Sunshine and a bit warm this late-afternoon of the second day of 2020 here in California’s San Joaquin Valley, a brightness after some pretty-thick morning low-clouds/fog which chilled the shit out of everything.
Weather in the age of climate change.
And far to the west, Australia is frying and burning from a climate ripped by rising temperatures and idiots in charge, a situation near-similar to the US — we’ve experienced our own horror show, too, but nothing compared to Down Under.
They also have to put up with a climate-change denier and full-blown asshole in PM Scott Morrison, who got a boo-and-a-hiss today from some of his subjects (h/t Digby):
This is the welcome every incompetent climate-denying Murdoch quisling should get across the Anglosphere. Good on the people of Cobargo for telling the Prime Minister of Australia what they think of him. https://t.co/bzUaz376DE
— Wesley Clark (@WesClarkjr) January 2, 2020
A good, informative post from a commenter in Australia at Balloon Juice this afternoon details the shitstorm in progress Down Under, not only with the devastation/terror of the brush-fires, but also in the dip-shit attitude of Morrison and his asshole gang.
And the slap-away of the reality of climate change.
In a most-related topic, a new study apparently reveals the closeness of climate change and our daily weather — a phenomenon as in Australia — and seemingly once again, the climate shit is worse than originally figured.
Via the Washington Post this morning:
For the first time, scientists have detected the “fingerprint” of human-induced climate change on daily weather patterns at the global scale.
If verified by subsequent work, the findings, published Thursday in Nature Climate Change, would upend the long-established narrative that daily weather is distinct from long-term climate change.
The study’s results also imply that research aimed at assessing the human role in contributing to extreme weather events such as heat waves and floods may be underestimating the contribution.
The new study, which was in part motivated by President Trump’s tweets about how a cold day in one particular location disproves global warming, uses statistical techniques and climate model simulations to evaluate how daily temperatures and humidity vary around the world.
Scientists compared the spatial patterns of these variables with what physical science shows is expected because of climate change.
…
In what one outside expert, Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, termed a “profoundly disturbing” result, the study found that the global warming fingerprint remained present even when the signal from the global average temperature trend was removed.
“This … is telling us that anthropogenic climate change has become so large that it exceeds even daily weather variability at the global scale,” Wehner said in an email.
“This is disturbing as the Earth is on track for significantly more warming in even the most optimistic future scenarios.”
According to Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, the new study advances our understanding of climate change’s effects. Diffenbaugh was not involved in the new research.
The fact that the influence of global warming can now be seen in the daily weather around the world — which in some ways is the noisiest manifestation — is another clear sign of how strong the signal of climate change has become,” he said in an email.
“This study provides important new evidence that climate change is influencing the conditions that people and ecosystems are experiencing every day, all around the world.”
A way-major impediment to getting a handle on climate change, however — the fossil fuel companies and their toadies (from today’s Harvard Political Review): ‘This is why “a good chunk of American society are convinced that the science is debatable and uncertain and we shouldn’t do anything,” climate researcher Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Institute told the HPR.’
And finally, this maybe more pertinent today than when first released more than 50 years ago:
(Illustration out front from the UN’s International Children’s Painting Competition, and found here).