Americans love surprises, especially hurricanes

 From Mike Luckovich

Climate crisis: Average world incomes to fall by one fifth

Soft denialists keep on telling us that it will be too expensive to cut emissions.   The cost of not acting will be far greater.

From The Guardian

The climate crisis will mean that average incomes will fall by almost a fifth within the next 26 years compared with what they would have been if there was no such crisis, according to a study that predicts the costs of damage will be six times higher than the price of limiting global heating to 2C.

Rising temperatures, heavier rainfall and more frequent and intense extreme weather are projected to cause $38tn (£30tn) of destruction each year by mid-century, according to the research, which is the most comprehensive analysis of its type ever undertaken, and whose findings are published in the journal Nature.

The hefty toll – which is far higher than previous estimates – is already locked into the world economy over the coming decades as a result of the enormous emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere through the burning of gas, oil, coal and trees.

This will inflict crippling losses on almost every country, with a disproportionately severe impact on those least responsible for climate disruption, further worsening inequality.

The paper says the permanent average loss of income worldwide will be 19% by 2049, in comparison to a baseline without the impacts of climate breakdown. In the United States and Europe the reduction will be about 11%, while in Africa and south Asia it will be 22%, with some individual countries much higher than this.

“It’s devastating,” said Leonie Wenz, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the authors of the study. “I am used to my work not having a nice societal outcome, but I was surprised by how big the damages were. The inequality dimension was really shocking.”

The study also looked at the second half of this century, where human actions now can still make a big difference. If business as usual continues, the authors projected average income losses of more than 60% by 2100. But if emissions fall to net zero by mid century, income declines will stabilise by mid century at about 20%.

The economic hit predicted by the paper is more than twice as high as any previous analysis.

Behind that difference is a more sophisticated methodology. While most previous studies considered only damages related to rising temperatures at a national level, the new paper also incorporated rainfall and extreme weather impacts using 40 years of data from 1,600 subnational regions. This is important because weather is a local rather than national phenomenon. The study also considered how impacts tend to persist over months and years, rather than being only a short-term hit.

The new paper says countries such as Germany (-11%), France (-13%), the US (-11%) and UK (-7%) will lose out even by mid century. Worst affected will be countries in already hot regions including Botswana (-25%), Mali (-25%), Iraq (-30%), Qatar (-31%), Pakistan (-26%) and Brazil (-21%).

Maximilian Kotz, an author of the study, said: “Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with south Asia and Africa being most strongly affected. These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labour productivity or infrastructure.”

Although the newly painted scenario is far worse than anything that came before, the authors acknowledge it is still conservative and incomplete. There are many major climate impacts that have not yet been incorporated into the analysis, including heatwaves, sea level rise, tropical cyclones, tipping points, and damage to natural ecosystems and human health. The authors said these factors would be added to future models.

“We are providing a more comprehensive picture but this is not the final picture,” Wenz said. “It is likely a lower bound.”

The authors said the study showed the need for stronger adaptation strategies, particularly in poorer, worst-affected countries, to cope with the changes up to 2050 that are already locked into the climate system.

It also found that reducing emissions was far cheaper than doing nothing and accepting more severe impacts. By 2050, it calculated mitigation costs – for example, from phasing out fossils and replacing them with renewable energy – to be $6tn dollars, which is less than a sixth of the median damage costs for that year of $38tn.

Anders Levermann, the head of complexity science at the Potsdam Institute, said: “It is on us to decide: structural change towards a renewable energy system is needed for our security and will save us money. Staying on the path we are currently on will lead to catastrophic consequences. The temperature of the planet can only be stabilised if we stop burning oil, gas and coal.”

Source: NOAA
Temperatures continue to rise inexorably

 

Global temperatures rising again

Despite three years of La Niña, global temperatures have started rising again.  This year, the world will experience an El Niño, and temperatures will rise as they always do during El Niños.  The chart shows the temperature anomaly relative to the 1901-2000 average.    The years from 1850 to 1900 were on average something like 0.2 degrees cooler, so a 1.5 degrees increase above pre-industrialisation temperatures would be reached when the red bars reach 1.3 degrees C on the chart.   Note the LOESS smoothing and its steady and inexorable rise.

