This month’s open thread on climate science topics. Things to look for – Arctic sea ice minimum, boreal wildfires and the Atlantic hurricane season – you know, the usual…
BPL: KIA doesn’t understand the difference between socialism and Communism.
Ray Ladburysays
Mr. KIA: “On Socialism, gotta be careful with that – it usually ends in tears…”
Yeah, because all the Scandinavian countries are such sad places and the US is so fricking happy. Dude, you really are a broken, useless tool.
John Pollacksays
Considering the recent highly amplified weather pattern in the Eastern Pacific/Western North American sector to be the “elephant” I’ve seen comments about a few of the body parts. I’d like to zoom out and take a look at how they connect with the rest of the beast.
A developing La Nina pattern is associated with a tongue of anomalously cold water in the eastern equatorial Pacific, but also a band of mid latitude warm water from southeast of Japan toward the Pacific Northwest and Gulf of Alaska. https://psl.noaa.gov/map/clim/sst.shtml In fact, there is an unusually warm area, even for this overall pattern, east of the dateline. Climate change helps make such a warm pocket more likely.
The warmer water helped maintain the strength of a typhoon as it went extratropical in the central Pacific. This resulted in an amplification of the snyoptic pattern, as was noted well over a week ago in the NCEP Weather Prediction Center extended forecast discussions, as they debated whether to use the slow and amplified ECMWF solutions (they did) or the faster and shallower GFS models.
The approaching typhoon-associated short wave energy first helped pump up an already existing southwest U.S. upper ridge, spilling additional hot air westward over the Sierras all the way to the central and southern California coasts. The greatest temperature anomalies were focused in the first valley east of the coast, which would normally be subject to a sea breeze before getting excessively hot – all the way from the L.A. basin to Ukiah. A lot of places set late season heat records, but the standouts were in the L.A. basin. Downtown L.A. hit 111. As noted by Mr. KIA #32, L.A. has reached at least the 90s every month of the year. However, despite daily heat records going back to the 1870s, the preponderance of monthly heat records have occurred in the past 40 years, and there were no readings of 110F or above before 1950. In the San Fernando valley northwest of downtown, it got even hotter. As noted by SH #26, a county high of 121 (all-time high according to NWS) was recorded at Woodland Hills on 9/6. Several other locations were in the 118-120F range, and Burbank Airport tied their all-time high of 114F on 9/5 and 9/6. BPL #43, no L.A. downtown didn’t hit 120, but the L.A. basin sure did! Incredible, but also a harbinger.
As the short wave energy arrived in the western U.S., it pulled a strong, cold high pressure airmass out of Canada, and dug an unseasonably deep upper low over the southwest U.S. This resulted in very strong easterly flow of warm dry air into the Pacific Northwest, resulting in explosive growth of forest fires Monday night. The NWS Portland OR weather discussion Saturday morning 9/5 highlighted the fire risk, noting ensemble forecasts by 00Z Tue with an “astounding” 6 to 7.4 standardized anomalies stronger than normal 1000 mb east winds.
On the cold side of the system, as noted by Mr. KIA #47, Colorado got relief from their fires as heavy snow blanketed especially the higher elevations. However, September at these elevations is no longer “summer” – as the region is subject to these sudden cold spells. In fact, I personally saw several inches of snow accumulation while camping well below timberline in late August 1985. So, the snow is nothing new. The fires currently putting over 10% of the Oregon population under evacuation orders are new in intensity. These events are two members of the same “elephant.”
Killiansays
Stupid. Just stupid. Everything after my comment is just… stupid.l
William B Jacksonsays
#47 Mr. Know It All, what a misnomer, Socialism is not Communism. Is there any thing you know that is not complete hogwash?
Adelorenzisays
“Back to the topic: the West Coast is on fire, record fire and record heat. How many warnings do we need to take action?”
It’s like being on the Titanic and there are people around, on the same sinking ship, who are saying “Icebergs don’t exist you idiot!” It’s truly remarkable. At times like this I have to remember that according to a pew research center poll 2/3 of Americans want the government to do more, I see that as hope for the future.
Mr KIA, as others have accurately pointed out, socialism is not communism (thanks BPL). I support the scandinavian model, which essentially combines socialism and capitalism. I read the economist journal. The following article shows just how well they have done economically, socially and in other ways:
Their climate policies are generally quite good as well. All these things look like they are mutually reinforcing to me.
Russellsays
57
“the West Coast is on fire, record fire… ”
Hate to spoil a good synechdochanecdote, but you left out record standing deadwood from insect damage.
Is the Tillamook Burn burning again?
Bob Loblawsays
William Jackson @ 56: “Mr. Know It All, what a misnomer … Is there any thing you know that is not complete hogwash?”
Well, based on KIA’s choice of user name, and his posting record here, I think he is operating under the same perspective as director Mike Curtiz talking to David Niven & Errol Flynn (as told in David Niven’s book Bring on the Empty Horses)
“You lousy bums, you and your stinking language, you think I know fuck nothing, well let me tell you— I know FUCK ALL!”
Charctic has the 2012 minimum on 9/17, at 3.387 km2; for JAXA, it’s 9/15 & 9/16, both listed at 3.18 million km2. (Though IIRC, if you look up the data table, that’s (nominally) to higher precision, so probably not a tie. But I’m not going that far into the weeds right now.)
The NOAA NHC plot for Atlantic tropical storms and potential storms is looking pretty crowded at the moment. Tropical Storm Sally has just been named (putting the 2020 season into =8th place in the ‘Number of Named Storms’ rankings with 18 so far) and likely contenders for two more named storms also currently plotted. It looks very likely that before long the 2020 season will gain 2nd spot for ‘Number of Named Storms’ (currently 2nd is 1933 with 20 Named Storms) and perhaps even rival 2005’s top spot. (2005 managed 28 Named Storms.)
Despite the number of storms, the 2020 season is a long way short of previous years in terms of Accumulated Cyclone Energy. While the number of storms is high, few have gained hurricane strength and those that did didn’t last very long, this perhaps contrary to the usual comment that AGW will bring fewer but more powerful storms. (So far in 2020, only Hurricane Laura managed more than a Cat1 hurricane strength and that only for 30 hours.)
Hate to spoil a good synechdochanecdote, but you left out record standing deadwood from insect damage.
Russell, you know there are multiple layers of causation for the current west coast fires. AGW is one of them. Insect damage is related to the warming, but its impact on fire regime isn’t simple. For example, it looks like insect-killed trees are more flammable than live trees until their needles fall, but not afterwards. From the abstract of Bark beetles, fuels, fires and implications for forest management in the Intermountain West (my emphasis):
Bark beetle-caused tree mortality in conifer forests affects the quantity and quality of forest fuels and has long been assumed to increase fire hazard and potential fire behavior. In reality, bark beetles, and their effects on fuel accumulation, and subsequent fire hazard, are poorly understood. We extensively sampled fuels in three bark beetle-affected Intermountain conifer forests and compared these data to existing research on bark beetle/fuels/fire interactions within the context of the disturbance regime. Data were collected in endemic, epidemic and post-epidemic stands of Douglas-fir, lodgepole pine and Engelmann spruce. From these data, we evaluated the influence of bark beetle-caused tree mortality on various fuels characteristics over the course of a bark beetle rotation. The data showed that changes in fuels over time create periods where the potential for high intensity and/or severe fires increases or decreases. The net result of bark beetle epidemics was a substantial change in species composition and a highly altered fuels complex. Early in epidemics there is a net increase in the amount of fine surface fuels when compared to endemic stands. In post-epidemic stands large, dead, woody fuels, and live surface fuels dominate. We then discuss potential fire behavior in bark beetle-affected conifer fuels based on actual and simulated fuels data. Results indicated that for surface fires both rates of fire spread and fireline intensities were higher in the current epidemic stands than in the endemic stands. Rates of spread and fireline intensities were higher in epidemic stands due, however, to decreased vegetative sheltering and its effect on mid-flame wind speed, rather than changes in fuels. Passive crown fires were more likely in post-epidemic stands, but active crown fires were less likely due to decreased aerial fuel continuity. We also discuss the ecological effects of extreme fire behavior. Information is presented on managing forests to reduce the impact of bark beetle outbreaks and the interplay between management, bark beetle populations, fuels and fire hazard and behavior.
The Tillamook Burn, a series of fires that began in 1933 and destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres, was probably as bad as this week’s fires, Dr. Moseley said. It’s hard to know for sure, she said, because “no one’s alive to tell the tale.”
And what’s different this time, Dr. Moseley said, is that far fewer people lived in those areas 90 years ago. “Tillamook didn’t have people in it,” she said. By comparison, this week’s fires seem likely to cause large numbers of casualties.
Mal Adaptedsays
Speaking of wildfire in Oregon, the nearest fire front is presently around 10 miles from my house, and appears to be stationary. Winds are calm, temperatures moderate and rain is predicted for early next week. This near-real-time mapping tool, using satellite sensors, is awesome:
What a brave new world we live in, where you can watch disaster marching toward you hour by hour.
Barry Finchsays
This is the semi-annual heat for the Arctic Ocean, centred 75N. The warm air is only accurate to a few w/m**2, the small numbers +/- 1
03-22 09-22
to
to
09-22 03-22
147 10 Sunshine absorbed
66 164 Warm air from south
0 20 Water freeze to sea ice latent heat
10 10 Atlantic Intermediate Water (AIW)
—- —-
223 204 Total heat provided
The heat above goes into this:
203 162 Radiated to space at 4, -12 degrees
20 0 Melt sea ice latent heat
0 42 Heat un-accounted (inversion?, ocean ?)
