As weather extremes multiply, Colombian Prez pleas, “The tragedy the country is going through has no precedents in our history”
NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has released its monthly global temperature data. It reveals that there is no April in the temperature record before 2005 that was warmer than April 2011.
And that’s in spite of the fact that we are still in the tail end of a major La Ni±a and just coming out of “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” April 2011 is surpassed in warmth only by 2005, 2007, and 2010. It tied with 2002 and just beat 1998.
The Australian Government’s Bureau of Meteorology foresees a transition to an El Ni±o this summer. NOAA only foresees “ENSO-neutral conditions.” NASA’s Hansen had predicted back in October that “It is likely that 2012 will reach a record high global temperature.” An El Ni±o would make that an extreme likelihood.
We have, as reported, seen almost unbelievable extreme weather in this country (see Hell and High Water: Weather Channel labels Texas drought and Mississippi floods truly “exceptional”; Masters: This is “only” a “1-in-100 to 1-in-300 year flood).”
We have also been seeing record-smashing extreme weather around the globe, from England to Canada, from Colombia to China — but the U.S. media is so focused on the Mississippi that these events have received little attention here.
April was the hottest in the Central England Temperature record going back some 350 years:
UPI reports “Canada’s central province of Manitoba braced Thursday for the worst seasonal flooding in 300 years, local officials said.” Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters has more here:
The flood is being called a 300-year flood, and damages are already in excess of $1 billion. In neighboring Alberta, the reverse extreme is causing havoc: severe drought and strong spring winds have made ideal conditions for wildfires,
And Colombia has been hit by “11 months of nearly nonstop rain” displacing over 3 million people. Masters again has details:
“Some parts of the country have been set back 15 to 20 years”, said Plan’s Country Director in Colombia, Gabriela Bucher. “Over the past 10 months we have registered five or six times more rainfall than usual,” said the director of Colombia’s weather service, Ricardo Lozano. Up to 800 mm (about 32 inches) of rain has fallen along the Pacific coast of Colombia over the past two weeks (Figure 3). The severe spring flooding follows on the heels of the heaviest fall rains in Colombia’s History. Weather records go back 42 year in Colombia. Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos said, “the tragedy the country is going through has no precedents in our history.”
… See also my December 2010 post, Heaviest rains in Colombia’s history trigger deadly landslide.
China has been hit by a devastating drought. The NYT reports today that:
A severe drought along the Yangtze River region in central China has rendered nearly 1,400 reservoirs in Hubei Province temporary unusable, devastated farm fields and made drinking water scarce, according to a report on Monday by Xinhua, the state news agency. The drought, which has lasted for five months, has brought water levels in the middle part of the Yangtze down to a near-record low.
AFP published this picture with the caption, “Chinese fishing boats are seen stranded a dried up river bank along the Yangtze river. Drought on the massive waterway has led to historically low water levels that have forced authorities to halt shipping, the government and media said Thursday”:
In his October analysis, Hansen warned, “Given the association of extreme weather and climate events with rising global temperature, the expectation of new record high temperatures in 2012 also suggests that the frequency and magnitude of extreme events could reach a high level in 2012. Extreme events include not only high temperatures, but also indirect effects of a warming atmosphere including the impact of higher temperature on extreme rainfall and droughts.”
I’ve often said of our current extreme weather, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.” Unfortunately, we may not have to wait that long to see the weather of the last year topped.
Related Posts:
- NASA’s James Hansen: “One sure bet is that this decade will be the warmest” on record
- 2010 Study: Global warming is driving increased frequency of extreme wet or dry summer weather in southeast, so droughts and deluges are likely to get worse
- Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding that harm humans and the environment
- NOAA: Monster crop-destroying Russian heat wave to be once-in-a-decade event by 2060s (or sooner)
- NCAR’s Trenberth on the link between global warming and extreme deluges: “There is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.”
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Climate crisis becoming more shocking daily…. The state next door is experiencing unprecedented flooding.
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20110516/slave-lake-alberta-wildfire-evacuation-110516/
Thousands of Slave Lake residents are waiting to learn if their homes have been destroyed by an out-of-control wildfire that has razed much of the northern Alberta town.
Brian Hay was among the thousands of residents forced to flee Slave Lake on the weekend, after high winds pushed a raging wildfire straight into the town where some 7,000 people live.
“They say 40 per cent of the town has burned,” Hay told CTV News Channel in a telephone interview from Boyle, Alta., on Monday morning.
