News of a late Friday

January 16, 2015 1:17 PM

In the 21st century, it almost goes without saying the past year was the hottest year on record. But it's worth mentioning 2014 was the hottest ever recorded, according to NASA and NOAA who independently confirmed. Drum roll: it was the 38th consecutive year of above-average temperatures. 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000. Nobody born since 1976 has experienced a colder-than-average year on Earth. The coldest spot on Earth during 2014 (on average) was the eastern half of the United States. The hottest on average was most of Europe. British wine growers rejoice.

2014 Was the Warmest Year Ever Recorded on Earth (New York Times)
2014 warmest year on record, say US researchers (BBC)
It’s official: 2014 was the hottest year in recorded history (Washington Post)
2014 officially the hottest year on record (Scientific America)

posted by stbalbach (49 comments total)

Not only that, but yesterday it was announced that humans have pushed past four of the nine planetary boundaries necessary for a "safe operating space" for human life.

So we got that goin' for us as well.
posted by tittergrrl at 1:19 PM on January 16, 2015 [10 favorites]

How many scientists still working on fracking?
posted by No Robots at 1:29 PM on January 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

British wine growers rejoice.

Where I live in England I have not yet seen one flake of snow this winter. Nothing but heavy hoar frost. We haven't had significant snow since 2010--which was heavy--with the last four years being rather snowfree.

(Also: "British wine" is a specific thing, not to be confused with English or Welsh wine.)
posted by Thing at 1:31 PM on January 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

....aaaand, in a totally unrelated development, NASA & NOAA will both find their funding slashed.

Completely unrelated, of course. Merely concern for the taxpayer, you understand.
posted by aramaic at 1:34 PM on January 16, 2015 [9 favorites]

It feels like recorded history goes back further than 1880, Washington Post.
posted by smackfu at 1:40 PM on January 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've been wondering if/when the breakdown in climate cycles is going to start messing up our biorhythms and sense of the passage of time, because our biorhythms are almost certainly influenced/effected by the season cycle. It doesn't feel like the seasonal weather is following any consistent pattern at all much of the time anymore--at least, not compared to norms. We still get cold in the winter, and occasionally, very cold, but it seems we're just as likely to have unseasonable weather the next day or even later in the same day. It's hard to express, and might not be a clear enough trend to prove, but it just feels like the seasons are becoming noticeably less stable to me.
posted by saulgoodman at 1:48 PM on January 16, 2015

I've been wondering if/when the breakdown in climate cycles is going to start messing up our biorhythms and sense of the passage of time, because our biorhythms are almost certainly influenced/effected by the season cycle.

I look forward with great enthusiasm to being dead before this happens in earnest. It's already bad enough that there were 70 degree days this past december in nyc followed by snow the very next day.
posted by poffin boffin at 1:52 PM on January 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

The coldest spot on Earth during 2014 (on average) was the eastern half of the United States.

I can't imagine a worse state of affairs, given the location of Washington, DC.
"If there's global warming, why is it so cold? Hur hur hur Al Gore something something."
posted by RedOrGreen at 1:57 PM on January 16, 2015 [18 favorites]

Cheer up; we only exist to pave the way for the true masters of the Earth and the stars are almost right.
posted by Renoroc at 2:02 PM on January 16, 2015 [7 favorites]

Also this week: Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says [NYT]
posted by ryanshepard at 2:03 PM on January 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

2014 was the hottest ever recorded, according to NASA and NOAA...
Don't you worry. Senator Cruz will nip that silly "science" and "facts" nonsense in the bud.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:07 PM on January 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

The coldest spot on Earth during 2014 (on average) was the eastern half of the United States. The hottest on average was most of Europe.

Note that it's not coldest spot on Earth, it's coldest relative to the normal average.
posted by smackfu at 2:14 PM on January 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

The coldest spot on Earth during 2014 (on average) was the eastern half of the United States.

>I can't imagine a worse state of affairs, given the location of Washington, DC.

