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Florence has 100 TJ of kinetic energy now.

Yes. All 3 operational cyclone models do this. You'll find the coupled SST products at the following links. HWRF: http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/gc_wmb/vxt/HWRF/ HMON: http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/gc_wmb/vxt/HMON/ COAMPS: https://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/coamps-web/web/tc

Probably splitting hairs, but that looks like a 35" contour on Wilmington.

This kind of goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway. Because the steering flow breaks down and Florence stalls/turns so close to the shore the consequences are magnified a lot. Sure, it injects an element of chance in determining landfall, but it also effects intensity at landfall, precipitation, etc. It would likely weaken under the stall scenario, but it'd also be over water longer so it would likely retain strong tropical characteristics longer as well. There's a lot of give and take with that scenario.

Yep. COAMPS does the same thing. It just makes the turn south further north after stalling longer. Either way the message is loud and clear. The steering flow is going to breakdown as Florence approaches the coast. Various models have been showing it off and on in a variety of different forms.

I guess the NHC could nudge the track south a bit. TVCN is still going to be to the right of the 0Z ECMWF track due to the north turn depicted by the UKMET and COAMPS. I'm not sure if the 18Z model guidance includes the 12Z Euro or not. Anyone know?

I have to be honest. I'm relieved that the GFS is falling more inline with the FV3/ECMWF. I mean given the option of the GFS or FV3 being more right I'd much rather it be the later since that's what NOAA is hanging their hat on for the next generation model.

The green tracks (TABS, TABM, TABD) are the beta-advection models. They use the mean flow of the GFS winds over different layers with a correction made for the beta drift. The different variations loop in different ways depending on how deep of steering flow you want to consider. S is for shallow, M is medium, and D is for deep. They loop largely because the GFS shows a breakdown of the steering flow. It's my understanding that a skilled forecaster can make some interesting inferences about the cyclone environment based on the TABx tracks. As a general rule you'll probably want to ignore them and instead focus on TVCN (or maybe TVCX). It is the consensus of the best track models which as of 2018 are an equal weighting of GFS, ECMWF, UKMET, HWRF, and COAMPS.

I agree. This is not atypical of global models. They often play catch up in regards to rainfall amounts when a tropical system phases with a slow moving front. There's probably going to be a stripe of 4-6" with locally higher amounts somewhere in the midwest when it's all said and done. We just don't know exactly where yet.

The Euro QPF map looks similar to what COAMPS has been showing.

Exactly. One thing people forget is that being wrong is a double edge sword. It's just as likely that the scientific consensus is underestimating the climate sensitivity as it is that they are overestimating it. Actually, based on the box-and-whisker plots of the climate sensitivity I've seen you can make an argument that our uncertainty on the low side is already constrained, but our uncertainty on the high side is still very large. And for this reason there is concern among scientists that the mean sensitivity is is more likely to underestimating the amount of warming that it is to overestimate it.

There's good reason to think RCP2.6 is a pipe dream. But, I agree that RCP8.5 isn't a likely trajectory either. I'll have to look to and see what the temperature dieoff is after the equilibrium climate response has run it's course, but I thought I remember the rate of decline in temperatures being way lower in magnitude than the rate of increase owing to the longevity of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere. So while I concede we might not be warmer 300 years from now vs 60 years from now we might not be that much cooler either. And it seems plausible that the more time we spend above certain temperature milestones the more likely we are to activate certain tipping points. I guess the question is will RCP4.5 or RCP6.0 activate hothouse tipping points?

The difference in position on the Euro from 0Z @ 60 vs 12Z @ 48 is 260 km. That's a pretty big shift.