CTV Edmonton reporter Sean Amato reported Monday that many prominent buildings are in ruins in Slave Lake, including the town hall, the local library and the main shopping mall.
But the full extent of the devastation will not be known until the blaze can be brought under control.
“We know that a number of businesses are gone. We know that dozens — possibly more — homes have been destroyed,” Amato told CTV News Channel by telephone on Monday morning.
“We don’t know whether the airport is still up, we don’t know whether the hospital is okay, we don’t know whether the high school is okay.”
Local authorities first began battling two separate fires near Slave Lake on Saturday, to the east and south of the town. It was initially believed that the fires could be brought under control.
Wildfires could be a major problem in the UK. Where I used to live in Surrey (SE England) there are large areas of heathland that could go up in smoke. Last month the fire service were busy stopping them developing. For this to be happening at all, let alone in April, is very weird.
In Germany, April was the 4,2 deg C above 1961-1990, second warmest April ever (only 2009 was warmer), and the 7th driest since 1901, 9th driest since 1881.
http://www.dwd.de/bvbw/appmanager/bvbw/dwdwwwDesktop?_nfpb=true&_windowLabel=dwdwww_main_book&T17860014671303375939491gsbDocumentPath=&switchLang=en&_pageLabel=dwdwww_klima_umwelt
It seems that NOAA is way behind in their assessment of ENSO conditions; for example, they say in their weekly report that “Atmospheric circulation anomalies associated with La Niña remain significant”, yet if you look at indicators like the SOI (first link), that is no longer the case; the BOM agrees. Even more significantly, the trade winds have become weaker than average over the past week (second link), which will cause a surge of warm water to flow eastwards, besides promoting further surface warming; we are also at the right time of the year (usually May-June) for an El Nino to develop:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/monitoring/soi30.png
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/jsdisplay/
If an El Nino develops, especially a strong one (as Hansen expects), it would be rather unusual given that the last one was only two years ago and we just had a pretty strong La Nina (though not so much when measured by SSTs), but then ENSO has been acting unusual lately, such as the multiple successive El Ninos in the 1990s and 2000s.
2015 looking like a crunch year for global civilization.
Certainly before 2020!
Joe, this is an excellent topic to include the recent solar activity to show how record-breaking warming is not being driven by solar influence.
John McCormick
Dear CP readers,
I have created a petition to be sent to President Obama and Secretary of the Interior Salazar objecting to the US Department of the Interior’s plan to lease public lands in the state of Wyoming that would provide big coal companies with 758 million tons of coal. Interior will also decide this year about leasing public lands that would provide coal companies with an additional 1.6 billion tons of coal to burn and pollute our atmosphere. Joe posted a report on this a month ago at http://climateprogress.org/ 2011/ 04/ 14/ export-coal-china/
I have used MoveOn.org’s new petition tool. If enough people sign the petition, then they will send the petition to their 5 million members for them to sign. I am only 100 signatories short of this petition being sent to MoveOn.org’s 5 million members for them to sign.
I was wondering if you would sign the petition, send it to your contacts on your email list asking them to sign it, and post it on your Facebook pages?
This is an opportunity to draw upon MoveOn’s large email list to put pressure on our leaders, to raise awareness among progressives about this new egregious plan, and also to help push for climate change as a priority issue at MoveOn.org.
Here is the link to the petition:
http://signon.org/ sign/ say-no-to-deadly-coal?source=c.url&r_by=163667
Thank you!
Huge forest fires and devastating floods in Canada too. Hell and High water.
Wow. More and more it’s looking like we’re in for the full roller-coaster. I used to read Lovelock and think “Nonsense!”
Reconsidering.
Sad face.
That’s a couple of more geographies to add to my mental map of extreme weather events over the past year – hadn’t heard about Columbia and Manitoba. It seems I have seen someone do a google maps-based tool of extremes. It would be helpful to have this.
Fires in Canada:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/story/2011/05/16/slave-lake-fire-evacuation.html
Flooding:
http://www.cbc.ca/manitoba/features/flood2011/http://www.cbc.ca/manitoba/features/flood2011/
Looks scarily like what is happening Texas and the Mississippi….
Russia is also experiencing fires again:
Greenpeace warns Russia of catastrophic wildfires
“The fires in the forests and peat bogs have started earlier and are more dangerous than last year,” said Alexei Yaroshenko, head of Greenpeace Russia’s forest programme, at a news conference.
This month, forest fires are already raging in Siberia, the Urals, and far eastern Russia, while peat bogs are smouldering in central Russia, Yaroshenko said.