It's astonishing, really. Just look at the global heatmap, the only inhabited area on the entire planet to experience unusually cool as opposed to unusually warm temperatures just happens to be the seat of power of the United States.
posted by kaspen at 2:30 PM on January 16, 2015 [12 favorites]

Cheer up! At least the widespread destabilization and release of methane clathrates hasn't happened.....yet.

the fact that public policy makers and politicians are actively working on driving us towards ever greater climate disaster is proof that hell exists and it is here
posted by Existential Dread at 2:31 PM on January 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

At least the widespread destabilization and release of methane clathrates hasn't happened.....yet.
posted by Existential Dread

Welp, that covers the eponysterical needs of this thread.
posted by RedOrGreen at 2:38 PM on January 16, 2015 [14 favorites]

We still get cold in the winter, and occasionally, very cold, but it seems we're just as likely to have unseasonable weather the next day or even later in the same day.

If you happen to live in North America, just far enough north that it used to be semi-reliably north of the winter jet stream, this kind of weather variability could be one of the more noticeable effects that some people have been predicting. Or maybe it's just bad luck in recent years, I don't know, but it seems to make for more layers of ice in the snow than there used to be.
posted by sfenders at 2:47 PM on January 16, 2015

(Also: "British wine" is a specific thing, not to be confused with English or Welsh wine.)

Eh?

Is it Jerriais? Scottish riesling? Manx pinot noir? Cornish cabernet?
posted by ocschwar at 3:36 PM on January 16, 2015

I do believe there is anthropogenic driven climate change and I don't like us fucking with the mechanism but "38th consecutive year of above-average temperatures" is an insanely small sample climate-wise as we are at the peak of an interglacial warming period.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data2.html

Ice Age.
posted by vapidave at 3:53 PM on January 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Eh?

Is it Jerriais? Scottish riesling? Manx pinot noir? Cornish cabernet?

"British wine" means wine fermented in the UK from foreign-grown grapes.
posted by Thing at 4:16 PM on January 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

I do believe there is anthropogenic driven climate change and I don't like us fucking with the mechanism but "38th consecutive year of above-average temperatures" is an insanely small sample climate-wise as we are at the peak of an interglacial warming period.

The jury is still out on that. For starters, there are still glaciers so we can hardly be in an interglacial period.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 4:51 PM on January 16, 2015

an insanely small sample climate-wise as we are at the peak of an interglacial warming period.

Well no, we're probably not yet at the peak. The charts you linked to show CO2 levels peaking somewhere below 300ppm in a typical interglacial of the kind we've all grown accustomed to over the past million years. If it weren't for global warming, we'd probably be well on the way to another ice age, with only a few thousand years to prepare for it.
posted by sfenders at 4:58 PM on January 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

I do believe there is anthropogenic driven climate change ... but ...

The standard for using data to illustrate a phenomenon is completely different from that for proving it. If I said "most cars have four wheels" I could illustrate that with one picture of some random car. It would be missing the point to critique my statement as having a sample size of 1, or by digging up a picture of a Reliant Robin. We know we're causing global warming, so this news illustrates the depth of our civilization's hole.

You might have heard how, back in the '70s, "they" were predicting another ice age. Never mind who, have you ever wondered why? It's more than just having a few cold years, according to the history of Earth's climate we could be due for another glacial period any day now—for geological meanings of the term. Your own NOAA link shows this: viewing the climate record purely as a time series of datapoints, we're not at the peak of an interglacial period, we're at the end of the usual time limit.

Of course the reason why "they" was basically one guy selling a book and not climate scientists was that it's not a valid method to predict the climate purely by using the time series of what happened before, it'll give you nonsense results. Much like what happens when you try to use a Markov Chain to 'understand' Alice in Wonderland, you get a "prediction" like this:

Just as when I goes like a tunnel for the Queen. Then the archbishop of Canted leaders, after it! Here, Bill! There were birds was that it, because I'm not much a nice looked down from ear the high to makes me very poor leading riddle of make you fair wits!" She drew her foot!

