One Global Warming Trend with Seven Pauses!

It just goes to show that Global Warming isn't a uniform process but a stair-step phenomenon that occurs in fits and starts.

From Youtube, posted by Dana Nuccitelli at the end of last year:

"One of the most common misunderstandings amongst climate deniers is the difference between short-term noise and long-term signal. This video shows how the same temperature data (green) that is used to determine the long-term global surface air warming trend of 0.18°C per decade (red) can be used inappropriately to "cherrypick" short time periods that show a cooling trend simply because the endpoints are carefully chosen and the trend is dominated by short-term noise in the data (blue steps). Isn't it strange how seven periods of cooling can add up to a clear warming trend over the last 4 decades? Several factors can have a large impact on short-term temperatures, such as oceanic cycles like the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) or the 11-year solar cycle. These short-term cycles don't have long-term effects on the Earth's temperature, unlike the continuing upward trend caused by global warming from human greenhouse gas emissions.
"The data (green) are NASA GISS monthly global surface temperature anomaly data from January 1970 through November 2016, with linear trends for the cherry picked time periods of Jan 1970–May 1977, May 1977–October 1979, October 1979–April 1988, April 1988–March 1997, March 1997–February 2002, February 2002–October 2009, and October 2009–April 2014 (blue), followed by the linear trend for the full time period (red)."

The same sort of thing could be plotted on a graph from each of the Hadley Centre's HadCRUT4 temperature data, Cowtan and Way's HadCRUT4-kriging, the Berkeley Earth data, and the NOAA NCDC data.

And a bonus video: confirmation of previous global warming models' predictions using the NASA GISS data for annual globally averaged mean temperatures. Teaser photo shows the famous Pause!

To adapt an Upton Sinclair saying:

It is extremely difficult to get an American to see the roots of the global warming problem when his lifestyle depends on him not understanding it.

First, the basics: what is causing our weird, extreme weather?  Climate change.  What is causing climate change?  Global warming.  What is causing global warming?  Ever-increasing amounts of CO2 and CO2e greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.  What is causing these greenhouse gasses to increase?  The burning of fossil fuels.  And what is causing the combustion of fossil fuels?  Well I don’t have to answer that question!

Take, for example, the recent wildfires in California and heavy snow from South Texas up to Atlanta and heading for the USA Northeast.  “It’s an odd juxtaposition, driven by a highly amplified weather pattern. Winds at the jet-stream level on Friday were blowing from the Canadian Arctic south across the Great Plains all the way to Mexico.”  This weird weather would have been far less likely had had this Arctic-to-Mexico jet stream diversion not been in place.  But a few years back, Dr. Jennifer Francis predicted that as the globe warms, such diversions and the crazy-weird dipoles in the weather that go with them would become increasingly common.

The Nunavut Express, or, Arctic-to-Mexico jet stream diversion.  The jet stream most likely went south around that patch of cold and low pressure over the Pacific and then went north around Alaska, too.  There is a high-pressure ridge and zone of warm air along the whole west coast of North America.  Circulation around high-pressure ridges is clockwise; around low-pressure troughs, anti-clockwise.  I know this is obvious, but some people, what with the state of “education” in the USA….  Source: Wunderground.com.

Another thing that people simply cannot understand or accept because their lifestyles wouldn’t allow it, is that we have a significant temperature rise and sea level rise baked into the cake.

Now take temperature rise.  For every doubling of CO2 / CO2e in the atmosphere the temperature rises by about 3 degrees Celsius over the short to mid-term, 6 deg C over the long term.  So 560 ppm / 280 ppm yields 3 deg C at first, 1120 ppm / 560 ppm yields another 3 deg C. This is a logarithmic scale and it yields this equation:

dT = 4.32 * ln ( Higher CO2 / Lower CO2 )

Back in the Nineteenth Century the CO2 Content was 280 ppm.  Today it is 410 ppm with 490 ppm CO2e (including the CO2).  Our current temperature is about 1.1 deg C above 19th Century values.  For some reasons, this temperature rise is lagging behind the fully adjusted short to mid-term temperature by about 0.5 deg C for just plain CO2 (1.6 deg C), 1.3 deg C for the total CO2e (2.4 deg C).  Which means we have quite a bit of further global warming baked into the cake!

Let’s see: 1.6 deg C above the mean preindustrial temperature is about the maximum interglacial temperature reached before the Earth plummeted back down into ice ages during the Pleistocene Era.  Of course, there is an uncertainty spread of +/- 2 deg C that far back---but James Hansen has hypothesized that superstorms tend to show up at around that 1.6 deg C temperature rise, and has demonstrated that they showed up in the past interglacials.  Superstorms that can wreck our civilization.

Now take sea level rise. We have a LOT of sea level rise baked into the cake. A few score feet of sea level rise, in fact:

When we were in the last ice age, the coldest part of it, roughly 18-20,000 years ago, the seas were about 420 feet lower.  Carbon dioxide levels rose from 180 to 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution, and the seas rose 420 feet, to where they are now,  And they didn’t do it in an even slow curve, but in a series of steps, rapid bumps and pauses.  All across our continental shelf, we have barrier reefs, old coastal mud flats and tidal delta complexes.  The record of sea level change is there.  This is why scientists are rightfully saying we’re probably going to have 70 to 80 feet of sea level rise, because the last time we were at the same CO2 levels we have now, that was where the sea level was.

Hal Winless, Professor and Chair of the Department of Geological Science at the University of Miami, as quoted by Ashley Dawson, Extreme Cities, p. 20.

That much rise in sea level---70 to 80 feet---will completely submerge many of the coastal cities around the world.  A far smaller sea level rise will submerge their ports, and make the cities utterly dysfunctional, global sea-trade completely impossible, and global trade by air much more difficult (because some of the airports are at or slightly above sea level such as Miami International Airport, JFK in New York City, Newark International in New Jersey, Logan Airport in Boston, etc.).

Now one side doesn’t even think global warming is even happening!  My experience is that these old horses have come to the water but they’ve refused to drink because they prefer the taste of Kool-Aid!  The other side is worse: they think we can slightly adjust our American lifestyle and everything will be fine (hybrids, fluorescent lightbulbs for the home, recycling, composting, etc.).  They also think that mass-producing electric cars and trucks to replace the internal combustion and diesel engines, and switching our entire energy infrastructure from fossil-fuel dependent to one reliant on renewables (strictly wind and solar) is feasible.  Photos from the recent devastation of Puerto Rico shows us what happens to wind turbine farms and solar panel installations in the face of a Category 4 hurricane, and the damage indicates otherwise.

 

The ugly reality is, we will have to change everything we do.  And nobody wants to hear that, because of the built environment that our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers have bequeathed us: compulsory automobility.  You cannot go without a motor vehicle in almost all of this country the USA and expect to be able to earn a living and have a life!  And the places where you can go without an automobile are inordinately expensive, enough to be unaffordable as a place to live for most.

And guess where I live: in an older city, but not in an area where I can function without a motor vehicle.