Vice-Regent

Disease vectors and droughts diminishing crop yields. This is not because the Earth is becoming drier overall rather it's because the sub-tropical high pressure zones move into the Breadbaskets of the world thus causing desertification over the regions that are currently used for agriculture. One may say we can grow our crops in Canada or Russia but there is no guarantee that the climate will be stable or supportive. Tread lightly.

It's likely to be on the low-side of the envelope if/when such a track verifies. I noticed the Euro intensity (SLP) is a bit conservative but I don't have access to the high resolution Euro.

[–]Sanpaku There’s no market signal from the future 6 points 3 hours ago* Probably not. The natural carbon reservoirs are similar now. The amount of carbon humans can release from fossil fuels is on the order of 1-3 teratonnes (edit: accidentally wrote gigatonnes) carbon, before we essentially kill off the consumers. And climate sensitivity is a logarithmic function, each doubling of atmospheric carbon increases equilibrium temperature by a fixed amount (median estimate 3° C, high end of plausible estimates IMO 4.7° C). So, assuming that the PETM reached 6° C mean surface warming, is 7 or 8 ° C possible with fossil emissions plus natural feedbacks? Probably. That's enough to make most current breadbaskets uninhabitable, and reduce the Earth's human carrying capacity to < 1 billion. That's a perfectly adequate description of collapse. Unlike some, I don't require the end of all macroscopic life over decades to make climate change a worthy cause. It's enough that humanity will undergo centuries of retreat over bottleneck centuries.

Lower East Rift Zone - USGS (Big Island) HVO Observation Tower - USGS (Big Island)

Not nearly enough to affect a northwardly propagating Catergory 5 during peak season. The models failed to see that an inner core would be established relatively early on.

We've never had such widespread warmth over the NW Atlantic. Could prove to be a unique winter albeit a very warm one with bouts of wet snow. The kind of wet snow that caves in roofs and such. Fun.

How is Lane doing this with 27C waters? Is there like a layer of 29-30C water 50 meters below the surface? Upper-air enhancements? Unreal stuff. For perspective. Most of the SW Atlantic has warmer waters than this region of the PAC.

Scientifically untennable in my opinion. They would need to post-season review it.

What is the purpose of casting doubt on this topic? I don't see anyone as interested in casting doubt on the absurd health care system in this country or the quality of life in the modern world which is supposedly the epitome of progress. That is because fixing global warming fixes all of the above. This topic is novel in it's scope and persistence.

July 2018 Global Temperature Update To sign up for our monthly update of global temperature (Maps and Graphs), click here. Additional figures are on our global temperature web page. Heat waves seemed unusually widespread in July, as the media reported extreme heat in Europe, the Middle East, northern Africa, Japan and western United States. Extreme heat contributed to extensive wildfires in the western United States, Greece and Sweden, with fire extending into the Arctic Circle. The left map is the global distribution of temperature anomalies with our usual 1200 km smoothing; the right map has 250 km smoothing and uses only meteorological stations (no sea surface temperatures). Area-weighted warming over land (1.14°C) is 1.5 times larger than global warming (0.78°C), consistent with data for the past century (see graphs at http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/T_moreFigs/). Globally July 2018 was the third warmest July since reliable measurements began in 1880, 0.78°C warmer than the 1951-1980 mean. The warmest Julys, in 2016 and 2017, were 0.82°C and 0.81°C, respectively. July 2018 temperature was +1.06°C relative to the 1880-1920 base period, where the latter provides our best estimate of pre-industrial global temperature. Continue reading: http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/Emails/July2018.pdf

Such a pleasant sensation. Forever reminded of this beautiful feeling with a aesthetically pleasing scar. Things are getting serious boys. I think it's time to hit the shovels.

