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Dr. Jeff Masters
Weather Blogs


El Niño of 2015 Hits All-Time Record Strength for a 1-Week Period

By: Dr. Jeff Masters , 4:44 PM GMT on November 16, 2015
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Incredibly warm waters continue to build across the equatorial Pacific, and the El Niño event of 2015 has just set a record for the warmest waters ever observed in the equatorial Pacific over a 1-week period. Sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) in the Pacific’s Niño3.4 region, between 90°W and 160°E longitude and 5° north/south latitude, are considered the benchmark for rating the strength of an El Niño event. The weekly departure of SST from average in this region hit +3.0°C (5.4°F) over the past week, NOAA announced in their November 16 El Niño update. This exceeds the previous 1-week record warmth in the equatorial Pacific of 2.8°C above average set during the week of November 26, 1997; accurate El Niño records extend back to 1950. However, the standard measure for the strength of an El Niño event is the three-month average Niño 3.4 SSTs, and the El Niño of 2015 is not yet officially considered the strongest on record. The August-September-October 2015 three-month average Niño 3.4 SSTs were 1.7°C above average, good for only the 2nd warmest on record, behind 1997. Judging from the trajectory of SST anomalies in Figure 1, though, it is likely that one of the late-year three-month average Niño 3.4 SST values in 2015 will end up upending 1997's record warmth and claim for the 2015 the title as strongest El Niño event on record. El Niño can't get much stronger than it is now, though, since there simply isn't enough warm water available in the Western Pacific to transport to the Eastern Pacific; wunderblogger Steve Gregory speculated in his Friday post that El Niño may now be peaking, and will begin a slow decline over the the next three months. Even so, El Niño will decline only gradually, and we can expect significant global impacts on weather during the coming winter. Below, I'll dive into some of the major non-U.S. impacts we can expect (and have already seen) from a strong El Niño; Bob Henson has covered the likely U.S. impacts in a number of previous posts, which are linked at the bottom of the blog.


Figure 1. Sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) in the Pacific’s Niño3.4 region, between 90°W and 160°E longitude and 5° north/south latitude, are considered the benchmark for rating the strength of an El Niño event. The weekly departure of SST from average in this region hit +3.0°C (5.4°F) over the past week, beating the previous record of +2.8°C set during November 1997 during that year's super-El Niño. Image credit: Jan Null Golden Gate Weather, via Twitter.


Figure 2. The typical shifts from normal climatic condition during the Northern Hemisphere winter (December - February) during El Niño episode. Image credit: NOAA/Climate Prediction Center.

An intense hurricane/typhoon season in the Pacific, and quiet in the Atlantic
The unusually warm waters that El Niño brings to the North Pacific usually leads to well above-average hurricane and typhoon activity in that ocean basin, with unusually intense storms. The strongest Eastern Pacific hurricane ever recorded prior to 2015, Category 5 Hurricane Linda, occurred during the strong El Niño year of 1997. Linda had sustained winds up to 185 mph and a central pressure of 902 mb on September 12th. The El Niño year of 1997 also saw a record number of Category 5 storms in the Northwest Pacific—ten, and a record ACE index of 594. At one point on October 17, 1997, Super Typhoon Joan had top sustained winds of 185 mph, while Super Typhoon Ivan had top winds of 180 mph--the first time that Category 5 storms of such extreme intensity existed simultaneously. Typhoons tend to form farther to the east in an El Niño episode, due to the warmer waters over the Central Pacific. Thus, El Niño-year typhoons take longer tracks over water before hitting Asia, resulting in a greater chance of reaching Category 5 intensity.

True to expectations, the strong El Niño event of 2015 has led to record-smashing activity for hurricanes and typhoons in the North Pacific. The all-time most intense Eastern Pacific hurricane on record is now 2015’s Hurricane Patricia, which attained a remarkable 879 mb pressure with sustained winds of 200 mph. It's also been a record-active Central Pacific hurricane season in 2015, and a much more active than usual Western Pacific typhoon season. The Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) for the Western Pacific was 161% of average as of November 13, and was 200% of average for the combined Eastern and Central Pacific Oceans. However, it’s a different story in the Atlantic, where El Niño has brought dry air and strong upper level westerly winds, creating high wind shear, suppressing Atlantic hurricanes. The ACE in the Atlantic this year has been only 57% of average.


Figure 3. Category 5 Hurricane Linda, the strongest hurricane on record in the Eastern Pacific prior to 2015, had sustained winds of 185 mph and a central pressure of 902 mb on September 12, 1997.

Flooding in South America
El Niño refers to the (Christ) Child in the Spanish language, and got its name from Peruvian sailors, who noted the arrival of warm waters off the coast of Peru typically coincided with Christmas. And it is in Peru and surrounding countries where the impact of El Niño on the weather can be the most severe. The unusually warm waters commonly cause record-breaking rains along the Pacific coast of equatorial South America, since warm air holds much more water vapor.

The two deadliest floods in Ecuador's history occurred during strong El Niño events: in November 1982 (307 killed) and during October 1997 (218 killed.) Peru’s deadliest flood (518 killed) also occurred during the 1997 El Niño. As reported by AP, a United Nations-backed study said that the 1997 - 1998 El Niño cost Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela nearly $11 billion.

Peru declared a pre-emptive state of emergency in July 2015 for 14 of its 25 states, appropriating about $70 million to prepare for the coming fall and winter rains. Authorities are clearing river beds of debris, reinforcing river banks with rocks and sandbags, and fortifying reservoir walls.


Figure 4. Residents of of Naranjal, Ecuador, walk along one of the town's flooded streets on November 28, 1997, after El Niño-driven floods killed at least 41 people along Ecuador's coast. Photo credit: ALICIA SMITH/AFP/Getty Images.

El Niño and drought
The warm waters off the Pacific coast of Peru during a strong El Niño episode generate a column of rising air over the tropical Eastern Pacific. Once this rising air reaches the bottom of the stratosphere, which acts as a stable lid preventing further rising motion, the warm air is forced to spread out to the east and west along the Equator. This air eventually sinks over tropical regions well to the east and the west of the Eastern Pacific to complete a huge circulation cell several thousand miles in diameter. Since sinking air warms and dries as it descends, areas of high pressure and drought tend to form in these sinking air regions. To the west of the Eastern Pacific, El Niño events tend to create drought over Indonesia, New Guinea, and Northern Australia; to the east, drought commonly occurs over Central America, Northern Brazil and the Caribbean.


Figure 5. Greenhouse gas emissions from Indonesian forest fires have exceeded all emissions from the U.S. economy on most days in September and October 2015. Image credit: World Resources Institute.

Drought in Indonesia
As discussed in detail in the Jeff Masters October 13 post, Costliest (and Deadliest?) Disaster of 2015: Indonesia's $14 Billion Fires, the El Niño events of 2015 and 1997 - 1998 brought devastating drought and fires to Indonesia and neighboring countries. This year's fires in Indonesia are on track to be their most expensive disaster in history, beating the $9.3 billion price tag of the 1997 - 1998 fires.

Drought in Australia
Drought in parts of southern and northern Australia typical for El Niño has already begun in 2015, and may cut as much as 1 percent off of the country's GDP, said Andrew Watkins, supervisor of climate prediction services at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, in an AP interview. October 2015 was Australia’s hottest month ever recorded, and rainfall was below average over most of the country. Two of the three most expensive droughts in Australia’s history occurred during the moderate El Niño years of 2002 and 1992.

Drought in Central America, the Caribbean and Brazil
The atmospheric circulation associated with El Niño brings dry air and high pressure to northern Brazil, the Caribbean, Central America and the tropical Atlantic; these conditions tend to bring drought. According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, dry weather caused by El Niño through September 2015 was responsible for declines of 60 percent in maiz

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Dr. Jeff Masters
Weather Blogs


El Niño of 2015 Hits All-Time Record Strength for a 1-Week Period

By: Dr. Jeff Masters , 4:44 PM GMT on November 16, 2015
0
+

Incredibly warm waters continue to build across the equatorial Pacific, and the El Niño event of 2015 has just set a record for the warmest waters ever observed in the equatorial Pacific over a 1-week period. Sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) in the Pacific’s Niño3.4 region, between 90°W and 160°E longitude and 5° north/south latitude, are considered the benchmark for rating the strength of an El Niño event. The weekly departure of SST from average in this region hit +3.0°C (5.4°F) over the past week, NOAA announced in their November 16 El Niño update. This exceeds the previous 1-week record warmth in the equatorial Pacific of 2.8°C above average set during the week of November 26, 1997; accurate El Niño records extend back to 1950. However, the standard measure for the strength of an El Niño event is the three-month average Niño 3.4 SSTs, and the El Niño of 2015 is not yet officially considered the strongest on record. The August-September-October 2015 three-month average Niño 3.4 SSTs were 1.7°C above average, good for only the 2nd warmest on record, behind 1997. Judging from the trajectory of SST anomalies in Figure 1, though, it is likely that one of the late-year three-month average Niño 3.4 SST values in 2015 will end up upending 1997's record warmth and claim for the 2015 the title as strongest El Niño event on record. El Niño can't get much stronger than it is now, though, since there simply isn't enough warm water available in the Western Pacific to transport to the Eastern Pacific; wunderblogger Steve Gregory speculated in his Friday post that El Niño may now be peaking, and will begin a slow decline over the the next three months. Even so, El Niño will decline only gradually, and we can expect significant global impacts on weather during the coming winter. Below, I'll dive into some of the major non-U.S. impacts we can expect (and have already seen) from a strong El Niño; Bob Henson has covered the likely U.S. impacts in a number of previous posts, which are linked at the bottom of the blog.


Figure 1. Sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) in the Pacific’s Niño3.4 region, between 90°W and 160°E longitude and 5° north/south latitude, are considered the benchmark for rating the strength of an El Niño event. The weekly departure of SST from average in this region hit +3.0°C (5.4°F) over the past week, beating the previous record of +2.8°C set during November 1997 during that year's super-El Niño. Image credit: Jan Null Golden Gate Weather, via Twitter.


Figure 2. The typical shifts from normal climatic condition during the Northern Hemisphere winter (December - February) during El Niño episode. Image credit: NOAA/Climate Prediction Center.

An intense hurricane/typhoon season in the Pacific, and quiet in the Atlantic
The unusually warm waters that El Niño brings to the North Pacific usually leads to well above-average hurricane and typhoon activity in that ocean basin, with unusually intense storms. The strongest Eastern Pacific hurricane ever recorded prior to 2015, Category 5 Hurricane Linda, occurred during the strong El Niño year of 1997. Linda had sustained winds up to 185 mph and a central pressure of 902 mb on September 12th. The El Niño year of 1997 also saw a record number of Category 5 storms in the Northwest Pacific—ten, and a record ACE index of 594. At one point on October 17, 1997, Super Typhoon Joan had top sustained winds of 185 mph, while Super Typhoon Ivan had top winds of 180 mph--the first time that Category 5 storms of such extreme intensity existed simultaneously. Typhoons tend to form farther to the east in an El Niño episode, due to the warmer waters over the Central Pacific. Thus, El Niño-year typhoons take longer tracks over water before hitting Asia, resulting in a greater chance of reaching Category 5 intensity.

True to expectations, the strong El Niño event of 2015 has led to record-smashing activity for hurricanes and typhoons in the North Pacific. The all-time most intense Eastern Pacific hurricane on record is now 2015’s Hurricane Patricia, which attained a remarkable 879 mb pressure with sustained winds of 200 mph. It's also been a record-active Central Pacific hurricane season in 2015, and a much more active than usual Western Pacific typhoon season. The Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) for the Western Pacific was 161% of average as of November 13, and was 200% of average for the combined Eastern and Central Pacific Oceans. However, it’s a different story in the Atlantic, where El Niño has brought dry air and strong upper level westerly winds, creating high wind shear, suppressing Atlantic hurricanes. The ACE in the Atlantic this year has been only 57% of average.


Figure 3. Category 5 Hurricane Linda, the strongest hurricane on record in the Eastern Pacific prior to 2015, had sustained winds of 185 mph and a central pressure of 902 mb on September 12, 1997.

Flooding in South America
El Niño refers to the (Christ) Child in the Spanish language, and got its name from Peruvian sailors, who noted the arrival of warm waters off the coast of Peru typically coincided with Christmas. And it is in Peru and surrounding countries where the impact of El Niño on the weather can be the most severe. The unusually warm waters commonly cause record-breaking rains along the Pacific coast of equatorial South America, since warm air holds much more water vapor.

The two deadliest floods in Ecuador's history occurred during strong El Niño events: in November 1982 (307 killed) and during October 1997 (218 killed.) Peru’s deadliest flood (518 killed) also occurred during the 1997 El Niño. As reported by AP, a United Nations-backed study said that the 1997 - 1998 El Niño cost Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela nearly $11 billion.

Peru declared a pre-emptive state of emergency in July 2015 for 14 of its 25 states, appropriating about $70 million to prepare for the coming fall and winter rains. Authorities are clearing river beds of debris, reinforcing river banks with rocks and sandbags, and fortifying reservoir walls.


Figure 4. Residents of of Naranjal, Ecuador, walk along one of the town's flooded streets on November 28, 1997, after El Niño-driven floods killed at least 41 people along Ecuador's coast. Photo credit: ALICIA SMITH/AFP/Getty Images.

El Niño and drought
The warm waters off the Pacific coast of Peru during a strong El Niño episode generate a column of rising air over the tropical Eastern Pacific. Once this rising air reaches the bottom of the stratosphere, which acts as a stable lid preventing further rising motion, the warm air is forced to spread out to the east and west along the Equator. This air eventually sinks over tropical regions well to the east and the west of the Eastern Pacific to complete a huge circulation cell several thousand miles in diameter. Since sinking air warms and dries as it descends, areas of high pressure and drought tend to form in these sinking air regions. To the west of the Eastern Pacific, El Niño events tend to create drought over Indonesia, New Guinea, and Northern Australia; to the east, drought commonly occurs over Central America, Northern Brazil and the Caribbean.


