Wind generation in Texas is soaring as a winter storm whips the state, adding an unexpected surge of electric supply as the bitter cold drives up demand on the state’s power grid. Wind farms were producing about 17.5 gigawatts at 9:55 a.m. local time, 85% higher than the day-ahead forecast, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or Ercot as the grid operator is known. Wind is accounting for about 30% of the grid’s electricity supply. A gigawatt is enough to power about 200,000 Texas homes.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wind-gives-unexpected-boost-texas-165429559.html

Its not the heat, its the humidity.

Here we show that surface equivalent potential temperature, which combines the surface air temperature and humidity, is a more comprehensive metric not only for the global warming but also for its impact on climate and weather extremes including tropical deep convection and extreme heat waves. We recommend that it should be used more widely in future climate change studies.

https://www.pnas.org/content/119/6/e2117832119

12 hours ago, bdgwx said:

All of the data is; at least all of the data I track. The 13 month moving average of the composite is now close to the trendline of +0.187 C/decade as we close out 2021.

 

Not good when back-to-back moderate ninas barely get you to the trendline, after 40+ years of warming.

4 hours ago, Vice-Regent said:

There are many notable feedbacks coming online mainly associated with snowcover and sea ice. Namely the Hadley Cell circulation is not allowing the ocean surface to cool off.

People say ocean SSTa is going bonkers due to rising forcing but it's actually two-fold.

This is not a popular outlook because people want to believe that this horse can still be reigned in. The AGW menace is free to torment humanity for god knows how long no matter what we do.

You are covering a lot of bases. Not aware of any new feedbacks. Snow/ice feedback is well understood. You may be confusing impacts, tipping points and feedbacks. Can you provide references? 

As far as the future. Warming is directly related to CO2 emissions. The more we emit the more we warm. Irreversible for tens of thousands of year, unless we remove CO2 from the atmosphere, which won't be cheap or easy. So yes we will be dealing with AGW for a long time, but the amount of warming is up to us. We are far from helpless, shortsighted yes, helpless no.

2 hours ago, Vice-Regent said:

For sure bro. I am somewhat taken back by how many other positive feedbacks are coming online.

The feedbacks impacting temperature aren't changing significantly.  Higher global temperature or ocean heat content generally means higher forcing from greenhouse gases.

8 hours ago, bdgwx said:

Cheng et al. 2022 - Another Record: Ocean Warming Continues through 2021 despite La Niña Conditions

Official: here

Free: here 

The nina is holding surface temps down, but the overall warming trend is strong.

Long but good video, providing background on:  Moreover, they underline the need for incorporating these feedback processes, which are currently not accounted for in most ice sheet models, to improve sea level rise projections.  Tl:DR - IPCC is probably a best case scenario

11 hours ago, stadiumwave said:

 

Doesn't look great to me. Very unscientific analysis - the trend since 2004 is much more uncertain than the trend since 1979; and doesn't look negligble either. Note that volume anomaly is higher in winter.

On 12/24/2021 at 12:01 PM, LibertyBell said:

yup there were some blockbuster winters in State College in the early-mid 90s (mid 90s for us too).

So has the average storm track been moving north and west or south and east?

Also we must remember the 70s and 80s were a huge aberration in low snowfall totals in (for example) NYC.

 

 

I haven't seen any studies on local storm tracks. But have seen enough Monmouth County jackpots to know that warming alone doesn't explain our local patterns.

1 hour ago, LibertyBell said:

storm track shifts causing less suppressed and offshore storms increasing snowfall totals in NE cities?

so storms that would give DC and Balt snowfall and then head out to sea are coming farther north and staying closer to the coast (because of warmer SST)

More the difference between State College and phl/nyc/bos, I95 vs interior.

7 hours ago, IowaStorm05 said:

I have asked about the mid term future of our climate, specifically to do with snowfall during the winter at a few locations I’ve lived in.

Reno, NV and coastal Southern New England are two such areas that receive around 20-40 inches of snow per year on average.

i have suggested that places like this, which tend to have erratic amounts of winter snowfall seasonal totals from one year to the next, might soon start to occasionally go through an entire winter season without, say, receiving one inch of snow the entire season.

in 2019-2020 winter season I read online in some sources that revealed parts of the mid Atlantic failed to receive an inch of snow that winter, but those locations were in cities that average quite a bit less snowfall than New England’s south coast or even Reno. 
 

it’s a thought. Meanwhile I found this screenshot with the source in the browser bar I thought I could post 

 

So far Coastal New England looks like it has actually seen subtly more snow in recent years but Reno has seen less. These can possibly change direction in future years of course.

