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Science / Re: 2019 Mauna Loa CO2 levels

« on: December 05, 2019, 07:46:17 PM »

  The CO2 growth rate lags ENSO.  the peaks in CO2 growth rate lag Niño 3.4 by ~4-6 months.

As does the  Atmospheric Response to ENSO.

https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/1520-0442-16.9.1391
The Nature and Causes for the Delayed Atmospheric Response to El Niño

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Antarctica / Re: Ice Apocalypse - MULTIPLE METERS SEA LEVEL RISE (narrated video)

« on: December 04, 2019, 08:32:32 PM »

Didn´t we prove that for CO2 too?

I'm pretty sure.  But a lot of posters on this forum seem to think that we're doomed and it's too late to do anything.

In the early 1980's Hansen warned policy makers that the atmospheric CO2 concentration should not exceed about 350 ppm.  However (ignoring that the AGGI uses a GMP100 for methane of 25 instead of AR5's value of 36), the attached Annual Greenhouse Gas Index, AGGI, shows that since 1990 the radiative forcing from GHG has increased by 43% to 2018.  So I believe there is reason to question the resolve of policy makers to take action appropriate for the current level of climate change risk.

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Antarctica / Re: Ice Apocalypse - MULTIPLE METERS SEA LEVEL RISE (narrated video)

« on: December 04, 2019, 08:02:08 PM »

a lot of posters on this forum seem to think that we're doomed and it's too late to do anything.

My impression is that a lot of posters are concerned we're not doing as much as we can, and should, because powerful forces do not think it necessary and/or desirable to do more than we're doing (which has not been much so far).

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The rest / Re: Good music

« on: December 04, 2019, 06:18:52 PM »

Drs. P - Knolraap En Lof, Schorseneren En Prei (nl) (1987)

Very good lyrics and they are on screen

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Policy and solutions / Re: Renewable Energy

« on: December 03, 2019, 06:55:05 PM »

Developing countries are increasingly skipping the dead-end fossil fuel phase and going strait to renewables.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-01/dutch-company-to-light-a-million-nigerian-homes-with-solar-power

Dutch Company to Light a Million Nigerian Homes With Solar

Lumos Global BV, a Dutch company specializing in off-grid solar power, plans to light up over a million Nigerian households by 2025 as it expands in Africa’s most populous country of more than 200 million where only 60% have access to electricity.

The Amsterdam-based company isn’t targeting only rural areas that are not served by the electricity grid but also towns and cities where power outages are frequent and households rely, at least partly, on generators. Lumos’ offering of solar panels and a battery enables families to spend a flat fee of around $15 per month rather than three or four times as much on kerosene or diesel, according to Gordon. The company expects to sign up more than a million households by the middle of next decade, he said.

The grant for standalone systems is part of $350 million raised by Nigeria from the World Bank to increase electrification rates in rural areas. The largest portion of $150 million is dedicated to developing solar mini-grids.

The World Bank said last week it’s negotiating a $3 billion loan with Nigeria to tackle mounting debt in the power sector that risks the collapse of companies running the national grid.

“The REA knows that solar is the quickest way that everyone is going to get power as fast as they can,” Gordon said.

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Arctic sea ice / Re: 2019 sea ice area and extent data

« on: December 01, 2019, 09:49:24 PM »

Another month has passed by.
Nearly half the days and more than half the extent and area gains of the 2019-20 freezing season are done.

So here are some graphs showing the freezing season to date.

Total Arctic Area & Extent
Show how late and how slow the freeze was especially in October.
Inevitably there has been a bit of a catch-up in November.
But compared with the 1980's, sea ice extent and area is still one month behind.

Pacific Gateway
Bering Sea Still far too early to tell what this season will bring.

Chukchi Sea Already one for the record books.
171 days at lowest daily sea ice area in the satellite record, and sea ice area currently around 275k less than the 2010's average.

Will December see the big catch-up or will the final freeze be delayed until the New Year?

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Science / Re: 2019 Mauna Loa CO2 levels

« on: December 01, 2019, 05:39:16 PM »

Next week last year averaged at 408.4 ppm. Only if the daily values will start to increase more vigorously than this week, an annual increase of 2 ppm is possible. Otherwise the rate will stay at the moderate value it has been at this week.

Back to data - here is the weekly Sunday evening CO₂ update from Mauna Loa

Week beginning on November 24, 2019:     410.71 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago:                   408.42 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago:                386.51 ppm
Last updated: December 1, 2019

The annual increase is back well above 2 ppm. There was no further daily average below 410 ppm, but some hourly values lay below this threshold.

Next week last year stayed around 408.5 ppm. At the moment the day-to-day changes are small, therefore an annual increase of slightly above 2 ppm is likely.

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Science / Re: 2019 Mauna Loa CO2 levels

« on: December 01, 2019, 12:33:24 PM »

Again, lot's of forecasts and dire warnings.
Climate reanalyzer shows no big trend for precipitation the last 40 years. About one percent up. And declining slightly during the last 10 years.
Agreed, this is the aggregate.

More intense droughts and more intense precipitation will probably show no big trends in aggregate precipitation. And forecasts/projections matter, especially in inert systems. As Diffenbaugh & Field 2013 show the current and coming antropogenic warming may well be 10-100 times faster than any warming in the past 65 million years:
https://denning.atmos.colostate.edu/readings/Impacts/Ecosystems.Science-2013-Diffenbaugh-486-92.pdf

How hard will it be for life, including human civilization, to adapt to such an unprecedented rapid climate shift? Should we take the risk to find out? On paper thru the Paris Agreement humanity decided we should not take that risk. Our practical behaviour and policies do not conform to this agreement yet. This is troubling in light of the risk of crossing potential tipping points even below two degrees C. Your persistent downplaying of this risk seems quite irrational and irresponsible. Why are you apparently so unwilling to take the science pointing to this risk seriously?