Figure 5. Greenhouse gas emissions from Indonesian forest fires have exceeded all emissions from the U.S. economy on most days in September and October 2015. Image credit: World Resources Institute.

Drought in Indonesia
As discussed in detail in the Jeff Masters October 13 post, Costliest (and Deadliest?) Disaster of 2015: Indonesia's $14 Billion Fires, the El Niño events of 2015 and 1997 - 1998 brought devastating drought and fires to Indonesia and neighboring countries. This year's fires in Indonesia are on track to be their most expensive disaster in history, beating the $9.3 billion price tag of the 1997 - 1998 fires.

Drought in Australia
Drought in parts of southern and northern Australia typical for El Niño has already begun in 2015, and may cut as much as 1 percent off of the country's GDP, said Andrew Watkins, supervisor of climate prediction services at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, in an AP interview. October 2015 was Australia’s hottest month ever recorded, and rainfall was below average over most of the country. Two of the three most expensive droughts in Australia’s history occurred during the moderate El Niño years of 2002 and 1992.

Drought in Central America, the Caribbean and Brazil
The atmospheric circulation associated with El Niño brings dry air and high pressure to northern Brazil, the Caribbean, Central America and the tropical Atlantic; these conditions tend to bring drought. According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, dry weather caused by El Niño through September 2015 was responsible for declines of 60 percent in maiz

Who is Jeff Masters....


Jeff Masters, Ph.D.
Director of Meteorology
Jeff Masters

Jeff Masters grew up in suburban Detroit, and attended the University of Michigan, where he received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Meteorology in 1982 and 1983, respectively. While working on his Masters degree, he participated in field programs studying acid rain in the Northeast U.S. and air pollution in the Detroit area.

In 1986, he took a position teaching weather forecasting to undergraduates at SUNY Brockport in New York, then later that year moved to Miami to join the Hurricane Hunters as a flight meteorologist for NOAA's Aircraft Operations Center. You can see him on the 1988 PBS documentary NOVA show titled "Hurricane!", flying into Hurricane Gilbert, the strongest hurricane ever observed in the Atlantic at that time. He co-authored several technical papers on wind measurement from aircraft during his four years flying with the Hurricane Hunters.

After nearly getting killed flying into Hurricane Hugo, Jeff left the Hurricane Hunters in 1990 to pursue a Ph.D. degree in air pollution meteorology from the University of Michigan. His 1997 Ph.D. dissertation was titled "Vertical Transport of Carbon Monoxide by Wintertime Mid-latitude Cyclones." The University of Michigan College of Engineering awarded him their 2006 Merit Award as the Alumnus of the year from their Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences Department, and Jeff remains active with the Department, offering guest lectures on hurricanes, and managing a Weather Underground undergraduate scholarship program.

While working on his Ph.D., he co-founded The Weather Underground, Inc. in 1995. He wrote much of the software that ingests and formats the raw NWS data used on the website, and created most of the imagery on the tropical page. Jeff currently serves as Director of Meteorology and on the Board of Directors for the company.

Jeff lives in the Ann Arbor, Michigan area with his wife and daughter. He and his wife are active in managing a 32-acre natural area owned by their neighborhood association. They spend a lot of time killing invasive plants such as garlic mustard, glossy buckthorn, and Asian bittersweet, and planting native species to take their places. Jeff enjoys hiking, cross country skiing, vegetarian cooking, and meditation. His favorite places are Havasu Canyon in the Grand Canyon and the Boiling River in Yellowstone National Park. His favorite book is Autobiography of a Yogi, and his favorite movie is Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He enjoys listening to Tangerine Dream, Loreena McKennitt, Anugama, and Beethoven. He occasionally picks up his trombone, but hasn't played much since freshman year in college, when he played with the University of Michigan Marching Band.

You can email Jeff at [email protected].

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Monster 2015 El Nino Likely to Be Most Intense Ever Seen

For nearly two years now, we’ve had every indication that Dr. Kevin Trenberth was right. A human-forced warming of the deep and middle ocean was indeed coming back to haunt us. Back during early 2014, signs were that a Monster El Nino was building in the Equatorial Pacific. This slow bleed of added heat to the Earth’s mid-section, in turn, forced global temperatures higher, leading to a record hot year during 2014, what will surely be a record hot year during 2015, and what may well also become a record hot year during 2016.

A primary driver of this record global surface heat was a period of extreme warming throughout the Pacific Ocean. A warming that increasingly centered upon the Equatorial Pacific as a Monster El Nino emerged and grew ever stronger.

The Strongest El Nino on Record

By mid summer, we had early indications that the 2015 event was likely to come in as the 1rst to 3rst strongest on record. Since t

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Climate change is 'single biggest threat' to polar bear survival

‘High probability’ of a 30% decline in polar bear numbers by 2050 due to retreating sea ice, IUCN study finds
In Canadian towns such as Churchill, polar bears have already come into conflict with humans as the ice season in Hudson Bay shortens.
In Canadian towns such as Churchill, polar bears have already come into conflict with humans as the ice season in Hudson Bay shortens. Photograph: Paul Souders/Corbis


Wednesday 18 November 2015 19.01 EST



Global warming is now the single most important threat to the survival of the polar bear with retreating sea ice set to decimate populations, according to a new study by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

It found a “high probability” that the planet’s 26,000 polar bears will suffer a 30% decline in population by 2050 due to the loss of their habitat, which is disappearing at a faster rate than predicted by climate models.

“There is a high risk of extinction and the threat is serious,” said Dena Cator of the IUCN’s species survival commission. “You could consider polar bears to be a canary in the coal mine. They are an iconic and beautiful species that is extremely important to indigenous communities. But changes to their sea ice habitat are already being seen as a result of climate change.”

The animals, already classified as vulnerable by the IUCN, depend on seasonal sea ice, which they use as a platform to hunt ring seals and bearded seals after their summer fast.

But the extent of sea ice at its lowest point each year, in September, has shrunk at a rate of 14% per decade from 1979 to 2011, with the fourth-lowest extent recorded this year.

Annual ice-free periods of five months or more will spread hunger among polar bears, the IUCN said, pushing the species over a “tipping point”, with widespread reproductive failure and starvation in some areas.

Latest projections indicate that swaths of the Arctic could be ice-free for five months of the year or more by mid-century. Three

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Polar Amplification, El Nino or Both? NASA Shows October of 2015 Was Hotter Than All of the Previous 1617 Months

If it seems we are doing a never-ending marathon of hottest posts, it’s simply because the world right now is ridiculously hot. Hotter than at any time ever seen before and being driven inexorably hotter by a combination of human greenhouse gas emissions and what appears to be a global warming weirdified El Nino that doesn’t look anything like a normal El Nino, but instead shows up as an intense blob of extreme heat sitting in a massive hot blob that makes up pretty much all of the Pacific Ocean from the Equator on north.

Busting the Top of the Global Temperature Graph

It’s in this rather crazy weather context that we find, according to NASA, October of 2015 set the bar for new hottest month in the global climate record for all of the past 135 years. That’s right, out of 1618 months in NASA’s global climate record, when comparing current readings to rolling baseline temperature averages, October of 2015 was the hottest one ever seen. A confirmation of the Japan Meteorological Agency’s findings from earlier this week. But one that, in true NASA fashion, also provides a boatload of additional data worth peeping at.

NASA global temperature graph

(With one month remaining in the December-through-November climate year, global temperature averages for the first 11 months of 2015 are now +0.819 C above the 1950-1981 NASA baseline. With November also likely to come in between +0.90 and +1.1 C hotter than normal, the 2015 yearly average is likely to come in well above the top of the chart. Image source: NASA GISS.)

Taking a glimpse at NASA’s Land-Ocean Temperature Index (LOTI), we find that October of 2015 came in at an extraordinary +1.04 C hotter than the 1950 to 1981 average or about 1.26 C hotter than 1880s averages. That’s an extreme temperature departure hitting within 0.74 C of the so-called safe limit of 2 C warming set by the UN. To put into perspective how weird and scary it is to hit such a high temperature departure, the last time temperatures were so high globally for any period of note, sea levels were between 10 and 30 feet higher than they are today. It’s another unfortunate passing of another bad climate marker on the way toward worse and worse to come if we can’t manage to stop emitting so much carbon into the atmosphere.

Overall, October of 2015 beat out the previous record hot month of January of 2007 (0.97 C above the NASA baseline) by 0.07 C. It is also the first month in the NASA monitor to exceed 1 C above the mid-to-late 20th Century range. In total, all of the top five hottest months in the global climate record have now occurred since 2007 with October 2015 (+1.04 C) coming in as hottest, January of 2007 (+0.97 C) coming in as second hottest, March of 2010 (+0.93 C) third hottest, March of 2015 (+0.90 C) fourth hottest, and September of 2014 (+0.89 C) as fifth hottest. But with the monster El Niño blowing up in the Pacific and with atmospheric greenhouse gasses pushing above 400 ppm CO2, it’s likely that many of these top five months could be replaced by new records into early next year. Moreover, the three month period of September, October, and November of 2015 now looks like it will be the first quarter year to exceed +0.9 C above the 1950-1981 baseline in the NASA record.

Warm Equator, Heating Poles

Moving on to NASA’s geospatial temperature anomalies map for the month of October, we see that much of the abnormal heat remains centered at the Poles. This despite a Godzilla El Nino belching hot air into the Equatorial region and pushing a strongly positive Arctic Oscillation. High polar temperature anomalies are an odd result during powerful El Nino periods due to the fact that warming at the Equator tends to strengthen the Polar wind field, locking cold into the upper and lower Latitudes. But over the past two months, Polar temperatures have remained extremely high despite what looks like the most powerful El Nino ever recorded tearing its way through the Pacific.

Global temperature anomalies map October of 2015

(This is what a record hot world looks like in NASA’s global temperature anomalies map. Note both the heat at the Poles and Equator along with the melt and ocean heat uptake related cool pools in the North Atlantic and Southern Ocean. Image source: NASA GISS.)

With such high polar temperatures giving what amounts to an atmospheric back-hand to the strongest El Nino on record, it’s a sign that a raging greenhouse gas driven polar amplification is becoming ever more heavily entrenched. The poles, in short, are more sensitive to global temperature swings and tend to amplify any overall warming or cooling trend. Such an additional sensitivity is due to a number of unique feedbacks that come into play in the upper Latitudes as greenhouse gas levels and global temperatures rise or fall. A circumstance that was predicted in even the earliest global climate model runs forecasting the impacts of a human forced heating of the Earth System. And it appears that this feedback-generated added warming is starting to take hold with a vengeance.

Overall, we find the highest temperature deltas in the Arctic Ocean just north of the Kara Sea, over various regions of the far South Antarctic, and over Central and Western Australia. These regions ranged into an extreme +4 to +5.1 C positive anomaly for the month. Broader warm regions featuring +2 to +4 C above average temperatures surrounded these hot zones. Strong warm temperature departures in this range also held sway over the Eastern Equatorial Pacific El Nino hot spot, over a band from North Africa through the Middle East, over the Lake Baikal region of Russia, and over South Africa.

Equator-to-Pole heat transport — another feature we really don’t like seeing — also remained plainly visible in the October NASA anomalies graphic. Two slots of warm air transport into the northern polar zone show up clear as day in the above graphic — one maintaining over Western North America and another holding sway over Northeastern Asia.

Somewhat cool regions include the heat sink zone in the Southern Ocean, the tip of South America, Eastern Europe, and the ominous Greenland melt related cool pool in the North Atlantic (something we also really don’t want to see). Overall, most of the world showed above average readings with cooler regions increasingly isolated on the NASA map.

zonal anomalies NASA

(Zonal anomalies map shows a strong polar amplification despite El Nino. Image source: NASA GISS)

At last coming to the zonal anomalies graphic, we again observe a very strong polar amplification for the month of October. Here we note that the highest global temperature anomalies occur at both the South and North Poles. These extreme temperature spikes in the range of +3.3 to +3.5 C above average for the month are plainly visible in the upward tilting ‘devils horns’ (another unfortunate climate change indicator) at both the left and right border of the graph. As we move toward lower Latitudes, temperature departures rapidly fall off into the global cool and stormy zones between 50 and 60 North and South Latitudes. Anomalies then steadily climb to an El Nino-warmed Equatorial region (+1.2 to +1.4 C).

November of 2015 Also Likely to Test New Records

Looking toward November, early indications are that both the record or near-record global surface temperatures and the tendency for polar amplification continue. Land and ocean temperatures appear to have extended their October jump into new record ranges. El Nino, which under the regime of human-forced warming has often nudged global temperatures toward ever-hotter extremes, likely pushed sea surface temperatures to new all-time highs in the Equatorial Pacific for the month. Such a huge amount of heat bleeding off this broad ocean zone will likely to continue to spike global surface temperatures. Given such a context, it appears that we’ll be under the gun for new global surface temperature records for a period of at least the next 4 months. So what we saw during October was almost certainly just the start of the current global temperature spike.

Links:

NASA GISS Surface Temperature Analysis

NASA GISS

NASA Land Ocean Temperature Index

Polar Amplification

October of 2015 Shaping up to be Hottest Month Ever Recordedx

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What Passing a Key CO2 Mark Means to Climate Scientists

Published: November 20th, 2015

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By Andrea Thompson and Brian Kahn

This week is a big one for our world. Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels climbed above the 400 parts per million (ppm) at the Mauna Loa Observatory and it’s distinctly possible they won’t be back below that level again in our lifetimes.

Humans have burned enough fossil fuels to drive atmospheric CO2 to levels that world hasn’t seen in at least 400,000 years. That’s driven up temperatures, melted ice and caused oceans to acidify. Some extreme weather events around the world have become more likely and stronger because of it, and some will likely only get worse as the planet continues to warm.

