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This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

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Based on projected world energy requirements, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (1956) has estimated an amount of fossil fuel combustion by the year 2000 that with our assumed partitions would give about a 25 percent increase in atmospheric CO2, compared to the amount present during the the 19th Century.

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If you thought last month seemed unusually hot for October, you weren’t imagining things. Globally, it was the hottest October on record, according to information released on Nov. 18 by NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It was also the greatest above-average departure from the average for any month.

Feel like you’ve read this before? You might be thinking of a similar article we ran last month—about September being the hottest September since NOAA began collecting records in 1880. In fact, reports NOAA, every month this year other than January and April has been the hottest on record.

The October average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 0.98°C (1.76°F) above the 20th-century average, according to the agency. This wasn’t only the hottest October on average; it was the highest departure from the average for any month since 1880—that’s 1,630 months of record-keeping. The next highest departure from the average was last month’s. Cumulatively, the year so far has been 0.12°C (0.22°F) hotter than any other on record.

Since not all areas of the planet are equally warm, NOAA also released a map of temperature variations broken down by region, for the period of January to October.

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Warm Arctic Storm To Hurl Hurricane Force Winds at UK and Iceland, Push Temps to 72+ Degrees (F) Above Normal at North Pole

We’ve probably never seen weather like what’s being predicted for a vast region stretching from the North Atlantic to the North Pole and on into the broader Arctic this coming week. But it’s all in the forecast — an Icelandic low that’s stronger than most hurricanes featuring a wind field stretching over hundreds and hundreds of miles. One that taps warm tropical air and hurls it all the way to the North Pole and beyond during Winter time. And it all just reeks of a human-forced warming of the Earth’s climate…
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By early Wednesday, temperatures at the North Pole are expected to exceed 1 degree Celsius readings. Such temperatures are in the range of more than 40 degrees Celsius (72 degrees Fahrenheit) above average.
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The Arctic region as a whole is expected to experience a [frankly quite insane] temperature anomaly in the range of 4 degrees Celsius above average by January 3rd of 2016. Note the broad regions over Northern Canada, Siberia, and the Arctic Ocean that are predicted to experience temperatures in the range of 20 degrees Celsius above the already hotter than normal 1979 to 2000 baseline readings. For some areas — particularly in Northern Canada — this will mean near or even above freezing temperatures for tundra and permafrost zones in the depths of Winter. A set of conditions that has serious implications for permafrost thaw and related carbon store feedbacks.

Verge posted:

Show me this weather-proof house.

Verge posted:

I don't consider the attic in a conventional home as wasted space because it does not extend outward into our land-space but I'd guess...1/4? I mean, all I'm saying is that I don't see the benefit to extending the structure outward. poo poo, a dome roof makes engineering sense, no question, and a dome house if you really need to withstand nature's wrath but outside those factors, I don't see a benefit outside of having wasted horizontal space, unless you're making the claim that they can make the walls significantly thinner. This is all, of course, secondary to the difficulty in the fabrication process (steel beams that don't go straight are a oval office!)

lapse posted:

New GISS data. As you can see, global warming stopped in 1998

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The December 2015 globally-averaged temperature across land and ocean surfaces was 1.11°C (2.00°F) above the 20th century average of 12.2°C (54.0°F), the highest for any month since records began in 1880, surpassing the previous all-time record set two months ago in October by 0.12°C (0.21°F). This is the first time the global monthly departure from average has surpassed 1°C and is the largest margin by which an all-time monthly temperature record has been broken. Incredibly, the December 2015 temperature also surpasses the December record temperature set last year by 0.29°C (0.52°F), the largest margin by which a monthly temperature record has been broken for its respective month.

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Separately, the global land surface temperature was 1.89°C (3.40°F) above average, the highest on record for December, surpassing the previous record set in 2006 by 0.48°C (0.86°F).
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For the oceans, the globally-averaged temperature anomaly of +0.83°C (+1.49°F) was the highest on record for December, surpassing the previous record set in 2009 by 0.19°C (0.34°F).
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Parts of the northwestern Pacific, the North Atlantic south of Greenland, and regions in the southern oceans near Antarctica were were cooler or much cooler than average, with no areas of the global oceans record cold.

