Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 95

We’re Aiming At 200 Feet Or More Of Sea Level Rise: Here’s What That Looks Like

The bad news: If we burn all of the planet’s fossil fuels, we’ll melt all of the world’s land ice.

The good news: You’ll be long gone so … party on!

Homo sapiens sapiens, the species with the ironic name, is not known for long-term thinking. So if the very real danger of Sandy-level storm surges coming every year or two in a half century — along with Dust-Bowlification of a third of the Earth’s habitable and arable landmass — isn’t enough to stop us from using the atmosphere as an open sewer for carbon pollution, then the prospect we are going to melt all of the Earth’s land ice and raise sea levels more than 200 feet over the next few millennia or so ain’t gonna do the trick.

Still, here’s what that would look like for the United States (via National Geographic):

[image error]

On the bright side, think of all the great scuba diving there will be off of our new coastline!

A new analysis in Science Advances, “Combustion of available fossil fuel resources sufficient to eliminate the Antarctic Ice Sheet,” finds just that if temperatures rise 11°C (20°F). The earth would lose all of the Antarctic ice sheet — which is where 90 percent of the world’s land-locked ice is, enough to raise sea level by itself more than 160 feet. When you add in the Greenland ice sheet — whose point of no return is probably closer to 3°C warming — plus all of the other land-based glaciers and thermal expansion, you get sea level rise of over 200 feet.

You can read the news release of the study here.

My main issue with this modeling study is that it is doubly conservative. First, it lowballs how fast rapid sea level rise can start, given the latest observational studies from Antarctica, as leading scientists have pointed out. Second — and equally important — it lowballs how fast temperatures might rise.

On the first point, climatologist Michael Mann told Mashable, “I’m not convinced that the ice sheet model fully accounts for the complex dynamics relevant to predicting ice sheet collapse on timescales of decades to centuries, which I consider to be most relevant.”

Mann, the director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center, added, “There is considerable empirical evidence that has been provided over the past couple years that we are likely already now committed to at least 3 to 4 meters of sea level rise from West Antarctic Ice loss, due to warming already in the pipeline and the destabilization of the ice shelves, which support the inland ice, due to southern ocean warming that has already taken place.”

James Hansen and 16 leading climate experts — including some of the world’s foremost authorities on Antarctic melt and sea level rise — warned in July we face “sea level rise of several meters in 50, 100 or 200 years,” which means as early as this century but in any case, sooner than expected. They also warn that even with the less than 1°C of warming we already have, ice sheet melt appears to be putting sea level rise on an exponential growth path that would bring 10 feet of sea level rise sooner, rather than later — even if we stabilize at 2°C total warming.

The science has made clear for a long time that we don’t need to burn anywhere close to all of the world’s fossil fuels to have beyond-catastrophic sea level rise. A March 2012 National Science Foundation news release on paleoclimate research warned, “Global Sea Level Likely to Rise as Much as 70 Feet in Future Generations.” The lead author pointed out, “The natural state of the Earth with present carbon dioxide levels is one with sea levels about 70 feet higher than now.” A 2009 paper in Science concluded that when CO2 levels were this high 15 million years ago, it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher.

Second, it is very far from clear that we need to burn all of the world’s fossil fuels to get 11°C warming. The study uses an “assumed climate sensitivity” of “about 3.1°C.” That number is in the mid-range of current estimates from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for how much warming you get with a doubling of CO2 levels — say, from preindustrial levels of 280 parts per million to 560 ppm. But, as I’ve discussed, such estimates assume the climate is sensitive to only fast feedbacks like sea ice retreat and increased water vapor and that there are no slow, decade scale feedbacks.

Yet we know there are many major slow feedbacks that are not included in current climate models, such as the release of carbon dioxide and methane from the thawing permafrost. And we know that all of those feedbacks become stronger and faster the hotter the temperature gets. That’s why various paleoclimate studies find that the Earth has warmed up much more in response to pulses of CO2 and CH4 than current models suggest.

