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199 Responses to "Unforced Variations: Jun 2021"

  1. Leaked IPCC draft: Scientists are getting realer, but IMO, still not real enough. Still, more urgent than in the past.

    It says that with 1.1C of warming above pre-industrial levels clocked so far, the climate is already changing. A decade ago, scientists believed that limiting global warming to 2C above mid-19th-century levels would be enough to safeguard the future.

    That goal is enshrined in the 2015 Paris agreement, adopted by nearly 200 nations who vowed to collectively cap warming at “well below” 2C – and 1.5C if possible. On current trends the world is heading for 3C at best.

    Earlier models predicted that Earth-altering climate change was not likely before 2100. But the UN draft report says prolonged warming even beyond 1.5C could produce “progressively serious, centuries-long and, in some cases, irreversible consequences.”

    Could? Hmmm… Will, people, will. And, it will continue to accelerate until we get this stuff going backwards. IMO, we are so far in now (it helps to think of climate as imposed in a chart of bifurcations and ask yourself, what if we are already 2,3, 4… or more?… bifurcations along?) that even net zero would probably mean continued increases in GHGs from feedbacks.

  3. KIA @146

    “I don’t think health is a big concern – our energy is fairly clean unless you are referring to high temperatures.”

    Burning fossil fuels has enormous detrimental effects on health regardless of the exact temperature. Here’s a summary:

    https://www.law.nyu.edu/centers/state-impact/press-publications/research/climate-and-health/health-effects-of-burning-fossil-fuels

    Renewables and nuclear power are much cleaner energy with far fewer problems for health than burning fossil fuels. There’s plenty of detailed information and peer reviewed research easily googled if you can spare some time from your bubble of disinformation.

  4. KIA 146: I think more people on the right side of the political spectrum are beginning to realize that AGW may be real. The problem in the US is that up to this point, only the Dem party has talked it up

    BPL: So has THE ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY. It was your right-wing pals that made this a political issue instead of a science issue. So all your frothing about how awful the Democrats are just feeds into that lying narrative.

  6. 145 nigelj
    On importance of modeling sea level rise, agreed.
    Over a decade ago, I attended an all day workshop on preparing for sea level rise in San Francisco Bay Area. Many attendees were town planners.
    After discussion of science and talks by towns and experts on topics like dikes, we split up into groups, were given descriptions of imaginary towns around the Bay, and asked to do 50-year plans, which suddenly made theoretical issues get very concrete.

    The uncertainy of sea level rise was a real challenge, i.e., any improvements in modeling save huge $.
    For example: suppose your town wants to build dikes, but has a choice of putting them at the edge of the water or further inland & uphill. The former will make everybody happy until unfeasible, the latter will cause great unhappiness for those outside them but may be more practical. Then there are sewage works, which want to be below the houses and above the water. At some point, managed retreat has to happen, but the question is when. It’s not bad if one has to abandon buildings or infrastructure whose normal life has already been exceeded, it’s not good to build things that rapidly become stranded assets. We argued a lot about such things.
    Consider 3 paths to 2100 (knowing this is way over-simplified).
    a) SLR would be 1ft for sure.
    b) SLR would be 3ft for sure.
    c) SLR could by between 1 and 3 ft. This makes it really hard for planners. Nobody wants to spend the money to deal with 3ft if they don’t have to.

  7. Nigel@141:

    “What worries me is if the population STILL can’t make the connection between global warming and changes in precipitation, after literally decades of explanation, when will they ever? ”

    In many cases probably not. One of the problems I see is that at any one location, the long term trend in precipitation/storms/whatever that has occurred over an average human lifetime may be much less than the variance due to internal natural variability. My line manager has this opinion on Atlantic hurricanes and climate change. The Atlantic hurricane basin exhibits one of the highest, if not the highest, year-to-year variability in tropical cyclone activity. If you look at trends in hurricane numbers or ACE index using a dataset that has been homogenised to account for changes in observing practices, any trend over the last century will be much smaller than the variance in activity over the same period. Therefore, the vast majority of Atlantic hurricane activity in any single season will be explainable by the known internal factors affecting hurricane activity, such as ENSO, Atlantic SST, trade wind speed, Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and spring NAO, therefore climate change has, and is likely to have in the future, a small effect. I do think this reasoning is oversimplified and tend to think it is not just about the ratio of trend to natural variability, but more about superposition of the two, and that if Atlantic SST continues to warm, this primes the basin for more intense hurricanes when the atmospheric conditions are optimal (low wind shear, upper level divergence, high humidity), but I’m not going to change his mind.

