HOT Hot hot

Last month I provided a weather up-date and it was not my intention to provide updates on a regular basis. But the latest NASA temperature anomaly data for January I feel are worthy of comment. Why is this relevant to The Oil Drum? Well amongst other things, mild winter weather in the northern hemisphere reduces demand for natural gas and heating oil. Furthermore, a continuation of current trends may see tracts of molten permafrost render oil exploration and production impossible throughout vast areas of Siberia, Canada and Alaska. Melting of Arctic Sea Ice, on the other hand, may open up new offshore provinces.


Figure 1. Surface temperature analysis map for January 2007 from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The datum period for comparison is 1951 to 1980.

There are 8 more maps and charts below the fold.


Figure 2. January 2007. Goddard Institute for Space Studies.


Figure 3. December 2006. Goddard Institute for Space Studies.


Figure 4. January 2006 Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Comparison December 2006 to January 2007

  • The warm anomaly over Asia and Europe has expanded and intensified between December 06 and January 07 (comparing Figures 2 and 3). Note that the upper scale band for January is 4 to 11.6 degrees compared with 4 to 8 degrees in December. The North Pole is 4 to 11.6 degrees warmer compared with the datum period (Figure 1).
  • The Antarctic in December was cooler compared with the datum period but in January it too is now showing positive temperature anomalies.
  • There are a few cool spots in January, notably North Africa, Arabian peninsula, SW USA and Mexico, Australia and East Siberia. But these are dwarfed by the massive, large positive anomaly over Asia, Europe and the Arctic

Comparison January 2006 to January 2007

  • In January 06, Russia and Europe experienced anomalous cold weather that threatened gas supplies and sent gas prices soaring. This is in stark contrast to January 07 (comparing Figures 2 and 4). Temperatures over a vast area appear to be somewhere between 8 to 20 degrees warmer this year compared to last year.
  • North America was somewhat cooler this January compared to last year.

21st Century warming


Figure 5. 2000 to 2006, mean January anomalies. Goddard Institute for Space Studies.


Figure 6. 2000 to 2006, zonal mean January anomaly. Goddard Institute for Space Studies.


Figure 7. 2000 to 2006, zonal mean September anomaly. Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

It is worth taking a broader look at 21st century warming. Figure 5 shows the mean January anomalies from 2000 to 2006 compared with the datum period (1951 to 1980) and Figure 6 charts these mean temperature anomalies by latitude. It is clear that the anomalies dicussed above for December 2006 and January 2007 are part of a broader trend.

Note that January temperature rises are not evenly distributed. All latitudes north of 60 degrees south have experienced January warming, but the amount of warming increases as you go north. An average global increase in the period of a fraction of a degree masks the fact that high latitudes have warmed by over 2 degrees C during the northern hemisphere winter (Figure 6).

The late summer (September), northern hemisphere anomaly (Figure 7) shows warming across the whole planet of 1 to 2 degrees C. Late summer warming of 1 to 2 degrees in the arctic regions of Canada and Russia is unlikely to have a catastrophic effect on melting permafrost - yet. This will be the subject of a follow on post.

Food for thought

Figure 8 shows a temperature reconstruction for the past 2000 years. Note that the temperature range from the peak of the Medieval warm period to the trough of the Little Ice Age is around 1 degree C.

Figure 9 shows various temperature forecast scenarios for the next 100 years from the newly published IPCC summary report (pdf). Warming forecasts vary from 1.8 to 4.0 degrees C.


Figure 8. Temperature reconstructions for the past 2000 years from Wikipedia.


Figure 9. Temperature forecasts for 6 different scenarios considered by the IPCC (Summary report for Policymakers, Figure SPM-5: pdf).

At this point it was my intention to discuss what are in my opinion certain critical factors for the global warming debate that go beyond the physics of radiative forcing that was discussed by Stuart last year:

  • Orbital / Milankovitch cycles
  • Solar / sunspot cycles
  • Loss of Arctic sea ice / reduced albedo
  • Melting Arctic permafrost

However, I feel there is more than enough food for thought here already so I will postpone this discussion to my next post.

It`s interesting to look also at the artic sea ice concentration:


Annual Sea Ice Minima (1979-2005)

The annual sea ice minima is clearly going down:


Khebab - nice charts. It looks like the trend of ice loss starts around 1950. It is also curious that the one area on Earth where temperatures seem to be lower now than in the past is around the Bering Sea, and yet sea ice is still being lost to the N of this cool spot.

Did you know that the arctic ice drifts continuously like a conveyer belt. This was used by Nansen in his 1893 to 1896 expedition, using the polar exploration vessel Fram, as a lazy way to get to the north pole - see map.



