A sketch of the founding father of global warming science, Charles Keeling, in today’s NY Times. As a young man he was the first to figure out how to measure the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It was 310 parts per million (ppm). The year he died, 2005, it had risen to 380 ppm.
The temperature of the air and the ocean, averaged over the world, is following this rise.
At midnight Mauna Loa time, the carbon dioxide level hit 390 — and rising.
Mark Hertzgaard has a new book out. It won’t make you happy. Of course you should already be unhappy. People who have paid attention have known since 1988 that CO2 increase in the atmosphere was initiating climate changes that, minimally, would not be easy to deal with, and maximally had catastrophic implications — not just for song-birds but human beings as well. Hertzgaard as dubbed those born this year and after as Generation Hot. Here’s why.
“My daughter Chiara, age five, is a member. So is my goddaughter Emily, age twenty-two. So are the thousands of Pakistani children now suffering after record monsoon rains left 20 percent of their country — an area the size of Great Britain — under water.
In fact, every child on earth born after June 23, 1988 belongs to what I call Generation Hot. This generation includes some two billion young people, all of whom have grown up under global warming and are fated to spend the rest of their lives confronting its mounting impacts.
For Generation Hot, the brutal summer of 2010 is not an anomaly; it’s the new normal.
One wouldn’t know it from most media coverage, but the world’s leading climate scientists have concluded that last summer’s rash of extreme weather — including record heat across much of Europe (especially Russia) and the United States — was driven in no small part by man-made global warming. Of course no single event can ever be definitively attributed to global warming; weather results from many factors. But according to the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization, the extraordinary heat, rains, drought and flooding that occurred this summer fit the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s projections of “more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming.” In other words, dangerous climate change is no longer tomorrow’s problem; it is here today.
But for most of us, the other scientific shoe has yet to drop. Aside from a fundamentalist few, most people around the world, in rich and poor countries alike, accept that climate change is real and has already begun to occur. Nevertheless, many non-specialists still do not grasp the most fiendish aspect of the climate problem: we can’t turn it off. …”
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Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas, and the entire eastern region of the state are suffering the worst drought in more than a century. A government scientist who calls it an “atypical” drought says it is chiefly caused by warmer ocean temperatures.
Scientist Carlos Nobre, of the National Institute of Space Research (INPE), said, “When it comes to the Rio Negro, in Manaus, this drought has no parallel in the last 103 years. That is, since 1902, when the level of the Rio Negro began to be measured,” he said.
In the eastern part of the region, this is the worst drought in the last 50 or 60 years, he estimates. The governor of Amazonas state has declared a crisis due to the drought. Environmental News Service
From Wunderground…
Tropical Storm Matthew continues to dump heavy rains over Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, and neighboring regions of Mexico today. Puerto Barrios, in northern Guatemala, has received 4.57″ of rain in the past 24 hours. With Matthew expected to slow down and dissipate by Sunday, the storm’s heavy rains of 6 – 15 inches can be expected to cause severe flooding and dangerous mudslides. The rains are of particular concern for Guatemala, which suffered its rainiest August in its history…
“Geologists led by Brown University say Lake Tanganyika, the second oldest and the second-deepest lake in the world, has experienced unprecedented warming during the last century, and its surface waters are the warmest on record. The finding is important because the warm surface waters likely will affect fish stocks upon which millions of people in the region depend.
The results of the study were published in Nature Geoscience.
The team took core samples from the lakebed that laid out a 1,500-year history of the lake’s surface temperature. The data showed the lake’s surface temperature, 26 degrees Celsius (78.8°F), last measured in 2003, is the warmest the lake has been for a millennium and a half.”
From Climate Progress
Fast on the heels of the hottest June to October on record, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies reports that last month was the hottest November on record, which should be no surprise to CP readers — see my November 24th post:
If November’s anomaly is the same as the anomaly for the last two months, then November will tie for the hottest November in the temperature record.
In fact, last month’s anomaly slightly exceeded that of September and October, which isn’t a big surprise since, as NOAA reported recently, “El Niño strengthened from October to November 2009.”
It seems increasingly likely that 2009 will be the second hottest on record in NASA’s dataset, which is superior to the Met Office/Hadley/CRU dataset (see “Why are Hadley and CRU withholding vital climate data from the public?” and Hansen essay below). The figure above, from GISS (here), which updates the temperature of 2009 through November shows 2009 just edging out 2007. As my 11/24 post also noted:
This year is currently on track to be the 5th warmest year on record, but, in fact, if the monthly temperature anomaly (compared to the 1951 to 1980 average) stays near where it has been for the last two months, then 2009 will surpass 2007 as the second hottest year on record.
Given how warm November was, December merely needs to be of average warmth (for this decade) for 2009 to be the second warmest in the temperature record.
Unlike NOAA, which announced its November global analysis with a major “State of the Climate” monthly update, NASA just quietly updates its data set (here). NASA will doubtless wait until January to make its big announcement on where 2009 fits in the historical record. NOAA uses a somewhat different temperature dataset, so, for it, November was only the fourth warmest on record.
Hansen just posted on his website, The Temperature of Science — a must-read piece about the purloined emails and his experience with temperature data…
The Hansen piece, referred to, is here. [pdf]
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