    I think precipitation is similar. Daily amounts at any location can have high variability, from zero to several inches or even feet. For example in the UK, the highest 24 hour rainfall total is 13.44 inches, the lowest is zero, and all other days are somewhere in between, so over a few decades of someone’s memory, how high a trend would be needed for a person to notice an increase in rainfall? One thing that might help people notice is if the rainfall record was repeatedly being broken more frequently that they would expect, records do get reported in the media.

  9. Zebra:In my experience, “the public” can understand concepts better than most scientists (and educators) think they can.

    RtW: In my experience the public understands precisely what their handlers choose for them to understand.

    The game is not so much about facts and truth, but about becoming and remaining a handler. Money, looks, fame…

    Think about it. Clear bald lies by GOPpish handlers who are obviously only in it for the money vs heartfelt honesty by folks who work in cinder block offices.

    Whooooooaaa. Supposedly brilliant and doesn’t even have wainscotting, let alone a cute coffee intern??? Something is rotten….

    Yep. Obviously the GOPpers must be right.

  10. Adam Lea @157 I agree that AGW driven precipitation trends can be hard to spot by casual observers, especially in rainier areas, due to other sources of high variance. However, ACE is not a very good indicator for precipitation impact from tropical cyclones. There are plenty of weak storms that nevertheless produce huge precipitation events. A storm going extratropical at mid latitudes and being absorbed into an upper low is a very dangerous pattern for flooding, but contributes little to ACE.

    In these extreme situations, even a 7% bump in total amounts from 1C SST warming can have a larger impact in terms of overwhelmed flood protection infrastructure.

  12. Adam Lea @157 says: “For example in the UK, the highest 24 hour rainfall total is 13.44 inches, the lowest is zero, and all other days are somewhere in between, so over a few decades of someone’s memory, how high a trend would be needed for a person to notice an increase in rainfall?”

    No idea really but I can make some guesstimates. From a quick google search “UK will see hourly increase in rainfall intensity by as much as 112% (due to global warming). ” I might notice a 50 -112% change at a guess. A doubling is pretty significant and obvious and would stand out from natural variability and I think I would remember previous decades well enough to notice this scale of change. But I doubt I would notice anything less than 50%. Certainly not 10%. Farmers might because their incomes depend on observing small pattern changes.

  13. RE. BPL @154

    So has THE ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY. It was your right-wing pals that made this a political issue instead of a science issue. So all your frothing about how awful the Democrats are just feeds into that lying narrative.

    Yes.

    Conservative think tanks, advocacy groups and political operatives such as The Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, Americans for Prosperity, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and C-Fact mostly all funded by the Koch political organization, have been casting doubt for decades on the consensus science on climate change. Thus confusing public opinion and forestalling passage of laws and regulations that would address the global environmental crisis. This has become the largest, longest and most consequential misinformation efforts mounted against mainstream science by an industry ever.

    Climate denial, thanks to the network’s influence, especially on conservative media, has become a core message of the Republican Party.

    And if Republican politicians don’t toe the line, consider the once popular former Representative Bob Inglis from South Carolina who was unseated in a Republican runoff primary election in 2010. Why?

    In his words:

    “I voted against cap and trade, because I think it’s a big tax increase. It grows government; it decimates American manufacturing; it’s hopelessly complicated. … But I proposed an alternative, and the alternative got me in some trouble. It’s basically a revenue-neutral tax swap where we would reduce taxes on payroll, shift the tax to carbon dioxide and revenue-neutral rates that the government wouldn’t grow, but we would just change what we tax as a way of trying to get the true cost comparisons on the fuels. …”

    Inglis had been a Koch backed darling conservative, but they quickly stopped funding his campaign and instead donated heavily to a primary opponent,Trey Gowdy, and helped organize teams of Tea Party activists to travel to town hall meetings to protest against Inglis. Some of the town hall meetings devolved into angry affairs, where Inglis couldn’t make himself heard above the shouting. Inglis lost reelection, and his defeat was a warning to other Republicans that is still heavily felt even today: Koch’s position on the climate crisis can not be violated by Republican politicians. To do so risks the full clout of Koch money and political machine to come down against you.

