Global cooling

[GURGLETROUSERS]

LHDR, I always listen to what you say. You do not patronise (English definition) and insult those who perhaps lack your insight in highly technical subjects. (That, is the mark of a teacher.)

I wasn't commenting on the accuracy, or otherwise, of the research, merely the manner in which the poster was dismissed. So excuse me if, with 78th birthday imminent, I now join the legions of 'grumpy oldies', which new research claims 'kicks in' for those in their late 70's.

Therefore, I must withdraw into my'comfort blanket' world of past glories ('when I were a lad', and all that) and moan at all the changes. Or, to be more accurate, make hay at my passions while the sun still shines, and my marbles are still reasonably intact!

It happens to us all eventually, even doctors. And THAT, is a life certainty!

[mac]

NW said, with glee:

[mac]

How do you suppose mrgybe and the Koch's can spin this one:

[isobars]

[mac]

Flabbergasted by reading it from NW and not from me, Iso calls this one of the biggest lies I've come up with:

[nw30]

No shit Sherlock!
This is what we get when we elect a pop culture Gov.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gov. Brown's link between climate change and wildfires is unsupported, fire experts say
Paige St. John•Contact Reporter

October 18, 2015, 5:50 PM

The ash of the Rocky fire was still hot when Gov. Jerry Brown strode to a bank of television cameras beside a blackened ridge and, flanked by firefighters, delivered a battle cry against climate change.

The wilderness fire was "a real wake-up call" to reduce the carbon pollution "that is in many respects driving all of this," he said.

"The fires are changing.... The way this fire performed, it's not the way it usually has been. Going in lots of directions, moving fast, even without hot winds."

"It's a new normal," he said in August. "California is burning."

Brown had political reasons for his declaration.

He had just challenged Republican presidential candidates to state their agendas on global warming. He was embroiled in a fight with the oil industry over legislation to slash gasoline use in California. And he is seeking to make a mark on international negotiations on climate change that culminate in Paris in December.

But scientists who study climate change and fire behavior say their work does not show a link between this year's wildfires and global warming, or support Brown's assertion that fires are now unpredictable and unprecedented. There is not enough evidence, they say.

University of Colorado climate change specialist Roger Pielke said Brown is engaging in "noble-cause corruption."

Pielke said it is easier to make a political case for change using immediate and local threats, rather than those on a global scale, especially given the subtleties of climate change research, which features probabilities subject to wide margins of error and contradiction by other findings.

"That is the nature of politics," Pielke said, "but sometimes the science really has to matter."

Other experts say there is, in fact, a more immediate threat: a landscape altered by a century of fire suppression, timber cutting and development.

Public attention should be focused on understanding fire risk, controlling development and making existing homes safer with fire-rated roofs and ember-resistant vents, said Richard Halsey, who founded the Chaparral Institute in San Diego.

Otherwise, he said, "the houses will keep burning down and people will keep dying."

"I don't believe the climate change discussion is helpful," Halsey said.

Brown does not contend that climate change alone is making California's fires worse, said Nancy Vogel, spokeswoman for the governor's Natural Resources Agency. But she said addressing fires in the same breath as global warming "broadens the discussion and encourages us to think about the future."

Brown's senior environmental advisor, Cliff Rechtschaffen, has said the governor believes climate change is not regarded with sufficient urgency and should be addressed "on a World War III footing."

At a U.N.-sponsored panel on air pollution last month, Brown again linked wildfires and global warming.

"In California, our forest fires are more frequent, [of] greater magnitude and display completely unique characteristics," the governor said. "We're already being affected by climate change."

But climate scientists' computer models show only that global warming will bring consistently hotter weather in future decades. Their predictions that warming will bring more forest fires — mostly in the Rockies and at other higher elevations, while fires may actually decrease in Southern California — also are for future decades.

Even in a warmer world, they say, land management policies will have the greatest effect on the prevalence and intensity of fire.

A study published in August by a Columbia University team led by climatologist Park Williams concluded that global warming has indeed shown itself in California, by increasing evaporation that has aggravated the current drought. But Williams said his research, the first to tease out the degree to which global warming is affecting California weather, did not show climate change to be a major cause of the drought.

Even climate ecologists who describe a strong tie between fire frequency and weather say they cannot attribute that connection to phenomena beyond normal, multi-decade variations seen throughout California history.

"There is insufficient data," said U.S. Forest Service ecologist Matt Jolly. His work shows that over the last 30 years, California has had an average of 18 additional days per year that are conducive to fire.

In addition, predictions of the impact that global warming will have on future fires in California vary.

A team of researchers at UC Irvine recently reported that in 25 years, climate change will increase the size of fires driven by Santa Ana winds in Southern California. But their models varied on how much increase to expect: from 12% to 140%.

Predictions from a UC Merced expert include a possible decrease of such fires as dry conditions slow vegetation growth.

Today's forest fires are indeed larger than those of the past, said National Park Service climate change scientist Patrick Gonzalez. At a symposium sponsored by Brown's administration, Gonzalez presented research attributing that trend to policies of fighting the fires, which create thick underlayers of growth, rather than allowing them to burn.

"We are living right now with a legacy of unnatural fire suppression of approximately a century," Gonzalez told attendees.

The Rocky fire, which began in late July in Lake County, spread quickly through mature chaparral in the Cache Creek Wilderness, creating tall plumes that sucked in air from all directions.


California fire records analyzed by The Times show a dozen similar fires from 2000 to 2014 that each moved quickly, spreading at more than 1,000 acres an hour. A few were driven by the notorious Santa Ana winds, but most were similar to the Rocky fire and three other fast-moving Northern California fires that followed it.