The last El Niño peak was in 2016, with the anomaly reaching 1.14 degrees C.   Temperatures are rising by roughly 0.2 degrees C per decade, so a temporary El Niño peak of 1.3 degrees C above the 1901-2000 average in 2024 is plausible.   (The rise between the 1998 and 2016 El Niños was 0.44 degrees C).  And that would mean we would have (temporarily) breached the 1.5 degree guardrail for the first time in recorded history.

Temperatures won't stop rising until CO2 emissions fall to zero or close to that, though we might get a temporary respite if methane emissions are slashed.  However, both CO2 and CH4 emissions continue to rise.

Too little is being done to prevent catastrophe.

Source: NOAA

Earth on track to exceed 1.5 degrees within 10 years

From The Guardian

The world is on the brink of breaching a critical climate threshold, according to a new study published on Monday, signifying time is running exceedingly short to spare the world the most catastrophic effects of global heating.

Using artificial intelligence to predict warming timelines, researchers at Stanford University and Colorado State University found that 1.5C of warming over industrial levels will probably be crossed in the next decade. The study also shows the Earth is on track to exceed 2C warming,which international scientists identified as a tipping point, with a 50% chance the grave benchmark would be met by mid-century.

“We have very clear evidence of the impact on different ecosystems from the 1C of global warming that’s already happened,” said Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, who co-authored the study with atmospheric scientist Elizabeth Barnes. “This new study, using a new method, adds to the evidence that we certainly will face continuing changes in climate that intensify the impacts we are already feeling.”

Utilizing a neural network, or a type of AI that recognizes relationships in vast sets of data, the scientists trained the system to analyze a wide array of global climate model simulations and then asked it to determine timelines for given temperature thresholds.

The model found a nearly 70% chance that the two-degree threshold would be crossed between 2044 and 2065, even if emissions rapidly decline. To check the AI’s prediction prowess, they also entered historical measurements and asked the system to evaluate current levels of heating already noted. Using data from 1980 to 2021, the AI passed the test, correctly homing in on both the 1.1C warming reached by 2022 and the patterns and pace observed in recent decades.

The two temperature benchmarks, outlined as crisis points by the United Nations Paris agreement, produce vastly different outcomes across the world. The landmark pact, signed by nearly 200 countries, pledged to keep heating well below two degrees and recognized that aiming for 1.5C “would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change”.

Half a degree of heating may not seem like a lot, but the increased impacts are exponential, intensifying a broad scale of consequences for ecosystems around the world, and the people, plants and animals that depend on them. Just a fraction of a degree of warming would increase the number of summers the Arctic would be ice-free tenfold, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a global consortium of scientists founded to assess climate change science for the UN. The difference between 1.5C and 2C also results in twice the amount of lost habitat for plants and three times the amount for insects.

The change will also fuel a dangerous rise in disasters. A warmer world will deliver droughts and deluges and produce more firestorms and floods. Scorching heatwaves will become more severe and more common, occurring 5.6 times more often at the 2C benchmark, according to the IPCC, with roughly 1bn people facing a greater potential of fatal fusions of humidity and heat. Communities around the world will have to come to grips with more weather whiplash that flips furiously between extremes.

For many developing countries – including small island nations on the frontlines of the climate crisis – the difference between the two is existential. Some regions warm faster than others and the effects from global heating won’t unfold equally. The highest toll is already being felt by those who are more vulnerable and less affluent and the devastating divisions are only expected to sharpen.

Climate scientists have long been warning of the near-inevitability of crossing 1.5C, but by offering a new way of predicting key windows, this study has made an even more urgent case for curbing emissions and adapting to the effects that are already beginning to unfold.

“Our AI model is quite convinced that there has already been enough warming that 2C is likely to be exceeded if reaching net-zero emissions takes another half-century,” said Diffenbaugh. “Net-zero pledges are often framed around achieving the Paris Agreement 1.5C goal,” he added. “Our results suggest that those ambitious pledges might be needed to avoid 2C.”

The findings shouldn’t be seen as an indication that the world has failed to meet the moment, Diffenbaugh emphasized. Instead, he hopes the work serves to motivate rather than dismay. There’s still time to stave off an even higher escalation in the effects and prepare for the ones already brewing – but not much.

“Managing these risks effectively will require both greenhouse gas mitigation and adaptation,” he said. “We are not adapted to the global warming that’s already happened and we certainly are not adapted to what is certain to be more global warming in the future.”