Because CO2 sits in the atmosphere long after it’s burned, that means we’ve likely lived our last week in a sub-400 ppm world. It also means that the reshaping of our planet will continue for decades and centuries to come, even if climate talks in Paris in two weeks are successful.

To get some perspective on what this means for the world, we asked leading climate scientists for their insight on passing this milestone as well as what it means for their particular areas of research. Below are their answers, some edited lightly for clarity or length.
How Do You Feel About CO2 Levels Passing This Threshold?

Ralph Keeling, director of the Scripps CO2 Program: “It will take some getting used to psychologically, like a round-numbered birthday. For someone who remembers when CO2 was only around 330 ppm, it's a pretty big change.”

Jason Box, ice researcher at the Geologic Survey of Denmark and Greenland: “I feel very concerned because the last time atmospheric CO2 was this high, global sea levels were at least six meters higher. You can see a recent study by Andrea Dutton and others on sea level rise due to polar ice-sheet mass loss during past warm periods.”

Michael Mann, climatologist at Penn State University: “Well, it is a sad milestone. CO2 levels were about 320 ppm when I was born in 1965. It is shocking to realize that they’ve gone up 80 ppm over the course of my lifetime.”

Katharine Hayhoe, atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University: “As a scientist, the difference between 399 ppm vs. 401 ppm is negligible.

As a human, though, passing both the 400 ppm and (potentially) the 1°C threshold within such a short time period makes it clear we are already living in a different world. We have blown past targets that were being considered as viable when I entered graduate school. We have significantly reduced the options available to us in the future. If we aren’t going to blow past the next set of thresholds — 500 ppm and 2°C — within just a few more decades, we have a lot of work to do in Paris in two weeks and beyond.”

Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute: “In some ways, the number 400 ppm is no different than 395 ppm or 390 ppm — it is just that we like watching our odometers turn over at even numbers with lots of zeros. But this feels far more important than pure symbolism. The truth is, when I was born, atmospheric CO2 levels were around 300 ppm. Today — maybe even this week — will be the last time anyone alive experiences a level below 400 ppm, and no one born in the coming century or even longer will ever see less than 400 ppm again. That is a deep, deep observation, with ramifications for our children and for every future generation.”

Pieter Tans, head of the Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gases Group at the Environmental System Research Laboratory: “What do I feel about this? Awe! To me, it demonstrates the continuing and unavoidable rise of CO2 as long as mankind continues to burn coal, oil, and natural gas in quantities so large that natural systems are being overwhelmed.”

Atmospheric CO2 concentrations in early spring, when plants in the northern hemisphere are still dormant, vs. summer, when plants draw CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Credit: NASA
What Does Reaching This Level Mean For Your Area Of Climate Science?

Ralph Keeling: “400 ppm is not a magic number for climate, but it does nicely symbolize that we are now in a new era of Earth history, a point that climate scientists have been making already for a while.”

Michael Mann: “It means that we are still trending at the upper end of past CO2 projections. It underscores the importance of acting now if we are going to avert dangerous interference with our climate. I suppose it stresses the importance of making substantial progress toward a meaningful international climate treaty at the Paris Summit later this month.”

Peter Gleick: “My focus is on the risks to our water resources from climate change. Some of the most significant impacts of future climatic changes, and some of the most obvious changes we've already seen, are on water resources, from a growing influence of climate change on extreme hydrologic events such as both floods and droughts, to a connection with social unrest and violence. I wrote a paper, for example, on the links between drought, climate change, water management, and the conflict in Syria published in the journal Weather, Climate, and Society. Here is a link.”

John Church, sea level rise researcher at the University of Tasmania: “The oceans, glaciers and ice sheets are all out of balance so sea level will rise for centuries, and more.”


Do You Think This Milestone Will Spur Action On Climate Change?

Ralph Keeling: “For those who are paying attention, it may further motivate. For those who haven't been paying attention, perhaps it's a starting point for understanding that changes is underway. ‘Remember, back when CO2 was only 400 ppm?’ ”

Jason Box: There's lots of talk about needed emissions reductions but emissions reductions won't get us down below 350 ppm where we need to be to avoid climate chaos. The missing conversation is how are we going to get CO2 down below 350 ppm? Fortunately the answer is in an amazing overlooked and existing technology (AOET ;-)): the tree. So here, I made some calculations what it would take.

Katharine Hayhoe: “Passing such a milestone can just as easily create a sense of despair as it can urgency. Which will win out? I don’t know — but I hope it’s the latter.”

Peter Gleick: “Yes, I do. While any particular measurement of atmospheric CO2 is an arbitrary number (e.g., 390 ppm, 398 ppm), round numbers mark milestones that help focus our attention and awareness. Combined with a growing number of increasingly severe weather events, improved science connecting the influence of climate change to extreme events, and milestones like 400 ppm CO2, pressure is finally building to tackle climate change. We'll see if the world finally acts and whether those actions will be enough to prevent ever accelerating and severe impacts to the planet and humans.”

Pieter Tans: “I think that most policy makers are already convinced that substantive action is needed. What is missing is the pressure to follow through as long as the public lets them get away with doing nothing by not demanding action strongly enough. The 400 ppm milestone is an opportunity for public education.”

John Church: “Not as urgently as required.”

Julienne Stroeve, research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center: “Doubtful. Any action on climate change will be driven by economics; sadly that's the way the world currently works. Unless it's economically viable to reduce CO2 emissions and turn to renewables, it will not happen unless there is money to make.”

Eric Rignot, Antarctic expert at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: “No. 400 ppm does not speak to anyone.”

An animation showing how carbon dioxide moves around the planet.
Credit: NASA/YouTube

You May Also Like:
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The Forgotten U.N. Climate Goal: 1.5°C
U.K. Plans to Shutter All Coal-Fired Power Plants by 2025
U.S. Agencies Agree: October Was Crazy Warm

[dlbww]

Apparently climate change (caused by us burning fossil fuels, or cows farting, etc.) is a myth. Follow the money: http://www.armstrongeconomics.com/archives/39667" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[dlbww]

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... r-survival

Climate change is 'single biggest threat' to polar bear survival

‘High probability’ of a 30% decline in polar bear numbers by 2050 due to retreating sea ice, IUCN study finds
In Canadian towns such as Churchill, polar bears have already come into conflict with humans as the ice season in Hudson Bay shortens.
In Canadian towns such as Churchill, polar bears have already come into conflict with humans as the ice season in Hudson Bay shortens. Photograph: Paul Souders/Corbis


Wednesday 18 November 2015 19.01 EST



Global warming is now the single most important threat to the survival of the polar bear with retreating sea ice set to decimate populations, according to a new study by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

It found a “high probability” that the planet’s 26,000 polar bears will suffer a 30% decline in population by 2050 due to the loss of their habitat, which is disappearing at a faster rate than predicted by climate models.

“There is a high risk of extinction and the threat is serious,” said Dena Cator of the IUCN’s species survival commission. “You could consider polar bears to be a canary in the coal mine. They are an iconic and beautiful species that is extremely important to indigenous communities. But changes to their sea ice habitat are already being seen as a result of climate change.”

The animals, already classified as vulnerable by the IUCN, depend on seasonal sea ice, which they use as a platform to hunt ring seals and bearded seals after their summer fast.

But the extent of sea ice at its lowest point each year, in September, has shrunk at a rate of 14% per decade from 1979 to 2011, with the fourth-lowest extent recorded this year.

Annual ice-free periods of five months or more will spread hunger among polar bears, the IUCN said, pushing the species over a “tipping point”, with widespread reproductive failure and starvation in some areas.

Latest projections indicate that swaths of the Arctic could be ice-free for five months of the year or more by mid-century. Three

Apparently not according to this article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... E-now.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Again I say, follow the money!

[msfreeh]

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... r-survival

Climate change is 'single biggest threat' to polar bear survival

‘High probability’ of a 30% decline in polar bear numbers by 2050 due to retreating sea ice, IUCN study finds
In Canadian towns such as Churchill, polar bears have already come into conflict with humans as the ice season in Hudson Bay shortens.
In Canadian towns such as Churchill, polar bears have already come into conflict with humans as the ice season in Hudson Bay shortens. Photograph: Paul Souders/Corbis


Wednesday 18 November 2015 19.01 EST



Global warming is now the single most important threat to the survival of the polar bear with retreating sea ice set to decimate populations, according to a new study by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

It found a “high probability” that the planet’s 26,000 polar bears will suffer a 30% decline in population by 2050 due to the loss of their habitat, which is disappearing at a faster rate than predicted by climate models.

“There is a high risk of extinction and the threat is serious,” said Dena Cator of the IUCN’s species survival commission. “You could consider polar bears to be a canary in the coal mine. They are an iconic and beautiful species that is extremely important to indigenous communities. But changes to their sea ice habitat are already being seen as a result of climate change.”

The animals, already classified as vulnerable by the IUCN, depend on seasonal sea ice, which they use as a platform to hunt ring seals and bearded seals after their summer fast.

But the extent of sea ice at its lowest point each year, in September, has shrunk at a rate of 14% per decade from 1979 to 2011, with the fourth-lowest extent recorded this year.

Annual ice-free periods of five months or more will spread hunger among polar bears, the IUCN said, pushing the species over a “tipping point”, with widespread reproductive failure and starvation in some areas.

Latest projections indicate that swaths of the Arctic could be ice-free for five months of the year or more by mid-century. Three

Apparently not according to this article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... E-now.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Again I say, follow the money!

I took your advice.


Here are some climate sceptic scientests funded by coal and Exxon Mobil companies



1.

Richard S. Lindzen
Richard S. Lindzen

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ri ... ts_Funding" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Learn more from the Center for Media and Democracy's research on climate change.

This article is part of the Coal Issues portal on SourceWatch, a project of CoalSwarm and the Center for Media and Democracy. See here for help on adding material to CoalSwarm.

Dr. Richard S. Lindzen ( b. February 8, 1940) is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology[1]

Joel Achenbach wrote in the Washington Post in 2006 that "of all the skeptics, MIT's Richard Lindzen probably has the most credibility among mainstream scientists, who acknowledge that he's doing serious research on the subject."[2]

Lindzen is perhaps best known for his "Iris hypothesis", which proposed that, like the iris of an eye, the earth's cloud systems will act to lessen global warming. Other climate researchers believe that further research has not supported this hypothesis;[3] Lindzen disagrees.[4]

Contents

1 Background
2 Fossil Fuel Interests Funding
3 Lindzen's Discarded Global Warming Arguments
4 Linzden's Betting Challenge on Global Warming
5 On Tobacco
6 Key Quotes by Lindzen
7 Affiliations
8 Actions
8.1 Signatory to Letters Opposing Action on Global Warming
8.2 Speaker at events disputing climate change
9 Articles and resources
9.1 Related SourceWatch articles
9.2 References
9.3 External resources
9.4 External articles
9.4.1 By Lindzen
9.4.2 Videos of Lindzen
9.4.3 About Lindzen

Background

His academic research involves studies of the role of the tropics in mid-latitude weather and global heat transport, the moisture budget and its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of climate sensitivity.[5] He has published numerous papers regarding meteorologic and atmospheric topics.[6]
Fossil Fuel Interests Funding

In a biographical note at the foot of a column published in Newsweek in 2007, Lindzen wrote that "his research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies." (Emphasis added).[7]

Ross Gelbspan, journalist and author, wrote a 1995 article in Harper's Magazine which was critical of Lindzen and other global warming skeptics. In the article, Gelbspan reports Lindzen charged "oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; [and] his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels and a speech he wrote, entitled 'Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus,' was underwritten by OPEC."[8]

A decade later Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam reported, based on an interview with Lindzen, that "he accepted $10,000 in expenses and expert witness fees from fossil- fuel types in the 1990s, and has taken none of their money since."[9]
Lindzen's Discarded Global Warming Arguments

An internal document (pdf) of the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) -- an industry front group that disbanded in 2002 -- reviewed some of the "contrarian" arguments used by Lindzen and other climate change skeptics that they later discarded. The document, which was obtained as part of a court action against the automobile industry[10].

In a section on the "Role of Water Vapor", the GCC's Science and Technical Advisory Committee wrote that "In 1990, Prof Richard Lindzen of MIT argued that the models which were being used to predict greenhouse warming were incorrect because they predicted an increase in water vapor at all levels of the troposphere. Since water vapor is a greenhouse gas, the models predict warming at all levels of the troposphere. However, warming should create convective turbulence, which would lead to more condensation of water vapor (i.e. more rain) and both drying and cooling of the troposphere above 5 km. This negative feedback would act as, a "thermostat" keeping temperatures from rising significantly."