We have been headed toward 900 to 1000 ppm of CO2 over the next century on our current emissions path. According to a 2011 study in the journal Science, the last time the Earth saw such levels of CO2, it was 29°F (16°C) hotter. The paleoclimate data suggests CO2 “may have at least twice the effect on global temperatures than currently projected by computer models.”

The good news is that, if Paris succeeds and the climate science deniers don’t, then we may well avoid that level of CO2 — assuming we can also avoid the worst carbon cycle feedbacks, which appear to really start kicking in around 2°C.

The bad news is that if, as still appears likely, we blow past 2°C warming, then we are likely to see quite rapid and irreversible sea level rise this century and beyond.

Tags

AntarcticaClimate ChangeSea Level Rise

The post We’re Aiming At 200 Feet Or More Of Sea Level Rise: Here’s What That Looks Like appeared first on ThinkProgress.

California’s Historic Drought Is Now Officially Even More Historic

It’s been at least half a millennium since California has been this dry.

The snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains — which provides nearly a third of the state’s water supply — is the lowest it has been in 500 years, according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change on Monday.

The researchers compared blue oak tree rings during known time periods of precipitation, snowpack, and temperatures — beginning in 1930 — and found that the data accurately reflected snowpack levels. They then looked at rings going back 500 years to chart California’s historic snowpack supply. The findings revealed the “exceptional character” of California’s ongoing, four-year drought. As of April 1, 2015, the Sierra Nevada snowpack was only 5 percent its historical average, the researchers found.

It’s not that California has never had this little rain, explained Soumaya Belmecheri, lead author of the study and a post-doctoral research associate at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. It’s that the high temperatures have combined with the drought to reduce snowpack.

“What is different is the record high temperatures that exacerbated or made this drought more severe,” Belmecheri told ThinkProgress. High temperatures affect the quality of precipitation — whether water falls as snow or rain — and whether the snowpack has a chance to stick around.

“The snowpack is like a reservoir. It’s a water bank,” Belmecheri said. “If this kind of drought in California is expected to become more common in the future, you can imagine all the impacts it will have for water in California.”

California is in the midst of a staggering drought, which has contributed to widespread wildfires, agricultural strain, and, in some cases, drinking water shortages. In April, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) issued water restrictions for the state for the first time ever, mandating that urban water suppliers cut their use by a quarter. The drought has been linked to climate change.

“This is probably the biggest water supply concern our state is facing,” Mark Gold, associate vice chancellor for environment and sustainability at UCLA told the Los Angeles Times. “On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s 11.”

The researchers found that for low-elevation sites, winter temperatures have a greater influence on snowpack. “The 2015 record low snowpack coincides with record high California January–March temperatures and highlights the modulating role of temperature extremes in Californian drought severity,” they write. This year’s snowpack is “strongly exceptional” the report says, exceeding the 95 percent confidence interval for 1,000-year return period. In other words, over 1,000 years, there is only a 5 percent chance of the snowpack being this low. For contrast, the second-driest year, in 1977, exceeded the 95 percent confidence interval for only a 60-year return period.

“The 2015 snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is unprecedented,” Valerie Trouet, one of the authors of the study and a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona, told the New York Times. “We expected it to be bad, but we certainly didn’t expect it to be the worst in the past 500 years.”

Tags

CaliforniaClimate ChangeDroughtLos AngelesmountainsNatureSierra NevadaSnowSnowpackWater

The post California’s Historic Drought Is Now Officially Even More Historic appeared first on ThinkProgress.

New Prime Minister Could Signal A Change In Direction For Australia’s Climate Efforts

Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who once publicly said “the climate change argument is absolute crap,” was defeated in a leadership battle Monday evening.

His replacement, Malcolm Turnbull, requested a Liberal Party leadership ballot to challenge Abbott amid flagging poll numbers. In a vote of 54 to 44, Turnbull displaced Abbott as leader of the actually-conservative Liberal Party, meaning Turnbull became Australia’s 29th prime minister.

The question for many around the world is whether Turnbull will be more progressive on climate or energy policy than Abbott was.

