Global Temperatures by Decade

I can't resist sharing this terrific graph that came via Grist.org. The dotted gray line is the long-term average for the period 1961-1990 so if the last two decades were included it would be much higher.

Grist quotes from the associated report:

The rapid changes that have occurred since the middle of the past century, however, have been caused largely by humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Other human activities also affect the climate system, including emissions of pollutants and other aerosols, and changes to the land surface, such as urbanization and deforestation.

Climate change: more data

Update, March 16: For more on the loss of the monarch habitat, see this Op-Ed in the New York Times.


Update, March 14: The New York Times is reporting that the monarch butterfly migration is the smallest in many years. If you have a subscription, read the article: first, I think it's fair to conclude that it illustrates that there are many unintended consequences from our decisions - weed-resistant plants mean fewer weeds, which means less food for the butterflies. And second, it illustrates the use of proxy measures - researchers cannot count the number of butterflies, so they count the amount of space the butterflies cover. The sharp declines are scary.

That is a graph showing temperature ranges over the last 11,000 years - the Holocene period, published last week in Science magazine (the full abstract is here; the full article is behind a paywall). What the data show is that the earth is warmer today than it's been for most of that period. What's different about this paper? Several things: it goes back much further than previous research and it examines global, not just regional, temperatures. As Tim McDonnell of The Climate Desk puts it:

To be clear, the study finds that temperatures in about a fifth of this historical period were higher than they are today. But the key, said lead author Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University, is that temperatures are shooting through the roof faster than we've ever seen.

"What we found is that temperatures increased in the last hundred years as much as they had cooled in the last six or seven thousand," he said. "In other words, the rate of change is much greater than anything we've seen in the whole Holocene," referring to the current geologic time period, which began around 11,500 years ago.

How did we get here and where are we going? Here's a link to a good infographic that tells you what you need to know about the continuing release of carbon dioxide will play out in different scenarios. It's not a pretty picture.

Global warming - 62 years in 13 seconds

From NASA via Climate Central, this video shows how the pace of global warming is accelerating. Watch closely, Climate Central says:

You’ll note an acceleration of the temperature trend in the late 1970s as greenhouse gas emissions from energy production increased worldwide and clean air laws reduced emissions of pollutants that had a cooling effect on the climate, and thus were masking some of the global warming signal.

Warm November weather

Weird December weather - not to mention October and November - when was the last time you saw a white Christmas? Climate Central is reporting that November 2012 was the 333d straight month when average temperatures exceeded the 20th century average. That's 27 years. And since 15 of those years were in the 20th century and included in the average, well, that's bad news.

Climate Central also says:

Much of the world saw warmer-than-average temperatures during November. Warmer-than-average weather affected Australia, the Central and Western U.S., northern Africa, far eastern Russia, and central Asia. The small European nation of Croatia was particularly mild during November, with temperatures ranging from 4.3°F to 7.9°F above average during the month.

The increasing heat of summer

Do summers appear to be getting warmer? You're right, they are. That video animates data showing that temperature extremes are become more frequent in the northern hemisphere. You can see another, equally frightening, video here. You can read the original article here.

Update: There's an amusing take on the unseasonably warm December from Philip Bump here.

Four Charts and a Video

in which The Atlantic identifies the impact climate change is having already.

Bonus picture:

That's a time-lapse picture of glacial ice melting in the Arctic, illustrating the Guardian's article about a new film, "Chasing Ice." More pictures available at the links.

Image via guardian.co.uk

September 2012 warmest on record - worldwide

It may not have seemed so in parts of the US, but worldwide temperatures in September 20112 were the warmest the month has been since record keeping began in 1880, according to NOAA. It was also the 331st straight month with above-average temperatures, and the 36th straight year with a global temperature above the 20th century average.

What does this mean? Weather patterns are changing. As Andrew Freedman of Climate Central puts it:

Ocean temperatures were boosted by a borderline weak El Niño episode on the tropical Pacific Ocean, which is associated with warmer-than-average water temperatures. According to NOAA, such conditions are likely to continue throughout the winter, with earlier forecasts for a moderate El Niño no longer looking likely. If an El Niño event does occur during the rest of 2012, it could bump global temperatures up further, since such events tend to boost global surface temperatures, NOAA reported.

The U.S. continued to suffer from one of its worst droughts on record, with the majority of the contiguous U.S. seeing some form of drought conditions during the month. In addition, eastern Europe, inclduing Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, suffered from drought conditions. In India, unusually dry weather was ameliorated when the Asian monsoon finally provided generous rains, albeit much later than average.

September also brought the lowest Arctic sea ice extent on record. Studies have shown that manmade global warming is the cause of the majority of sea ice loss that has occurred since the beginning of the satellite record in 1979.

Image from NOAA via climatecentral.org

Increasing Antarctic Sea Ice and Global Warming

I received a comment or two in response to my earlier post about the record Arctic sea ice melt, arguing that I should address the increasing sea ice around the Antarctic. There are climate skeptics who claim that the increase, which is small but exists (you'll have to scroll down to the bottom of the linked page) means that global warming is not happening, or at least concerns are greatly exaggerated. That is simply wrong. Justin Gillis, a writer for the New York  Times' Green blog, has recently written a post debunking the myth.