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Arctic sea ice / Re: The 2019/2020 freezing season

« on: December 01, 2019, 08:01:45 AM »

Major stratospheric warming under way(starting today-tomorrow and getting stronger every day)! This will probably have all kinds of consequences for NH midlatitude weather and Arctic weather as well. Pic of T+10 days as an example. (no polar vortex split seen in the forecasts yet)

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Science / Re: 2019 Mauna Loa CO2 levels

« on: December 01, 2019, 07:10:50 AM »

Sam, I think there are plenty of examples of animal populations in trouble . Whether you react with alarmism , denial, or just profound sadness is somewhat dependent on what you have seen and what you are built out of. I agree with you about the speed of the changes taking place . I also agree that these changes will progress far into the future and I personally think it will take the typical 100,000
years for weathering processes to bring the surface oceans back into current pH levels . That for me is indicative of how long other earth processes will struggle with the carbon excursion we have triggered. 
 The calcite horizon is beginning to invade the shelf off Oregon and Washington. Twenty years ago the words “ ocean acidification “  weren’t coined yet. The aragonite horizon is now shoaling to surface waters in the Eastern boundary Calif. Current ecosystem and the numbers days that the surface waters will be under saturated will continue to increase. I don’t think animal extinctions are anywhere as common in the oceans as they are on land . They are coming.
 Insects, birds, ancient ocean species beginning to blink out of existence. Should my alarm bother me?
What physical evidence do we need ?   
 

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Science / Re: 2019 Mauna Loa CO2 levels

« on: December 01, 2019, 06:17:27 AM »

...
The climate will need just a moment to respond to this massive and shockingly sudden insult before it stabilizes. Before that can fully happen we must first stop emitting warming gases.

We are at the beginning of a highly unstable ultra-rapid human caused climatic shift.

...
Sam

Those statements by Sam I bolded are not vindicated by physical facts. There is little cause for such alarmism.

Quite to the contrary. The CO2 in the atmosphere, along with several other key warming gases will take millennia to reduce to prior levels assuming current ecosystem functions. And that only happens if the climate doesn’t shift before that can occur. As the climate shifts, the ecosystems shift, and those basic functions are put at risk.

What should be amply clear (and is) even to young people, let alone to those of us with more life history behind us, is that we are already seeing an ultra rapid shift in progress.

We see that with the rapidly vanishing arctic ice. We see it with the methane boiling out of the clathrates on the arctic plains. We see it with the collapse of the tundra globally. We see it with the warming of the ocean surfaces sufficient to doom coral reefs within the next decade or two. We see it in the hyper rapid acidification of the oceans which doom most shelled creatures. We see it in the very rapid melt on both Greenland and the West Antarctic sheet. We see it in the rapid loss of mountain glaciers and ice all over the world, and with the quite soon loss of the glacial ice supporting a billion people in South Asia. We see it in the destabilization of the atmospheric circulation with massive swings in heat transport both north and south from and to the arctic resulting in climatic chaos in the northern hemisphere beginning. We see it in droughts, fires, deluges and worse. .... and in a thousand other ways ....

Hefaistos, that you apparently choose not see these and myriad indicators is only evidence of your own willful and reckless blindness.

Greta Thunberg is still a young person. Yet she sees clearly, where you do not. She sees the indicators and clearly and concisely called out the leaders of the world in Davos. She is right. You are wrong.

Yes the oceans will take time to equilibrate. And perhaps if we bend every effort, destroying civilization as we know it in the process, we might now barely be able to salvage something of the world we know. Personally, I doubt that is possible any longer. We waited too long. We were too slow to learn. We were and remain too blind to see. And the CO2 trends from Mauna Loa speak volumes to that at megaphone levels. We are not in any way doing what must be done. Instead we argue about slowing the rate of increase of the rate of increase. That is insane.

Worse leaders of major countries are already throwing out efforts to reduce emissions and are instead increasing the rate of burning of oil, coal and natural gas, while also slash burning the lungs of the world. That is beyond insane.

The CO2 already in the atmosphere is catastrophically high. Under the most optimistic business near usual trends, we don’t even slow the increase, let alone stop it, and reverse it. Under these conditions, we will release the 1,600 Gigatons of carbon in the permafrost. And we will boil out the clathrate on the arctic plains, both in the very near future. Either of those take the situation completely out of human control.

Yes the oceans will take time to equilibrate. The continued heat input caused by the warming gases will assure that there is heat enough and time enough to do that. But that is meaningless in the time scale of the catastrophe we face. The continued heating of the Earth from the gases in the atmosphere will assure it. And the changes in the surface biosphere and atmosphere will not wait for that equilibration to finish.

Our rate of change now makes the PETM look obscenely slow. And yet the PETM is the definition of rapid climate change. We are now in the early stages of an ultra rapid climate shift. And that is obvious for all to see except for the willfully blind.

In time, the Earth may shift back to this mostly precariously stable point between hot house and ice house conditions. These have been rare in Earth’s history. The orbital balances could bring us back to some stable place with ice remaining in the Antarctic. And perhaps in half a million years there may be ice in the arctic again. But it is also possible that we continue on a runaway to hot house conditions, having pushed over the climate and ruined the world we know.

I worry more about the highly unstable transition. Creatures can adapt to hundred millennia scale changes. Decade scale changes are another matter entirely. Worse, the impacts of the collapse of whole ecosystems may have dramatically more important transient impacts on O2, pressure, temperature, rainfall, circulation, CO2, methane and other parameters that may drive many species and even whole genera extinct.

Sam

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Arctic sea ice / Re: The 2019/2020 freezing season

« on: November 30, 2019, 03:32:43 PM »

Here using mercator (model) salinitytemperature at 34m to show currents at 34m that may help to explain the resilience of the extended Chukchi bite. Sep21-nov29. Turbulence along the edge of the chukchi plateau is likely to increase mixing of shallow water.

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Arctic sea ice / Re: "Stupid" Questions :o

« on: November 30, 2019, 01:04:16 PM »

By stating that SkS and Jo Nova are two sides of the same coin, KK proves that he/she is 0% serious about AGW, and so is banned.

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Antarctica / Re: Antarctic Icebergs

« on: November 30, 2019, 12:39:50 AM »

Looking back to the initial post I thought it might be interesting to have a current "fix" on all numbered icebergs so that future movements can be defined more accurately. This might be particularly useful for A23A and B22A which have been grounded for years but move slightly?

 The positions are at 11/29/2019

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The forum / Re: Arctic Sea Ice Forum Humor

« on: November 28, 2019, 08:56:19 PM »

https://changingclimatetimes.substack.com/p/climate-crisis-cartoon-roundup-1

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Science / Re: 2019 Mauna Loa CO2 levels

« on: November 28, 2019, 07:28:30 PM »

More important even is that there is no sign at all that globally we will do anything meaningful to change this situation.