The Fram Museum in Oslo is well worth a visit.

http://www.fram.museum.no/en/

And to finnish with a picture of Nate in Wisconsin....


Whilst on topic, this clearly has little to do with peak oil - sorry Dave.

Very funny. Did my Mom send you that?

Isn't this year supposed to be an 'El Niño' year. Is this significant to the j-2007 anomalies?

Very good point Louise - Wikipedia says that the last 3 El Ninos were 1997-1998, 2002-2003 and 2006-2007. So here's the Jan charts for 1998 and 2003.



The 1998 El Nino was a strong event - and we still have a lot of blue colours in the Arctic and Siberia. You are right to point out small time-scale variablity and Dec 06 - Jan 07 will no doubt turn out to be a blip on the record. I just find it amazing to have such a huge area of the N hemisphere covered by such a large anomaly.

The change of 1 C from medieval warm period to the little ice age is interesting to compare to the changes expected this century.

1 C change took about 600 years.

Earth has already warmed about 0.6 C in the past 30 years, perhaps the next 0.4 C will happen in the next couple of decades?

That's 1 C in less than 60 years, or about 10 times the previous rate. If the same math is done for the global ice age to the start of the warm present the rate difference is about 100 times faster now.

Now how to place the importance of this rate into a context folks in the 21st century can understand....Okay, here it goes:

If you are driving a car at 60 miles per hour (ca. 100 km/hr) and decelerate to 0 mph in 10 seconds that is no problem.

But if you make the same change in 1 second you are probably dead or seriously impaired.

This is why all the talk about "the Earth has dealt with climate change before...." are so ridiculous. Sure it has, but not at this rate except during previous mass extinction events. It's like telling someone, don't worry, you have gone from 60 to 0 many times before!

But if you make the same change in 1 second you are probably dead or seriously impaired.



If this was intended as a causal chain I think a more appropriate construction would be: 1) seriously impaired; 2) abrupt deceleration; 3) death.


Looking forward to the next post Euan. Cheers!

Jason, abrubt climate change is not new. The last six ice ages (in the last million years) all ended by methane bombs. Abrubt climate change in those periods is said to have happened in as little as 12 to 20 years with temp changes of 5C. It causes sea levels to rise in those surges at rates of 70cm/yr (3"/yr). In some deglaciations, the temp change was 11C overall.

The last time it happened, about 10k yrs ago, we lost the sabre tooth tiger and mammoths etc and the ecology of Earth has some changes but it was hardly catastrophic. Some folks resist change. But it is part of the natural process. Homo sapiens have been roaming for 60k yrs. They have gone thru this before. The pop'n likely dropped from 100k to 10k ... but Darwin (and MS) would probably say that was a good thing (from a genetics point of view) and helped clear out the neanderthals (tho i wonder sometimes).

Upon rereading your post, i notice that u acknowledge that this has happened before ... but mass extinctions came with it. That was because the inhabitants of the time were basically agrarian and stubborn. Oooops. That does not bode well for Heinberg's kool-aid drinkers, eh?!!

This isn't very accurate. Agriculture was not invented (as far as we know) before the start of the Holocene (around 10k years ago) (and modulo some South East Asian horticulturists). Since modern humans have been around for ~150k-~200k years, and in Eurasia for around ~50k years, the leading explanation for why we didn't invent agriculture/civilization till the Holocene - when we invented it numerous times independently - is that the climate was too unstable for us to stay in one place long enough until then. I don't know that this can be considered proven beyond a reasonable doubt (given that some of the possible evidence is under water and lots of mud). But still, given that no agricultural civilization has ever survived anything of the magnitude of a glacial-interglacial transition, the thought of abrupt climate changes should probably inspire some fear - though it's essentially impossible to quantify the likelihood of one in the 21st century.

Also, the methane forcing in Pleistocene deglaciations was less important than the CO2 forcings - "methane bomb" is rather misleading. And since there doesn't seem much reason to suppose the last deglaciation was any worse than previous ones, I'm inclined to accept the theory that early human hunters were the main factor in the mass mammal extinctions.

Certainly the Clovis people in North America lived for only a very short time (about 1000 years I think) before becoming something else-- 13000 years ago.

There distinctive trademark was the large bladed stone spearhead.

It appears that at the same time a number of the North American super-mammals were extincted.

This would be consistent with the impact of the Polynesians on New Zealand-- again a wave of extinctions, including the Dodo Bird.

I believe Diamond raises this point in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Clovis culture appears to be associated with the loss of North American mega fauna. The same loss of mega fauna is also found with hominid entry to the Australian continent.