However, the GCC's science advisers noted that this argument had been disproven to the point that Lindzen himself had ceased to use it. "Lindzen's 1990 theory predicted that warmer conditions at.the surface would lead to cooler, drier conditions at the top ofthe troposphere. Studies of the behavior of the troposphere in the tropics fail to find the cooling and drying Lindzen predicted. More recent publications have indicated the possibility that Lindzen's hypothesis may be correct, but the evidence is still weak. While Lindzen remains a critic of climate modeling efforts, his latest publications do not include the convective turbulence argument."[11]

In conclusion the GCC's science advisers was that "Lindzen's hypothesis that any warming would create more rain which would cool and dry the upper troposphere did offer a mechanism for balancing the effect of increased greenhouse gases. However, the data supporting this hypothesis is weak, and even Lindzen has stopped presenting it as an alternative to the conventional model of climate change."[12]
Linzden's Betting Challenge on Global Warming

In November 2004, climate change skeptic Richard Lindzen was quoted saying he'd be willing to bet that the earth's climate will be cooler in 20 years than it is today. When British climate researcher James Annan contacted him, however, Lindzen would only agree to take the bet if Annan offered a 50-to-1 payout. Subsequent offers of a wager were also refused by Pat Michaels, Chip Knappenberger, Piers Corbyn, Myron Ebell, Zbigniew Jaworowski, Sherwood Idso and William Kininmonth. At long last, however, Annan has persuaded Russian solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev to take a $10,000 bet. "There isn't much money in climate science and I'm still looking for that gold watch at retirement," Annan says. "A pay-off would be a nice top-up to my pension."[13]
On Tobacco

In a 2001 profile in Newsweek, journalist Fred Guterl wrote that Lindzen "clearly relishes the role of naysayer. He'll even expound on how weakly lung cancer is linked to cigarette smoking."[14] James Hansen recalls meeting Lindzen whilst testifying before the Vice President's Climate Task Force: "I considered asking Lindzen if he still believed there was no connection between smoking and lung cancer. He had been a witness for tobacco companies decades earlier, questioning the reliability of statistical connections between smoking and health problems. But I decided that would be too confrontational. When I met him at a later conference, I did ask that question, and was surprised by his response: He began rattling off all the problems with the date relating smoking to helath problems, which was closely analagous to his views of climate data." [15]
Key Quotes by Lindzen

"I think it's [concern about global warming] mainly just like little kids locking themselves in dark closets to see how much they can scare each other and themselves." [16]

Lindzen told the BBC that ExxonMobil was "the only principled oil and gas company I know in the US" and that "they have a CEO who is not going to be bamboozled by nonsense."[17]

"To say that climate change will be catastrophic hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions that do not emerge from empirical science."[18]

On the term climate skeptic "Let me explain why I dont like it. You know to be skeptical assumes there is a strong presumptive case, but you have your doubts. I think were dealing with a situation where there's not a strong presumptive case."[19]

"There is no substantive basis for predictions of sizeable global warming due to observed increases in minor greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons." Lindzen speaking at the International Conference on Climate Change (2009).[20]

Affiliations

Lindzen was a member of the Science, Health, and Economic Advisory Council of the Annapolis Center[1], a Maryland-based think tank which had been funded by corporations including ExxonMobil[21], but does not appear to have filed a tax return with the IRS since 2007. [1]

He is also on the Academic Advisory Council of the U.K.-based Global Warming Policy Foundation.[22]
Actions
Signatory to Letters Opposing Action on Global Warming

Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change [23][24]
"Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations", December 13, 2007.[25]

Speaker at events disputing climate change

Lindzen has been a keynote speaker at media events and conferences of a range of think tanks disputing climate change including the Heartland Institute[26] and the Cooler Heads Coalition.[27][28][29]



2.



Judith Curry
Judith Curry


http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Judith_Curry" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Learn more from the Center for Media and Democracy's research on climate change.

Judith A. Curry is chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She runs a climate blog and has been invited by Republicans on several occasions to testify at climate hearings about uncertainties in climate understanding and predictions. Climate scientists criticize her uncertainty-focused climate outreach communication for containing elementary mistakes and inflammatory assertions unsupported by evidence. Curry is a regular at Anthony Watts' denier blog, as well as Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit, another denier site. She has further embarrassed herself (and her university) by using refuted denier talking points and defending the Wegman Report, eventually admitting she hadn't even read it in the first place.[1]

Contents

1 Education
2 Career
2.1 Research interests
2.2 Academic institutions
2.3 Business - Climate Forecast Applications Network
2.3.1 Clients not disclosed
2.3.2 Fossil fuel industry funding
3 Climate views
3.1 Blog - Climate Etc
4 Criticisms from climate scientists
4.1 Criticisms of outreach communication
4.1.1 Laundry list
4.1.2 Willingness to criticize based on second-hand info from contrarian, inexpert sources
4.1.3 Offering off-the-cuff, uninformed criticism of mainstream climate science
4.1.4 2011: Berkeley Earth Project "BEST" dissension, and widely publicized claims of "pause"
4.2 Criticisms of academic research
4.2.1 2011 WIRES article on uncertainty
4.2.1.1 Claims not backed up
4.2.2 2010: Liu and Curry
5 Articles and Resources
5.1 References
5.2 Related SourceWatch Articles
5.3 External resources
5.4 External articles

Education

Curry has a B.S. in Geography from Northern Illinois University (1974) and her PhD in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago (1982).[2]
Career
Research interests

Curry's research interests have included hurricanes, remote sensing, atmospheric modeling, polar climates, air-sea interactions, and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for atmospheric research. In 2010 and beyond, she has been looking at uncertainty.
Academic institutions

Curry's academic positions have been:[1]

2002- : Georgia Tech, Chair, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
1992-2002 University of Colorado at Boulder, Professor, Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences
Earlier positions at Penn State, Purdue University, University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Business - Climate Forecast Applications Network

With partner Peter J. Webster, Curry has run a weather prediction consulting business, Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN), since 2006.[3].
Clients not disclosed

The identities of Curry's clients have not been disclosed.
Fossil fuel industry funding

Curry receives ongoing funding from the fossil fuel industry. In an interview with Curry for a October 2010 Scientific American profile[4], Michael Lemonick reports (pers. comm.) that he asked Curry about potential conflicts of interest, and she responded,

"I do receive some funding from the fossil fuel industry. My company...does hurricane forecasting...for an oil company, since 2007. During this period I have been both a strong advocate for the IPCC, and more recently a critic of the IPCC, there is no correlation of this funding with my public statements."

Climate views

Curry believes the IPCC has done a bad job of characterizing uncertainty".[5] She believes "skeptical scientists" have difficulty getting their papers published.[6] She does not view herself as a climate hawk[7] (one who judges that the risks of climate change are sufficient to warrant a robust response.[8]) - though somewhat confusingly, she denies playing down the urgency of climate action: "I am saying nothing about that one way or the other".
Blog - Climate Etc

In September 2010, Curry started a weblog, Climate Etc., which takes the same "stress-the-uncertainties" approach also seen in other efforts to thwart science-based policy actions, as documented by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their book Merchants of Doubt[9].
Criticisms from climate scientists
Criticisms of outreach communication
Laundry list

Curry's contrarian-leaning "public outreach" public communication is criticized by prominent climate scientists and other science-aligned climate bloggers for a propensity toward "inflammatory language and over-the-top accusations ...with the...absence of any concrete evidence and [with] errors in matters of simple fact."[10],[11],[12],[13],[14],[15].

"...Examples of the unreliability of Curry's blog publications are illustrated by Michael Tobis[16] and James Annan[17], who both showed basic flaws in her understanding of uncertainty and probability, or at least an irresponsible level of sloppiness in expressing herself. Arthur Smith pointed out an under-grad level misunderstanding[18] in her own field's basic terminology," said Coby Beck.[10]

Climate scientist James Annan has provided examples (with rebuttals) of assertions made by Curry on topics like no-feedback climate sensitivity, aerosols, climate change detection&attribution, and the IPCC tolerance of challengers; he finds there's a pattern of "throwing up vague or demonstrably wrong claims, then running away when shown to be wrong",[19]
Willingness to criticize based on second-hand info from contrarian, inexpert sources

"In a 2010 comment[20] she called blogger Deep Climate's detailed and well-documented investigation into the Wegman Report "one of the most reprehensible attacks on a reputable scientist that I have seen" even as she revealed in her incorrect synopsis of the charges that she had not even read it for herself. ... [i.e.] she shows herself ready to publicly criticise someone else in the strongest terms based entirely on second hand information gleaned from places like Climate Audit and Watts Up With That."[10]

Offering off-the-cuff, uninformed criticism of mainstream climate science

Gavin Schmidt has criticised Curry for "not knowing enough about what she has chosen to talk about[21], for not thinking clearly about the claims she has made with respect to the IPCC[22], and for flinging serious accusations at other scientists without just cause."[23].
2011: Berkeley Earth Project "BEST" dissension, and widely publicized claims of "pause"

Curry was a member of the partially-Koch-funded Berkeley Earth Project temperature reanalysis project headed by former global warming skeptic Richard Muller, which reanalyzed existing weather station data and found yes, global warming was real. The project FAQ[2] (and a draft paper, which lists Curry among the authors[3]) reported there was no evidence to indicate the rate of global warming had changed in the last decade.

But despite Curry's having agreed (as evinced by her coauthorship) with this conclusion, London Daily Mail contrarian (and oft-misrepresenting[4], [5], [6]) journalist David Rose portrayed a vigorously-disagreeing Curry saying, "This is 'hide the decline' stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline."[24].

Curry backtracked somewhat on her blog, saying "The article spun my comments in ways that I never intended"[24], but didn't step back from "Our data show the pause", and "There has been a lag/slowdown/whatever you want to call it in the rate of temperature increase since 1998."[25] When pressed for the scientific basis for these statements, Curry admitted the time period was too short for a statistically significant difference to emerge.
RommSkepticsPauses.png

In response Tamino noted, "There is Occam's razor -- ... the simplest hypothesis (namely: the trend hasn't changed) is preferable. Besides which, basing her statement on "It may have stopped since 1998" is really no different than "it may have stopped since last Thursday.""[7]

Eyeballed "pauses" are misleading - in a graph titled "How "Skeptics" View Global Warming", Joe Romm shows that if you see a "pause" in the post-1998 temperature data, you'll also think global warming "paused" at least six times from 1973-2010, covering almost the entire period - yet the global temperature actually continued to increase.[26]
Criticisms of academic research
2011 WIRES article on uncertainty

Climatologist James Annan noted in passing that in this article Curry had "grossly misrepresented the IAC report."[27].
Claims not backed up

The WIRES article also didn't back up claims made earlier: in an earlier paper, Curry and Webster had said the forthcoming article "argues that the attribution argument cannot be well formulated in the context of Boolean logic or Bayesian probability...[and] argues that fuzzy logic provides a better framework..."[8] But when the WIRES paper appeared[9], it didn't do so - not even mentioning fuzzy logic, Boolean logic or Bayesian probability.[28]. (When asked, Curry said her reviewers had found that section confusing, so "in the revised version, I simplified the argument".[29])
2010: Liu and Curry

Liu and Curry's August 2010 paper, "Accelerated warming of the Southern Ocean and its impacts on the hydrological cycle and sea ice"[30], has been criticized for its failure to cite previous papers drawing the same conclusion, and for its "uncritical use of invalid data".[31], [32]



3.


Roger Pielke Jr.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Roger_Pielke_Jr" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.


Learn more from the Center for Media and Democracy's research on climate change.

Not to be confused with his father, atmospheric scientist Roger Pielke, Sr..

Roger A. Pielke Jr. is a professor of environmental studies at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research[2] at the University of Colorado at Boulder.[1]. Dr. Pielke is a prolific and controversial writer; his most recent book setting forth his views is called "The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics," which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. His doctorate is in political science.[2]

Some of Dr. Pielke's comments and work have proven to be controversial. Critics note that his work has been frequently cited by "global warming skeptics,"[3] Dr. Pielke and his allies have praised his independence and called his critics "climate McCarthyists."[4] (For more information on who the "skeptics" are and which corporations fund skeptics, SourceWatch has created a global warming skeptic clearinghouse.)

Dr. Pielke's work on climate change effects has been criticized by Dr. Stephen Schneider, who said that with Pielke "one consistent pattern emerges-he is a self-aggrandizer who sets up straw men, knocks them down, and takes credit for being the honest broker to explain the mess-and in fact usually adds little new social science to his analysis [3].

Contents

1 Politics
2 Controversial Positions
2.1 Testimony about Bush Administration Political Interference in Science
2.2 Scientific Integrity
2.3 Critique of the Predictions of NASA Scientist James Hansen
2.4 Hurricane Theory and Climate Change
2.5 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
3 Affiliations
4 Books and Articles
5 Testimony to Congress
6 Contact details
7 Other resources
7.1 Related SourceWatch articles
7.2 References
7.3 External resources

Politics

On political views, Dr. Pielke has stated "If you want to know what I think about things that I have some expertise in, just have a look at our blog and my publications and you’ll get a pretty good sense of my views on particular subjects."[5] He has written that he supported Barack Obama's 2008 campaign to be President.[2] Huffington Post writer David Roberts has argued that Dr. Pielke has "been playing footsie with denialists and right-wing ideologues for years; they're his biggest fans."[6] Dr. Pielke describes himself as a "Blue Dog Democrat."[7]
Controversial Positions

Dr. Pielke has published hundreds of articles in a variety of publications, and some of his statements and arguments have attracted significant controversy.
Testimony about Bush Administration Political Interference in Science
Roger Pielke Jr.

During 110th Congress, Democratic leaders investigated claims by numerous scientists that their research and findings were subject to political interference by members of the Bush Administration, and Dr. Pielke was selected by the Republican minority to testify during that investigation.[8] In the face of voluminous documentation of political interference by the Bush Administration, Dr. Pielke asserted that President Bush's actions were similar to those observed in the Clinton Administration, that science in policy was unavoidably political, and scientists had politicized science.[9]

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), along with many others in the scientific community, strongly disagreed that the Bush Administration's pattern of interference in scientific integrity was simply business as usual in Washington.[10] For example, UCS provided a thorough compilation of the manipulation, suppression, and distortion of critical scientific information in its "A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science."[11]

To take just one of many examples, Dr. Pieter Tans, a chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency’s Global Monitoring Division in Boulder, Colorado--in the same city as Dr. Pielke--"was asked by lab director Dr. David Hofmann to cancel a conference session on energy use and the carbon cycle due to its 'policy implications' and was told that the words 'climate change' could not appear in the titles of any presentations. Hoffman had previously told Tans and other NOAA scientists not to use the word 'Kyoto' in presentations or papers."[12] At the time of this political interference and censorship, Dr. Tans was chair of the Scientific Program Committee for the Seventh International Carbon Dioxide Conference and was preparing to talk about "the dominant role that carbon dioxide plays as a forcing agent in climate change."[13] Dr. Tans was later told that any material dealing with climate change, including his laboratory’s website content, had to be pre-approved at the White House level.[14]

(Dr. Pielke has testified before other House and Senate Committees on climate issues, as listed in detail below.)[15]
Scientific Integrity

In 2006, Dr. Pielke drew parallels between the integrity of a non-scientist government contractor, Ms. Susan Hassol, who was serving as one of the editors of a climate report and who had previously written about climate changes underway, and the highly controversal Bush White House political operative Philip Cooney who edited government reports to downplay the science of climate change.[16] Ms. Hassol is a writer whose work documents climate changes; among other things, she wrote HBO's global warming documentary, Too Hot Not To Handle, which premiered in April 2006.[17]Before joining the Bush White House, Philip Cooney who had spent years on the payroll of the American Petroleum Institute where he worked as a leading lobbyist against regulation of the oil and gas industry and served as the former "climate team leader" of API. After the scandal described below documented that Cooney had extensively revised government scientific conclusions, which Dr. Pielke was referencing, Cooney resigned and took a job with ExxonMobil.)