The fundamental basis of the current economic paradigm is growth.

The fundamental basis of all or nearly all religions is growth. Out populate those other heavens.

The basis so far for economies is fossil fuel based and that is proportional to population and compounded by economic output. As people everywhere demand a higher living standard and more stuff, energy use (fossil fuel use) rises per capita. Economic growth demands this.

At the same time, the major stories out now breathlessly talk about how CO2 levels now exceed any time in human history going back 3-5 million years. They utterly miss the fact that under current or even under vastly reduced growth rates, the “current” atmospheric CO2 levels will race above that short term blip in CO2 level 3 million years ago and rise to levels not seen in over 25 million years.

And still we blindly race off the cliff into an utterly changed environment, one that will catastrophically destroy the world we know.

Stories out today note that the current plans for reduction under the Paris accords need to be 5 times more aggressive. Instead the United States has decided to burn the Paris accords and slam their foot down on the accelerator instead.

Under the best of conditions, we now need to reduce fossil fuel use by 7.5% per year, year on year for a decade, to have even a mediocre chance of avoiding catastrophic climatic change. Personally, I doubt that we could stop that now even if we stopped all emissions today. But, let’s say we do try that.

No national government or economy has survived such rates of degrowth. Yes, we could convert to wind and solar. That might reach 3% a year. That isn’t enough to even fully offset the economic demands for growth, or separately population growth. So, to “succeed” under the best of circumstances requires overcoming every religion on Earth, and destroying every economy on Earth. Yeah, right. That is not going to happen.

The alternative of course is that we do not do this and we let the natural systems do it for us in a far more abrupt and vastly more catastrophic way. Or, we do it more gradually with a similar though slightly less severe rate of change, and a likely imperceptibly less catastrophic outcome.

If you are looking for magic answers, there are no answers here. We waited too long. We were and are far too slow to learn as a species

As a result, we are in for an evolutionary reset.

The chaos you see ahead is far closer than it appears. And we are racing toward it at breakneck and ever increasing speed.

All the while we are distracted by second and third order derivatives of curves, and fundamental misunderstandings of the most basic understandings of math, physics, and other fields if science.

Sam

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Policy and solutions / Re: UN Climate Agreement - Paris 2015 and beyond

« on: November 27, 2019, 08:06:03 PM »

Nine Climate Tipping Points Now 'Active,' Warn Scientists
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-climate-scientists.html

"A decade ago we identified a suite of potential tipping points in the Earth system, now we see evidence that over half of them have been activated," said lead author Professor Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter.



This threatens the loss of the Amazon rainforest and the great ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, which are currently undergoing measurable and unprecedented changes much earlier than expected.

This "cascade" of changes sparked by global warming could threaten the existence of human civilisations.

Evidence is mounting that these events are more likely and more interconnected than was previously thought, leading to a possible domino effect.

... we must admit that we have underestimated the risks of unleashing irreversible changes, where the planet self-amplifies global warming.

"This is what we now start seeing, already at 1°C global warming.

"The growing threat of rapid, irreversible changes means it is no longer responsible to wait and see. The situation is urgent and we need an emergency response."



Exiting the fossil fuel economy is unlikely before 2050, but with temperature already at 1.1°C above pre-industrial temperature, it is likely Earth will cross the 1.5°C guardrail by 2040. The authors conclude this alone defines an emergency.

... "The situation is an emergency if both risk and urgency are high. If reaction time is longer than the intervention time left (τ / T > 1), we have lost control."

Open Access: Timothy M. Lenton, et.al. Comment: Climate tipping points—too risky to bet against, Nature (2019)

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The rest / Re: Who should be the Democratic nominee for President in 2020?

« on: November 27, 2019, 09:11:52 AM »

"Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a quay and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
It's rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
It's letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew."

http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/poetry/martha-snow.html

sidd

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Policy and solutions / Re: But, but, but, China....

« on: November 26, 2019, 10:33:12 PM »

ps: Ken, how do you rate the chances of reducing CO2 emissions in 2030 by 55% (7.5% p.a.) for +1.5 celsius, 25% for +2 celsius ?

With solar and wind now cheaper than fossil fuels in about three quarters of the world (already cheaper in the developed countries and now at grid parity in China), pretty good.

Given that we're already seeing drops in global coal consumption (down 3% in 2019) and softening of demand for oil and a huge glut in natural gas, the major wildcard is how quickly battery electric vehicles take over the transportation market.  The forecast year for cost parity between BEVs and ICEs is now 2022.  So we should see peak oil demand within the decade.

I doubt we'll see a new coal power plant built after 2025 or a new natural gas power plant after 2035.  Sales of new ICE vehicles will probably be banned in most countries in the 2030s.

I suspect that we wont hit the 7.5% annual decreases needed for the 1.5 degree C target until the 2030s, but we should be able to hit the 2.0 target for emissions reductions in the 2020s and exceed them in the 2030s and 2040s.  With global temperatures increasing at around 0.18 degrees per decade and the five-year average increase around 0.9 C, we'd hit 1.5 degrees in the 2050s. So we'll end up somewhere by 1.5C and 2.0C temperature increase before looking at options for carbon dioxide removal (CDR).

When people think of CDR, they usually think of artificial leaves or other large machines to suck CO2 from the air and pipe it underground (or deep under the sea).  However, there are much better options that can be used to increase global carbon sinks from better agricultural practices, which are increasingly being used.  Look up regenerative agriculture, biochar, sustainable grazing, renewable natural gas, or reductions in methane from rice farming. 

And there are possibilities in kelp farming, with the kelp reducing acidity in the oceans and then being fed to ruminants to reduce their methane emissions.

In the past decade, a lot of progress has been made in all of these areas.  Keep that in mind when you read a gloom and doom report.  We must continue to press our leaders for more rapid changes to reduce greenhouse gases and improve carbon sinks, and we shouldn't give up hope that it can be done.

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Antarctica / Re: Ice Apocalypse - MULTIPLE METERS SEA LEVEL RISE (narrated video)

« on: November 26, 2019, 05:54:28 PM »

The linked articles describe how climate change can lead to abrupt changes in hypoxia in coastal fisheries (see the attached image and quote below):

http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/deadzones/climatechange.pdf

http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/28/7930047/climate-change-could-mean-massive-ocean-dead-zones

Quote: "Though the exact mechanism driving dead zone expansion is unclear, studies show that it’s happening and will likely increase. One model predicts a 50 percent increase in low-oxygen water by the end of the century. As the zones spread, they reduce the number of habitats for many of the sea creatures we eat.