In 2009, the Liberal Party was out of power and Turnbull lost his leadership position to Abbott by one vote, in part because of Turnbull’s support for a carbon emissions trading scheme. At the time, the Labor Party was in power and making big strides on climate change, investing in renewable energy and instituting a carbon price. Abbott helped to foment and then rode a backlash against the carbon price into power in 2013, winning a majority and a prime ministership with a catchy slogan: “Axe the Tax.”

Giles Parkinson, editor of the Australian climate blog RenewEconomy, told ThinkProgress that Abbott’s ouster was “a blessed relief” because his policies were “dominated by a climate science denying far right.”

Indeed, Abbott has made headlines by saying coal is “good for humanity,” laughing at one of his minister’s jokes about Pacific island nations facing sea level rise, and more substantively, cutting support for renewables and successfully gutting his country’s emissions trading policy (ETS). In Abbott’s first year, renewable investment dropped below Algeria, Myanmar, Thailand, and Uruguay.

In Abbott’s sign-off speech, he did not mention energy or climate change in lists of things he was proud of nor goals he still wanted to accomplish, beyond a more general statement that “Labor’s bad taxes are gone.”

Status Quo?

But on first glance, it seems there would not be much change from Abbott to Turnbull. In the press conference following Monday’s vote, Turnbull said he would follow existing Liberal Party policy. His new deputy, Julie Bishop, added that Australia had already set its 2020 emissions reduction target, with the implication that there was not much additional work to do.

Abbott’s plan to address climate change passed last year in the form of a “direct action plan,” essentially a fund of a couple billion dollars that provides competitive grants to organizations or businesses that would voluntarily reduce their emissions. Many have criticized this as seriously inadequate and expensive for what it would achieve, yet Turnbull said Monday night that the current “climate policy is one that has been very well designed, a very, very good piece of work.”

Political journalist Malcolm Farr wrote that though Turnbull “endorses a market response to carbon reduction,” he “will not impose himself on the existing Abbott programs.”

Christopher Wright, a University of Sydney business school professor who focuses on societal responses to climate change, told ThinkProgress that because of this Turnbull is unlikely to change policies “unless he won a new term in government and then we might see the Coalition move towards support for an ETS — which Turnbull is known to support.”

Addition by Subtraction

Yet Turnbull had previously articulated a conservative case for acting to confront climate change. In 2009 he dubbed Tony Abbott’s climate change policy “bullshit” in a Sydney Morning Herald article. He used the term to describe Abbott’s contention that he had a plan to cut emissions without a cost, criticizing those in the party who refute mainstream climate science.

“Many Liberals are rightly dismayed that on this vital issue of climate change we are not simply without a policy, without any prospect of having a credible policy but we are now without integrity,” Turnbull wrote. “We have given our opponents the irrefutable, undeniable evidence that we cannot be trusted.” He went on to say he supported the emissions trading system.

At the Monday night press conference, he acknowledged that with regard to the Abbott government climate policy, he supported the policy as a minister, yet “policies are reviewed and adapted all the time.”

Turnbull is the first former environment minister to be prime minister of Australia. A businessman and lawyer, he was elected to his seat in the suburbs of eastern Sydney in 2004.

“Turnbull will change the focus, but he will have to do it gradually”

“Turnbull will change the focus, but he will have to do it gradually,” Parkinson said. “That means tightening the rules around Direct Action, although it seems clear that this policy will have to be dumped, particularly if there is success in Paris.”

Earlier this year, Turnbull said that Australia “should take a prudent, cautious, insurance approach, and say, we should seek to restrain the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, insofar as we can, in order to offset that chance.”

“For renewables, it is very positive,” Parkinson said. “Abbott and his key players hated renewables — wind energy in particular. Turnbull likes them, and his leadership should provide a lot of heart for investors in wind and solar, and will also mean that institutions like the Clean Energy Finance Corp, ARENA and the climate change authority will be retained.”

Though Australia’s U.N. commitments to cutting carbon emissions will likely stay weak, they aren’t likely to get worse under Turnbull.

