Occasional Thoughts on Climate Change

[LibertyBell]

5 hours ago, bluewave said:

They really need to change their opposition to air conditioning since Europe has some of the fastest summer warming on the planet.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/02/climate/europe-air-conditioning-heat-wave-intl-latam

 

 

wait why would ANYONE have an opposition to air conditioning?

 

[LibertyBell]

5 hours ago, bluewave said:

They really need to change their opposition to air conditioning since Europe has some of the fastest summer warming on the planet.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/02/climate/europe-air-conditioning-heat-wave-intl-latam

 

 

Western Europe is warming like Western North America is warming, does having an ocean west of you increase the rate of warming? And why? One would think the opposite should be true (since the main flow of air is west to east.)

 

[LibertyBell]

3 hours ago, Typhoon Tip said:

Yet ... AC only adds more to the anthropomorphic forcing integral, too. 

Humanity needs to accept an opposition to using fossil fuels to power the grid, being far more apropos.  

CC worsening will incur increased frequency of those types of predicaments, like the AC catch-22.  It may seem like just a pie slice in the total anthropomorphic forcing but situations like that will get more common.   Obviously ... not a novel assertion to suspect that, just sayn'   Expediency to solve local/regional imminent threat to health and safety forces taking measures within those realms to stop the death, now.  And yet ...as those measures provide immediate protection they only augment the why-for crisis is at hand in the first place.

It's just laughable to know what the solution really should be, while humanity divisively obfuscates from seeing it ... Instead, application of all these duct tape on a leaking dam strategies that evade the real problem. I keep coming across all these articles featuring these technological discoveries on how to combat x-y-z and I'm like ...Jesus.  If you're nauseated by the potion, just stop fucking drinking the potion.

It all comes back to what Don and I were ruminating over a couple of weeks ago ... the insidious nature of "hiding" CC from common experience. It has to appeal directly to the natural senses before the awareness moves from intellectualism and debate to a state of prevalence. It's just the evolutionary biology of all organisms, their impulse response to crisis is slaved to that system.  The human species is no different...  The difference here is that we are just beginning to see CC finally appealing ... but it will probably take some time to wake up the species awareness fully enough.  A time in which we'll see these follies. 

To be honest, I don't think it matters what us regular people think, it's useless to lose any sleep over what regular people think.  Nothing will change until our oligarchs decide it's time for things to change.

 

[LibertyBell]

23 hours ago, TheClimateChanger said:

It was a LOT colder back then though, so Africa was probably pretty temperate, especially at elevation. Well, for most of that time... per AI, it sounds like homo sapiens first evolved around 300,000 years ago, so they would have been around for a couple of glacial cycles and lived through the somewhat warmer Eemian interglacial. Of course, more importantly, the population was tiny compared to today.

Humanity lived much more sustainably back then.

 

[Brewbeer]

On 9/17/2025 at 2:07 PM, LibertyBell said:

wait why would ANYONE have an opposition to air conditioning?

because it requires high energy consumption, and emissions from energy consumption are currently a driving force in CC

On 9/17/2025 at 2:10 PM, LibertyBell said:

To be honest, I don't think it matters what us regular people think, it's useless to lose any sleep over what regular people think.  Nothing will change until our oligarchs decide it's time for things to change.

some people absolutely can make choices to reduce their CC footprint:  some people have the ability to choose to live in smaller houses, drive smaller cars, consume less products, put solar panels on their house, etc. 

everything around CC can't be blamed entirely on our corporate overlords, we are the end consumers of their products 

[LibertyBell]

2 hours ago, Brewbeer said:

because it requires high energy consumption, and emissions from energy consumption are currently a driving force in CC

some people absolutely can make choices to reduce their CC footprint:  some people have the ability to choose to live in smaller houses, drive smaller cars, consume less products, put solar panels on their house, etc. 

everything around CC can't be blamed entirely on our corporate overlords, we are the end consumers of their products 

Thats what I did, I no longer have a car.  I do use air conditioning but only a room air conditioner in my bedroom.  It's wasteful to air condition other rooms when I'm not in them for more than a few minutes at a time.

Meanwhile, my neighbor has like 4 cars, one for each member of their family. Lol.

 

[Typhoon Tip]

17 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

Thats what I did, I no longer have a car.  I do use air conditioning but only a room air conditioner in my bedroom.  It's wasteful to air condition other rooms when I'm not in them for more than a few minutes at a time.

Meanwhile, my neighbor has like 4 cars, one for each member of their family. Lol.

 

You know ... there's another way.

Change the incentive model.  

If it becomes profitable to go green, problem solved. 

 

[donsutherland1]

Below is an illustration of how Social Media's climate change denial scammers mislead when it comes to U.S. temperatures.

Notice several things:

1) The 11-year moving average stops short of the chart's end to make things look even cooler than they are

2) The chart is based on maximum temperatures, only. Climate is based on the entire set of temperatures, not just maximum temperatures. Hence, it is good and customary practice to assess climate change based on mean, not maximum temperatures.

3) The chart relies on raw data, only. Doing so is unreliable due to a range of issues, including but not limited to, new stations, eliminated stations, station moves, time of observation, etc.

Now to the actual facts:

1) Summers are generally warmer than they were during the Dust Bowl Era on an 11-year moving average (the average used above) and they are warming (trend line):

2) In terms of maximum temperatures, summers are nearing the drought-inflated maximum values achieved during the Dust Bowl Era on an 11-year basis:

Note: All data in my charts is official NOAA data.

[LibertyBell]

16 hours ago, donsutherland1 said:

Below is an illustration of how Social Media's climate change denial scammers mislead when it comes to U.S. temperatures.

Notice several things:

1) The 11-year moving average stops short of the chart's end to make things look even cooler than they are

2) The chart is based on maximum temperatures, only. Climate is based on the entire set of temperatures, not just maximum temperatures. Hence, it is good and customary practice to assess climate change based on mean, not maximum temperatures.

3) The chart relies on raw data, only. Doing so is unreliable due to a range of issues, including but not limited to, new stations, eliminated stations, station moves, time of observation, etc.

Now to the actual facts:

1) Summers are generally warmer than they were during the Dust Bowl Era on an 11-year moving average (the average used above) and they are warming (trend line):

2) In terms of maximum temperatures, summers are nearing the drought-inflated maximum values achieved during the Dust Bowl Era on an 11-year basis:

Note: All data in my charts is official NOAA data.

I don't mind maximum temperatures Don because using maximum temperatures removes urban heat island from the equation.

Also it's useful to compare hot weather by maximum temperature only because higher amounts of humidity will also increase minimum temperatures, which is why H20 is considered a greenhouse gas even more potent than C02.

An example: tropical rain forests are extremely warm because of their very high mean temperatures, but the extremity of hot can't hold a candle to the kind of extreme heat you get in parts of the Middle East or Death Valley for that matter.

I find our biggest heatwaves occurred in the 1940s and 1950s, the 1930s did not have the kind of extreme and long heatwaves that years like 1944, 1948, 1949, 1953, 1955, etc. had.  The total number of 90 degree days was eventually exceeded, but not until 1983 and then 2010 did this take place.  Our climate for our local area anyway seems to warm in stair steps.  The summers are getting hotter, but not a straight line.  There is an extremely hot summer and then many summers below that threshold before the next big increase occurs. Meanwhile the length of heatwaves of a summer like 1953 has still not been approached.  Or the number of 100 degree days for that matter (tied between 1953 and 1966 at 4.)

 

[chubbs]

19 hours ago, donsutherland1 said:

Below is an illustration of how Social Media's climate change denial scammers mislead when it comes to U.S. temperatures.

Notice several things:

1) The 11-year moving average stops short of the chart's end to make things look even cooler than they are

2) The chart is based on maximum temperatures, only. Climate is based on the entire set of temperatures, not just maximum temperatures. Hence, it is good and customary practice to assess climate change based on mean, not maximum temperatures.

3) The chart relies on raw data, only. Doing so is unreliable due to a range of issues, including but not limited to, new stations, eliminated stations, station moves, time of observation, etc.