—- —-
223 204 Total heat provided
Note that the latent heat of ice forming & melting has zero effect on the annual heat budget (20 w/m**2 consumed for 6 months, then 20 w/m**2 generated for 6 months). I infer that the 42 w/m**2 of un-accounted heat must be mostly, or all, heat that is radiated to space from high altitude because there are large tropospheric temperature lapse rate inversions over the Arctic Ocean in autumn/winter because that huge 164 w/m**2 of warm air from the south is coming in at high altitude so there’s evidently 42 w/m**2 of heat not making it to the surface. The numbers are quite approximate for general illustration because it’s like pulling teeth to get comprehensive, accurate input analysis all accurate to 1 w/m**2 or better (and there’s no way I’ll be computing from billions of raw data points). I don’t know whether Warm air from south 66,164 would increase or decrease with Jet Stream wonk. The Jet Stream formula form is:
Acceleration[west—>east] = f (Velocity[south—>north], latitude)
When/if there were no sea ice on the Arctic Ocean April-September then the 147 Sunshine absorbed above increases to 189 because ocean is less reflective than light/dark ice (from a June/July 2019 paper), scientists had 0.71 w/m**2. This extra 42 will be partly heating the Arctic Ocean & partly heating the surface/air, maybe + 3 degrees to the surface/air and the other 34 w/m**2 heating the Arctic Ocean. It’ll be close to those quantities anyway unless there’s a big change to warm air from the south 66 above due to more Jet Stream wonk than now. You can interpolate of course from now until no sea ice. I don’t know what warm air from south 66 & 164 changes to, whether it increases due to more Jet Stream wonk changing the heat drop from 40N-90N that way or whether it decreases because it’s only going there because it’s colder there. It’s about time that the WG1 climate science scientists put out a paper about that, it would be very handy to clear that up.
dhogazasays
Russel sez:
“Hate to spoil a good synechdochanecdote, but you left out record standing deadwood from insect damage.”
Not in the western Oregon forests that are burning. Most of these fires are in heavily managed (that’s timber industry/USFS jargon for “logged”) forests. The west slope of the Oregon Cascades are wet with species like Doug fir predominant at the lower elevations where much of the fires are burning.
In Oregon, the large stands of record standing deadwood from insect damage you refer to are primarily found east of the Cascades, and a bunch of it has been removed in the last 15 or so years with the blessing of conservationists. Take a drive on US 97 north of Klamath Falls towards Bend and you’ll drive by large areas where insect-killed lodgepole pine has been removed from the side of highway, greatly increasing its effectiveness as a firebreak. But this is just a diversion since this type of forest doesn’t even exist in NW Oregon.
Many of the fires in California are burning in chaparral, not forest. The CZU complex north of Santa Cruz was burning in a variety of forest types, including old growth redwoods (where they’re probably doing relatively little harm other than structures burning), younger Doug fir and redwood second growth, etc.
The Dolan Fire is burning its way through part of the Ventana Wilderness in the Los Padres National Forest, and this forest has a scattered drought (not insect) weakened or killed trees in it. Of course, drought frequency and extent in California are linked to warming.
The primary fires aren’t in anything like the solid stands of trees killed by pine bark beetles that the timber industry likes to publish photos of to push their claims that we need more logging and fewer scientists and conservationists to conserve forests.
Of course, the insects you refer to (pine bark beetles etc) have been extending their range and have more limited winter die-offs due to warming, and more frequent droughts in California are linked to warming, so your point, even if entirely correct, would still lead to the conclusion that warming is making things worse.
Western Hikersays
#57
“Back to the topic: the West Coast is on fire, record fire and record heat. How many warnings do we need to take action?”
Fortunately, the two occurring together (fire and record heat) is short lived. Smoke reflects sunlight, just like clouds, and the observed temperature ends up being way cooler than what the weather models predict. Sometimes a 20 F discrepancy if the smoke is thick enough.
Western Hikersays
Russell, #59
“Hate to spoil a good synechdochanecdote, but you left out record standing deadwood from insect damage.”
The Eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains have a big problem with the pine bark beetle. Ponderosa Pine is especially vulnerable. This is not true for the western slopes, where the fires have been raging.
You should know that the crown of an infected tree turns a rusty orange/yellow as the tree dies. Not the case here:
@4 Kevin McKinney “JAXA SIE: 3.89 km2, down another 50k. ‘How low can it go?’” Whatever. It’s obviously irrelevant to the physical science (it strictly a social thing) and this is patently obvious, because the solar radiation bell curve is almost back down to zero (land of the midnight sun, and the noonday night). The solar radiation absorbed is actually the integration of the product of the open water (converse of sea ice area) and the solar radiation bell curve which was 5-10 times as high in late June as it is now. Sort of obvious to the type of brains & educations of many who browse the comments of this particular Web Log Site (as opposed to oh so many others).
Barry Finchsays
@30 sidd Well I think the interesting thing, rather than 1971–2018 heat gain, is the step change in rate at 1995 AD or soon after that led to 0.75 w/m**2 year for the ocean for the 22 years after that rather than the 0.38 w/m**2 year for the ocean for the years before that.
———-
Recent intensification of wind-driven circulation in the Pacific and the ongoing warming hiatus
Nature Climate Change 4, 222–227 (2014) doi:10.1038/nclimate2106 Received 11 September 2013 Accepted 18 December 2013 Published online 09 February 2014 Corrected online 14 February 2014
Matthew H. England, Shayne McGregor, Paul Spence, Gerald A. Meehl, Axel Timmermann, Wenju Cai, Alex Sen Gupta, Michael J. McPhaden, Ariaan Purich & Agus Santoso Affiliations
Quote: “Here we show that a pronounced strengthening in Pacific trade winds over the past two decades—unprecedented in observations/reanalysis data and not captured by climate models—is sufficient to account for the cooling of the tropical Pacific and a substantial slowdown in surface warming through increased subsurface ocean heat uptake.”
—————-
Quote: “The record-breaking increase in Pacific Equatorial trade winds over the past 20 years had, until now, baffled researchers. Originally, this trade wind intensification was considered to be a response to Pacific decadal variability. However, the strength of the winds was much more powerful than expected due to the changes in Pacific sea surface temperature. Another riddle was that previous research indicated that under global warming scenarios Pacific Equatorial Trade winds would slow down over the coming century. The solution was found in the rapid warming of the Atlantic Ocean basin, which has created unexpected pressure differences between the Atlantic and Pacific. This has produced wind anomalies that have given Pacific Equatorial trade winds an additional big push. “The rapid warming of the Atlantic Ocean created high pressure zones in the upper atmosphere over that basin and low pressure zones close to the surface of the ocean,” says Professor Axel Timmermann, co-lead and corresponding author from the University of Hawaii. “The rising air parcels, over the Atlantic eventually sink over the eastern tropical Pacific, thus creating higher surface pressure there. The enormous pressure see-saw with high pressure in the Pacific and low pressure in the Atlantic gave the Pacific trade winds an extra kick, amplifying their strength. It’s like giving a playground roundabout an extra push as it spins past.” Many climate models appear to have underestimated the magnitude of the coupling between the two ocean basins, which may explain why they struggled to produce the recent increase in Pacific Equatorial trade wind trends. While active, the stronger Equatorial trade winds have caused far greater overturning of ocean water in the West Pacific, pushing more atmospheric heat into the ocean, as shown by co-author and ARCCSS Chief Investigator Professor Matthew England earlier this year. This increased overturning appears to explain much of the recent slowdown in the rise of global average surface temperatures. Importantly, the researchers don’t expect the current pressure difference between the two ocean basins to last. When it does end, they expect to see some rapid changes, including a sudden acceleration of global average surface temperatures. “It will be difficult to predict when the Pacific cooling trend and its contribution to the global hiatus in surface temperatures will come to an end,” Professor England says.”
Karsten V. Johansensays
#BPL “marginal theory makes accurate predictions about how markets behave”.
KVJ: Really? Marginalists predicted the crashs 1929, 1967, 1973, 1979, 1987, 1997, 2001, 2008 and now? Their theory of spontaneous market equilibrium was confirmed over and over again?
Clearly Marx was wrong about many things, but not about the tendency of capitalism to end up in monopoly and wreak havoc all over the place. If you then point to the Soviet Union etc., I will remind you that “The soviet system is nothing but state capitalism under the dictatorship of the bolshevik party” as Lenin himself declared 1921, a truth which he of course didn’t understand the fatal implications of. He believed just as any other dictator that his genius guaranteed happy end, even if he was more honest than his successor Stalin, who simply declared the whole capitalist dictatorship to be communism in 1936 after murdering millions of peasants and almost all his fellow revolutionaries from 1917.
As Marx wrote in his “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (an early german socialist programme): “You write that “Work is the source of all wealth”. Wrong! Nature is even more this source.” Here we have the main reason for Marx’ declaration at about the same time: “I am no marxist”. What he pointed out here was what he often repeated: capitalism is the same as the wage labour system, and labour unionism therefore does not tend to a break with capitalism, on the contrary. In the world of today, the economic center of capitalism has become the chinese “communism”. What has become known as communism is simply the asian way to capitalism. What Marx thought of as “the productive forces” have never been as he thought, restricted by capitalist organization, but have instead 1) more and more been perverted to warring capacity (as discussed by Lenin 1914) and superflouus production/environmental destruction and 2) later completely outgrown the capacity of their ecological foundations and therefore become more and more destructive forces.
