In my corner of the internet I’ve been debating the recent news of 2014 being the hottest year on record. In response to the news I get ” It’s only a 0.04C increase. Error of measurement rate of +/- 0.1C And based on surface measurements, not satellite data.”
Any well thought out response from someone who isn’t an amateur like me.
zebrasays
Chris Korda @50,
You are correct about what the obstacle is, however…
The first step in dealing with the vested interests is to stop using their framing. Too many of these analyses accept metrics for “the economy” that only have meaning for those same interests. If you don’t own coal in the ground, directly or indirectly, you are not affected by leaving it there.
How is building a renewable energy harvesting infrastructure, and a more efficient consumption infrastructure, with government intervention to motivate it, different from rebuilding Europe?
How would this mean a “degrowth” of the “economy”?
What is “growth” of the economy? Isn’t it in effect circular to include the metric of FF consumption in the definition?
Bruce Angiersays
I have a question for the experts: What is the temperature range of the sea during ice ages–say in the last million years? If I understand it correctly, the overall Earth surface temperature changes 5 – 6 degrees Centigrade, but how much does the sea temperature (surface and deep?) change?
The reason for this question is to continue a discussion with some skeptical friends who have become enthused with Svensmark’s cosmic ray explanation for climate change. In particular I’m trying to know what to say as to the temperature variations hidden in the smoothing of the 500 million year cosmic ray and sea temperature graph in the Svensmark Wikipedia article. I already have the critical citations in the article itself and on the Skeptical Science site, but haven’t read the right one to address this question.
Thanks for the help.
She claims to have been intimidated by unnamed politicians threatening the tax status of non-profit institutions. But she also claims to have been an activist so she should understand that its politics to behave cravenly just as much as it is to act bravely.
If you’re fond of watching space operations, keep an eye on the Dragon spacecraft now approaching the ISS.
“NASA’s Cloud-Aerosol Transport System is bolted inside Dragon’s unpressurized trunk. The space station’s robotics system will unpack the CATS instrument and mount it outside the station to monitor cloud and aerosol coverage, which directly impacts global climate.
Chris Korda,
I think it is a mistake to ignore Piketty’s emphasis that inequalities arise due to differential savings and that growth, inflation or fiscal policy are the only way of negating the growing inequality.
Also, given the political polarization prevalent in Economics academia, I’m not sure I want to trust the future health of human civilization to mere academic studies.
Whales even now do more to fertilize the upper ocean than any of the geoengineering schemes have suggested. Recovery of whales and other top predators could stabilize climate.
Or we could go on strip-mining the ocean and screw it up for good and all.
I know that the owners of RealClimate have said they don’t want arguments about mitigation or carbon reduction strategies. However, I have read a number of very strident articles here arguing that there is basically no way the energy supply can be decarbonized using existing technology without a) economic catastrophe; b) huge investment in nuclear power; c) additional technology that doesn’t exist yet.
I would like to gently point out that the state of California, followed by several other states, has made it a matter of policy to have the economy be effectively carbon free by mid-century. As an analyst in the Energy Division of the California Public Utilities Commission, I work every day on implementing these policies. I see technologies, companies and entrepreneurs every day that are pushing forward solutions that are cost-effective, based on available technology and create jobs that boost the economy. Although the utility industry is a behemoth, it is responding to the increasing push both from customers and the regulators to change its operations to decrease the costs of deploying high penetrations of renewable distributed energy resources.
The state is requiring (through the Renewable Portfolio Standard and the storage mandate) development of utility scale, central station renewables, and energy storage. Markets are responding, and at the moment there is a glut of renewable energy contracts available in CA. Electric vehicle charging is a hot topic, and the state has established a goal of 1.5 million electric vehicles on the road by 2025. These are all driven by both the AB 32 goal and associated carbon market to reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. In my view, CA policies are an unsung success story that shows how the right policies and partnerships between government and the private sector can move the shift in infrastructure that will be required to decarbonize.
Just my two cents, but I wanted to add that perspective, which seems to be largely missing here, i.e., that decarbonization is doable, and it is happening in California.
Tony Weddlesays
For those who might have been worried that the paper from Wright and Schaller, a couple of years ago, showed that a temperature rise of 5C in 13 years is possible, a new paper by Pearson and Thomas casts serious doubts on that particular result of the Wright/Schaller paper. Worth a look.
Could someone point me to recent information on satellite observations of changes in outgoing longwave radiation? Basically, I’d like to find an update to the information presented in John Cook’s great 2010 post, “Human Fingerprint in Global Warming” (http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-fingerprint-in-global-warming.html). I’m particularly interested in the section of the post, “The human fingerprint in the increased greenhouse effect”, where he cites Harries 2001 and other research as late as Wang 2009. I would be interested to see more in-depth information about the latest work.
FWIW, my experience has been that mentioning satellites and showing people the graph there from Harries 2001 makes an impact, even on people inclined toward skepticism.
Now that carbon dioxide can be measured at several km scale resolution, the details of what California is doing will be important in modeling climate data. Distinguishing the effect of drought, for example, in carbon dioxide data will need detailed anthropogenic emissions data such as the California (and other) PCUs can provide. California’s ambitious efforts may make it a particularly productive geographic region for gaining clear interpretation of data as well.
The subject your raise has a very direct tie-in to basic climate science.
> a new paper by Pearson and Thomas casts serious doubts on that
> particular result of the Wright/Schaller paper. Worth a look.
agreed. Amateur summary from abstract: drill cores read as 13 annual layers (suggesting near instant carbon excursion) were reassessed and explained as likely drilling artifacts. That loses support for both of the popular instant catastrophe stories explaining the PETM excursion — methane burp and asteroid impact.
Chuck Hughessays
Question(s): Are the oceans so warm now that an El Nino event is no longer detectible?
I understand that El Nino/La Nina events are frequent and the PDO is more complex and happens on a longer time scale. I’m just trying to put it all together as far as what the overall trend is looking like. Since 2014 is the hottest year on record and there was little or no El Nino it makes me think something different is happening, like we’ve overwhelmed the system. I’m wondering if the oceans are about to dump a bunch of heat back into the atmosphere… something like an El Nino on steroids. Thanks
patricksays
Gavin Schmidt, many thanks. Those who gave you awards for science or climate science communication spoke better than they knew–because you continue to break the mold:
Are you suggesting that a non-nuclear based energy development plan is both suitable for the entire globe at the scale of tens of terawatts, and that its growth can be rapid enough to completely displace coal within decades? No problem? Because that is our task, and then some.
