Another Hot Year, Even Hotter for 2016

Word from Australia that this year and next will probably see record-breaking temperatures.

Sea temperatures around Australia are posting "amazing" records that climate specialists say signal global records set in 2014 may be broken this year and next.

March sea-surface temperatures in the Coral Sea region off Queensland broke the previous high by 0.12 degrees – a big jump for oceans that are typically more thermally stable than land. Temperatures for the entire Australian ocean region also set new highs for the month, the Bureau of Meteorology said.

The unusual warmth off Australia comes as the Pacific Ocean remains primed for an El Nino event, as the bureau reported last month.

If such an event occurs, the underlying warming from climate change will get a further boost from natural variability, making 2014's ranking as the hottest year on records going back to the 1880s likely to be short-lived, according to Andy Pitman, head of climate research at the University of NSW.

"If we do get an intense El Nino, it will blitz the records," Professor Pitman said. "The climate is on a performance-enhancing drug and that drug is carbon dioxide."

Another Part of the Puzzle - Our Warming Oceans

The playpen of climate change denialists is on temperature change.  They like to cherry pick statistics, sweep the bulk of the data under the carpet, and declare that global warming has stopped.

Not so fast.

Here's an example of what the denialist mantra carefully omits.

This is a depiction of what's happening in the  North Pacific and Bering Sea.  The red areas such as the Bering Sea are up to 3 degrees Celsius warmer than normal. From the US Pacific Northwest along British Columbia up to the Gulf of Alaska it's 2-3C warmer.

As I've written several times before we in coastal BC are seeing species migrating into our waters that we rarely saw before - fish, marine mammals, sea birds.  This translates into massive schools of sardines, white sided dolphins, even brown pelicans.  We've even had an apparent influx of transient orca perhaps in pursuit of the larger dolphin newcomers. That is the face of climate change.

Here's a pod of transients that has herded a school of white-sided dolphins into the ferry dock at Nanaimo's Departure Bay.

 

In Alaskan waters newcomers include thresher sharks, skipjack tuna and the giant sunfish or Moa.

What's important is how this warming weather is building up.

Normally storms and winds roll through to cool off the surface of the Northern Pacific, but a weather pattern popped up for a few months in winter 2013 that inhibited those storms from developing, said Nate Mantua, a NOAA research scientist. Then, from October 2013 through January, the weather pattern came back as a ridge of high pressure (the same one connected to the California drought). All of that made the already warm waters in the Alaskan gulf even warmer, a layer about 100 meters thick, Mantua said.

In the spring, warm water started to develop in other Northern Pacific waters, namely the Bering Sea. There's also a chunk of warm water developing off the coast of California.

"You have lots of warm water, and it's due to weather patterns that basically don't take heat out of the ocean," Mantua said. "They are letting the ocean warm up rapidly, and stay warm."

The oceans are heating because the wind patterns have changed in the northern hemisphere.  It's the same wind pattern change that has brought severe drought to the west coast of the US, that brought the Polar Vortex slamming across eastern US and Canada last winter and that gave us a summer of flash flooding from southern California to Burlington to New England.

Some research suggests we should have had a powerful El Nino by now.  The water conditions changed as expected in the central Pacific but the winds associated with El Nino didn't appear to carry that warm water moisture up into California as hoped.  

We're just beginning to explore what these phenomena could mean in the long term.  Are El Ninos destined to become less frequent and less powerful just as we're discovering how dependent the ecology of the American southwest is on them?  What happens to all this heat that's accumulating in our oceans?  What does it do to the oceans and all life that lives in or depends on them?

The answer is as brief as it is troubling - right now, no one really knows.

The Relief of California

Desperately needed rain may be enroute to northern California.  With any luck some agricultural production may be saved.  There's hope that an El Nino believed to be building in the Pacific will indulge California with a good drenching next winter.

Denialists Are Not Skeptics, Even When You Turn the Planet Upside Down.

Maybe the time has come when the onus of proof should shift off the shoulders of climate science and onto the shoulders of the denialist community.   You say it's all a hoax then prove it.  You say what's happening now is just natural variability, then prove it.  You say that mankind isn't driving it, then prove it.  You claim to have all these grounds that undermine the climate change consensus.  Fine, just pick at least one and prove it.   Lay it all out there:  your theory, your research and supporting data, the conclusions you contend are supported by all that research and data and then let the science types assess it.  Of course, if you were going to do that, you would have done it by now.  The Koch Brothers (Gerhard und Fritz) would have popped for oodles of cash to fund that sort of research but, strangely, they haven't.  Skeptics have to work from something called demonstrable fact.  When they fall back on belief instead of fact then they're just facile denialists.

Case in point, Australian prime minister Tony Abbott.  He's a denialist, through and through.  Tony believes in things he imagines, just not facts.  His country has warmed up a lot over the course of Tony's lifetime.  In the course of the Tony Era, his already hot country has roughly doubled in average heatwave days per year.

 

Despite this, Australia's conservative elite, including News Corp columnist Miranda Devine and climate change denying prime minister Tony Abbott deny the link between climate change, extreme heat waves and bush fires.