What Marx etc. couldn’t possibly know, was that the enormous development of productivity wasn’t just labour productivity but almost solely depended on the fossilized concentration of “buried sunshine energy” from hundreds of millions of years: coal and oil. Thus mankind ended up in a fatal ecological trap. Marx wrote that capitalism would either be succeeded by democratic socialism (in his elderly days he thought that democratic states like Great Britain and the Scandinavian countries could develop socialism without revolution, only absolutist states like Russia and Germany could not, and he would clearly have disagreed strongly with Lenin on most subjects, had he ever met him) or it would end up in barbarism.
As is now easy to see, he was right in this. The first world war, Hitler and Stalin etc. weren’t just unfortunate exceptions and faults in the otherwise perfect development towards “the end of history” (Francis Fukuyama 1990). On the contrary. As we can now again see with Trump/Clinton, Putin, Xi etc., the spontaneous tendency of capitalism is towards total war, barbaric and ruthless dictatorship and global climatic and ecological collapse. The worlds fourth richest man, the eager Trump-supporter Elon Musk, is a fascist madman and megalomaniac just as is all his fellow oiligarchs all around the world. He promises to put one million men on Mars within a decade. But: “There may be water on Mars. But is there any intelligent life on Earth?” (George Monbiot).
“Stephen Fry, Mark Rylance and a former Archbishop of Canterbury are among 150 public figures to hit back at government moves to classify the climate protesters of Extinction Rebellion as an “organised crime group”. In a letter to be published in the Observer on Sunday, XR is described as “a group of people who are holding the powerful to account” – who should not become targets of “vitriol and anti-democratic posturing”.”
MA Roger@62: It has been a strange hurricane season this year. No problem spawning storms but every problem intensifying them. Dry Saharan air helped inhibit storm formation and intensification in August, and there has been a persistent TUTT in the tropical Atlantic inflicting wind shear over any storms that form in the MDR (hence little has developed and intensified in the MDR until a week ago). It goes to show that it is not all about the sea surface temperatures, that gives you an idea of the maximum potential intensity, but it is ultimately the atmospheric conditions (and land interaction) which dictate whether any developing storm can reach that potential. Hence I think it is an over-simplification to say that warming SSTs will automatically lead to more frequent and stronger storms, you need to try and estimate how vertical wind shear will change in a changing climate. I expect that a warming Atlantic SST will increase the potential intensity of storms on average, so when the atmospheric conditions become optimal at the time of a developing storm, that storm will likely become more intense than if the SSTs hadn’t warmed. It doesn’t mean every Atlantic tropical depression will blow up into a monster, put 50 kts of wind shear over it and it doesn’t matter how warm the SSTs are, it is doing nothing.
It is slightly ominous that many storms hitting the U.S this year have intensified right up until landfall. If this keeps up that doesn’t bode well if we get a Wilma-like storm forming in October and ploughing into the Gulf coast.
Ray Ladburysays
Russell: “Hate to spoil a good synechdochanecdote, but you left out record standing deadwood from insect damage.”
And you forgot to point out that insect damage is made worse because of climate change. Wonder why that was.
Barry Finchsays
@4 Kevin McKinney “JAXA SIE: 3.89 km2, down another 50k. ‘How low can it go?’” Whatever. It’s obviously irrelevant to the physical science (it’s strictly a social thing) and this is patently obvious because the solar radiation bell curve is almost back down to zero (land of the midnight sun, and the noonday night). The solar radiation absorbed is actually the integration of the product of the open water (converse of sea ice area) and the solar radiation bell curve which was 5-10 times as high in late June as it is now.
Chucksays
Mr. Know It All says:
8 Sep 2020 at 4:12 AM
26 – Split Dog
Just be thankful you arent living back in the 1800s when LA set most of their daily record highs:
NOAA has posted for August 2020 with an anomaly of +0.94ºC, a little up on July’s anomaly of +0.91ºC and giving May-Aug roughly similar anomalies. (The anomalies of the year-so-far sit in the range +0.91ºC to +1.18ºC).
August 2020 is the 2nd warmest August on the NOAA record, sitting below August 2016 (+0.98ºC) and above August 2017 & 2019 (both +0.92ºC), 2015 (+0.91ºC), 2014 (+0.83ºC) & 2018 (+0.80ºC).
August 2020 has the =25th highest anomaly in the all-month NOAA record.
The 2020 year-to-date average anomaly sits 2nd in the ranking tabled behind 2016. To gain the “warmest year” accolade from 2016 would require the Sept-Dec average to top +0.933ºC, so not much higher than the average over then last four months (which averaged +0.930ºC). And to slip to 3rd below 2019 would require Sept-Dec to average below +0.795ºC.
The NOAA data shows the Ocean temperature anomaly to be running particularly high with August 2020 Ocean temperature anomalies globally the =4th highest and for the NH 2nd highest (behind August 2019).
S.B. Ripmansays
That this is a GLOBAL climate emergency is beyond question. The smokey air quality currently plaguing Los Angeles is the same as existed in Sydney last January. The smog, heat and oppressiveness hammering New Delhi is the same as that in Jakarta. The force 4 and 5 hurricanes blasting at the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico are duplicates of what the Philippines have seen recently. Arctic amplification is changing weather patterns all over the Northern Hemisphere. We’re all in this together.
patricksays
Peter Gleick’s article, “The future has arrived: These explosive fires are our wake-up call.”
Western Hiker @67 – having experienced unprecedented fires in Australia last year I have to say I didn’t notice smoke reducing the temperature. It sure didn’t reduce the fire danger. Hot winds coming off the Australian interior rather than direct sunshine locally seemed to be why it was so hot. Why it was so unseasonally hot is going to be complex to answer but overall raised temperatures from global warming will be a factor.
patricksays
#59 Russell: “…but you left out record standing deadwood from insect damage.”
That’s funny, hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick did too.
Climate scientist-NASA data scientist Peter Kalmus did too. Fire ecologist Natasha Stavros did too.
You inflate a talking point favored by denialists, conspiracists, and obsessive high-volume tweeters. Not to mention the all-of-these.
Mr. Know It Allsays
57 – Adelorenzi
““Back to the topic: the West Coast is on fire, record fire and record heat. How many warnings do we need to take action?”
It’s like being on the Titanic and there are people around, on the same sinking ship, who are saying “Icebergs don’t exist you idiot!” It’s truly remarkable. At times like this I have to remember that according to a pew research center poll 2/3 of Americans want the government to do more, I see that as hope for the future.”
The fires, nor the heat are even close to “records”. In fact, they are the norm. Even the Oregonian, as leftist as it gets, agrees:
Such fires don’t occur often, but when they do, and when 2/3 of the people are struggling to blame every unusual event on AGW or Trump, it’s easy to see everything as AGW or Trump-caused. Perhaps the most recent large fire that dwarfed the fires of today occurred in 1910, burning 3,000,000 acres in a single fire. You read that right – 1910, 110 years ago when CO2 was in short supply. The fire stretched from Washington to Montana and was called The Great Fire of 1910:
Back in those days, and earlier, fires that dwarfed even that fire were not unusual – it’s just that no-one was there to record it.
There’s nothing new under the sun.
FYI, the claims that 10% of Oregonians had to evacuate are false – it may be true that 10% were told to be ready to evacuate, but probably less than 50K actually had to do it.
One guy was caught setting fires, arrested, released (of course), and then re-arrested after setting a half dozen more fires on the day he was released! You cain’t make this stuff up:
At least 3 of the Oregon big fires were human-caused, several have “unknown” as the cause, and a few are lightning-caused. Some, no doubt are arson like this one in California:
Climate science denier appointed to top position at NOAA
Situation Room
David Legates, a longtime climate change skeptic, has been appointed by the Trump administration to help run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency charged with producing “much of the climate research funded” by the government, The Washington Post reports.
Killiansays
Re # 71 Karsten:
I’ve told them this. They do not listen. “Socialism” is nothing more than group ownership Capitalism. Ownership is the problem regardless which stupid name one puts on it.
Killiansays
#58 nigel:
Are they sustainable, or even close to it? No. Capitalism cannot be without a huge proportion of the population being extremely poor… which is exactly where we are heading, but without the sustainability. THAT’S all forms of Capitalism in a nutshell. See Karsten’s comments before barking more words.
Vendicar Kahnsays
#6 – “As long as capitalism exists, there will be no meaningful way”
Close but incorrect. As long as Capitalism is allowed to run rampant and to be valued more than the nature there is no hope.
Capitalism must be monitored, metered, controlled, so that it functions for the betterment of all living things rather than to serve to maximize 0’s and 1’s in some meaningless bank account maintained in the ether.
Essential services, for example have no business being in the hands of Capitalists. Neither do any of the regulatory agencies that overwatch those capitalists.
There needs to be a concerted effort to abolish neoLiberal economics – Libertarian ideology – from university Economics departments, and the abolition of propaganda groups like the Cato (Koch) institute, Heritage foundation, CEI etc, so that they will no longer spread their deadly propaganda into the body politic.