Another interesting text is Sea of Slaughter by Farley Mowat. He documents the decline of all species in the Gulf of St Lawrence area with the arrival of European settlers.

Current research is discounting hunting for these extinctions. Not enuf bone damage on found carcasses. It is likely that the food chain was disrupted by the turning of the mass grasslands North of 60 to tundra. Large parts of yukon and alaska known as Beringia were ice free for much of last ice age. Mammoths starved. Saber tooth had no prey. etc etc.

References?

http://www.beringia.com/02/02mainb.html

Stuart et al, click on the "research notes" with each link. Unfortunately most of these were written in 95/96 and have not been updated with current research being shared at local seminars and lectures ... mostly by univ of alaska & univ of calgary paleantologists.

Of all the beringia fauna, wolf has adapted best over time. Much larger now due to absence of predators and new status of near top of the food chain.

With GW, deer are penetrating our are deeper. And that is bringing larger numbers of cougars.

Interesting research presently is why do sabre tooth cats have sabre. Mammoths don't have pierced neck bones. Slashing abdomen?

DNA et al testing allows new diet info by analysis of compounds in ancient teeth.

If i can get a Powerpoint from lecturers, i'll post it another time.

I believe there's still a very active debate on this subject with neither side having convinced the other. The Wikipedia has a fair summary. I expect there's some of both going on, but I find the idea that the extra ecological stress of humans was the main cause of so many extinctions in such a short time fairly persuasive.

You are getting into areas of my professional expertise. What has happened historically is probably not analogous to current changes due to rate differences.

See something some friends of mine wrote:

http://www.wfu.edu/~silmanmr/labpage/publications/consuelo.science.2004.pdf

I have also been part of modeling studies on the ecosystem impacts of such rapid change:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/310/5750/1029?ijkey=rSvd9...

Jason: Your article is behind a paywall. Reading from the abstract, is it correct that the change in species composition lowers the above ground carbon sink?

Yes. This was the aspect of ecosystem function modeled and that was the general conclusion.

More specifically, a decline in species diversity that corresponds to a loss of functional diversity would tend to reduce carbon storage as a functional attribute of an ecosystem, especially an ecosystem being stressed.

Thanks for the response.


And that finding would apply to other forest types beyond the montane forest under study?


I recognize that question may be pushing beyond the findings of the research study but does the above appear to be likely?

On-topic I hope but kinda a side note.
Europe has been consistently warm on these charts month after month for years now. Interrupted only by hot hot hot.
As soon as the IPCC report came out US went into a deep freeze. We are warmer than in the past but not with the intensity and consistency the Euros have lived. The differing attitudes here and there follow.

Look at Euan's Fig 5 (the average anomaly over the last six years, relative to 1950-1981). North America has at least as large an anomaly as Europe. The retreat of glaciers in North America is every bit as bad as that in Europe.

I think the explanations for the different responses are political, not environmental. The US has always been several degrees more conservative than most European countries, and conservatives have been much slower to accept the reality of global warming. (The facts are increasingly penetrating their ranks now, but it's a slow process, possibly not much faster than the breakup of a large ice sheet :-).

Stuart, the reluctance of joining the GW hoopla is 'cuz:
a) the change in temp in 1985 was only 0.2C to that point
b) the change to 1995 was only 0.4C
c) the change to today is only 0.6C

It is easy to monday morning quarterback from today's vantage. There was not the overwhelming science to support GW from 1985 to Y2k. It is revisionist to presume that "it was obvious".

No Earthling can detect these minute changes. Even North of 60 where we face a 2C difference, it is difficult to discern that tiny background increase from inter-annual and decadal weather patterns.

To muddy the waters, 1980 was clearly shown by science to be a peak in solar activity for the last 1000 years by all manner of proxies. There was no indication that "fighting GW" would not be a losing battle in light of possible very long term solar and orbital cycles.

The price tag of IPCC 2001's mitigation effort was said to be about $600-Billion. Several g-20 Govt's were in Recession or flat growth at that time. Europe refused to identify the USA penalties that would be accessed against the USA, Australia and Canada should they not meet 2009 Kyoto Protocol targets. All three countries were already 20% higher in emissions instead of 5% below 1990 levels. There was little appetite to spend Hundreds of Billions of Dollars for an effort that was possibly agin the grain of Mother Nature's fate. Albeit we acknowledge that GHG was im play, only in the last two years has their been sufficient science to illustrate that Earth is not in a long term solar forced warming cycle.

Further, as shown on the Climate venue of my website, albeit the Globe has been on this 0.6C warming trend, the USA in fact was on a cooling trend since the el nino of 1998. In 2004, it was 1.5F cooler than 1998.