“In a week’s time, the situation risks escalating in a catastrophic manner… and we will have a repeat of last year’s situation,” he said.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gITn9F7kwYFkJwUCIws3DK43kv5w?docId=CNG.f054e888a931a326850fb59d1ca285e8.751
There were times in the past when I’d look forward to solar maxima. The high frequency Ham Radio bands would open up to all kinds of places which did not require huge antenna installations to talk to. But times have changed. I’ll still work the bands but I’ll also know someone, somewhere is paying the price.
theworld de ve3hsf sk
When you use Google or I use Google or Joe Rom uses Google, the same search words, at the same time, we all three get different results on our first page. Search algorithms produce customized results.
The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you:
Eli Pariser
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/eng//id/1091
Joe,
In the highlighted portion of the second sentence, I believe you mean April 2011 rather than April 2010.
[JR: Good catch.]
@14 catman one perspective is to set your browser to private browsing. This should hide in most cases the cookies that they use to ‘customize’ your results.
Not much emphasis on the role that the wind speed is playing in the fire events.
The global wind speed vectors are linked to global warming and so these events are directly linked to GW.
According to SOI, this has been the strongest la Nina on record. In the absence of human-caused global warming, global mean temperature should be near or at record cold levels.
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/teleconnections/soi-s-pg.gif
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/data/indices/soi
All these crazy temperatures and events following a very strong La Nina. Wasn’t it the famed Dane, Svensmark, who back in 2009 declared that global warming was over and cooling had begun. So much for that silly theory.
Warmest April in the English record, now that is interesting. Remember professional disinformer Piers Corbyn? He lucked out with his December forecast and became the official weather guru of the Mayor of London. Not only did his forecast of a “cruel” January and February in England crash and burn, with temps well above normal, but his long term forecast for spring was for very low temperatures, as he said: unlike what the “warmist want”. Well, I’d say that a record smashing April is exactly what the “warmists want”. The press was all over these clowns when it was nippy in December, how come they aren’t highlighting their utterly embarrassing failures now? Very little mention of record breaking highs, but once some snow falls on the ground, it is front page material.
# 15 (MarkB): That is indeed true. Super strong La Nina in combination with the aftermath of the deepest solar slump in more than 100 years, and we are at close to record setting temps worldwide. Check the latest UAH data. SSTs are about to surpass 2009 and lower troposhere temps only surpassed by 2010.
Yet, the denialosphere is now celebrating the tired solar theory of Svensmark. Bizarro world anyone?
2012/13 looks like it is going to be well toasty, but the melting Arctic will likely set off another winter with negative AO/NAO with local cold temps and snow, so the press and most folks will believe that everything is A-OK.
Esop @16,
“Yet, the denialosphere is now celebrating the tired solar theory of Svensmark.”
I must be missing something. Has there been a revelation?
#19 (MapleLeaf): yes, there is a rumor that the CLOUD project might reveal that there is some substance in the theory with regards to cloud formation. That does not explain why we are seeing record setting temps during a near record setting solar slump. Exactly the opposite of what Svensmarks theory predicted. That fact is completely lost on the anti-science crowd, it seems.
The idea that Alberta is “neighboring” to Manitoba would be interesting to residents of Saskatchewan. :-)
GFW @23,
Poor Saskatchewan, they always get left out, well almost always. Was that my error or CBC’s error?
Esop @22,
Thanks. Good grief. Hope McIntyre audits that study.
Very dry as well as unusually warm in SE England in March/April.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/16/water-firms-uk-dry-spell
Ladies and gentlemen, there is no cause for alarm. The wings have just fallen off the aircraft and we have entered a nose-er, an altitude readjustment scenario. Don’t worry, it’ll only last a minute. We’ll soon be on the ground. Have a pleasant flight.
Esop,
I’m not convinced (yet) by the melting Artcic ice and colder European winters hypothesis. As Hansen notes:
“However, we note in our Reviews of Geophysics paper that the few years just prior to 2009-2010, with low Arctic sea ice, did not produce cold winters in Europe. The cold winter of 2009-2010 was associated with the most extreme Arctic Oscillation in the period of record. Figure 3, from our paper, shows that 7 of the last 10 European winters were warmer than the 1951-1980 average winter, and 10 of the past 10 summers were warmer than climatology. The average warming of European winters is at least as large as the average warming of summers, but it is less noticeable because of the much greater variability in winter.”