The disconcerting thing about Moffitt’s study is that it shows how quickly these changes can happen. Most policy discussions about climate change are conducted in terms of estimates and averages — 3 feet of sea level rise, 170 percent increase in ocean acidity — but what we’re dealing with are complex interlocking systems with tipping points and feedback loops we barely understand.

"It’s not just about temperature," says Moffitt. "It’s about disrupting fundamental earth processes that we as humans have understood to be very stable. They’re not stable. These systems have the capacity to be very unstable when you poke climate system with a sharp stick.""

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Arctic sea ice / Re: MOSAiC news

« on: November 26, 2019, 05:29:54 PM »

There is a golden opportunity to study how ice drift correlates with wind direction during an unusual period of steady wind speed and direction in in late October. As Nansen observed during the voyage of the Fram, motion of the ice was almost always offset from the direction of the wind. However he lacked the big picture that we have today (eg basin-wide cyclone).

The response of the Polarstern is shown in the two-frame animation and the csv of its variables below. Note both the zonal and meridional drift components were linear, with moderate drift to the north but a strong component to the east, forming a large angle to the wind direction (which is counter-intuitive but expected).

The ship presents a very large target to the wind but is of a negligible mass compared to the larger ice pack. Mosaic has declined to make public the ship's bearing (ie alignment with wind) over time, presumably to reserve for themselves (in 2023) the capability of using the GFS forecast to make a few days of ice motion forecast.

Attached also are the wind roses for wind direction and wind speed during the 229 hours of this low variability event.

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Policy and solutions / Re: Coal

« on: November 26, 2019, 05:24:47 PM »

Meanwhile, back in the USA, since the year 2000...
- US consumption of coal has almost halved .
- Natural Gas consumption has increased by about 30%.

BUT in energy terms (monthly consumption in trillions of BTU)
- coal reduced by circa 750,
- natural gas up by about 600.

Natural Gas consumption is also about 160 percent higher than coal. Excluding methane leakage etc, they say natural gas produces about 50% of CO2 per unit of energy compared with coal.

This suggests that in the USA Natural Gas consumption is now more important than coal in terms of CO2 pollution.

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Antarctica / Re: PIG has calved

« on: November 24, 2019, 12:47:18 PM »

And a zoom-out!

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Consequences / Re: The Holocene Extinction

« on: November 24, 2019, 08:27:44 AM »

Thank you vox for your high quality, interesting and good to read posts. And cartoons

I'd like to warn people about an error in your top link. Many people make this mistake.
Is this way:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/23/sumatran-rhinoceros-now-extinct-in-malaysia-say-zoologists    all traffic from clicks will be routed through google.com, which is not what people think they clicked. In this way it is easy for Google to build a profile of you. This is the reason that many people use duckduckgo.com or startpage.com.

It is safe to remove the google part to get the correct link: theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/23/sumatran-rhinoceros-now-extinct-in-malaysia-say-zoologists

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Consequences / Re: The Holocene Extinction

« on: November 24, 2019, 12:58:18 AM »

Iman Was the Last of Her Kind in Malaysia. The Sumatran Rhino is Now Extinct In the Country.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/23/sumatran-rhinoceros-now-extinct-in-malaysia-say-zoologists
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/11/23/iman-was-last-her-kind-malaysia-sumatran-rhino-is-now-extinct-country/?outputType=amp



A 25-year-old female Sumatran rhino has died at a sanctuary in Borneo, marking the extinction of the species in its native Malaysia.

There are fewer than 80 Sumatran rhinos — sometimes called “hair rhinos” — left in the world, with some estimates as low as 30, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Once native to rainforests throughout Asia, Sumatran rhinos now only live in the wild in Indonesia.

... “What’s made breeding these rhinos so difficult is because they are so solitary; you can’t house males and females together, or else they’ll fight, and the pairing has to be timed to when the female is ovulating,” Roth told The Washington Post on Saturday. “What’s happened with the wild population, and such fragmented forests, is that they don’t come into contact often enough.”

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The rest / Re: Good music

« on: November 23, 2019, 06:01:34 PM »

OK, when it comes to 'polit music' i have an ace up my sleeve.

Confounds the Science - Don Caron / Linda Gower

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Consequences / Re: 2019 ENSO

« on: November 23, 2019, 05:44:30 PM »

El Niño Swings More Violently in the Industrial Age, Compelling Hard Evidence Says
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-el-nino-violently-industrial-age.html

A new study has found compelling evidence in the Pacific Ocean that the stronger El Ninos are part of a climate pattern that is new and strange.

It is the first known time that enough physical evidence spanning millennia has come together to allow researchers to say definitively that: El Ninos, La Ninas, and the climate phenomenon that drives them have become more extreme in the times of human-induced climate change.

"What we're seeing in the last 50 years is outside any natural variability. It leaps off the baseline. Actually, we even see this for the entire period of the industrial age," said Kim Cobb, the study's principal investigator and professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "There were three extremely strong El Nino-La Nina events in the 50-year period, but it wasn't just these events. The entire pattern stuck out."

The study's first author Pam Grothe compared temperature-dependent chemical deposits from present-day corals with those of older coral records representing relevant sea surface temperatures from the past 7,000 years. The team found the industrial age ENSO swings to be 25% stronger than in the pre-industrial records.

The corals' recordings of sea surface temperatures proved to be astonishingly accurate when benchmarked. Coral records from 1981 to 2015 matched sea surface temperatures measured via satellite in the same period so exactly that, on a graph, the jagged lines of the coral record covered those of the satellite measurements, obscuring them from view.

... To stress-test the data, Grothe left out chunks to see if the industrial age ENSO signal still stuck out. She removed the record-setting 1997/1998 El Nino-La Nina and examined industrial age windows of time between 30 and 100 years long.

The signal held in all windows, but the data needed the 97/98 event to be statistically significant. This could mean that changes in the ENSO activities have just now reached a threshold that makes them detectable.



Pamela R. Grothe et al, Enhanced El Niño‐Southern Oscillation variability in recent decades, Geophysical Research Letters (2019).