Specifically, Dr. Pielke stated that "A prominent non-scientist responsible for editing official government reports on climate change is at the exact same time being paid to engage in advocacy work related that that issue. To quote the media question to Scott McClellen regarding the Phil Cooney affair, 'are there not indications of at least the appearance of impropriety?'" Dr. Benjamin Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who served as the Convening Lead Author of Chapter 5 of the U.S. CCSP Synthesis and Assessment Report 1.1 ("Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere"), argued that this was "a cheap shot," adding that the suggestion that associate editor referenced by Dr. Pielke, Susan Hassol, "is responsible for introducing some form of bias in the Report" could not be "further from the truth."[18] He explained that "Susan Hassol's expertise has been invaluable in helping the authors of the first CCSP Report explain complex scientific issues in terms readily understandable by a lay audience. She has made our Report a better and clearer Report. She has not modified the scientific conclusions of the Report," in contrast to the work of Bush political operative Philip Cooney.

(The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform issued a report documenting the numerous ways in which Philip Cooney modified the scientific conclusions of materials produced by government scientists. This report includes original documents showing how Cooney added and deleted text to advance a political agenda of undermining confidence in climate change issues and introduce greater doubt that climate change was underway. Links to documentary evidence of this interference is provided in this congressional report noted in the footnote below.[19])

Dr. Pielke responded to Dr. Santer by stating, "Let me reiterate that this post is not to disparage either Mr. Cooney or Ms. Hassol, but to compare and contrast their very similar professional roles and how it seems that each has been treated very differently by the media and commentators, and certainly by scientists."[20] Dr. Pielke noted that he also commented in his original note: "I am sure that Ms. Hassol must be good at what she does, given her resume ..."[21]

Answering a review by Michael Tobis of his book "The Honest Broker" Pielke writes "My concern about climate science is that too many science arbiters and honest brokers have decided to engage in advocacy. The choice to become an advocate is of course a personal one, but I would argue that some place needs to be reserved for honest brokering of policy options, a role best served by authoritative institutions. However, this role that has gone wanting in the context of climate as the IPCC, national academies and professional organizations have all jumped on the advocacy bandwagon to some degree."[22] Pielke goes on to argue that scope for action has been narrowed by the "advocacy" he complains of. In this interesting exchange he also says climate change is like "abortion politics."
Critique of the Predictions of NASA Scientist James Hansen

Dr. Pielke has argued that NASA Scientist James Hansen's 1988 prediction of global warming was inaccurate.[23] Of the two lower projections Pielke wrote that "neither is particularly accurate or realistic. Any conclusion that Hansen's 1988 prediction got things right, necessarily must conclude that it got things right for the wrong reason (italics in original)."[24]

Tim Lambert has argued that "Pielke's criticism of Hansen's scenarios is badly misconceived. The important input to Hansen's model was the total forcing from greenhouse gasses, but Pielke ignores this to focus on the growth rate of emissions of each gas. For instance, he claims that scenario B was off by a factor of 2 on CO2. This sounds like a lot until you discover that means that emissions grew by 0.5% per year instead of 1% a year. And that works out to scenario B having the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere within 1% of what has actually happened. Pielke is being much more than a little unfair by calling a prediction that got within 1% of the correct answer as not being "particularly accurate or realistic"."[25]
Hurricane Theory and Climate Change

Dr. Pielke has suggested that hurricanes should be part of the climate change mitigation debate. He published a peer-reviewed study on this topic in the journal Proceedings of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.[26] This paper updates and extends a study that he originally published in the skeptic journal Energy and Environment, and at the 2007 Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Dr. Pielke gave a joint presentation on hurricanes and climate change with noted global warming skeptic Stephen McIntyre.[27]
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

In a February 2, 2010 televised interview on BBC TV, Dr. Pielke said his work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had been misrepresented in a report produced by the IPCC. In particular, he cited a graph that was included in the report that showed a relationship between rising temperatures and the increasing costs of damages from weather-related occurrences. Dr. Pielke stated he was surprised to see the graph, "because there's no evidence in the literature to suggest that that relationship exists." "Even more troubling," Dr. Pielke said, was the fact that one of IPCC's reviewers asked the IPCC to check with him (Pielke) about this information. Pielke said that the IPCC responded by saying they thought he had changed his mind on the topic. Pielke maintains that this was not true. He also took exception to the IPCC's citing of information in its report from non-peer-reviewed sources, like NGO reports, newspaper articles and information from private sources. Dr. Pielke said that the IPCC must be sure that is has the public's trust and should make it clear when they are relying on non-peer-reviewed sources.[28] (As noted above, however, Dr. Pielke himself has cited his own prior works and others that were not subject to peer review.)

In response to criticism of how its Fourth Assessment Report handled the question of recent trends in economic losses from climate-related disasters, the IPCC issued a statement in January, 2010 saying

"...This section of the IPCC report is a balanced treatment of a complicated and important issue. It clearly makes the point that one study detected an increase in economic losses, corrected for values at risk, but that other studies have not detected such a trend. The tone is balanced, and the section contains many important qualifiers. In writing, reviewing, and editing this section, IPCC procedures were carefully followed to produce the policy-relevant assessment that is the IPCC mandate." [29]

Affiliations

University of Colorado 2001 - present as Professor in the Environmental Studies Program;[30]
Director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado 2001-2007; he is currently a Fellow of CIRES;[30]


As of April 2011, Pielke is also:

Visiting Senior Fellow, Mackinder Programme, London School of Economics[1]
Senior Visiting Fellow at the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University[1]
Senior Fellow of The Breakthrough Institute[1]

From 2001-2006 he was a director of Weatherdata, Inc., "a leading provider of weather services", according to Wikipedia.
Member of advisory boards of the Societal Impacts Program at National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Pacific ENSO Applications Center at the University of Hawaii - dates not specified;[31]
Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research 1993-2001;[30]
Associate Fellow of the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization at Oxford University's Said Business School 2007;[31] and
as of May 2009 Pielke Jr. is a member of the editorial boards of Minerva, Darwin, Environmental Science & Policy, Global Environmental Change, Natural Hazards Review, Policy Sciences, and Water Resources Research [31].

Books and Articles

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I'm not trying to be controversial here but you are creating a straw-man picking questionable scientists with an agenda. I'm looking for facts trying to form an opinion. So did the ice pack increase the past two years or not? Look at Martin Armstrong's graphs and tell me this isn't a natural cycle (a 300 year one) of the sun. And Mars is warming apparently. Greenhouse gas or natural cycle?

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http://cheniere.org/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;




Oil Industry Factoids

Production residue is often radioactive due to high concentration of Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material

Bunker fuel for ships, which is little more than asphalt, can produce as much pollution from a single ship in a year as 50m cars and is the most polluting fuel in the world.

Canadian tar sands are complex operations involving mining and upgrading two tons of sand to produce a barrel of low quality crude oil.

Natural gas liquids and biofuels generally have lower energy content than crude oil and are generally not widely applicable transport fuels in their own right.

Shale oil requires constant investment in drilling to maintain production. Typical oil wells in shale plays decline as much as 60%/year, compared with 7-10%/year for conventional wells
—Oil&Gas Journal, Jan.5, 2015

“When you change the price of oil, you change the economy's speed limit.”
— Jeff Rubin, former CIBC economist and author

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More Signs of Gulf Stream Slowdown as Floods Devastate Cumbria, England

Back in 2009 heavy rains fell over the Northern UK. The rains, abnormally intense, pushed river levels to heights never before measured. A wall of water built-up. Surging over banks, it inundated the county of Cumbria, England forcing many to flee to higher ground.

At the time, weather forecasters and climatologists wondered if there might have been a global warming link to the freak Cumbria floods. There was certainly risk. Risk that the North Atlantic would become a mess of storms as the Gulf Stream slowed down and cold air masses collided with warm — developing a raging storm track to the west of the UK. A climate situation with the potential to draw in never-before-seen rivers of moisture and set off flooding the likes of which the UK has never known. Flood defenses were shored up. New commitments were made to shift the country away from carbon emissions.

But in just six short years many of those commitments have lagged. Funding for flood defenses was cut by conservatives in the UK parliament even as similar funds for wind and solar energy were targeted in favor of fracking the countryside for natural gas. The usual litany of climate change denial spewed out of the regular conservative mouthpieces in the politics and the media. It was the height of hubris and mismanagement. And again we have a ‘never before seen’ rainstorm roaring up out of a greatly troubled North Atlantic.

*****

Sands Center Carlisle River Level

(On December 6 of 2015 river levels at Sands Centre in Carlisle hit 8 meters above the typical range. The previous record highest level for this river gauge was 4.5 meters — a level the new flood defense systems were designed to contain. But this week’s rainfall simply overwhelmed both flood defenses and previous expectations for the upper limits of extreme weather. Image source: Shoothill Gauge Map.)

On Saturday and Sunday of December 5th and 6th, 2015, Cumbria flooded again. An even higher flood surge than before overwhelmed the new defenses and forced residents to yet again flee. Then, just three days later on Wednesday more than two months worth of rain fell over the Cumbria region. The amount at 341 mm in just 24 hours was a new UK record and compares to average total rainfall for the month of December at 146 mm. The county was again overwhelmed by water. Human chains were formed to help bring those stranded to safety. After the waters began to subside — devastation. More than 6,000 homes were found to have been flooded with perhaps as many as 20,000 people displaced.

This was the flood UK parliamentarians swore they would fight to keep from happening again. The one conservative politicians said would never again happen in our lifetime. A flood that was worse than the terrible event of 2009 happening just six years after the first. And one that was almost certainly made worse by the dreadful alterations wrought by human forced climate change on the environment of the North Atlantic.

The Gulf Stream Slowdown and The Great New Storms of the North Atlantic

One doesn’t have to be a climatologist to see that sea surface temperature patterns in the North Atlantic are all topsy-turvy. The region of ocean to the west of the UK is cooler than normal. It’s a great cool pool once predicted by climate scientists and now made real by a human-forced warming of the world’s airs and waters. The result of an ever-increasing glacial melt outflow coming from Greenland.

image

(Temperature anomaly deltas in the region of the Gulf Stream are in the range of -5 C below average in the northern, Greenland melt-related, cool pool, and +9 C above average in a hot ribbon off the US East Coast. This overall new 14 C temperature variance from south to north is generating new atmospheric instabilities that intensify storm systems firing off in the North Atlantic. Image source: Earth Nullschool.)

Climate scientists have known for a long time that just such a cool pool of fresh glacial melt could play havok with weather across the North Atlantic and on to far-flung regions of the globe. And it’s just such a weather disruptor that we see developing there now. One that was originally dramatized in the film The Day After Tomorrow. But one that will all-too-likely represent centuries of catastrophic weather terminating in a new, much hotter, far more toxic, and far less life-sustaining world — rather than simply a week-long hemisphere-sized superstorm abruptly halted by a nonsensical new ice age (Please see World Ocean Heartbeat Fading).

To the south of our cool pool and on off the US East Coast we find that sea surface temperatures are screaming hot. Hot as in the range of 5-9 degrees Celsius (9-16 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal. Both the cool pool to the north and the hot pool to the south taken together are an ominous sign that the Gulf Stream is slowing down. The cool, fresh water outflow from glaciers near Greenland is interrupting a heat and salt driven over-turning there. The over-turning, which drives the Gulf Stream current, slows down. As a result, heat that would be transported northward instead backs up off the US East Coast.

What results is a kind of dipole temperature pattern that aids in storm generation over the North Atlantic. The cool pool tends to pull cold air southward from Greenland. The hot ribbon off the US East Coast tends to draw warm, moist, tropical air into collision with the trough zone south and east of Greenland. The result is a high potential for storm bombification in the region west of the UK. These storms, in turn, pull rivers of moisture up from the tropical airs to the south and over England, Ireland and Scotland. This confluence of weather sets off unprecedented storms and heavy rainfall for the UK.

Both the new North Atlantic sea surface temperature pattern and the resulting storms are not normal. They are an upshot of only recently emerging weather patterns resulting from a human-forced climate change. And, sadly, we can expect to see them continue to worsen. This year, in particular, could see some extraordinary trans-Atlantic storms as the El Nino-driven tendency for trough development and tropical air injection over the US East Coast comes into play. But overall, El Nino or no, the new dipole temperature anomaly pattern in the North Atlantic fed by Greenland melt and a related Gulf Stream slowdown will tend to keep pushing the region into a stormier and stormier pattern for the foreseeable future. The UK and its politicians should be made well aware of the consequences of their actions. Continuing to plan to burn fossil fuels is simply adding more fuel to an already raging climate fire.

