2020 officially saw a record number of $1 billion weather and climate disasters.

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117696223#Comment_117696223

So even though you claim to think climate change is exaggerated, this comment clearly shows that you know, as much as everyone who understands the science, that due to human activities, our climate is going to relentlessly get warmer and warmer until we can stabilise atmospheric GHGs (and then wait decades for equilibrium)

In any normal scenario, a month being in the top 5 warmest months of all time, would be an exceptional month. You've shown that you expect every month to be at least in the top 5 warmest months

The radiative balance is out of balance. The planet will keep getting warmer until either we reach a new equilibrium, or we reduce the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117695211#Comment_117695211

This study is an interesting one. Climate scientists, especially those who conduct science in remote areas, or present to conferences regularly in person, have much more 'air miles' than the average scientist

What is the reasonable conclusion from this research?

I think that it should drive climate scientists and politicians to move their conferences online so that they do not require participants to present their findings in person but rather allow participation via the web

This would have the benefit of allowing all of these conferences and presentations to be released to the public so anyone interested in the science, can hear the lead authors present their research at academic conferences

For researching scientists who need to fly to reach remote locations to perform research, I'm perfectly ok with this because it's a justified use of carbon emissions, at least until global aviation becomes more sustainable and carbon neutral.

While we transition to sustainable air travel, I think there needs to be an intermediate step where carbon rationing means people should pay increasingly higher charges as they fly more often.

In terms of Ryanair's carbon offset plan, if there was a proper emissions trading scheme, this bs would not be required, so we should get that up and running and properly regulated asap. Emissions trading works by setting a cap of emissions per country, and then the government can sell those credits to businesses. Businesses who reduce their CO2 emissions can sell surplus carbon credits back to the government, or auction them off to other industries

The emissions allocation reduces every year, so the price goes up, so if a company buys credits that they don't use, then they can sell them at a profit later on.

It rewards companies for reducing their carbon emissions, and penalises those who do not transition to sustainable energy.

Gaoth Laidir

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117697153#Comment_117697153

Nice angle on my thought process, except it's completely wrong. My point was that ,despite the warm period and the record being broken, the month still didn't turn out the warmest, hence the "just shows how crap the rest of the month was" comment. But you go ahead and misread my mind if you want. 

Gaoth Laidir

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117697322#Comment_117697322

And what does the money go to?

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117697384#Comment_117697384

It goes to the state (or whoever happens to be acting as 'the state', could be an intergovernmental body too), just like how the state allocates mining or exploration licenses, or sells bandwidth to broadcast spectrum, or allocates quotas to farmers and fishermen to sell into a limited market, or extract a limited resource

The money received from selling those credits could be significant, although, most likely, the scheme won't have any new credits to sell. In most cases, the government would likely give current producers an allocation equal to their current emissions minus a set percentage, and then companies would buy additional credits from either then government/NGO or get them from the trading scheme. Most of the money would be traded amongst companies with governments acting as a 'central bank' to maintain stability in the emissions trading market

Companies who reduce emissions can sell those credits for a profit. The point is to create a market that penalises CO2 emissions and rewards reducing emissions

Nabber

At least we can throw satellite data out the window, can’t we?

Tried to find out how much of the surface of the earth (including oceans) is cover by thermometers. I’m expecting its low, but can’t seem to find data on usage within temp measurement is reliant on satellite imagery. I recalled reading that in some areas a thermometer reading could cover a span of 500km as no other sources in the area exist.

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117697553#Comment_117697553

Yes, and the results are gridded, so that if you have 300 thermometers in 1 500km zone, they are averaged, but one thermometer in a remote location for another 500km zone, that data represents the whole zone. While this might seem absolutely ridiculous, it makes perfect sense when talking about anomalies, and not absolute values

Where we don't have fixed buoys, there are satellite, military and shipping reports that all feed into the synoptics and are used regularly to validate data and smooth out outliers

Its not easy, or simple, and any objection you can think of is most likely covered in the scientific literature where researchers are justifying their choice of methodology and sampling

The fact that the IPCC takes 8 years and many thousand scientists painstakingly reviewing thousands of research papers to produce a report that summarises the latest science on climate change, says a lot about the complexity of the task. It's not just doing sums

Nabber

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117697578#Comment_117697578

Thanks for the responses.

Still doesn't answer the question however. How much of the earths temperatures are reliant on satellite, ground stations and transportation readings.

There are vast areas of the planet that have never had a verified ground/sea level reading. Yet they are depicted in 1880 - 2021 areas of temperature rises. Satellite data went through a 'major' correction a few years back, trust in that data is questionable.

In mainstream media and publications, the over reliance on inadequate modelling is downplayed. The lack of data to cover planetary wide records is diminished. The lack of accounting for cloud coverage or ground moisture is worrisome and in my opinion the over use of flux adjustments is an indication of bias confirmation. Could go on further about woeful performance on cloud characteristics (which play a larger part in climate regulation than CO2)

The biased attention toward CO2 is a major concern, ignoring human impact in many other areas, notably increased moisture in the atmosphere due to farming techniques and mining of aquifers.

CO2 reduction is not a panacea to climate woes.

Gaoth Laidir

Just getting back to Germany's July. In terms of temperature it ranked no. 31 in the 1881-2021 temperature series (the same as 1969, 1946, 1928 and 1900).

Bavaria was actually the wettest region and had the stations with the highest monthly totals. Nordrhein-Westfalen was second, and it had the station with the highest daily total (164.2 mm at Wipperfürth-Gardemeg).

https://twitter.com/DWD_klima/status/1422094989333569536?s=19

Again, there is no real trend in heavy rainfall (>20 mm) days per year, unless you call +0.03 days (~40 minutes) per decade a trend. July and summer rainfall trends are equally unimpressive.

A lot of talk on climate issues relates to the alleged clearly evident ruination of agriculture, phenology, etc. In the case of Germany at least, about where claims of increasing severe weather are being handed out like COVID vaccines, there don't seem to be any trends in harvest dates and other phenelogical parameters, according to the DWD anyway. Rumours of their demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Early-apples harvest date.

https://twitter.com/DWD_klima/status/1422193082573934597?s=19

Winter-barley harvest date.

https://twitter.com/DWD_klima/status/1419983924239945731?s=19

This is the German national met service posting these figures, not Heller or some other crank on YouTube. So I ask again, where is the evidence that the meagre trends one way or the other are having any actual effect on the ground, the kind of effects that some on here believe will spell annihilation of the human race?

Banana Republic 1

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117700255#Comment_117700255

See what the ipcc come up with I suppose

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117699373#Comment_117699373

The earths temperatures are monitored in a multitude of ways and scientists have grown adept at using different data from different sources and analysing them to get usable and reliable climate data

The further back we go in time, the fewer tools and instruments we have, so the certainty decreases, but the experts are confident that they have the data they need to support their confidence interval stated in their research

Currently and since 2007 there are a network of about 4000 Argo Floats that are constantly measuring water temperatures directly, and at multiple depths,

So the data is always getting better and better, but given that global warming, particularly in the oceans have already exceeded the confidence range of the older data, we can be very confident that oceans are warmer now than they before the satelite record, and since then we have much more reliable and consistent data

There was a big adjustment to the satellite data when it was discovered that satellites orbits were decaying more than they had accounted for so the data needed to be adjusted. When the errors in the data were identified, they were corrected, which is how scientific progress is meant to work

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117700927#Comment_117700927

IPCC don’t go the research, they summarize and assess the research, I was expecting an attribution study on these floods, got greedy because some others were released very quickly, but in time we will have plenty of peer reviewed studies to refer to for this event given that it was so tragic in terms of loss of life

kine99huke

In 2017, there were 16 separate weather-related disasters worth billions of dollars across the United States, shattering the previous record of 22 from 2017 and 2011. In 2020, there were seven disasters worth one billion dollars, including seven tropical cyclones, 13 severe storms, one drought, and one wildfire. An estimated $95 billion was spent on damages as a result of the 22 events

https://basketballonpoint.com/best-basketball-shoes-for-wide-feet/

Gaoth Laidir

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117702172#Comment_117702172

70% of the globe is ocean. Historic measurements were few and far between for the vast majority if this area up until relatively recently, yet we see detailed anomaly maps for these areas.

