etudiant

Is there a drought issue, given a warmer than usual climate with a sub par snowpack?

Thank you, Isotherm, for bringing us all back to the facts! This is the kind of reality check that is often missing in these discussions.

Presume this is the IBM sponsored weather service. I'll certainly give it a try, there is surely a need for a detailed short term weather service.

Not a stance that I agree with. Pension money is inherently long term oriented, they are seriously interested in this issue. I think that a frank discussion in front of a bunch of no BS money managers would be enlightening and I'm sorry the field was left to the skeptics.

Honestly, at well over 10,000 feet, it does get colder, even in Hawaii. It does switch to extensive fog during the summer.

Nothing at all wrong with KIlbeggan Irish Oats, they are actually delicious. While they are not instant, they are organic. Can be had as Irish Oatmeal Cookies if instant convenience is essential. Guiness or Harp both go well with them.

Absolutely correct on the human impact, 74/75 was modest, the worst was in 2009, when 171 people died in Victoria.

A quick look at the record indicates that the 1974-75 fire season in Australia was by far the worst in terms of acreage, with over 100 million acres burned. No other year comes close. The burn to date for this season is about 15 million acres, still a huge area, but again not in the same league.

It is a serious issue that the researchers recognize by widening the error bars on the older data. There are so many changes to take into account, in the instrumentation as well as the environmental transformation over the past 140 years. Add to this that many places were not monitored consistently, so putting it all together is a massive task involving lots of judgments. For instance, a site that has a continuous record since 1880 is valuable, as there are not that many, but that location may have gone from rural to midtown during that interval. There has been an effort to select a relatively small number of stations, in the 1000 range iirc, which are deemed representative, so many fewer stations are used for the more recent data than are available.

Trying to translate this measurement into actual temperature impact, I estimate as follows. The increased heat content since 1990 of 300 or so zettajoules (300x10**21 joules) is spread over perhaps the top one third of the oceanic volume of roughly 1.3 billion cubic kilometers. That is roughly 400 million cubic kilometers. (400x10**6 cubic kilometers). A cubic kilometer contains 10**9 cubic meters, each of which contains 10**6 cubic centimeters of water, so the relevant ocean volume is about 400 zettacubic centimeters (10**21 cubic centimeters) of water. Rounding, it means the added heat content is about a joule per cubic centimeter. It takes about 4 joules to raise the temperature of 1 cubic centimeter of water 1 degree C, so the added heat increases the temperature by about a quarter of a degree C. At first glance, that does not seem much, but it really highlights how massively important the oceans are to our survival. They buffer the imbalances hugely.

Thank you! That is both informative and very helpful.

Powerful stuff! Can anyone help put the heat content change into perspective? The increase of roughly 300 Zetta Joules since the 1980s is what percentage of the annual global heat budget?

Thought the ice melt was accelerated that year by a significant storm, so it is actually somewhat a cautionary input. Combine such a storm with a really warm ocean influx, it would set dramatic new lows.

Suspect that here in the US, it won't be till Mar-a- Lago is flooded, not sure what a comparable event would be in China, but perhaps Hong Kong might serve,,,

Arson seems very far fetched, who by and for what purpose are obvious questions, plus this is a nation wide problem, too big for a bunch of fire bugs imho. What does however seem plausible is that poor range management is a major factor. Afaik, the aborigines used fire as a control tool, preventing the kind of fuel load buildup thatsupports massive fires. More recent policy has been to prevent fires more aggressively, so the vegetation has not been thinned as before. This seems quite similar to the recent California fires, likewise made more intense by the abundance of fuel resulting from an extended period without fires. That unchecked growth combined with a super hot summer is a recipe for disaster, as is now apparent.

Why blame the model? The weather has been very volatile the past couple of months, so I think it is not unreasonable if the models behave similarly.

Sadly the actual paper is paywalled, we just get the summary. It seems a very interesting approach, apparently using some historical weather statistics to show current results deviate from those. It would take more statistical and meteorological capability than most can muster to assess this result, but if it verifies, it should be very powerful.

The forecast map suggests a warmer than usual Alaska, which was indeed the case until recently. However, there appears to have been a shift towards much colder since about the start of winter on Dec 22, with much below normal temperatures. So perhaps there will be some revision in the near future..

Careful about that, that was in 2015. The Arctic ice is in continuous flux, rotating around the pole with the older ice getting dumped down the Fram Strait between Greenland and Iceland. Very little Arctic ice is permanently fixed to the shores, mainly it gradually circulates around the pole. That is why the north coast of Iceland is littered with driftwood originating in Siberia. Afaik, there is nothing like the really old (100,000 to 2,000,000 years old) ice found in Antarctica in the north polar ice. That ice is all sea ice, totally vulnerable to a warm summer melt and it is not very useful to focus on the bits that are 3-5 years old, they just reflect whether the last few summers have been warmer or colder than usual.

Man has surely changed the climate, it is just not plausible that the massive changes we have implemented on the earth's surface and the associated biosphere would not impact the heat flows. There is argument about how much change, whether that change is reversible and what are the relevant time frames, but just calling it a hoax is unlikely to convince anyone.

While that is a forecast for Jan 1-6 of 2020, not of the temperatures now, it is pretty chilly already, with Fairbanks around 25 below zero F. Quite a swing from earlier.

I think we're basically in violent agreement, but really all you need to do is to fly over the western US. The landscape is blighted as far as the eye can see from 35000 feet by 1000 foot diameter irrigated fields, cooling the atmosphere and draining the aquifers to produce crops no one wants. I cannot see that as a natural process, no matter how hard I try.

Perhaps it would be easier if we accept that humans are in fact geoengineering right now. That may help put the risk of deliberate geoengineering into perspective.

Agree 100%, but of course the concern is that humans are already geoengineering the globe, with massive distortions in soil, water and air management due to agriculture, industry and settlement. So the threshold for intervention is correspondingly much lower, even though the uncertainties are as large as ever.

I have no expertise on the topic, but the uncertainties are indeed massive. Consequently it is questionable whether the researcher quoted in The Guardian can credibly assert that the oceans cannot absorb the needed amount of CO2. Of course, this also reinforces your other point, about the known and unknown risks inherent in any geoengineering effort.