It is well understood that nuclear energy has orders of magnitude more economic potential than fossils, so why would we not improve it and use it for everyone? A new nuclear system based upon Oak Ridge’s successful MSRE has been proposed. It has the potential in early iterations to produce at below $1/watt. The reactors are to be mass produced. The wastes will be systematically collected and safely disposed of through an efficient vitrification process. We are looking at an important technological advance on the same significance as the microprocessor, and some nations will start building these machines.
Some confusion seems to have arisen over the difference between short term price trends in the Californian energy market, and the basic requirements for very low cost energy to rapidly displace fossils globally. These are not the same problems: One asks what will California (or parts of Europe) pay for their energy, while the other; what technology is suitable for the problem we have?
From an engineering perspective, a full scale renewable machine (based upon wind and solar), is a monstrously inefficient thing (lots of energy sinks like storage and long, underutilized transmission) with massive capital costs ($trillions to get started), and a considerable environmental impact. The power density of wind looks like it will be below 2 watts/sq meter at a large scale, and perhaps declining as the farms grow in size. So yeah, some renewables will experience radical improvements, but because of the nature of the overall power system, those improvements do not translate into great economic gains. That is the key problem. A renewable machine is just not a good way for us to produce power on an industrial scale, despite its ‘free fuel’. Imagine trying to deal with ocean acidification (at the terawatt scale) with renewable power. How many immediate problems can you imagine must be overcome to make this scheme attractive and effective? I think this is a complete nonstarter.
From my perspective (for whatever that may be worth), our institutions have pursued renewables for political reasons rather than practical ones, because they have been to date largely incapable of grasping the magnitude of the problems we face. This is not a condemnation. Just like planetary climate, these matters are exceedingly complex. And make no mistake, we are trying to form a major new adaptation for humanity, and sustainability is a problem that is at least equal to the hardest problems we have ever faced.
#59–Dave E–Yes, that seems to be the current denialist meme du jour. A nice quick counter is this: just ask them what the mean of 0.5, 0.5, and 1.0 is.
At more length, though, I would say that they are conflating accuracy and precision. 0.1 C may indeed be a reasonable figure for the accuracy of any single reading from a normal instrument. However, that isn’t the limit to what is determinable, because repeated/distributed measurements allow us to infer to a closer degree (sorry, no pun intended) the actual value we’re trying to determine. That’s why one of the very first science labs most of us do involves repeated measurements of the quantity of interest.
In the case of weather data, of course, we don’t get to repeat the daily readings. But we do get to observe the readings we get over years, and we get to compare them with other instruments nearby to validate the readings we do get. (Of course, when spurious reading are detected and compensated for, some ‘skeptics’ will then bitch and moan about ‘fudged data’ and insist that the raw data must be correct–at least, if it shows less warming.)
And doing that is a normal part of the scientific enterprise; working scientists understand the difference between precision, accuracy, and related issues at a very practical level. Here’s one discussion: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision
Dpsays
Re 50
The poster is deluding himself if he thinks that degrowth is opposed by the owning class. Most ordinary people would regard it with horror. The abhorence of affluence amongst certain sections of the greens will have little popular resonance. To convince people of the dangers of warming the message will have to be more mainstream.
Steve Fishsays
Re- Comment by Chuck Hughes — 18 Jan 2015 @ 2:38 PM, ~#65
This comment- “I’m wondering if the oceans are about to dump a bunch of heat back into the atmosphere…” comes up here in discussions from time to time, but I am at a loss as to what physical mechanism could possibly cause this to happen. The only way for net heat (in a closed system) to be transferred from one mass to another is from a warmer one to a cooler one. We are not in an ice age so the ocean is colder than the atmosphere.
Any clarification to the contrary from anybody is welcome. Steve
# 67 Corey Barcus: The future is about flexibility, and there are utility leaders and builders saying so, today. The next grid is the smart grid plus independent generation. That’s where the efficiency, the security, and the continuing innovation of the future lies. There are no silver bullets. What “industrial scale” is will look different too.
Presumably that average is for the surface/mixed layer, not the total ocean.
The linked page was last edited in 2004; it gives watts per square meter for many different ways that heat transfers occur; I wonder if any newer information would change those numbers.
That reactor design was a huge failure requiring a hugely expensive clean up. Further, reprocessing poses huge proliferation risks. Nuclear power promises pixie dust and delivers poison. More too cheap to meter nonsense indeed.
jgnfldsays
@52 Most basically you don’t decide on whether there’s an increasing trend by looking for a series of local maxes that are significantly higher than earlier local maxes. You decide on whether there’s a trend by looking at all the data.
Edward Greischsays
59 Dave Erickson: Your comment is definitely off topic, but since you started it:
“Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, reported that in the second half of 2013, German households paid 29.2 euro cents (37 U.S. cents) per kilowatt-hour, a price second only to that paid by Danish households in the European Union. German industry, meanwhile, paid an average of 14.4 euro cents per kWh.
In the United States, the Energy Information Administration reported, American households paid 12.5 cents per kWh for electricity on average this year.
I am paying 7&1/2 cents per kilowatt hour in Illinois. You are paying twice that and if you keep it up, you will be paying 2 dollars per kilowatt hour. Illinois has 6 nuclear power plants. I live near one and I want to keep it to keep my price for electricity down.
And energy storage is really going to kill your plan. My estimate for the cost of a battery for the US is $0.5 QUADrillion. 5 times 10 to the eleventh power. About 29 times GDP. How I got it: Fairbanks has a battery that can last 7 to 15 minutes. They paid $35 Million for it. Fairbanks has 30,000 people. That is $1167 per person. Multiply by 400 million people. Divide 7 minutes into a week. Multiply that by the number you got before. You get half a quadrillion dollars. Batteries are out.
I know this nuclear argument always degenerates which is why it is frowned upon. But maybe it would help if people would *start out* trying to be reasonable.
France has a cost of .20 compared to Germany at .35, from one source. That’s a fair comparison. Not one locale in the US to Germany. And anyway, there’s no cosmic rule that I know of that says what electricity should cost compared to water or food or housing or anything else.
“A Giant Battery” is a silly construct. There are lots of options available for making renewables viable– better, smarter grid, efficiency and non-electrical storage, electrifying transportation. Good things in themselves, which will not be achieved by nuclear. That has to be part of the debate.
