It’s official: 2014 was the hottest year in recorded history

Say I boil 1/5 of the water in a bowl, and freeze the remaining 80%, if I average the temperature by volume of this divided water (steam and ice) I will see very little temperature change. But we will have had drastic changes in temperatures. Certainly averaging out big changes especially those that are out of phase as the younger dryas make the changes seem smaller, but back to my water example imagine if we had fish in that water. We would have cooked some and frozen others depending on where they were in the bowl. If we are talking catastrophic change reginional change matters a great deal. The younger drias coincided with a mass extinction event (although more minor than the big 5) If all the heat gained was say put in the middle of australia where population is low, it would not be nearly as scary as the younger drias tipping point.

I figured we would not get more "neutral" than NOAA that at least attempts to keep the politics out of paleo reconstructions. As stated above it is regional changes that cause catastrophic events not globally blurred ones. The facts are that nature can indeed have rapid temperature changes. Some predict man will cause similar changes, but we really don't know. Will there be a tipping point like there was in the younger dryas? Will man push us to the tipping point? I don't know but it would be wised to do more productive to A) Find out scientifically (launch satellites, which the us has just done), and invest in technologies that may mitigate the changes and slow ghg accumulation. The world seems to be underinvesting here.

I don't think the younger dryas reconstruction should give anyone comfort. That along with higher sea levels in the last 2 interglacial point to the strong possibility that even if man stopped using any fossil fuel today, but continued agriculture and cities, sea levels would rise and the tipping point may have been hit.

It should though make you look at any single year as a big so what, it is a large group of years that make the trends, and natural variation likely had a lot to do with how hot 1998 was (at least according to the IPCC). I am optimistic that this 8 degree F prediction in the next century is way off, as most of the models have been. I am less optimistic that man invests in technology to mitigate and lessen changes.

 

Much more worrisome than the temperature per se, is the rapidity of change.

 

Sure, 1998 was a little hotter than usual because the big El Niño that year drew warmer ocean water to the surface but that just enhanced the underlying upward temperature trend that was man-made via fossil fuel burning. That's why the climate change deniers love to use it as a comparison point for later year warming trend graphs.

There is no similar El Niño event responsible for pushing up this year's temperatures.

I'm certainly not denying the severity of the climate changes, rapidity of change, and the extinctions that followed during the younger dryas. I'm just saying the present rapidity of onset is nearly as sudden as far as the evolutionary adaptability of many species when compared to the usual and long-term rate of natural climate change.

And, the global impact of our present course of climate change is looking far more severe.

 

The saga continues...

 

Better stick with 'anthropogenic'. Androgenic refers to boy-chemicals.

Little Ice Age also included about 5 or 6 missed sunspot cycles.

 

lol. Wow, good thing it was a misspelling, I thought it was re-branded and I missed it.

 

It's strange. New York area is bracing for a blizzard. My wife and I went for a walk today, sunny and 14C. A caretaker at a church was running the mower. Yeah, in a couple of weeks it could all come crashing down, but nice today.

 

Records highs around Seattle three days running. Great bicycling, rotten skiing.

 

Cyclo, you may enjoy reading

Dark ages and dark areas: global deforestation in the deep past
Michael Williams
Journal of Historical Geography, 26, 1 (2000) 28-46
doi:10.1006/jhge.1999.0189

There is less forested area than 'way back when', but that remaining is also much 'younger'. It is a testament to the resilience of biological carbon cycling that atmospheric CO2 did not increase earlier than it actually has. Time scales. Dump CO2 to the atmosphere over centuries, and it gets absorbed. Dump over decades (like now) and half gets absorbed. Seems clear to me that we have hit the 'speed limit'.

 

Above corrected as tochatihu sugested and cyclopathic agreed.

Nice I mean we have theories but not much agreement of causes, certainly not enough to predict these will happen again.
What caused the Little Ice Age? | Earth | EarthSky

Little Ice Age was global: Implications for current global warming -- ScienceDaily
What caused the Little Ice Age? - Bad Astronomy : Bad Astronomy

We have the paleo reconstructions that say the little ice age was only europe, which have been discredited. These were the ones that claimed yeah it must have been man and agriculture and disease. Who knows but anthropogenic factors could have contributed even though the reconstructions were garbage.

Then we have reconstructions that say the cold in the southern hemisphere was out of phase with the northern, and others that say they were in phase. IMHO this is key to understanding as it is hard to know what happened if you have a poor model in the past.

We know 4 volcanos erupted, we know there were less sunspots, and we know it got colder. But what caused it. Why did we have 4 major eruptions, was it predictable, or random. Most eruptions have short lived changes to weather, why did these change climate for centuries? Do fewer sunspots mean less solar radiation? Why would this cool the earth if they don't. Do they change other things in climate? If it was sunspots can we predict other periods of low sunspots? What effect did changing ocean currents and the jet stream cause, and what caused them to change. What about cloud cover did this contribute, and help explain changes in rainfall?

