We have all heard it before: “What’s so bad about a little warming?” Several things are at play here. First, it’s winter. It’s far colder in winter than the warming we have experienced. So when it’s winter it’s cold, relative to when it’s not winter. But a little warming can’t be that bad, right?Our global…
We have all seen it, at least in the news. Most of us have been impacted by it because it is all around us. Extreme weather events have increased in intensity. Our climate has changed and as the modelers said 30 years ago, extremes have increased. In the future, expect further increases to triple what…
James Hansen, 32 year director of the U.S. national climate modeling agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (1981-2013, now retired), has had a new fundamental piece of climate work published. His team looks at the negative emissions required–in addition to various scenarios for emissions reductions–that are needed to achieve “non-dangerous” warming. Under Hansen’s…
Hurricane Harvey, 25,000-year Storm: Enhanced, or Caused by Climate Change? It was a 25,000-year storm. Its area of 24-inch rainfall was 50 to 100 times greater than anything previously recorded in the lower 48. Up to a million cars may have been flooded. In Harris County alone, 136,000 homes were flooded. Yet the official word…
Climate catastrophism, or as it will be called soon, reality, is getting tougher to pin down with every new climate catastrophe. A real page turner on the subject is Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. It’s from 2007 and hyperbolic for the day, but appearing less so as extremeness increases faster…
Increasing Extremes: Hurricane Harvey and the Jet Stream “We can’t tell if this particular weather event was caused by climate change or not.” This is one of the most dangerous climate science statements in history. Science is based on certainty in statistics. Generally, if there is a 1 in 20 chance, or even a…
It’s all around us but masked by “noise” in the media; enabled by fairness in journalism, driven by myth that has been propagated by experiences that we as a society have never before experienced. When Unprecedented drought in California was replaced by unprecedented flooding, the paper says: “The media, resource management entities, and the scientific…
One of the general quandaries about current climate change impacts and those with our future climate has been: “how do we end up with drying when precipitation increases with warming as we already see happening and is further projected in the future?” This research from Princeton, University of Southampton and the US Geological Survey does…
It’s not the averages that are troublesome. The understating reporting of scientists, journalists and climate science consensus organizations is one of the most confounding parts of climate change today. It’s the extremes that matter, yet extremes are viewed as “uncertainty” in a way almost entirely related to written grammar, rather than the statistical uncertainty of when,…
A recent article in Atlantic implies climate change to be wrongly viewed as something we don’t yet know much about. This article “American Trees Are Moving West, and No One Knows Why”, is half correct. The authors in the study reported upon reveal the reasons why trees are shifting west (as well as north), and…
President Trump it seems, has given us permission to backslide with our thinking about climate change. Until we have rule or law that tells us we must do something about climate pollution, “those that would rather it not be real” have won. This allows the debate to rage encouraging doubt. The Clean Power Plan and…
In 1834 and 1850, two European scientists (Clausius and Clapeyron) developed scientific principles that told us that warmer air holds more water. In the 1960s and 70s the computer models that first simulated our climate showed that more atmospheric CO2 would increase Earth’s temperature, relative humidity, and total precipitation because of the Clausius–Clapeyron principles. In the…
The driver of our climate system has changed in the last two decades from one that is controlled by annual emissions, to one that is controlled by already emitted CO2. This means that previous strategies to control annual emissions are no longer meaningful and we must now turn our attention to the already emitted climate…
Increasing extreme storms are a big deal. Our civil infrastructure design is based on our old climate. Meteorologist across the country have been evaluating the historic record to see exactly how much change has already taken place. Climate modeling is still advancing towards being able to robustly understand exactly how much the most extreme storms will increase in the…
An article from the Associated Press (AP) by Bajak and Borenstein on May 18 tells us that: “Extreme downpours have doubled in frequency over the past three decades.” This is a tall statement with serious implications. The alarming nature of this statement is the reason that the Climate Change Now Initiative exists (of which I…
Already, with just a single degree Fahrenheit of warming, the most extreme rain events have increased 40 percent across the Central U.S. including Texas. It’s not just our imaginations; it’s not natural cycles. Interestingly, some of it may be caused, or enhanced by, agricultural practices. Groisman et al. emphasizes that their work did not evaluate…
A 500-year storm today is the same as a 500-year storm in the past. It rains 8 inches in 6 hours. In our old climate, every year there is a 0.2 percent chance of a 500-year storm occurring. For a betting person the odds are 1:500. Projections are that by mid century 100-year events will…
Work from the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, Zurich, Switzerland has found that about 18% of moderate daily precipitation extremes and about 75% of moderate daily hot extremes, that are currently occurring over land, are attributable to warming. An ensemble of the latest models was used to try and average the individual modeling from…
From the National Snow and Ice Date Center: “Air temperatures reached record high levels at two Antarctic stations last week, setting a new mark for the warmest conditions ever measured anywhere on the continent. On March 23, at Argentina’s base Marambio, a temperature of 17.4° Celsius (63.3° Fahrenheit) was reached, surpassing a previous record set…
From the abstract: “A devastating societal and economic toll on the central United States, contributing to dozens of fatalities and causing billions of dollars in damage. As a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture (the Clausius–Clapeyron relation), a pronounced increase in intense rainfall events is included in models of future climate. Therefore, it is crucial to examine whether the magnitude…