Again my focus is for locations in the United States which do receive snowfall every winter, and historically have always been guaranteed to receive at least some amount of snow each winter but have an overall average snowfall of less than 40 inches per year. 
 

other than the screenshot I provided here is a group of people who did some study on the subject: https://www.climatecentral.org/news/report-the-case-of-the-shifting-snow

 

Interesting. Below are snow trends since 1940 for some eastern cities that I have been tracking. My tabulation agrees with the chart above. I95 cities from Philly to Boston are doing well. Other northeast is mixed. Cities south of philly are down.  My take - warming is reducing the opportunity for snow, but increasing moisture and/or storm track shifts are offsetting in some areas.

12 hours ago, etudiant said:

Thought that tree rings measure warm season moisture, rather than temperature.

Separately, I have to question this graph, if only because the Briffa tree ring data showed a decline since the mid 1900s, which is not reflected here. 

Believe he is taking a temperature reconstruction, which comes from tree rings and a number of other sources, and putting it in tree ring format. Below is the latest - going back 24,000 years. Note chart below is global, while chart above is northern Hemi.

On 11/19/2021 at 1:51 AM, raindancewx said:

Cure is worse than the disease for the near future. That's why the opposition remains.

https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2021/10/fossil-fuel-shortages-shrink-world-gdp.html#.YZdFk-jMLrc

After COVID-19 disrupted the regional economy of Southeast Asia in July and August 2021, we're seeing a new factor behind recessionary forces affecting the Earth's GDP: fossil fuel shortages.

China has been coping with shortages of both coal and oil since August 2021, with now widespread power outages disrupting its economic output from September 2021 into October 2021. Since the country is the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide by a very wide margin, the impact of its forced blackouts are already showing up in the measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration at the remote Mauna Loa Observatory in the Pacific Ocean.

Using the default value of a -0.18 parts per million to account for the change in the rate of growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide since June 2021, we find the equivalent net loss to global GDP attributable to the spread of COVID in southeast Asia and to China's fossil fuel shortage is $6.0 trillion. Going back to the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the reduction of 0.65 part per million in the rate at which carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth's air corresponds to a net loss to global GDP of $21.6 trillion.

Realistically, what's the point of changing how food and energy and products are delivered if we destroy ourselves in the process by over reacting?

If you look at actual history, and adjust for inflation, the costs incurred by old exploration companies like the Dutch East India Company in the 1600s were about the same as the costs to go on a Virgin Galactic flight to Space in the modern world. By the late exploration period, say 1750-1850, the costs were low enough for poor people to travel across the oceans at about the cost of a flight from LA to NYC, depending on the exact route. Personally think it's simpler, cheaper, and less delusional to subsidize space travel and colonization than to do what climate scientists advocate at a societal level. I'm sure initially the abandonment of Europe by the colonists was pretty difficult emotionally, but they got over it. Same thing would hold with space. I fully expect to be able to afford space tourism or travel at least by the end of my life in the absence of government interference with that market (30-50 years from now). 

This is a good argument to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels. The fossil fuels of the past 100 years are not the same as the ones that are left. The giant oil/gas fields we have been using are increasingly depleted. We have an "energy" crisis because fossil fuels deplete making the supply unreliable without ongoing investment. The oil industry cut investment as prices plunged in early 2020 and now we are short on supply, even though global oil demand still lags the pre-covid peak. Its the classic boom/bust oil and gas cycle. Fracking makes it worse, because capital costs are large, economics marginal, and fracked wells deplete rapidly.  A tired, worn-out horse to harness your future to.

16 minutes ago, bluewave said:

Same story….

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-22/n-j-amps-up-wind-fight-overriding-beach-towns-balking-at-farms

Offshore wind farm developers are finding one more thing in common with the fossil fuel industry: community backlash on both sides of the Atlantic.

