etudiant

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.

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.

Transitions are not so easy. Just ask the Federal Reserve, trying to unblow the current zero interest bubble. That said, I think you overestimate the difficulties. I think that populations are already under control in the industrialized world, with Europe, China, Japan and the US all under replacement fertility, leaving immigration to offset the decline. Only Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia still have high birth rates, largely driven by poverty. That can be cured within a generation, as China demonstrated. Separately, I do not think CO2 capture is a serious problem. The experiments in seeding the southern oceans with iron sulfate were hugely successful and underscore the late John Martins claim 'give me a half tanker of iron sulfate and I'll give you an ice age'.

Very nice paper, thank you for posting this. I'm intrigued that the warm pool has been tracked since the start of the 1900s, a more than doubled warm area is massive and deserves to be highlighted more.

All these links refer to the same Bloomberg article, which has very little detail. It is easy to store solar heat for decades, just grow some trees. The new molecule, cost unspecified, stores and releases some unquantified amount of heat, but there is nothing about how fast or how the release is controlled. At this point, the article seems click bait, rather than useful reporting.

Afaik, the issue here is that incoming energy from the sun is more short wave, which is not as obstructed by greenhouse gases as are the longer wave length heat radiations, The effect is same energy incoming, less outgoing, resulting in a heating effect. Note that this leaves lots of room for discussion, as we have no full agreement on the effects of water vapor, the predominant green house gas, or of clouds, or of atmospheric convection, ocean heat flows etc etc. It is a very complex system and it is frankly a major achievement to have it modeled as well as it is. Major uncertainties still remain, but the existence of greenhouse effects is not one of them.

Thank you, csnavywx, very helpful links. Even without ability to pass the paywall, the summaries and the charts tell the story. The charts especially are pretty alarming. Sadly, seen that coal fired power plant construction is still very strong, particularly in China and India, i see no possibility of arresting the CO2 uptrend. We will see this future, like it or not.

That is a stunning change. Is there a reference which you could point me to? I've seen some reports, but nothing that suggests global loss of alkalinity on that scale.

It is not obvious that human style intelligence is a common feature anywhere, afawk it has evolved just once in the several hundred million years that multi cellular life has existed on this earth. Actually the constraint is even stricter, industrial technology is only a few hundred years old, so about a millionth of the multi cellular life span. That suggests intelligent life as we know it is a very fleeting apparition, even if we assume that it has longevity once achieved. However, as noted, the lack of wisdom which humans are showing in their dealing with their own biosphere strongly suggests longevity may be limited for our technological society.

Thank you for this more complete explanation, although it is really over my head. For a novice such as me, TCHP and MPI are not familiar terms, so there are gaps in my understanding of the process. But I gather the hurricane formation is much more chaotically competitive than I'd thought, so that very small vortices sometimes play a pivotal role. Is that correct?

Rare is a better term. I mentioned some others above: Pam, Patricia, Wilma, Gilbert and Allen all had similar structures. There have been a number of others that developed a super intense >5nm micro-vortex eyewall within a much larger banded concentric envelope. Still, it's not something we see with regards to such extreme sub 890 hpa estimated intensities on a yearly basis. Think perhaps once every 5-10 years globally within the satellite era. Thank you, a very informative summary. Has there been any explanation or modeling that would shed light on how this comes about? Why and how would a micro vortex spin up within the eye?

Don't think I've ever seen something like this before. Is it usual in cyclones?

Thank you, that is a well documented piece of work.

I'd thought that the primary objection was not denial of the current evidence, but rather claims that similar or warmer conditions were in effect in prior recorded history, for instance during the Norse settlements of Greenland.. That then translates into a claim that there is a natural warm cold cycle, which the current models fail to capture. The Norse settlement was not small, it was big enough to be allocated its own bishop and they were able to sustain cattle and sheep. Presumably there could be some isotope measurements possible in stalactites or glacier ice which provides some guidance on this issue, but I've not seen anything that really digs into the question.

I suspect we all underestimate the potential for reform. If people want change, they will get it. With effectively unlimited power from nuclear, even extreme efforts such as carbon capture are feasible. What is required is a broad recognition that there really is a problem. That has not been achieved, imho partly because the early AGW researchers desperately oversold the immediacy of their findings. The subsequent pause after 1998 put them into the 'boy who cried wolf' category and that has impeded any further consensus action. Sadly I believe it will now take a climate catastrophe to spur any concerted action. A collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet might force a recognition of the problem, but failing that, business as usual remains the most likely outcome. The best hope for progress is from the renewable energy sector. If it can continue to deliver increasingly economical power, we might buy some additional decades to find a solution to the problem.

The discussion was about the difficulty of mobilizing the public to tackle climate change as an imminent danger. I was simply pointing out that the actions by the most powerful leaders in the debate undermine the narrative for the broader public.

An other problem imho is the dissonance between the rhetoric and the actions of the leading AGW politicians. The public sees that both Al Gore as well as Barack Obama bought large oceanfront estates shortly after leaving office. Presumably these well informed individuals would not buy such homes if they anticipated losing them shortly to rising seas. John Q Public takes comfort from this evidence that there is no imminent danger.

Don't think this is a helpful cartoon. It is deeply anti scientific, an appeal to mass authority. In response to a book 'A hundred authors against relativity'. Einstein said: 'Why 100? If I were wrong, one would have been enough.' Einstein said 'Why 100? If I were wrong, one would have been enough.'

Not a regular here, but this really needs organization to provide help. I'm thinking of 10,000 or so households that have lost everything and that are remote from any helping entity. Is there a shuttle ferry or something similar (airport was under water afaik) to deliver basic supplies? All we can do here is to send money, but who is a trustworthy recipient? Do any of the regulars here know?

It would be so very helpful if the media presentation of this issue were better guided by the science. Instead we have a high school kid sailing to the UN to tell the world what to do. Not sure that is a good basis for policy.

That redundancy costs a lot of money. Overall, one pays for 2 complete power systems. That makes everyone so much poorer. I'd much rather see the money spent on low emission nuclear, because it is 24/7 available, so it folds seamlessly into the grid. The associated pollution issues are less imho than the massive problems generated by rare earth extraction for wind power generators or area coverage with solar collectors.