And, while progress is being made on shifting toward a more sustainable future, there’s a long way to go. “Stabilizing the climate system will require reaching net zero, he said. “There are a lot of emissions globally – and it’s a big ship to turn around.”

Models can be wrong, though the climate models from even 30 years ago have been surprisingly right.  A "neural network" is just a much more sophisticated model, where the meta program chooses the model after it's "learned" what the relationships are.   All models, however created, are also entirely dependent on their inputs, and this report doesn't give the AI's assumptions of emissions declines.  So one could dismiss this warning.   I myself am not convinced that the decadal rise in temperatures will exceed 0.2 degrees, and if we halve emissions by 2040, which is still possible, even probable, temperatures will rise by another 0.3 degrees, not 0.5.   But I am not a climate scientist.  It's possible that the fall in particulate (SO2) emissions as we move away from coal will increase the decade-by-decade rise to 0.3 degrees C.   I don't know what the model has assumed.

What I do know is that pumping CO2 into our atmosphere is an experiment, and we do not know what impact it will have, on the only planet we have to live on, so that the sooner we move to zero emissions, the better.

Source: NOAA

 

2023 likely to be hotter than 2022

2022 was a La Niña year, when global temperatures are temporarily reduced as part of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).  Most meteorologists are forecasting that 2023 will not be another La Niña year, but at this stage, it doesn't look like it will be an El Niño year, when temperatures reach new records.  (See the 1998 and 2016 El Niño years in NOAA's chart below)  So, prolly, higher temperatures on average, but not extreme.

The trend over the last 50 years is a rise of 0.18 degrees C per decade.  The rise in temperatures is proportional not to the rise in emissions, but to the level of emissions.  Emissions are levelling off (sort of), thanks to Covid, recessions, and the inexorable rollout of renewables. But to reduce the decadal increase in global temperatures to, say, 0.1 degrees, we will need to halve emissions.  And then, to get close to a zero decadal rise, we will need to halve them again.  It would be nice if we halved them over the next decade and halved them again in the 2040s.  But we prolly won't, despite some partial good news.

Source: NOAA

A short list of climate actions which will work

 From an (old) article in CleanTechnica 

Electrify everything

Convert all energy services to work directly from electricity instead of fossil fuels. Transportation, industry, and agriculture. All of it. All gas appliances must go. All road transport must be electric. Most trains and a lot of planes must shift to electric. Electricity creating biofuels or hydrogen for the subset of transportation that can’t be electrified. All heat from electricity. The US throws away two thirds of all primary energy, mostly in the form of waste heat from fossil fuels used in inherently inefficient combustion processes. We only have to replace a third of the actual primary energy we use today to maintain our lifestyle and economy.

Overbuild renewable generation

All other forms of generation with the exception of nuclear were overbuilt, so we’ll do the same with wind and solar, and they are really cheap, so that is not that expensive. Also a bit of geothermal and some biomass. After all, about $3 trillion would provide all primary energy for everything the US does today.

Build continent-scale electrical grids and markets

And improve existing ones. HVDC became much more viable with high-speed hybrid circuit breakers in 2011, and is an essential technology for long-distance, low-loss electrical transmission. It can replace some AC transmission and be buried along existing right-of-ways.

Build a fair amount of hydro storage

And some other storage too. While storage of electricity is an overstated concern given overbuilt renewables and continent-scale grids, some is still required. Pumped hydro resource potential is far greater than the need, is efficient, and uses very stable, known technologies. Shifting existing hydro-electric dams to be passive, on-demand storage as opposed to baseload is also key. Fast response grid storage can be provided by existing lithium-ion technologies, as Tesla has proven in California and Australia. By 2050, we’ll have roughy 20 TWh of batteries on wheels in US cars alone, available both for demand management to reduce peak demand, soak up excess generation, and to provide vehicle-to-grid electricity as needed.

Plant a lot of trees

We have cut down about 50% of the six trillion trees that used to grow on earth. Planting a trillion trees would buy us a lot of time as they sucked about a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere per tree over 40 years.

Change agricultural practices

High-tillage agriculture is a process that keeps releasing carbon captured by the soil back into the atmosphere. Switching to low-tillage farming would buy us a lot of time as the CO2 captured by farmland would stay in the soil a lot longer, and some of it would be permanently sequestered.