Key Points

• Line Island corals provide 1,751 years of monthly‐resolved ENSO variability from the mid‐Holocene to present
• ENSO strength is significantly weaker between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago compared to the 2,000‐year periods both before and after
• ENSO extremes of the last 50 years are significantly stronger than those of the pre‐industrial era in the central tropical Pacific

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Arctic sea ice / Re: MOSAiC news

« on: November 22, 2019, 11:47:17 AM »

The situation has gotten increasingly dire in the immediate vicinity of the Mosaic ice camp as extensional forces have opened multiple km-wide bands. A second Sentinel image of 05:46 has just come in that provides a snapshot of ongoing motion -- the situation has worsened considerably in the last three hours. PolarView has just now posted a third intermediate time, the 04:08, but we won't be able to follow events further until tomorrow morning other than hourly weather and drift which are unremarkable (there's no storm) since the last S1AB:

   Lat  Long  YY-MM-DD  UTC     Wind       T(C)  hPa
  85.7  120.7 19-11-22 10:00    5   50    -16.3 1016.0
  85.7  120.8 19-11-22 09:00    4   40    -17.0 1015.5
  85.7  120.8 19-11-22 08:00    5   10    -16.1  1015.0
  85.7  120.8 19-11-22 07:00    4  340    -16.1  1014.5

This event will be extremely disruptive to all deployed experimental equipment and effectively destroys the floe for purposes of studying its evolution over a year. Let's hope the Polarstern and all the people aboard stay safe as the event continues to unfold today.

This is a very unfortunate situation ultimately attributable to climate change, its amplification in the Arctic Ocean and the long-term trend to thinner, more mobile ice that cannot resist wind stresses.

The upper two images follow Mosaic convention with north up, the first needs a click to display full size; the lower animation has S1AB orientation of the Pole down the 120º meridian with inverted insets in coordinates attached to the ship at 2x enlargement.  The 4x enlargement is also north down after contrast leveling and light unsharp mask.

Some of the 87 surviving autonomous buoys out of the 100 deployed in the Mosaic project will likely succumb to the same ice pack deformations affecting the Polarstern. So far, they all reported on the 22nd or 23rd with the exceptions below. All but the last two are Chinese buoys that have previously had reporting delays.

300234068118580   SVP    PRIC   MOSAiC   15 11 19   86.19   118.51   
300234010077180   GPS    TUT    MOSAiC   19 11 19   86.08   117.27   
300234065091830   GPS    TUT    MOSAiC   19 11 19   86.01   123.00   
300234065090840   GPS    TUT    MOSAiC   21 11 19   85.51   120.54   
300234065980590   GPS    TUT    MOSAiC   21 11 19   85.73   123.98   
300234065981590   GPS    TUT    MOSAiC   21 11 19   85.61   118.57   
300234065984580   GPS    TUT    MOSAiC   21 11 19   85.95   121.98   
300234065985570   GPS    TUT    MOSAiC   21 11 19   85.92   121.06   
300234067705700   IT      AWI    MOSAiC   21 11 19   85.75   121.63   
.................90094   ITP   WHOI   MOSAiC   21 11 19   85.68   121.98   

1 Like

29

The rest / Re: Archaeology/Paleontology news

« on: November 22, 2019, 01:41:05 AM »

^^
It's rather obvious that this is a life size representation of a robotic overseer. His 3 antenna were for communications with the Master AI and up to two henchmen, his "screen face" was for communication with his slaves, and the "club" representing his physical domination over any foolish enough to resist.


The 3 dots on the screen represent the 3 levels that he operated on.


1 - I Club You
2 - I Club You Hard
3 - I Club You Dead


Representing him as a recumbent figure lying in the sand, as opposed to a vertical statue was no accident as it was rendered immediately after the successful slave revolt by the Bowler Hat Gang. The indigenous still don headwear totally unsuited to their environment.
Terry

2 Likes

30

The rest / Re: Good music

« on: November 21, 2019, 01:14:55 PM »

"The Star-Spangled Banner", transposed to the minor key. 

2 Likes

31

Policy and solutions / Re: Policy and solutions in the Netherlands

« on: November 21, 2019, 07:12:20 AM »

A request for our german members.

Recently there was a vote on the maximum speed on german roads and that got voted down.
What was the background of this vote and why did the vote go the way it went?

Also.

We are changing from gas to electric while currently the area next to the dutch border is transitioning to gas. Is nat gas just a (temporary) solution for the areas using coal? What is your national energy transition policy?

Thanks in advance!

For the speed limit, that was a bill introduced by the Green Party and was voted down by the 'Große Koalition' that is the three parties forming the government (CDU/CSU and SPD) plus the FDP (liberal democrats) and of course the AFD, the right wing (or extremist) party which is denying climate change anyway.
The speed limit in Germany is something like guns in the US. I have got the impression that although probably a majority would support a speed limit - there a some polls indicating this - that the opponents are far more outspoken (not sure it this is the correct term). They dominate the public discussions and forums.
Our minister for transport commented on one study which promoted a speed limit, that a speed limit is against 'common sense'.....

For the transition to renewables, I don't see any plan at all, installation of new windmills is dropping like a stone, I think it is -80 % this year compared to the best years, new legislation is making it even harder to find a new place for a windmill as it has to have a minimum distance of 1000 m to the next 'community' which is a group of at least 5 houses. For off-shore wind the building of new power lines is still slow and private PV is still a disaster as it involves a lot of tax issues - usually you have to become an entrepreneur to install PV and feed the surplus electricity into the grid.

So, I in my opinion the current policies in Germany are really, really bad!

2 Likes

32

Policy and solutions / Re: Electric cars

« on: November 20, 2019, 09:27:54 PM »

Sig, It is amazing how two different people can look at the same chart and see two different things. As per your graph post# 940. What I see is a house that in the winter is using 30kW plus another 10kW for their EV. All that power is coming from the grid and we know nothing about the energy mix renewable/ fossil fuel.  OK during summer their 6 kW panels are covering 30 kW of their 40 kW daily use ( EV + house ) . But they are still pulling 10 kW from the grid even under the best solar performance.
 Now if you compare to my current daily production in Nov., my 5 kW home solar is producing about 20 kWh per day and I am using almost zero grid energy for my home. Exactly 2 kWh for the month and not the 30 kWh of daily grid energy your #940 example is showing.
If I were to add an EV I would either have to add solar or use grid power. If I wanted the powerwalls to make EV nighttime charging actually renewable I would need to add at least one powerwall in addition to the extra solar.
 The thing that is bothering me about your continued insistence on showing examples of people charging their EV with grid power is that it isn’t 100% renewable because it largely is dependent on nighttime charging with grid energy.
 I am making a serious attempt at zero grid energy. If you don’t believe me when I say you need at
least three powerwalls and I think something close to a 10kW solar system to run an average home plus EV here in Calif. then please show me an example of someone doing better. With zero grid.
 Zero is where we are suppose to be going . Selling more cars, helping your stock portfolio , or just plain selling GreenBAU because it make people feel better about themselves is not in the planets best interest.
 What solar/battery/ EV costs and how well it performs year round is all tied together with electric cars and whether they will either increase or decrease future grid demands. None of this addresses food production but I guess we can just put that off to some later day.