If this can’t be done though the courts, then it must be done through fire.
Vendicar Kahnsays
#78 – “The future has arrived: These explosive fires are our wake-up call.”
“What you are seeing is not happening” – Donald Trump.
The willfully ignorant will remain willfully ignorant to the end.
If there is to be progress then they will need to be either steamrolled or exterminated.
There are no other options.
Killiansays
nigeltherearenopoorj:
Actually if industry had to pay the costs of its environmental externalities (and it should) they would just pass these costs onto the consumer and absorb some of them in efficiencies, and still make a profit on top of all that. So the UN article on the issue is a bit silly.
Hmmm… a large majority of humanity already can’t afford much – most? – of what the global 1% consumes, but you think adding the costs of Nature will be a simple matter of just passing on costs when even among the global 1%, like you and I, most people are living month-to-month? Do you have ANY idea what the true costs would be? Rhetorical: Incalculable.
Anyone who says otherwise is a liar or a fool. Yes, they can come up with a price, but there is absolutely no way to know if it would be accurate, and, worse, how do you calculate extinctions, collapse of society, human deaths, etc?
How do you calculate the end of civilization, extinctions and deaths at all?? It’s not even a meaningful question.
Saying the costs would just be passed on shows that you, as ever, cannot think.
Killiansays
41 Ken Fabian: Seems to be getting off topic but my 2c worth –
Corruption, not Capitalism is at the heart of our problems addressing the energy/emissions/climate problem.
The cause is the cure? You’re deluded, badly.
Tell us, which principles underlie Capitalism and which principles underlie a regenerative society?
Vendicar Kahnsays
PIOMAS. Current minimum ice volume = 4,000 Kilometes**3
Rate of ice reduction = 3,000 Kilometers**3 per decade.
Arctic is is free in Summer by 2030.
Diaminedavesays
Dear Mr KIA
your second link details why the fires were so large, it was because of the railway Most of the fires were caused by sparks from the coal fired locos.
No one disputes that droughts occurred before the recent (geologically speaking) rise of CO2. and other global warming gasses in the atmosphere.
KVJ 71: KVJ: Really? Marginalists predicted the crashs 1929, 1967, 1973, 1979, 1987, 1997, 2001, 2008 and now? Their theory of spontaneous market equilibrium was confirmed over and over again?
BPL: You have the performance of markets confused with business cycle theory.
@4 Kevin McKinney “JAXA SIE: 3.89 km2, down another 50k. ‘How low can it go?’” Whatever. It’s obviously irrelevant to the physical science (it’s strictly a social thing)….
Not irrelevant at all physically: for one thing, the more open water there is after Arctic seasonal nightfall, the greater the energy flux from ocean to atmosphere. Insolation isn’t the only relevant process.
But leaving that aside, maybe you’re forgetting that climate change, and especially its mitigation, are also “social things?” Another seriously sub-4 million minimum may not be a disaster in terms of solar forcing, but it is very much another red light flashing on the planetary dashboard. I don’t think it’s too much to suggest we spare it a few glances.
So, updating–JAXA logged 3.58 million km2 yesterday, which was *up* by 30k from the previous day. So it’s possible the daily minimum in that record will be seen to have occurred on 9/13, at 3.55 million:
They show 9/14 at 3.773 million km2, which was down 15k from the previous day.
Chucksays
Killed In Action (KIA) said: Back in those days, and earlier, fires that dwarfed even that fire were not unusual – it’s just that no-one was there to record it.”
>Your level of asinine bullshit is breath taking. I guess the moderators are powerless to send your drivel to the bore hole. It’s sad really because you’re constantly spreading disinformation and propaganda on a “legitimate” science blog that others continually have to spend hours debunking.
You’re a low level troll, an asshole and a moron rolled into one. Congratulations!
Victorsays
“You’re a low level troll, an asshole and a moron rolled into one. Congratulations!”
Thank you, Chuck, for this remarkably thoughtful and insightful assessment.
If anyone belongs in the bore hole it is YOU.
Western Hikersays
#79, Ken Fabian:
“having experienced unprecedented fires in Australia last year I have to say I didn’t notice smoke reducing the temperature.”
This surprised me. I had assumed the phenomenon was universal. Here is a sample of what folks have been noticing up and down the West Coast:
“We’re having such a large scope of dense smoke across the Bay Area and the West Coast in general, that it’s actually impacting our weather conditions,” Gass said. “We’re kind of in uncharted territory right now.”
“The smoke caused temperatures to drop on what was supposed to be another warm day on the tail end of a heat wave, with the darkness forcing morning drivers to turn on their headlights and triggering streetlights to turn on as early as noon.”
“In a tweet, the National Weather Service warned that the smoky conditions were “beyond the scope of our models.” Those models, which predicted temperatures in the 80s across parts of the Bay Area on Wednesday, don’t take into account the potential for smoke to be so thick that it blocks sunlight and keeps temperatures cool, Gass said.
The Bay Area has witnessed the phenomenon, known as smoke shading, before, including after the Camp Fire in 2018.”
I have a hunch the smoke messes with wind forecasts as well. The lack of surface heating creates an inversion, with the atmosphere ending up much more stable than the models ‘expected’. Might explain the failed forecasts here:
I’ve been checking forecasts for various locations on my Weather Channel app. Places where, for example, 5-10 mph winds were supposed to help clear out the smoke, the observed tended to be calm. The pattern seems to go on for days in many locations.
Thanks for the link.
Should be noted that most likely only the periphery of those areas are actively burning. The fuel in the centers had burned prior. The current fires are eating their way outwards.
William B Jacksonsays
#94 Wrong Mr KIA is if anything worse than any thing he said!
it’s true the forecast for favorable winds to disperse the smoke, and rain, where I live have been revised for later and later. I don’t know whether that’s attributable to the smoke or not. The smoke is still here, and now the rain isn’t coming until Thursday. They’re telling us we shouldn’t exercise outdoors without an N95 mask. I don’t have one, so I’m limited to short forays. Kinda sucks, but I’m not really afraid of losing my house this time around.
Mr. Know It Allsays
75 – Chuck
“You need to attend a few Trump rallies.”
He doesn’t have rallies any more. He has “peaceful protests”. Why? Because peaceful protests of unlimited size are encouraged by the left as we see every night in burning D-controlled war zones (aka cities); while huge, enthusiastic crowds of patriots who support the President are discouraged, even prohibited, by local laws limiting meeting size.
93 – Chuck
Nice childish temper tantrum you threw up there, Chuck.
nigeljsays
Killian @84,
“Are they (Scandinavian countries) sustainable, or even close to it? No. Capitalism cannot be without a huge proportion of the population being extremely poor… which is exactly where we are heading, but without the sustainability. THAT’S all forms of Capitalism in a nutshell. See Karsten’s comments before barking more words.”
No, the Scandinavian countries have capitalism in their socio econmomic model, and they do not have a huge proportion of poor people. In fact they have very low poverty rates, for example Sweden below. They do it partly with some targeted income redistribution and very good help for the unemployed etc.
Growing inequality is however a problem in some countries particularly western democracies. However this is due to neoliberal economic policies and there are ways of mitigating the problem.
Of course Scandinavia doesn’t meet some definition of perfect sustainability and probably never will. Neither does your model, because it includes at least some modern technology, which is not ever going to be perfectly sustainable and “last indefinitely”. Its purely a question of what is the best compromise, and you have to convince people your ideas are the best compromise. Hows that going?
————————————————
Killian @87
“Hmmm… a large majority of humanity already can’t afford much – most? – of what the global 1% consumes, but you think adding the costs of Nature will be a simple matter of just passing on costs when even among the global 1%, like you and I, most people are living month-to-month? Do you have ANY idea what the true costs would be? Rhetorical: Incalculable……Saying the costs would just be passed on shows that you, as ever, cannot think.”
Costs of externalities could be set quite high, and as a result some people will not be able to afford some industrial goods. But of course I accept we have to pay costs of externalities for the sake of protecting the environment. Indeed I promote it.
And yet your own model includes very significant use of modern technology (communications, health, public transport, recycling) so it has ‘externalities’ (roughly meaning environmental impacts and costs) so it has to deal with these, which means someone has to bear the costs. I think it probably means your system would deliver fewer goods, the same as capitalism if it had to pay for its externalities properly.
So who cannot think here? Not me.
nigeljsays
KVJ 71: “Really? Marginalists predicted the crashs 1929, 1967, 1973, 1979, 1987, 1997, 2001, 2008 and now? Their theory of spontaneous market equilibrium was confirmed over and over again?”
Like BPL says you are confusing markets with the business cycle. And economists do predict business downturns like this about every 10 years on average, but its hard to predict exactly when, like its hard to exactly predict when el nino will occur in climate predictions.
There are believed to be other longer wave business downturns on approximately a 60 year cycle called Kondratieff waves, but again its very hard to accurately predict exactly when, and there is not a consensus on the idea.
KIA 47: On Socialism, gotta be careful with that – it usually ends in tears; nigelj will perhaps learn from this one:
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/100-years-communism-death-deprivation
BPL: KIA doesn’t understand the difference between socialism and Communism.
Mr. KIA: “On Socialism, gotta be careful with that – it usually ends in tears…”
Yeah, because all the Scandinavian countries are such sad places and the US is so fricking happy. Dude, you really are a broken, useless tool.