Fix concrete

8% of global CO2 emissions come from making Portland cement. It’s absolutely critical to urban densification and industry, so we won’t stop making it. But it’s a huge source of CO2, about half from the energy and half from CO2 that bakes off limestone as it is turned into quicklime. Electrifying that energy flow helps a lot, but capturing that CO2 is one of the few places where mechanical carbon capture makes sense.

Price carbon aggressively

The simplest way to get a lot of people and industries to shift away from emitting lots of CO2 is to make it expensive. That’s what carbon taxes do.

Shut down coal and gas generation aggressively

Getting rid of coal is already happening, but it’s by far the biggest single source of CO2 emissions. Aggressive actions to eliminate burning coal are needed. For gas, the question is how few gas plants can we build, how many of them can we run on biologically sourced methane and how fast can we shut them down.

Stop financing and subsidies for fossil fuel

Exploration, extraction, and use, just cut it out. The US alone spends tens of billions of dollars annually on subsidies of various kinds for the fossil fuel industry, and hasn’t done a thing about it since committing to eliminate them in 2009. The G7 and G20 have committed to eliminating subsidies, but progress has been very slow. The World Bank continues to finance coal, oil, and gas projects, despite commitments to end them.

Source: NOAA

 

Case over. 99.9% consensus on climate change

 From The Guardian

The scientific consensus that humans are altering the climate has passed 99.9%, according to research that strengthens the case for global action at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow.

The degree of scientific certainty about the impact of greenhouse gases is now similar to the level of agreement on evolution and plate tectonics, the authors say, based on a survey of nearly 90,000 climate-related studies. This means there is practically no doubt among experts that burning fossil fuels, such as oil, gas, coal, peat and trees, is heating the planet and causing more extreme weather.

A previous survey in 2013 showed 97% of studies published between 1991 and 2012 supported the idea that human activities are altering Earth’s climate.

This has been updated and expanded by the study by Cornell University that shows the tiny minority of sceptical voices has diminished to almost nothing as evidence mounts of the link between fossil-fuel burning and climate disruption.

The latest survey of peer-reviewed literature published from 2012 to November 2020 was conducted in two stages. First, the researchers examined a random sample of 3,000 studies, in which they found only found four papers that were sceptical that the climate crisis was caused by humans. Second, they searched the full database of 88,125 studies for keywords linked to climate scepticism such as “natural cycles” and “cosmic rays”, which yielded 28 papers, all published in minor journals.

The authors said their study, published on Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, showed scepticism among experts is now vanishingly small.

“It is really case closed. There is nobody of significance in the scientific community who doubts human-caused climate change,” said the lead author, Mark Lynas, a visiting fellow at Cornell University.

This echoed the view expressed in August by the world’s leading scientific body, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.”

The general public does not yet understand how certain experts are, nor is it reflected in political debate. This is especially true in the US, where fossil fuel companies have funded a disinformation campaign that falsely suggests the science is not yet settled, similar to the campaign by tobacco industries to cast doubt on the link between smoking and cancer.

The paper cites a 2016 study by the Pew Research Center that found only 27% of US adults believed that “almost all” scientists agreed the climate emergency was caused by human activity.

Many senior Republicans continue to cast doubt on the link between human activity and the climate crisis as market researchers have advised them to do since at least the presidency of George W Bush. According to the Center for American Progress, 30 US senators and 109 representatives “refuse to acknowledge the scientific evidence of human-caused climate change”. Several big media organisations and social networks also promote climate-sceptical views that have little or no basis in science.

Lynas said the study should encourage them to review their policies. “This puts the likes of Facebook and Twitter in a quandary. It is pretty similar to vaccine misinformation; they both lack a basis in science and they both have a destructive impact on society. Social networks that allow climate misinformation to spread need to look at their algorithms and policies or to be forced to do so by regulators.”

Source: NOAA

Oceans primed for peak hurricane season

 From NASA's Earth Observatory

Heading into the peak of hurricane season, the seas around North and Central America are primed to fuel storm development and intensification in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific. While sea surface temperatures are just one factor influencing the development of hurricanes, they are a fair predictor of the readiness of the ocean to sustain them.

The map above shows sea surface temperatures (SSTs) as measured on August 11, 2021, by a combination of satellite and ocean instruments. Meteorologists generally agree that SSTs above 27.8° Celsius (82° Fahrenheit) intensify and sustain hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons. Surface waters above that threshold are represented in red on the map. Note the finger of warm water—the Gulf Stream—running parallel to the U.S. East Coast.