1 Like

33

Arctic sea ice / Re: MOSAiC news

« on: November 20, 2019, 11:47:32 AM »

Here the time series are using 26 rolling weekly averages according to the Cryosat2 freeboard  / Smos thinness merger of observational ice thickness

Nice analysis

there's no long term consistent data set using these satellites and the refined merger algorithm.

The merged cryosat2-smos v2.02 data appears to go back to nov2010 at AWI (someone's been busy ) so a mid term comparison could perhaps be made.

It's been a long journey through google, guesswork, commas and brackets to buoy labels. Today I got the lucky click. So, an update on drift speed of the meereis Pbuoys closest to Polarstern from nov14-20, latest data at ~04:00, with labels. (temporarily without tails)

edit: Polarstern is currently roughly half way between p204 p201 and p207. The buoy on the edge of the floe 'fortress' STIPAKAF is not shown here.
somewhat thicker ice previously also known as fortress

Added an overlay of Pbuoys with labels near Polarstern, circled in red, on today's S1B 04:24 image. The buoy colours just happen to be inverse of drift speed of a much shorter animation. It was an easy way to make them more visible. Click for full resolution.

4 Likes

34

Arctic sea ice / Re: MOSAiC news

« on: November 20, 2019, 10:59:02 AM »

That's disturbing: not really seeing ice thickening at PS location on Cryo2Smos

Here the time series are using 26 rolling weekly averages according to the Cryosat2 freeboard  / Smos thinness merger of observational ice thickness. There is some thickening over this period in the 0.8 to 1.2 m range. Oddly the ice is thicker to the southeast of the Polarstern's position.

It's hard to say whether that is notably fast or slow relative to past years because there's no long term consistent data set using these satellites and the refined merger algorithm.

Mosaic, in their floe planning, expected to find 1.2m ice here back on October 5th. That is 17 days before the first data frame here and 43 days before the final frame (which has finally attained that thickness). So it's probably fair to say that 1.2 m thickness is quite late.

20191111_20191117
...
20191016_20191022

Technical note: after setting the rectangle bounding the Polarstern's drift over these dates (using locations in the S1AB database from sailwx), set the color picker in Gimp to radius 5 which will fill the bounding box and take the average. Then fill a small overlaid rectangle with this color and pick the whole image with the non-contiguous color selector, capturing the local selection on the palette bar after adding 0.05 m subdivisions from the grid tool. The desired product (ice thickness growth in the Polarstern's vicinity) is then the animation of the palette bar. This could be done on the original png file without the -45º rotation to 'Greenland down' or better still by utilizing the nicely done netCDF file in Panoply which includes error estimates etc and has the option of exporting and analyzing numeric values of the equal area projection pixels. However this won't change bottom-line talking points obtained from much faster image analysis.

2 Likes

35

Arctic sea ice / Re: Atmospheric connections, structure, and long range weather forecasting

« on: November 18, 2019, 07:47:07 AM »

Possibly a very serious stratospheric warming event is coming soon. GFS shows  strong warming starting T+10. As stratospheric forecasts are said to be more reliable than troposheric ones, it is more likely to come true than usual T+10 and beyond crap. Such warming are usually followed by a polar vortex split. T+16 10hpa temps shown.

1 Like

36

Policy and solutions / Re: Renewable Energy

« on: November 17, 2019, 10:38:20 PM »

NordStream2 is a shame. Europe theoretically embargoes the Russian for taking Crimea and all the while not only buying their oil and gas (thereby keeping the Putin regime alive), but throwing Ukraine (theoretically their ally) to the wolves by making their gas route useless.
What a bunch of ........!

The Ukraine defaulted on their gas debts to Russia (backed by the IMF against its own rules), so they have displayed their untrustworthiness. So Russia has built alternative pipelines through Turkey and now Nordstream. Even in the middle of the first Cold War the USSR remained a reliable supplier to Europe; they have displayed their trustworthiness. The big gas field in the Netherlands is being shut down, so Europe desperately needs more gas imports, and Russia is the most trustworthy and cost competitive supplier. This is intelligent German independent policy making for the benefit of the German people, which is nice to see given the pressure from the US, Poland etc.

We are moving to a multi-polar world and the Germans seem to understand the need for some independence from the declining power. The US cant throw its weight around the way it could in the couple of decades after the collapse of the USSR.

If Europe etc. wants to get rid of despicable regimes they should start with Saudi Arabia, the country with horrendous human rights violations (like murdering a journalist in their embassy and beheading people in the street) and that spends billions supporting Wahhabi terrorists. Then quite a few Central American countries (like the coup regime in Honduras) etc., well before Russia. They should also be sanctions on the Ukraine until they remove the explicitly fascist and anti-semitic elements within the power structure. Seems the new Ukrainian President is trying to come to a settlement with Russia, in the best interests of the average Ukrainian, but with extreme difficulty given some of the powerful elements in the country.

Welcome to the new non uni-polar world.

2 Likes

37

Antarctica / Re: Ice Apocalypse - MULTIPLE METERS SEA LEVEL RISE (narrated video)

« on: November 17, 2019, 05:41:15 PM »

I doubt that the LTG model included the use of plentiful resources that were harmful to the extent of being a potential existential threat when society knows it.

- We have vast amounts of coal reserves.
- We have loads of oil & natural gas (even if some places such as the USA may be soon reaching a second physical peak oil/gas limit).
- CO2 emissions are rising - reducing them by 45% by 2030? huh...
-We can and do make ever more increasing quantities of herbicides and pesticides. Many are known to be harmful but are still used in many parts of the world. So many new compounds are produced every year and put into the system after relatively short-term studies that the long-term effects are unknown.
- We knock down forests and and expand the acreage devoted to pasture, to plantations, to arable crops.
- We know we need biodiversity and reduce it at an alarming rate. When its gone its gone. Technology can't fix that - Jurassic Park is an SF flic.