But most of all, the level of paranoia exhibited is analogous to the claims that we will all be freezing in the dark, and the economy will collapse, if there is a carbon tax and subsidies for putting solar panels on the roof. Who is proposing taking away your plant or the ability to build new ones?
Why not offer some kind of plan for integrating nuclear into a modernized energy grid, using it where it is most appropriate. Perhaps a nuclear plant dedicated to charging plug-in hybrids and pure electric cars. (Work it out with Elon Musk.)
Seriously, that’s the way to get people on board.
Steve Fishsays
Re- Comment by JCH — 18 Jan 2015 @ 9:47 PM, ~#72
Chuck Hughes was asking if “the oceans are about to dump a bunch of heat back into the atmosphere…” Your link, although a good one, doesn’t address Chuck’s question. The piece is about meridional heat transport not net heat exchange. Chuck’s question is, apparently, about the tremendous heat that has been absorbed by the ocean because of the greenhouse effect coming back out somehow. The ocean is, on average, much colder than the atmosphere and is slowly warming up. Short of an ice age, I don’t see how there can be a “dump” of heat back into the atmosphere.
Come on, Ed, you just look ridiculous when you try to estimate costs for some of the most rapidly advancing technologies on the planet using data that is more than a decade old. You are better than that.
I’ll say no more, in the interest of avoiding yet another outbreak of Mitigation Follies.
SecularAnimistsays
Well, we’ve just had a demonstration of the moderators’ wisdom in declaring discussions of mitigation off topic for these comment pages.
As Dave Erickson notes, such discussions invariably result in “very strident articles” from a handful of commenters who aggressively ignore what is really happening in the real world with ongoing mitigation work, particularly in the area of decarbonizing the electric grid, and launch into ill-informed, sometimes nonsensical, sometimes belligerent and insulting rants.
And here we see this in action:
Mr. Erickson, an individual who is actually engaged in the hands-on work of decarbonizing California’s electric grid, offers some valuable information and insight into that effort — which is certainly leading the nation, and arguably leading the world.
In response come two comments from Corey Barcus and Edward Greisch, who display complete ignorance of today’s renewable energy, efficiency, smart grid, electricity storage and EV technologies, industries and markets, and ignore everything substantive that Erickson wrote, offering in hostile rebuttal some vague contrafactual generalities and incomprehensible nonsense about building a single giant battery to power the entire USA.
Best to stop there because it will only get worse — I would expect that in about two or three more exchanges, Edward Greisch will be screaming that Mr. Erickson is paid by the Koch Brothers and Corey Barcus will be lecturing us that solar energy cannot do what it is already doing.
#74–On second thought, I’m going back on what I said earlier.
Ed lectures someone on the costs of renewables, solemnly assuring them that they will soon be paying “$2 per kilowatt hour” if they keep up their misguided ways.
And who is that ‘someone?’
“…an analyst in the Energy Division of the California Public Utilities Commission, I work every day on implementing these policies.”
Wow. Can we spell, yet again, “Dunning-Kruger?”
Mitchsays
For #70 and #79:
Heat can come out of the ocean because the ocean is layered by density, which primarily is driven by temperature–cold water is on the bottom. In the tropical Pacific, persistent trade winds push warm surface water westward, and lift up cooler water underneath. This results in a huge amount of heat input to the oceans (because there is less evaporation and latent heat loss from cool water), and causes a low surface temperature in the eastern tropical Pacific. Net effect is a lower surface temperature than if there were no tradewinds.
In an ENSO event, heat comes out of the ocean because the warm (30°C) western Pacific water sloshes back east as the trade winds die, and cover up the cool (22°C) eastern Pacific water. Remember warm water is less dense than cool water. When an ENSO happens, there is a large net change of surface temperature, and a large increase in global surface temperature. Now there is a much larger area with significant latent heat loss.
JCHsays
Steve Fish – I took him to be asking about heat leaving the ocean during a super El Nino, or similar, event. The graph shows a large reduction in the OHC anomaly from three volcanic eruptions and from the powerful 1997-1998 El Nino.
The oceans lose heat to the atmosphere in the conductive portion of ocean skin layer (white, red, and yellow stars in the GHRSST cartoon), which is usually warmer than the atmosphere. The skin layer gradient that predominates now slows the loss of energy from the oceans. Unless I completely misunderstand this stuff, that’s why energy is now accumulating in the oceans. I don’t see how the temperature of the oceans as a whole has much to do with this. What matters is conditions at the sea-air interface.
Absorption of insolation in the first meters and resulting temperature gradient: The solar radiation that penetrates the air-sea interface is mostly absorbed, heating the water over depths of several meters or more (Figure 2). Since the ocean is nearly always warmer than the overlying atmosphere, there is heat flow from the ocean to the air above.
Heat loss in the thermal skin layer: The sign of the temperature gradient in approximately the first millimeter is nearly always such that the surface is cooler than the underlying water and here the conductive heat flow supplies energy for the heat loss to the atmosphere, both the radiant (net infrared) heat loss and the sensible and latent heat losses.
If you’re talking about getting rid of accumulated energy in this graph, then I agree that would take a TOA imbalance in other direction: more energy out than in, which would require a persistent skin layer gradient that speeds the loss of energy from the oceans.
Re #69 “The poster is deluding himself”: Delusion is an important part of our evolutionary toolkit. We tell ourselves what we want to hear because doing so worked for us on the savannah. Nate Hagen (The Monkey Trap) talks about this in an interesting lecture he gives called The Converging Energy and Environmental Crises – A Pep Talk for those Paying Attention. Science helps us correct for our delusional biases, but it doesn’t make them disappear. Science also makes our delusional biases more dangerous, by empowering us to cause trouble. Pretending that we aren’t deluded (i.e. delusion about delusion) gets us into serious trouble.
But regarding your allegation that the message needs to be more mainstream, let’s explore that a bit. How about a message that everyone should keep right on doing what they’re already doing, but shop for slightly different products? That sounds pretty good right? Corporations and their shareholders will like it too. It also sounds suspiciously similar to what we’ve been doing all along. I live in the United States, so let’s see how that’s worked out for us. Some fun facts, here in the USA:
* Forty percent of births are unintended [actually it’s 49% but hey, who’s counting?].
* Americans eat 815 billion calories of food each day – that’s roughly 200 billion more than needed – enough to feed 80 million people.
* Americans throw out 200,000 tons of edible food daily.
* The average American generates 52 tons of garbage by age 75.
* The average individual daily consumption of water is 159 gallons, while more than half the world’s population lives on 25 gallons.