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2010november/
Here’s a perspective from Canada’s north.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/violent-arctic-storm-a-climate-change-harbinger/article2023865/
Esop #22 I thought Svensmark, another of those Danish gifts to humanity like Lomborg and Fogh Rasmussen, was simply discredited years ago by consulting the recorded observations of the cosmic ray flux, that revealed no fluctuations that would in any way fit his ‘theory’. After all are cosmic rays in his ‘theory’ nothing but a proxy for solar activity?
Seems hard to believe here in cool Vancouver. We should have scheduled the Winter Olympics for this year, rather than last year. Third coldest April here in Vancouver, and one of our local mountains is planning its skiing until the July 1st long week-end. La Nina is parked outside my front door. Brrrrr.
But we are expecting some floods in BC next month as the snow melts.
And what happens with the return of el Nino? We are going to cook.
On Gistemp here used to be a line graph showing how the year compared to previous monthly records. Does anyone know where it’s gone?
George D #30
I think you’re talking about this graph:
http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/T_moreFigs/2011vs2010+2005.pdf
They moved it to the Columbia University webpages which are maintained by Hansen and Sato. http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/
Just click on the “Global Temperature” link and then “More Figures” at the bottom of the page and you’ll see that graph with many more. There is also a link to these pages where the graph used to be on the original NASA graphs page.
Research Aircraft Polar 5 Returned from Spring Measurements in the High Arctic
Good Post. Highest temperatures have also been reported in other parts of the globe as well. Is it not due to Global Warming?
Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India
Seems to me that there is a very strong possibility that the Climate Crisis could actually reduce human population substantially overnight. Certainly over a decade.
The changes and extreme events we are seeing, are affecting the globe across large, widely dispersed regions simultaneously. And the frequency of these wide spread extreme extreme events is now certainly under a decade (looking like 5-7yrs currently). The crescendo of more minor extreme events is becoming overwhelming as well.
Consider the scenario of say a ~1C tipping point, which when we get there basically the northern and southern hemispheres spontaneously combust with raging fire storms duing summer.
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20110516/slave-lake-alberta-wildfire-evacuation-110516/
And agriculture lands are parched and barren.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1387801/Dustbowl-Britain-faces-repeat-1976-drought-dry-spell-drags-crop-failures-leads-higher-food-prices.html
And during the winter we get extreme snowfall and deluges which flood especially during the spring.
Unprecented floods on the Mississippi, in Colombia, and Canada
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1802
Throw in a few nasty storms and cyclones with heightened surf – tornados happening at the same time….
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/23/st-louis-tornado-damage-injuries-lambert-airport_n_852823.html
Possible geological activity trigger by GW….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1267137/Climate-change-spark-volcanoes-earthquakes-tsunamis.html
Cycling every 2-7yrs.
How long would it be before the global population starts to decline under these conditions?
A dramatic drop in population could occur within a decade. (Lovelock’s predictions are coming to light).
The current situation is looking very precarious….
Kim says we’re cooling. Hey, so much for bifurcatin’ poetry.
It’s a little less than 8 percent more water vapor in the atmosphere per degree C increase in temperature.
Wikipedia – Atmospheric Thermodynamics
So, when we reach 2 degrees C of cumulative warming, we can expect something like 16 percent more water vapor in the atmosphere, instead of our current 4 or 5 percent.
But if we get 5 degrees C of warming by say, 2050, due to the start of a methane catastrophe by dissociating methane hydrates in the Arctic, we’re talking maybe 40 percent more water vapor. I’m not sure I believe this number- maybe precipitation would happen much sooner, and maybe increased convection will lead to a shorter lifetime of water vapor in the troposphere, who knows?
But, it’s going to be a lot more water vapor in the atmosphere. More water vapor means more heat of condensation, driving convection and storms.
And, if the methane hydrates start to dissociate in a big way, we can expect very weird things to start happening in the atmosphere, according to this very recent study using a state of the art atmospheric chemistry transfer model:
Strong atmospheric chemistry feedback to climate warming from Arctic methane emissions
They’re talking about several hundred percent increases in stratospheric water vapor. They’re talking about big increases in tropospheric ozone especially in the tropics- extending down to ground level. They talk about a roughly 20% increase in lifetime for methane in the atmosphere, due to a decline of the hydroxyl radical in the troposphere, where it’s needed to oxidize methane, and a huge increase in hydroxyl radical concentrations in the stratosphere, where it is not needed.