What’s Next

The question of what a Turnbull government does on energy and climate policy may hinge more on how strong his coalition within his party stands, what the polls tell him about his national popularity, and whether the opposition Labor Party fields a strong candidate to challenge Turnbull in a possible national election this year.

“Labor’s leader Bill Shorten has already proclaimed that climate change would be a central issue in the next federal election,” Wright said. They would likely advocate for a market-based emissions trading policy, avoiding anything that could be called a carbon tax. Their emissions targets would be better than Abbott’s, but aren’t likely to be very strong. Many in the Labor Party support coal exports.

Labor could look to change leaders under the assumption that Shorten would lose to Turnbull in an election, something Rupert Murdoch tweeted Monday. Parkinson said the “timing of the election will depend on polls in next few weeks.”

A new election is important for any serious change in policy because of the way the current government coalition is composed. The right wing of Turnbull’s coalition will likely oppose any movement on climate policy.

“Key right-wing powerbrokers such as former Senator Nick Minchin were the key architects of Abbott’s successful former challenge to Turnbull in 2009 specifically over the issue of climate change,” Wright said. “The vote for the leadership was only 54-44 (or thereabouts) and there will be those who seek to maintain the war on the environment, renewables, and climate denial.”

Whichever direction Turnbull goes, one thing is for sure: climate hawks will not have Tony Abbott to kick around anymore.

Tags

AustraliaClimate ChangeMalcolm TurnbullTony Abbott

The post New Prime Minister Could Signal A Change In Direction For Australia’s Climate Efforts appeared first on ThinkProgress.

This Is What Your Weather Forecast Looks Like With A Bit Of Climate Science Added In

It’s common knowledge that weather and climate aren’t the same thing. Weather is short-term fluctuations in precipitation, humidity, and temperature, while climate is long-term atmospheric behavior. Typically, climate trends aren’t mentioned in meteorological forecasts — until now.

WXshift, a new website from Climate Central, allows users to get weather forecasts and see long-term regional climate trends at the same time. Users can select their state, city, or zip code, and then explore short-term weather predictions and long-term temperature and precipitation trends in the location.

Richard Wiles, senior vice president for program strategy and integration for Climate Central, thought of the idea for WXshift about three years ago. To him, the idea of giving people climate data with their weather forecast just seemed obvious.

“Weather is how people experience climate,” he told ThinkProgress. The weather forecast, he said, is “the easiest, simplest way to get the facts on climate change to the broadest audience. Everybody cares about the weather … and climate is the future of weather.”

The website, which pulls from 100 years of U.S. temperature data from more than 2,000 weather stations, also lays out ten “climate indicators,” including extreme heat, ocean acidification, sea level rise, and El Niño. Each indicator has facts on how it contributes to climate change, or how climate change contributes to it — the site explains, for instance, how El Niño contributes to elevated temperatures, and also how climate change could increase the likelihood of extreme El Niños and La Niña events.

[image error]

CREDIT: www.wxshift.com

These climate indicators “take climate change and present this bulletproof argument,” Wiles said. “If you look at all of those, you come out with one conclusion. There’s no way around it when you’re done with those ten.

But Wiles said allowing people to see how climate change has affected their cities and states over time may present even more compelling data on the planet’s warming trend.

“It’s really hard to argue with a local temperature trend that shows that summers are warming or winters are warming,” he said. “It strips away all the political baggage that tends to be attached to climate change, and just gives people the information in a way you’re more likely to accept it.”

This isn’t Climate Central’s first foray into making the link between weather events and long-term climate trends. The organization has been working to advise television meteorologists on the link between weather and climate since 2012 — historically, meteorologists as a group have been known more for their climate skepticism than their willingness to tie climate change trends into their 10-day forecasts. But according to an April study, climate denial among meteorologists may be fading.

Climate Central is planning to design an app to go along with the website soon, and Wiles said they’re also looking into adding new features to the website — little things like seeing what the high temperature was on your birthday in a given year. The site is also open to partnerships with other companies and organizations as a way of ensuring that more weather sites start delivering climate information.

“We want to transform the way people get their weather forever,” Wiles said, “because there’s no going back. [Climate change] is the biggest problem we have.”