I just think there is also a possibility we tip into a monsoonal regime and shift the sub-tropics to the poles. This would only happen after passing an unreal high amount of CO2(850+ ppm) and after a long period of drought worldwide. I often wonder if aerosol emissions and volcanoes do more harm than good. There was even a brief shutdown in the AMOC in the late 1960s. If you rush headlong into Greenhouse Earth you stand a good chance of reducing the populations by 80% and greening parts of the sub-tropics (win-win). That's the only reason why you would ever be a climate action denier but it's still disingenuous. Humidity values must rise. Geoengineering could cause more drought. As for Atlantic tropical activity. That's currently being trumped by forcings in the South Pacific. Last year's hurricane season was the costliest on record because of increased development and record flooding from Harvey.

The global tropics have been soaking up an insane amount of heat because of the monsoons and strong trades. Atlantic basin more fortunate with the negative SAL forcing but still heating robustly below the surface.

Reasoning? I think the retracement period is already behind us. Next el nino late 2019?

On face value humans only respond to short term threats. There may never be a time where humanity is in harmony with the environment. Imagine a series of peaks and valleys in human population for the next several millennia (via a combination of war, climate, and disease) or perhaps a complete near-extinction of humans for the foreseeable future. Put simply - we are not wired for hothouse climates.

Another factor to consider is that the human contribution amount towards GHG forcing will drop off drastically after 2C warming. Perhaps this was the intention behind the Paris Climate Agreement/Accord. Burn up carbon until the very end. However natural GHG sources will no doubt become more profound when the human contribution declines. Such that the traditional argument of civilization collapse causing climate stabilization is not valid. You simply cannot burn prolific amounts of carbon-based fuels on a Hothouse Earth which is not saving grace but a reminder that nature is large and in charge and we should take a step back and work with nature.

Notice that the PNAS paper doesn't mention geoengineering. Hinting that this method of approach is not viable going forward. We could debate this all day but the Paris Climate Accord has paved the way for mass confusion, scientific reticence, and planet hacking of unprecedented scale which ultimately will not rectify the millennium climate predicament without a systems design approach.