    Republicans, many of whom are denialists are unfortunately mostly just simple unwitting ignorant fossil fuel industry dupes. Sad.

  16. @Killian: I disagree, you don’t have to be a denialist to ask such questions that Adam Lea patiently makes understandable. I believe it is a fair and “innocent” question: “How can it be that things go worse when it can be detected nowhere?” And it is not the population’s fault that the answer is hard to grasp (because it is so counterintuitive).

    So please don’t say it’s a waste of time to explain things again and again. And maybe the right explanation – that people really understand – still wasn’t found.

  17. Ladies and Gentlemen

    We are supposed to stay on topic, What shall we do with or against the heat?

    Let me remind you all that it is allready very traditional and belongs quite essencially to local lifestyle for both humans and animals everywhere at any time..

    So we should rather look a bit to how it is traditionally done and perhaps learn something instead of ridiculing all good old manners and habits.

    I once got a termometer for winter hiking sport and hang it under my dressings. And found that the temperature there is frappintgly constamnt 32 celsius regardless of situation. At hard struggle, at rest, day and night and in my sleeping bag. And in the summer, we simply take off our heavy dress and jackets and even underwear. We obviously undertake a lot of things quite spontaneously all the time in order to adapt to given weather climate and situation, in order to “feel comfortable”. Both in regard to heat and to chill. To preserve that frappingly constant and comfortable 32 celsius skin temperature.

    A Doctor told me “That is the typical Ape- climate under our dressings!”

    Heat can be contained and stored and transported for use elsewhere, that is very tradeitional, obvious, and natural. But also chill can be conserved and stored and freighted and even sold on the free market at high prices when needed.

    Heat can be stored and brought from day to night, and chill can be stored at night for vuse duringv the too hot days, and even from winter here to summer overseas.

    All this has been very obvious and necessary in pre- electric days, Ice- freight in sawdust by sailships to London has been big business, that collapsed by the introduction of the electric heat- pump.

    Pope Francis seems to be right, “air condition is sinful!”.

    Like so many other modern inventions, it displaces good old manners, knowledge and training and methods, perhaps in an unnecessary or even harmful way,

    “And when it fails, no- one will come and fix it at that temperature!” according to John Pollack 134

    The moral of this may be that a certain ecology and economy of it, good and better handling of both heat and chill as vital exspensive resources, ought to be conscidered and perhaps brought in order first, instead of sheere, unneccessary, harmful, expensive, electric struggle against reality and nature.

    What about shipping of freshwater ice from the arctic winter to areas who would pay well both for chill and for freshwater?

  19. @155 Kilian

    The younger dryas episode was discowered in Denemark and named after the national flower of Island Dryas octopetala L., a high mountain and tundra- weed in the roseaceae family, an extreme variety of Potentilla.

    I have looked further into it for other reasons, and my belief is that the younger dryas episode was caused by the Eiffel vulcanism, that occured exactly at the same time and was quite enormeous.

    Other national suggestions is that it was caused by the cathastrophic breakdown of Lake Agazziz in north America, which is less credible because it does not coincide in time.

    Extraterrestrial comet impact suggestions were quite popular in recent time, but hardly taken serious for the explaination of younger Dryas.

  21. Zeke Hausfather, a scientist at the climate-data nonprofit Berkeley Earth, said the Pacific north-west has warmed by about 3F (1.7C) in the past half-century. That means a heat wave now is about 3F warmer than it would have been before and the difference between 111F and 114F, especially for vulnerable populations, he noted.

    “In a world without climate change, this still would have been a really extreme heat wave,” Hausfather said. “This is worse than the same event would have been 50 years ago, and notably so.“

    I dont think there would be an extreme heatwave, cause climate change also changes the weather pattern, not just the overall temperature.

    “We are not meant for this,” Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, said in an interview on MSNBC. “This is the beginning of a permanent emergency … we have to tackle the source of this problem, which is climate change.”

    no, govenor, the source of the problem isnt climate change…its us, we are responsible for it! goddamit!

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/29/pacific-north-west-heatwave-temperatures-weather-seattle-portland

  22. “Southeast Asia contains about half of all tropical mountain forests, which are rich in biodiversity and carbon stocks, yet there is debate as to whether regional mountain forest cover has increased or decreased in recent decades. Here, our analysis of high-resolution satellite datasets reveals increasing mountain forest loss across Southeast Asia. Total mean annual forest loss was 3.22 Mha yr−1 during 2001–2019, with 31% occurring on the mountains. In the 2010s, the frontier of forest loss moved to higher elevations (15.1 ± 3.8 m yr−1 during 2011–2019, P < 0.01) and steeper slopes (0.22 ± 0.05° yr−1 during 2009–2019, P < 0.01) that have high forest carbon density relative to the lowlands. These shifts led to unprecedented annual forest carbon loss of 424 Tg C yr−1, accelerating at a rate of 18 ± 4 Tg C yr−2 (P < 0.01) from 2001 to 2019. Our results underscore the immediate threat of carbon stock losses associated with accelerating forest clearance in Southeast Asian mountains, which jeopardizes international climate agreements and biodiversity conservation.
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00738-y?utm_campaign=Carbon%20Brief%20Daily%20Briefing&utm_content=20210629&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20Daily

    Humans can't help themselves. We think we own the planet, we don't realize the planet owns us. Paraphrase from Chief Sealth

  23. “In our work on Yellowstone Lake in Yellowstone National Park, we demonstrate microbiological conversion of methylamine to CH4 and isolate and characterize an Acidovorax sp. capable of this activity. Furthermore, we identify and clone a gene critical to this process (encodes pyridoxylamine phosphate-dependent aspartate aminotransferase) and demonstrate that this property can be transferred to Escherichia coli with this gene and will occur as a purified enzyme. This previously unrecognized process sheds light on environmental cycling of CH4, suggesting that O2-insensitive, ecologically relevant aerobic CH4 synthesis is likely of widespread distribution in the environment and should be considered in CH4 modeling efforts.”

    https://www.pnas.org/node/990006.abstract?collection=

    If I understand this correctly, the work indicates that naturally occurring methane production can happen in environments where it was previously thought that natural methane production could not happen.

    How are we doing on methane in the atmosphere? Doing good, if hockey stick numbers look good to you.

    https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-atmospheric-concentrations-greenhouse-gases

    Cheers

  24. I have a question for which I haven’t been able to find an answer. The questions I generally see are about how long it would take to cool the Earth by removing CO2 from atmosphere. Answers seem optimistic and very vague. There is about 30 times the carbon tied up in the land carbon cycle and 50 to 100 times the atmospheric carbon in the oceans. Even if we could magically remove all CO2 from the air, wouldn’t it just be replenished from the oceans, and to a much lesser extent from the land? How much time does that add to slowing down, stopping, and then backing the Titanic off the iceberg?

  26. 169: Other national suggestions is that it was caused by the cathastrophic breakdown of Lake Agazziz in north America, which is less credible because it does not coincide in time.

    Asteroid bits in Europe. Asteroid bits in Canada = same-same event. Broken ice sheet = end of L. Agassiz.

    And, that volcanism and the multi-bolide impact are not mutually exclusive events.

    Named for a flower: Common knowledge.

    When you get new info, might wanna update your analysis…?