Tags

Climate ChangeWeather

The post This Is What Your Weather Forecast Looks Like With A Bit Of Climate Science Added In appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Largest Cities In The U.S. And China Set New Climate Targets

Cities, states, and provinces from the world’s biggest superpowers — and by far the world’s biggest carbon emitters — just pledged to reduce their carbon emissions at a summit in Los Angeles on Tuesday.

The pledges vary widely by locality. California officials reiterated pledges to reduce statewide greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels and generate a third of the state’s electricity from renewable resources by 2020. Phoenix pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent over a 2005 baseline and create the largest municipal fleet of alternative fuel vehicles in the country. Carmel, Indiana, will add 30 new roundabouts, which decrease car emissions and electricity for traffic lights. That city will also reduce its overall emissions by 40 percent by 2040. Other participating places include Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Portland, Houston, Salt Lake City, Lancaster (California), New York, Oakland, Des Moines, Miami Dade County, Phoenix, and San Francisco.

The 11 Chinese cities participating in the pledges, the “Alliance of Peaking Pioneer Cities,” will all peak their emissions by 2030, in line with national targets. Some, such as Beijing, Zhenjiang, and Guangzhou, will reach that goal a full decade earlier — by 2020.

“Last year was a year for setting goals and targets,” White House Senior Adviser Brian Deese told reporters on a call Monday night. “This year needs to be a year of implementation, and a year when our two countries demonstrate our commitment.”

In November 2014, Presidents Obama and Xi Jinping made the Joint Announcement on Climate Change, a historic agreement that could keep 640 billion tons of carbon emissions out of the atmosphere this century. China pledged to double its renewable energy generation and peak carbon emissions by 2030, if not earlier. The United States pledged to cut net greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants under the guidelines of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, released in August, is one way the United States seeks to achieve its goals. China, for its part, has been full steam ahead on developing renewable sources of energy. One recent state report suggested that by 2050, China could get 85 percent of its electricity from resources such as wind and solar.

Small changes in China’s energy mix can mean broad carbon reductions. In the first four months of 2015, China’s coal use fell almost 8 percent from the previous year. This 8 percent reduction is roughly the same as all the carbon dioxide emissions from the United Kingdom over the same period.

But pivoting from national pledges to on-the-ground reductions is an important component of achieving the targeted national goals. Actions like the ones taken this week at the U.S.-China Climate-Smart/Low-Carbon Cities Summit in Los Angeles could demonstrate to the world that the two biggest carbon emitters are serious about climate change.

The Chinese localities participating in the commitments account for a quarter of China’s urban emissions. These cities emit about 1.2 gigatons of carbon each year — an amount roughly equal to the total emissions of Brazil or Japan.

The new alliance of cities “highlights the fact that the country as a whole is moving to achieve its national target as soon as possible,“ Deese said.

The commitments also could strengthen the pathway to a multinational agreement at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Paris in December. Reaching a strong climate treaty in Paris is widely seen as a necessary step towards keeping emissions low enough to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

The summit, where Vice President Joe Biden and a special representative from China will both speak, occurs against the backdrop of increasingly strained U.S.-China relations in other arenas. President Xi is set to visit the White House this month.

Tags

carbonChinaClimate Leaders SummitemissionsGreenhouse GasesObamaUnited StatesXi

The post Largest Cities In The U.S. And China Set New Climate Targets appeared first on ThinkProgress.

This Southern State Made A Big Commitment To Start Teaching About Climate Change

Alabama’s science education standards — which once invited students to grapple with the theory of evolution’s “unresolved problems” — just got an upgrade.

Students in Alabama will now learn about both climate change and evolution, under new standards that experts say treat the topics with more scientific accuracy than they did before.

Under the new standards, which were adopted unanimously by the school board last week, Alabama students of environmental science will “analyze and interpret data and climate models to predict how global or regional climate change can affect Earth’s systems (e.g., precipitation and temperature and their associated impacts on sea level, glacial ice volumes, and atmosphere and ocean composition).” They’ll also learn about how changes in climate influence human activity (the standards give mass migrations as one example).