The data for the map come from the Multiscale Ultrahigh Resolution sea surface temperature analysis, produced at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It is based on observations from several satellite instruments, including the NASA Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-EOS (AMSRE), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the NASA Aqua and Terra platforms, the U.S. Navy microwave WindSat radiometer, the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) on several NOAA satellites, and from in situ observations from NOAA.

The 2021 hurricane season started quickly. In May, Tropical Storm Andres became the earliest named storm—winds of 39 miles per hour or greater—on record in the Eastern Pacific. To date, eleven tropical storms have developed in the basin, including four hurricanes.

In the Atlantic, five named storms formed between May 19 and July 9, with Hurricane Elsa becoming the earliest fifth named storm on record. After Elsa, the Atlantic remained quiet until Tropical Storm Fred emerged on August 11. The storm lost some strength while passing near Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, but it is forecasted to regain tropical storm force before making landfall in Florida over the weekend. Forecasters warned citizens about the potential for heavy rainfall.

In its mid-season update on August 4, scientists from the NOAA Climate Prediction Center forecasted 15 to 21 named storms in the Atlantic in 2021, including 7 to 10 hurricanes, of which 3 to 5 could become major hurricanes. They noted: “Atlantic sea surface temperatures are not expected to be as warm as they were during the record-breaking 2020 season; however, reduced vertical wind shear and an enhanced west Africa monsoon all contribute to the current conditions that can increase seasonal hurricane activity.”

July 2021 hottest month ever

 From The Guardian

July was the world’s hottest month ever recorded, US government scientists have confirmed, a further indication of the unfolding climate crisis that is now affecting almost every part of the planet.

The global land and ocean surface temperature last month was one degree Celsius, 0.9C (1.6F), hotter than the 20th-century average of 15.8C (60.4F), making it the hottest month since modern record keeping began 142 years ago.

It has beaten the previous record set in July 2016 [an El Niño year], according to the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“In this case, first place is the worst place to be,” said Rick Spinrad, the administrator of NOAA. “July is typically the world’s warmest month of the year, but July 2021 outdid itself as the hottest July and month ever recorded. This new record adds to the disturbing and disruptive path that climate change has set for the globe.”

Last month’s record heat was driven by soaring temperatures across the world, with Asia experiencing its hottest July on record and Europe, which has been scorched by heatwaves and wildfires in countries including Greece and Italy, recording its second hottest July on record. Europe’s hottest ever recorded temperature was reportedly set in Sicily on Wednesday, where it reached a roasting 48.8C (119.8F).

Australia had its fourth warmest July on record, while North America, which has been confronted with extreme heat, drought and wildfire across much of its western half for much of the year, has its sixth-highest July temperature on record.

The NOAA climate report also found that Arctic sea ice extent was more than 18% below an average set between 1981 to 2010, the fourth smallest extent since satellite records began in 1979.

It is now “very likely” that 2021 will rank among the 10 hottest years ever recorded, NOAA stated.

Source: NOAA

Of course, this is just one month.  The 12 months to end-July have not been as hot as the 12 months to end-July in 2016, an El Niño year.  But the last 7 years have also been the hottest seven years ever.  No doubt denialists are already pointing out that temperatures have been in a falling trend since 2016, a new "pause".  I wish that we could be so lucky.  But you have to look at the last major El Niño, in 1998, and compare the peak then with the peak in 2016.  If global temps have stabilised for a decade or so, that will give us a chance to slash emissions and prevent further increases.  But if we have a new El Niño, we'll move to new annual highs.

Source: NOAA

CO2 exceeds 420 ppm for first time in recorded history

From Lucas Novak

For the first time in recorded history, the concentration of atmospheric CO2 was measured at more than 420 parts per million at the Mauna Loa Observatory, halfway to doubling pre-industrial levels.

 It's the highest it's been over 800,000 years.  (Source)

2020 temperature tied record

 From ClimateCrocks

Temperatures last year tied the modern record, climate scientists reported today. Overall, the planet was about 1.25°C warmer than in preindustrial times, according to jointly reported assessments from NASA, the U.K. Met Office, and other institutions.

