APOD: Global Warming Predictions (2009 April 21)

[BMAONE23]

Nothing like physical facts
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere ... .south.jpg
Antarctic Sea ice extent appears to be peaking at a level that is 3 million sq k less than last year.

[Loco]

Nothing like physical facts
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere ... .south.jpg
Antarctic Sea ice extent appears to be peaking at a level that is 3 million sq k less than last year.

"There's oil money in them thar Polar Bear graveyards!" (Skipper of the Ekszon Valdooze, quoted in The Slippery Slope, July/09.

[BMAONE23]

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0 ... ivity.html

[Loco]

Nothing like physical facts
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere ... .south.jpg
Antarctic Sea ice extent appears to be peaking at a level that is 3 million sq k less than last year.

I tend to believe it's a little early in the summer to be making this kind of guess. My guess is there will be less sea ice this year than last. If not, it could be accounted for by small changes in ocean currents, perhaps a temporary cold upwelling. Overall, the ice is on track to disappear in another five years.

[BMAONE23]

Nothing like physical facts
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere ... .south.jpg
Antarctic Sea ice extent appears to be peaking at a level that is 3 million sq k less than last year.

I tend to believe it's a little early in the summer to be making this kind of guess. My guess is there will be less sea ice this year than last. If not, it could be accounted for by small changes in ocean currents, perhaps a temporary cold upwelling. Overall, the ice is on track to disappear in another five years.

I might even say that there is a probability for less Arctic Ice this year than the dramatic 2007 record minimum.

[aristarchusinexile]

Nothing like physical facts
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere ... .south.jpg
Antarctic Sea ice extent appears to be peaking at a level that is 3 million sq k less than last year.

I tend to believe it's a little early in the summer to be making this kind of guess. My guess is there will be less sea ice this year than last. If not, it could be accounted for by small changes in ocean currents, perhaps a temporary cold upwelling. Overall, the ice is on track to disappear in another five years.

I might even say that there is a probability for less Arctic Ice this year than the dramatic 2007 record minimum.

Almost certainly.

[BMAONE23]

Interestingly, since they set up the North Pole Webcam the Ice (ground) level has lowered by over a foot and temperatures have increased by over 25d C or 48d F. Looking at the Image during set-up, note they dug down to set the foundations of the Pole indicator and the Wind indicator, then releveled the ice surface. Also note the temperature on that day -21d C (-5.8d F). As time progresses, April 13 the ground level looks firmly set at the base of the wind indicator. Here is another good image. And: time passed, and storms passed, and temperature increased. At one point, a storm nearly covered the Camera, but this too melted back, and yesterday the temperature has risen to a balmy 6d C (42.8d F) and the surface level has lowered by over a foot. (notice the base of the Pole indicator and Wind indicator. Both are showing their foundations)
It is also interesting to note Sondre Stormfjord, above the Arctic Circle in Greenland, has hit 68d F for the last 6 days and most of the other temperature stations along the west coast of Greenland also indicate temperatures of >60d F during the day. Funny how all this arctic warming is happening during such a "Deep Solar Minimum" that was touted by others as being a force for global cooling.

Then there is Today's image wich indicates a further warming to 7d C or 44.8d F and shows what resembles surface ponding near the polar indicator.

[Loco]

Then there is Today's image wich indicates a further warming to 7d C or 44.8d F and shows what resembles surface ponding near the polar indicator.

And such huge masses of air are being shifted around that here in Ottawa summer has yet to begin .. it's been more like autumn.

[BMAONE23]

This is interesting
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/scien ... .html?_r=1

[BMAONE23]

Lookng at this image it is plain to see that, like 2007, this year both the Northeast and Northwest passages have just a few hundred miles of ice remaining before the waters are once again open.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere ... dw.000.png

[Redbone]

Looks like it's trending back towards recent averages.

[bystander]

Sun's Cycle Alters Earth's Climate
Space.com - 2009 August 27

Weather patterns across the globe are partly affected by connections between the 11-year solar cycle of activity, Earth's stratosphere and the tropical Pacific Ocean, a new study finds.