* Fifty-six percent of available farmland is used for beef production.
* There are more shopping malls than high schools.
And so forth. Looks to me like selling the most wasteful people on Earth lots of electric cars and solar panels is unhelpful, because it sends the wrong message, which is that the affluent classes of developing countries can emulate our example, and feel good about themselves too.
It might be useful to consider how Americans fared the last (and only) time there was anything resembling top-down egalitarianism here (run-up to and aftermath of WWII). Let’s see, private automobiles weren’t manufactured, food and gasoline were rationed, women made do without nylons, etc. And of course the top marginal income tax rate was over 90%, incredible but true.
So even rapacious Americans are in fact capable of making altruistic sacrifices on a mass scale, given sufficient motivation. Which suggests that climate change possibly fails to constitute a sufficient motivation, the subject of George Marshall’s fascinating book “Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change”. He quotes Daniel Kahneman (Nobel-winning author of “Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow”) as saying “No amount of psychological awareness will overcome people’s reluctance to lower their standard of living.” That goes double for the ultra-rich, and they own the fossil carbon.
john byattsays
using sks trend calculator NOAA shows a trend of 0.134C decade from 1998, on the NOAA site it show 06C decade, why the difference ? anyone from NOAA http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global
David B. Bensonsays
Moderators — Would you kindly just borehole all comments regarding mitigation. This is the wrong forum for that. Thank you.
[Response: I agree that this is (again) the wrong forum. No more on the endless sniping about mitigation options please! – gavin]
I can only assume that you chose the NOAA land data. If I choose the NOAA land/ocean data and set the date range to 1998-2015, I get a trend of 0.058C/decade, which rounds to 0.06C/decade.
” The reaction of the ‘pausemaniacs’ to the record hottest year has mostly been protest. Breakin’ some temperature record just don’t mean a gosh-darn thing worth payin’ no attention to. It only broke the record by a little bit. And besides, it ain’t the individual years, record hot or not, that count, it’s the pause that counts — a record hottest year don’t end the pause!
Methinks they do protest too much. Perhaps they fear that a record year really does threaten their beloved “pause.” But that’s not the real threat at all, it’s the fact that the data have followed the global-warming-continues-without-slowing-down pattern just about as closely as one could have expected, because all the while they’ve been bellowing about the pause that never was.
But the record year does do this: it makes it harder to sell the whole ‘pause’ idea…”
Nir Shaviv from IAS Princeton/Hebrew University, Jerusalem is giving the colloquium this week in the Yale Astronomy department. Here is his abstract:
“The 20th Century has seen a notable temperature rise, generally attributed to the greenhouse effect of anthropogenic gases, and a future “business as usual” policy is generally believed to be catastrophic. However, significant evidence indicates that the sun plays a major role in climate change. We will review the evidence which proves the existence and quantifies the physical mechanism linking between solar activity and climate—galactic cosmic ray ionization of the atmosphere and its effect on cloud cover. We will also discuss the experiment carried out to pinpoint the exact mechanism. We will see that once the link is taken into account, a much more consistent picture for the 20th century global warming is obtained. In it, climate sensitivity is low and future climate change is benign.”
Can someone help me with some questions to ask him? This seems like the standard denialist ‘it’s all cosmic rays and clouds’ trope. How should I approach this?
[Response: It’s not totally crazy as a potential mechanism, and who knows he might have some interesting results. Where it all goes a little pear-shaped is when they try and use it to attribute real changes in recent decades. See our previous postson this. Watch out for a) use of ISCCP cloud trends – these are due to inhomogeieties and are not climatic, b) long-ago debunked correlations (Larsen and Fritz-Christiansen, Svensmark and Marsh etc.), c) cherry picked and/or manipulated neutron monitor data sets that suggest there has been a trend in GCR (there hasn’t). Read Gray et al (2010) for a good summary of current understanding. Report back how it went! – gavin]
I see Berkeley Earth have published a note on 2014 temperatures, although they haven’t yet updated their on-line data. Like GISTEMP and NOAA NCDC, the note confirms that 2014 is the hottest in their land+ocean series, but then obfuscates by claiming that it isn’t really because it didn’t beat the previous hottest years (2005 and 2010) within the margins of error. That is of course strictly correct — for GISTEMP and NOAA NCDC too — it just doesn’t seem very helpful in general discourse. No one would claim that 2014 is a stand-out new high; it is only very marginally hotter than the rest. But that is how meteorological ‘records’ have always been defined.
In a noisy upward-trending series where the half-width of the noise band exceeds the trend change per interval, a strict “outside the error bars” new record will be a rare thing indeed. Are we to ignore each new record as it occurs, just because its error bars didn’t quite jump those of the previous highest, which, on the errors, didn’t quite beat the highest before that … and so on?
Thanks for the Tamino link Wili. In another forum, some “skeptic” was touting Roy Spencer’s RSS data as the only reliable data set. So perhaps they get round it by seeking out data sets that might support their increasingly untenable position.
#92–Thanks for that heads up on the IRENA report, Chris. I won’t comment on it here–mitigation!–other than to say that for those who haven’t been following the economic trends in energy production it ought to be a very illuminating read.
#43–Another bargain with the Devil?
In my corner of the internet I’ve been debating the recent news of 2014 being the hottest year on record. In response to the news I get ” It’s only a 0.04C increase. Error of measurement rate of +/- 0.1C And based on surface measurements, not satellite data.”
Any well thought out response from someone who isn’t an amateur like me.
Chris Korda @50,
You are correct about what the obstacle is, however…
The first step in dealing with the vested interests is to stop using their framing. Too many of these analyses accept metrics for “the economy” that only have meaning for those same interests. If you don’t own coal in the ground, directly or indirectly, you are not affected by leaving it there.
How is building a renewable energy harvesting infrastructure, and a more efficient consumption infrastructure, with government intervention to motivate it, different from rebuilding Europe?
How would this mean a “degrowth” of the “economy”?
What is “growth” of the economy? Isn’t it in effect circular to include the metric of FF consumption in the definition?
I have a question for the experts: What is the temperature range of the sea during ice ages–say in the last million years? If I understand it correctly, the overall Earth surface temperature changes 5 – 6 degrees Centigrade, but how much does the sea temperature (surface and deep?) change?