Links:

The Story of the 2009 Cumbria Floods

More Rain and Flooding Expected in Northwest England

Toxic Interests: In Lead-up to Paris Summit, Conservatives Around the World are Fighting to Kill Renewable Energy

The Devastation in Cumbria

Shoothill Gauge Map

Earth Nullschool

World Ocean Heartbeat Fading

Warning From Scientists – Halt Fossil Fuel Burning Fast or Age of Superstorms, 3-20 Foot Sea Level Rise is Coming Soon

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December 13 2015



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Hundreds of Records Broken as December Warmth Sends Temperatures Up To 30 Degrees Above Average
Published:
5 hours 39 min ago
weather.com

00:00 / 00:49
December Warmth Continues through Weekend

Record breaking temperatures contuinue to warm Saturday through Monday in the Ohio Valley, Tennessee Valley, eventually in parts of the East and Great Lakes.

A very mild weather pattern by December standards has engulfed a large swath of the Lower 48 states, setting hundreds of record highs and record-warm daily lows. The warmth has been so incredible that several cities in the Midwest and Northeast have set daily record highs during the morning hours this weekend.

According to preliminary data from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), at least 574 record daily highs were tied or broken across the U.S. during the first 10 days of December, representing about 2.6 percent of the 21,600 daily high-temperature reports received from more than 3,000 locations. By comparison, just 88 daily record lows were set in the same time frame.

(MORE: This Shouldn't Be Happening in December)

That 574-to-88 ratio is likely to become even more imbalanced as additional reports are processed for Thursday, Friday and Saturday and as widespread warmth grips the nation, squeezing out the possibility of record lows over most of the Lower 48. In fact, on Sunday record highs may be threatened for 20 percent of all weather observation sites in the Lower 48.

Temperatures will soar up to 30 degrees above average into Monday, setting even more records as the mild air spreads to the East Coast. Below are the forecast details and a recap of the records so far.
Cold Air Stays Bottled Up North

As we start meteorological winter, which runs from Dec. 1 through Feb. 29, true arctic air remains locked up in extreme northern Canada, well to the north of the U.S. border and even well north of all the major

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Record Hot Arctic: NOAA’s 2015 Report Card Shows Signs of Failing Climates

In NOAA’s most recent annual Arctic Report Card, the records just keep falling as the litany of global warming related events appearing throughout the far north continued to crop up with ever-more dizzying frequency…

(NOAA’s Arctic report is a stark expose of the state of the Arctic climate. What we view now is a system undergoing a rapid and dynamic transition from its previously stable state to something that is entirely new and alien to human civilization. Video source: NOAA.)

The 12 month period of October 2014 to September 2015 was the hottest one year time-frame since record keeping began for the Arctic back in 1900. As a result of these record warm temperatures, Arctic sea ice during the Winter hit its lowest maximum extent ever seen. Summer sea ice extent was likewise greatly reduced hitting its 4th lowest extent ever recorded. Old, thick sea ice which represented 20 percent of the ice pack in 1985, has precipitously declined to a mere 3 percent of the ice pack today. Snow cover also took a hit, declining to its second lowest extent on record during 2015 and striking a range of 50 percent below the typical average for the month.

Overall warming of the Arctic is at a much more rapid pace than the rest of the world. This accelerated pace of warming is due, in large part, to loss of snow and sea ice reflectivity during the Spring and Summer months. As a result, more heat is absorbed into dark land and ocean surfaces — a heat that is retained throughout the Arctic over longer and longer periods. And, though NOAA doesn’t report it in the above video, overall higher concentrations of greenhouse gasses like methane and CO2 in or near the Arctic region also contribute to a higher rate of warming (see NOAA’s ESRL figures). In a world that is now rapidly proceeding beyond the 400 ppm CO2 and 485 ppm CO2e threshold, this is exactly the kind of Northern Hemisphere polar amplification we would expect to see.

Warm Winds, Greenland Ice Sheet Melt, and Mass Migrations

NOAA notes a marked change in the distribution of life with mass migrations of all life forms well underway in and around the Arctic. Transitions and disruptions are most highly visible among marine mammals like walruses and polar bears — who are increasingly forced to live on land during the summer months. Meanwhile, an ever-broadening number of non-native fish are invading the Arctic from the south.

south-to-north-weather-pattern-alaska

(South to north weather patterns, like the one featured above, have increasingly drawn warm winds up and over Alaska. An anomalous new weather feature that has merited comment in NOAA’s recent annual Arctic report card. Image from “Arctic Heatwave to Rip Polar Vortex in Half”.)

NOAA also links the warm wind invasion events reported on widely here to the second worst wildfire season ever to strike Alaska in 2015. A dipole feature that displays teleconnections between Arctic snow and ice loss, the hot blob of water in the Northeastern Pacific, and the persistent trough that prevailed over the US East Coast during the Winter of 2014-2015.

Finally, Greenland Ice Sheet surface melt hit a maximum coverage above 50 percent for the first time since the extreme melt that occurred in 2012. NOAA notes that the amount of ice delivered to the ocean by glaciers also increased across Greenland even as recent studies continued to find an increasing prevalence of glacial destabilization and acceleration among Greenland’s ocean-terminating glaciers.

NOAA concludes: “Taken together, 2015 shows a continuing set of major changes in the Arctic.”

Links:

NOAA’s Arctic Report Card

Major Arctic Wildfire Outbreak

NOAA ESRL

Arctic Heatwave to Rip Polar Vortex in Half

El Nino, Polar Amplification or Both?

Hat Tip to Alexandr


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A Pulitzer Prize-winning, non-profit, non-partisan news organization dedicated to covering climate change, energy and the environment.

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Exxon's Oil Industry Peers Knew About Climate Dangers in the 1970s, Too
Members of an American Petroleum Institute task force on CO2 included scientists from nearly every major oil company, including Exxon, Texaco and Shell.
By Neela Banerjee, InsideClimate News
Dec 22, 2015

Beginning in 1979 the American Petroleum Institute, the nation’s most powerful lobbyist, together with the country's largest oil companies ran a task force to monitor and share climate research. Credit: JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images

The American Petroleum Institute together with the nation's largest oil companies ran a task force to monitor and share climate research between 1979 and 1983, indicating that the oil industry, not just Exxon alone, was aware of its possible impact on the world's climate far earlier than previously known.

The group's members included senior scientists and engineers from nearly every major U.S. and multinational oil and gas company, including Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco, Sohio and Standard Oil of California and Gulf Oil, the predecessors to Chevron, according to internal documents obtained by InsideClimate News and interviews with the task force's former director.

An InsideClimate News investigative series has shown that Exxon launched its own cutting-edge CO2 sampling program in 1978 in order to understand a phenomenon it suspected could harm its business. About a decade later, Exxon spearheaded campaigns to cast doubt on climate science and stall regulation of greenhouse gases. The previously unpublished papers about the climate task force indicate that API, the industry's most powerful lobbying group, followed a similar arc to Exxon's in confronting the threat of climate change.

Just as Exxon began tracking climate science in the late 1970s, when only small groups of scientists in academia and the government were engaged in the research, other oil companies did the same, the documents show. Like Exxon, the companies also expressed a willingness to understand the links between their product, greater CO2 concentrations and the climate, the papers reveal. Some corporations ran their own research units as well, although they were smaller and less ambitious than Exxon's and focused on climate modeling, said James J. Nelson, the former director of the task force.

"It was a fact-finding task force," Nelson said in an interview. "We wanted to look at emerging science, the implications of it and where improvements could be made, if possible, to reduce emissions."

The group was initially called the CO2 and Climate Task Force, but changed its name to the Climate and Energy Task Force in 1980, Nelson said.

A background paper on CO2 informed API members in 1979 that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was rising steadily, and it predicted when the first clear effects of climate change might be felt, according to a memo by an Exxon task force representative.

In addition, API task force members appeared open to the idea that the oil industry might have to shoulder some responsibility for reducing CO2 emissions by changing refining processes and developing fuels that emitted less carbon dioxide.

Bruce S. Bailey of Texaco offered "for consideration" the idea that "an overall goal of the Task Force should be to help develop ground rules for energy release of fuels and the cleanup of fuels as they relate to CO2 creation," according to the minutes of a meeting on Feb. 29, 1980.

The minutes also show that the task force discussed a "potential area" for research and development that called for it to "'Investigate the Market Penetration Requirements of Introducing a New Energy Source into World Wide Use.' This would include the technical implications of energy source changeover, research timing and requirements."

Yet by the 1990s, it was clear that API had opted for a markedly different approach to the threat of climate change. It joined Exxon, other fossil fuel companies and major manufacturers in the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a lobbying group whose objective was to derail international efforts to curb heat-trapping emissions. In 1998, a year after the Kyoto Protocol was adopted by countries to cut fossil fuel emissions, API crafted a campaign to convince the American public and lawmakers that climate science was too tenuous for the United States to ratify the treaty.

"Unless 'climate change' becomes a non-issue, meaning that the Kyoto proposal is defeated and there are no further initiatives to thwart the threat of climate change, there may be no moment when we can declare victory for our efforts," according to the draft Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan circulated by API.

API and GCC were victorious when George W. Bush pulled the U.S. out of the Kyoto agreement. A June 2001 briefing memorandum records a top State Department official thanking the GCC because Bush "rejected the Kyoto Protocol in part, based on input from you."

API did not respond to several requests for comment on this story.

The Climate and Energy Task Force continued until at least 1983, when Nelson left API after a four-year stint. At the time, the Environmental Protection Agency's authority was growing, and oil companies believed the agency was silencing them, Nelson said. It became harder for corporations to get scientific papers published or to draw favorable media attention, the industry felt. In the end, company leaders feared this would lead to overregulation.

As a result, API decided that it wasn't enough to have scientists meeting in a task force about climate change or other pollution issues. It needed lobbyists to influence politicians on environmental issues, Nelson said.

James J. Nelson, the former director of the API task force on CO2. Credit: Neela Banerjee/InsideClimate News

"They took the environmental unit and put it into the political department, which was primarily lobbyists," Nelson said of API. "They weren't focused on doing research or on improving the oil industry's impact on pollution. They were less interested in pushing the envelope of science and more interested in how to make it more advantageous politically or economically for the oil industry. That's not meant as a criticism. It's just a fact of life."

Nelson said he departed API because he was not a lobbyist, but said he did not object to API's lobbying. Nelson does not accept that human activity is the main driver of climate change; he believes that natural cycles and phenomena such as volcanoes and deforestation have contributed significantly to a warming planet. The API was not about "trying to distort the truth but about getting the information out in a factual manner. It wasn't about propaganda," he said.

Nelson joined API in 1979 after a career as an Air Force pilot and then as the director of the first air quality monitoring system in Fairfax County, Va. At the time, API had an environment division that helped member companies organize and staff committees on potential pollution issues, including waste management and water quality. Nelson was hired to run the air quality committee, which focused largely on pollution such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and other pollutants that had more immediate, local consequences.

CO2 was not among the most pressing issues that API members faced, Nelson said. Still, by the time he arrived, companies were already putting together the task force to monitor the emerging science on higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations and their possible impact on the climate. They had seen how pollution had hammered other industries, such as acid rain's effect on power generation or asbestos on construction, Nelson said. The oil industry did not want to be blindsided by the CO2 problem, which the science of the late 1970s had already linked to fossil fuel combustion.

As the group came together, Raymond J. Campion, a scientist at Exxon Research and Engineering and a member of the task force, recommended in memos to colleagues that "CO2 not receive a high priority" from API. One reason, Campion wrote, was because "the industry's credibility on such issues is not high at the present time, and should an API study indicate no serious CO2 problems, the results would be greeted with skepticism."

Some of the recipients of those memos were top people on the lobbying and planning side of Exxon USA, the company's domestic affiliate. On July 9, 1979, Campion wrote a memo to W.W. Madden, the manager of strategic planning at Exxon USA. Campion noted "Bill Slick's need for information on atmospheric CO2 buildup as a potential emerging issue for API to consider." Slick was an Exxon USA vice president and a well-known lobbyist in Washington.

Another reason to pursue a limited agenda, Campion wrote, was because the Energy Department and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) were expected to issue a report "momentarily" based on an April 1979 climate symposium that "concluded no catastrophic hazards would be associated with the CO2 buildup over the next 100 years and that society can cope readily with whatever problems ensue."

(Eventually published in October 1980, the AAAS report offered more sobering forecasts than Campion had expected, describing risks to nearly every facet of life on Earth and concluding catastrophes could be avoided only if timely steps were taken to address climate change.)

A memo from Campion to colleague J.T. Burgess dated Sept. 6, 1979 showed that the task force moved quickly to draft a background paper about CO2. Campion wrote that he was asked to critique it for Slick to use in API discussions.

Campion suggested corrections to the background paper's quantification of the rate of CO2 build-up, as well as an estimate in the paper that the "warming of the atmosphere…may be noticeable within the next twenty years."

He estimated that the effects would be felt after 2000, after a cyclical cooling period had passed. Because a cyclical warming trend was then expected post 2000, it would intensify climate change, "worsening the effect," he wrote. It is not known if the corrections were made to the paper.

Campion declined to be interviewed regarding his participation on the task force. Other Exxon representatives included Robert J. Fritz, who could not be located, and Henry Shaw, the company's lead climate researcher in the late 1970s, who is deceased. Exxon did not answer a request for comment.

The company representatives were scientists and engineers, and well-versed on air quality issues, Nelson recalled. Their views on carbon dioxide's possible impact on the climate varied, with many skeptical that man-made emissions could substantially affect the atmosphere. But they approached their participation on the task force dispassionately, he said.

"The individuals I had on the task force were very, very technically and ethically moral," Nelson said. "They felt that their job for their company was to look at an issue and if there was a problem, or if the petroleum industry was part of it or could contribute to fixing the problem, they wanted to do that."

Nelson organized the monthly meetings, took minutes and disseminated information companies wanted to share. Documents show representatives of about a half-dozen companies at various meetings. The meeting sites rotated among the members' cities, including oil hubs such as Houston and Tulsa; Washington, where API is located; and New York, where Exxon was headquartered at the time.