For the remaining land area, the majority also has very poor historic coverage. Many areas of Africa, Asia, South America have never had any observations and yet again we have detailed anomaly maps filled in.

I know we have to make the best stab at the data and account for the shortcomings, but when the overall talk is in the order of tenths of a degree relative to "pre-industrial" then for the globe as a whole it's a very woolly claim.

Satellite lower-troposheric temperature measurements, while of some use, are no substitute for a Stevenson Screen on the ground. You cannot compare the two very different techniques, yet we have them spliced together into a seamless 'homogeneous" data series. I'm not saying we would not see a rising trend anyway had we a dense network of such stations everywhere for the past 150 years, but I don't think people quite get the level of guesswork and random number generation that goes on with a large proportion of the data that we see.

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117702966#Comment_117702966

We don't actually see those anomaly maps pre-satellite era and the current maps use the 1981 - 2010 baseline because this is the earliest period that we have reliable satellite data for

If you're talking about graphs of SST anomalies, these are not gridded because we do not have the data for those, but averaged over larger bodies of water and have much higher error bars the farther back in time we go

eg here

Much wider uncertainty before the satellite era

We have historical datasets like the ERSST

The historical SST datasets are usually reported and analysed separately to the more modern SST datasets

Where research talks about long term SST anomalies, the vast bulk of the work in that study, is combining the different datasets and the methodology they use to combine them is a big factor in whether that research gets accepted for publication, and the error bars are always higher when ERSST data is involved.

Thelonious Monk

From what I can gather most on boards don't believe in man made climate change but it's pretty terrifying if these scientists turn out to be correct.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/05/climate-crisis-scientists-spot-warning-signs-of-gulf-stream-collapse

Pa ElGrande

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117711544#Comment_117711544

No need to sweat. It's just PIK and the Guardian using their usual inconclusive, vague language with built in escape hatches to make it look like being bound without actually being bound otherwise known to us as weasel words such as almost, may, complexity, uncertainty, impossible, not known, tipping points, worrying, could be, possible and might. In other word they don't know and can't predict, but they believe!

Researchers are projecting Earth may be near a tipping point where invisible pink unicorns may be ready to kill us all but we cannot measure them because of observational limitations, or uncertainties that are not yet confidently modelled.

Banana Republic 1

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117711883#Comment_117711883

one can see the invisible man or even “invisible pink unicorns” with a pair of infrared goggles so your bogus argument is bogus.

One question I do have is, if these pink unicorns are invisible to humans, ie beyond or visible spectrum, how do you know there pink?

Tyrone212

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117711544#Comment_117711544

This thread has the same 5 or 6 posters, the normal weather page has a lot more frequent posters so its hard to tell what their opinion is. I've seem some mention it in passing occasionally but it never turns in to a discussion.

I think most avoid this thread as its just too confrontational and childish at times so don't think its worth posting whatever their opinion.

magicbastarder

seems as good a place as any to post this...

Pa ElGrande

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117711911#Comment_117711911

Borrowing from Mr. Boers conclusion "To understand this in-depth we need to find ways to improve the representation of the Unicorn and spectrum analysis in comprehensive Earth system models and to better constrain their projections." 🤑

Thelonious Monk

https://mobile.twitter.com/ellamcsweeney/status/1423748767270965253

John does a good job here, surprised RTE let him on the air but fair play to him. The way we live needs to change drastically.