While it is easy for leftist, socialist, liberal on-the-bandwagon, tree-hugger types to now say we coulda/shoulda/woulda ... they are plainly uneducated as to what was consensus during this timeline.

And how many on the bandwagon stopped 1949 M King Hubbert's efforts for us to go Nuclear power and hydro elec generation? How many of them wanted us to burn oil, gas and coal instead of uranium?

And how many of the pro-GW emission cutters actually know the magnitude of cuts required in g-20 countries to meet kyoto protocol targets? Dick all. Neither politicians nor enviromentalists have been honest with that shopping list of "to do items".

What does it tell u when 98% of scientists believe in GW?? It tells me that only 2% of scientists are climatologists!!

I have little patience for recent bandwagon practioners. That is not to say that i do not appreciate the magnitude of the problem and the necessity of action plans. I am saying that very few are ready for the consequences of "today's fad of going green".

As an analogy, consider this. Edwards, Hillary Clinton et al have been asked for weeks why they supported the 21-day Iraq2 offensive. Each one admits to possibly being wrong, but state categorically that they made their decisions based on the "best information available at the time". The Climate Change debate is no different...

Nobody was right or wrong. One must be prudent with the knowledge at hand.

I agree it is going to be damn hard to fix the problem, unless we come up with a magic bullet.

Hi Freddy,

My you do bring back the good old days of 1982 and arguing with my young wife about whether or not GW was 'a happening'...I would jump up and down and cry things like 'Hawaiian mountain tops' and 'radical CO2 increase' and she would smile and humour me, put cold cloths on my fevered brow...happy days, happy days.

You are quite right about the attitude then as a newly minted meteorologist friend of mine was not as simpatico and through clenched teeth would sternly say, "up at the Academy we consider GW just so much ballyhooo and nonsense".

I couldn't understand why no one was excited about this CO2 increase. I also did not understand why it took nearly a month after hearing about 'cold fusion' before I heard another word on the news about it. The Saviour had appeared it' seemed, and nobody give a cool god damn. So far 'they' were right about ignoring that one...win some loose some.

To muddy the waters, 1980 was clearly shown by science to be a peak in solar activity for the last 1000 years by all manner of proxies. There was no indication that "fighting GW" would not be a losing battle in light of possible very long term solar and orbital cycles.

Cite? AFAIK, there is no evidence of any sustained cycle in solar output, as long as we have been measuring it.

The price tag of IPCC 2001's mitigation effort was said to be about $600-Billion. Several g-20 Govt's were in Recession or flat growth at that time. Europe refused to identify the USA penalties that would be accessed against the USA, Australia and Canada should they not meet 2009 Kyoto Protocol targets. All three countries were already 20% higher in emissions instead of 5% below 1990 levels. There was little appetite to spend Hundreds of Billions of Dollars for an effort that was possibly agin the grain of Mother Nature's fate. Albeit we acknowledge that GHG was im play, only in the last two years has their been sufficient science to illustrate that Earth is not in a long term solar forced warming cycle.

Again a number of 'facts' that need checking, or seem just plain wrong, or need to be put in context.

$600bn *over time*. Not in one go.

$600bn in 2001 was roughly 1.7% of world GDP at that time. However GDP is a 'flow' number ie it is meaningless unless taken over a unit time (per annum).

Of course, Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the *US* alone, as much as that in the interim since then. Not to mention Homeland Defence.

On your 'only in the last 2 years' that amazes me. Where do you get those data for solar flux and forcings?

Further, as shown on the Climate venue of my website, albeit the Globe has been on this 0.6C warming trend, the USA in fact was on a cooling trend since the el nino of 1998. In 2004, it was 1.5F cooler than 1998.

Puzzled by this claim. The 11 hottest summers ever recorded in North America have all been since 1990, I believe. Now 1991 and 1992 were cold, because of Pinatubo (which Hansen's model predicted quite exactly).

So in those 16 years, you've just told us that the years, as a whole, were cooler 1998-2004. That leaves 1993,94,95,96,97?

While it is easy for leftist, socialist, liberal on-the-bandwagon, tree-hugger types to now say we coulda/shoulda/woulda ... they are plainly uneducated as to what was consensus during this timeline.

FWIW I never voted anything but the Canadian Tory Party. (I wouldn't vote for those right wing prudes though). So I resent the undertone that it is only leftists/ socialists or worse, liberals and tree huggers, that think that global warming is a problem.

In fact, the first world politician of stature to sound the alarm on global warming was none other than Margaret Thatcher.

I don't think Margaret Thatcher was a leftist, a soicalist, a liberal on the bandwagon, nor a tree-hugger.