  28. 170: “Things sure are hot in the Pacific North West region of America”

    Yes I recently heard about that. Absolutely insane temperatures for that region. It seems a lot of places in the Northern Hemisphere are experiencing high summer temperatures at the moment. Where I am in the UK is the exception, the last two weeks of June have been very dull, wet and cool (i.e. stuck under a trough). Very annoying that I live in the one small part of the world which is experiencing November in June. :-(

  29. 160:

    I wasn’t trying to like ACE index to tropical cyclone rainfall. I was using Atlantic hurricane activity as an example of a variable with high variance where an AGW trend should it exist will likely not come out in the data for several decades. Rainfall in some parts of the world is similar. Having said that, my gut feeling (whatver that counts for) suggests major flooding events in the UK are becoming more common. Some of that could be due to an increase in heavy rain events, some is very likely due to poor land management and building on flood plains. If rainfall increases as much as nigelj’s quick search suggests, our government really needs to start looking into the future at adaptation to a world with higher flood risk, that is difficult when a government term is only 4-5 years and they prioritise the here and now issues.

  31. Adam Lea@157 Ultimately, the problem may be that people are looking at the wrong statistical metrics to extract the climate-change signal. For instance, people often look at all-time high temperatures or maximum rainfall events. The problem is that these are extreme value events, and extreme-value statistics are by their nature rare. In drawing from a stationary distribution, the time to exceed a maximum increases as the maximum increases–it has to, because the probability of higher results has to go to zero for the probability to converge.

    It can be easier to spot changes to the central tendency (mean, median, mode) or the variability (standard deviation/variance), but you need to have enough data that the change exceeds the natural variability–that’s why you need 30 years to determine a climatic temperature trend.

    You can also look at the order statistics of the phenomenon–not just the maximum, but the second highest, third highest… Sometimes the order statistics show a change before the maximum or minimum.

    What I am saying here is that you need to keep in mind the characteristics of the phenomenon you are looking at and of the underlying distribution and choose a statistic that is sufficiently sensitive with small amounts of data to see the signal.

    BTW, Tamino did a study several years ago where he looked at how temperatures were changing, and the change appears to affect mainly the central tendency (mean), not the higher moments (variance, skew, kurtosis…). So, the current heat wave in the Pacific Northwest is likely a very rare event even given the change in the mean of several degrees.

  32. well, most of us knew this was coming. The heat deaths, not Biden joining scientists. from the Guardian:

    “Joe Biden has joined scientists in blaming the climate crisis for a record-shattering heatwave in the western US and Canada that has been linked to dozens of deaths, buckled roads, blackouts and wildfires.

    Officials in Canada have been shocked by the temperature rise, which hit 47.9C (118F) in Lytton, British Columbia, on Monday, smashing the national record set the previous day. The extended heatwave has also posed a health threat. In Vancouver, police said they responded to 25 sudden-death calls in a 24-hour period.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/30/canada-heatwave-dozens-dead-as-searing-plus-40c-temperatures-grips-vancouver?utm_term=699d49b3df3a024e4eda5f03a3404bb0&utm_campaign=GuardianTodayUS&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=GTUS_email

    CO2 levels?

    Daily CO2

    Jun. 29, 2021 = 417.81 ppm
    Jun. 29, 2020 = 416.14 ppm

    1.67 ppm increase yoy

    so, I guess we are still in a la nina or nina neutral state. Heat waves coming. Everyone should prepare for heat waves as best they can except the deniers. The heat is on.

    Cheers

    Mike

  33. Fungal decomposition emits about 55 gigatonnes of carbon each year.
    Human combustion of fossil fuels emits about 10 gigatonnes.
    P197 ‘Entangled Life’ by M. Sheldrake.

  34. Hey as this is an open forum I want to know if the recent findings about arctic ice here –>

    https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/jun/arctic-sea-ice-thinning-faster-expected

    … has implications for what they call the first blue water event. That is – does it mean the ice cap disappearing sooner ?

    I believe the most recent estimates, including by the author herself, have been somewhere around 2035, so does this research bring the date forward ?

    thanks

  35. Joe Joyce @174,
    Your question isn’t entirely clear as you talk of “all CO2 from the air” (so 870Gt(C) being removed at present concentrations) and also ” backing the Titanic off the iceberg” which suggests a more realistic reduction to combat AGW.