The indirect effects from ozone, CO2, and water vapor increases coupled with increased methane lifetime mean that large amounts of methane would have indirect global heating effects several times greater than from the methane itself. And methane is a very, very strong greenhouse gas, with global warming potential 70 or so times that of CO2 when it’s effects are averaged over a 20 year period.
This finding about indirect effects of methane, creating a stronger positive feedback for large methane emissions, might actually explain things about previous apparent runaway greenhouse events like the End Permian mass extinction. In our current situation, it provides a bridge from mild CO2 based warming to true runaway global warming leading to a methane catastrophe.
This is a very important finding, I think.
We’re seeing weather and climate changes already, and those changes are totally insignificant compared to the changes in atmospheric chemistry which are likely coming, as most or all of us know.
Here is something that points to a 1C threshold…
“The principal conclusion in the “Paleoclimate” paper is that prior warmer inter-glacial periods were only slightly (less than 1C) warmer than today. ” Hansen.
http://columbia.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0ebaeb14fdbf5dc65289113c1&id=2e8df036b2&e=331a85e8a3
Could it be that before we actually reach 1C, feedback mechanisms ie weather events (triggering also geological events) start to ramp up, strongly, to balancing the temperature imbalance. I guess the mechanism in the past would be to accelerate vigorous weathering, which in turn starts to pull down the greenhouse gasses, mainly CO2.
Basically we are at this threshold and if this is the case then that means we are going to be witnessing cataclysmic events occurring from now on. Getting more violent and frequent.
Meanwhile in Finland, a tv-program promoting Abdussamatovs thoery of spectral 200 yers variations gets primetime, fancily mentions also UHI and Berlin/St.Petersburg as not warming on the same sentence (Well not exactly on the same sentence but I guess 2 minutes is a normal attention span for ‘sceptics’). I guess this is for the election results.
Nice post, Joe–and what’s happening is sobering, to be sure. I also appreciate all the comments. But I wonder if this information is going to have any impact in the near future. I can’t see that happening. We’ve already had numerous reports of extreme weather, with scientists like Kevin Trenberth pointing to the impact of climate change … and this has hardly registered with the public. With the floods here in Canada (Manitoba and southern Quebec), almost no one is making a link to climate. I suspect it will take both quantitative and qualitative increases in weather extremes–dramatic increases!–before the reality sinks in with the public and governments act. And given the Republican majority in the HR, I fear it will be years before anything meaningful happens by way of mitigation.
I’d love to be proven wrong, though.
Thanks Michael T. That graph was, and is, exceptionally helpful in understanding where a particular month stood in relation to previous records. I’m not sure why GISS have decided that it no longer suits their website.
Great to see so many Canadians commenting here. My mother and wife are both from Saskatoon in the evidently mythical Saskatchewan (their mascot is the unicorn). Nobody knows hockey sticks like Canucks (and by the way, go Vancouver Canucks!).
And speaking of Chris from Vancouver, the GISS map for April shows that you were in the only populated bulls-eye (with the center maybe a little closer to Whistler or Kamloops) in the world during the month of April, with temps down to 4 degrees C cooler than average. We felt it in the outer rings of the bulls-eye here in Portland and my daughter developed a Vitamin D deficiency going to college in Squamish (now much better that she’s working outdoors on an organic farm in sunny Colorado). Here’s the map. Notice how the huge swath up to 7 C warmer than the average for the month is some thousands of square kilometers of Northern Siberia including almost half the breadth of the adjoining Arctic Ocean – great surfing from the methane clathrates bubbling on certain ice-free shores, if you like Apocalyptic surfing conditions.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=04&sat=4&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=04&year1=2011&year2=2011&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Also here’s meteorologist Ed Hummel’s epic explanation of how global warming leads to extreme weather with the mechanisms explained succinctly yet in detail:
http://climateprogress.org/2011/05/12/national-academy-america%e2%80%99s-climate-choices/#comments
Again, I think this would make a great guest post, which reminds me, Go Canucks!
#27 (MarkB): It will be interesting to see this coming fall/winter, but I got a feeling that we are stuck in the warm Arctic/cold continents pattern for at least the latter part of November and all of December. Interesting to note is that temperatures in Europe went back to above normal when the Hudson Bay finally froze up, pretty much right at New Years. One thing is for sure though: a cold December creates much more support for the anti-science side than all sorts of climate related disasters and warm records create for the science side during the rest of the year. Unfortunate, but true.
Charles, 35: “I suspect it will take both quantitative and qualitative increases in weather extremes–dramatic increases!–before the reality sinks in with the public and governments act.”