Pa ElGrande

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117717893#Comment_117717893

You are kidding me? John Gibbons is the go to person in Irish media when ever they want sensationalist copy for climate change. It was an appearance by him on Pat Kennys RTE radio show over decade ago that started me looking into this whole carry on. I'll transcribe the interview above over the weekend and publish it for the record so people get to know his hyperbole and how he shoots himself in the foot during this interview.

Thelonious Monk

You really don't need to do that Pa.

Banana Republic 1

https://theconversation.com/5-things-to-watch-for-in-the-latest-ipcc-report-on-climate-science-165430

Monday

Thelonious Monk

I'm sure it will be nothing but good news and positivity. Gulp.

Pa ElGrande

For context PIK has been spouting this same AMOC weakening nonsense since at least 2012. Their problem is that a moored buoy array called RAPID was deployed across the entire North Atlantic at 26N latitude in 2004 precisely to measure this AMOC climate possibility. It has as yet detected NO weakening. The primary motivation behind this newswire release can be inferred from Niklas Boers comments, they are looking for money.

To understand this in-depth we need to find ways to improve the representation of the AMOC and polar ice sheets in comprehensive Earth system models and to better constrain their projections. I hope that the results presented here will help with that!”, Boers concludes.

There is no fear of the gulf stream being turned off. (See letter) You may get a change in the Beaufort gyre circulation every few decades that led to the a phenomena last seen in the 60s and 70s named the Great Salinity Anomaly.

Sir,

Your News story “Gulf Stream probed for early warnings of system failure” (Nature 427, 769; 2004) discusses what the climate in the south of England would be like “without the Gulf Stream”. Sadly, this phrase has been seen far too often, usually in newspapers concerned with the unlikely possibility of a new ice age in Britain triggered by the loss of the Gulf Stream.

European readers should be reassured that the Gulf Stream’s existence is a consequence of the large-scale wind system over the North Atlantic Ocean, and of the nature of fluid motion on a rotating planet. The only way to produce an ocean circulation without a Gulf Stream is either to turn off the wind system, or to stop the Earth’s rotation, or both.

Real questions exist about conceivable changes in the ocean circulation and its climate consequences. However, such discussions are not helped by hyperbole and alarmism. The occurrence of a climate state without the Gulf Stream any time soon — within tens of millions of years — has a probability of little more than zero.

Carl Wunsch

Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

Now onto the main entertainment. Media services in Ireland occasionally need airtime filler when recurring topics arise and they have rent a quote commentators on standby for these occasions. John Gibbons fills that role where it comes to climate change. In the latest instalment published below he delivers his well worn lines of doom and gloom which going by comments elsewhere seems to be an RTE meme these days.

Sarah McInerney: The climate scientists are warning of the collapse of the gulf stream which could mean catastrophic changes in Irelands weather. Research from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany found an almost complete loss of stability over the last century of what researchers call the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). I'm joined now by environmental journalist John Gibbons. You can tell me if I pronounce that right John to start with, but what exactly is the Gulf Stream? 

 

John Gibbons: Yes Indeed. I think that's pretty good, yeah. The Gulf Stream I guess is a part of a global circulation system, so the bit that we know about in Europe, basically it begins life if you like in the Caribbean region and it transfers vast amounts of warm salty water from the Caribbean to Northwest Europe, so it gives like an energy subsidy, a heat subsidy to North-Western Europe and the reason why we have, the climate that we have is because of the huge transfer of heat energy from the Gulf Stream that laps by. and, People who know say, South-West Kerry, the almost semi-tropical experience that you get down there, that's because you are literally lapping in Caribbean waters as they head continuing Northwards, and, it’s part of a global circulation system and that system as the researchers have said is beginning to lose what they said dynamic stability, the best way to think of this is, it's a bit like a bicycle . .As a bicycle depends on movement to stay stable as it slows down it begins to wobble and at a certain point it just tips over, and the danger here, the, the researchers are pointing out is that we are approaching a critical tipping threshold, with this particular system, the AMOC, and if that happens, basically, then we are looking at radical changes to our climate system certainly in the Northern hemisphere, but, it is really important to stress that this is part of a global overturning system that runs past Antarctica, It runs around India, so essentially the Worlds oceans are one continuous body of water. A single molecule of water will travel from one part of the world to the other over the space of say a 1000 years. So what happens if we get a breakdown of this system in the North Atlantic it will have implications all over the world, but here in Ireland, some of the implications we are looking at, is, the likelihood is we would have a climate more equivalent to what it's like in Newfoundland in Canada today. Newfoundland in on roundabout the same latitude as Ireland, but it's probably between 5 and 7 degrees cooler which means that Newfoundland is covered in snow or ice for 7 or 8 months of the year, so however counter intuitive it might be, imagine in a climate changed world and a world of global warming, what we could be looking at an era in North-Western Europe where temperatures drop dramatically and we know for example that this happened round about the end of the last ice-age, there was a huge up-welling of fresh water that burst into the North Atlantic, switched off the gulf stream and a cold period that lasted till about 1000 years. We know about this because we have the evidence from plant fossils and so on it was a dramatic climate shift, and early humans would have been affected by it. The big difference now of course is there is a lot of humans and the effects are dramatic.