    The carbon deposits on the planet are very roughly (A) Rocks & marine soils ~80,000, (B) Ocean waters 40,000 (C) Fossil fuels 4,000, (D) Biosphere/organic 2,000, (E) Atmosphere 800. Most of this happily remains where it is and would not bother the carbon cycle.
    If we don’t trash the climate, removals of CO2 from the atmosphere will result in releases from the oceans (which will be slow) & biosphere (which will be fast). The net result would then be about a quarter of your reduction in atmospheric CO2 remaining after 1,000 years with most of the reduction lost in the first 100 years.
    But that would assume the carbon cycle starts off in equilibrium. This is not the case today with long-term perhaps ~120Gt(C) yet to be absorbed by ocean/biosphere to reach that equilibrium. So the initial removal of some 50ppm CO2 (which would result in that equilibrium) would not cause net emissions from ocean+biosphere but further removal would.
    (There is a very recent paper Zickfield et al (2021) (the subject of a CarbonBrief post) that considers the asymmetry of CO2 emissions/absorption which I am ignoring. I read from this paper that the asymmetry is not great.)

    If you emptied the atmosphere of CO2 as you mention, the impact on climate, oceans & biosphere would quickly cool the oceans which would then happily absorb more CO2. The removal would also kill off most of the biosphere which presumably would release CO2 into the atmosphere. How quickly CO2 would then build back up in the atmosphere from dead plants & in the long term from volcanic eruptions? I don’t see much point dwelling on such a hypothetical event.

  37. Ladies & Gentlemen

    I have a further missionary statement for you:

    “The termostat is also further sinful!

    It is the Devils device to make humanity unaware of temperatures, energetics, heat and chill, isolation and ventilation, and proper conscious, responsible economics, of that all”

  39. 166 Hans-Peter Stricker says:
    28 Jun 2021 at 9:33 AM

    So please don’t say it’s a waste of time to explain things again and again. And maybe the right explanation – that people really understand – still wasn’t found.

    It’s not a waste of time to repeat things, it is a waste of time to engage deniers. The psychology is clear. Argue all you want. You’re wrong. Why?

    Opportunity cost.

    All the energy put into denialists, if put into solutioneering, might help change the situation. Engaging denialists in no way, shape, or form makes our situation better.

  40. No forced response thread available right now, so agriculture post going here for now.

    Why did hunter-gatherers first begin farming?

    “Professor Colin Osborne, from the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Sheffield, said: “We know very little about how agriculture began, because it happened 10,000 years ago — that’s why a number of mysteries are unresolved. For example why hunter-gatherers first began farming, and how were crops domesticated to depend on people.

    “One controversy in this area is about the extent to which ancient peoples knew they were domesticating crops. Did they know they were breeding domestication characteristics into crops, or did these characteristics just evolve as the first farmers sowed wild plants into cultivated soil, and tended and harvested them?

    … selective breeding of vegetables by early farmers would have acted on the leaves, stems or roots that were eaten as food, but should not have directly affected seed size.

    Instead, any changes in vegetable seed size must have arisen from natural selection acting on these crops in cultivated fields, or from genetic links to changes in another characteristic like plant or organ size. In the last instance, people might have bred crops to become bigger, and larger seeds would have come along unintentionally.

    …domesticated maize seeds are 15 times bigger than the wild form, soybean seeds are seven times bigger. Wheat, barley and other grain crops had more modest increases in size (60 per cent for barley and 15 per cent for emmer wheat) but these changes are important if they translate into yield.

    “We found strong evidence for a general enlargement of seeds due to domestication across seven vegetable species,” said Professor Osborne.

    “This is especially stunning in a crop like a sweet potato, where people don’t even plant seeds, let alone harvest them. The size of this domestication effect falls completely within the range seen in cereals and pulse grains like lentils and beans, raising the possibility that at least part of the seed enlargement in these crops also evolved during domestication without deliberate foresight from early farmers.”

    Professor Osborne added: “Our findings have important implications for understanding how crops evolved, because they mean that major changes in our staple crops could have arisen without deliberate foresight by early farmers.

    “This means that unconscious selection was probably more important in the genesis of our food plants than previously realised. Early increases in the yields of crops might well have evolved in farmers’ fields rather than being bred artificially.”

