NASA posted this a couple days ago about the heat situation last week. Nothing much we hadn’t already known about, but an interesting 48-state view of things.
Nothing to be concerned about.
Hey look, we have a new way to measure zettajoules that doesn’t involve nuclear weapons!
I’ve often wondered why it’s so difficult to make my fellow Americans see what we’re doing to the planet as a bad thing. But if you think of this entire endeavor as a never ending Boston tea party it starts to make more sense.
It’s no harder than the hoary old saw that it’s very difficult to convince a man to believe something when his job depends on not believing that something.
To fix this we need to turn off everything and revert to living like the 1600s. Tomorrow. Not next year, nor over a span of decades. Right F-ing now!
And eliminate about 3/4ths of the human population via either active unspeakably evil measures or the simple reality that 1600s tech cannot feed 8 billion people even if everyone is a farmer, so starvation will cull the herd to a few million even if no man ever raises a hand to another. And fat chance of a violence-free fall from the modern world.
OK, that’s out. So now what?
Close your eyes, whistle in the dark, & hope you die of a comfortable old age before modern techno-society collapses under the strain. Or if you’re a multi-billionaire, build a colony on another planet or an appropriately secret defensible island and be the progenitor of your own Captain Bligh act on your own Pitcairn Island.
Or, most comfortingly, simply pretend the whole thing isn’t happening and is the result of a giant scare tactic by some evil politicians who want to control your life in a direction contrary to your desires.
I think nearly everyone here can identify with the effectiveness of: “some evil politicians who want to control your life in a direction contrary to your desires.” As it’s presently being applied in the service of other goals, not AGW-reduction.
Or the third option. Bear witness to our failures and deal with psychological drain by occasionally laughing at the people with their heads stuck in the sand.
I want to say “with heads stuck stupidly in the sand” but the jury is still out on which path of futility is actually dumber.
I just preheated, outside, a refrigerated 3 quart sauce pan 1/2 full of shredded porkloin/onion/jalapeno/refried beans/rotel* In 2 hours it was up to 120 degf.
*to make enchiladas.
An interesting report about a report on the progress in attribution science, the ability to reliably blame, or not, changing climate for any particular weather event.
This article includes links to the actual NASEM report.
From their executive summary:
Significant challenges remain, however, including structural limitations of the process- based models used in EEA studies, temporal and geographic limitations of observations, and understanding how dynamic—not just thermodynamic-drivers of extreme events might respond to climate change. Confidence in EEA studies thus varies significantly across different types of extremes, with the highest confidence associated with extreme cold and heat events and others
strongly influenced by a warming atmosphere, such as large-scale heavy rainfall events. Conversely, confidence is lowest for phenomena where observational records are limited and those that depend on small-scale dynamical processes that are poorly resolved in global climate models, such as severe convective storms.
So my takeaway is that we’re getting pretty good at attribution when we have a good statistical backdrop (lots of observations) and features that show up at the resolutions used in climate models. And things are less certain if one or both of those are untrue.
One would expect the job to continue getting easier with each passing year as climate change’s signal continues to increase in magnitude and eventually overwhelms the noise.
E.g. if we ever see our first true “Cat 6” hurricane disaster - won’t take a lot of statistical sophistication to deduce whether climate change was involved.
Delicious. And worrying.
2 hours to go from 40ish fridge temp to 120F barely warm is pathogenic contaminant heaven.
I’m the guy who Does. Not. Care about food safety. Wipe off the maggots and eat it.
This story concerns me. Which is saying a LOT.
There isn’t, of course, such a thing as a Category 6 hurricane (the Saffir-Simpson scale tops out at the open-ended Cat 5), but yeah, a hurricane which breaks known records on wind speed, size, and damage, and having formed over record-hot ocean waters, would be pretty clear evidence, to those of us willing to listen.
And that is the money quote of the entire thread, and the entire government / scientific discussion around the world for the last ~50 years.
Too many people are unwilling to accept the reality that our historic way of life must be over very soon and very hard. So they will not listen. And nothing will change until they do listen and believe.
There’s been talk about the need for a new category. Just talk for now as there are only a couple of instances that even flirt with edge of where that new category would theoretically start. And I don’t think we know definitely if that theoretical cat 6 is physically possible or not. Warmer waters provide more energy, but I vaguely recall reading that other facets of a warmer world might dampen some of the other conditions necessary for cyclone creation?
Anyway, I wouldn’t expect it to really become a thing unless/until they need to convey to the public that, no really, that hurricane barreling towards you is not something we’ve seen before and you need to evacuate.
There’s a LOT more discussion on the idea that the entire S-S category system is scientifically and practically bankrupt and needs to be replaced wholesale.
Wind speed isn’t irrelevant, but it’s about #5 on the ranking of stuff which damages modern infrastructure and kills people. Storm surge height and areal extent and sustained rainfall amounts and areal extent are what kills and destroys. Not wind. Wind, even 150mph wind, is largely an irritant doing mostly cosmetic damage.
I can generate some cites if you want, but not immediately.
Exactly so. As Mr. LSL well knows, living in South Florida, the building codes, and building practices, in hurricane-prone areas have been upgraded tremendously over the past few decades. Modern residential roofs don’t peel off the way that they used to when high wind got under them. It’s the water – both storm surge and rainfall – that’s more often the greater issue now.
FYI. I PRE HEATED outside and then cooked in an oven for an hour. Anyway… the dew point is currently 85 at 9:00 PM and it’s fucking miserable.
An interesting NASA bit on seaweed. This particular weed is growing like, well, you know, in the warmest parts of the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico. One of the graphs there shows how this pest has gone from negligible to frickin’ huge in a little over a decade. Seems a tipping point has been reached.
Nasty smelling stuff when you encounter a beach full of it. Between that, sea level rise, rising temperatures, and dying corals it must be a fun time in the gulf tourism industry these days.
Yes. I live very close to the beach in SoFL. We’ve had severe weed since mid June and in the places where it naturally accumulates extra heavily & the relevant agency hasn’t been hauling it away, the stink is obvious nearly 1/2 mile inland.
I’m just wrapping up a Caribbean vacation today. My hotel is on the windward side of its island, and yes, the beach is quite fouled with stinking rotting Sargassum. I got here Friday and just today = Wednesday there are skiploaders and offroad dump trucks out to pick up much of the mess along the hotel’s frontage. Great timing gents!
There’s a solution to that in today’s political climate – stop funding and disband the National Academies. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet.
It’s a straightforward fact that, everything else being equal, warmer waters contribute to more energetic cyclones. But in the real world it’s a profoundly complex situation. The hurricane researcher Kerry Emanuel, who developed the Power Dissipation Index (PDI), a measure of hurricane energy, believes that warmer waters will tend to promote more energetic hurricanes but not necessarily more of them. There’s evidence that PDI has been increasing in the North Atlantic, though the pattern is erratic, and it’s less clear elsewhere.
Research with climate models tends to agree with Emanuel, showing that the number of hurricanes forming in the North Atlantic, at least, will likely not increase in number due to warming sea surface temperatures, but that the proportion of them hitting 4 and 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale will likely increase. It’s been suggested that disruptive factors like wind shear may mitigate the tendency for more hurricanes to form, but not their strength once they do form.
There’s even a researcher at the University of Wisconsin who claims that it’s not even absolute SSTs in any local area that govern hurricane energy, but rather, the SST differentials across a broad area. I’m skeptical, particularly since this is the same guy who claims that the reason modern global climate models have been converging on similar projections is because of selection bias! I think he might even be some sort of contrarian nut or just a researcher trying – you should pardon the expression – to make waves.