Don't hold your breath waiting for a period of cooling due to a solar grand minimum. The difference between the Maunder Minimum and the Modern Maximum is about 1.0 W/m^2. Compare that with the radiative forcing of CO2 doubling which can be estimated as 5.35 * ln(560/280) = 3.7 W/m^2. A hypothetical grand minimum will certainly mitigate the warming, but it won't stop it. Also, look closely at your graph. The modern maximum was in a peaking process between 1960 and 1990 with the time integration of total solar irradiance beginning to wane by 1980 and definitely by 1990. And since 1990 the entire biosphere (land, air, ocean, etc.) has accumulated about 20*10^22 joules of heat with most of that uptake being stored in the ocean. And the global mean surface temperature has increased by about +0.6C. And that's just the transient response. We still have to wait a decade or two to see what the equilibrium response is to the current 410 ppm of CO2. Furthermore, the LIA cannot be explained by solar output alone. Increased volcanic activity and, to a lesser extent, land use changes by humans also likely contributed. So no, the evidence does not suggest that we should intentionally release more CO2 into the air as a means for staving off a bout of cooling caused by a hypothetical solar grand minimum. But, to get back to the point of this thread one could ask if a hypothetical solar grand minimum would change the conclusion of the paper cited in the OP. Probably not. At least not drastically. Research shows that a hypothetical solar grand minimum would certainly change the timing of the milestones of the warming, but it won't actually prevent them from happening. It should also be pointed out that solar grand cycles have periods on the order of few decades to a couple of hundred years. Yet, CO2 residence times in the atmosphere are on the order of 100-1000 years. And while the equilibrium response to specific GHGs concentrations occurs pretty quickly (a decade or two) the falloff in temperature is much slower. I just don't think a grand minimum would have a significant impact on hothouse tipping points from a macroscopic viewpoint anyway. But, I could be wrong. The devil is often in the details.

All Hansen was attributed to saying in that AP article is "The Arctic is the first tipping point and it's occurring exactly the way we said it would." The author took the liberty to interpret that single statement as him echoing his peers with a prediction that the Arctic would be ice free in 5 to 10 years. Those were the AP article author's words; not Hansen's. And none of Hansen's publications (which are numerous) claim a quick melt out. I do acknowledge that there are peer reviewed publications that contain aggressive predictions of Arctic sea ice loss, but when weighed against the abundance of research on the subject these aggressive predictions do not represent the consensus. Your point about Mann is fair. Just because Mann's work is corroborated by his peers doesn't necessarily make it right. But, there's no reason to think that he "manipulated" the data or that he "erased" the MWP or LIA or that anything he did was unethical. You can read his original work and can see for yourself that his data does show a slight signal for the MWP and LIA or at the very least they can easily fit into the margin of error which brackets his best guess. Furthermore, his later publications have refined data that increase the signal for the MWP and LIA a bit more. Did Mann underestimate the MWP with the original MBH1999 work? Probably. But was it an egregious error or academic dishonesty? Not even close. Here are various reconstructions for you to consider. Also, I don't deny that there were periods of warm and cool anomalies in the past. I don't have a choice but to acknowledge this because I accept the abundance of evidence that is available. I also do not take Mann's work as absolute truth. Instead I focus on a consensus derived from the evidence. And the evidence tells me, despite my personal misgivings of Mann and his style, that I have to accept that his work falls in line with everyone else or at the very least there are no obvious or egregious deficiencies with it. But it's mostly moot anyway. In the context of AGW we need an explanation for the cause of the warming today. And just because the physical processes that modulated climate change in the past were mostly natural does not preclude an anthroprogenic component from also modulating climate change. I'm not saying we can't learn something from the past, but we also can't assume that the past is exactly like the present either. Afterall, there's a new variable in play now!