The bottom line is that the extent of what is happening in the Arctic dwarfs what is happening in the Antarctic. As Gillis puts it, "in percentage of ocean cover, the decline in Arctic winter ice is eight times as fast as the increase in Antarctic winter ice."

There's no question that the issues are complex. But the Arctic and the Antarctic are not directly comparable:

• the Arctic is an ocean, confined and shallow, and surrounded by land. The Antarctic is a continent, land surround by deep ocean.
• The poles are in different places. When it is summer in the Arctic, it is winter in the Antarctic, and vice versa. So simultaneous ice melt in one and ice growth in the other are expected.
• The topography is different. As Gillis explains it, in contrast to the Arctic:

In Antarctica, when winter sets in and the sun drops low in the sky, sea ice can grow unimpeded over the huge ocean surface. But then, in contrast to the historical situation in the Arctic, about 80 percent of the Antarctic ice melts in the summer. So the Antarctic ice has always come and gone in an annual rhythm. Most of it does not hang around to reflect sunlight back to space at the time of year when Southern Hemisphere sunlight is strongest.

The blog Skeptical Science points out that the Southern Ocean is warming, even while Antarctic sea ice is increasing. Its conclusion:

In summary, Antarctic sea ice is a complex and unique phenomenon. The simplistic interpretation that it must be cooling around Antarctica is decidedly not the case. Warming is happening - how it affects specific regions is complicated.

Read these two columns for yourself for more detail and some useful graphics.

Summer Arctic ice melt, and winter weather

This year's record Arctic sea ice melt, nicely illustrated in the video, is providing the starting point for a series of studies on the possible impact on the jet stream - and with the jet stream, on global weather.

As Andrew Freedman of Climate Central puts it, one study suggests that because of the extent of the ice melt:

the jet stream, which has always been rather capricious, is behaving differently now. It has become slightly more elongated during fall and winter, with bigger troughs and ridges. A more wavy jet stream may have contributed to recent extreme winters that have featured historic blizzards along the East Coast of the U.S. as well as in Europe . . .

Another study has found that the colder winters and large snowstorms of the northern hemisphere are at least in part the result of the arctic ice melt. I'll be keeping an eye out for updates.

Arctic Sea Ice Melt

The graph above is the best visual depiction of the extent of the Arctic Sea ice melt I've found. This year, more ice was lost, earlier, than in all the previous years. The illustration shows pretty clearly the difference compared with five years ago and with the 1979-2000 average. The shaded gray area is two standard deviations from that average - and the 2012 line is well below it.

Why does it matter? Well, it's a pretty good sign that the planet is warming, especially, as you can see from the graph, that the loss of ice is also happening earlier in the season. Sea ice is already floating, so it won't raise sea levels. Now forecasters predict that the Arctic Sea will be ice-free in the summer in the next 15 years. And there will likely be other consequences, including further melting of the Greenland ice sheet. And that will raise sea levels. See more details here.

For more information about the extent of the melt, and comparisons with older data, check out the National Snow and Ice Data Center's Arctic Sea Ice page.





Image via: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

350.org and climate change

Update 1:50 pm: Here's a link to Derek Thompson's blog on theatlantic.com, with charts from Hansen's paper showing areas where temperatures are more than 3 standard deviations above recorded normals. There's no question that it's human caused global warming.

Yesterday's New York Times had an Op-Ed by James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, arguing that by using tar shale, or tar sands, for fuel, instead of finding other, less damaging energy sources, we make what is now a risk of of keeping earth's carbon concentrations below 550 ppm (parts per million) a certainty. (Hansen addresses tar shale in the US and Canada, though there are also tar sands in Venezuela.) It's a depressing prediction, and one worth thinking about.

As Hansen points out, we are already seeing extreme weather events caused by our heating planet. The photo at the top, from Climate Central, shows waterspouts (essentially tornadoes over water) in the Gulf of Mexico off of Louisiana on May 9th, 2012. You can see more at the Climate Central's website, here.

But there are some grounds for at least minimal hope. The author Bill McKibben and a team of 'university friends' has started a website called 350.org intended to build grassroots understanding of the need to reduce the carbon concentration to, you guessed it, 350ppm. Here's their introductory video:

And I know it's behind a paywall, but this New Yorker article by David Owen about a search for an artificial photosynthesis, is interesting, first because of the science (an artificial leaf) and second because of the approach (limiting the increase in energy needs of developing countries while bringing up the standard of living, instead of focusing only decreasing demand in developed countries).

More climate data from NOAA

Update, April 19: Here's a link to the Early Bloomers Op-Ed in today's NY Times about the how much earlier the plants that Thoreau noted bloom now, and how rare some of them have become.