The study could help scientists get an edge on eventually predicting the intensity of certain climate phenomena, such as the Indian monsoon and tropical Pacific rainfall, years in advance.


The sun is the ultimate source of all the energy on Earth; its rays heat the planet and drive the churning motions of its atmosphere.


The amount of energy the sun puts out varies over an 11-year cycle (this cycle also governs the appearance of sunspots on the sun's surface as well as radiation storms that can knock out satellites), but that cycle changes the total amount of energy reaching Earth by only about 0.1 percent. A conundrum for meteorologists was explaining whether and how such a small variation could drive major changes in weather patterns on Earth.

[BMAONE23]

I've read that the Sun's power output has a direct effect on the types and ammount of clouds that the earth produces. Higher output equates to less cosmic interference craating higher level clouds that allow solar energy to enter the biosphere but reflect the energy trying to exit while lower output equates to more cosmig energy reaching the bioshpere creating more lower level clouds and reflecting the initial solar input

[Chris Peterson]

I've read that the Sun's power output has a direct effect on the types and ammount of clouds that the earth produces. Higher output equates to less cosmic interference craating higher level clouds that allow solar energy to enter the biosphere but reflect the energy trying to exit while lower output equates to more cosmig energy reaching the bioshpere creating more lower level clouds and reflecting the initial solar input

That effect is pretty well accepted, but is also now understood well enough to know that it can only be responsible for a small part of the variation in long term temperatures associated with solar variability. It is nice to see the research homing in on the multiple ways that solar variability forces long term temperatures, as this has been an area where climate models have been pretty weak (not all that relevant to the current warming trend, of course, but very useful for studying long term climate).

[harry]

G'day from the land of ozzzzzz

What causes the cycles within the Sun that affects our climate?

Yes I know there is Sun Flares.

[Chris Peterson]

What causes the cycles within the Sun that affects our climate?

The 22-year magnetic cycle is roughly understood as the product of an interaction between the Sun's differential rotation and its magnetic field. Basically, the field gets wound up over time until it breaks, and then the cycle repeats. This causes changes in surface features of the Sun that result in a 0.1% variation in output (a tiny variability seen in many stars, maybe with the same cause). The variability affects weather (or very short term climate, depending on the definitions used) through forcing mechanisms that are starting to yield to theoretical analysis.

Almost nothing is known about any longer cycles, or even if any longer cycles exist. Occasional periods where the 22-year cycle fails must have some influence on short term climate, but the degree of influence remains very uncertain, and whether or not such missing or altered cycles have a cyclical component is also undetermined.

[harry]

G'day Chris

Thanks for that, sounds logical.

[neufer]

<<For most of the past century, the Jakobshavn Glacier, or Jakobshavn Isbræ, along the west coast of Greenland has extended out into the ocean as a long, narrow ice tongue. The glacier drains a large portion of Greenland’s ice sheet, and consequently, the glacier has the potential to contribute more to sea level rise than any other single feature in the Northern Hemisphere. On July 6–7, 2010, the glacier retreated by roughly 1 mile (1.5 kilometers). By itself, this breakup was not dramatic, but it continued a pattern of calving and retreat followed by ice flow acceleration that began nearly a decade ago.

Click to view full size image 1 or image 2

These images acquired by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite show Jakobshavn Glacier in 2001 and 2010. In 2001, Jakobshavn Glacier extends westward, showing typical features of a glacier, including flow stripes and crevasses. The yellow line in the 2001 image shows the part of the glacier that retreated by early July 2010. In the 2010 image, the same area is mélange—broken glacier ice and sea ice covered with snow.

In the winter of 2010, Jakobshavn’s ice front did not re-advance as it usually does, so it began the 2010 melt season in the same location as the 2009 summer melt season. As a result, the glacier had the potential to experience significant retreat during the summer of 2010. The breakup in early July 2010 occurred on the northern tributary to Jakobshavn Glacier. The southern tributary actually drains a larger portion of Greenland’s central ice sheet, so a retreat there could lead to a more substantial ice discharge.>>

[neufer]

Europe was heavily deforested in the centuries before the Black Death. After the plague hit, huge areas that had been dedicated to agriculture reverted to forests, sequestering carbon and dropping atmospheric CO2 levels, with a presumed consequent impact on global temperatures.