In addition, students in earth and space science classes will be exposed to data — including global levels of greenhouse gases and temperature maps — that will help them “describe how various human activities (e.g., use of fossil fuels, creation of urban heat islands, agricultural practices) and natural processes (e.g., solar radiation, greenhouse effect, volcanic activity) may cause changes in local and global temperatures over time.”

This is just what the science shows and they want their students to learn the best science

That “natural processes” part might raise some hackles among climate advocates. Solar radiation does have some impact on the earth’s climate, but scientists agree that it’s fossil fuels — not the sun — that are the driver in the planet’s current warming period. But Minda Berbeco, programs and policy director at the National Center for Science Education, said that though the section could be misinterpreted by teachers, she thinks that it’s still a positive step forward for Alabama.

“With a standard like that, you have to be cautious, because it can be interpreted it in multiple ways,” she said. A teacher might see that section, she said, and decide to do a debate in class about whether climate change is caused by natural forces or by humans, which wouldn’t be helpful for students. But “that’s not really what the standard is trying to get at,” she said. Instead, it’s attempting to put human-caused climate change in the context of natural climate forces to get students to better understand the issue.

A teacher’s professional development will have a lot to do with how they address the standards, Berbeco said. If they have a good basis in science and are able to get the professional development they need — which can come from organizations such as the National Science Teachers Association, which hosts conferences and workshops for educators — they’ll be able to accurately talk about climate change and the forces driving it.

“If they don’t, it’s a big area of concern,” she said. “Now that they have the standards, my goodness, they need the professional development to make sure they have the good science.”

Lisa Hoyos is the director of Climate Parents, a group that works to push the adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards, which were developed by 26 states and multiple science and education organizations to serve as guidelines for science education in the United States. She said that, though Alabama didn’t implement NGSS — the standards did pull from some of NGSS’s “core ideas” for life sciences — she was happy about the state’s upgraded standards.

“While there could have been more content directly linking climate change to the burning of fossil fuels by human beings, there is some degree of linkage” in the standards, she said. “All earnest science teachers will be able to use these standards to ensure kids learn about the threats of climate change, and hopefully about climate solutions as well.

The idea behind NGSS, she said, is to embed concepts like climate change and evolution in the curriculum, so that students get exposed to them throughout their time at school. So even if Alabama’s standards don’t directly follow NGSS, they’re still an upgrade.

Berbeco agreed.

“What we’re seeing now is states are using NGSS as a jumping off point. And so in some cases they’re changing some of the wording, in some cases they’re using core concepts and redeveloping the rest of it,” she said. In Alabama’s case, she said, “it looks like they used NGSS as starting point, utilized components of it, and developed it as what they perceived as their own version.”

Still, some states are choosing to fully adopt NGSS, standards that recommend that the topic of climate change be incorporated into the general curriculum starting in middle school. NGSS has been adopted in 15 states, plus the District of Columbia. Hoyos’ Climate Parents has been active in pushing states — especially conservative ones — to adopt the standards.

Berbeco said she would love if Alabama inspired more largely-conservative states to upgrade their standards to include the latest science on climate change and evolution.

“It’s great to see the science teachers really advocating for the good science, and it’s great to hear them listened to,” she said. “Alabama is certainly a state that we can point to now — this is just what the science shows and they want their students to learn the best science.”

Tags

AlabamaClimate ChangeScience

The post This Southern State Made A Big Commitment To Start Teaching About Climate Change appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Hot August Confirms That Long-Awaited Global Temperature Speed Up Is Here

NASA reports that this was the hottest start to any year on record by far. This was the hottest August by far in the dataset of the Japan Meteorological Agency, and close to tied with 2014 for hottest August in the NASA dataset.

With the underlying long-term warming trend adding to the short-term warming from the strongest El Niño since the big one of 1997-1998, you can bet the house that this will be the hottest year on record by far.

Different climate-tracking groups around the world use different data sets, so they can show different results for a given month. The Japan Meteorological Agency is a World Meteorological Organization Regional Climate Center of excellence.