Now to the actual facts:

1) Summers are generally warmer than they were during the Dust Bowl Era on an 11-year moving average (the average used above) and they are warming (trend line):

2) In terms of maximum temperatures, summers are nearing the drought-inflated maximum values achieved during the Dust Bowl Era on an 11-year basis:

Note: All data in my charts is official NOAA data.

Some charts from the recent climate experts review of the recent DOE CWG report. The first chart shows how misleading taking an average of GHCN stations is because: 1) the stations are not spread uniformly across US and the 2) station network has changed with time both equipment and station locations. The second chart shows that a proper analysis shows heat wave days are increasing in the US and are now well above 1930s levels. The final chart shows that mid-latitude extreme temperatures are increasing much faster outside of the US. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1knIpC4vGrZXDsrF13RC2CujCjhbILgaa/view?usp=sharing

[donsutherland1]

5 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

I don't mind maximum temperatures Don because using maximum temperatures removes urban heat island from the equation.

Also it's useful to compare hot weather by maximum temperature only because higher amounts of humidity will also increase minimum temperatures, which is why H20 is considered a greenhouse gas even more potent than C02.

An example: tropical rain forests are extremely warm because of their very high mean temperatures, but the extremity of hot can't hold a candle to the kind of extreme heat you get in parts of the Middle East or Death Valley for that matter.

I find our biggest heatwaves occurred in the 1940s and 1950s, the 1930s did not have the kind of extreme and long heatwaves that years like 1944, 1948, 1949, 1953, 1955, etc. had.  The total number of 90 degree days was eventually exceeded, but not until 1983 and then 2010 did this take place.  Our climate for our local area anyway seems to warm in stair steps.  The summers are getting hotter, but not a straight line.  There is an extremely hot summer and then many summers below that threshold before the next big increase occurs. Meanwhile the length of heatwaves of a summer like 1953 has still not been approached.  Or the number of 100 degree days for that matter (tied between 1953 and 1966 at 4.)

 

UHI is effectively addressed in the adjustments. One needs all temperatures to get a good understanding of climate change.

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/papers/hausfather-etal2013.pdf

 

[bluewave]

The recent summer pattern across the U.S. is a reversal of the Dust Bowl. The record heat has been located in the West and East with cooler and wetter in the middle. This is the opposite of the Dust Bowl with record heat and drought focused in the middle.

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/36/20/JCLI-D-22-0716.1.xml

Abstract

A cooling trend in summer (May–August) daytime temperatures since the mid-twentieth century over the central United States contrasts with strong warming of the western and eastern United States. Prior studies based on data through 1999 suggested that this so-called warming hole arose mainly from internal climate variability and thus would likely disappear. Yet it has prevailed for two more decades, despite accelerating global warming, compelling reexamination of causes that in addition to natural variability could include anthropogenic aerosol–induced cooling, hydrologic cycle intensification by greenhouse gas increases, and land use change impacts. Here we present evidence for the critical importance of hydrologic cycle change resulting from ocean–atmosphere drivers. Observational analysis reveals that the warming hole’s persistence is consistent with unusually high summertime rainfall over the region during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Comparative analysis of large ensembles from four different climate models demonstrates that rainfall trends since the mid-twentieth century as large as observed can arise (although with low probability) via internal atmospheric variability alone, which induce warming-hole-like patterns over the central United States. In addition, atmosphere-only model experiments reveal that observed sea surface temperature changes since the mid-twentieth century have also favored central U.S cool/wet conditions during the early twenty-first century. We argue that this latter effect is symptomatic of external radiative forcing influences, which, via constraints on ocean warming patterns, have likewise contributed to persistence of the U.S. warming hole in roughly equal proportion to contributions by internal variability. These results have important ramifications for attribution of extreme events and predicting risks of record-breaking heat waves in the region.

[donsutherland1]

49 minutes ago, bluewave said:

The recent summer pattern across the U.S. is a reversal of the Dust Bowl. The record heat has been located in the West and East with cooler and wetter in the middle. This is the opposite of the Dust Bowl with record heat and drought focused in the middle.