The Planet Is Dangerously Close to the Tipping Point for a 'Hothouse Earth' Credit: Shutterstock It's the year 2300. Extreme weather events such as building-flattening hurricanes, years-long droughts and wildfires are so common that they no longer make headlines. The last groups of humans left near the sizzling equator pack their bags and move toward the now densely populated poles. This so-called "hothouse Earth," where global temperatures will be 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit (4 to 5 degrees Celsius) higher than preindustrial temperatures and sea levels will be 33 to 200 feet (10 to 60 meters) higher than today, is hard to imagine — but easy to fall into, said a new perspective article published today (Aug. 6) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Top 9 Ways the World Could End] In the article, a group of scientists argued that there is a threshold temperature above which natural feedback systems that currently keep the Earth cool will unravel. At that point, a cascade of climate events will thrust the planet into a "hothouse" state. Though the scientists don't know exactly what this threshold is, they said it could be as slight as 2 degrees C (around 4 degrees F) of warming above preindustrial levels. Sound familiar? The 2 degrees C mark plays a big role in the Paris Agreement, the landmark 2016 agreement signed by 179 countries to combat climate change by reducing carbon emissions (the same one that the U.S. announced it would withdraw from last year). In that accord, countries agreed to work to keep global temperature rise well below 2 degrees C, and ideally below 1.5 degrees C, above preindustrial levels this century. "This paper gives very strong scientific support … that we should avoid coming too close or even reaching 2 degrees Celsius warming," article co-author Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Resilience Center and a professor of water systems and global sustainability at Stockholm University in Sweden, told Live Science. Changing Earth's rhythm For the last million years, Earth has naturally cycled in and out of an ice age every 100,000 years or so. The planet left the last ice age around 12,000 years ago and is currently in an interglacial cycle called the Holocene epoch. In this cycle, Earth has natural systems that help keep it cool, even during the warmer interglacial periods. But many scientists argue that due to the immense impact of humans on climate and the environment, the current geological age should be called the Anthropocene (from anthropogenic, which means originating with human activity). Temperatures are almost as hot as the maximum historical temperature during an interglacial cycle, Rockström said. If carbon emissions continue unabated, the planet might leave the glacial-interglacial cycle and be thrust into a new age of the "hothouse Earth." Today, we emit 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year from burning fossil fuels, Rockström said. But roughly half of those emissions are taken up and stored by the oceans, trees and soil, he said. However, we are now seeing signs that we are pushing the system too far — cutting down too many trees, degrading too much soil, taking out too much fresh water and pumping too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, Rockström said. Scientists fear that if we reach a certain temperature threshold, some of these natural processes will reverse and the planet "will become a self-heater,"Rockström said. That means, forests, soil and water will release the carbon they're storing. "The moment the planet becomes a source of greenhouse gas emissions together with us humans, then as you can imagine, things are accelerating very fast in the wrong direction," he said. [Doom and Gloom: Top 10 Postapocalyptic Worlds] Many tipping points In their perspective paper, Rockström and his team corroborated existing literature on various natural feedback processes and concluded that many of them can serve as "tipping elements." When one tips, many of the others follow. Nature has feedback mechanisms, such as a rainforest's capability to create its own humidity and rain, that keep ecosystems in equilibrium. If the rainforest is subject to increasing warming and deforestation, however, the mechanism slowly gets weaker, Rockström said. "When it crosses a tipping point, the feedback mechanism changes direction," Rockström said, and the rainforest morphs from a moisture engine into a self-dryer. Eventually, the rainforest turns into a savanna and, in the process, releases carbon, he said. This, in turn, can become part of a cascade that would influence other processes around the world, such as ocean circulation and El Niño events. Other tipping points include the thawing of permafrost, loss of Arctic summer sea ice and the loss of coral reefs. A global call for help The first big goal should be to completely stop carbon emissions by 2050, Rockström said. But that won't be enough, he added. In order to stay away from these tipping points, the "whole world [needs to] embark on a major project to become sustainable across all sectors," he said. That could be a challenge, as countries around the world grow increasingly nationalistic, he said. Instead of focusing on narrow national goals, the world should collectively work to reduce carbon emissions — for instance by creating investment funds that can support poorer nations that don't have as much capacity to reduce emissions as richer countries do, he said. All of this means "that it's, scientifically speaking, completely unacceptable that a country like the U.S. leaves the Paris Agreement, because now more than ever, we need every country in the world to collectively decarbonize … in order to secure a stable planet," Rockström said. The new paper is an opinion article that includes no new research but rather draws on the existing literature, Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University who was not part of the study, told Live Science in an email. "That having been said, the authors do, in my view, make a credible case that we could, in the absence of aggressive near-term efforts to reduce carbon emissions, commit to truly dangerous and irreversible climate change in a matter of decades," Mann said. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Abstract We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a “Hothouse Earth” pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene. We examine the evidence that such a threshold might exist and where it might be. If the threshold is crossed, the resulting trajectory would likely cause serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies. Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere, climate, and societies—and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/31/1810141115

Nothing here. Let's embrace our mutual dryness. The western and eastern borders of the mid-atlantic. https://water.weather.gov/precip/#

Death by humidity and fog. The second shortest path (fastest being bottom melt from atlantification) to ice free/blue ocean. The most interesting melt season to date - most people just don't know it yet.

Something must be broken. I don't even know where to begin when explaining the discrepancy between HYCOM and PIOMAS ice volume.

Are you ready?

The AMOC is slow enough to stop further catastrophic melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet but fast enough to cause extreme heat events in Europe (and the US?). That can't be a good thing. As well we know Antarctica holds 5x the fresh water content of Greenland. Maybe it's just a natural variability and revision to the mean but I would say it's not a good sign. We still have tremendous heat transport in the Atlantic. This can't hold for much longer without causing massive damage to something/somebody. If you thought Sandy and Harvey was bad just wait a few years.