Considering the recent highly amplified weather pattern in the Eastern Pacific/Western North American sector to be the “elephant” I’ve seen comments about a few of the body parts. I’d like to zoom out and take a look at how they connect with the rest of the beast.
A developing La Nina pattern is associated with a tongue of anomalously cold water in the eastern equatorial Pacific, but also a band of mid latitude warm water from southeast of Japan toward the Pacific Northwest and Gulf of Alaska. https://psl.noaa.gov/map/clim/sst.shtml In fact, there is an unusually warm area, even for this overall pattern, east of the dateline. Climate change helps make such a warm pocket more likely.
The warmer water helped maintain the strength of a typhoon as it went extratropical in the central Pacific. This resulted in an amplification of the snyoptic pattern, as was noted well over a week ago in the NCEP Weather Prediction Center extended forecast discussions, as they debated whether to use the slow and amplified ECMWF solutions (they did) or the faster and shallower GFS models.
The approaching typhoon-associated short wave energy first helped pump up an already existing southwest U.S. upper ridge, spilling additional hot air westward over the Sierras all the way to the central and southern California coasts. The greatest temperature anomalies were focused in the first valley east of the coast, which would normally be subject to a sea breeze before getting excessively hot – all the way from the L.A. basin to Ukiah. A lot of places set late season heat records, but the standouts were in the L.A. basin. Downtown L.A. hit 111. As noted by Mr. KIA #32, L.A. has reached at least the 90s every month of the year. However, despite daily heat records going back to the 1870s, the preponderance of monthly heat records have occurred in the past 40 years, and there were no readings of 110F or above before 1950. In the San Fernando valley northwest of downtown, it got even hotter. As noted by SH #26, a county high of 121 (all-time high according to NWS) was recorded at Woodland Hills on 9/6. Several other locations were in the 118-120F range, and Burbank Airport tied their all-time high of 114F on 9/5 and 9/6. BPL #43, no L.A. downtown didn’t hit 120, but the L.A. basin sure did! Incredible, but also a harbinger.
As the short wave energy arrived in the western U.S., it pulled a strong, cold high pressure airmass out of Canada, and dug an unseasonably deep upper low over the southwest U.S. This resulted in very strong easterly flow of warm dry air into the Pacific Northwest, resulting in explosive growth of forest fires Monday night. The NWS Portland OR weather discussion Saturday morning 9/5 highlighted the fire risk, noting ensemble forecasts by 00Z Tue with an “astounding” 6 to 7.4 standardized anomalies stronger than normal 1000 mb east winds.
On the cold side of the system, as noted by Mr. KIA #47, Colorado got relief from their fires as heavy snow blanketed especially the higher elevations. However, September at these elevations is no longer “summer” – as the region is subject to these sudden cold spells. In fact, I personally saw several inches of snow accumulation while camping well below timberline in late August 1985. So, the snow is nothing new. The fires currently putting over 10% of the Oregon population under evacuation orders are new in intensity. These events are two members of the same “elephant.”
Stupid. Just stupid. Everything after my comment is just… stupid.l
#47 Mr. Know It All, what a misnomer, Socialism is not Communism. Is there any thing you know that is not complete hogwash?
“Back to the topic: the West Coast is on fire, record fire and record heat. How many warnings do we need to take action?”
It’s like being on the Titanic and there are people around, on the same sinking ship, who are saying “Icebergs don’t exist you idiot!” It’s truly remarkable. At times like this I have to remember that according to a pew research center poll 2/3 of Americans want the government to do more, I see that as hope for the future.
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/06/23/two-thirds-of-americans-think-government-should-do-more-on-climate/
Mr KIA, as others have accurately pointed out, socialism is not communism (thanks BPL). I support the scandinavian model, which essentially combines socialism and capitalism. I read the economist journal. The following article shows just how well they have done economically, socially and in other ways:
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2013/01/31/the-secret-of-their-success
Their climate policies are generally quite good as well. All these things look like they are mutually reinforcing to me.
57
“the West Coast is on fire, record fire… ”
Hate to spoil a good synechdochanecdote, but you left out record standing deadwood from insect damage.
Is the Tillamook Burn burning again?
William Jackson @ 56: “Mr. Know It All, what a misnomer … Is there any thing you know that is not complete hogwash?”
Well, based on KIA’s choice of user name, and his posting record here, I think he is operating under the same perspective as director Mike Curtiz talking to David Niven & Errol Flynn (as told in David Niven’s book Bring on the Empty Horses)
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/57209-from-david-niven-s-autobiography-bring-on-the-empty-horses-director
JAXA is back up, and for 9/11 shows an extent of 3.56 million km2–that’s just 230k above the record-low 2012.
https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/vishop/#/extent
For Charctic, the numbers show 3.770 million km2 for this year, and 3.480 for 2012 (a difference of 290k).
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
Charctic has the 2012 minimum on 9/17, at 3.387 km2; for JAXA, it’s 9/15 & 9/16, both listed at 3.18 million km2. (Though IIRC, if you look up the data table, that’s (nominally) to higher precision, so probably not a tie. But I’m not going that far into the weeds right now.)
The NOAA NHC plot for Atlantic tropical storms and potential storms is looking pretty crowded at the moment. Tropical Storm Sally has just been named (putting the 2020 season into =8th place in the ‘Number of Named Storms’ rankings with 18 so far) and likely contenders for two more named storms also currently plotted. It looks very likely that before long the 2020 season will gain 2nd spot for ‘Number of Named Storms’ (currently 2nd is 1933 with 20 Named Storms) and perhaps even rival 2005’s top spot. (2005 managed 28 Named Storms.)
Despite the number of storms, the 2020 season is a long way short of previous years in terms of Accumulated Cyclone Energy. While the number of storms is high, few have gained hurricane strength and those that did didn’t last very long, this perhaps contrary to the usual comment that AGW will bring fewer but more powerful storms. (So far in 2020, only Hurricane Laura managed more than a Cat1 hurricane strength and that only for 30 hours.)
Russell:
Russell, you know there are multiple layers of causation for the current west coast fires. AGW is one of them. Insect damage is related to the warming, but its impact on fire regime isn’t simple. For example, it looks like insect-killed trees are more flammable than live trees until their needles fall, but not afterwards. From the abstract of Bark beetles, fuels, fires and implications for forest management in the Intermountain West (my emphasis):
Russell:
No, but see In Oregon, a New Climate Menace: Fires Raging Where They Don’t Usually Burn:
Speaking of wildfire in Oregon, the nearest fire front is presently around 10 miles from my house, and appears to be stationary. Winds are calm, temperatures moderate and rain is predicted for early next week. This near-real-time mapping tool, using satellite sensors, is awesome:
https://www.oregon.gov/odf/fire/pages/firestats.aspx
What a brave new world we live in, where you can watch disaster marching toward you hour by hour.
This is the semi-annual heat for the Arctic Ocean, centred 75N. The warm air is only accurate to a few w/m**2, the small numbers +/- 1
03-22 09-22
to
to
09-22 03-22
147 10 Sunshine absorbed
66 164 Warm air from south
0 20 Water freeze to sea ice latent heat
10 10 Atlantic Intermediate Water (AIW)
—- —-
223 204 Total heat provided
The heat above goes into this:
203 162 Radiated to space at 4, -12 degrees
20 0 Melt sea ice latent heat
0 42 Heat un-accounted (inversion?, ocean ?)
—- —-
223 204 Total heat provided
Note that the latent heat of ice forming & melting has zero effect on the annual heat budget (20 w/m**2 consumed for 6 months, then 20 w/m**2 generated for 6 months). I infer that the 42 w/m**2 of un-accounted heat must be mostly, or all, heat that is radiated to space from high altitude because there are large tropospheric temperature lapse rate inversions over the Arctic Ocean in autumn/winter because that huge 164 w/m**2 of warm air from the south is coming in at high altitude so there’s evidently 42 w/m**2 of heat not making it to the surface. The numbers are quite approximate for general illustration because it’s like pulling teeth to get comprehensive, accurate input analysis all accurate to 1 w/m**2 or better (and there’s no way I’ll be computing from billions of raw data points). I don’t know whether Warm air from south 66,164 would increase or decrease with Jet Stream wonk. The Jet Stream formula form is:
Acceleration[west—>east] = f (Velocity[south—>north], latitude)
When/if there were no sea ice on the Arctic Ocean April-September then the 147 Sunshine absorbed above increases to 189 because ocean is less reflective than light/dark ice (from a June/July 2019 paper), scientists had 0.71 w/m**2. This extra 42 will be partly heating the Arctic Ocean & partly heating the surface/air, maybe + 3 degrees to the surface/air and the other 34 w/m**2 heating the Arctic Ocean. It’ll be close to those quantities anyway unless there’s a big change to warm air from the south 66 above due to more Jet Stream wonk than now. You can interpolate of course from now until no sea ice. I don’t know what warm air from south 66 & 164 changes to, whether it increases due to more Jet Stream wonk changing the heat drop from 40N-90N that way or whether it decreases because it’s only going there because it’s colder there. It’s about time that the WG1 climate science scientists put out a paper about that, it would be very handy to clear that up.
Russel sez:
“Hate to spoil a good synechdochanecdote, but you left out record standing deadwood from insect damage.”