The reason for this question is to continue a discussion with some skeptical friends who have become enthused with Svensmark’s cosmic ray explanation for climate change. In particular I’m trying to know what to say as to the temperature variations hidden in the smoothing of the 500 million year cosmic ray and sea temperature graph in the Svensmark Wikipedia article. I already have the critical citations in the article itself and on the Skeptical Science site, but haven’t read the right one to address this question.
Thanks for the help.
Kevin (#51),
She claims to have been intimidated by unnamed politicians threatening the tax status of non-profit institutions. But she also claims to have been an activist so she should understand that its politics to behave cravenly just as much as it is to act bravely.
If you’re fond of watching space operations, keep an eye on the Dragon spacecraft now approaching the ISS.
http://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=40370
Chris Korda,
I think it is a mistake to ignore Piketty’s emphasis that inequalities arise due to differential savings and that growth, inflation or fiscal policy are the only way of negating the growing inequality.
Also, given the political polarization prevalent in Economics academia, I’m not sure I want to trust the future health of human civilization to mere academic studies.
Whales as ecosystem engineers: some numbers:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0114067#pone-0114067-g002
Whales even now do more to fertilize the upper ocean than any of the geoengineering schemes have suggested. Recovery of whales and other top predators could stabilize climate.
Or we could go on strip-mining the ocean and screw it up for good and all.
I know that the owners of RealClimate have said they don’t want arguments about mitigation or carbon reduction strategies. However, I have read a number of very strident articles here arguing that there is basically no way the energy supply can be decarbonized using existing technology without a) economic catastrophe; b) huge investment in nuclear power; c) additional technology that doesn’t exist yet.
I would like to gently point out that the state of California, followed by several other states, has made it a matter of policy to have the economy be effectively carbon free by mid-century. As an analyst in the Energy Division of the California Public Utilities Commission, I work every day on implementing these policies. I see technologies, companies and entrepreneurs every day that are pushing forward solutions that are cost-effective, based on available technology and create jobs that boost the economy. Although the utility industry is a behemoth, it is responding to the increasing push both from customers and the regulators to change its operations to decrease the costs of deploying high penetrations of renewable distributed energy resources.
The state is requiring (through the Renewable Portfolio Standard and the storage mandate) development of utility scale, central station renewables, and energy storage. Markets are responding, and at the moment there is a glut of renewable energy contracts available in CA. Electric vehicle charging is a hot topic, and the state has established a goal of 1.5 million electric vehicles on the road by 2025. These are all driven by both the AB 32 goal and associated carbon market to reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. In my view, CA policies are an unsung success story that shows how the right policies and partnerships between government and the private sector can move the shift in infrastructure that will be required to decarbonize.
Just my two cents, but I wanted to add that perspective, which seems to be largely missing here, i.e., that decarbonization is doable, and it is happening in California.
For those who might have been worried that the paper from Wright and Schaller, a couple of years ago, showed that a temperature rise of 5C in 13 years is possible, a new paper by Pearson and Thomas casts serious doubts on that particular result of the Wright/Schaller paper. Worth a look.
Siberian Arctic permafrost decay and methane escape http://climatestate.com/2015/01/18/siberian-arctic-permafrost-decay-and-methane-escape/
Could someone point me to recent information on satellite observations of changes in outgoing longwave radiation? Basically, I’d like to find an update to the information presented in John Cook’s great 2010 post, “Human Fingerprint in Global Warming” (http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-fingerprint-in-global-warming.html). I’m particularly interested in the section of the post, “The human fingerprint in the increased greenhouse effect”, where he cites Harries 2001 and other research as late as Wang 2009. I would be interested to see more in-depth information about the latest work.
FWIW, my experience has been that mentioning satellites and showing people the graph there from Harries 2001 makes an impact, even on people inclined toward skepticism.
Dave (#59),
Now that carbon dioxide can be measured at several km scale resolution, the details of what California is doing will be important in modeling climate data. Distinguishing the effect of drought, for example, in carbon dioxide data will need detailed anthropogenic emissions data such as the California (and other) PCUs can provide. California’s ambitious efforts may make it a particularly productive geographic region for gaining clear interpretation of data as well.
The subject your raise has a very direct tie-in to basic climate science.
> a new paper by Pearson and Thomas casts serious doubts on that
> particular result of the Wright/Schaller paper. Worth a look.
agreed. Amateur summary from abstract: drill cores read as 13 annual layers (suggesting near instant carbon excursion) were reassessed and explained as likely drilling artifacts. That loses support for both of the popular instant catastrophe stories explaining the PETM excursion — methane burp and asteroid impact.
Question(s): Are the oceans so warm now that an El Nino event is no longer detectible?
I understand that El Nino/La Nina events are frequent and the PDO is more complex and happens on a longer time scale. I’m just trying to put it all together as far as what the overall trend is looking like. Since 2014 is the hottest year on record and there was little or no El Nino it makes me think something different is happening, like we’ve overwhelmed the system. I’m wondering if the oceans are about to dump a bunch of heat back into the atmosphere… something like an El Nino on steroids. Thanks
Gavin Schmidt, many thanks. Those who gave you awards for science or climate science communication spoke better than they knew–because you continue to break the mold:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/little-bit-hotter-2014s-record-temperatures-continue-long-term-trend/
Plus things like this bespeak improved communication all around:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/despite-polar-vortex-2014-warmest-year-record/
Real Climate response
@59 Dave Erickson
Are you suggesting that a non-nuclear based energy development plan is both suitable for the entire globe at the scale of tens of terawatts, and that its growth can be rapid enough to completely displace coal within decades? No problem? Because that is our task, and then some.
It is well understood that nuclear energy has orders of magnitude more economic potential than fossils, so why would we not improve it and use it for everyone? A new nuclear system based upon Oak Ridge’s successful MSRE has been proposed. It has the potential in early iterations to produce at below $1/watt. The reactors are to be mass produced. The wastes will be systematically collected and safely disposed of through an efficient vitrification process. We are looking at an important technological advance on the same significance as the microprocessor, and some nations will start building these machines.
Some confusion seems to have arisen over the difference between short term price trends in the Californian energy market, and the basic requirements for very low cost energy to rapidly displace fossils globally. These are not the same problems: One asks what will California (or parts of Europe) pay for their energy, while the other; what technology is suitable for the problem we have?
