New GISS data

NASA GISS has released their data for temperature through June of 2015. Prior to now, they have used ERSSTv3b (extended reconstructed sea surface temperature version 3b) for sea surface temperature, but they have now switched to the revised, updated ERSSTv4 (version 4). Let’s take a look at the new data and how it compares to its predecessor.

Most Extremely Hotter-than-usual Month

In a recent post I showed that in June the northwest had its most extremely hot month on record.

Breaking Climate

An oft-used analogy for the effect of man-made climate change is that the weather is on steroids. Baseball players have always been able to hit home runs, but with performance-enhancing drugs they hit more than they could without. Similarly, climate change is making the weather do things more often, more severely, than it could without. This is not natural.

But that old analogy won’t cut it much longer. Because the climate will keep changing, taking weather not just into “enhanced” territory but to a state like nothing we’ve seen before. It won’t just be dangerous, it will be violent. Weather won’t be on steroids any more. It’ll be on meth.

SO hot

Cliff Mass, in his blog post about recent temperatures, asks the question “Why is the Northwest so warm?” He then proceeds to answer the question “Why is the Northwest warm?” What he doesn’t address is the question he himself asked: why SO warm? Perhaps we should say “so hot.”

Extreme

One of the subjects that interests me (a lot of people, in fact) is extreme values. By definition, they’re not very common. It follows that when we look at observed data to discover what the likelihood of extreme values is, we have little data to go on.

I was wrong

Not long ago I posted about results from Prashant Sardeshmukh of a study he and others did regarding the frequency of hot days, based on reanalysis data.

I considered the results so implausible that I concluded they had made a “rookie mistake” in using a different cutoff limit for the two time spans they compared, a mistake which would completely invalidate their results.

I haven’t seen the data, but I’ve heard enough testimony from credible sources that Sardeshmukh et al. are both honest and competent. I am now convinced, the mistake was mine.

I was wrong.

I’ll also take this opportunity to apologize for any and all unnecessarily snarky content. I’m OK with being snarky on one’s own blog, but if you’re going to do that then get the facts right first. I didn’t.

Prediction: What will Republican Presidential contenders do about global warming?

Answer: flip-flop.

Except for two, maybe three or four of them (to be named shortly).

“Corporations are interested in environmental impacts only to the extent that they affect profits”

UPDATE:

There’s an excellent post about this, well worth the read, at Climate Progress

end UPDATE

Leonard S. Bernstein was Exxon’s “in-house climate expert” during much of his 30 years of working for the oil industry (including both Exxon and Mobil). In 2014 he sent an email to to the director of the Institute for Applied and Professional Ethics at Ohio University, revealing that the oil giant was aware of the climate impact of CO₂ emissions way back in the early 1980s.

According to Bernstein’s email, “Corporations are interested in environmental impacts only to the extent that they affect profits, either current or future. They may take what appears to be altruistic positions to improve their public image, but the assumption underlying those actions is that they will increase future profits. ExxonMobil is an interesting case in point.”

You can read more about it, including the full text of the email, in The Guardian and Inside Climate News.

Why SO hot?

You’re an olympic athlete in the javelin throw. You’ve trained hard most of your life, and kept careful records of your distances for some 2,000 practice throws during the last year. It turns out that your distances follow the normal distribution with a mean of 78.82 meters and standard deviation 3.07 meters.

Competition is tough and you’re desperate to win, so you give in to temptation. You start taking a new kind of steroid which improves performance and can’t be detected by the olympic committee’s drug tests. You continue to keep careful records of your practice throws, discovering that the steroids have increased your mean distance by 4 meters.

Come competition time, you’re at your best. You trained hard, got plenty of sleep, ate right, and you were just plain “in the groove.” You’re wearing a new kind of shoe with special cleats designed to give you perfect traction without slowing you down or interfering with your rhythm. Even the weather cooperates, reducing atmospheric friction to a minimum. Everything comes together, all the “natural variation” factors conspire to give you the best performance of your life. Oh happy day! Near day’s end you’re standing on the podium listening to the national anthem, because you won the gold medal with a throw of 89.60 meters — fully 4.2 meters ahead of the 2nd-place throw.

You didn’t just win the gold, you broke the world record (89.58 meters by Jan Železný in 1996; javelins with serrated tails were outlawed in 1991). You’re heralded as a national hero and approached by a well-known breakfast cereal enticing you to sign an endorsement deal for one helluva lot of money. After all, extremes which are that extreme are a big big deal.

That night a sports journalist asks “Why was is so long a throw?” You talk about hard work, proper technique, new training shoes, good weather, and how everything came together at just the right moment. All of which is true.

But the next day the drug tests arrive from the lab. It turns out that the olympic committee has kept pace with the latest in steroid innovations, and the new performance-enhacing drug is detected, no doubt about it. In subsequent investigation, statisticians analyze your careful records of practice throws and demonstrate the surprising increase in your numbers, inexplicable except by cheating. The olympic committee announces that your are stripped of your gold medal and world record, and that you are banned from competition for the next five years.

One of your biggest fans protests that the stats show your drug use only increased your mean distance by 4.00 meters but you beat the 2nd-place throw by 4.2. “He would have won anyway! Give him back his gold! His winning throw wasn’t because of steroids, it was because of a great performance!!!”

There are two things wrong with that claim. First, when we ask “Why was it so long?” we have to include steroids in the list of reasons. Second, it’s downright disingenuous to suggest that there’s some single cause. Yes it was a perfect day, yes those new shoes really did help, yes the weather cooperated, yes you gave a great performance. If you hadn’t worked so hard and so diligently, you wouldn’t even have made it to the olympics in the first place. But steroids increased your chances of throwing the javelin so far, far enough to break the world record, by a factor of more than 60. The fact is that without steroids your throw wouldn’t have been so far.

These days, it’s the weather that’s on steroids. Because of man-made climate change. Cliff Mass’s blog post asks “Why is the Northwest so warm?” Part of the reason — the part that Cliff Mass is desperate to dispute — is global warming.

Uncritical Mass

Cliff Mass is at it again, trying to tell us that the recent extreme heat in the northwest is unrelated to man-made global warming. What’s surprising is that he actually had this to say in a recent blog post: