Diary Of The Last Age

This research is important because it was led be a physicist who was originally a global warming denier but whose opinion was changed by his own analysis of the data.  It's also important because the data he analyzed was a far more complete survey of earth based instruments than what created the most strenuous global warming denier, Anthony Watts, who began his denial by making claims that climate scientists were misled by the land based measurement devices.  The new research is an absolutely thorough analysis of land based measurements. For its latest findings, the team analyzed “19 million monthly-average temperature observations from 46,000 weather stations” on land since 1850, including 205,000 monthly averages in 2018 alone. They combined that with ocean-based data, some “374 million measurements collected by ships and buoys, including 19 million observations obtained in 2018.” The lead researcher was Richard Muller. Berkeley Earth’s founder and scientific d...

I've posted before about the Pacific Northwest as being where you want to be while the planet is threatened by global warming.  I'm getting support from the Chief Strategist, TFIE Strategy Inc., an editor of The Future is Electric: The Future is Electric is the house journal of TFIE Strategy Inc, a firm which assists global clients to future proof themselves in our rapidly changing world of business and technical innovation, and geopolitical and climate disruption. The article linked to provides a good summary of what we might expect much of which has been described in my posts to this blog.  Then he turns to assert where the best places to be are.  He names three locations on the planet, Chile, Poland, and, and...the Pacific Northwest   as I've believed all along. Pacific Northwest — Northern coastal California, Oregon, Washington State and British Columbia. These places will typically see better weather than they see now: warmer in the summer a...

I've written about the polar vortex before .  It's balmy here in the Pacific Northwest, the warmest winter I can recall, but this year is another year for cold winter storms in the Northeast.  They've been hit hard this year so far, but it's not going to stop. Brace for the Polar Vortex: It May Be Visiting More Often Find your long johns, break out the thick socks and raid the supermarket. After a month of relatively mild winter weather, the Midwest and the East Coast are bracing for what is becoming a seasonal rite of passage: the polar vortex. It looks interestingly like the Arctic Circle weather just dumped itself over the East Coast of the U.S. It’s this escaping polar air that is dropping temperatures in the Midwest and the East — there’s a lag time between the atmospheric event and when we experience the effects. The broken vortex is also sending icy temperatures to much of Europe in what some call the “Beast From the East.” [....] While climate...

I went to a presentation at the University of Washington by Professor Raftery of the Statistics and Sociology Departments of a recent paper of his and colleagues (Alec Zimmer, Dargan M.W. Frierson, Richard Startz, and Peiran Liu) in the Journal Nature ( Nature Climate Change   volume  7 ,  pages 637–641 ( 2017 )) , entitled Less than 2 °C warming by 2100 unlikely   (link behind a paywall) . Their paper is a response to a need to provide a statistical forecast for global temperatures.  What the IPCC has previously provided are "scenarios" based on "expert" thinking.  Raftery has previously developed statistical methods for estimating world-wide migration patterns that has been adopted by the United Nations.  At the presentation he presented a statistical model for forecasting global temperatures. Their result is a 90% interval forecast of 2 to 4.9 degrees Centigrade with a median of 3.2 degrees. Their backtesting strongly supported the median...

Ocean temperatures actually matter more than atmospheric temperatures. Last year was very likely the hottest year on record, according to the authors of a new study in the journal Science.  The study examined “multiple lines of evidence from four independent groups” measuring ocean heat and concluded “ocean warming is accelerating.” Researchers found the rate of warming for the upper 2,000 meters of ocean has increased by more than 50 percent since 1991. As a result, “2018 is shaping up to be the hottest for the oceans as a whole, and therefore for the Earth,” a press release accompanying the study explains.  [....] “While there still is time to do something to slow this process down, it is too late to stop serious global warming,” study co-author John Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, told ThinkProgress, Abraham warned that global warming “is happening faster than we previously thought.” Ocean heat content ...