Unfortunately the changes are slow enough that most will not see them. Todays events are very much different to the events in the 1980′s but noone sees it as ‘dramatic’. Therefore, it is ignored.
I have not come across the Open Mind blog before. Do you know who publishes it or anything about it? It gives no clues.
RE # 37
Leland, once again, the focus on the OH radical and its limited supply as CH4 release from the Arctic increases. That link provided a frightening set of conclusions and warnings. We are so far out on thin ice.
Senator Boxer should be holding hearings soon on reports such as the one you linked. You might make some contacts with her Committee staff to explore that.
John McCormick
France in crisis as drought deepens
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/16/us-france-drought-idUSTRE74F3PR20110516
———-
Now we’ll see just how effective nuclear power is , as the French curtail operations due to low stream flows, and discharge temperatures in their cooling waters.
Robert – Open Mind is the blog of a professional statistician who specializes in time-series analysis. He’s been “outed” in the past but I’ll respect his privacy here. He doesn’t specialize in climate issues but has worked with climate scientists, i.e. providing professional statistical support, and has a personal interest in skewering denialist arguments with professional skill.
@47 yes. Indeed.
However, I think were now at a stage where its how effective and resilient humanity is …
#47 + #49 : this drought here makes up for a total of 10 seconds in daily TV news, and tiny articles in the papers… not even everyday… I noticed a single 90 seconds item related to wheat and agriculture, during the whole event (1 month+).
I think that is far from enough to have people connect the dots.
Re. nuclear power: EDF (the electricity operator, owner of the plants) apparently manages to plan 100% operational sea-cooled plants during the summer, leaving the option to shut down river-cooled ones (44 out of 58). AFAIK, that never happened though. In 2003, they just rejected water 2°C above limits in some rivers.
How the french react to this kind of power outages remains to be seen. I’ll tell you – if I can ;-)
When was the last 300-year-flood?
The climate is getting so bad, I was outside yesterday and it was pretty hot. I think it’s caused my garden to be 3-4 weeks late this year. All this heat is going to be bad for my corn. My yard was filled with snow this April but usually it is clear, I think it must have been warm new snow, not the good old cold kind.
All these weather events have never happened before. So many forest fires now, I bet 40 years ago and more there weren’t hardly any fires or droughts. Why can’t deniers see that? It’s just common sense.
I’m sure the denier’s take on the beginning of this article would be “NO WARMING SINCE 2005!”.
Leland Palmer @ 37: There is another effect in all that extra water in the atmosphere that I have not seen addressed. It may be something you could shed light on. Rain does not fall only on land but on the oceans as well. Rain is fresh water with a different density than sea water. Could there be enough rain falling in some areas to mess with the thermal-cline circulation patterns.
About a year ago I asked CP readers just how much water the 4% extra water vapor in the atmosphere represented. One commentator came back with an answer of ~ 1.5X the volume of Lake Superior. I have subsequently seen that estimate repeated in the blog world but I have not seen a peer review of the computations. Any insights? For the layman, 4% does not sound like much. However, an extra Lake Superior and a half floating around looking for a place to land as rain , or snow in the winter, is a different story. For instance what is the volume of water represented by the current floods thru the central US? (Soon to double and double yet again.)
Along the same lines, it is important to note that once that 1.5? X Lake Superior extra water condenses someplace and floods it does not mean that it is GONE. Evaporation continually replenishes the atmosphere. This IS THE NEW NORMAL! At least until it gets worse.
The paper Leland Palmer links to in comment #37 above presents critical findings that require translation for the average lay person along with dot connecting. I’m not sure I fully comprehend it, but at the 30,000-foot level, it seems that methane emissions are yet another massive overshoot associated with human activities, with methane levels in the atmosphere now approximately 2.5 times pre-industrial levels. Importantly, the human activities primarily contributing to this overshoot include natural gas exploration (what are the implications of this paper for fracking and the use of natural gas as a transition fuel?), raising livestock, and burying municipal/household waste in landfills. I think I understand that feedback releases of methane from melting permafrost and methane clathrates have the potential to overwhelm human efforts to prevent a climate catastrophe. However, to do all that we can to prevent this, surely we need to understand and minimize the methane emissions that we can control and we need to do this very rapidly.
@ Richard Miller #7:
The link that you posted to your petition shows as partial and incorrect. Thanks for setting up the petition though. Hopefully you won’t mind if I post a corrected link to the same petition here for any one that may want to still sign it.
SAY “NO” TO DEADLY COAL By Richard Miller