Here is the horserace chart — the running year-to-date average temperature — for the past two decades, from HotWhopper.

[image error]

The datapoint for January of each year just shows the anomaly (temperature above the 1951-1980 mean) for January of that year. “For February it shows the average of January and February for each year,” HotWhopper reported. “For March, it’s the average of the monthly anomaly from January to March.” And so on until December, which is the “annual average temperature for the full year.”

As the chart shows, 2015 has set a pace the other years can’t keep up with. In all likelihood, 2015 warming will increase over the coming months due to the increasing temperatures in the east-central tropical Pacific associated with the current El Niño, as I discussed in my Saturday post. And that means 2016 could well top 2015.

Indeed, the U.K. Met Office reports that broader trends in the oceans “are consistent with a return of rapid warming in the near term.” The long-awaited speed up in global temperatures is here.

Tags

Climate Change

The post Hot August Confirms That Long-Awaited Global Temperature Speed Up Is Here appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Hot August Keeps 2015 On Torrid Pace For Record-Smashing Warmth

NASA reports that this was the hottest start to any year on record by far. This was the hottest August by far in the dataset of the Japan Meteorological Agency, and close to tied with 2014 for hottest August in the NASA dataset.

With the underlying long-term warming trend adding to the short-term warming from the strongest El Niño since the big one of 1997-1998, you can bet the house that this will be the hottest year on record by far.

Different climate-tracking groups around the world use different data sets, so they can show different results for a given month. The Japan Meteorological Agency is a World Meteorological Organization Regional Climate Center of excellence.

Here is the horserace chart — the running year-to-date average temperature — for the past two decades, from HotWhopper.

[image error]

The datapoint for January of each year just shows the anomaly (temperature above the 1951-1980 mean) for January of that year. “For February it shows the average of January and February for each year,” HotWhopper reported. “For March, it’s the average of the monthly anomaly from January to March.” And so on until December, which is the “annual average temperature for the full year.”

As the chart shows, 2015 has set a pace the other years can’t keep up with. In all likelihood, 2015 warming will increase over the coming months due to the increasing temperatures in the east-central tropical Pacific associated with the current El Niño, as I discussed in my Saturday post. And that means 2016 could well top 2015.

Indeed, the U.K. Met Office reports that broader trends in the oceans “are consistent with a return of rapid warming in the near term.” The long-awaited speed up in global temperatures is here.

Tags

Climate Change

The post Hot August Keeps 2015 On Torrid Pace For Record-Smashing Warmth appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Tens Of Thousands Of Acres Ablaze As California Governor Declares State Of Emergency

New fires added to the evacuations and destruction in California over the weekend, as Gov. Jerry Brown (D) declared a state of emergency in two northern counties.

The Valley Fire, just north of San Francisco, covered 62,000 acres and was only 5 percent contained as of Monday morning. The Butte Fire, due east of the Bay Area, has burned 71,063 acres and is 30 percent contained, according to the state’s Cal Fire agency. Four firefighters were injured over the weekend, and hundreds of homes have been destroyed. There’s also one report of a death from the fire, but it hasn’t yet been confirmed.

2015 has been a record year for wildfires across the West, and California has been hit particularly hard. This year, Cal Fire has fought nearly 5,000 wildfires over 150,000 acres, the agency reported. But the worst might be yet to come. Officials noted that, historically, September and October are the worst months for wildfires in California.

The state’s drought is primarily responsible for increasing wildfire danger year-round. California is now in its fourth year of a historic dry spell — one that’s been linked to climate change. Dry underbrush and trees ignite more easily, and fires spread more quickly. Earlier this year, officials called a fire’s spread “unprecedented.”

“Since 2000 we’ve been seeing larger and more damaging fires,” Daniel Berlant, chief of public information for Cal Fire, also told NBC News in April. “What we’re seeing now is that the rain is starting later and stopping much earlier. The fires are burning at explosive speed because the vegetation is so dry and that allows them to get much larger.”

Over the weekend, 1,000 firefighters were battling the Butte Fire. This manpower comes at a tremendous cost to the state, which spent an estimated $4 billion fighting wildfires between 2003 and 2012.