As Campion had recommended, API did not conduct its own research. But some of its members did, and they were generous about sharing their work and insights, Nelson said. "There were lots of discussions about climate models: whose were right and whose were wrong," he said.

Chevron acquired Texaco in 2000. Nelson said that Texaco's Bailey ran a small climate modeling team at the research facility in Beacon, N.Y. Bailey could not be located for comment. Chevron declined to comment on early CO2 research activities.

At Shaw's urging, the task force invited Professor John A. Laurmann of Stanford University to brief members about climate science at the February 1980 meeting in New York. Shaw and Laurmann had participated in the same panel at the AAAS climate conference in April 1979.

Like many scientists at the time, Laurmann openly discussed the uncertainties in the evolving climate research, such as the limited long-term sampling data and the difficulty of determining regional effects of climate change, according to a copy of his presentation attached to the meeting minutes.

Still, Laurmann told his audience several times that the evidence showed that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is likely "caused by anthropogenic release of CO2, mainly from fossil fuel burning."

In his conclusions section, Laurmann estimated that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would double in 2038, which he said would likely lead to a 2.5 degrees Celsius rise in global average temperatures with "major economic consequences." He then told the task force that models showed a 5 degrees Celsius rise by 2067, with "globally catastrophic effects."

The documents also show that the Energy Department contacted the task force in November 1979 to get its opinion on a study to be published in the journal Science about CO2 emissions from the development of oil shale. The government and oil industry had embarked on a mission to develop synthetic petroleum from sources such as oil shale and coal because of falling conventional oil production in the U.S. and political instability in the Middle East.

The Science study, by two geologists from the U.S. Geological Survey, estimated that synthetic crude from oil shale would generate three to five times more CO2 than conventional oil, double previous estimates, the Energy Department said.

The task force spent several months analyzing and refining its statement on the USGS paper, documents show. "Our estimates are less than theirs," Nelson said, "and if their numbers become gospel and no one challenges them, it could cause concern."

Because it was heavily involved in synfuels, Exxon weighed in first in December 1979. Shaw said that the paper was well-written. But he agreed with the Energy Department that the CO2 estimates were too high, and that "the paper may alarm the public unjustifiably," he wrote in a letter to API.

Shaw's own calculations about CO2 from synfuels served as the basis of the eventual position paper the task force sent to the Energy Department in the spring of 1980 after multiple drafts. In one draft, the task force stated in March 1980 that the estimates in the Science article were accurate in light of the assumptions it used. "However, several of these assumptions stem from worst-case scenarios that are highly improbable and unrealistic," the task force concluded.

It is unclear what the Energy Department did with the task force's assessment of the paper. Roger C. Dahlman, the Energy Department staff member who sent the article to the task force, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

After he left API in 1983, Nelson said he followed sporadically the organization's response to climate change. He said he felt the API's lobbying stemmed from a desire to have its concerns heard.

"That was the driving force, a worry about excessive regulation, my impression from having watched it along the way," he said.

Charles DiBona served as president of API from 1979 to 1997, when the organization shifted its approach on climate change from following the science to intense lobbying to discredit it. DiBona said in a phone interview that he did not remember the climate task force. Like Nelson, he does not accept the prevailing scientific consensus that climate change is being driven by fossil fuel combustion. "I think there is some question about the broader scientific community. There's not much evidence that there is real consensus," DiBona said.

In the 1990s, API argued that the science was too weak to warrant action, even as research grew more certain about the link between fossil fuel use, greater CO2 concentrations and rising global temperatures. Exxon chief executive Lee Raymond was API chairman from 1996 to 1997, when he focused on the uncertainty. The GCC emphasized the issue, too, in its public statements.

"Many people, politicians and the public alike, believe that global warming is a rock-solid certainty," Raymond said in a 1997 speech in Beijing. "But it's not."

API organized industry resistance to the possibility of the EPA's regulation of greenhouse gases in 1999. When the Bush administration took office, former API lobbyist Philip A. Cooney became chief of staff at the Council on Environmental Quality, the White House office that drove climate policy. Government scientists accused Cooney of rewriting federal research reports to sow doubt about man-made climate change. Cooney resigned in 2005 and went to work for ExxonMobil.

API's current position is that "fossil fuel development and environmental progress are not mutually exclusive," according to Jack Gerard, the group's president. But API still rejects any federal mandates to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Gerard decried President Obama's Clean Power Plan to cut emissions from the country's power plants, the cornerstone of the administration's climate agenda, as destructive "government interference" in free markets.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that scientists from Chevron were involved in the American Petroleum Institute's CO2 task force. The scientists were from the companies that would officially form the company named Chevron in 1984: Standard Oil of California and Gulf.

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Costa Rica's Green Energy Feat Shows Hope For The Planet
Almost all the energy produced in the developing country this year came from renewable sources.
12/22/2015 07:57 pm ET

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Green energy beacons continue to pop up around the world -- from a small Scandinavian island to a Japanese resort town to other first-world enclaves such as Burlington, Vermont. But one source of lessons and inspiration in the transition to renewable energy may come as a bit of a surprise: a developing Central American country.

As nearly 200 nations pledged to wean themselves off climate-disrupting fossil fuels earlier this month in Paris, Costa Rica was already well on its way -- proving, according to some experts, that major moves to stave off catastrophic climate change were indeed possible and practical.

Nearly all of the energy produced in Costa Rica during 2015 came from renewable sources -- 99 percent as of Dec. 17 -- including 285 days during which the small Central American country completely eschewed fossil fuels in its energy generation, according to official data. (The nation's roads, like much of the world, are still filled with fossil-fuel-guzzling vehicles.)

Back in March, the nation broke a world record for the longest streak of relying solely on renewable energy for electricity: 75 days. Among the effects were lower electricity prices for Costa Rican residents.

"The newly adopted Paris climate agreement has sent a powerful signal: the world will need to leave fossil fuels behind if we are to achieve climate security this century," Monica Araya, executive director at Nivela, a Costa Rica-based environmental group, told The Huffington Post in an email. "Costa Rica is well positioned to be a trail blazer in this clean-energy transition."

Andrea Watson, section manager for strategy and implementation at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, agreed that this is "absolutely a signal" of the world's potential to head down the right path.

She also noted that Costa Rica's efforts illustrate one of the key components included in the Paris accord: "differentiated responsibilities" based on countries' unique capabilities and circumstances. It ended up a crucial point, helping bring all 195 nations at the 21st Conference of the Parties, or COP21, on board.

"The idea out of the agreement wasn't that everyone will cut their emissions by this much, or that everyone must convert to renewable energy," said Watson. "But rather, every country will take an individualized approach to ambitious renewable energy goals -- one that works best for them and their development goals."

"The idea is that there is a path," she added. "Costa Rica has demonstrated that."

Costa Rica's individualized approach began decades ago with investments in its most abundant sources of renewable power. A major river system and heavy rainfall meant hydroelectricity could provide a solid base of energy generation. Geothermal and, increasingly, wind are also now significant in their mix.
Esteban Bermudez Forn

Since rivers tend to continuously flow, hydropower is generally among the more predictable renewable sources. The wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine, of course. Yet climate change itself may be compromising hydropower's reliability due to more extreme fluctuations between floods and droughts. In nearby nations, such as Chile, melting glaciers also threaten future hydroelectric power generation.

"Most countries in Central and South America are still growing their use of electricity," said Gabriel Goldschmidt, regional head of infrastructure for Latin America and Caribbean at the International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank.

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Rainfall records broken in Great Britain since record keeping began in 1700's




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Hundreds flee their homes as England’s north is submerged

• Met Office issues two highest-level red weather warnings
• Former pub washed away in Summerseat, Greater Manchester
• Severe flood warning in place for Leeds city centre
Water surges through Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, where the river Calder burst its banks.
Water surges through Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, where the river Calder burst its banks. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Robin McKie and agencies

Saturday 26 December 2015 14.10 EST



Hundreds of people had to flee their homes on Saturday after torrential rain triggered flooding in towns across Lancashire and West Yorkshire, and dangerously high waters reached the cities of Manchester and Leeds. The Met Office issued two of its most serious, red weather warnings – indicating a “danger to life” – for the area and warned that up to five inches of rain could fall over the weekend.

In addition, the Environment Agency (EA) issued 22 severe flood warnings – which also signal danger to life – as well as 238 standard flood warnings, which mean that immediate action is required. In Leeds, a severe flood warning has been put in place for the city centre, with the river Aire expected to reach a record peak later on.
The EA said it was due to “significant impacts to infrastructure and risk to life in the area”. “The peak at Leeds Crown Point is expected around 23:00 tonight,” it said.


In another incident believed to be connected with the flooding, there was a gas explosion at around 4.30pm in Radcliffe, Greater Manchester. Saeed Atcha, a radio presenter, said: “All of a sudden we heard a bang, we looked over to where the sound came from and couldn’t see anything.

“Then a second later there was another explosion and then a big orange beam lit up the sky, like a flash. It was very, very scary. Everyone was looking around in a state of shock. A police officer shouted ‘Get back into your house, there has been a gas explosion.’ Two or three minutes later the police officer jumped into his van and drove away.”
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Atcha said he understood that the explosion had been caused by the flooding. It occurred right next to the river Irwell, which has burst its banks. He added: “It is going to be a very dark and miserable evening. It seems like the area is on lock-down.”

Areas such as Cumbria, which escaped the worst of Saturday’s downpours, could still be hit by further flooding later today, forecasters added. Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service said it had been called out to around 350 incidents and had rescued 50 people. All of its boats and fire engines were mobilised, an official added.

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Floods of biblical proportions leave cities, towns and villages under water

Troops come to the aid of emergency services to evacuate stranded families
Drone footage of flooding in Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd

Robin McKie

Saturday 26 December 2015 15.24 EST
Last modified on Sunday 27 December 2015 07.12 EST



It was the day the floodwaters inexorably advanced across the Pennines, leaving much of the north of England sodden and beleaguered. From Greater Manchester in the north-west to parts of North Yorkshire some 50 miles to the east, Boxing Day 2015 will be remembered as the day the rains came.

In Todmorden, in West Yorkshire’s Calder Valley, Rebecca Marshall was last night facing the grim prospect of having to abandon her home as the floodwaters slowly rose around her house. The incessant rains had left the little town cut off after all the roads in and out were flooded.

By late afternoon the waters were “inches” from the top of the local defence wall and Marshall was stuck inside her home without electricity. Then floodwaters started to rise through her floorboards. “At the moment in our house it’s ankle-deep,” she said.
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“There’s about three feet of water outside our door. With no electricity we will have to move out. However, I don’t think we can get out of the town. All the roads in and out of Todmorden have been closed. Fortunately we have had friends and family turn up from all over the place offering to help.”

It was the same disturbing picture in towns and villages across Lancashire and Yorkshire. More than 300 flood

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Mass Displacement: a underappreciated consequence of warming

Paris Accord Considers Climate Change as a Factor in Mass Migration

Dec 12, 2015

LE BOURGET, France — The two-week United Nations climate conference outside Paris that drew to an end on Saturday focused on many of the physical dangers associated with climate change: extreme weather, severe drought, the warming of oceans, rain forest destruction and disruptions to the food supply.

But global warming has already had another effect — the large-scale displacement of people — that has been an ominous, politically sensitive undercurrent in the talks and side events here.

Scientists have said that climate change can indirectly lead to migration by setting off violent conflicts. Scholars have made this connection since at least 2007, when they cited climate change as a reason for the war in Darfur, Sudan.

A drought that lasted from 2006 to 2011 in much of Syria has been cited as a factor in the long-running civil war there, fueling a mass migration to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, but also to Europe, Canada and, in small measure, the United States.

Europe, in particular, is experiencing the largest influx of migrants since World War II — Germany alone has already taken in nearly a million this year. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, told world leaders on Nov. 30 that climate change could “destabilize entire regions and start massive forced migrations and conflicts over natural resources.”

The Paris climate accord, adopted on Saturday, calls for developing recommendations “to avert, minimize and address displacement related to the adverse impacts of climate change” — an explicit acknowledgment of the dangers of migration that some of the poorest of the 195 countries involved in the talks had sought to include in the text.

From 2008 to 2014, an average of 26.4 million people were displaced each year by floods, storms, earthquakes and other natural disasters, according to a report released in July by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, part of the Norwegian Refugee Council. Most moved within their countries.

“Climate-related displacement is not a future phenomenon,” said Marine Franck, who works on climate change and migration for the United Nations high commissioner for refugees. “It is a reality; it is already a global concern.”

William Lacy Swing, a retired American ambassador who now leads the International Organization for Migration, said that climate change was adding to a “perfect storm” of “unprecedented human mobility,” a result of the quadrupling of the world’s population over the last century and wars, conflicts and persecution that have displaced a record 60 million people.







He said that migration had to be viewed “not as a problem to be solved, but a human reality that has to be managed.”

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification — like the climate talks, it grew out of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 — and the British Defense Ministry recently cited a 2009 report estimating that 135 million people are at risk of displacement because desertification, the drying out of once-fertile land, will reduce drinking-water supplies and lower coral yields. The problem is most pronounced across a band of Africa, from the Sahel in the west to the Horn of Africa in the east.

By 2020, some 60 million people could move from the desertified areas of sub-Saharan Africa toward North Africa and Europe, the report found; by 2050, about 200 million people may be permanently displaced.

The report was prepared by a research and advocacy organization led by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, that shut down in 2010; some of the report’s findings have been disputed. Indeed, the numbers are so staggering that Jan Egeland, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who with Mr. Swing and others spoke at a panel discussion here, took pains to point out that the vast majority of migration worldwide takes place in the developing world.

As early as 1990, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned, “The greatest single impact of climate change could be on human migration.”