The annual update of global surface temperatures—an average of readings from thousands of weather stations and ocean probes—shows 2020 essentially tied records set in 2016. But the years were nothing alike. Temperatures in 2016 were boosted by a strong El Niño, a weather pattern that warms the globe by blocking the rise of cold deep waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Last year, however, the Pacific entered La Niña, which has a cooling effect. That La Niña didn’t provide more relief is an unwelcome surprise, says Nerilie Abram, a climate scientist at Australian National University. “It makes me worried about how quickly the global warming trend is growing.”

The past 6 years are the six warmest on record, but the warming of the atmosphere is unsteady because of its chaotic nature. The ocean, which absorbs more than 90% of the heat from global warming, displays a steadier trend, and here, too, 2020 was a record year. The upper levels of the ocean contained 20 zettajoules (1021joules) more heat than in 2019, and the rise was double the typical annual increase, scientists reported yesterday in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. The subtropical Atlantic Ocean was particularly hot, fueling a record outbreak of hurricanes, says Lijing Cheng, a climate scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Institute of Atmospheric Physics who led the work.

This heat, monitored down to 2000 meters by a fleet of 4000 robotic probes, is spreading deeper into the ocean while also migrating toward the poles. An extreme heat wave struck the northern Pacific, killing marine life. For the first time, warm Atlantic waters were seen penetrating into the Arctic Ocean, melting sea ice from below and driving its extent nearly to a record low. The warming ocean and melting ice sheets are raising sea levels by 4.8 millimeters per year, and the rate is accelerating.

[Read more here]

12 months to July 2nd hottest ever

The average global temperature anomaly for August 2019 to July 2020, relative to the 20th century average,  was behind only the 2015/16 August-July average. There was an El Niño in 2015/16, and there isn't one now.  How long before we pass to new record highs even without an El Niño?

Source: NOAA

Extraordinary increase in high-tide flooding

Sunny day flooding Miami

From ClimateCrocks

The increase in high-tide flooding along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts since 2000 has been “extraordinary,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported, with the frequency of flooding in some cities growing fivefold during that time. That shift is damaging homes, imperiling the safety of drinking water, inundating roads and otherwise hurting coastal communities, the agency said.

“Conditions are changing, and not just in a few locations,” Nicole LeBoeuf, acting assistant administrator for NOAA’s National Ocean Service, which compiled the report, said during a call with reporters. “Damaging floods that decades ago happened only during a storm now happen more regularly, even without severe weather.”

NOAA defines high-tide flooding, also called sunny-day or nuisance flooding, as water rising more than half a meter, or about 20 inches, above the normal daily high-tide mark. The frequency of that flooding has increased because of rising sea levels, which were roughly 13 inches higher nationally last year than in 1920, the agency reported.

The number of days with high-tide flooding set or tied records in 19 places around the country last year, including Corpus Christi, Texas, which recorded 18 days of flooding; Galveston, Texas (18 days); Annapolis, Md. (18 days); and Charleston, S.C. (13 days). The place with the greatest number of recorded flood days was Eagle Point, Texas, in Galveston Bay; it reported high-tide flooding on 64 days, or almost one day out of five.

Those numbers represent huge jumps in a short period of time. In 2000, Corpus Christi had just three days of tidal flooding; Charleston had just two. The report notes that Charleston recorded just 13 days of high-tide flooding in the more than 50 years that measurements were first kept — the same number that occurred last year alone.

That trend is likely to accelerate, the agency said. By 2030, NOAA projected, the frequency of high-tide flooding could double or triple. By 2050, it said, that number could be five to 15 times as great, with the typical coastal community flooding between 25 and 75 days a year.

12 months to April second hottest ever

The 12 months to April was the second hottest May-April period since 1880, according to NOAA, just behind May-April 2016, which was an El Niño year (there is no El Niño now!)  The trend remains inexorably upwards, at about 0.2 degrees C per decade. 

Enough water to fill Lake Michigan

© Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson Churchill Manitoba

From The Hill:

Antarctica and Greenland lost thousands of gigatons of ice in the last 16 years, according to results from a new NASA mission published Thursday.

Scientists reported that the two land masses have lost 5,000 gigatons of ice in that time period, which is enough to fill Lake Michigan. A gigaton is equal to a billion metric tons. 

The data was measured by ICESat-2, a NASA satellite launched in 2018, following a mission from ICESat that gathered data from 2003 to 2009. Using information from both missions, researchers calculated the scale of melting.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said last week that Arctic ice reached its second-lowest extent on record in 2019. NOAA also said earlier this month that they are projecting 2020 will be the hottest year on record, surpassing a record set in 2016. 

