now have the satellite measured lower-tropospheric temperature data from Remote Sensing Systems (RSS).
The map below shows the global temperature anomalies for most of the earth, with the exception of the Antarctic and a portion of the Arctic. Reds are above-normal temperatures while blues are cold anomalies.
As you can see, there was a large region of cold anomalies over a large portion of central North America, while most of Alaska was unusually mild. Since then, the pattern across North America has pretty much flipped.
Specific numbers from RSS in regards to the October lower-tropospheric temperature anomalies.............
Globally (70S to 82.5N latitude): +.282 C (+.508 F)
Northern Hemisphere: +.328 C (+.688 F)
Continental U.S.: -1.597 C (-2.87 F)
Based on RSS records alone, October 2009 was the coldest month (Jan to Dec) compared to normal since December of 2000 in the continental U.S.
October 2009 was the coldest October on record in the continental U.S., going back to 1979. (satellite record began in 1979)
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Acknowledgement
MSU/AMSU data are produced by Remote Sensing Systems and sponsored by the NOAA Climate and Global Change Program. Data are available at www.remss.com.
I ran across this small article from Earthweek.com.
I have blogged a few times over the past about changing the colors of pavement or roofs to white in order to cool urbanized areas. Now it's rocks.
Eduardo Gold, a Peruvian scientist and president of Glaciers of Peru says that painting highly reflective white paint over rock and ground that has been exposed by receding glaciers is a way to combat global warming.
According to Gold, a project like this in Peru could create 15,000 new jobs for local residents that are hired to do the landscape painting.
Gold stresses that environmentally friendly lime-based paint made without harmful chemicals would have to be used.
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I can't imagine using brushes, probably better off using several massive spray guns and helicopters.
A survey by New York University's Institute for Policy Integrity states that 94% of a total of 144 economists that responded to a survey believe the United States should join climate agreements to limit global warming.
Many republicans and some democrats in Congress are also concerned about the economic costs of reducing emissions, and do not support the current version of the clean-energy bill.
Last month, a National Research Council report found that burning fossil fuels, which release greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, exerts a hidden $120 billion cost on the U.S. economy because of higher health costs, leaving aside climate damage, according to the USA Today article.
The survey also found the following.......
--91.6% wanted a tax or "cap and trade" system, where polluters buy and sell emission permits, instead of regulation, to cut greenhouse gases.
--84% agreed the effects of global warming "create significant risks" to the economy, particularly to agriculture, fishing, insurance and health.
--Of the 94.3% who favor the U.S. joining climate agreements to limit greenhouse-gas emissions, 57% say greenhouse-gas cuts should come "regardless of the actions of other countries."
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Here is more on this story.
The Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) is a non-partisan advocacy organization and think-tank dedicated to improving the quality of governmental decisionmaking.
New research from NASA suggests that the bulk of nitrogen oxide (NOx) produced during lightning storms ends up significantly higher in the atmosphere, and thus has a stronger impact on ozone and the climate than previously thought.
Photo courtesy of the Accuweather.com photo gallery.
According to the NASA story, there are 1.2 billion lightning flashes in the world per year. Each lightning flash produces a puff of nitrogen oxide gas that reacts with sunlight and other gases in the atmosphere to produce ozone. Near Earth's surface, ozone can harm human and plant health; higher in the atmosphere, it is a potent greenhouse gas.
The image below from NASA shows the annual lightning flash density across the globe. Note the highest concentration is over central Africa. Florida also experiences a great deal of lightning.
It is believed that lightning contributes about 10% of atmospheric nitrogen oxide, which is much smaller compared to fossil fuel emissions, but scientists are still not completely sure if that estimate is correct, and that it may be underdone.
"One of the things we're trying to understand is how much ozone changes caused by lightning affect radiative forcing, and how that might translate into climate impacts," said Kenneth Pickering, an atmospheric scientist who studies lightning at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
There's a possibility that lightning could produce a feedback cycle that accelerates global warming. "If a warming globe creates more thunderstorms," Pickering noted, "that could lead to more NOx production, which leads to more ozone, more radiative forcing, and more warming," Pickering emphasizes that this is a theory, and while some global modeling studies suggest this is indeed the case, it has not yet been borne out by field observations.
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