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This post by physicist John Cook was first published in Skeptical Science. The figure is surface temperature from Lake Tanganyika paleorecord for the past 1,500 years. Orange shading is 95% error bars.

Lake Tanganyika, in East Africa, is the second largest lake in the world (by volume). The lake supports a prodigious sardine fishery which provides a major source of animal protein for the region as well as employment for around 1 million people. Direct observations over past 90 years find that Lake Tanganyika has warmed significantly. At the same time, there’s been a drop in primary productivity in the lake impacting sardine populations. To further explore this matter, geologists took lake cores to determine the lake’s surface temperature back to 500 AD (Tierney 2010). They found that warming in the last century is unprecedented over the last 1500 years.

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As Russia chokes from a heat wave of unprecedented ferocity, president Dmitry Medvedev has strengthened his call for the world’s leaders to take action to fight global warming pollution. The scientific community has warned for decades that burning coal and oil without limit would intensify heat waves, droughts, and floods. Now that the planet is at its hottest in recorded history, freak climate disasters are arriving with increasing frequency. Some scientists are now stating the obvious: Russia’s heat wave simply would not have happened without the influence of fossil fuel pollution on our atmosphere. University of Texas climate scientist Michael Tobis is “hazarding a guess” that “the Russian heat wave of 2010 is the first disaster unequivocally attributable to anthropogenic climate change”:

But right now I feel like hazarding a guess. As far as I understand, nothing like this has happened before in Moscow. . . . The formerly remarkable heat wave of 2001, then, is “the sort of thing we’ll see more of” with global warming. But it may turn out reasonable, in the end, to say “the Russian heat wave of 2010 is the first disaster unequivocally attributable to anthropogenic climate change.”

Meteorologist Rob Carver, the Research and Development Scientist for Weather Underground, agrees. Using a statistical analysis of historical temperature records, Dr. Carver estimates that the likelihood of Moscow’s 100-degree record on July 29 is on the order of once per thousand years, or even less than once every 15,000 years — in other words, a vanishingly small probability. However, those tiny odds are based on the assumption that the long-term climate is stable, an assumption that is no longer true.

Like Dr. Tobis, Carver believes that manmade global warming has fundamentally altered weather patterns to produce the killer Russian heat wave. “Without contributions from anthropogenic climate change,” Carver said in an email interview with the Wonk Room, “I don’t think this event would have reached such extremes or even happened at all”:

I agree with Michael Tobis’s take at Only In It For the Gold that something systematic has changed to alter the global circulation and you’ll need a coupled atmosphere/ocean global model to understand what’s going on. My hunch is that a warming Arctic combined with sea-surface-temperature teleconnections altered the global circulation such that a blocking ridge formed over western Russia leading to the unprecedented drought/heat wave conditions. Without contributions from anthropogenic climate change, I don’t think this event would have reached such extremes or even happened at all. (You may quote me on that.)

Just as the Russian heat wave is fueled by global warming, so is the rest of the world’s killer climate. World-renowned climatologist Kevin Trenberth explained in an interview with Wired’s Brandon Keim that the Eurasian heat wave is part of the even larger circulation pattern that has produced the catastrophic southeast Asia monsoon:

The two things are connected on a very large scale, through what we call an overturning or monsoonal circulation. There is a monsoon where upwards motion is being fed by the very moist air that’s going onshore, and there are exceptionally heavy rains. That drives rising air. That air has to come down somewhere. Some of it comes down over the north.

Dr. Rob Carver’s analysis of the statistical likelihood of the Moscow heatwave: Read more

PORT FOURCHON, LA“”In what may be the greatest environmental disaster in the nation’s history, the supertanker TI Oceania docked without incident at the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port Monday and successfully unloaded 3.1 million barrels of dangerous crude oil into the United States.

Best.  Onion.  Ever.

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Florida, Maine, and Massachusetts residents agree: Global warming is here and we’re causing it.

By Kalen Pruss of CAP’s executive team.

Large majorities of Florida, Maine, and Massachusetts residents believe that global warming is real””and that humans are causing it.

So says the latest poll from Jon Krosnick, senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.  Krosnick found that large majorities of Florida, Maine, and Massachusetts residents believe that:

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IEA: China overtakes the United States as world’s largest energy user

Preliminary data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) indicate that China has become the largest energy consumer in the world, having overtaken the United States in the top spot. An IEA chart shows China using roughly 2.25 billion tons of oil last year, while the United States used roughly 2.2 billion tons of oil in 2009. China rose to its top ranking faster than expected because the country was much less affected by the global financial crisis than the United States. The IEA notes that China’s energy use would be even higher today had the government not made significant progress in reducing the energy intensity of the nation’s economy, that is, the amount of energy used per unit of output. China has also become one of the world’s leaders in renewable energy, particularly wind and solar energy, and is planning a major expansion of its nuclear power industry.

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“Greenland appears to be literally cracking up in front of our eyes”

Today’s guest blogger is the UK’s Joss Garman.

The Daily Mail has become the latest previously ‘climate sceptic’ newspaper to shift its editorial line to acknowledge that climate change is “real and deeply worrying”.

Yesterday the paper’s science editor, Michael Hanlon, who could previously be seen as the UK’s most influential ‘sceptic,’ writes:

“I have long been something of a climate-change sceptic, but my views in recent years have shifted. For me, the most convincing evidence that something worrying is going on lies right here in the Arctic.”

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Our guest blogger is CAP’s Richard Caperton, Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress.

Yesterday’s New York Times article (“Portugal Gives Itself a Clean Energy Makeover“) on Portugal’s transition to a clean energy economy should be welcome news for renewable energy advocates.  Portugal’s experience validates what we’ve all been saying for years: reliance on fossil fuels is dangerous, renewables are affordable, and extensive use of renewable electricity is technically possible.  Unfortunately, the article “balances” all of these lessons with misleading comparisons to the United States and wildly overblown descriptions of the cost and difficulty of the transition.

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