High overcast and a bit on the cold side this way-too-early Thursday on California’s north coast, with not much rain in sight for the next few days.
The weekend is forecast for sunny and warm — Ha! to winter.
However, the weather is after all, the weather and nobody knows the future. Especially, the guys/gals at the NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, where the moniker, ‘missed the mark’ would fit nicely. Wrong is the right word:
The official forecast for November 2013 through January 2014 anticipated “above normal” temperatures for the swath of the continental U.S. stretching from Maine to Baja, California.
Above normal.
(Illustration found here).
Of course, that shit was shot down way back yonder: “Not one of our better forecasts,” admitted Mike Halpert, the Climate Prediction Center’s acting director.
Maybe the exact opposite — freezing temperatures, record snowfalls and just general chaos. Out here in California, and in some other small patches across the US, it was warm, but we’re in the vast minority.
Hence, the in-bred horror in getting any-kind of handle on climate change, the big weather bell-ringer.
Last Sunday, John Kerry, the US secretary of state, told folks in Jakarta, Indonesia, that climate change is “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction,” and it’s way-not “…an exaggeration to say that the entire way of life here is at risk.”
Kerry, of course, meant Indonesia when he said “here,” but he could have been talking about the entire place where he was standing — earth.
And yesterday, Daniel J. Weiss, a senior fellow and climate strategy director at the Center for American Progress, told a panel discussing the dumb-ass proposed Keystone XL pipeline that if the project is approved, it will be “a dirty bomb, which would cause an explosion of carbon pollution.”
Whoa!
Meanwhile, in the Arctic, build-up of sea ice hasn’t made any kind of come-back, in fact, sits at its lowest spot in history.
Via Climate Central:
Arctic sea ice growth has slowed dramatically in recent weeks, thanks in large part to abnormally warm air and water temperatures. Sea ice now sits at record low levels for mid-February.
…
“Right now, the Arctic is pretty warm everywhere. If I look at temperature anomalies, there’s a huge anomaly over the Barents Sea and Sea of Okhotsk of about 10°C (above normal) compared to 1981-2010,” said Julienne Stroeve, a senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Stroeve also said that warm waters in the North Atlantic have slowed ice growth, which is part of a decades-long trend due to both natural variability and human influences.
The decline in sea ice is one of the key indicators of climate change.
Sea ice in January, the last full month for which data is available, has declined 3.2 percent per decade since 1979 compared to the 1981-2012 average.
That equals roughly 18,500 square miles in ice lost per decade, the same area as Vermont and New Hampshire combined.
This past January ranked as the fourth-lowest year on record, with 2011 being the all-time record lowest.
Even the color of the Arctic has great implications — dark is the new warm.
In the melting white of Arctic ice means not only sea level rise, but more heat off the darkness:
With more dark, open water in the summer, less of the sun’s heat is reflected back into space.
So the entire Earth is absorbing more heat than expected, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
That extra absorbed energy is so big that it measures about one-quarter of the entire heat-trapping effect of carbon dioxide, said the study’s lead author, Ian Eisenman, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.
The Arctic grew 8 percent darker between 1979 and 2011, Eisenman found, measuring how much sunlight is reflected back into space.
“Basically, it means more warming,” Eisenman said in an interview.
…
While earlier studies used computer models, Eisenman said his is the first to use satellite measurements to gauge sunlight reflection and to take into account cloud cover.
The results show the darkening is as much as two to three times bigger than previous estimates, he said.
More via New Scientist:
They found that the Arctic Ocean’s albedo – the fraction of sunlight it reflects back into space – dropped from 52 per cent in 1979 to 48 per cent in 2011.
That may not seem like much, but it means a big rise in energy absorbed – equal to 25 per cent of that trapped by the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the same period.
“That is big – unexpectedly big,” says Eisenman.
“Arctic sea ice retreat has been an important player in the global warming that we’ve observed during recent decades.”
“It reaffirms that albedo feedback is a powerful amplifier of climate change, maybe even more so than is simulated by the current crop of climate models,” says Mark Flanner of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
The extra energy absorbed goes into the ocean, particularly on the side of the Arctic near Alaska and Siberia, which is losing the most ice.
“I don’t know where it’s going from there,” says Eisenman.
“I think this is an important piece in the climate change story, but there are lots of other pieces we need.”
Even as all this falls down upon the known world, here in California the darkness is liquid. Yesterday, Gov. Jerry Brown and his people unveiled a $687.4-million drought-relief package for the state, a move to hopefully counter the dryness.
Via the LA Times:
The proposal would provide millions of dollars to clean up drinking water, improve conservation and make irrigation systems more efficient.
It would increase penalties for those who illegally divert water.
The plan also contains money for emergency food and housing for those out of work because of the drought, including farmworkers, and to provide emergency drinking water to communities in need.
…
Brown, appearing before reporters at the state’s emergency operations center, said that unlike many problems in Sacramento, “this is not caused by partisan gridlock or ideology. It’s caused by Mother Nature herself.
“We really don’t know how bad the drought is going to be,” Brown said.
Right you are, Moonbeam-now-old-guy. How about real-real bad?
Under-estimation the prime worry:
Underestimates will continue to characterize climate projections, cautioned Richard Somerville, IPCC scientist and Professor Emeritus and Research Professor at Scripps Institution, “But that’s the nature of research,” as it constantly discovers new possibilities.
Looking back at the 1950s when scientists first identified the climate problem, Somerville notes that the tone at the time “was not catastrophic at all, but rather curious to see how the climate system would react to a big spike in carbon dioxide emissions.”
Only over time did the full realization dawn on the scientific community that many of the consequences of climate change could be very serious and even catastrophic.
And that is what hasn’t gotten across to the public, Somerville warned: a sense of urgency that, to most scientists, is now very clear.
“This is an urgency that has nothing to do with politics or ideology,” said Somerville.
“This urgency is dictated by the biogeochemistry and physics of the climate system.
“We have a very short time to de-carbonize the world economy and find substitutes for fossil fuels.”
The new normal is not the old life.