Much like the resistance to fracking in parts of the U.S. and the U.K., oceanfront towns have fought against power lines running ashore from wind farms, even as the massive turbines themselves are mostly out of sight. 
 

https://pressofatlanticcity.com/news/local/ocean-city-mayor-wind-turbines-should-not-be-seen-from-beach/article_8e634b9c-35d5-11ec-be77-1fb09d4a7bec.html

OCEAN CITY — Mayor Jay Gillian has called on regulators to ensure wind turbines could not be seen from the beach, a change that would require a major realignment for a billion-dollar offshore energy project.

Got a kick out of this one. One solution is to let the ocean continue to rise, allowing the Ocean City beach to recede far enough so the wind farms can't be seen.

On 2/19/2021 at 2:16 PM, blizzard1024 said:

Its getting even colder vs the 1979-2000 normal. The Arctic for the first time in many many years is at +0.0C in the winter months. There is a warm blob over the Arctic Ocean but this is unknown territory given it is model data and model climo.  Given the Arctic is normal the assertion that Arctic warming is leading to record cold in Europe/Asia and north America is false. These ideas already have been floated around. They are not true. Look at the data...

 

 

 

This site has the reanalysis data with a daily temperature of minus .172C the coldest I have seen in many many years. 

 

 

Of course we all know this is very short term climate and not reflective of long term trends. It does illustrate how much ENSO does affect the global temperature. The mean period for the graph I believe is 1994-2013 and the reanalyzer data is 1979-2000. So relatively to late 20th century and into early 21st century, significant cooling has taken place in a matter of months. Should this La Nina persist, it would be interesting to see if we get back to a negative departure vs 1981-2010 normal or even the 1979-2000 period below. 

 

Where's Blizz? Torchy recently considering the enso state.  We should get some nina-related cooling this winter. Guessing we will be even warmer next fall, if the nina relaxes. We'll see.

This new paper is about the tropics, but the physics are relevant to this summer heat wave in the NW. Dry areas are going to experience more amplification of extreme heat under climate change:

"According to the theory, warming is amplified for hot land days because those days are dry, which is termed the ‘drier get hotter’ mechanism."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00828-8

5 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

is this volcano in the Canary Is going to have any affect on the climate?

 

Haven't heard that it will. Appears that eruptions haven't been energetic enough to inject large amounts of material into the stratosphere.

Some evidence for an increase in the rate of global warming in the past 20 years. Chart below accounts for ENSO and volcanoes, the main sources of natural variability. The trend differences are only statistically significant in some datasets, so need to run more clock before getting too excited.

https://tamino.wordpress.com/2021/10/18/an-honest-appraisal-of-the-global-temperature-trend-part-2/

This study measured the earthshine reflecting off the moon. The falling trend agrees with satellite observations and climate model projections that clouds are dimming as the earth warms.

https://phys.org/news/2021-09-earth-dimming-due-climate.html

Caption for Figure below

Earthshine annual mean albedo 1998–2017 expressed as watts per square meter (W/m2). The CERES annual albedo 2001–2019, also expressed in W/m2, are shown in blue. A best fit line to the CERES data (2001–2019) is shown with a blue dashed line. Average error bars for CERES measurements are of the order of 0.2 W/m2. Credit: Goode et al. (2021),

From Sydney Morning Herald, Ruport Murdoch is switching away from climate denial in Australia. No word on his US media properties yet, i.e. Wall Street Journal and Fox News.

The owner of some of the nation’s most-read newspapers, including the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Australian and 24-hour news channel Sky News Australia will from mid-October begin a company-wide campaign promoting the benefits of a carbon-neutral economy as world leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in Glasgow later this year.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/rupert-murdoch-newspapers-24-hour-news-channel-to-champion-net-zero-emissions-20210905-p58oyx.html

5 hours ago, Bhs1975 said:

Is there a chart like that for the SE?


.

I haven't seen one

4 hours ago, raindancewx said:

I'm absolutely convinced that those of you in the Northeast are only capable of posting in this thread when unusual things happen in the wide wide world of not-New Jersey. At the end of the day 3 inches of rain in an hour is way more impressive than the west beating old highs by a small amount for five minutes a day whether you want to admit it or not.

Yes the rains this week were impressive, humidity/moisture could be a better local indicator of summer climate change than temperature

Analysis of SST of gulf waters that IDA passed over. Below are the odds of being above the given SST by decade.

https://tamino.wordpress.com/2021/09/02/hurricane-ida-climate-change-makes-a-monster-storm/#more-11625

3 minutes ago, jrips27 said:

 

The station trace