The loss in Arctic  [Antarctic and Greenland] ice is expected to result in rising sea levels globally. 

"It will reach us eventually here, even though it's really far away and hard to think about," said Helen Fricker, a glaciologist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego told NPR. 

"How much ice we are going to lose, and how quickly we are going to lose it, is a really key thing that needs to be understood, so that we can plan."

Second hottest year ever

NOAA has calculated the global temperature anomaly (relative to 1901-2000) for December and so the year 2019.  The chart below shows the annual average as well as a LOESS trend estimation.

Four points:

1. 2019 was not an El Niño year (that was 2016).  Even so, it was the second hottest ever measured.
2. The average rise per decade since the beginning of 1970 has been roughly 0.2 degrees C.
3. Since 2010, as measured by the LOESS trend, that has increased to 0.3 degrees C per decade.  
4. If this trend continues (and it is consistent with ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions), we have less time to de-carbonise our economies than we thought.

Source: NOAA

2019 very likely second hottest year ever

NOAA has released their estimates for the global temperature anomaly for November 2019.  Unlike other analysts, NOAA doesn't calculate that November 2019 was hotter than November 2016, an El Niño year, but it was the second hottest since 1880.  We now have 11 months of data for world temperatures, and it looks virtually inevitable that the global average temperature for 2019 will be exceeded only by 2016.  Global temperatures continue to climb.  Global CO₂ and methane emissions continue to climb.  And at Madrid, a depraved clique of denialists (Australia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil,  Russia and the USA) continue to thwart concerted global action on climate change.

Because of random fluctuations, it helps to look at a 5 year moving average of the data.  This moving average suggests that global temperatures are now rising  by 0.3 degrees C per decade, up from the post 1970 average of 0.2 degrees.  In other words, if nothing is done, and ignoring any positive feedbacks (such as methane release in the Arctic and Antarctic), global temperatures will be 3.3 degrees C above the 1970 level by 2100.  This will be catastrophic.

Source: NOAA

2019 to be second hottest year ever

We now have data for the first 10 months of 2019.  The 12 months to October 2019 were the second hottest ever recorded in the record going back to the 1880s, so it is very likely 2019 will also be the second hottest ever recorded.  This is not an El Niño year like 2015 or 1998, which is normally when records tend to get broken.  Note how after 1998, it took 12 years for that record to be broken.  After the latest El Niño, temperatures have risen so fast we are already at risk of new record temperatures even without an El Niño.  Note that all the hottest years have been in the last five years.

This is what the 5 year moving average looks like.  The decadal rate of rise in temps has increased, from 0.2 C/decade to 0.3 C/decade.  Too early to say whether this is the new trend, but it would be perfectly consistent with the acceleration in the level of emissions.  At 0.3 C/decade global temperatures will have risen 3.5 degrees C from pre-industrial levels by 2100.  And that will have catastrophic consequences.

Source: NOAA

12 months to September second hottest ever

The 12 months to September 2019 have been the second warmest ever measured.  Note how after the last big El Niño year (1998) it took 12 years before the the average global temperature anomaly rose above the 1998 level.  In fact climate denialists shouted  no new warming from the rooftops, using the cherry-picked 1998 record year as the starting point.  After the 2016 El Niño, temperatures haven't paused, and in fact are already started rising again, to the extent that we are now looking at the second warmest average since reliable records start in 1880.

Source: NOAA

The chart below shows the five year moving average ending in September, which shows that the five years is the hottest ever recorded.  And of course, there are no signs of it levelling off, as indeed there weren't after 1998 either.  Note how the increase in temperatures has accelerated in recent years.  It's not getting better, people.  It's getting worse—over the last decade, the five year average has increased by nearly 0.3 degrees C, as opposed to the post-1975 trend of 0.2 degrees C. Assuming that this acceleration doesn't even worse, that means that global temperatures will have risen another 0.9 degrees by 2050.  Unless we act now.

Second hottest 12 months ever recorded

After the 1998 El Niño, it took 12 years before the average global temperature exceeded the 1998 level again, and temperatures dropped a lot in the 3 or 4 years after 1998.  After the 2016 El Niño, temperatures haven't dropped much.  In fact, the 12 months to August 2019 were the equal second hottest since 2016.  The equal second hottest since 1880. 

Source: NOAA