It was not until 20 years later, at the 2010 United Nations climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, that countries formally agreed that “climate change-induced migration, displacement and relocation” were among the challenges the world faced in adapting to a warmer planet.

In 2012, the Norwegian and Swiss governments established a research entity, the Nansen Initiative, which found that “a serious legal gap exists with regard to cross-border movements in the context of disasters and the effects of climate change.” The initiative has held consultations in four particularly vulnerable regions — Central America, the Horn of Africa, Southeast Asia and the islands of the South Pacific — and plans to recommend a “protection agenda” that may include standards of treatment.

People forced to leave their homes because of climate change are not easily classified under existing human rights, refugee or asylum law. In July, a New Zealand court dismissed a landmark case brought by a man from Kiribati, Ioane Teitiota, who had sought to have his family classified as “climate change refugees.” They were deported in September.
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Warm Arctic Storm To Hurl Hurricane Force Winds at UK and Iceland, Push Temps to 72+ Degrees (F) Above Normal at North Pole

We’ve probably never seen weather like what’s being predicted for a vast region stretching from the North Atlantic to the North Pole and on into the broader Arctic this coming week. But it’s all in the forecast — an Icelandic low that’s stronger than most hurricanes featuring a wind field stretching over hundreds and hundreds of miles. One that taps warm tropical air and hurls it all the way to the North Pole and beyond during Winter time. And it all just reeks of a human-forced warming of the Earth’s climate…

Freak North Atlantic Storm Featuring Extremely Low Pressures

Today, a powerful, hurricane force low pressure system is in the process of rounding the southern tip of Greenland. This burly 960 mb beast roared out of an increasingly unstable Baffin Bay on Christmas. As it rounded Greenland and entered the North Atlantic, it pulled behind it a thousand-mile-wide gale force wind field even as it lashed the tip of Greenland with Hurricane force gusts. To its east, the storm now links with three other lows. Lows that are, even now, drawing south-to-north winds up from a region just west of Gibraltar, on past the UK, up beyond Iceland, over Svalbard, and into the Arctic Ocean itself.

image

(GFS forecasts predict a storm bombing out between 920 and 930 mb over Iceland by Wednesday. It’s a storm that could rival some of the strongest such systems ever recorded for the North Atlantic. But this storm’s influence is unique in its potential to shove an unprecedented amount of warm air into the Arctic. A warm storm for the Arctic Winter time. Image source: Earth Nullschool.)

Over the next few days these three lows are predicted to combine into a storm the likes of which the far North Atlantic rarely ever sees. This storm is expected to center over Iceland. But it will have far-reaching impacts ranging from the UK and on north to the pole itself. As the lows combine, GFS predicts them to bomb out into an unprecedentedly deep low featuring 920 to 930 mb (and possibly lower) minimum central pressures by this coming Wednesday. These pressures are comparable to the very extreme storm systems that raged through the North Atlantic during the Winter of 2013. Systems that featured minimum pressures in the range of 928 to 930 mb.

It’s worth noting that the lowest pressure ever recorded for the North Atlantic occurred in the much further southward forming Hurricane Wilma at 882 mb. In the far north, a January 11 1993 storm between Iceland and Scotland featured 913-915 mb pressures. It’s worth noting that the GFS model currently puts the predicted storm within striking distance of setting a new record for the far north. Meanwhile, ECMWF models predict a somewhat less extreme low in the range of 940 mb. By comparison, Hurricane Sandy bottomed out at around 940 mb as well.

Regardless of peak strength, the expected storm is predicted to be both very intense and wide-ranging as both model forecasts feature numerous lows linked in chain with a much deeper storm center near Iceland. Among these and further north, two more strong lows in the range of 965 to 975 mb will round out this daisy chain of what is now shaping up to be a truly extreme storm system. The Icelandic coast and near off-shore regions are expected to see heavy precipitation hurled over the island by 90 to 100 mile per hour or stronger winds raging out of 35-40 foot seas. Meanwhile, the UK will find itself in the grips of an extraordinarily strong southerly gale running over the backs of 30 foot swells.

Warm Winds to Force Above Freezing Temperatures For the North Pole

image

(By early Wednesday, temperatures at the North Pole are expected to exceed 1 degree Celsius readings. Such temperatures are in the range of more than 40 degrees Celsius (72 degrees Fahrenheit) above average. Image source: Earth Nullschool.)

All along the eastern side of this storm, powerful warm winds are expected to funnel northward. Originating along the 35 degree North Latitude line west of Spain, these winds will force a train of warm air and moisture pole-ward ahead of our storm. The winds will rush up over a very riled North Sea, they will howl into a far warmer than normal Barents, and they will roar on past Svalbard — finally turning as they pass beyond the North Pole.

These winds will bring with them extraordinarily warm temperatures for the High Arctic region during Winter time. By Wednesday, the North Pole is expected to see temperatures in the range of 1-2 degrees Celsius or 41-42 degrees C above average (73-75 degrees Fahrenheit above the normal daily temperature of -40 F for a typical Winter day). Such an extreme departure would be like seeing a 120 degree (Fahrenheit) December day in my hometown of Gaithersburg, MD. Needless to say, a 1-2 C reading at the North Pole during late December is about as odd as witnessing Hell freezing over. But, in this case, the latest wave of warmth issuing from a human-driven shift toward climatological hell appears to be on schedule to arrive at the North Pole in just a few more days.

Arctic temp anomaly +4 C

(The Arctic region as a whole is expected to experience a [frankly quite insane] temperature anomaly in the range of 4 degrees Celsius above average by January 3rd of 2016. Note the broad regions over Northern Canada, Siberia, and the Arctic Ocean that are predicted to experience temperatures in the range of 20 degrees Celsius above the already hotter than normal 1979 to 2000 baseline readings. For some areas — particularly in Northern Canada — this will mean near or even above freezing temperatures for tundra and permafrost zones in the depths of Winter. A set of conditions that has serious implications for permafrost thaw and related carbon store feedbacks. Image source: Climate Reanalyzer.)

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NASA: Worst of El Nino Still to Come. With Climate Change in the Mix, 2015-2016 Event May Equal Most Devastating On Record

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When we look at the 2015-2016 El Nino and compare it with the 1997-1998 monster we find both similarities and differences.

First the differences. The 2015-2016 El Nino is firing off in a global atmosphere that is on the order of 0.25 C hotter than 1997-1998. It’s an event that’s spring-boarding off an unprecedented hot blob of water in the Northeastern Pacific. One that some studies have linked to human-forced climate change and that has been associated with a plethora of ills ranging from failing ocean health, to the California drought, to strange and troubling warm air and water invasions entering the Arctic. It’s an event that’s occurring in the context of yet another extreme warm air invasion of the Arctic now ongoing in the North Atlantic. And, likely, it’s an event that has, overall, been torqued and twisted by the ongoing pressure of atmospheric and ocean influences associated with human-forced climate change.

Now the similarity. Though a bit more widespread, the heat content of the current El Nino is about equal to that of the monster 1997-1998 El Nino. In other words, there’s an enormous punch of heat hitting the atmosphere from this thing. As a result, you’re bound to get some extraordinarily profound weather impacts. You can see this heat evidenced in the sea surface heights map provided by NASA yesterday below:

NASA TOPEX Sea Surface Heights

(Sea Surface Heights graphic by NASA shows a very intense El Nino currently ongoing in the Equatorial Pacific. Image source: NASA.)

These extreme and very widespread sea surface heights represent a massive load of heat energy steaming off of Equatorial Pacific waters. And what this means is that more severe weather due to the El Nino influence alone is likely in store.

NASA notes that A Still-Growing El Nino is Set to Bear Down on The US:

The current strong El Niño brewing in the Pacific Ocean shows no signs of waning, as seen in the latest satellite image from the U.S./European Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason-2 mission. El Niño 2015 has already created weather chaos around the world. Over the next few months, forecasters expect the United States to feel its impacts as well. The latest Jason-2 image bears a striking resemblance to one from December 1997, by Jason-2’s predecessor, the NASA/Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) Topex/Poseidon mission, during the last large El Niño event.

El Nino May Hit New Peak Amidst Another Strong Westerly Wind Burst

NASA also hints that the current very strong El Nino may not have even reached peak yet. In evidence to NASA’s statement, this week another strong westerly wind burst (WWB) roared out across the Equatorial Pacific. The winds howled with near gale force intensity against the prevailing trades along a broad stretch of water between New Guinea and the Date Line. Such westerlies tend to increase the intensity of El Nino by generating strong down-welling Kelvin Waves that deliver yet more heat to the sea surface in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific. Heat that then pools out, radiating its energy load into the atmosphere to far-ranging weather impact.

image

(Another strong westerly wind burst runs against the trades on Tuesday, December 29th in the above Earth Nullschool/GFS graphic. Image source: Earth Nullschool.)

Long range models, though pointing toward a peak in December (which may be subject to revision given the intensity of the current WWB), also indicate a rather long lasting event. NOAA’s CFSv2 ensemble, for example, doesn’t show a transition to Nino neutral status until summer — possibly even late summer. As a result, El Nino effects will likely linger for quite a few more months at least while a second peak in intensity over the coming month would further extend and intensify El Nino-related impacts.

Severe Impacts On the Horizon

Regardless of peak intensity timing or overall duration, there’s rough weather expected in the pipe. Even though we’ve already seen instances of severe weather likely associated with El Nino such as the severe four season storm in the Central US, the Eastern US heatwave, droughts across Central America, India, the Carribean and Brazil, Australian heatwaves and a shift of the storm track toward Iceland in the North Atlantic among other impacts, many forecasters believe the worst is still to come.

As an example, Oxfam International recently warned:

“The El Niño weather system could leave tens of millions of people facing hunger, water shortages and disease next year if early action isn’t taken to prepare vulnerable people from its effects.”

But perhaps some of the most devastating impacts could come as storms finally roar into the US West Coast or even as heavy weather continues over the Central US and Northern England. The recent severe weather is expected this week to bring some of the highest Mississippi River levels on record. But if a new set of severe storms emerge, the floods could repeat or worsen — much as we’ve seen during the historic floods gripping North England this year. Floods that could continue hitting the UK through to April. For the West Coast, the heavy storms could come suddenly, unexpectedly and all at once.

NASA notes that recent strong El Ninos have delivered as much as twice the typical amount of rainfall to Southern California:

In 1982-83 and 1997-98, large El Niños delivered about twice the average amount of rainfall to Southern California, along with mudslides, floods, high winds, lightning strikes and high surf.

Although, historically, very extreme events have been capable of delivering quite a bit more. Something to consider when human-forced warming of the globe by about 1 C since the 1880s has amped up the rate of evaporation and precipitation by about 7-8 percent globally. And to this point, though NASA isn’t saying it directly at this time, it is all-too-possible that human forced climate change is adding more intensity to the El Nino related severe weather events we’ve already seen and are likely to see over the coming months. So when you hear it’s the worst flood ever or the worst drought ever or, especially, the hottest day ever, don’t just think El Nino. Think El Nino on climate change steroids.

Links:

A Still Growing El Nino to Bear Down on US

Sick of El Nino? You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.

Punishing Four Season Storm Grips US

UK Floods

Extreme Missouri Floods

Warm Arctic Storm Pushes North Pole Above Freezing

Earth Nullschool

[msfreeh]

Dr. Jeff Masters
Weather Blogs



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Historic Unseasonable Flood Begins on Mississippi River; 928 mb Low Hits Iceland

By: Jeff Masters, 5:13 PM GMT on December 30, 2015

A historic and unseasonable flood has begun on the Mississippi River and its tributaries, thanks to heavy rains that fell from Oklahoma to the Ohio Valley during Christmas week. Never before has water this high been observed in winter along the levee system of the river. The Father of Waters began over-topping its levees just north of West Alton, Missouri (population 500) on Tuesday, forcing evacuations. West Alton lies at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississi...
Flood Winter Weather

Updated: 11:07 PM GMT on December 30, 2015

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U.S. Reeling From Violent Tornadoes, Epic Flooding, Winter Weather, and Weird Heat

By: Bob Henson and Jeff Masters, 10:54 PM GMT on December 28, 2015

Wild weather continued to plaster the nation’s midsection on Monday as a multi-barreled storm system shifted eastward. Thankfully, the severe weather threat has ramped down somewhat, with the highest risks now shifting to river and flash floods--from eastern Oklahoma to the Appalachians--and snow and ice, from Nebraska to New England. More than 40 weather-related deaths have been reported since Wednesday. The storminess is related to a gradual realignment of the ...
Flood Tornado Winter Weather Heat

Updated: 11:43 PM GMT on December 28, 2015

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Punishing Four-Season Storm Grips U.S. during the Holiday Week, Killing Over 40

By: Bob Henson and Jeff Masters, 3:24 AM GMT on December 28, 2015

An incredible variety of weather hazards made their presence felt over Christmas weekend across the central U.S., from blizzard to tornado to freezing rain to flash flooding and river floods. More than 40 weather-related deaths have been reported since Wednesday. The multi-day storminess is related to a gradual realignment of the large-scale pattern over North America. A stunningly warm, moist air mass across the eastern and southern U.S.--by some measures the most ...
Extreme Weather Blizzard Flood Torn Tornado Winter Weather

Updated: 7:39 AM GMT on December 28, 2015

View Full Blog Entry — View Comments (232)
Tornadoes Rake Mississippi Delta; More Storminess Ahead

By: Bob Henson and Jeff Mast ers, 5:31 PM GMT on December 24, 2015

One of the longest-tracked tornadoes ever observed in December carved its way from northwest Mississippi into southwest Tennessee on Wednesday. The twister, likely to be rated at least an EF3 after damage surveys on Thursday, was part of an unusually far-flung year-end outbreak of severe storms that extended from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes. Although several tornadoes were reported as far afield western Illinois and central Indiana--and even Michigan experienc...