Miranda Devine wrote in 2013 in The Daily Telegraph "Australia has never had a mild and easy climate" and then proceeded to list a number of hot days in Sydney in the 1800s. This, according to Devine, is proof that because there was extreme heat in the past, that the heat waves we experience now are normal.

Meanwhile, prime minister Tony Abbott denounced common sense and the growing body of scientific evidence that links climate change to bush fires. In an interview with the Washington Post in October last year, he used standard denialist lines to cast uncertainty and doubt: "Australia has had fires and floods since the beginning of time. We've had much bigger floods and fires than the ones we've recently experienced."

 

Last year was, of course, a record year for Australia in terms of heat waves, fires, etc.   This year seems to be picking up where last year left off.  Bear in mind that happened during an interval of ENSO neutral conditions, there was no El Nino event which, in terms of Australia, is like adding a blast furnace to the mix.

 

But there are cautious warnings that the world could be in for a substantial El Nino beginning this spring.  If that does come to be, this could be an ugly summer for Abbott, Murdoch and their denialist crowd.

 

Sorry, Australia, but you elected this clown.  Good on ya. 

 



He's Back - The Return of El Nino.

We only just managed to bid adieu to his ugly stepsister, La Nina. Was it too much to hope for a few years of normal conditions? Maybe so because he's back. El Nino is back and his oceanic presence is already being detected as far north as the Baja.

And what does El Nino hold in store for our fellow human beings? According to the United Nation's Office for Humanitarian Affairs, nothing good:

Rising sea surface temperatures across the central and eastern Pacific Ocean herald El Niño, which could disrupt the rains in major cereal producing regions, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has warned.

"Typically, an El Niño has the potential to disrupt the rainy seasons and cause lower rainfall in India, Australia, Southeast Asia - Philippines and Indonesia - southern Africa and Central America," said Robert Stefanski, a WMO scientific officer who works on agriculture-related weather and climate issues. "In past El Niño events, droughts have occurred and lowered food production in many of these regions."

In contrast, La Niña is the cooling of sea surface temperatures; both El Niño and La Niña are part of the normal climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean and occur once every four to seven years. According to WMO, "Recent changes are consistent with the early stages of a developing El Niño event in the second half of 2009."

It seems like we did indeed once get these phenomenon every seven years but that has changed over the past decade. Now, it seems, we're hit by them more often than not. They once were "part of the normal climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean" but now they seem to have become not just part but the climate cycle of the Pacific.

So what does all this mean for Canada? Here's a handy explanation from the University of British Columbia:

During the winter of an El Nino event, the air temperature tends to be warm over most of Canada, with the greatest warming centred around Manitoba-western Ontario, where a temperature anomaly of up to +3 degrees Celcius (averaged over the last nine El Nino events) can be found (Hoerling et al., 1997; Shabbar and Khandekar, 1996). Southern Canada also tends to be drier during an El Nino winter (Shabbar et al., 1997). Southern British Columbia tends to receive less snow (Hsieh and Tang, 1999).

In the case of the cold La Nina event-- the opposite of the warm El Nino event-- the coastal waters off British Columbia tend to be cool. In a La Nina winter, the Canadian air temperature (especially west of Quebec) tends to be below normal (Hoerling et al., 1997; Shabbar and Khandekar, 1996), while the precipitation in southern Canada tends to be above normal (Shabbar et al., 1997). Southern British Columbia tends to receive more snow (Hsieh and Tang, 1999). Poor Canadian prairie wheat harvests often follow La Nina events (Garnett and Khandekar, 1992; Hsieh et al., 1999)

Great, just what I didn't want to hear. Glancing at the CBC website I found an item suggesting that there's a new generation of El Nino emerging, a lot different from the old familiar phenom we were just getting to understand:

Changes in the nature of global weather phenomenon El Niño may be causing an increase in the total number of hurricanes as well as their likelihood of hitting land, new research suggests.

El Niño forms in the Pacific, but it affects circulation patterns across the globe — from drought in Australia, to the Indian monsoon and the number and severity of hurricanes in the Atlantic.

Conventional El Niño events involve warming in the eastern Pacific. But a new wrinkle might be emerging as a phenomenon dubbed El Niño Modoki (from the Japanese meaning "similar, but different") shows warming in the Central Pacific — similar to that which is seen during La Nina years.

"
Normally, El Niño results in diminished hurricanes in the Atlantic," said Peter Webster, a professor at Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, who led a research team studying the issue. "But this new type is resulting in a greater number of hurricanes with greater frequency and more potential to make landfall."

Warming in the central Pacific Ocean is associated with a greater-than-average [hurricane] frequency and increasing landfall potential along the Gulf of Mexico coast and Central America, the report said.

Changes in the characteristics of El Niño could have huge ramifications for the insurance industry, as well as making storm-ravaged areas better able to avert catastrophe.

"
This new type of El Niño is more predictable," said Webster. "We're not sure why, but this could mean that we get greater warning of hurricanes, probably by a number of months."