Scientists Solve Puzzle Of Black Death’s DNA
By NICHOLAS WADE: October 12, 2011

[b][color=#0000FF]A scanning electron microscope micrograph of Yersinia pestis bacteria.[/color][/b]

---

<<After the Black Death reached London in 1348, about 2,400 people were buried in East Smithfield, near the Tower of London, in a cemetery that had been prepared for the plague’s arrival. From the teeth of four of those victims, researchers have now reconstructed the full DNA of a microbe that within five years felled one-third to one-half of the population of Western Europe.

A draft sequence of the Yersinia pestis genome has been reconstructed using DNA extracted from victims of the Black Death. The bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, is still highly virulent today but has different symptoms, leading some historians to doubt that it was the agent of the Black Death.

Those doubts were laid to rest last year by detection of the bacterium’s DNA in plague victims from mass graves across Europe. With the full genome now in hand, the researchers hope to recreate the microbe itself so as to understand what made the Black Death outbreak so deadly.

So far, the evidence points more toward the conditions of the time than to properties of the bacterium itself. The genome recovered from the East Smithfield victims is remarkably similar to that of the present-day bacterium, says the research team, led by Kirsten I. Bos of McMaster University in Ontario and Johannes Krause of the University of Tübingen in Germany.

This is the first time the genome of an ancient pathogen has been reconstructed, opening the way to tracking other ancient epidemics and how their microbes adapted to human hosts.

The bacterium’s genome consists of a single chromosome, about 4.6 million DNA units long, and three small rings of DNA called plasmids. In the 660 years since the Black Death struck, only 97 of these DNA units have changed and only a dozen of these changes occur in genes and therefore would affect the organism’s physical properties, the researchers report in Wednesday’s issue of the journal Nature. Dr. Krause and others reported the DNA sequence of one of the plasmids in August. The changes in the genome will be studied one by one to see how each affects the microbe’s virulence.

The researchers hope eventually to modify a living plague bacterium so that its genome is identical to that of the agent of the Black Death. Such a microbe could be handled only in special secure facilities. But even if it did infect a person, the bacterium would be susceptible to antibiotics, like its living descendants, said Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University, a team member.

If the microbe’s genome is so little changed, the deadliness of the Black Death may reflect the condition of its medieval victims. Harsh as the economic stresses assailing Europe today may be, they are a breeze compared with problems in the mid-14th century. The climate was cooling, heavy rains rotted out crops and caused frequent famines, and the Hundred Years’ War began in 1337. People were probably already suffering from malnutrition and other diseases when the plague arrived like the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. “People honestly thought it was the end of the world,” Ms. Bos said.

Recovery of the medieval plague bacterium’s full genome is a technical tour de force. The DNA had been degraded into millions of small fragments that were overwhelmed in number by DNA from the human host and from the bacteria that consumed the body after death. Dr. Krause’s team fished out the plague DNA by using DNA from the modern bacterium, relying on the fact that DNA strands bind to DNA of complementary sequence.

“This is a major technological step forward, a great advance for the entire field of DNA and pathogens,” said Mark Achtman, an expert on ancient plague at University College Cork in Ireland.

The modern plague bacterium changes its DNA units slowly, but it does quite often rearrange the order of its genes. Some experts believe gene order can affect pathogenicity. Dr. Krause had available only tiny fragments of DNA, so although he was able to reconstruct all the medieval bacterium’s genes he could not establish the exact order in which the genes were arranged, leaving open the possibility that the bacterium was inherently more pathogenic because its genome was differently organized.

Paul Keim, an expert on infectious bacteria at Northern Arizona University, said that work by Dr. Achtman and Dr. Krause had shown that the Black Death “was really a series of epidemics coming out of China and sweeping across the susceptible ecological situation” created by the culture of medieval Europe. The plague in each outbreak probably did not persist very long and was repeatedly re-established by new infections from East Asia, where the bacterium is still endemic in small rodents like marmots.