The images of newspaper articles come from realclimatescience.com (not to be confused with realclimate.org). It is ran by Tony Heller who used to post on Anthony Watts' blog as Steven Goddard until even Watts got fed up with him. Heller thinks all of the data available is fake and that climate science is all one big hoax. Heller frequently indicts scientists of fraud. He also pushes the Ideal Gas Law myth which I'm guessing is where you got the link to the Holmes paper. It also did not escape my notice that Holmes uses Lansner's work (ya know...the questionable ocean-land boundary argument used to diminish the amount of warming that has occurred) so there's a nice circular reference going on here. Also, Hansen never claimed that the Arctic would be ice free by now despite the piece of fake news Tony Heller dug up. And Al Gore is not a credible source nor an expert or even a scientists so I pretty much ignore any of his predictions. And, no, the scientific consensus did not predict that the Arctic would be ice by now either. Nor did Mann manipulate anything. You can read his papers regarding the topic here and here. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of Mann either mostly because of his bravado on the topic but the fact is that there have been dozens of reconstructions of the pre-industrial temperature using various proxies and they overwhelmingly corroborate Mann's original work from 1998 and beyond. I thought about mentioning these points earlier but figured it would be a waste of time. It's probably still a waste of time, but what's done is done.

There's enough fossil fuels to bring atmospheric concentrations to at least 1000 ppm and that's not counting an activation of a possible tipping point that could flip natural CO2 fluxes from negative to positive. So today we are at 410 ppm and our transient response to the 5.35 * ln(410/280) = 2.0 W/m2 of forcing is at least +1.0C (being conservative here). We still have a decade or two before the equilibrium response completes so I think +1.0C mapped to 2.0 W/m2 of forcing is a pretty conservative estimate. Then if we top 1000 ppm that would yield an additional 5.35 * ln(1000/410) = 4.75 W/m2 of forcing. Assuming our response-to-forcing ratio remains constant (probably not likely) that would yield another +2.5C for a total of +3.5C of warming. And that's just the transient response. Using a TCR-to-ECR ratio of 0.7 (trying to be reasonable here) yields an equilibrium response of 5.0C. So yeah, 7C of warming is in the realm of possibility if you consider that 1) I ignored a potential flip of the natural CO2 flux from negative to positive which would result in even high CO2 concentrations 2) I assumed there is only enough fossil fuel to raise concentrations to 1000 ppm and 3) I was trying not to be too aggressive with my assumptions on climate sensitivity. Note, that my numbers here work out to a total ECR of about 2.6C for a doubling of CO2 which puts me pretty close to the middle of the consensus estimate.

Tony Heller (or is it Steven Goddard) isn't a credible source. I don't mind discussing the science of climate change. It is a legitimate field of study afterall. But, I'd rather not waste my time discussing and debunking propaganda from a lone non-expert blogger who has a history of misunderstanding physical principles, misrepresenting research, fabricating strawman arguments, and dispensing fake news.