From an engineering perspective, a full scale renewable machine (based upon wind and solar), is a monstrously inefficient thing (lots of energy sinks like storage and long, underutilized transmission) with massive capital costs ($trillions to get started), and a considerable environmental impact. The power density of wind looks like it will be below 2 watts/sq meter at a large scale, and perhaps declining as the farms grow in size. So yeah, some renewables will experience radical improvements, but because of the nature of the overall power system, those improvements do not translate into great economic gains. That is the key problem. A renewable machine is just not a good way for us to produce power on an industrial scale, despite its ‘free fuel’. Imagine trying to deal with ocean acidification (at the terawatt scale) with renewable power. How many immediate problems can you imagine must be overcome to make this scheme attractive and effective? I think this is a complete nonstarter.
From my perspective (for whatever that may be worth), our institutions have pursued renewables for political reasons rather than practical ones, because they have been to date largely incapable of grasping the magnitude of the problems we face. This is not a condemnation. Just like planetary climate, these matters are exceedingly complex. And make no mistake, we are trying to form a major new adaptation for humanity, and sustainability is a problem that is at least equal to the hardest problems we have ever faced.
#59–Dave E–Yes, that seems to be the current denialist meme du jour. A nice quick counter is this: just ask them what the mean of 0.5, 0.5, and 1.0 is.
At more length, though, I would say that they are conflating accuracy and precision. 0.1 C may indeed be a reasonable figure for the accuracy of any single reading from a normal instrument. However, that isn’t the limit to what is determinable, because repeated/distributed measurements allow us to infer to a closer degree (sorry, no pun intended) the actual value we’re trying to determine. That’s why one of the very first science labs most of us do involves repeated measurements of the quantity of interest.
In the case of weather data, of course, we don’t get to repeat the daily readings. But we do get to observe the readings we get over years, and we get to compare them with other instruments nearby to validate the readings we do get. (Of course, when spurious reading are detected and compensated for, some ‘skeptics’ will then bitch and moan about ‘fudged data’ and insist that the raw data must be correct–at least, if it shows less warming.)
And doing that is a normal part of the scientific enterprise; working scientists understand the difference between precision, accuracy, and related issues at a very practical level. Here’s one discussion: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision
Re 50
The poster is deluding himself if he thinks that degrowth is opposed by the owning class. Most ordinary people would regard it with horror. The abhorence of affluence amongst certain sections of the greens will have little popular resonance. To convince people of the dangers of warming the message will have to be more mainstream.
Re- Comment by Chuck Hughes — 18 Jan 2015 @ 2:38 PM, ~#65
This comment- “I’m wondering if the oceans are about to dump a bunch of heat back into the atmosphere…” comes up here in discussions from time to time, but I am at a loss as to what physical mechanism could possibly cause this to happen. The only way for net heat (in a closed system) to be transferred from one mass to another is from a warmer one to a cooler one. We are not in an ice age so the ocean is colder than the atmosphere.
Any clarification to the contrary from anybody is welcome. Steve
> Imagine trying to deal with ocean acidification
>(at the terawatt scale) with renewable power.
Planet did fine dealing with it the last few times that happened, without our help. Took a while, obviously. Pity they paywall this stuff:
Review
Paleo-perspectives on ocean acidification
Carles Pelejero, Eva Calvo, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2010.02.002
Bottom scale on this picture:
http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/607216/4833226/gr1.jpg
What’s the approach you’re thinking of?
Besides leaving off making it worse?
On average the ocean is about 1 or 2 degrees warmer than the atmosphere so on average ocean heat is transferred from ocean to atmosphere by conduction.
A good one-page explanation.
# 67 Corey Barcus: The future is about flexibility, and there are utility leaders and builders saying so, today. The next grid is the smart grid plus independent generation. That’s where the efficiency, the security, and the continuing innovation of the future lies. There are no silver bullets. What “industrial scale” is will look different too.
> on average the ocean
Presumably that average is for the surface/mixed layer, not the total ocean.
The linked page was last edited in 2004; it gives watts per square meter for many different ways that heat transfers occur; I wonder if any newer information would change those numbers.
Comment by JCH — 18 Jan 2015
Comment by Steve Fish — 18 Jan 2015
Thank you for the kind response.
Corey (#67),
That reactor design was a huge failure requiring a hugely expensive clean up. Further, reprocessing poses huge proliferation risks. Nuclear power promises pixie dust and delivers poison. More too cheap to meter nonsense indeed.
@52 Most basically you don’t decide on whether there’s an increasing trend by looking for a series of local maxes that are significantly higher than earlier local maxes. You decide on whether there’s a trend by looking at all the data.
59 Dave Erickson: Your comment is definitely off topic, but since you started it:
“Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, reported that in the second half of 2013, German households paid 29.2 euro cents (37 U.S. cents) per kilowatt-hour, a price second only to that paid by Danish households in the European Union. German industry, meanwhile, paid an average of 14.4 euro cents per kWh.
In the United States, the Energy Information Administration reported, American households paid 12.5 cents per kWh for electricity on average this year.
I am paying 7&1/2 cents per kilowatt hour in Illinois. You are paying twice that and if you keep it up, you will be paying 2 dollars per kilowatt hour. Illinois has 6 nuclear power plants. I live near one and I want to keep it to keep my price for electricity down.
And energy storage is really going to kill your plan. My estimate for the cost of a battery for the US is $0.5 QUADrillion. 5 times 10 to the eleventh power. About 29 times GDP. How I got it: Fairbanks has a battery that can last 7 to 15 minutes. They paid $35 Million for it. Fairbanks has 30,000 people. That is $1167 per person. Multiply by 400 million people. Divide 7 minutes into a week. Multiply that by the number you got before. You get half a quadrillion dollars. Batteries are out.
I have a long list of references on this, but here is just one: Do the Math
Using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options―by Tom Murphy
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/
Edward Greisch #74
I know this nuclear argument always degenerates which is why it is frowned upon. But maybe it would help if people would *start out* trying to be reasonable.
France has a cost of .20 compared to Germany at .35, from one source. That’s a fair comparison. Not one locale in the US to Germany. And anyway, there’s no cosmic rule that I know of that says what electricity should cost compared to water or food or housing or anything else.
“A Giant Battery” is a silly construct. There are lots of options available for making renewables viable– better, smarter grid, efficiency and non-electrical storage, electrifying transportation. Good things in themselves, which will not be achieved by nuclear. That has to be part of the debate.
But most of all, the level of paranoia exhibited is analogous to the claims that we will all be freezing in the dark, and the economy will collapse, if there is a carbon tax and subsidies for putting solar panels on the roof. Who is proposing taking away your plant or the ability to build new ones?