Properly understanding the climate requires physics-based models that incorporate as much as we can cram in there about how all the parts of the climate system actually work. They're the ones saying not only that anthropogenic climate change exists, but that it's by far the largest component of climate change and has been for years, and it's not good for humanity at all.

If it weren't for global warming, we'd probably be well on the way to another ice age...: the first reason we can't know this I just outlined: it's not valid to use "past performance" to predict "future results" for the climate. The second reason is that ice ages seem to end when their last interglacial period sticks around for a long while. Since we've so radically changed this part of Earth's climate history we might never know if we were meant for another glaciation or not.
posted by traveler_ at 5:06 PM on January 16, 2015 [5 favorites]

"Since we've so radically changed this part of Earth's climate history we might never know if we were meant for another glaciation or not."

I agree with this.

"We know we're causing global warming, ..." climate change is the better term here I think

This remains to be proven. But as I said above, I don't like us fucking with the mechanism.
posted by vapidave at 5:34 PM on January 16, 2015

vapidave, climate scientists are very clear that currently observed warming is the result of increased CO2 concentration. The evidence (mass balance, isotope ratios) that increased CO2 is the result of human burning of fossil fuels is even more straightforward. How long should we wait before deciding that something is proven?
posted by sneebler at 5:45 PM on January 16, 2015 [4 favorites]

"We know we're causing global warming, ..." climate change is the better term here I think

We can choose which term to use, but the terms usually mean something. Climate change is the natural variability of climate changing over millions of years. Global warming is observed warming since the 19th century attributed to humans. These are discrete concepts and they can be used in the same sentence eg. global warming is not caused by climate change.
posted by stbalbach at 5:55 PM on January 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

vapidave: This remains to be proven.: among the experts on this it most definitely has (modulo that "proofs are for math" and natural science has a different standard for what knowing something means). As far as I'm concerned that puts the burden of proof on the denialists to justify what amounts to a conspiracy theory these days.

climate change is the better term here I think: potayto potahto—they were coined about the same time, referred to the same phenomenon, and right now give similar hit counts in Google Scholar. It kind of matters in that I'm seeing a rising bit of revisionism that thinks (here's that "time series" view again) that the warming trend was discovered first, that anthropomorphic explanations were proffered second, and now any unusual weather gets touted as proof of "climate change" irresponsibly. In truth the effect of the industrial revolution on CO₂ levels was first a prediction, as was the idea it would lead to a type of climate change, specifically, a global warming. Then one by one those predictions panned out.
posted by traveler_ at 6:01 PM on January 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

vapidave: This remains to be proven.: among the experts on this it most definitely has (modulo that "proofs are for math" and natural science has a different standard for what knowing something means). As far as I'm concerned that puts the burden of proof on the denialists to justify what amounts to a conspiracy theory these days.

For the record the only above quote that is mine is the "This remains to be proven."

Climate change is the better term here I think: "potayto potahto—they were coined about the same time, referred to the same phenomenon, and right now give similar hit counts in Google Scholar. It kind of matters in that I'm seeing a rising bit of revisionism that thinks (here's that "time series" view again) that the warming trend was discovered first, that anthropomorphic explanations were proffered second, and now any unusual weather gets touted as proof of "climate change" irresponsibly. In truth the effect of the industrial revolution on CO₂ levels was first a prediction, as was the idea it would lead to a type of climate change, specifically, a global warming. Then one by one those predictions panned out."

Panned out over a miniscule window of time. You are looking at less than 300 years which is a tiny fraction.

I think climate change is the better term because that is what it is. Some places you can grow your potayto potahto whereas before you couldn't, some places you can't grow your potayto potahto whereas before you could. We need to be accurate here because otherwise deniers can point to one inconsistancy as a refutation of anthropogenic climate change. Cold, ha ha, it's snowing so how could there be global warming?

I'm still amazed at how much the climate reflects a sinus rhythm.
posted by vapidave at 6:49 PM on January 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

we might never know if we were meant for another glaciation or not.