[Davies 2018] depends on [Davies 2017]. The later makes the claim that because the computed R^2 correlation of CO2 and T is low for the period 450-34 MYA then that necessarily falsifies the hypothesis that CO2 can modulate temperature. Davies then goes on to say that the R^2 could be low due to there being a low resolution in the data for that period. He concedes that the R^2 is strong for 34-0 MYA which is a period with a much higher temporal resolution of the data. And, of course, the ice core data from 1 million years ago to present shows an undeniable and extremely strong correlation. So Davies is already starting off with a weak argument. The rest of the paper isn't very convincing either IMHO. Namely, his ideas can't explain things like the faint young Sun problem. He also makes really weird warming claims such as that it has only warmed 0.8C since 1850 and that it hasn't warmed any at all from 1998. He also erroneously claims that the "warming hiatus" is proof that CO2 cannot be the cause of the warming. Yet, he doesn't realize that the "warming hiatus" is marked by a strong El Nino at the beginning and a strong La Nina at the end nevermind that the ocean heat content jumped up 5*10^22 joules during this period. And all of that is ignoring the fact that it actually has warmed quite a bit since 1998 anyway. So yeah, if you use the most egregious cherry-picking possible you can claim that global warming paused from 1998 to 2012. But that's only for the atmosphere. The rest of the biosphere (ocean, land, ice, latent heat of fusion), which accounts for more than 90% of the heat uptake pretty much marched straight up. [Holmes 2018] incorrectly applies the Ideal Gas Law. I see this myth from time to time. The gist is that PV=nRT dictates the T of a planet with the reasoning that the T is high/low because the P is high/low. Skeptics then erroneously point out the differences between the P and T of Venus and Earth as proof that the T is modulated only by the P. However, the big problem with this argument is that the Ideal Gas Law is a state equation and nothing more. It is diagnostic; not prognostic. You can use it derive the value of one variable if you know the others, but you can't use it to explain how a system evolved in the first place. Think about it. It is just as valid for me to claim that the P is high/low because the T is high/low. And, in fact, that better explains the situation for both Venus and Earth in my opinion. Specifically thermal radiation performed work on the atmospheres to increase T in a partially isochoric manner which caused P and perhaps V as well to respond accordingly in a T leads to PV scenario. Holmes and others who use the Ideal Gas Law are assuming (perhaps unknowingly) that the opposite case of P leads to T scenario requires a polytrophic process to reduce the V thus raising both P and T. This could happen via mechanical compression. And the only candidate force that can do this is gravity. So if the argument is that T increased because P increased then that means the planet must have undergone a process by which its gravity increased. The problem...there's no physical process by which planets spontaneously (without external influence) increase their gravity. However, there is a physical process by which planets can spontaneously (without external influence) increase their IR absorption. That is via the radiation trapping behavior due to an accumulation of GHGs. [Gray 2018] isn't actually written by Gray nevermind the fact that it isn't peer reviewed. It's also just a rehash of skeptic talking points that have already been presented. None of these citations have much if anything to do with the topic of this thread though.

Then it should be easy to find a natural process or set of natural processes that when summed together explain most of the warming since 1960. So which process(es) can explain the ~1.0C rise in the global mean surface temperature and the rise of 20*10^22 joules of oceanic heat content? What natural physical process explains the warming of the troposphere while the stratosphere cools? And where is all of that energy that is getting captured via greenhouse gas effect going if it's not going into heating the biosphere? Thanks for the link. Unfortunately it's behind a paywall and I can only read the abstract. The first thing to keep in mind is that this is just one publication and it must be considered in the context of all others. Second, without actually reading the paper my hunch (again based only on the abstract) is that there's going to be an argument that the homogenization step used by conventional datasets like NASA GISS, NOAA GlobalTemp, and the like may be more susceptible to topographical elements than the maintainers of those datasets aren't considering. I want to make a few points here. First, we really need to get a rebuttal from the maintainers of these datasets before we blindingly toss out the hundreds of peer reviewed publications confirming the validity of these datasets based a single publication. Second, the paper seems to be focused on land-ocean boundaries which represents a small percentage of the entire surface area of Earth. Third, there are actually multiple different lines of evidence that corroborate the fact that the Earth has warmed significantly in the modern era. We have satellite based datasets (like RSS and UAH). We have reanalysis (like CFSR, ERA, MERRA, NCAR, JRA, and countless others). And, of course, we have checks on the conventional datasets from independent groups like Berkeley Earth which was originally founded and funded by skeptics specifically to question the consensus. These datasets are from multiple groups using wildly different techniques and subsets of available and they all come to the conclusion that the Earth is warming and the magnitude of the warming is remarkably similar regardless of which dataset you look at. That is a testament to the confidence in this conclusion. The probability that a single publication (which was just published and has yet to get expert commentary from a sufficient depth of the scientific community) would upend this consensus is next to nothing. In other words, don't hold your breath hoping that a big paradigm shift is in the making from this one publication because it's not going to happen. Anyway, thanks for the link. Often times you can find a free copy if you google hard enough. Luck isn't on my side this go around, but I'll poke around some more. I'm always open to reading any peer reviewed literature even if it does buck the consensus. And in regard to the urban heat island effect keep in mind that this has been known about for a very long time. I can probably dig up some really old papers by James Hansen documenting how he dealt with the problem as far back as the 1980's. But all datasets which might have a disproportionate weighting toward urban stations has there own method for dealing with the issue. My point is that this is not a new problem and scientists have definitely embraced it and accounted for it using various different techniques.