So it's more like a drunk continuing to drink even though it will eventually cause liver failure & death. Many drunks stagger on longer than the Doctors think is possible, but in the end they die.

It is a small planet with limited resources to maintain life. That resource is in decline.

2 Likes

38

Policy and solutions / Re: Renewable Energy

« on: November 17, 2019, 02:56:12 PM »

I prefer the energy to be produced locally.

I guess that means i want an european Europe.

2 Likes

39

Antarctica / Re: Ice Apocalypse - MULTIPLE METERS SEA LEVEL RISE (narrated video)

« on: November 17, 2019, 09:52:25 AM »

If you reject the fundamental influence of market forces you always risk repeating the mistake of the Club of Rome report "Limits to growth".

Have you actually read "Limits to Growth"? If so, where exactly did you find the mistake?
As far as I know they didn't reject the fundamental influence of market forces at all, but maybe I missed it.
Even market forces cannot provide unlimited material growth on a finite planet.
Current market forces are already exceeding several planetary ecological boundaries.
The longer this overshoot lasts, the higher the risk of eventual collapse.
Only by governing market forces can we hope to still avoid this collapse, or at least make its impact less destructive.
This is how I understand the Club of Rome's warning of 1972 (updated several times since), which still seems very accurate to me.

4 Likes

40

Arctic sea ice / Re: What's new in the Arctic ?

« on: November 15, 2019, 12:16:57 AM »

Couldn't figure out where to put this so ...

Sea Ice Movements Trace Dynamics Transforming the New Arctic
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-floe-sea-ice-movements-dynamics.html

Research led by the University of California, Riverside, is the first to use moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer, or MODIS, satellite imagery to understand long-term ocean movements from sea ice dynamics. (... I think A-Team might beg to differ)

... "No one had bothered before to use MODIS because the satellite is sensitive to clouds and it's hard to identify ice," Martinez said. "Our algorithm automatically filters clouds and uses other image processing algorithms that give the velocity and trajectory of the ice floes."

"MODIS data is one of the longest records of earth ever compiled," said first author Rosalinda Lopez, a graduate student in Martinez's lab. "This means that we are able to expand our analysis to almost two decades to observe the variability of sea ice as dramatic changes transform the region."



R.Lopez-Acosta, et.al. Ice Floe Tracker: An algorithm to automatically retrieve Lagrangian trajectories via feature matching from moderate-resolution visual imagery, Remote Sensing of Environment (2019)

Abstract:

Satellite observations of sea ice along marginal ice zones suggest a strong coupling between sea ice transport and the underlying ocean turbulent eddy field. Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite imagery spanning over almost two decades of daily observations at a resolution of up to 250  m provides a good resource for deriving long-term ocean kinematics from sea ice dynamics.

In this paper, we present a newly developed automatic algorithm to retrieve dynamic measurements of sea ice from these images. We describe the methodology by presenting results acquired along the East Greenland Current (ECG) for 6.5  weeks in the spring of 2017. During this period, our ice floe tracker was used to identify and track ice floes with length scales ranging from 8 to 65  km. By effectively filtering atmospheric conditions from MODIS images, ice floes were tracked for up to ten consecutive days, and a total of 1061 trajectories were retrieved.

 A southward mean sea ice flow associated with the ECG was observed along with deviations in both direction and magnitude, suggesting the effect of an underlying turbulent eddy field. The absolute position and tracking errors associated with our method are 255  m and 0.65  cm/s, respectively, each derived from a comparison between manually and automatically identified ice floes. Going forward, our methodology will be employed to process longer time sequences to analyze nonlinear interactions between drifting ice floes and the upper ocean turbulent eddy field in the ECG as well as to investigate other prominent regions of the Arctic Ocean.

3 Likes

41

Antarctica / Re: Ice Apocalypse - MULTIPLE METERS SEA LEVEL RISE (narrated video)

« on: November 14, 2019, 11:46:37 PM »

when there is no other source of greenhouse gas emissions that can make up for the missing coal emissions.

Such certainty gives you away. 30 years of the IPCC and we have not changed the shape of the keeling curve appreciably.
Coal has mostly been swapped for new gas assets with a fifty year life.
I can think of a few potential sources of greenhouse gas emissions including permafrost melt, burning the Amazon and furtive methane from fracking and faulty infrastructure  that could push us over RCP 8.5
RCP 8.5 is very unlikely but not "impossible" at this point.

On the other hand the lower RCP's always have been impossible being based on technology we do not actually have and the application of which we could not achieve in any reasonable expectation of the  economic and political future. 

In fact, studies indicate that if we can keep the temperature rise to 1.5 C the WAIS won't collapse.

@1.2 C now  and  0.2C  a decade that's less than two decades away without allowing for warming masked by human induced aerosols.
1.5C is already blown 2C is highly unlikely and 3C probable on our present path.

2 Likes

42

Permafrost / Re: Northern Hemisphere snow cover

« on: November 14, 2019, 09:27:22 AM »

maybe switch to brr?

1 Like

43

Greenland and Arctic Circle / Re: Greenland 2019 Melt Season

« on: November 13, 2019, 07:18:30 PM »

GRACE-FO has updated - now  with Greenland Mass loss to mid-September

http://gravis.gfz-potsdam.de/greenland 

Thank-you Potsdam, Germany.

In the 09/2018 to 08/2019 Greenland Year, total SMB gain was a very low 170 GT.
Greenland Mass Loss from Mid-Oct 2018 to Mid-Sept 2019 was just over 500GT.

So mass loss from calving and glacial melt from contact at the ocean edge with salt water  was approaching 700GT, which was high but not extremely so.

But the circa 500GT net mass loss is extremely high compared with the 2002-2019 average of circa 225 GT, due in part to low SMB gain but also due to greater calving / melt from marine-terminating glaciers.

3 Likes

44

The rest / Re: Poll for the Democratic Party's Nomination for U.S. President in 2020

« on: November 12, 2019, 11:32:40 PM »

KK
Other countries haven't settled for lower care levels, or longer wait times, they simply supply better care at lower cost. American voters aren't particularly stupid, they just grew up in a propaganda bubble that is making a few of them obscenely wealthy even as it reduces everyone else to penury.