Conservatives like trees too, I might add.

And how many on the bandwagon stopped 1949 M King Hubbert's efforts for us to go Nuclear power and hydro elec generation? How many of them wanted us to burn oil, gas and coal instead of uranium?

The governments of the world staged an accelerated programme to encourage nuclear power. See Robert Pool 'Beyond Engineering: How Society Shapes Technology' for an excellent history of the civilian (US) nuclear power industry and the government's role in 'kick starting' the industry.

I can tell you from the family experience of building CANDUs that government subsidy, not least on the question of nuclear waste, is an inextricable part of the history of civilian nuclear power (and hydro electric-- the issue of land rights and eminent domain alone, plus the time lags to finance and build).

There is better evidence. As soon as privatisation and deregulation took off in North America and the UK, the utility industry stopped building anything but gas fired stations.

And how many of the pro-GW emission cutters actually know the magnitude of cuts required in g-20 countries to meet kyoto protocol targets? Dick all. Neither politicians nor enviromentalists have been honest with that shopping list of "to do items".

Untrue. Completely untrue. Both assertions. Most environmentalists have a very good handle on how much CO2 we emit, and what our Kyoto Targets are.

What does it tell u when 98% of scientists believe in GW?? It tells me that only 2% of scientists are climatologists!!

1. you are misquoting. 99% of *climatologists* believe in global warming. I'm not sure if anyone has polled scientists as a whole.

I have little patience for recent bandwagon practioners. That is not to say that i do not appreciate the magnitude of the problem and the necessity of action plans. I am saying that very few are ready for the consequences of "today's fad of going green".

I think the problem is political. Scientists say we need to stop accumulations by 500ppm CO2, 550ppm at the worst. They have been saying that, pretty consistently, since the middle of the 90s. James Hansen has been saying it for longer than that, and whereas 18 years ago his models were seen to be 'way out there' they are now pretty close to consensus.

Economists have been saying that might be too expensive, or you cannot show that the damage is worth the cost of abatement. However the inputs have been garbage: they have assumed the base cases on global warming, without recognising the extreme costs and consequences of the highest costs.

The costs of stabilising the world at 550ppm range from minus 1 to plus 5 per cent. of GDP in 2050 (minus 1 meaning there is a net gain due to the creation of new industries to meeet the challenge of low carbon). The Stern Review credibly says it will be 1% of GDP. They do something called a Monte Carlo simulation of different possible cost scenarios.

Let's contextualise this. 5% of GDP in 2050 says that, in 2050, the world will have the GDP of January 2048, because it opted to do something about global warming, rather than pursue Business As Usual.

As an analogy, consider this. Edwards, Hillary Clinton et al have been asked for weeks why they supported the 21-day Iraq2 offensive. Each one admits to possibly being wrong, but state categorically that they made their decisions based on the "best information available at the time". The Climate Change debate is no different...

Actually the analogy is entirely false. Because you have this thing about 'liberals' you are trying to find an analogy that puts them in the worst possible light.

The Iraq decision was made on the basis of a conscious effort by the people presenting the information to filter and distort it in the worst light--that Iraq had WMD, that Iraq was somehow involved in 9-11. Difficult for a US politician to vote against war when his President tells him or her that Iraq has WMD which threaten the United States.

On global warming, the science has been in place since the early 1990s. What has changed has been:

1). there is more data (the hottest years ever recorded, plus truly alarming data on glaciation). As Hansen says, the anthropogenic global warming trend has decisively broken out of the background noise.

The best analogy I can come up with is when the hole in the ozone layer was discovered.

The political climate suddenly switched from 'do nothing, it's too expensive, it's not necessary, we don't know enough, we can't prove CFCs are doing this' to 'do something'.

You will spot the familiar conservative arguments about CFCs. When the hole in the ozone layer was discovered, that crashed.

2). the well organised disinformation campaign against global warming has begun to break up. Some of the world's leading companies (BP and Shell) abandoned it in the late 90s. Even Exxon is beginning to find it to be a political liability.

3). in the early 1990s, the public, if it thought about global warming at all, thought it was a long time away. It doesn't think that any more.

I think you mean Figure 6. Look again. No anomaly for southeast USA at all (including D.C.) and the strong anomaly for North America is all north of the border. And stronger across N. Europe.
I've been trying to get Goddard data to refresh my memory but their server isn't feeding me today. Euans Fig. is January only.
Consistency really matters. From a PR point of view the current cold weather across America was the worst possible thing that could've happened to the IPCC report. Europe does continue warm. When people are reluctant to accept something new the message has to be repeated over and over and over. If the weather just won't cooperate with the science it's so easy for popular consciousness to revert to a long term outlook of 'Weather: Variable'.
You are so right that it's a slow process. Only speedup will be from strong repeated heat waves.