CO2 does, in fact, get its vibrational modes activated by outgoing longwave photons. 150 years of laboratory experiments, infrared spectroscopy, and quantum electrodynamic theory confirm this. Furthermore, the warming of the troposphere while the stratosphere cools is the smoking gun signal for IR radiation capture and the greenhouse gas effect. There is no other process that can explain this vertical temperature profile observation aside from having more multiatomic molecules (like H20, CH4, CO2, etc) entering the atmosphere and increasing the cross section area of this IR radiation capture. And the predicted magnitude of this persistent radiative forcing is a reasonable match to what is observed. I'm not saying there aren't skeptical lines of evidence out there. They do indeed exist. But, when weighed against the abundance of supporting lines of evidence these skeptical lines of evidence are just a flash in the pan. The existence of an alarmist opinion piece in no way refutes any of this. And besides, is the opinion piece "alarmist" because it sounds scary or because it's wrong? I agree that it sounds scary and is presented with a hint of a blustering tone. It's also based on just one academic publication with expert commentary provided by someone with a history of bravado. That's the media for you. But, that by itself doesn't make the original research wrong. What would make it wrong is an abundance of evidence that says it's wrong using arguments based on physical law instead of arguments that appeal to emotional sensibilities. But either way it certainly doesn't invalidate the fact that GHGs are warming the planet. So regardless of whether hothouse tipping points really are activated at 2C, which I happen to be skeptical of myself, all of that CO2 we're pumping into the atmosphere will continue to provide a persistent positive radiative forcing that will encourage future warming.

The scientific consensus doesn't claim that CO2 is the only game in town nor does it knowingly exclude any forcing mechanism. It just claims that of all radiative forcing mechanisms (both natural and anthroprogenic) CO2 happens to be a significant contributor. And in an attempt to steer the conservation back toward the topic of the thread the paper is actually focused more on what happens if the global mean surface temperature rises by 2C rather than the exact pathway of how it got there in the first place. Would a hypothetical 2C rise in the global mean surface temperature activate hothouse tipping points or not? Is there an abundance of evidence to support that hypothesis or not? The authors believe there might be. That's the focus of the paper.

Sahara Air Layer Also, I hadn't heard the phrase "atmosphere depletion" either, but enhanced ocean heat uptake at the expense of less atmospheric heat uptake is the way I understood Vice-Regent's definition. Obviously the harder your compress the spring the more it fights back. In other words, the atmosphere will eventually respond to the ocean heat uptake. It always does.

Using Gough's (1981) solar luminosity formula L(t) = L(t0) / (1 + 0.4 * (1 - t/t0)) we can estimate that solar radiation was still L = 1 / (1 + 0.4 * (1 - 4.55/4.60)) = 99.5% of today's value. This yields a radiative forcing reduction of (1360 / 4) * 0.995 = -1.7 W/m2 relative to today. Using Arrhenius' (1896) original radiative forcing formula ΔF = λ * ln(C/C0) and using 5.35 W/m2 as a more conservative estimate of CO2 sensitivity parameter (the IPCC used 6.3 at one time) we can see that 1000 ppm would produce an effect of ΔF = 5.35 * ln(1000/400) = +4.9 W/m2 relative to today. So yeah, the net CO2 and solar radiative forcing 50 MYA relative to today would be around +3.2 W/m2 whereas just the CO2 forcing today at 1000 ppm would +4.9 W/m2 or about 1.5x times higher. It's obviously just a rough estimate I calculated and it doesn't factor in other climate forcing elements. The point...1000 ppm might be expected to have a bigger effect today all other things being equal because the sun is also brighter. Just food for thought...

Here is the radar screenshot of the Redding, CA firenado.