“We don’t have a human ecological situation comparable today, plus it is really easy to break the transmission cycle with antibiotics and public health,” Dr. Keim said. There are still small outbreaks, like one in Madagascar in the 1990s, but “a multiyear large human outbreak is inconceivable in this day,” he said.

Besides the Justinian plague and the Black Death, a third great wave of plague swept out of China in 1894, causing an epidemic in San Francisco in 1900 and killing millions of people in India.

All the teeth used in the study will be returned to the skulls from which they were taken, now in a London museum whose archaeologists excavated the East Smithfield cemetery in the 1980s.>>

[GaryR]

snip...

Paul Keim, an expert on infectious bacteria at Northern Arizona University, said that work by Dr. Achtman and Dr. Krause had shown that the Black Death “was really a series of epidemics coming out of China and sweeping across the susceptible ecological situation” created by the culture of medieval Europe. The plague in each outbreak probably did not persist very long and was repeatedly re-established by new infections from East Asia, where the bacterium is still endemic in small rodents like marmots.

“We don’t have a human ecological situation comparable today, plus it is really easy to break the transmission cycle with antibiotics and public health,” Dr. Keim said. There are still small outbreaks, like one in Madagascar in the 1990s, but “a multiyear large human outbreak is inconceivable in this day,” he said.

Besides the Justinian plague and the Black Death, a third great wave of plague swept out of China in 1894, causing an epidemic in San Francisco in 1900 and killing millions of people in India.

All the teeth used in the study will be returned to the skulls from which they were taken, now in a London museum whose archaeologists excavated the East Smithfield cemetery in the 1980s.>>

Curious that so many deadly infectious diseases had come out of China in the past and even recently like some strains of flu and SARS. What was it with the Chinese life style that caused them? Some time back, someone mentioned that it could be that in rural communities, the people kept their livestock with them in their houses, at least overnight, giving rise to cross-species bacterial mutation that led to the diseases. Don't know if this is true. Hopefully, the improvements in their living standard have led to a more healthy lifestyle.
Gary

[geckzilla]

Those were both viruses. But yeah, crowded living conditions, even sanitary ones, give rise to diseases which transmit through the air. That's why it is easier to catch a cold during winter. Not because it's cold but because you're more likely to be indoors and in contact with infected individuals.

[Chris Peterson]

Curious that so many deadly infectious diseases had come out of China in the past and even recently like some strains of flu and SARS. What was it with the Chinese life style that caused them? Some time back, someone mentioned that it could be that in rural communities, the people kept their livestock with them in their houses, at least overnight, giving rise to cross-species bacterial mutation that led to the diseases.

That is certainly a factor in diseases where the pathogen exists in different parts of its life cycle in different species, or exists naturally in various animal reservoirs (which is true of SARS, influenza, and bubonic plague).

SARS is very rare, plague is no longer a problem, and the flu has been coming out of China for years. Not sure what other recent deadly diseases you are referring to. In general, I think there is much more concern about tropical diseases spreading to the developed world- especially in light of the present climate change.

[vikaivanova]

Then all the plankton dies,, as do the rest of the life in the sea

[Chris Peterson]

Then all the plankton dies,, as do the rest of the life in the sea

Life is resilient. Even in the greatest extinctions, where most life has died out, much has survived- and rapidly evolved to fill the freed up niches. There is certainly nothing happening now that suggests everything will die- and most certainly not everything in the sea. Global warming is likely to be very unpleasant for humans (but hardly fatal to our species); for the rest of the biosphere, it's just change. Species come, species go. This just happens to be one of those times when the action is speeded up.

[neufer]

Will new studies confirming global warming settle skeptics’ questions? Don’t hold your breath
By Andrew Freedman, Washington Post
Posted at 11:33 AM ET, 10/24/2011

<<During the past several years, some skeptics of manmade global warming have focused their attention on the reliability of the modern surface temperature record, which according to numerous studies, shows a distinct warming trend starting in the middle of the 20th century, and continuing through the present day.

The surface temperature record isn’t reliable, the skeptics argue, because the data is biased by the urban heat island effect, which can raise temperatures in cities compared to rural locations. And even if it isn’t biased because of the heat island effect, the skeptics reason, the record can’t be trusted because of the statistical methods scientists have used to account for missing or intermittent temperature data over time, and sparse data coverage across certain areas, like the Arctic.