No, I mean Fig 5 (captions are below the figure).

You're absolutely right about the captioning. So my comments were right(?) about September, not Jan.
A lot of info here.
When The Goddard server talks to me again will spend much time reading, digesting.

You fool, it's a scientific plot to cripple the United States.

A worldwide alliance of leftwing scientists and their fellow travellers.

There is no global warming. What we see is just a natural cycle. Human activity couldn't possibly cause the recorded increase in CO2. The instruments are wrong-- the measurements are taken too close to cities. The temperature curve is a fiction. The world was warmer in the Middle Ages than it is now. The costs of global warming have been wildly overstated. It would be impossibly too expensive to do anything about it in any case.

VT - you had me going for a moment there.

It would be impossibly too expensive to do anything about it in any case.

I just wonder if this bit of your satirical rant may be perceived to be true. I get the feeling that in certain countries (like the UK) politicians are beginning to panic a bit - but without a world consenus to take drastic action, I don't think anything will happen. Equally, I don't think anyone actually knows what the consequences of GW are going to be.

Realclimate.org had this link,
http://bostonreview.net/BR32.1/emanuel.html
to an excellent article written by Emanuel Kerry (primary author for one of the studies on increasing hurricane intensity), on the uncertainties in current understanding of climate behavior. More importantly from my perspective, he included a multilayered explanation of the wildly non-linear responses climate often displays to minor forcing events.

I have read a lot of these and this may be the best. He used extreme effort to be non-partisan and non-confrontational.

But he invents a whole category of 'radicals' and 'extremists' about global warming.

This allows him to take a nice 'middle position' about global warming.

And caters to the conservative notion that they are in the middle, and those who are alarmed about global warming are way out there on the fringe.

The reality is rather the opposite. The one-time extreme views of climate modellers such as James Hansen, have become the received scientific wisdom-- Hansen's people have predicted very closely the observed temperature increase since 1988 (to the point where their critics delete the Hansen 'B' case, when criticising him).

When Hansen says if we don't do something, we could see mass breakup of ice sheets, huge ocean level rises, super hurricanes and super droughts, he is reflecting back what his models tell us, and, increasingly, what glaciologists and other field workers are telling us about what is going on out there.

The 'extreme' view is actually increasingly the scientific consensus-- particularly the revelations about past rapid changes in climate that have taken place. We no longer view the world's climate as inherently stable, rather it 'flips' between states.

Whilst the scientific community has moved to (for scientists) a state of near breathless panic, the political and public media debate remains stuck in an 'is it happening?'/ 'won't a warmer world be better?' frame.

Normally scientists are more sanguine than the public at large (think nuclear power). As James Lovelock has pointed out, this is this odd case where the scientific community, whilst accepting the uncertainties, is prepared to say that if we do not alter course, we have all but guaranteed disaster.

The public and politicians at large are barely awake on this.

RE: Emmanuel Kerry’s: Phaeton’s Reins; The human hand in climate change
http://bostonreview.net/BR32.1/emanuel.html

In one sense I agree with you, his characterization of “environmentalist extremists” and their role in the global warming debate is overly negative. However, after I got over a bit of defensiveness, I found his description of events not too far from the truth.

At some point those of us who believe in the necessity of a sustainable future have to quit talking to each other and must persuade “non-believers” to change their minds. To this end, Kerry’s discussion of the politicization of the global warming appears to be a vehicle for affirming the IPCC conclusions as an answer to unhealthy dogmatism on both sides. In particular, by using a FOX channel descriptor (environmental extremists), he is inviting people who identify with such concepts to agree with him that extremists previously exaggerated evidence, but that new evidence makes it non-extreme (correct) to accept the consensus IPCC evidence that warming is real. Politically quite clever.

I hope this will not prevent anyone from reading this article, as the description of abrupt climatic change is eloquent.

I may have missed his subtle rhetorical point and I thank you for bringing it to my attention.

It seems to me the sobering lesson of this environmental crisis, as with so many previous ones (remember how Rachel Carson was treated? As an extremist, a woman without a Phd-- there was also an unsubtle undertone of anti-semitism, this was the early 1960s after all) has been that the 'extremists' usually have the right end of the stick, they are just 20 years ahead of the rest of us.

In the 30 or so years that I have been following current affairs, the 'extremist' environmentalist position has almost always become the received wisdom in the subsequent decade or two.