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170516080810.htm

    a little bit of history of domestication of animals and origins of something we would recognize as farming:

    https://owlcation.com/humanities/When-did-Humans-domesticate-animals-and-plants

    Early dog domestication makes sense to me because the dog would be helpful for hunting. Goats and other early domesticated animals may have started as “hunting lite” and developed as a happy accident with agricultural benefits because goats may defoliate plants and improve sunlight on ground crops and goat droppings are useful as raw fertilizer.

    Again, in these instances, the developments with animals (beyond dogs) may not have involved a lot of intention and planning on the part of the humans, the practice and benefits may have developed in situ and revealed themselves over time, finally becoming a significant factor in the ways humans live on the planet.

    Cheers

    Mike

  41. JC 183: Fungal decomposition emits about 55 gigatonnes of carbon each year.
    Human combustion of fossil fuels emits about 10 gigatonnes.
    P197 ‘Entangled Life’ by M. Sheldrake.

    BPL: Scientists have known since the late 19th century that human emissions of CO2 are dwarfed by natural emissions. The thing is, James, that natural sources of carbon dioxide have natural SINKS to match them. The excess is provided by our taking carbon out of the ground and burning it, and that is what has led to the increase. Not fungal decomposition.

  42. James Charles @183,
    Your reference to the Merlin Sheldon book ‘Entangled Life’ and its apparent reference to the 55Gt(C) annual emissions from fungi being many times the 10Gt(C) emissions from fossil fuels simply compares one small section of the carbon cycle with another.

    You could similarly mention the 2Gt(C) [=~6Gt(CO2)] annual emissions from the species Homo Sapiens which is not an insignificant amount but just as irrelevant to AGW. This is because both fungi & Homo Sapiens operate within parts of of the carbon cycle that are generally in balance – Carbon[in]=Carbon[out] (the is cycle shown in this simplistic graphic), the function of fungi being usually relegated in such diagrams to their role within ‘decomposition’. (Given fungi are one of the five kingdoms of life on Earth, that is a bit of a demotion.)

    AGW results because the Carbon[in] creating FossilFuels from Dead+Waste is completely incapable of matching the level of Carbon[out] caused by the modern anthropogenic combustion of FossilFuels.

    I doubt Sheldrake’s book mentions it (at least not in this vein) but we are in this AGW dilemma because of fungi. If they had been doing their job properly 300Mya, back in the Carboniferous period, they would have eaten up all the dead plants and there would be no big fat coal deposits to power our industrial Smog Works and so we wouldn’t be in this AGW mess we are now.

  44. The first storm of the North Atlantic Hurricane 2021 season has been classified at hurricane-strength by NOAA’s National Hurricane Centre. Hurricane Elsa will be a little longer-lasting than earlier storms of the 2021 season-so-far with a run through the Antilles and landfall in Florida the current forecast for the storm track.
    I note the Wikithing pages for Atlantic Hurricane Seasons (the 2021 page HERE) are no longer sourcing ACE values from their own calculations but are sourcing the numbers from a swanky new Colorado State Uni website. This provides a useful page of headline year-to-date numbers although the year-to-date climatology numbers (1981-2010) are probably not a great comparison given the 1980s & early 1990s were not very hurricane-rich.
    There is also a sparky-looking Real Time Tropical Cyclones page which looks to be a useful go-to page when it is up-&-running properly.

  45. James Charles @183

    Fungal decomposition emits about 55 gigatonnes of carbon each year.
    Human combustion of fossil fuels emits about 10 gigatonnes.

    The decomposing Fungai is emitting the CO2 that it absorbed during its lifetime thus not changing the overall levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Decomposition is part of the naturally balanced carbon cycle.

    The combustion of fossil fuel by mankind is emitting CO2 that has been sequestered for millenniums by plants from ancient times that did not decompose–ancient times when atmospheric CO2 levels were much higher than present. The rapid release of ancient CO2 emitted by the burning of fossil fuels is not completely offset by the natural carbon cycle thus it has been raising the levels in the atmosphere since the beginning of industrialization as observed.

    The burning of fossil fuels has upset the natural balance of the carbon cycle, while the decomposition of any plant material does not–decomposing plants are replaced at the same rate by similar new CO2 absorbing plants.