Image: NY Times

  
After yesterday's post, I took a closer look at NOAA's Climate Services page. It's very useful, with links to reports, data, a news feed, a lookup for historical weather data by zip code, and other material. My favorite: two interactive data dashboards (one for climate change, the other for climate variability). Here's a partial screenshot:

 

The top graph is change in average surface temperature across the earth compared to the average for 1901-2000. The second shows the area of the Northern Hemisphere covered by snow in March and April, shown as the difference from the 1971-2000 average. And the third shows the average mass, together, of 30 reference glaciers from around the world. How do I know this? The little question mark signals a popup that explains what each graph displays in one or two sentences, and then offers a "read more" link for more information.

I encourage my clients to develop and update data dashboards because they let you see, at a glance, the status of your programs. These are particularly glitzy ones, but then they draw on a large number of data points. It's worth going to NOAA's site and experimenting with them directly. And, as I've said before, also here, it's not as if more proof of global warming were needed. Climate change is here, and these depressing numbers show that it's time to take some action.

Climate change data displays

Two useful displays of data showing climate change underway. First, remember how warm March felt? Here's a video using NOAA data to show visually the 15,000+ records that were broken in the US in March:

Second, here's a screenshot of a post from RealClimate ("Climate science from climate scientists") showing how recent earth temperatures have exceeded predictions from a paper published in Science in 1981. The grey is the original graph; the pink is the actual measurements.

I found both of these because I regularly follow James Fallows' terrific blog at TheAtlantic.com. He posted the second; the first was on the Atlantic's video channel.

Global warming in a flash

Climate Central has posted a video based on NASA surface temperature data since 1880, showing how temperatures over the years have wandered from the average. The baseline period is 1951-1980. That's a screenshot above, but you'll have to click on the link to play the video. You've probably figured it out, but blue is cooler, red is warmer, than the baseline average. The video is only 26 seconds long. Watch the US for the drought and dustbowl of the 1930s, and look for the recent changes in the arctic zones.

Gapminder, a great website

One of my very first posts was about Hans Rosling's "200 Countries in 200 Years" video, which shows the growth in income around the world across two centuries. Now here's a link to Rosling's own site, Gapminder.com. It contains links to many of his famous TED conference videos, including the "Magic Washing Machine," embedded below.

But Gapminder has a lot more than that. One of the best pages is the "Health and Wealth of Nations" chart that lets the viewer compare all sorts of metrics around the world. Interested in seeing carbon emissions per person by country? It's there, and also available by region and world wide. Health, education, population, energy, environment work - it's all there, and it's all accessible. There's even a guide for teachers. It's creative and useful. And fascinating.

More anecdotal evidence of global warning

As if any were needed: the New York Times sports section has an article today describing high altitude glaciers melting. If it weren't such an inappropriate adjective I'd call it chilling. But I suppose scary is the operative adjective. Glacierworks has a graphic photo illustrating the difference in one glacier. Here's how it looks now:

and here's how it used to look:

Source: Glacierworks

If you haven't seen one of the "Rivers of Ice" exhibits (underway now in London and Beijing) there's another US one slated at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA, opening in April.

In honor of Durban, more on global warming

Here's a link to an article from New Scientist via Slate, about extreme weather events, global warming, and a new technique British meteorologists want to use that considers the odds of particular events to assess the extent of human-induced climate change involved. (You know: was Hurricane Katrina really a 100 year storm, or was it worse than it might have been because of global warming?) Peter A. Stott, a climate scientist in the UK, wrote the article. We don't have a good enough system yet, he says, but:

What we need is an attribution system, operated regularly like the weather forecast and made available to the public. Its purpose would be to deliver rapid and authoritative assessments of the links, if any, between recent extreme weather events and human-induced climate change.

In the event of, say, a severe flood, the system would provide estimates of the extent to which the event was made more or less likely by human-induced climate change. It would also take into account alternative natural explanations such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, a large-scale climate pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean that affects weather worldwide.

Such a system would be useful - it's hard to tell from one day to the next what is causing particular weather events. And it might even move the discussion in the US from whether climate change is happening to what to do about it.

Sometimes it helps to go outside US news sources, and today's BBC World News Service has a fascinating interview with David Attenborough about his new programs about global warming. I can't find a direct link to the interview, but you can listen to the BBC's webcast here. The Attenborough interview is in the Newshour.

And, FWIW, since I use Wikipedia a lot, here's a link to the Tech Crunch blog post complaining about the placement of Wikepedia's fundraising pleas.

Globaia maps the Anthropocene

Globaia, an organization dedicated to fostering understanding of environmental issues, has released a series of maps and photos documenting our present geological age, which is starting to be called the Anthropocene, or age of human effects upon the Earth. Whether you call it the Anthropocene or Holocene, the pictures and graphics are telling--it's a great use of mapping software--and also eerily beautiful.

Click through the Globaia site, there are very many pictures. If you have any doubt that humans are having an impact on the global environment, take a look at its clickable graphic "The impact of a global temperature rise of 4 degrees C." (Screenshot below).