Another common skeptic argument has been that too few surface observation stations are used for global climate change studies, and many of these stations suffer from data quality issues.

Now a new series of studies has come along, produced by someone known for his skepticism of mainstream climate science, which conclude that these skeptic arguments are simply not tenable.

Of course, there were previous studies showing that some, if not all, of these concerns had little factual basis – particularly concerning the urban heat island issue. But the skeptics ignored those, and the questions persisted, and grew louder in the wake of the so-called “climategate” email scandal that raised doubts about the credibility of one of the main sources of surface temperature data, the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, in Britain. Texas Governor Rick Perry, for example, still makes references to the “climategate” dustup (among other reasons) in justifying his skepticism of manmade climate change, and the state of Texas cited concerns about the reliability of the surface record in a petition for the U.S. EPA to reconsider its finding that carbon dioxide, a climate-warming greenhouse gas, endangers public health and welfare.

Twelve month moving average of surface temperature record over land. New Berkeley temperature record, which agrees with other temperature records, shown in black (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project)

---

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

The new studies will make it much, much harder to credibly cast suspicion upon the surface temperature record.

Known as the “Berkeley Earth Study,” the interdisciplinary collaboration headed by Richard Muller, a noted physicist, sought to directly address the legitimate questions concerning the reliability of the surface temperature record. The Berkeley Earth analysis shows 0.911 degrees Celsius of land warming (+/- 0.042 C) since the 1950s, which translates to about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Berkeley study analyzed data from more than 39,000 weather stations, more than five times the 7,280 stations found in the Global Historical Climatology Network Monthly data set (GHCN-M) that has served as the foundation of many other climate studies. The researchers employed new statistical methods that, the team says, more accurately take into account discontinuities in the data as well as data quality questions.

Muller has (or had) credibility in the skeptic community due to his criticisms of mainstream climate science findings. So while the conclusions reached by Muller’s group are not exactly surprising, the source of those conclusions is noteworthy.

The Berkeley team’s analysis strongly refutes claims that the urban heat island effect causes a warm temperature bias in the surface data. The researchers also found that despite the skeptics’ assertions, readings from networks of temperature stations are not compromised by poor data quality from many of the individual stations.

The Berkeley Earth Study should put the criticisms of the surface record to rest. As Andy Revkin of the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog wrote, “Muller’s work... appears to completely undercut efforts to raise doubts about the extent of recent warming.”

And as Muller himself wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, a paper whose editorial board routinely casts doubt on the existence of global warming, let alone manmade global warming:

When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.

Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate…

I doubt Muller’s work will end the debate regarding the surface data, though, judging from the reactions of some climate skeptics. Blogger Anthony Watts, for example, who had previously written that he was “prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong,” slammed the Berkeley group for releasing its results before the studies underwent peer review.

“I know that I’ll be criticized for my position on this, since I said back in March that I would accept their findings whatever they were, but that was when I expected them to do science per the scientific process,” Watts wrote.

The irony in this reaction is that Watts and his contributors have long criticized the same peer review process, and they frequently post non-peer reviewed analyses and papers online.

Of Watts’ work, the Berkeley team states in a press release:

Stations ranked as “poor” in a survey by Anthony Watts and his team of the most important temperature recording stations in the U.S., (known as the USHCN -- the US Historical Climatology Network), showed the same pattern of global warming as stations ranked “OK”. Absolute temperatures of poor stations may be higher and less accurate, but the overall global warming trend is the same, and the Berkeley Earth analysis concludes that there is not any undue bias from including poor stations in the survey.

The Berkeley team has put its data and methods online, allowing for anyone to verify its work. This is a good sign, since it demonstrates that scientists have learned from “Climategate” and other recent pseudo-scandals that being transparent is the best way to earn credibility, rather than simply appealing to authority. Hopefully the peer review process (in the broadest meaning of that term) will bolster the studies’ findings when all is said and done, and we can finally move on to the more legitimately pressing questions in climate science, such as how high sea levels will rise between now and the end of this century.>>