We do also have a possible human/carbon feedback loop. It got cold and and perhaps dark with volcanic emissions-> People and animals died ->co2 and land use by people and animals changed.

Without answering these questions it is difficult to really model the recent (500 year) past, which makes it hard for climate models to be predictive. Still satellites and a cooperative sun should help us solve sunspot questions, and hopefully better palo reconstructions can help answer the other questions. IMHO it will take another decade of research for good answers.

 

Assuming a volcano has enough vertical push to get sulfur dioxide to the stratosphere, the duration of its cooling effect is related to the availability of hydroxyl radicals. A really big volcano has the longer effect because the hydroxyl radical 'system' gets overwhelmed.

Methane is a better infrared absorber than CO2. But its lifetime (before conversion to plain old CO2) is also controlled by the availability of hydroxyl radicals.

Both of those processes are reasonably well understood. The following is purely my speculation. As it is the same hydroxyl radicals involved in both processes, methane may have a different dynamic during times of intense volcanism. Volcanic 'winters' may have a different dynamic during times when methane reaches unusual levels (high or low, from any source).

There are reasons why such a linkage would be difficult to explore. First, the central figure, hydroxyl radicals, are extremely difficult to measure. Second, transfers between troposphere and stratosphere are highly variable in time and space, and beyond that, we basically know squat about them.

I don't know what all that amounts to, beyond saying that the overall system is full of non linearities and context-specific responses. I am most glad to not be in the occupation of trying to model such a climate system.

Those who are (as summarized by IPCC) I suppose that AustinGreen would accuse of some degree of hubris. Perhaps that's fair. But we recently took a look at a much more simplified climate model, Monckton et al., purported to blow those other models out of the water. Now you're talking hubris raised to a very high exponent.

 

It seems current volcantic models are short lived, what was unique in the 2012 paper was the theory that these short lived changes set about a chain reaction to become a global cooling (whether it was synchronous or asynchronus is still debated with some paleo reconstructions going one way while others go a different way) that unfolded over hundreds of years.

Well some professions require a big ego, it just is sad many of those in this field don't do all that well. You read IPCC 3, and it turns IPCC 2 on its head when it comes to the LIA, then IPCC 4 came out with a lot of studies that said, oops maybe 2 was better than we thought and IPCC 3 was out of line. Hopefully for IPCC 6 the reconstructions will be accurate enough to test the theories. One problem with climate science is it takes a very long time to do any experiments, so we have to try to find past events that are interesting and try to understand what happened, with very incomplete data.

 

Some sources of methane are poorly quantified. Beyond those Cyclo mentioned, the fossil-fuel industry (including fraking and pipeline transport), wetlands and freshwater impoundments, termites and ruminant animals.

For sinks, well-aerated soils host bacteria that consume methane, and the hydroxyl radical in the atmosphere does what it does. Both are also poorly quantified. Overall the situation would be called 'a tip' in England. It is, in the sense that our knowledge to predict methane fluxes next year (etc.) is inadequate.

The good news (best available news) is that methane concentrations are more or less trivial to measure, to accuracy much better than parts per billion. This is because it is such a strong absorber of particular infrared wavelengths, that anyone (with appropriate technology) can measure it. Even an orbiting 'look down' satellite can measure it, and those gadgets work in very difficult environments.

Methane is much easier to measure (with high accuracy) than water vapor in the atmosphere, even though the latter is much more concentrated. Physics rules chemistry. Gotta say it.

Time to make this a little more fun, though. We are PriusChat, not some egghead journal. Human flatulence is dominated by hydrogen, not methane gas (unless you eat a very unusual diet). H2 is not much of an IR absorber, so let 'er rip.

Or, don't. The 'held-in' gas will simply dissolve in your blood and you'll later exhale it. Chemical cycles are not affected by those personal decisions.

 

(As posted in the political Forum)
The big lie is that 2014 is the hottest year ever.The raw thermometer data has been adjusted mainly to give this spurious headline.Even after using fake data,they still can only get the temp 0.02 degrees above the previous high.
The big lie is in the margin of error which is not disclosed by Pinocchio Schmidt.

Gavin Schmidt gives data with a 38% confidence level. (0.02 degrees warmer with a
0.1 degree margin of error.)
Only in climate science do you declare something as fact with the same confidence level as there is that Santa Clause exists.
This is pure con man territory and Icarus,it cannot be "debunked"

 

I agree with mojo that a trivial new annual high is not important. I disagree that the best way to talk about it is by invoking Disney cartoon characters. Had 2014 been something less, perhaps mojo would have advised us again about the upcoming ice age.

Instead, what we have here, consistently, is years when air T has not gone down since 1998 big El Nino. This is new territory at least during the instrumental T record. Something is afoot. One is obliged to wonder what that is.

Hypothetically, all independent groups analyzing global air T could be conspiring to cook the books. All of the independent, concordant evidence from biological patterns, ice melt and sea-level rise argues against that hypothesis. Including new equatorial-lake sediments and ocean heat-flux studies I have not troubled you with. Y'all can keep up with this stuff just as well as I can.