Fire behavior specialist Jeff Shelton, who provided daily forecasts for the Rocky fire and, later, the Jerusalem fire, said he could not attribute their behavior to climate change. He cited the summer's dry weather, an abundance of fuel created by a lack of previous fires, and steep slopes that allowed the fires to spread quickly.

Ecologists said their behavior was typical of natural chaparral fires, which burn infrequently but intensely.

A regional staff member in Brown's emergency operations office called the fires "unprecedented," a description then used by the administration for other conflagrations.

But those burns were classic plume-dominated convection fires, fed largely by an abundance of combustible material, fire scientists said.

"They are more and more common because we have more and more fuels," said Joaquin Ramirez of Technosylva, an international fire modeling company based in San Diego.

A month after Brown's visit to Cowboy Camp, a team of federal wildland managers and a chaparral researcher met at the spot and climbed to the ridge where the Rocky fire had made a 20,000-acre run in one afternoon and night.

Charred burls in the lower lands already had spurted bright green growth. Water would soon spring from dry creek beds, like a Biblical miracle, as the acquifer rose without vegetation to suck it down.

Bureau of Land Management fire manager Jeff Tunnell surveyed the mosaic of black stubble against untouched silvery green stands of manzanita and chamise, oak and pine. A fire had been due.

"One hundred years of fire suppression is building fuel beds," Tunnell said. "Almost any year can produce a fire like this one."

http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-pol-ca-brown-wildfires-20151019-story.html

[mac]

Grasping at the straws that won't keep you afloat. Multiple causes of the severity of the fires and drought. Both are part of California. The best research shows that California's drought was about 25% more severe this year because of global warming.

To be sure, that is compounded by approving subdivisions in lands that would burn eventually, with or without global warming. Such development generally doesn't cover the cost to serve it in taxes. Particularly in California, where the tax cutting policies have reigned since the days of Ronnie.

NW will be long gone before a right wing governor is elected in California. Duh.

[mac]

The latest projections of sea level rise, from James Hansen's latest paper, currently in discussion mode, are for meters, not feet if temperature rise of 2 degrees occurs:

8 Summary implications
Humanity faces near certainty of eventual sea level rise of at least Eemian proportions,
15 5–9 m, if fossil fuel emissions continue on a business-as-usual course, e.g., IPCC scenario
A1B that has CO2 ∼ 700 ppm in 2100 (Fig. S21). It is unlikely that coastal cities
or low-lying areas such as Bangladesh, European lowlands, and large portions of the
United States eastern coast and northeast China plains (Fig. S22) could be protected
against such large sea level rise.
20 Rapid large sea level rise may begin sooner than generally assumed. Amplifying
feedbacks, including slowdown of SMOC and cooling of the near-Antarctic ocean surface
with increasing sea ice, may spur nonlinear growth of Antarctic ice sheet mass
loss. Deep submarine valleys in West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin of East Antarctica,
each with access to ice amounting to several meters of sea level, provide gateways
25 to the ocean. If the Southern Ocean forcing (subsurface warming) of the Antarctic ice
sheets continues to grow, it likely will become impossible to avoid sea level rise of
several meters, with the largest uncertainty being how rapidly it will occur.

The Greenland ice sheet does not have as much ice subject to rapid nonlinear disintegration,
so the speed at which it adds to 21st century sea level rise may be limited.
However, even a slower Greenland ice sheet response is expected to be faster than
carbon cycle or ocean thermal recovery times. Therefore, if climate forcing continues
5 to grow rapidly, amplifying feedbacks will assure large eventual mass loss. Also with
present growth of freshwater injection from Greenland, in combination with increasing
North Atlantic precipitation, we already may be on the verge of substantial North
Atlantic climate disruption.
Storms conjoin with sea level rise to cause the most devastating coastal damage.
10 End-Eemian and projected 21st century conditions are similar in having warm tropics
and increased freshwater injection. Our simulations imply increasing storm strengths
for such situations, as a stronger temperature gradient caused by ice melt increases
baroclinicity and provides energy for more severe weather events. A strengthened
Bermuda High in the warm season increases prevailing northeasterlies that can help
15 account for stronger end-Eemian storms. Weakened cold season sea level pressure
south of Greenland favors occurrence of atmospheric blocking that can increase wintertime
Arctic cold air intrusions into northern midlatitudes.

[mac]

Oh those inconvenient facts. The sack-cloth and ashes argument made so frequently by the gybster and the fickster turns out not to be true. We can have continued economic growth--even robust economic growth--and a lower carbon signature.

[isobars]

Condensed from a Lomborg letter to the WSJ:
A recent poll of 8 million people around the globe reinforced the original Copenhagen Consensus conclusion among many impoverished countries that AGW ranks about 16th-18th ... DEAD LAST ... on the list of global humanitarian disasters. Yet rich countries and development organizations are scrambling to join the fashionable ranks of “climate aid” donors. This effectively means telling the world’s worst-off people, suffering from tuberculosis, malaria or malnutrition, that what they really need isn’t medicine, mosquito nets or micronutrients, but solar panels. To that end, the richer nations are scrambling to out-donate scores of billions of dollars for fashionable AGW aid at the expense of improved public health, education and economic development. The OECD has analyzed about 70% of total global development aid and found that about one in four of those dollars goes to climate-related aid.

In a world in which malnourishment continues to claim at least 1.4 million children’s lives each year, 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty, and 2.6 billion lack clean drinking water and sanitation, this growing emphasis on climate aid is immoral.

Just $570 million a year—or 0.57% of the $100 billion climate-finance goal—spent on direct malaria-prevention policies like mosquito nets would reduce malaria deaths by 50% by 2025, saving an estimated 300,000 lives a year.

It goes on.