Not in the western Oregon forests that are burning. Most of these fires are in heavily managed (that’s timber industry/USFS jargon for “logged”) forests. The west slope of the Oregon Cascades are wet with species like Doug fir predominant at the lower elevations where much of the fires are burning.
In Oregon, the large stands of record standing deadwood from insect damage you refer to are primarily found east of the Cascades, and a bunch of it has been removed in the last 15 or so years with the blessing of conservationists. Take a drive on US 97 north of Klamath Falls towards Bend and you’ll drive by large areas where insect-killed lodgepole pine has been removed from the side of highway, greatly increasing its effectiveness as a firebreak. But this is just a diversion since this type of forest doesn’t even exist in NW Oregon.
Many of the fires in California are burning in chaparral, not forest. The CZU complex north of Santa Cruz was burning in a variety of forest types, including old growth redwoods (where they’re probably doing relatively little harm other than structures burning), younger Doug fir and redwood second growth, etc.
The Dolan Fire is burning its way through part of the Ventana Wilderness in the Los Padres National Forest, and this forest has a scattered drought (not insect) weakened or killed trees in it. Of course, drought frequency and extent in California are linked to warming.
The primary fires aren’t in anything like the solid stands of trees killed by pine bark beetles that the timber industry likes to publish photos of to push their claims that we need more logging and fewer scientists and conservationists to conserve forests.
Of course, the insects you refer to (pine bark beetles etc) have been extending their range and have more limited winter die-offs due to warming, and more frequent droughts in California are linked to warming, so your point, even if entirely correct, would still lead to the conclusion that warming is making things worse.
#57
“Back to the topic: the West Coast is on fire, record fire and record heat. How many warnings do we need to take action?”
Fortunately, the two occurring together (fire and record heat) is short lived. Smoke reflects sunlight, just like clouds, and the observed temperature ends up being way cooler than what the weather models predict. Sometimes a 20 F discrepancy if the smoke is thick enough.
Russell, #59
“Hate to spoil a good synechdochanecdote, but you left out record standing deadwood from insect damage.”
The Eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains have a big problem with the pine bark beetle. Ponderosa Pine is especially vulnerable. This is not true for the western slopes, where the fires have been raging.
You should know that the crown of an infected tree turns a rusty orange/yellow as the tree dies. Not the case here:
https://tinyurl.com/yxfzrtno
(Taken from Henline Mountain, in Oregon, which overlooks part of the area affected by the Beachie Creek Fire.
https://www.koin.com/news/wildfires/marion-county-beachie-creek-lionshead-fires-evacuations-09122020/amp/
@4 Kevin McKinney “JAXA SIE: 3.89 km2, down another 50k. ‘How low can it go?’” Whatever. It’s obviously irrelevant to the physical science (it strictly a social thing) and this is patently obvious, because the solar radiation bell curve is almost back down to zero (land of the midnight sun, and the noonday night). The solar radiation absorbed is actually the integration of the product of the open water (converse of sea ice area) and the solar radiation bell curve which was 5-10 times as high in late June as it is now. Sort of obvious to the type of brains & educations of many who browse the comments of this particular Web Log Site (as opposed to oh so many others).
@30 sidd Well I think the interesting thing, rather than 1971–2018 heat gain, is the step change in rate at 1995 AD or soon after that led to 0.75 w/m**2 year for the ocean for the 22 years after that rather than the 0.38 w/m**2 year for the ocean for the years before that.
———-
Recent intensification of wind-driven circulation in the Pacific and the ongoing warming hiatus
Nature Climate Change 4, 222–227 (2014) doi:10.1038/nclimate2106 Received 11 September 2013 Accepted 18 December 2013 Published online 09 February 2014 Corrected online 14 February 2014
Matthew H. England, Shayne McGregor, Paul Spence, Gerald A. Meehl, Axel Timmermann, Wenju Cai, Alex Sen Gupta, Michael J. McPhaden, Ariaan Purich & Agus Santoso Affiliations
Quote: “Here we show that a pronounced strengthening in Pacific trade winds over the past two decades—unprecedented in observations/reanalysis data and not captured by climate models—is sufficient to account for the cooling of the tropical Pacific and a substantial slowdown in surface warming through increased subsurface ocean heat uptake.”
—————-
Quote: “The record-breaking increase in Pacific Equatorial trade winds over the past 20 years had, until now, baffled researchers. Originally, this trade wind intensification was considered to be a response to Pacific decadal variability. However, the strength of the winds was much more powerful than expected due to the changes in Pacific sea surface temperature. Another riddle was that previous research indicated that under global warming scenarios Pacific Equatorial Trade winds would slow down over the coming century. The solution was found in the rapid warming of the Atlantic Ocean basin, which has created unexpected pressure differences between the Atlantic and Pacific. This has produced wind anomalies that have given Pacific Equatorial trade winds an additional big push. “The rapid warming of the Atlantic Ocean created high pressure zones in the upper atmosphere over that basin and low pressure zones close to the surface of the ocean,” says Professor Axel Timmermann, co-lead and corresponding author from the University of Hawaii. “The rising air parcels, over the Atlantic eventually sink over the eastern tropical Pacific, thus creating higher surface pressure there. The enormous pressure see-saw with high pressure in the Pacific and low pressure in the Atlantic gave the Pacific trade winds an extra kick, amplifying their strength. It’s like giving a playground roundabout an extra push as it spins past.” Many climate models appear to have underestimated the magnitude of the coupling between the two ocean basins, which may explain why they struggled to produce the recent increase in Pacific Equatorial trade wind trends. While active, the stronger Equatorial trade winds have caused far greater overturning of ocean water in the West Pacific, pushing more atmospheric heat into the ocean, as shown by co-author and ARCCSS Chief Investigator Professor Matthew England earlier this year. This increased overturning appears to explain much of the recent slowdown in the rise of global average surface temperatures. Importantly, the researchers don’t expect the current pressure difference between the two ocean basins to last. When it does end, they expect to see some rapid changes, including a sudden acceleration of global average surface temperatures. “It will be difficult to predict when the Pacific cooling trend and its contribution to the global hiatus in surface temperatures will come to an end,” Professor England says.”
#BPL “marginal theory makes accurate predictions about how markets behave”.
KVJ: Really? Marginalists predicted the crashs 1929, 1967, 1973, 1979, 1987, 1997, 2001, 2008 and now? Their theory of spontaneous market equilibrium was confirmed over and over again?
Clearly Marx was wrong about many things, but not about the tendency of capitalism to end up in monopoly and wreak havoc all over the place. If you then point to the Soviet Union etc., I will remind you that “The soviet system is nothing but state capitalism under the dictatorship of the bolshevik party” as Lenin himself declared 1921, a truth which he of course didn’t understand the fatal implications of. He believed just as any other dictator that his genius guaranteed happy end, even if he was more honest than his successor Stalin, who simply declared the whole capitalist dictatorship to be communism in 1936 after murdering millions of peasants and almost all his fellow revolutionaries from 1917.
As Marx wrote in his “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (an early german socialist programme): “You write that “Work is the source of all wealth”. Wrong! Nature is even more this source.” Here we have the main reason for Marx’ declaration at about the same time: “I am no marxist”. What he pointed out here was what he often repeated: capitalism is the same as the wage labour system, and labour unionism therefore does not tend to a break with capitalism, on the contrary. In the world of today, the economic center of capitalism has become the chinese “communism”. What has become known as communism is simply the asian way to capitalism. What Marx thought of as “the productive forces” have never been as he thought, restricted by capitalist organization, but have instead 1) more and more been perverted to warring capacity (as discussed by Lenin 1914) and superflouus production/environmental destruction and 2) later completely outgrown the capacity of their ecological foundations and therefore become more and more destructive forces.
What Marx etc. couldn’t possibly know, was that the enormous development of productivity wasn’t just labour productivity but almost solely depended on the fossilized concentration of “buried sunshine energy” from hundreds of millions of years: coal and oil. Thus mankind ended up in a fatal ecological trap. Marx wrote that capitalism would either be succeeded by democratic socialism (in his elderly days he thought that democratic states like Great Britain and the Scandinavian countries could develop socialism without revolution, only absolutist states like Russia and Germany could not, and he would clearly have disagreed strongly with Lenin on most subjects, had he ever met him) or it would end up in barbarism.
As is now easy to see, he was right in this. The first world war, Hitler and Stalin etc. weren’t just unfortunate exceptions and faults in the otherwise perfect development towards “the end of history” (Francis Fukuyama 1990). On the contrary. As we can now again see with Trump/Clinton, Putin, Xi etc., the spontaneous tendency of capitalism is towards total war, barbaric and ruthless dictatorship and global climatic and ecological collapse. The worlds fourth richest man, the eager Trump-supporter Elon Musk, is a fascist madman and megalomaniac just as is all his fellow oiligarchs all around the world. He promises to put one million men on Mars within a decade. But: “There may be water on Mars. But is there any intelligent life on Earth?” (George Monbiot).