And the costs of meeting the 'extremist' pollution abatement have always turned out to be much lower than was feared or forecast.

20 years ago, the notion that we would ban PVC because it might be causing male sterility, would have been laughed out of the room.

And yet our studies of fish and amphibians now suggest that we will, indeed, have to ban PVC.

20 years ago, the notion that ground level atmospheric ozone was a serious pollutant was certainly a fringe one. Yet now, we have decent links to the rising incidence of asthma-- one of the most serious chronic ailments in the industrialised world.

I still haven't recovered from all the "coming ice age" panic of the 1970's.

There's a good summary of that (non) issue here.

A couple of speculative scientific papers. A cover article in Newsweek. All associated with a few cold winters (1976 in particular). An false analogy.

Whereas speculation about, and theorising about, global warming is over 100 years old. See 'The Discovery of Global Warming'.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html

Spencer Weart's website is the book plus hyperlinks. It's all worth reading-- utterly fascinating.

The better analogy is with CFCs. A theory, in the 70s, got the US to ban CFCs in spray cans. But industrial uses kept growing. Then in 1985, the British Antarctic Survey discovered the hole in the ozone layer. The theory suddenly had a very tangible human reality.

Political and industry resistance to doing something about it was overwhelmed, and the Montreal Protocol was signed. CFC productiong is due to be phased out by 2011.

To address several of the points raised above:

Annual average temperatures - 2000 to 2006


Europe has warmed marginally more than USA - there are no grounds to excuse the USA in these data IMO. Warming of 1 to 2 degrees over N hemisphere continental areas in the years since 1951/80!

Pre-industrial trend


These data suggest that if anything for the past 3000 years the Earth has been on a mild cooling trend. However, the Medieval warm period and Little Ice Age just appear as blips on this trend and since 1800 - we have been on a natural warming blip - that would if anything reinforce radiative GHG forcing. (note temperature scale is relative not absolute).

Methane burps


Antarctic ice core data - show CO2 and methane going up and down together - in concert with orbital cycles. It is difficult here to separate the effect of warming causing GHG emissions from bogs etc, and the effect of GHG on warming. Note that methane concentrations are all less than 1 ppm - scale is parts per billion, and that methane oxidises relatively quickly to CO2 - no methane burps in this data.

A methane burp has been recorded at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary about 55 million years ago - we're talking abut the last 0.6 miilion years here.

For me, the anomaly map for North America you show here tends to reinforce the political point rather than contradict it.

From the map, the 2000-2006 anomaly in my area might be about 0.7C/1.3F. Now, I've got plenty of snow and ice to sharply signal when the 0C threshold is crossed, but 0.7C is just not noticeable subjectively. It must be measured with good instruments, and/or deduced from careful study of records of freezing dates for the lakes.

I think folks living in the equable maritime climate of coastal England and Europe - places so benign that just a few cm of snow (inevitably of the wrong kind) seem regularly to shut everything down - often don't "get" the sheer noisiness of interior continental weather. (N.B.: Californians bundled in parkas at 10C are amusing too.) Indeed, when they visit, we must sometimes caution them, lest they succumb to heat exhaustion, or bad frostbite, according to the season. Sometimes, it's 38C with the dew point around 27C, or it's -25C (the extremes are 40C and -38C.) And yes, even in January it's sometimes 15C - this January's massively-hyped lengthy warm spell broke few if any local records.

I think this helps account for a steady stream of impractical and even life-threatening suggestions from coast-dwellers for ways to reduce CO2 and other emissions. For example, bicycle-riding, or even walking to the bus stop and waiting, are potentially dangerous for almost a third of the year, either from ice (broken hips are not funny) and cold, or else heat. One absolutely wants a car - though in summer, one must take care if that car is sitting in the sun. And some building managers overdo the heating-and-cooling, but severely curtailing it just isn't on. (What did people do before these luxuries were invented? Simple: they lived on the coasts and sometimes still they died like flies, but hardly anyone lived in the interior.)

Anyway, subjectively - and it's emotions that drive politics, not "objective science" - there is not yet much to notice, other than that weather indeed varies tremendously. Meanwhile, the maps and charts of the modeled far future are unfortunately still made by wizards and magicians wielding unaudited secret computer programs. If we need to use computer extrapolations to forcibly turn billions of lives upside down, then let's have the source codes and ISO 9000 quality audits posted for any and all to see. Now. "Trust me" simply doesn't cut it. (I neither share, nor even "get", given the awful history of Europe, Europeans' charming, blind and naive trust that governments are intrinsically wholly benign, that absolute power never corrupts absolutely or at all. In truth, I find the traditional French paintings of grown-adults-as-infants suckling at the breasts of Marianne, the personification of the State, to be philosophically revolting. Sorry.)