 

SMI: And John, Do we know what the cause of it is?

 

JG: Absolutely, yeah. It is pretty clear the scientists, the smoking gun in all of this is greenhouse gas emissions, and to give you a sense of the scale of the change we are talking about here. Greenland ice sheet is currently described as being on the brink, now, in 2020 the Greenland sheet lost about 532 billion tons of ice, now that’s a ridiculously large figure, let me break it down by the minute, every minute in 2020, the Greenland ice sheet lost a million tons of ice, per minute, now Greenland contains enough ice if in ends up in the sea to raise global sea levels by between 6 and 7 meters, that of course means completely redrawing the map of Ireland and that means no more coastal settlements. So these are dramatic things, these are systems that have been in situation

and been stable for millennia, millions of years in fact and we're approaching a point now where scientists are saying if we don't dramatically and immediately reduce and then eliminate emissions of carbon, and that of course is both CO2 and also methane, these dangerous greenhouse gases. If we don't do this we are pushing the climate system into instability and for the AMOC to switch off basically all bets are off.

 

The climatic system that I just described there would mean, for example the end of Ireland as an outdoor agricultural country, our agricultural systems would be wiped out, we would not be able to grow grass for much of the year, so these are absolutely profound things to consider and I also think it's important to say that people who say we can't afford to take action on climate, they really have to ask themselves can we afford to let these large scale and irreversible changes occur and really when we are thinking about climate action in this country, in a wealthy country. We have really got to get serious about it and this is right across the board, because as I say, once this system is broken there is no fixing it again, it will stay broken in human terms indefinitely.

 

SMI: And you said this is happening faster than it was previously thought, but how far off are the implications of it?

 

JG: We don't know. This is like we are walking into a minefield we don't know where the mines are and now the best advice that scientists will give you when walking into a minefield is number 1: Stop, and number 2: backup and walk very carefully out the way you came. And what does that mean in climate terms, that means get emissions to zero, net zero quickly. Not 2050, Not 2040 but ASAP. This is global emergency! and I dunno' how many times we can say this, you know without sounding like we are ringing the alarm, this is a global emergency. If this system goes and fails well then basically all bets are off and one other thing I would say is, and this is more speculative and this isn't related to the current research, but a NASA research called James Hansen . . . He published some very disturbing research in relation to the North Atlantic over turning system. a number of years ago and what he pointed out is that not only does it transfer a lot of heat from the tropics to the mid to high latitudes, it also, it, it, balances if you like the temperature, reduces the temperature gradient, now in a world where that heat is not being transferred from the tropics to the high latitudes you get a dramatic increase in what’s called the temperature gradient, what that does is, it fuels super-storms. These are storms larger than have ever been experienced by humans at least in the last 10,000 years. And, Hansen and his colleagues warned that these are storms capable of flattening cities and he said if we let this thing run, he said, all hell will break lose in the North Atlantic that is what's at stake and that's why we really need to get serious about this.

