Overcast and chilly for a way-too-early Monday on California’s north coast — supposedly, the NWS expects maybe a 40 percent chance of rain for us this morning, but forecasts sunshine for at least the next week.
Weather to be seen, or not…
And weather itself has funnelled into extremes (via EcoWatch): ‘During 2014, cities in regions like the Midwest and Northeast endured record cold months. Zoom out to the state level, however, and three states (California, Nevada and Arizona) saw record warm annual temperatures in 2014, while none experienced record cold annual temperatures.’
Furthermore:
The national average temperature was warmer than normal, and at the global scale, last year was more than just above average—2014 was the warmest year ever recorded.
While portions of the eastern United States have faced historic snow totals and frigid temperatures this year, the opposite can be said for much of the western U.S.
A growing body of research suggests that a contributing factor of this drastic east-west temperature contrast could be the accelerated warming taking place in the Arctic, which can have a weakening effect on the polar jet stream, a west-to-east river of wind in the atmosphere where cold Arctic air meets milder subtropical air in the mid-latitudes (e.g., the U.S.) of the Northern Hemisphere.
A weaker polar jet stream creates more favorable conditions for a “wavy” north-south oriented path around the Arctic, which can increase the frequency of phases where Arctic air seeps south into regions like the eastern United States while warmer air protrudes north in the western half of the country.
Despite that massive influence, eyes of the scientific community seem to shifting from the north to the south — Antarctica melting fast, apparently replacing the Arctic region as the planet’s boiler room:
A few years back, scientists figured Antarctica as a whole was in balance, neither gaining nor losing ice.
Experts worried more about Greenland; it was easier to get to and more noticeable, but once they got a better look at the bottom of the world, the focus of their fears shifted.
Now scientists in two different studies use the words “irreversible” and “unstoppable” to talk about the melting in West Antarctica.
Ice is gaining in East Antarctica, where the air and water are cooler, but not nearly as much as it is melting to the west.
“Before Antarctica was much of a wild card,” said University of Washington ice scientist Ian Joughin.
“Now I would say it’s less of a wild card and more scary than we thought before.”
Over at NASA, ice scientist Eric Rignot said the melting “is going way faster than anyone had thought. It’s kind of a red flag.”
How many red flags does it take to make a point? Most-likely in the near future, there will be one giant, humongous red flag to replace the million little ones, but will it be too late?.
Last week, science writer Chris Mooney at the Washington Post pondered yet another avenue to get the public mass aware of the reality of climate change and its right-now-not-way-yonder-tomorrow danger — drafting use of the 2013, now-well-known report that 97.1 percent of published scientific studies ‘endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming,’ people seem to understand easier, and think…
A new study, just out in PLOS One from researchers at Princeton, Yale, and George Mason University, presents some results on this inquiry.
In the study — part of the findings were previously reported in a 2014 paper — 1,104 research subjects (save for those in a control group) were presented with the following message: “97 percent of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.”
Sometimes, they received the message in the form of simple text or a simple pie chart.
In other cases, the message was conveyed through various metaphorical explanations — for instance, “If 97 percent of doctors concluded that your child is sick, would you believe them? 97 percentof climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.”
But it was always the same message: 97 percent, people. 97 percent. 97 percent.
The new PLOS One paper hypothesized that receiving such a message would make people worry more about climate change, and would render them more likely to believe it’s real and caused by humans.
“We posit perceived scientific agreement as a ‘gateway belief’ that either supports or undermines other key beliefs about climate change, which in turn, influence support for public action,” the authors wrote.
…
And the paper further found that when people up their estimate of the percentage of scientists who accept that global warming is caused by humans, they also increase their own belief in the science, and their own worry about it, becoming more likely to want the world to take climate action.
Hence, their ‘own worry’ makes it a little closer to home and hearth.
(Illustration above found here).