Is there some reason to think another glaciation would not have happened? Of course you can't rule out some crazy undiscovered thing preventing it, but the usual suspects that are often said to be the cause of major changes to climate significant on the scale of millions of years don't seem to be present: Ocean currents haven't got radically re-routed lately, no big biological transformations other than humans, no unusual volcanism or asteroid impacts, et cetera. So it seems very likely. Precisely how long this interglacial might last I have little idea; but searching the web, it seems like the debate is over how long until the next advance of the glaciers (maybe 50,000 years?), there's little doubt it would have happened eventually.
posted by sfenders at 7:02 PM on January 16, 2015

On a related, depressing note, here is a short piece by Andrew Lilico, director and principal of Europe Economics, explaining quite unequivocally why he feels there should be no efforts to prevent or limit climate change if such efforts would depress the global economy even one iota. It includes brilliant lines like "Next the issue of leaving things to our children. First, our children will be unimaginably wealthier than we are, partly as a result of our innovations and infrastructure investments and capital accumulation" and (regarding the tropics becoming uninhabitable due to global warming, resulting in massive human migration) "It’s not 'worse' living in Canada than in Haiti. It’s merely 'different'."

It's nice to be reminded that there is no chance the global elite will be making any attempt to solve the climate change problem because they value money more than they value human lives.
posted by adecusatis at 7:50 PM on January 16, 2015 [8 favorites]

"For the record the only above quote that is mine is the "This remains to be proven.""

Sorry if I wasn't clear. I was using italics to represent your quote, and the rest of the paragraph is my response.

"Panned out over a miniscule window of time. You are looking at less than 300 years which is a tiny fraction."

At the risk of sounding like a broken record this is also something I'd call "time series" thinking that views climatology as a plot of values over time rather than a question of physical processes. Compared with the climatic history of Earth 300 years seems small. But compared with the entire universe the Solar System seems small. Does that mean we can't predict the planets' orbits?

If people had predicted that all the fossil fuel burning would increase atmospheric CO₂, and then the levels increased, that would be important but not definitive. But when they examined all plausible sources and sinks of CO₂ in Earth's systems, measured them and combined them in a total accounting of the CO₂ mass budget; when they measured the isotopic composition of atmospheric CO₂ versus the gas's sources; and when they used satellites to map the location of CO₂ sources and sinks on Earth to a very precise level; and when all these methods and more confirmed the anthropogenicity of that CO₂ rise, that was what sealed it as a successful prediction.

The "300 years" thing is completely irrelevant because we aren't measuring the amount of data collected or tests performed or strength of results in tearms of years.
posted by traveler_ at 7:52 PM on January 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

Climate change: climate that changes over any time frame for any reason, natural or man-made.

Global warming: warming caused by humans since the 19th century.

Technically yes climate change is another way to put it, but climate change is non-committal as it could mean natural caused. It's a favorite among politicians, polite society, and others not wishing to rock the boat. Except when its 100 degrees out and they let the freak flag fly with (gasp) global warming.
posted by stbalbach at 8:27 PM on January 16, 2015

"Does that mean we can't predict the planets' orbits?"

Um, we've been able to observe and Kepler predicted the orbits of planets with a level of precision for some centuries now. We know more about the orbits of planets than we do about tomorrow's weather.
posted by vapidave at 8:55 PM on January 16, 2015

Vapidave, it looks like you missed that that was meant to be a rhetorical question with the obvious answer "no".
posted by traveler_ at 9:28 PM on January 16, 2015

Oops. Sorry. My fault. Thanks traveler_.
posted by vapidave at 10:04 PM on January 16, 2015

You know, I'm a morbid person, so I sort of think about what it will be like dying in I hope let's see over forty years from now.

I used to be all, 'o, I want to be at home with loved ones with tons of good drugs and a heap of reading material.'