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Australia ended 2015 on a warm note, with its sixth highest December temperature in the country's 106-year period of record, at 1.04°C (1.87°F) higher than the 1961–1990 national average.
The average temperature for Norway during December 2015 was 4.4°C (7.9°F) higher than the 1961–1990 average, marking the seventh warmest December since national records began in 1900.
Tropical air masses brought the United Kingdom its warmest December since records began in 1910, at 4.1°C (7.4°F) above the 1981–2010 national average and surpassing the previous record by a full 1.0°C (1.8°F).
France also observed its warmest December since its national records began in 1900, with a temperature almost 4°C (7°F) above the 1981–2010 average, easily surpassing the previous records of 1934 and 2000.
With records dating to 1767, Austria reported its fourth warmest December, at 2.8°C (5.0°F) above the 1981–2010 average.
With a temperature 2.0°C (3.6°F) higher than the 1981–2010 average, Spain reported its second warmest December, behind only 1989, since national records began in 1961.
With every province record warm, Germany as a whole observed its warmest December since national records began in 1881, with a temperature 5.2°C (9.4°F) higher than the 1981–2010 average.
The Netherlands also reported its warmest December in its 115-year period of record. The average monthly temperature of 9.9°C (49.1°F) was almost as high as the average temperatures in October and November 2015 (both 9.9°C / 49.8°F).
Russia was extremely warm in December. During the first 10 days of the month, temperatures were 12°–16°C (22°–29°F) above average.
With 29 eastern states reporting record high temperatures for December, the continental U.S. as a whole was also record warm for the month, with a December temperature 3.3°C (6.0°F) above the 20th century average.
To the north, Ontario, Canada, was also record warm across the entire province for December, with temperatures 5°–10°C (9°–18°F) above the 1981–2010 average.

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The State of the Climate November 2015 report noted that in order for 2015 to not become the warmest year in the 136-year period of record, the December global temperature would have to be at least 0.81°C (1.46°F) below the 20th century average—or 0.24°C (0.43°F) colder than the current record low December temperature of 1916. In fact, December 2015 was the warmest month of any month in the period of record, at 1.11°C (2.00°F) higher than the monthly average, breaking the previous all-time record set just two months ago in October 2015 by 0.12°C (0.21°F).

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With the contribution of such record warmth at year's end and with 10 months of the year record warm for their respective months, including the last 8 (January was second warmest for January and April was third warmest), the average global temperature across land and ocean surface areas for 2015 was 0.90°C (1.62°F) above the 20th century average of 13.9°C (57.0°F), beating the previous record warmth of 2014 by 0.16°C (0.29°F).

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The warmth was due to the near-record strong El Niño that developed during the Northern Hemisphere spring in the eastern and central equatorial Pacific Ocean and to large regions of record warm and much warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in parts of every major ocean basin.

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As many as 110 out of 140 positions at the atmosphere and oceans division at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) will be cut, Larry Marshall, the agency’s chief executive, told staff Friday. Another 120 positions will be cut from the land and water program. Across the agency, 350 climate staff will be moved into new roles unrelated to their specialty.
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Marshall, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, became CSIRO’s CEO in Jan. 2015 and immediately announced that CSIRO would focus on innovation over basic science. Marshall and CSIRO representatives did not respond to ClimateWire’s request for comment by deadline.

When Malcolm Turnbull became Australia’s prime minister in September last year, replacing a pro-energy predecessor, environmentalists rejoiced. But Turnbull’s government has also emphasized science that can be easily commercialized, according to media reports.
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On Feb. 3, Marshall wrote in a memo that CSIRO would henceforth focus on commercially viable projects. The next day, during a staff meeting, he said all climate change programs would be cut. Staff would be transferred into other programs, so there would not be job losses, he said.

Marshall wrote in the memo that climate change is now settled science, and basic research is no longer needed.

“The question has been answered, and the new question is what do we do about it, and how can we find solutions for the climate we will be living with,” he wrote.

CSIRO would now focus on a path where “climate and industry can be partners, now we must walk that path to prove our science.”

TildeATH posted:

What horrible doom does this graph mean? I don't know anything about O2 concentration.

Placid Marmot posted:

That's pretty pedantic (N.B. I am never pedantic) and NOT important.
For every CO2 that enters the reaction, one O2 is emitted - it makes no difference (outside of determining isotope ratios) whether the oxygen atoms come from the H2O or the CO2.
Your graphs, as your link states, show a downward trend due to fossil carbon being combined with atmospheric oxygen faster than photosynthesis can convert the CO2 back to O2.

