chubbs

GISS at record levels for April edging 2016. Keeps a record possible this year; depends on ENSO and spring/summer fall off.

Stations observing a record mean temperature for the month of March. Consistent with warm GOM. Severe/tropical dice have an extra snake eye.

This year staying within striking distance of 2016

Here is UAH6 - RSS. Almost a decade of cooling in UAH6 relative to RSS after the MSU to AMSU transition in 1998. Recently introduction of satellites with limited diurnal drift has reduced the trend differences between RSS+UAH (see link above).

Will need to see more evidence re; smoke/volcano. Spencer is missing the two obvious factors for UAH warmth: GHG and improved satellites with no diurnal drift. Evidence for the last point is the UAH trace - the period after the 2016 nino is much warmer relative to the super nino peak than the period after the 1998 nino. What happened in 1998? the MSU to AMSU transition. Scientists still don't know which satellite was right NOAA-14 or NOAA-15. UAH picked the colder satellite, of course, which looks like the wrong choice when compared against other series. Meanwhile per the article below, recent satellites have essentially no diurnal drift, with very stable performance for climate detection. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/10/eaau0049.full

Unfortunately, we have been running above the trend-line used for the prediction the past 4 or 5 years.

Winter temps From Karsten Haustein's twitter.

Decent shot at a record this year https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/202001/supplemental/page-2

This years decadal forecast from UK MetOffice. " The forecast remains towards the mid to upper end of the range simulated by CMIP5 models that have not been initialised with observations (green shading in Figure 3). " https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/seasonal-to-decadal/long-range/decadal-fc/index

You are right. The earth's climate varies. When CO2 is high - hothouse; when CO2 is low - ice age. The change we are causing now is no big deal to the planet as a whole. It will shrug it off and keep on ticking. It may be problematic to us and other species though due to the speed at which it is occurring. When we came out of the last ice age the earth warmed at a rate of roughly 1C per 1000 years, currently we are warming at 1C per 50 years. During the last ice age - 2 million hunter gatherers were able to adapt - they could move as ecosystems changed. Different situation today.

Watch the video, Australia is a big country. Fires in unpopulated dryland is not the same as fire in forested SE with more towns, people.

Haven't seen the commercial. Natural gas is better than coal, but need to get to zero emissions eventually to halt warming. Most of the improvement in long-term outlook is due to the big cost drops this decade for solar, wind and batteries. For me highest priority is introducing some kind of carbon pricing, which would improve economics of nuclear and all other improvement options.

The article below provides a good summary of how recent energy trends are impacting IPCC emission scenarios. While I am even more pessimistic about the science of climate than I was a decade ago, I have become much more optimistic about non-fossil energy technology and natural gas vs coal. Limited policy and luck has improved the "worst-case" considerably vs CMIP5 IPCC scenarios. Unfortunately though, we haven't made any progress on the "best" case due to inaction/denial. Recent experience shows that improved climate policy and support for renewable energy technology could have enormous long-term pay-back. https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/3c-world

PV = photovoltaic i.e. solar

Here is solar in previous IEA outlooks - 2035 in the base case is undoubtedly conservative.

Saw this on twitter from the International Energy Agency's recently issued 2019 World Energy Outlook. Base case on left, sustainable development, broadly consistent with Paris targets, on right. Solar forecast to be #1 in global power generation by 2035 in base case. That date is moved forward to 2028 for "sustainable development". This isn't rocket science.

A strong enough carbon tax would quickly put us on a much better trajectory, been a no-brainer for decades. Much better to tax carbon than income.

Think this will go down to the wire. The Pac-side pack has been deteriorating in a favorable pattern.

Looking more and more like a 2 horse race

From Amy Butler's twitter. Unusual coupling of the stratosphere and troposphere this summer. Models at times too eager to end pattern.

4 days later forecasts are variable but most keep it going for quite some time - probably helping by preventing a classic dipole

Recent summer warming in the Yukon exceeds the Holocene climatic maximum despite reduced summer insolation vs early Holocene. https://t.co/gCPWogUB5N

IPO phase could bring September ice-free date forward. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018GL081393

Antarctic sea ice has large natural variability. Here are a couple of speculations: 1) I don't recall the details but one paper flagged the the large nino in 2015/16. For sea ice the timing does line-up, 2) The antarctic ozone hole is slowly recovering this would tend to weaken winds and produce warming, both of which will reduce sea ice extent 3) Antarctica warming lags because of the deep ocean nearby which is slow to warm. as time proceeds though Antarctica will catch-up. Per the chart below, the south pole has also warmed in the past decade in a way that doesn't match enso, so it is likely more than just enso.

Rapidly receding Arctic Canada glaciers revealing landscapes continuously ice-covered for more than 40,000 years Here we show that pre-Holocene radiocarbon dates on plants collected at the margins of 30 ice caps in Arctic Canada suggest those locations were continuously ice covered for > 40 kyr, but are now ice-free. We use in situ 14C inventories in rocks from nine locations to explore the possibility of brief exposure during the warm early Holocene. Modeling the evolution of in situ 14C confirms that Holocene exposure is unlikely at all but one of the sites. Viewed in the context of temperature records from Greenland ice cores, our results suggest that summer warmth of the past century exceeds now any century in ~115,000 years. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08307-w