I guess I still feel that way but I want the good drugs in part so that I will not be glued to the news watching the north pole turn into hot lava that sucks in screaming masses or whatever.
posted by angrycat at 1:30 AM on January 17, 2015

Thanks for that Andrew Lilico piece, adecusatis. That's an amazing summary of why economists shouldn't be the ones speaking to energy and environmental policy decisions.
posted by sneebler at 8:10 AM on January 17, 2015

Why Google Gave Up On Global Warming:

I was disappointed when Google gave up. In 2007, they announced a bold initiative to fight global warming. They wanted to replace a gigawatt of coal power by renewable energy, in less than a decade. In 2011, they gave up.

Now two engineers in the project have said why... the short version is this. They couldn’t find a way to accomplish their goal: producing a gigawatt of renewable power more cheaply than a coal-fired plant — and in years, not decades.

And since then, they’ve been reflecting on their failure and they’ve realized something even more sobering. Even if they’d been able to realize their best-case scenario — a 55% carbon emissions cut by 2050 — it would not bring atmospheric CO2 back below 350 ppm during this century.

[...]

What would we need to accomplish this? They say two things. First, a cheap dispatchable, distributed power source... But “dispatchable”, they say, means “not solar”. Second, a lot of carbon sequestration...

i like the idea of planting a trillion trees! "Dyson has suggested that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could be controlled by planting fast-growing trees. He calculates that it would take a trillion trees to remove all carbon from the atmosphere."

also btw...
-Climate Change in Perspective
-Cities and Markets Can Fight Climate Change
-Japan Promotes Home Fuel Cell on Path to Hydrogen Society
-George Shultz Gone Solar: Now That's a Sign of Thawing in the U.S. Climate Debate
-What Have Climate Scientists Learned from 20-Year Fight with Deniers?
-Convincing Creationists Of Climate Change, Ctd

Properly understanding the climate requires physics-based models that incorporate as much as we can cram in there about how all the parts of the climate system actually work.

Climate networks - "Recently some people have been trying to use climate networks to predict El Niños. The Azimuth Project - a team of scientists and programmers I'm working with - has been reviewing this work. That's what my talk is about. You can see a draft here..."

oh and re: markov processes :P
posted by kliuless at 8:24 AM on January 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

why economists shouldn't be the ones speaking to energy and environmental policy

Some Myths of the Economics of Climate Change and its Economic Conclusion - "Ultimately, economists need to step up on climate change. It is more than a textbook example of externalities and far more nuanced than many simple accounts make it to be. It is also far more harmful than many of their models suggest (consider the limits). Economic logic sometimes fails... if an asteroid was about to crash into New York City, we wouldn't ask economists to create a poorly-founded model of its costs. We would tell NASA to do whatever it can to save us. Economists need to stop telling us what the program for change should be, but rather identify the most efficient means of implementing a program scientists already deem necessary." [previously (1,2)]
posted by kliuless at 8:33 AM on January 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Trees are nature's carbon capture and storage systems. Why not plant a bunch of them, and at least rebuild some of the world's carbon sinks that we've chopped down over the last 1000 years?

One of the issues is that it's easy for people to assume, as Lilico does, that as the world warms, we'll just move agriculture operations northwards and grow crops there. This ignores a series of problems, from poor soils to inadequate drainage to changing rainfall patterns. Given that some level of long-term warming is inevitable, we could be thinking about how to manage that transition over the next century. That probably means trying to artificially move southern, temperate forest ecotypes into what's now Boreal forests or Taiga, to jump-start the process of soil-building for agriculture. Similarly, we could increase efforts to re-claim deserts if CO2 fertilization gives drought-tolerant plants a slight advantage. Back to the Pliocene!