Why not offer some kind of plan for integrating nuclear into a modernized energy grid, using it where it is most appropriate. Perhaps a nuclear plant dedicated to charging plug-in hybrids and pure electric cars. (Work it out with Elon Musk.)
Seriously, that’s the way to get people on board.
Re- Comment by JCH — 18 Jan 2015 @ 9:47 PM, ~#72
Chuck Hughes was asking if “the oceans are about to dump a bunch of heat back into the atmosphere…” Your link, although a good one, doesn’t address Chuck’s question. The piece is about meridional heat transport not net heat exchange. Chuck’s question is, apparently, about the tremendous heat that has been absorbed by the ocean because of the greenhouse effect coming back out somehow. The ocean is, on average, much colder than the atmosphere and is slowly warming up. Short of an ice age, I don’t see how there can be a “dump” of heat back into the atmosphere.
Steve
#74–Seriously? That battery system was installed in 2003!!
http://www.power-eng.com/articles/print/volume-110/issue-1/dg-update/worldrsquos-largest-battery-storage-system-marks-second-year-of-operation.html
Come on, Ed, you just look ridiculous when you try to estimate costs for some of the most rapidly advancing technologies on the planet using data that is more than a decade old. You are better than that.
I’ll say no more, in the interest of avoiding yet another outbreak of Mitigation Follies.
Well, we’ve just had a demonstration of the moderators’ wisdom in declaring discussions of mitigation off topic for these comment pages.
As Dave Erickson notes, such discussions invariably result in “very strident articles” from a handful of commenters who aggressively ignore what is really happening in the real world with ongoing mitigation work, particularly in the area of decarbonizing the electric grid, and launch into ill-informed, sometimes nonsensical, sometimes belligerent and insulting rants.
And here we see this in action:
Mr. Erickson, an individual who is actually engaged in the hands-on work of decarbonizing California’s electric grid, offers some valuable information and insight into that effort — which is certainly leading the nation, and arguably leading the world.
In response come two comments from Corey Barcus and Edward Greisch, who display complete ignorance of today’s renewable energy, efficiency, smart grid, electricity storage and EV technologies, industries and markets, and ignore everything substantive that Erickson wrote, offering in hostile rebuttal some vague contrafactual generalities and incomprehensible nonsense about building a single giant battery to power the entire USA.
Best to stop there because it will only get worse — I would expect that in about two or three more exchanges, Edward Greisch will be screaming that Mr. Erickson is paid by the Koch Brothers and Corey Barcus will be lecturing us that solar energy cannot do what it is already doing.
Edward (#74),
That battery calculation has always been entirely misleading. http://www.engineering.com/ElectronicsDesign/ElectronicsDesignArticles/ArticleID/8272/Is-Storage-Necessary-for-Renewable-Energy.aspx
I think you should post directly to the bore hole when you link that one over and over again.
#74–On second thought, I’m going back on what I said earlier.
Ed lectures someone on the costs of renewables, solemnly assuring them that they will soon be paying “$2 per kilowatt hour” if they keep up their misguided ways.
And who is that ‘someone?’
“…an analyst in the Energy Division of the California Public Utilities Commission, I work every day on implementing these policies.”
Wow. Can we spell, yet again, “Dunning-Kruger?”
For #70 and #79:
Heat can come out of the ocean because the ocean is layered by density, which primarily is driven by temperature–cold water is on the bottom. In the tropical Pacific, persistent trade winds push warm surface water westward, and lift up cooler water underneath. This results in a huge amount of heat input to the oceans (because there is less evaporation and latent heat loss from cool water), and causes a low surface temperature in the eastern tropical Pacific. Net effect is a lower surface temperature than if there were no tradewinds.
In an ENSO event, heat comes out of the ocean because the warm (30°C) western Pacific water sloshes back east as the trade winds die, and cover up the cool (22°C) eastern Pacific water. Remember warm water is less dense than cool water. When an ENSO happens, there is a large net change of surface temperature, and a large increase in global surface temperature. Now there is a much larger area with significant latent heat loss.
Steve Fish – I took him to be asking about heat leaving the ocean during a super El Nino, or similar, event. The graph shows a large reduction in the OHC anomaly from three volcanic eruptions and from the powerful 1997-1998 El Nino.
The oceans lose heat to the atmosphere in the conductive portion of ocean skin layer (white, red, and yellow stars in the GHRSST cartoon), which is usually warmer than the atmosphere. The skin layer gradient that predominates now slows the loss of energy from the oceans. Unless I completely misunderstand this stuff, that’s why energy is now accumulating in the oceans. I don’t see how the temperature of the oceans as a whole has much to do with this. What matters is conditions at the sea-air interface.
Google: near-surface+oceanic+temperature+gradient+-+GHRSST
From that source:
Absorption of insolation in the first meters and resulting temperature gradient: The solar radiation that penetrates the air-sea interface is mostly absorbed, heating the water over depths of several meters or more (Figure 2). Since the ocean is nearly always warmer than the overlying atmosphere, there is heat flow from the ocean to the air above.
Heat loss in the thermal skin layer: The sign of the temperature gradient in approximately the first millimeter is nearly always such that the surface is cooler than the underlying water and here the conductive heat flow supplies energy for the heat loss to the atmosphere, both the radiant (net infrared) heat loss and the sensible and latent heat losses.
If you’re talking about getting rid of accumulated energy in this graph, then I agree that would take a TOA imbalance in other direction: more energy out than in, which would require a persistent skin layer gradient that speeds the loss of energy from the oceans.
Re #69 “The poster is deluding himself”: Delusion is an important part of our evolutionary toolkit. We tell ourselves what we want to hear because doing so worked for us on the savannah. Nate Hagen (The Monkey Trap) talks about this in an interesting lecture he gives called The Converging Energy and Environmental Crises – A Pep Talk for those Paying Attention. Science helps us correct for our delusional biases, but it doesn’t make them disappear. Science also makes our delusional biases more dangerous, by empowering us to cause trouble. Pretending that we aren’t deluded (i.e. delusion about delusion) gets us into serious trouble.
But regarding your allegation that the message needs to be more mainstream, let’s explore that a bit. How about a message that everyone should keep right on doing what they’re already doing, but shop for slightly different products? That sounds pretty good right? Corporations and their shareholders will like it too. It also sounds suspiciously similar to what we’ve been doing all along. I live in the United States, so let’s see how that’s worked out for us. Some fun facts, here in the USA:
* Forty percent of births are unintended [actually it’s 49% but hey, who’s counting?].