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/36/20/JCLI-D-22-0716.1.xml

Abstract

A cooling trend in summer (May–August) daytime temperatures since the mid-twentieth century over the central United States contrasts with strong warming of the western and eastern United States. Prior studies based on data through 1999 suggested that this so-called warming hole arose mainly from internal climate variability and thus would likely disappear. Yet it has prevailed for two more decades, despite accelerating global warming, compelling reexamination of causes that in addition to natural variability could include anthropogenic aerosol–induced cooling, hydrologic cycle intensification by greenhouse gas increases, and land use change impacts. Here we present evidence for the critical importance of hydrologic cycle change resulting from ocean–atmosphere drivers. Observational analysis reveals that the warming hole’s persistence is consistent with unusually high summertime rainfall over the region during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Comparative analysis of large ensembles from four different climate models demonstrates that rainfall trends since the mid-twentieth century as large as observed can arise (although with low probability) via internal atmospheric variability alone, which induce warming-hole-like patterns over the central United States. In addition, atmosphere-only model experiments reveal that observed sea surface temperature changes since the mid-twentieth century have also favored central U.S cool/wet conditions during the early twenty-first century. We argue that this latter effect is symptomatic of external radiative forcing influences, which, via constraints on ocean warming patterns, have likewise contributed to persistence of the U.S. warming hole in roughly equal proportion to contributions by internal variability. These results have important ramifications for attribution of extreme events and predicting risks of record-breaking heat waves in the region.

The heat in the West and Southwest are aided by ongoing aridification linked in recent research to the changes in the North Pacific. 

Summer:

Annual:

 

 

[LibertyBell]

7 hours ago, chubbs said:

Some charts from the recent climate experts review of the recent DOE CWG report. The first chart shows how misleading taking an average of GHCN stations is because: 1) the stations are not spread uniformly across US and the 2) station network has changed with time both equipment and station locations. The second chart shows that a proper analysis shows heat wave days are increasing in the US and are now well above 1930s levels. The final chart shows that mid-latitude extreme temperatures are increasing much faster outside of the US. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1knIpC4vGrZXDsrF13RC2CujCjhbILgaa/view?usp=sharing

For our area specifically though, while the number of heatwaves might be getting higher, their average length is much shorter than it used to be.  So we are getting 3-4 heatwaves of 3-4 days each in length in our hottest summers vs 2 heatwaves of 7+ days in length like we used to in some of our hottest summers (1944, 1949, 1953, 1955, 1966, 1980, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1999, 2002).  The last of the type of summers that had multiple 7+ day heatwaves was 2002 here.

 

[LibertyBell]

5 hours ago, bluewave said:

The recent summer pattern across the U.S. is a reversal of the Dust Bowl. The record heat has been located in the West and East with cooler and wetter in the middle. This is the opposite of the Dust Bowl with record heat and drought focused in the middle.

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/36/20/JCLI-D-22-0716.1.xml

Abstract

A cooling trend in summer (May–August) daytime temperatures since the mid-twentieth century over the central United States contrasts with strong warming of the western and eastern United States. Prior studies based on data through 1999 suggested that this so-called warming hole arose mainly from internal climate variability and thus would likely disappear. Yet it has prevailed for two more decades, despite accelerating global warming, compelling reexamination of causes that in addition to natural variability could include anthropogenic aerosol–induced cooling, hydrologic cycle intensification by greenhouse gas increases, and land use change impacts. Here we present evidence for the critical importance of hydrologic cycle change resulting from ocean–atmosphere drivers. Observational analysis reveals that the warming hole’s persistence is consistent with unusually high summertime rainfall over the region during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Comparative analysis of large ensembles from four different climate models demonstrates that rainfall trends since the mid-twentieth century as large as observed can arise (although with low probability) via internal atmospheric variability alone, which induce warming-hole-like patterns over the central United States. In addition, atmosphere-only model experiments reveal that observed sea surface temperature changes since the mid-twentieth century have also favored central U.S cool/wet conditions during the early twenty-first century. We argue that this latter effect is symptomatic of external radiative forcing influences, which, via constraints on ocean warming patterns, have likewise contributed to persistence of the U.S. warming hole in roughly equal proportion to contributions by internal variability. These results have important ramifications for attribution of extreme events and predicting risks of record-breaking heat waves in the region.

I'm glad to see we are going back to a drier pattern on the east coast, some of those high rainfall flooding years were truly unbearable