“Stephen Fry, Mark Rylance and a former Archbishop of Canterbury are among 150 public figures to hit back at government moves to classify the climate protesters of Extinction Rebellion as an “organised crime group”. In a letter to be published in the Observer on Sunday, XR is described as “a group of people who are holding the powerful to account” – who should not become targets of “vitriol and anti-democratic posturing”.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/12/stephen-fry-and-mark-rylance-join-defence-of-climate-activists-extinction-rebellion
MA Roger@62: It has been a strange hurricane season this year. No problem spawning storms but every problem intensifying them. Dry Saharan air helped inhibit storm formation and intensification in August, and there has been a persistent TUTT in the tropical Atlantic inflicting wind shear over any storms that form in the MDR (hence little has developed and intensified in the MDR until a week ago). It goes to show that it is not all about the sea surface temperatures, that gives you an idea of the maximum potential intensity, but it is ultimately the atmospheric conditions (and land interaction) which dictate whether any developing storm can reach that potential. Hence I think it is an over-simplification to say that warming SSTs will automatically lead to more frequent and stronger storms, you need to try and estimate how vertical wind shear will change in a changing climate. I expect that a warming Atlantic SST will increase the potential intensity of storms on average, so when the atmospheric conditions become optimal at the time of a developing storm, that storm will likely become more intense than if the SSTs hadn’t warmed. It doesn’t mean every Atlantic tropical depression will blow up into a monster, put 50 kts of wind shear over it and it doesn’t matter how warm the SSTs are, it is doing nothing.
It is slightly ominous that many storms hitting the U.S this year have intensified right up until landfall. If this keeps up that doesn’t bode well if we get a Wilma-like storm forming in October and ploughing into the Gulf coast.
Russell: “Hate to spoil a good synechdochanecdote, but you left out record standing deadwood from insect damage.”
And you forgot to point out that insect damage is made worse because of climate change. Wonder why that was.
@4 Kevin McKinney “JAXA SIE: 3.89 km2, down another 50k. ‘How low can it go?’” Whatever. It’s obviously irrelevant to the physical science (it’s strictly a social thing) and this is patently obvious because the solar radiation bell curve is almost back down to zero (land of the midnight sun, and the noonday night). The solar radiation absorbed is actually the integration of the product of the open water (converse of sea ice area) and the solar radiation bell curve which was 5-10 times as high in late June as it is now.
Mr. Know It All says:
8 Sep 2020 at 4:12 AM
26 – Split Dog
Just be thankful you arent living back in the 1800s when LA set most of their daily record highs:
You need to attend a few Trump rallies.
NOAA has posted for August 2020 with an anomaly of +0.94ºC, a little up on July’s anomaly of +0.91ºC and giving May-Aug roughly similar anomalies. (The anomalies of the year-so-far sit in the range +0.91ºC to +1.18ºC).
August 2020 is the 2nd warmest August on the NOAA record, sitting below August 2016 (+0.98ºC) and above August 2017 & 2019 (both +0.92ºC), 2015 (+0.91ºC), 2014 (+0.83ºC) & 2018 (+0.80ºC).
August 2020 has the =25th highest anomaly in the all-month NOAA record.
The 2020 year-to-date average anomaly sits 2nd in the ranking tabled behind 2016. To gain the “warmest year” accolade from 2016 would require the Sept-Dec average to top +0.933ºC, so not much higher than the average over then last four months (which averaged +0.930ºC). And to slip to 3rd below 2019 would require Sept-Dec to average below +0.795ºC.
…….. Jan-August Ave … Annual Ave ..Annual ranking
2016 .. +1.08ºC … … … +1.00ºC … … … 1st
2020 .. +1.03ºC
2017 .. +0.95ºC … … … +0.91ºC … … … 4th
2019 .. +0.95ºC … … … +0.95ºC … … … 2nd
2015 .. +0.88ºC … … … +0.93ºC … … … 3rd
2018 .. +0.82ºC … … … +0.83ºC … … … 5th
2010 .. +0.78ºC … … … +0.73ºC … … … 7th
2014 .. +0.74ºC … … … +0.74ºC … … … 6th
1998 .. +0.73ºC … … … +0.65ºC … … … 10th
2005 .. +0.67ºC … … … +0.67ºC … … … 9th
2002 .. +0.67ºC … … … +0.63ºC … … … 15th
The NOAA data shows the Ocean temperature anomaly to be running particularly high with August 2020 Ocean temperature anomalies globally the =4th highest and for the NH 2nd highest (behind August 2019).
That this is a GLOBAL climate emergency is beyond question. The smokey air quality currently plaguing Los Angeles is the same as existed in Sydney last January. The smog, heat and oppressiveness hammering New Delhi is the same as that in Jakarta. The force 4 and 5 hurricanes blasting at the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico are duplicates of what the Philippines have seen recently. Arctic amplification is changing weather patterns all over the Northern Hemisphere. We’re all in this together.
Peter Gleick’s article, “The future has arrived: These explosive fires are our wake-up call.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/11/the-future-has-arrived-these-explosive-fires-are-our-climate-change-wakeup-call
“…the sky was blood red, a color I’ve never seen before…” –Peter Gleick’s audio interview (CBC, “As It Happens”) @3:38, or 2:17 with intro.
https://16523.mc.tritondigital.com/CBC_ASITHAPPENS_P/media-session/8768f780-0a71-4d2f-9f69-fae858a9d4b3/asithappens-SucJpO6r-20200911.mp3
Western Hiker @67 – having experienced unprecedented fires in Australia last year I have to say I didn’t notice smoke reducing the temperature. It sure didn’t reduce the fire danger. Hot winds coming off the Australian interior rather than direct sunshine locally seemed to be why it was so hot. Why it was so unseasonally hot is going to be complex to answer but overall raised temperatures from global warming will be a factor.
#59 Russell: “…but you left out record standing deadwood from insect damage.”
That’s funny, hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick did too.
Climate scientist-NASA data scientist Peter Kalmus did too. Fire ecologist Natasha Stavros did too.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-09-12/climate-change-wildfires-california-oregon-heat
You inflate a talking point favored by denialists, conspiracists, and obsessive high-volume tweeters. Not to mention the all-of-these.
57 – Adelorenzi
““Back to the topic: the West Coast is on fire, record fire and record heat. How many warnings do we need to take action?”
It’s like being on the Titanic and there are people around, on the same sinking ship, who are saying “Icebergs don’t exist you idiot!” It’s truly remarkable. At times like this I have to remember that according to a pew research center poll 2/3 of Americans want the government to do more, I see that as hope for the future.”
The fires, nor the heat are even close to “records”. In fact, they are the norm. Even the Oregonian, as leftist as it gets, agrees:
https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2020/09/oregons-historic-wildfires-the-unprecedented-was-predictable.html
Such fires don’t occur often, but when they do, and when 2/3 of the people are struggling to blame every unusual event on AGW or Trump, it’s easy to see everything as AGW or Trump-caused. Perhaps the most recent large fire that dwarfed the fires of today occurred in 1910, burning 3,000,000 acres in a single fire. You read that right – 1910, 110 years ago when CO2 was in short supply. The fire stretched from Washington to Montana and was called The Great Fire of 1910:
https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5444731.pdf
Back in those days, and earlier, fires that dwarfed even that fire were not unusual – it’s just that no-one was there to record it.
There’s nothing new under the sun.
FYI, the claims that 10% of Oregonians had to evacuate are false – it may be true that 10% were told to be ready to evacuate, but probably less than 50K actually had to do it.
One guy was caught setting fires, arrested, released (of course), and then re-arrested after setting a half dozen more fires on the day he was released! You cain’t make this stuff up:
https://www.13newsnow.com/article/news/crime/man-arrested-for-starting-at-least-7-brush-fires-along-i-205/283-a659a1ed-db3b-4f03-9583-a9fee05a5033
At least 3 of the Oregon big fires were human-caused, several have “unknown” as the cause, and a few are lightning-caused. Some, no doubt are arson like this one in California:
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/man-charged-with-arson-after-allegedly-starting-ranch-2-fire-in-angeles-national-forest-during-argument/
Oregon human-caused fires:
Riverside
https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/article/7174/55739/
Grizzly Creek:
https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/6942/
Brattain:
https://gacc.nifc.gov/nwcc/information/fire_info#OR-FWF-200406
Echo Mountain Fire Complex was listed as “human”, now it’s “under investigation” as are almost all the others in list on right side of this page:
https://gacc.nifc.gov/nwcc/information/fire_info#OR-FWF-200406
Be Best! MKIA
Climate science denier appointed to top position at NOAA
Situation Room
David Legates, a longtime climate change skeptic, has been appointed by the Trump administration to help run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency charged with producing “much of the climate research funded” by the government, The Washington Post reports.
Re # 71 Karsten:
I’ve told them this. They do not listen. “Socialism” is nothing more than group ownership Capitalism. Ownership is the problem regardless which stupid name one puts on it.
#58 nigel:
Are they sustainable, or even close to it? No. Capitalism cannot be without a huge proportion of the population being extremely poor… which is exactly where we are heading, but without the sustainability. THAT’S all forms of Capitalism in a nutshell. See Karsten’s comments before barking more words.
#6 – “As long as capitalism exists, there will be no meaningful way”
Close but incorrect. As long as Capitalism is allowed to run rampant and to be valued more than the nature there is no hope.
Capitalism must be monitored, metered, controlled, so that it functions for the betterment of all living things rather than to serve to maximize 0’s and 1’s in some meaningless bank account maintained in the ether.
Essential services, for example have no business being in the hands of Capitalists. Neither do any of the regulatory agencies that overwatch those capitalists.
There needs to be a concerted effort to abolish neoLiberal economics – Libertarian ideology – from university Economics departments, and the abolition of propaganda groups like the Cato (Koch) institute, Heritage foundation, CEI etc, so that they will no longer spread their deadly propaganda into the body politic.