Placid Marmot posted:

I understand that, chemically, the O2 comes from H2O, as I acknowledged in my response (though my last line was self-contradictory), but I had not appreciated that this mechanism may be a significant cause of ocean deoxygenation, which I believed to be caused by eutrophication-like phenomena.

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New research led by NASA scientists reveals that almost one-fifth of the global warming that has occurred in the past 150 years has been missed by historical records due to quirks in how global temperatures were recorded. The study explains why projections of future climate based solely on historical records estimate lower rates of warming than predictions from climate models.

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The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of Earth, but there are fewer historic temperature readings from there than from lower latitudes because it is so inaccessible. A data set with fewer Arctic temperature measurements naturally shows less warming than a climate model that fully represents the Arctic.

Because it isn’t possible to add more measurements from the past, the researchers instead set up the climate models to mimic the limited coverage in the historical records.

The new study also accounted for two other issues. First, the historical data mix air and water temperatures, whereas model results refer to air temperatures only. This quirk also skews the historical record toward the cool side, because water warms less than air. The final issue is that there was considerably more Arctic sea ice when temperature records began in the 1860s, and early observers recorded air temperatures over nearby land areas for the sea-ice-covered regions. As the ice melted, later observers switched to water temperatures instead. That also pushed down the reported temperature change.

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These quirks hide around 19 percent of global air-temperature warming since the 1860s. That’s enough that calculations generated from historical records alone were cooler than about 90 percent of the results from the climate models that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses for its authoritative assessment reports. In the apples-to-apples comparison, the historical temperature calculation was close to the middle of the range of calculations from the IPCC’s suite of models.

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Any research that compares modeled and observed long-term temperature records could suffer from the same problems, Richardson said. “Researchers should be clear about how they use temperature records, to make sure that comparisons are fair. It had seemed like real-world data hinted that future global warming would be a bit less than models said. This mostly disappears in a fair comparison.”

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The crack in Larsen C grew around 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) in length between 2011 and 2015. And as it grew, also became wider — by 2015, yawning some 200 meters in length. Since then, growth has only continued — and now, a team of researchers monitoring Larsen C say that with the intense winter polar night over Antarctica coming to an end, they’ve been able to catch of glimpse of what happened to the crack during the time when it could not be observed by satellite.

The result was astonishing.

The rift had grown another 22 kilometers (13.67 miles) since it was last observed in March 2016, and has widened to about 350 meters, report researchers from Project MIDAS, a British Antarctic Survey funded collaboration of researchers from Swansea and Aberystwyth Universities in Wales and other institutions. The full length of the rift is now 130 km, or over 80 miles.

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With about two weeks of seasonal melt yet to go, it is unlikely that a new record low will be reached. However, since August 26, total sea ice extent is already lower than at the same time in 2007 and is currently tracking as the second lowest daily extent on record. In addition, during the first five days of September the ice cover has retreated an additional 288,000 square kilometers (111,000 square miles) as the tongue of sea ice in the Chukchi Sea has started to disintegrate.

NewForumSoftware posted:

Just because you're incapable of understanding that there is nothing we can do at this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM0uZ9mfOUI

Uncle Jam posted:

The temperature of the great lakes is actually increasing in November.


Its gonna snow a lot.

parcs posted:

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We are some 500k km2+ below the record low and over 1mln km2 below 2007 for Nov 9.

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The chart below shows the mean temperature anomaly for these 19 stations in each October since 1971. Remarkably, the 19-station mean temperature in October 2016 was 5.6°C above the 1981-2010 normal and more than 2°C above the 2012 record. October 2016 was the second most anomalous calendar month in the data since 1971 - only January 2016 was warmer relative to normal, at +6.5°C.

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Looking at recent daily temperature anomalies for the same 19 stations, it is amazing to see that the warmth has become even more pronounced since the end of October; the 19-station mean anomaly reached +9.6°C last Thursday (November 3), and on Friday the coolest of the stations was 5.4°C warmer than normal. In terms of standard deviations, Thursday's mean anomaly was the highest of any day from 1971-present.

yellowyams posted:

Couldn't anyone make a big news story out of this? I haven't seen any of the climate change groups making much of an effort to spread info on what's going on with the Arctic right now. The only reason I even know is because of this thread.