* Americans eat 815 billion calories of food each day – that’s roughly 200 billion more than needed – enough to feed 80 million people.
* Americans throw out 200,000 tons of edible food daily.
* The average American generates 52 tons of garbage by age 75.
* The average individual daily consumption of water is 159 gallons, while more than half the world’s population lives on 25 gallons.
* Fifty-six percent of available farmland is used for beef production.
* There are more shopping malls than high schools.
And so forth. Looks to me like selling the most wasteful people on Earth lots of electric cars and solar panels is unhelpful, because it sends the wrong message, which is that the affluent classes of developing countries can emulate our example, and feel good about themselves too.
It might be useful to consider how Americans fared the last (and only) time there was anything resembling top-down egalitarianism here (run-up to and aftermath of WWII). Let’s see, private automobiles weren’t manufactured, food and gasoline were rationed, women made do without nylons, etc. And of course the top marginal income tax rate was over 90%, incredible but true.
So even rapacious Americans are in fact capable of making altruistic sacrifices on a mass scale, given sufficient motivation. Which suggests that climate change possibly fails to constitute a sufficient motivation, the subject of George Marshall’s fascinating book “Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change”. He quotes Daniel Kahneman (Nobel-winning author of “Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow”) as saying “No amount of psychological awareness will overcome people’s reluctance to lower their standard of living.” That goes double for the ultra-rich, and they own the fossil carbon.
using sks trend calculator NOAA shows a trend of 0.134C decade from 1998, on the NOAA site it show 06C decade, why the difference ? anyone from NOAA http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global
Moderators — Would you kindly just borehole all comments regarding mitigation. This is the wrong forum for that. Thank you.
[Response: I agree that this is (again) the wrong forum. No more on the endless sniping about mitigation options please! – gavin]
John,
I can only assume that you chose the NOAA land data. If I choose the NOAA land/ocean data and set the date range to 1998-2015, I get a trend of 0.058C/decade, which rounds to 0.06C/decade.
Tamino just added his two cents to the hottest-year discussion: https://tamino.wordpress.com/2015/01/20/its-the-trend-stupid-3/
“It’s the Trend, Stupid”
” The reaction of the ‘pausemaniacs’ to the record hottest year has mostly been protest. Breakin’ some temperature record just don’t mean a gosh-darn thing worth payin’ no attention to. It only broke the record by a little bit. And besides, it ain’t the individual years, record hot or not, that count, it’s the pause that counts — a record hottest year don’t end the pause!
Methinks they do protest too much. Perhaps they fear that a record year really does threaten their beloved “pause.” But that’s not the real threat at all, it’s the fact that the data have followed the global-warming-continues-without-slowing-down pattern just about as closely as one could have expected, because all the while they’ve been bellowing about the pause that never was.
But the record year does do this: it makes it harder to sell the whole ‘pause’ idea…”
New information on the cost of clean power is available broken down by source and regions. http://www.irena.org/DocumentDownloads/Publications/IRENA_RE_Power_Costs_2014_report.pdf
Nir Shaviv from IAS Princeton/Hebrew University, Jerusalem is giving the colloquium this week in the Yale Astronomy department. Here is his abstract:
“The 20th Century has seen a notable temperature rise, generally attributed to the greenhouse effect of anthropogenic gases, and a future “business as usual” policy is generally believed to be catastrophic. However, significant evidence indicates that the sun plays a major role in climate change. We will review the evidence which proves the existence and quantifies the physical mechanism linking between solar activity and climate—galactic cosmic ray ionization of the atmosphere and its effect on cloud cover. We will also discuss the experiment carried out to pinpoint the exact mechanism. We will see that once the link is taken into account, a much more consistent picture for the 20th century global warming is obtained. In it, climate sensitivity is low and future climate change is benign.”
Can someone help me with some questions to ask him? This seems like the standard denialist ‘it’s all cosmic rays and clouds’ trope. How should I approach this?
[Response: It’s not totally crazy as a potential mechanism, and who knows he might have some interesting results. Where it all goes a little pear-shaped is when they try and use it to attribute real changes in recent decades. See our previous posts on this. Watch out for a) use of ISCCP cloud trends – these are due to inhomogeieties and are not climatic, b) long-ago debunked correlations (Larsen and Fritz-Christiansen, Svensmark and Marsh etc.), c) cherry picked and/or manipulated neutron monitor data sets that suggest there has been a trend in GCR (there hasn’t). Read Gray et al (2010) for a good summary of current understanding. Report back how it went! – gavin]
I see Berkeley Earth have published a note on 2014 temperatures, although they haven’t yet updated their on-line data. Like GISTEMP and NOAA NCDC, the note confirms that 2014 is the hottest in their land+ocean series, but then obfuscates by claiming that it isn’t really because it didn’t beat the previous hottest years (2005 and 2010) within the margins of error. That is of course strictly correct — for GISTEMP and NOAA NCDC too — it just doesn’t seem very helpful in general discourse. No one would claim that 2014 is a stand-out new high; it is only very marginally hotter than the rest. But that is how meteorological ‘records’ have always been defined.
In a noisy upward-trending series where the half-width of the noise band exceeds the trend change per interval, a strict “outside the error bars” new record will be a rare thing indeed. Are we to ignore each new record as it occurs, just because its error bars didn’t quite jump those of the previous highest, which, on the errors, didn’t quite beat the highest before that … and so on?
More: http://gergs.net/2015/01/2014-warmest/
@52, Freemike
The answer to that inquiry can be found in .
The University of Oregon Senate has voted to urge divestment from fossil fuels. http://portlandtribune.com/sl/247661-116015-uo-senate-votes-to-urge-divestment-of-fossil-fuel-stocks-
From the State of the Union Address, the President said: “Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what – I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.” http://news.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/obama-2015-state-of-the-union-address-sotu-live/?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=b-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news#obama-delivers-rebuke-to-climate-change-critics
Thanks for the Tamino link Wili. In another forum, some “skeptic” was touting Roy Spencer’s RSS data as the only reliable data set. So perhaps they get round it by seeking out data sets that might support their increasingly untenable position.
> if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see …
Should’ve said “our children and their children will continue to see rising oceans. If we do not act forcefully, they will also be seeing ….”
It’s time to admit some of the damage is done, slow as it is to arrive.
What part of “glacial” don’t we understand?
#92–Thanks for that heads up on the IRENA report, Chris. I won’t comment on it here–mitigation!–other than to say that for those who haven’t been following the economic trends in energy production it ought to be a very illuminating read.