For those wondering why the planet hasn’t yet exceeded the 1998 El Ni±o-fueled temperature record, a new Science magazine article (subs. req’d) explains why. Basically, in addition to the steady increase in anthropogenic warming from greenhouse gases you have to add a smaller variation from climate oscillations linked to the oceans. Those oscillations have been tamping down temperatures a tad, and will keep doing so for the next couple of years, but the decade of the 2010s is going to bring a return to record-smashing temperatures:

Our system predicts that internal variability will partially offset the anthropogenic global warming signal for the next few years. However, climate will continue to warm, with at least half of the years after 2009 predicted to exceed the warmest year currently on record.

They further predict the year 2014 will “be 0.30° ± 0.2°C warmer than the observed value for 2004,” which means there is a 50% chance that the warming from 2004 to 2014 will be 3/8 that of the warming of the previous century!

In short, if these projections are right (and if there are no major volcanoes to dampen temperatures), then the Denyers have a couple more years to spin their misinformation, but, after that, the accelerating nature of climate change should become painfully clear to all. And I would not be surprised if this epic multi-year heatwave drives the Arctic over the edge, leading to a drastic — if not total — reduction in summer ice by 2020.

As a physicist, I have never been a big fan of Freeman Dyson. He was, after all, one of the “geniuses” pushing Project Orion — the absurdly impractical idea of creating a rocket ship powered by detonating nuclear bombs — I kid you not!

Dyson has written a new book, A Many Colored Glass, that you shouldn’t waste your time and money on, as this extract on global warming makes clear. Dyson has basically joined the famous-confusionist camp with Michael Crichton and Bill Gray. You can read a good debunking of Dyson here. I’ll add my two cents.

Dyson says many things that are just plain wrong: “There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global.” Uhh, no. The warming is global — as every set of data makes clear — that’s why it’s called global warming.

He says the “fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated” because he is certain the climate models do not reflect reality. I agree they don’t reflect reality– but that leads me to the opposite conclusion. Dyson fails to ask whether the simplifications and omissions in climate models lead them to overestimate or underestimate climate impacts. So far, they have underestimated things like Arctic ice loss, mass loss of the great ice sheets, and sea-level rise. They don’t model many feedbacks very well, and we know today that most feedbacks are amplifying.

No nonsense essay would be complete without a nonsense solution. He believes “the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management” and that the entire climate problem can be solved by increasing topsoil:

Read more

This clip — Jason Jones 180° — is hilarious.

Check out the old windmill in front of the yacht club.

The only thing I would add is that if people are really worried about spoiling the Cape, imagine what 20 feet of sea level rise would do, let alone the 80 feet we can eventually expect if we keep dawdling and temperatures rise another 2° to 3°C.

Geo-engineering is “the intentional large scale manipulation of the global environment” to counteract the effects of global warming, which itself was unintentional geo-engineering — although today you’d have to say global warming is intentional, since everybody now knows what we’re doing to the planet.

But I digress. We’re screwing up the planet with unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions, and the question is, do we want to try to fix that problem by gambling on some other large-scale effort to manipulate the climate — or should we just try to restrict emissions? It’s as if the doctor says you have a disease that can definitely be cured by diet and exercise but you opt for expensive chemotherapy even though the doctor can’t guarantee the results but is pretty certain the side effects would be as bad as the disease.

A new study drives that home for the most discussed geo-engineering idea:

Pumping sulphur particles into the atmosphere to mimic the cooling effect of a large volcanic eruption has been proposed as a last-ditch solution to combating climate change — but doing so would cause problems of its own, including potentially catastrophic drought, say researchers.

And if we pursued the sulphur strategy but then found out, say, a decade later, the drought prediction was correct, we’d be stuck, since if we discontinued injecting the sulphur shield, global temperatures would rebound rapidly, potentially triggering catastrophic effects. (And, of course, this shield does nothing to stop catastrophic ocean acidification.)

Here is the abstract to the study, “Effects of Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption on the hydrological cycle as an analog of geoengineering”:

Read more