  47. @Dr Kilian 176

    Things being “updated” does not entail at all that it is valid and true.

    Its being “updated” and ones having to study this anew…, is a fameous, liturgic formula of racketeers , gangsters, and traditional communists, here where I live.

    It betrays general lacks of higher formation because of longtime aquaintedness to unhealthy sports and membership submissions.

    So avoid it.

    The Agazziz- history has been carefully studied from my side, and it does not coincide well in time to the dramatic events of younger Dryas. But so does the Eiffel Vulcanism.

    Extra- terrestrial and asteroide- causes were quite popular as a new kind of political Apokalypses after the fall of the soviet union, due to sudden lack of apokalyptic fear for atomic war. And so were also the James Hansen- Al Gore- apokalypses.

    They could fill a sudden apokalyptic, moral political emptiness.

    One of your serious problems is that there ain`t no such evidence of large or massive extraterrestrial impacts in European holocene sediments.

    Your sources are most probably suggesting and composing it from vulgar rumors of the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, the worldwide ( Europe and Canada etc etc etc..) and very obvious and easy to see, sharp C/T horizon in the bedrock with Iridium- proof of extraterrestrial matter, that vaporized totally during the impact and settled down worldwide.

    Do not phantacize in terms of “bits”; do instead demonstrate that you have an idea at least of what it is about.

    There “ain`t no” such horizons in local european and distal canadian holocene sediments from about 12900 years ago & thousand years onward.

    But that severe Eiffel vulcanism suddenly covered moors and marshes, fields heathers and pools all the way up to Skåne. Thus discard your popular asteroids, comets, and megafaunas, and rather think in terms of large and largest volcanic events. Then you have a more fruitful field of investigations.

    The Little ice age for instance, “LIA” is solidly related to known and large vulcanisms rather than to extraterrestrial events.

    You seem to be unaware also that the world is larger than the US. We also have “lake district” land of 1000 seas and “The greast seas” on the eastern side. I can mention Lake Vänern, Ladoga, Onega, and the very Baltic sea, even the Kaspian and the Black seas, with a history as dramatic as Agazziz, by the same geophysical and glaciological causes. And further in Russia, enormeous fossile glacial freshwater sea evidence.

    If you can simply read geophysical maps by coastline evidence, interprete the meandering of large and small rivers, Abscence of the same, hundreds and thousands of small freshwater pools, total lacks of the same elsewhere in very wet landscapes, , further obvious fossile evidence in the form of turfs and moors and look further to relict flora and fauna,….

    …. then you can control the landscape and climate history and its causes for yourself, and do not have to worship under the experts and obey to their formulas & scriptures.

    And you will feel better at home in nature and reality.

  48. Ray Ladbury@181 Considering the recent Pacific Northwest heat wave, I think that climate change can be discerned in the meteorology of an unprecedented event, in addition to looking at it statistically.
    The upper ridge responsible for the heat wave was unusually early and intense, which fits the pattern of expansion of the subtropical high into the mid latitudes that also helped produce European heat waves.
    The seasonally early intensification of high pressure aloft also allowed for maximum solar heating potential. Drought conditions also allowed a great proportion of solar heating to be partitioned into warming the atmosphere, instead of into evapotranspiration.
    These factors were sufficient to produce record temperatures east of the Cascade mountains, from eastern Oregon into interior B.C.
    Temperatures west of the Cascades were even more exceptional, as the normal marine inversion was eroded nearly to the coast. This is illustrated by a high of 110F at Quillayute Washington, 11F above the previous record. This is a unique (so far) signature of this heat wave.
    When a combination of factors all expected to be enhanced by AGW result in a qualitatively new meteorological pattern, it’s important in a way that the statistics have difficulty capturing. Credit the forecasters for recognizing how exceptional this heat wave would be, before the event, or the casualties could have gone a lot higher.

  49. James Charles@183 wrote:

    Fungal decomposition emits about 55 gigatonnes of carbon each year.
    Human combustion of fossil fuels emits about 10 gigatonnes.

    What’s your point?