There's a lot happening in the climate news, but Network Address is less interested in the facts, and more interested in the meta-facts, like how many superlatives an article uses, or how many new words have to be coined in order to keep track of what the heck is going on, or just cases where the weather centers monitoring disasters are themselves in the disaster zone, or maybe just outer space observatories that were never meant to be weather stations yet provide more accurate data than actual weather stations. It's all in there:
But first! More examples of scientists saying the word "crazy"
Hurricane Beryl supercharged by ‘crazy’ ocean temperatures, experts say
Jul 2024, The Guardian
“In the Caribbean Sea it has actually been warmer than its usual peak since mid-May, which is absolutely crazy,” said McNoldy. “If the ocean already looks like it’s the peak of hurricane season, we are going to get peak hurricanes.” [Not just crazy but absolutely crazy.]
Shipping emissions regulations enacted in 2020 improved air quality but accelerated warming
Aug 2024, phys.org
Regulations put into effect in 2020 by the International Maritime Organization required a roughly 80% reduction in the sulfur content of shipping fuel used globally.
They scanned over a million satellite images and quantified the declining count of ship tracks, estimating a 25 to 50% reduction in visible tracks. Where the cloud count was down, the degree of warming was generally up.
Further work by the authors simulated the effects of the ship aerosols in three climate models and compared the cloud changes to observed cloud and temperature changes since 2020. Roughly half of the potential warming from the shipping emission changes materialized in just four years, according to the new work. In the near future, more warming is likely to follow as the climate response continues unfolding. (Although it is noted that the magnitude of warming in 2023 is too significant to be attributed to the emissions change alone, according to their findings.)
via Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: A. Gettelman et al, Has Reducing Ship Emissions Brought Forward Global Warming?, Geophysical Research Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1029/2024GL109077
Say something about the speed of new word occurrence in a general field as related to a kind of turbulence or unpredictability or some kind of measurement of entropy in a system:
Mexico counting dead from 'zombie storm' John
Sep 2024, BBC News
The term "zombie storm" was first used by meteorologists from the US National Weather Service in 2020 to describe a storm which dissipates only to regenerate again.
This storm hit Mexico's Pacific Coast, then dissipated over the mountains before regaining strength over the waters of the Pacific and hitting the Mexican coast a second time.
We’re only beginning to understand the historic nature of Helene’s flooding
Sep 2024, Eric Berger for Ars Technica
The National Climatic Data Center maintains the world's largest climate data archive and provides historical perspective to put present-day weather conditions and natural disasters into context in a warming world due to climate change.
Unfortunately, the National Climatic Data Center is based in Asheville, North Carolina. As I write this, the center's website remains offline. That's because Asheville, a city in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains, is the epicenter of catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Helene that has played out over the last week. The climate data facility is inoperable because water and electricity services in the region have entirely broken down due to flooding.
N.J. weather - Is this our driest October ever?
Oct 2024, nj.com
So many superlatives:
If our long streak of dry weather continues, this not only will turn out to be the driest October in most areas of New Jersey — but also the driest of any month on record.
If the month ended today, this would be the driest October ever recorded in the Newark, Trenton and Atlantic City areas, as well as New York City and Philadelphia.
It also would be number one for the least amount of rain to fall from the sky in any month of any year — not just October, according to the weather data.
Observatory finds local 1.1 ºC increase in 20 years, twice as much as predicted by climate models
Oct 2024, phys.org
Surprise - At the observatory, the weather station has sent data on temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure and wind speed and direction every two seconds for the past twenty years. "The station was built with the intention to have some guidance for telescope operations, not to characterize local weather professionally, let alone the effects of climate change on the measured parameters. But the fact that they were relatively low-cost devices has been an advantage, since they had to be changed and recalibrated every two years or so, which has favored the reliability of the data and greatly limited the effects of long-term sensor drifts, which are difficult to detect."