 

SMI: So, just to be clear can it stopped or reversed and what are the those things that need to be done?

 

JG: Well, OK. The honest answer is we don't know. {pause} If I were to refine that I would say that we know for certain and I'll put it this way. Every, It was described by one of the researchers, he said the only thing we can do is to keep emissions as low as possible. He said the risk increases with every gram of CO2 and methane that we put into the atmosphere. Now, on current trajectory we are going to dump another 40 thousand million tons of CO2 into the Earths atmosphere, now bear in mind that atmosphere is only about the distance of, I dunno, let’s say Dublin to Kildare, it's incredibly shallow. It look large but the global atmosphere is only about 20 kilometres deep. We are filling that with heat trapping gasses and dramatically changing the conditions for life on Earth. And Ireland, I'll say we're one of the worlds highest emitters, the third highest emitter per capita in Europe, so just before anyone says we are too small, we're too this, we're too that, we're all in this together. We all act together or we all sink together.

 

SMI: And you mentioned the impact it could have in Ireland with a similar climate to Newfoundland, but what about other parts of the world?

 

JG: Well, this we don't know. We know for example that the global AMOC, the thermohaline system, this controls for example the monsoon season and the monsoon season, hundreds of millions of people depend on a reliable monsoon for their crops and their survival. So, we know that if this system shuts down, all bets are off as to what happens to the monsoon and that means hundreds of millions of peoples lives are on the line as well and that’s in one case, we also know we are looking at dramatic sea level rise, we are looking at other impacts and I think it's very important to say that one of the difficulties with this is when you tip over these tipping points you suddenly discover, it's like tipping over dominoes it isn't just one thing, it's one thing, begets another thing, begets another thing and very quickly you're in a situation that has spiralled out of control, at the moment we have a certain amount of human agency, we have choices to make but for certain the humans alive today are the only humans who will ever have choices about the future of the global climate system and at the moment we are fudging those choices and we are condemning our children and our grandchildren and every human being in the future, condemning them to unimaginable future because we're failing to act even though the science is crystal clear.

 

SMI: So finally and briefly John If I can ask you, am, As climate warnings go where does this rank in terms of seriousness?

 

JG: Laughs {ah ha, huh huh}. On a scale of 1 to 10, yeah, it's right up there, it really is. It's an 8, it's a 9 if you like. Now of course we have the, am, IPCC's AR6 to be published on Monday so you are going to find that . . .

 

SMI: {interrupts} That's the Intergovernmental panel on climate change report. Is that right?

 

JG: That is correct. yeah. These are the blockbuster reports . . .

 

SMI: {interrupts} And what's expected in that?

 

JG: Oh, it's, ah, We expect bad news, ah, The IPCC is an interesting intergovernmental mixture of scientists, policymakers and politicians. As a result it's a very conservative group and they've kind of hedged their bets over the years, but essentially they are taking the gloves off and saying, guys we are really running out of time here on this and we can't keep, we can't keep delaying decisive action and if we do well then we are out of options.

 

SMI: Ok John Gibbons environmental journalist. Thank you for that. We will take a quick break

Gaoth Laidir

I've just realised something after reading all of that hyperbole above: John Gibbons is Akrasia!

Seriously, though, his answer to every question was "We don't know", yet it was still enough to give it an 8 or 9 out of 10. Absolutely laughable performance.

Banana Republic 1

Meanwhile in Greece.

https://www.channel4.com/news/thousands-forced-to-evacuate-as-greece-battles-fifth-day-of-wildfires

Gaoth Laidir

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117721461#Comment_117721461

Yep, we're in peak fire season in the Med. Another offshoot of the large Sardinian fire to the south of me started up again yesterday but was brought under control. And so it will continue, as it always has, long before the dawn of social media and online newspapers and hyperbole TV channels.

These same outlets are probably raging that Greece didn't break its European heat record this week. They probably had the articles written and ready to go. I guess the record will continue on into its 42nd year now.