Maybe there's a reason why the politics is so much used as a vehicle for other agendas, such as Kunstler's irrational hatred of suburbs, or just socialist ardor for forcibly imposing the lowest common denominator. Subjectively, it doesn't yet stand well on its own. But do consider that action taken based on hidden, non-transparent agendas will be apt to dry up and blow away as it bites down on living standards.

PaulS - I think you make some good points about perceptions in your first 2 paragraphs. In Aberdeen, by the Sea, in NE Scotland, where I live, we had several days this january with temperatures over 10 C. We've had virtually no snow and little frost - this is all quite anomalous. The Autumn was also extraordinarily mild. This is one of the reasons I'm following these charts. OK - so one swallow doesn't make a summer - but this is clearly part of trend - of my own experience for the past 20 years, which NASA is tracking.

The inner continental areas that are accustomed to +30C in summer and -20C in winter may not notice much difference yet. But on vacation in France this year (Paris) the temperature was near 40C - this is becomming a regular feature - and I couldn't drink enough beer to stay cool.

Everything may seem normal for you - but you need to be alert to changes else where - droughts leading to croplands drying out, melting ice sheets and permafrost melting.

"Anyway, subjectively - and it's emotions that drive politics, not "objective science" - there is not yet much to notice, other than that weather indeed varies tremendously."

I agree with this. The changes are not that subjectively noticeable yet, and in any case by subjective human standards will be slow (unless we trigger some kind of abrupt climate change threshold). Humans are evolved to mainly respond to emotionally significant (ie concrete) events happening clearly in front of them, not abstract slow-changing events that are clearest in statistical averages.

That's why this issue is so dangerous. There are huge lags built into the climate system (massive oceans slowly catching up with the higher heat flux, ice sheets slowly developing more and more meltwater-opened cracks and fissures in places that used to be solid ice, trees getting more and more stressed as their climate zone moves away from them). By the time the changes are so clear that people will be prepared to do what is required, there will be decades worth of worse damage already in the pipeline. And although we don't observe slow changes, our infrastructure is very long lived and it will not be so easy to reconfigure it on as large a scale as may be required.

This is why I keep saying "CAFE, CAFE, CAFE". Raising fuel economy standards is becoming politically feasible, automobiles are one of the fastest changing parts of the system, and there is enormous technical room to improve their efficiency without requiring deep changes in the way people live (which they will not accept). And hopefully Detroit's ability to block progress will be reduced by the fact that they are haemorraging money precisely because they focussed too much on inefficient vehicles. Economically, a carbon tax is much more sensible, but I think it's going to go nowhere politically as soon as people understand what it means in their pocket book (increased gas and electricity prices).

Your problem in the usa with social security balancing is easy. Raise payroll deductions 2% and it balances 'til 2075 instead of 2045.

Same with gasoline taxes. Raise them to where Canadians are and join the rest of the world. Like metric! Phase in over five years if u wish.

But as with so many other unimplemented long term strategies, usa Elections get in the fricken way. Mid-term Elections were imminent. Let's hold off. Now we see that instead of rushing out and doing the "right thing" non partisan committees are going partisan 'cuz of the Presidential Primaries jockeying; and we will shortly hear that the 2008 Elections are again "too close" to make voters angry. The public is primed presently. But the politicians, imho, are afraid of the blowback of sticter regulations and restrictions on both the consumer and businesses.

I certainly agree that a substantial US gasoline tax, introduced in stages, would solve many problems - reduce imports, CO2 emissions and budget defecit - its a no brainer. Problem is getting elected on that ticket. US politicians would have to become adept liars.

As an aside, the UK government has come under fire from the courts in their handling of a consultation on building new nuclear power stations. Interestingly, the politicians are now placing energy security above CO2 emissions in their argumentation for new newks.

US politicians would have to become adept liars.



What, you don't think they are good enough now?

I've argued again and again that gasoline taxes don't solve your CO2 problem.

Carbon taxes might-- because there are other areas where the price elasticity of carbon emission is high, most notably power generation.

But in transport, there are few substitutes for what we do now, and the way we do it.

Gasoline taxes are about revenue generation, and to a lesser extent energy security. But mostly about revenue generation. Gasoline is a very price inelastic good.

Peak Oil and human nature will be the predominant influence on future global temperature. As oil supply deminishes, we will strip mine this planet for coal like there is no tomorrow. Gov. Perry of Texas has 10 coal-fired power plants fast-tracked for construction. In the next couple decades we will burn all the coal we can get our hands on as part of our final energy death convulsions.