But alas - The experimental data obtained show an increase of 1.1ºC over the past 20 years, i.e., 0.55ºC per decade. This is more than double the increase predicted by climate models for the same area, and even more than expected for the next 20 years.
via Department of Physics of the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory: Markus Gaug et al, Detailed analysis of local climate at the CTAO-North site on La Palma from 20 yr of MAGIC weather station data, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2024). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stae2214
'Doomsday' Antarctic glacier melting faster than expected, fueling calls for geoengineering
Nov 2024, phys.org
This is about glacial geoengineering not just the "regular kind" (i.e., stratospheric injection)
One example - creating a giant submarine curtain that would at least partially prevent warm tidal currents from reaching the glacier ice.
via the Columbia University Climate School
Unexplained heat-wave 'hotspots' are popping up across the globe
Nov 2024, phys.org
Just here for the ad copy:
Distinct regions are seeing repeated heat waves that are so extreme, they fall far beyond what any model of global warming can predict or explain.
For instance, a nine-day wave that hammered the U.S. Pacific Northwest and southwestern Canada in June 2021 broke daily records in some locales by 30°C, or 54°F. This included the highest ever temperature recorded in Canada, 121.3°F, in Lytton, British Columbia. The town burned to the ground the next day ... .
via Columbia Climate School's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory: Kai Kornhuber et al, Global emergence of regional heatwave hotspots outpaces climate model simulations, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2411258121
You know we're having a problem making sense of what's happening with the climate when we're willing to take into consideration the quantum effects of water:
Quantum mechanism identified as a key to accelerating ocean temperatures
Nov 2024, phys.org
Professor Smith said the apparent role of non-thermal energy in accelerating ocean temperatures now needs to be factored into climate models:
"When ocean water is heated by radiation from the sun and the sky it stores energy not only as heat, but as hybrid pairs of photons coupled to oscillating water molecules.
"These pairs are a natural form of quantum information, different to the information researchers are pursuing in the development of quantum computing. This extra store of energy has always been present and aided ocean thermal stability prior to 1960.
"But now the average heat dissipated overnight from each day's heating is no longer stable as extra heat input from Earth's atmosphere raises both forms of stored energy [including the quantum energy described above]."
via University of Technology Sydney: G B Smith, A many-body quantum model is proposed as the mechanism responsible for accelerating rates of heat uptake by oceans as anthropogenic heat inputs rise, Journal of Physics Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1088/2399-6528/ad8f11
On the heels of recent concern over the use of the word "tipping point" as having become kind of useless, and the scientific community is asking to stop using the word because it's confusing and counterproductive:
Rapid surge in global warming mainly due to reduced planetary albedo, researchers suggest
Dec 2024, phys.org
Far worse than expected - not only is it yes to the shipping sulfur aerosols, but also the warming itself is doing this, which means we've passed the tipping point (decades early).
"The 0.2-degree-Celsius 'explanation gap' for 2023 is currently one of the most intensely discussed questions in climate research."
One trend appears to have significantly affected the reduced planetary albedo: the decline in low-altitude clouds in the northern mid-latitudes and the tropics. In this regard, the Atlantic particularly stands out, i.e., exactly the same region where the most unusual temperature records were observed in 2023. [Albedo being the reflection of sunlight back off the earth, so that it never accumulates as heat.]
"It's conspicuous that the eastern North Atlantic, which is one of the main drivers of the latest jump in global mean temperature, was characterized by a substantial decline in low-altitude clouds not just in 2023, but also—like almost all of the Atlantic—in the past 10 years."
It appears global warming itself is reducing the number of low clouds.
"If a large part of the decline in albedo is indeed due to feedbacks between global warming and low clouds, as some climate models indicate, we should expect rather intense warming in the future. We could see global long-term climate warming exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius sooner than expected to date."
via Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research, and European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts: Helge F. Goessling, Recent global temperature surge intensified by record-low planetary albedo, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adq7280.