I was told by Nevada's best doctors that I had <6 months to live. I promptly sold everything and came back to Canada for a final look at the country of my birth. That was in 2004!


In my first week back my cancer had been confirmed and the operation completed. It was a few months before my neurological problems came out of remission and could be treated - a treatment that was simply far to expensive for my HMO to offer. Within a few months I left my cane behind and could actually run - not too far or to fast, but running, not hobbling on a cane!


At the moment it's been 10 years since the cancer has last reappeared, and my CIDP hasn't raised it's head for even longer. I'm still a very long way from being healthy, but I've outlived the majority of my peers in Las Vegas & I'm sure that when my time does come I will have had the best care available anywhere, and my family won't be out a nickel.


I've been very ill in both countries. I've experience with both plans. Anyone voting for the status quo in the US is simply the victim of a very evil propaganda campaign & the successful lobbying efforts of Big Pharma and the AMA.


Keeping people healthy is much less expensive than trying to keep them alive for a few weeks or months after years of neglect have taken their toll. Don't fall for any of the BS that's being fed to you.
Terry

2 Likes

45

Arctic sea ice / Re: When will the Arctic Go Ice Free?

« on: November 11, 2019, 07:12:54 PM »

Stroeve & Notz papers

To state that the linear relationship between sea ice loss and Arctic Global-mean(?) temperatures will hold until there is no more ice is heroic indeed.

How do they deal with September sea ice loss 1979 to 2019 of around 50% and volume loss of around 75% ? If both continue at the same linear rate then an arithmetical impossibility looms.

1 Like

46

Permafrost / Re: Permafrost general science thread

« on: November 11, 2019, 10:37:43 AM »

Geophysical Research Letters

Research Letter  Open Access

Rapid CO2 Release From Eroding Permafrost in Seawater
G. Tanski  D. Wagner  C. Knoblauch  M. Fritz T. Sachs  H. Lantuit
First published: 15 October 2019
https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL084303
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Abstract
Permafrost is thawing extensively due to climate warming. When permafrost thaws, previously frozen organic carbon (OC) is converted into carbon dioxide (CO2) or methane, leading to further warming. This process is included in models as gradual deepening of the seasonal non‐frozen layer. Yet, models neglect abrupt OC mobilization along rapidly eroding Arctic coastlines. We mimicked erosion in an experiment by incubating permafrost with seawater for an average Arctic open‐water season. We found that CO2 production from permafrost OC is as efficient in seawater as without. For each gram (dry weight) of eroding permafrost, up to 4.3 ± 1.0 mg CO2 will be released and 6.2 ± 1.2% of initial OC mineralized at 4 °C. Our results indicate that potentially large amounts of CO2 are produced along eroding permafrost coastlines, onshore and within nearshore waters. We conclude that coastal erosion could play an important role in carbon cycling and the climate system

Rapid CO2 Release From Eroding Permafrost in Seawater
G. Tanski  D. Wagner  C. Knoblauch  M. Fritz T. Sachs  H. Lantuit
First published: 15 October 2019
https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL084303

2 Likes

47

Policy and solutions / Re: But, but, but, China....

« on: November 09, 2019, 11:36:13 PM »

China's coal based electricity fleet way more efficient that the US

Interesting report on the Chinese coal-fired electricity generation fleet. 50% is already made up of super-critical and ultra super-critical units (higher temperatures and steam pressure produce more electricity per unit of coal) and by 2020 all units will have to meet an efficiency level that the top 100 units in the US cant meet. With the very low utilization rate of the fleet, less efficient ones can be shut down without the need for replacement. All new plants are at the least super-efficient, so will increase the efficiency of the whole fleet.

Since China’s fleet uses more advanced technology, it also consumes less coal: an average of 286.42 grams of coal equivalent, or gce, consumed per kilowatt-hour of power produced in China versus 374.96 gce consumed per kilowatt-hour produced at lower heating value in the United States.

In 2016:
- Subcritical coal power plants in SE Asia were on average 32% thermally efficient
- SuperCritical coal power plants in SE Asia were on average 36% thermally efficient (that's 12.5% more efficient than subcritical)
- Ultra SuperCritical coal power plants in SE Asia were on average 39% thermally efficient (that's 22% more efficient than subcritical)

China already has Ultra Supercritical plants that are 10 years old running at 45% efficiency (thats 41% more efficient than subcritical). The goal is to get to over 50% efficient.

This means that China may very well be able to cut coal usage in electricity production while actually increasing the amount of electricity generated from coal.

At these levels of efficiency coal plants are pretty close to natural gas plants for CO2 emissions and have much less fugitive methane emissions during production and transport of the coal/NG.

There is also significantly less flue gas to deal with for the sulphur and nox scrubbers to deal with.

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2017/05/15/432141/everything-think-know-coal-china-wrong/

https://www.worldcoal.org/file_validate.php?file=The%20Power%20of%20high%20efficiency%20coal%20-%20WCA%20-%200316.pdf

https://www.power-technology.com/projects/yuhuancoal/

1 Like

48

Arctic sea ice / Re: 2019 sea ice area and extent data

« on: November 07, 2019, 07:50:05 PM »

I took the monthly extent value for October 2019 and added it into my long-term plot where I calculate the anomalies from 1979 up to now.
The average October extent is now 7,98 M km². October 2019 had an average extent of 5,67 M km², which is 2,31 M km² less than that average and the lowest ever recorded since 1979 and the only October with an average value which is smaller than the average minus 2 standard deviations.
This low level also let the blue curve dip deeper below the red long term linear trend line. It is lower now by -1,10 M km² (calculated from the trend line this October should have been at 6,77 M km²).
The slope of the overall trend line has decreased by four digits compared to September 2019.

See attached graph.

4 Likes

49

Antarctica / Re: PIG has calved

« on: November 07, 2019, 09:28:27 AM »

That's the correct location, Stephan! Thanks for pointing it out.

Sorry for not being detailed enough, Baking.

Here is a GIF showing the supposed Sentinel grounding line.


https://m.imgur.com/ha91dZW

2 Likes

50

Consequences / Re: Working on (free) Climate Themed Game, advice on a post 4ºC world looks like?

« on: November 07, 2019, 02:44:47 AM »

I was interviewed about the game by The Weather Channel on Monday:

Interview:

1 Like