You're right, I should have said "it shouldn't be only economists speaking to policy..."
posted by sneebler at 8:50 AM on January 17, 2015

Regarding rectifying the situation with mass planting of trees, by all means give it a go, and I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I don't see how that can fully or even substantially mitigate what we are in for. Carbon sinks have value but forests are not immortal and any carbon therein will never remain fixed without deep burial (although a persistent averaged quantity could be assumed to be contained). Regardless, it's about the carbon cycle and the volume being shuffled through the cycle. Fossil carbon hasn't been in play since it was fixed there by whatever dinosaur forests made their way underground back when the earth was a very different place. Without permanently fixing what we've uprooted back into the surface/atmosphere cycle with geological permanence we will never be able to return to the conditions that enabled us to develop and flourish in the first place. Which is why the only solution is to leave what fossil resources we have lined up underground, i.e. as stranded assets instead of tangible values of the balance sheets of landholding corporations, and beyond that, to seriously invest in whatever pricey technologies we can come up with to get atmospheric carbon locked away back in the ground. As it has become popular to express in climate change circles, it is a rate not a flow problem, and it cannot be addressed by simply slowing consumption in a "slim down diet" model as we are prone to conceive of it. So go ahead, plan one trillion trees, it will certainly benefit the earth and ourselves, but I don't see it being anything approaching a solution.
posted by kaspen at 8:23 PM on January 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

My apologies but I have really bungled that statement about stocks and flows, perhaps read what Stanford has to say on the matter instead: Understanding GHG emissions: Stock vs. Flows
posted by kaspen at 8:29 PM on January 17, 2015

I agree that more trees isn't the solution. But planting a bunch of trees would have additional effects like stalling habitat loss or improving soil moisture retention. At the same time, making people feel like they can do something positive for the world why we think about how to stop the insane consumption machine would be ok in my book. Plus I like forests.

People are generally uneducated about ecological issues, and there appears to be a movement in the US to deny that ecological values are important in the economy. Probably naively, I think that a widespread tree-planting effort might get people thinking more carefully about this stuff.
posted by sneebler at 6:35 AM on January 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

No doubt preaching to the choir here. Trees are nice. They release their stored carbon almost immediately as they decay though. The first problem is that we are releasing hundreds of millions of years of carbon that was slowly isolated [in the form of coal and oil and lately oil shale].

The real problem though is that there are just to fucking many of us releasing stored carbon. Some of you are going to have to leave.

I'll be doing my part by checking out in 20 or so years. Alcohol, C2H6O, has some carbon and I'm taking them with me.
posted by vapidave at 9:36 AM on January 18, 2015

Scientists react to warmest year: 2014 underscores ‘undeniable fact’ of human-caused climate change
posted by homunculus at 10:25 AM on January 18, 2015

He calculates that it would take a trillion trees to remove all carbon from the atmosphere.

He apparently made that calculation in 1976, so it would take a few more trees to do it today. Of course we don't actually want to remove all the carbon from the atmosphere, but removing a third of it at a time (while we keep adding more) over three phases of new global reforestation sounds like a fun thing to do... it would keep us busy for a hundred years while we come up with a more permanent solution.

Anyway, a trillion trees at 500 trees per acre is an area equivalent to about half of all the arable land in the world. Something on the scale of devoting the entire 48 contiguous US states to nothing but growing trees. Actually doing it might be slightly more politically complicated than most proposals for reducing CO2.
posted by sfenders at 11:41 AM on January 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

The trees would have to be buried before they rot otherwise it would go back into the atmosphere. Essentially reversing the process of how fossil fuels were created. That's a lot of digging.
posted by stbalbach at 1:46 PM on January 18, 2015

Papal Text Says Man Betrays God by Destroying the Environment
posted by homunculus at 3:39 PM on January 18, 2015

We don't have to bury the trees though! We'll make them into buildings. And cutting back on concrete production will reduce another large source of CO2.
(I know all this stuff is probably unrealistic and politically inexpedient, but sitting around listening to right-wing economists and think tanks argue that we should just ignore any societal future that doesn't involve 2 - 4% annual growth and business as usual makes me crazy.)
posted by sneebler at 6:19 AM on January 19, 2015

And here's a proposal to formally value forests as part of carbon-offset markets. You really can have it both ways!
posted by sneebler at 9:56 AM on January 20, 2015