If this can’t be done though the courts, then it must be done through fire.
#78 – “The future has arrived: These explosive fires are our wake-up call.”
“What you are seeing is not happening” – Donald Trump.
The willfully ignorant will remain willfully ignorant to the end.
If there is to be progress then they will need to be either steamrolled or exterminated.
There are no other options.
nigeltherearenopoorj:
Actually if industry had to pay the costs of its environmental externalities (and it should) they would just pass these costs onto the consumer and absorb some of them in efficiencies, and still make a profit on top of all that. So the UN article on the issue is a bit silly.
Hmmm… a large majority of humanity already can’t afford much – most? – of what the global 1% consumes, but you think adding the costs of Nature will be a simple matter of just passing on costs when even among the global 1%, like you and I, most people are living month-to-month? Do you have ANY idea what the true costs would be? Rhetorical: Incalculable.
Anyone who says otherwise is a liar or a fool. Yes, they can come up with a price, but there is absolutely no way to know if it would be accurate, and, worse, how do you calculate extinctions, collapse of society, human deaths, etc?
How do you calculate the end of civilization, extinctions and deaths at all?? It’s not even a meaningful question.
Saying the costs would just be passed on shows that you, as ever, cannot think.
41 Ken Fabian: Seems to be getting off topic but my 2c worth –
Corruption, not Capitalism is at the heart of our problems addressing the energy/emissions/climate problem.
The cause is the cure? You’re deluded, badly.
Tell us, which principles underlie Capitalism and which principles underlie a regenerative society?
PIOMAS. Current minimum ice volume = 4,000 Kilometes**3
Rate of ice reduction = 3,000 Kilometers**3 per decade.
Arctic is is free in Summer by 2030.
Dear Mr KIA
your second link details why the fires were so large, it was because of the railway Most of the fires were caused by sparks from the coal fired locos.
No one disputes that droughts occurred before the recent (geologically speaking) rise of CO2. and other global warming gasses in the atmosphere.
all the best
Dave
KVJ 71: KVJ: Really? Marginalists predicted the crashs 1929, 1967, 1973, 1979, 1987, 1997, 2001, 2008 and now? Their theory of spontaneous market equilibrium was confirmed over and over again?
BPL: You have the performance of markets confused with business cycle theory.
#74, Barry–
Not irrelevant at all physically: for one thing, the more open water there is after Arctic seasonal nightfall, the greater the energy flux from ocean to atmosphere. Insolation isn’t the only relevant process.
But leaving that aside, maybe you’re forgetting that climate change, and especially its mitigation, are also “social things?” Another seriously sub-4 million minimum may not be a disaster in terms of solar forcing, but it is very much another red light flashing on the planetary dashboard. I don’t think it’s too much to suggest we spare it a few glances.
So, updating–JAXA logged 3.58 million km2 yesterday, which was *up* by 30k from the previous day. So it’s possible the daily minimum in that record will be seen to have occurred on 9/13, at 3.55 million:
https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/vishop/#/monitor
Or not. You get ups and downs around minimum, some quite surprising.
In any event, NSIDC’s Charctic graph tells a slightly different tale anyway:
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
They show 9/14 at 3.773 million km2, which was down 15k from the previous day.
Killed In Action (KIA) said: Back in those days, and earlier, fires that dwarfed even that fire were not unusual – it’s just that no-one was there to record it.”
>Your level of asinine bullshit is breath taking. I guess the moderators are powerless to send your drivel to the bore hole. It’s sad really because you’re constantly spreading disinformation and propaganda on a “legitimate” science blog that others continually have to spend hours debunking.
You’re a low level troll, an asshole and a moron rolled into one. Congratulations!
“You’re a low level troll, an asshole and a moron rolled into one. Congratulations!”
Thank you, Chuck, for this remarkably thoughtful and insightful assessment.
If anyone belongs in the bore hole it is YOU.
#79, Ken Fabian:
“having experienced unprecedented fires in Australia last year I have to say I didn’t notice smoke reducing the temperature.”
This surprised me. I had assumed the phenomenon was universal. Here is a sample of what folks have been noticing up and down the West Coast:
“We’re having such a large scope of dense smoke across the Bay Area and the West Coast in general, that it’s actually impacting our weather conditions,” Gass said. “We’re kind of in uncharted territory right now.”
“The smoke caused temperatures to drop on what was supposed to be another warm day on the tail end of a heat wave, with the darkness forcing morning drivers to turn on their headlights and triggering streetlights to turn on as early as noon.”
“In a tweet, the National Weather Service warned that the smoky conditions were “beyond the scope of our models.” Those models, which predicted temperatures in the 80s across parts of the Bay Area on Wednesday, don’t take into account the potential for smoke to be so thick that it blocks sunlight and keeps temperatures cool, Gass said.
The Bay Area has witnessed the phenomenon, known as smoke shading, before, including after the Camp Fire in 2018.”
https://tinyurl.com/yxmsmfvz
I have a hunch the smoke messes with wind forecasts as well. The lack of surface heating creates an inversion, with the atmosphere ending up much more stable than the models ‘expected’. Might explain the failed forecasts here:
https://tinyurl.com/y3hma42e
The winds never materialized.
I’ve been checking forecasts for various locations on my Weather Channel app. Places where, for example, 5-10 mph winds were supposed to help clear out the smoke, the observed tended to be calm. The pattern seems to go on for days in many locations.
Maybe ‘Mal Adapted’ could back me up on this?
#64, Mal Adapted
“This near-real-time mapping tool, using satellite sensors, is awesome:
https://www.oregon.gov/odf/fire/pages/firestats.aspx”
Thanks for the link.
Should be noted that most likely only the periphery of those areas are actively burning. The fuel in the centers had burned prior. The current fires are eating their way outwards.
#94 Wrong Mr KIA is if anything worse than any thing he said!
Western Hiker:
it’s true the forecast for favorable winds to disperse the smoke, and rain, where I live have been revised for later and later. I don’t know whether that’s attributable to the smoke or not. The smoke is still here, and now the rain isn’t coming until Thursday. They’re telling us we shouldn’t exercise outdoors without an N95 mask. I don’t have one, so I’m limited to short forays. Kinda sucks, but I’m not really afraid of losing my house this time around.
75 – Chuck
“You need to attend a few Trump rallies.”
He doesn’t have rallies any more. He has “peaceful protests”. Why? Because peaceful protests of unlimited size are encouraged by the left as we see every night in burning D-controlled war zones (aka cities); while huge, enthusiastic crowds of patriots who support the President are discouraged, even prohibited, by local laws limiting meeting size.
93 – Chuck
Nice childish temper tantrum you threw up there, Chuck.
Killian @84,
“Are they (Scandinavian countries) sustainable, or even close to it? No. Capitalism cannot be without a huge proportion of the population being extremely poor… which is exactly where we are heading, but without the sustainability. THAT’S all forms of Capitalism in a nutshell. See Karsten’s comments before barking more words.”
No, the Scandinavian countries have capitalism in their socio econmomic model, and they do not have a huge proportion of poor people. In fact they have very low poverty rates, for example Sweden below. They do it partly with some targeted income redistribution and very good help for the unemployed etc.
https://www.thelocal.se/20181017/sweden-has-eus-lowest-proportion-of-people-living-in-serious-poverty
And global poverty rates have fallen under free market capitalism:
https://www.economist.com/international/2017/03/30/the-world-has-made-great-progress-in-eradicating-extreme-poverty
Growing inequality is however a problem in some countries particularly western democracies. However this is due to neoliberal economic policies and there are ways of mitigating the problem.
Of course Scandinavia doesn’t meet some definition of perfect sustainability and probably never will. Neither does your model, because it includes at least some modern technology, which is not ever going to be perfectly sustainable and “last indefinitely”. Its purely a question of what is the best compromise, and you have to convince people your ideas are the best compromise. Hows that going?
————————————————
Killian @87
“Hmmm… a large majority of humanity already can’t afford much – most? – of what the global 1% consumes, but you think adding the costs of Nature will be a simple matter of just passing on costs when even among the global 1%, like you and I, most people are living month-to-month? Do you have ANY idea what the true costs would be? Rhetorical: Incalculable……Saying the costs would just be passed on shows that you, as ever, cannot think.”
Costs of externalities could be set quite high, and as a result some people will not be able to afford some industrial goods. But of course I accept we have to pay costs of externalities for the sake of protecting the environment. Indeed I promote it.
And yet your own model includes very significant use of modern technology (communications, health, public transport, recycling) so it has ‘externalities’ (roughly meaning environmental impacts and costs) so it has to deal with these, which means someone has to bear the costs. I think it probably means your system would deliver fewer goods, the same as capitalism if it had to pay for its externalities properly.
So who cannot think here? Not me.
KVJ 71: “Really? Marginalists predicted the crashs 1929, 1967, 1973, 1979, 1987, 1997, 2001, 2008 and now? Their theory of spontaneous market equilibrium was confirmed over and over again?”
Like BPL says you are confusing markets with the business cycle. And economists do predict business downturns like this about every 10 years on average, but its hard to predict exactly when, like its hard to exactly predict when el nino will occur in climate predictions.
There are believed to be other longer wave business downturns on approximately a 60 year cycle called Kondratieff waves, but again its very hard to accurately predict exactly when, and there is not a consensus on the idea.