And that’s not even counting the federal spending on fighting fires. The Forest Service spent about $1.2 billion on fire suppression in fiscal year 2014, CNBC reported.

But fires don’t only threaten lives, homes, and livelihoods in their direct paths. They also contribute to worsening air quality, sending billowing smoke full of particulate matter across the country. This can increase hospital visits for respiratory illness and drive up asthma rates.

According to a study that analyzed historic data, air quality in cities 50 to 100 miles from fire can be five to 15 times worse than normal. The Center for Disease Control found that in 2007, six hospitals near sustained wildfires in Southern California saw a 25 percent increase in respiratory syndrome diagnosis and a 50 percent increase in asthma diagnoses.

“These cascading impacts are the things that keep me up at night,” Jason Funk, a senior climate scientist for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told ThinkProgress earlier this year. “We haven’t been looking at them so much.”

The state of emergency order will make it easier for evacuees to process paperwork, such as replacing destroyed birth certificates. It will also expedite clean-up processes.

Tags

Cal FireCaliforniaFireforest firesJerry BrownSan FranciscoWildfires

The post Tens Of Thousands Of Acres Ablaze As California Governor Declares State Of Emergency appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Thousands Of Acres Ablaze As California Governor Declares State Of Emergency

New fires added to the evacuations and destruction in California over the weekend, as Gov. Jerry Brown (D) declared a state of emergency in two northern counties.

The Valley Fire, just north of San Francisco, covered 62,000 acres and was only 5 percent contained as of Monday morning. The Butte Fire, due east of the Bay Area, has burned 71,063 acres and is 30 percent contained, according to the state’s Cal Fire agency. Four firefighters were injured over the weekend, and hundreds of homes have been destroyed. There’s also one report of a death from the fire, but it hasn’t yet been confirmed.

2015 has been a record year for wildfires across the West, and California has been hit particularly hard. This year, Cal Fire has fought nearly 5,000 wildfires over 150,000 acres, the agency reported. But the worst might be yet to come. Officials noted that, historically, September and October are the worst months for wildfires in California.

The state’s drought is primarily responsible for increasing wildfire danger year-round. California is now in its fourth year of a historic dry spell — one that’s been linked to climate change. Dry underbrush and trees ignite more easily, and fires spread more quickly. Earlier this year, officials called a fire’s spread “unprecedented.”

“Since 2000 we’ve been seeing larger and more damaging fires,” Daniel Berlant, chief of public information for Cal Fire, also told NBC News in April. “What we’re seeing now is that the rain is starting later and stopping much earlier. The fires are burning at explosive speed because the vegetation is so dry and that allows them to get much larger.”

Over the weekend, 1,000 firefighters were battling the Butte Fire. This manpower comes at a tremendous cost to the state, which spent an estimated $4 billion fighting wildfires between 2003 and 2012.

And that’s not even counting the federal spending on fighting fires. The Forest Service spent about $1.2 billion on fire suppression in fiscal year 2014, CNBC reported.

But fires don’t only threaten lives, homes, and livelihoods in their direct paths. They also contribute to worsening air quality, sending billowing smoke full of particulate matter across the country. This can increase hospital visits for respiratory illness and drive up asthma rates.

According to a study that analyzed historic data, air quality in cities 50 to 100 miles from fire can be five to 15 times worse than normal. The Center for Disease Control found that in 2007, six hospitals near sustained wildfires in Southern California saw a 25 percent increase in respiratory syndrome diagnosis and a 50 percent increase in asthma diagnoses.

“These cascading impacts are the things that keep me up at night,” Jason Funk, a senior climate scientist for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told ThinkProgress earlier this year. “We haven’t been looking at them so much.”

The state of emergency order will make it easier for evacuees to process paperwork, such as replacing destroyed birth certificates. It will also expedite clean-up processes.

Tags

Cal FireCaliforniaFireforest firesJerry BrownSan FranciscoWildfires

The post Thousands Of Acres Ablaze As California Governor Declares State Of Emergency appeared first on ThinkProgress.