Sea Heat 2

The subject of this post isn’t the only new research on how ocean heat content has changed. Zanna et al. have taken a new approach to estimating it based on sea surface temperature history.

Of course knowing sea surface temperature at some point in time, doesn’t tell you the ocean heat content profile throughout the depths of the ocean at that time. But if you know the sea surface temperature history, and the heat-content-at-depth history, you can (at least theoretically) find a “transfer function” which tells you how the heat content profile depends on the time history of surface temperature. After all, the waters at depth were near the surface some time in the past and that’s where and when they got their heat.

El Niño and Sea Level Rise: U.S. East Coast (VII)

It was suggested that sea level along the U.S. east coast can be affected by the el Niño southern oscillation (ENSO, usually just referred to as el Niño although that’s not quite correct usage). And indeed it does. I looked for its fingerprint in the data for the U.S. east coast, aggregated by my new method.

Climate Change: When Nature Roars

A new voice has taken center stage in the argument over what to do, if anything, about man-made climate change.

Although clear for decades, the science is easily obscured by clever propogandists. But thanks to this new advocate, things have changed; hers is a voice powerful enough that we’re nearing the point where climate deniers simply won’t be taken seriously any more. An unimpeachable source, impervious to politics, we cannot help but listen, by the millions, from New York to California, from Alaska to Florida, women and men, liberal and conservative and independent, Christian and Jew and Moslem and atheist alike.

The children hear her loudest.

Sea Heat

Just a quick note, that when it comes to the heat that’s been building up in the oceans, Zeke Hausfather got right to the point:

Wobbly Sea Level Rise: U.S. East Coast (VI)

I’ve been looking more closely at the result from my new alignment method for tide gauge data, applied to the U.S. east coast. In particular, I’ve been studying the data since 1950, which very nearly follows a straight line:

Climate Change: More Gas from Trump and the USA

Under Trump administration policies, U.S. emissions of CO₂ went up — substantially — from 2017 to 2018, according to analysis from the economic firm Rhodium Group.

Sea Level Rise: U.S. East Coast (V)

In my ongoing quest to find a better way to align sea level records from tide gauges at different locations, I’ve tried a new strategy.

Different tide gauges are at different levels, so we need to offset them by a constant to align them before we combine them. But they don’t just show different base levels, they also have different vertical land movement (VLM). To put different tide gauge stations on a “global” scale we need to cancel that out, which means we need to remove a trend from the data — because the primary effect of vertical land movement is rise or fall at a constant rate which differs from place to place, sometimes dramatically.

Global Warming Comes to Your Town

Like most people, I live on land, not at sea. I even live in the northern hemisphere.

Global warming isn’t the same everywhere. In particular, it’s happening faster on land areas than over the oceans. While the globe as a whole is warming at a rate of around 1.7 to 1.8 °C/century over the last several decades, the land areas alone have been warming up more than 50% faster, at about 2.8 °C/century. And of course, not all land areas are warming at the same rate either. On the whole, the northern hemisphere land is warming faster than southern hemisphere land; here in the north we’re heating up at around 3.2 °C/century (for land areas, I like to use the data from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project).

Fooled by Noise

I keep hearing the strangest things from strange quarters.

I know global warming didn’t take a “hiatus,” it didn’t “pause,” but some folks keep saying it did. I know Arctic sea ice hasn’t merely declined (dramatically in fact), it’s declining still, but some folks just can’t stop saying that the decline is over and/or that it’s actually in “recovery.”

I know wildfires in the western U.S. are getting worse and a big part (of course not all) of the reason is climate change, but some say that had nothing to do with it, it’s all due to something else. I know heat waves are getting worse and more frequent, but the usual suspects can’t help but deny it. I know sea level rise is accelerating but they insist it isn’t and that we shouldn’t even plan for the possibility.

Heat Wave 2040

Some things deserve repeating.

One of those things, which happened to come up in conversation recently, is that climate change has its most profound effect on extreme events. Climate change is a change in the probability function (the odds for each possible outcome) of weather, and when you look at probability functions you find that if they change in the way we expect them to, it can increase (or decrease) the chance of extremes by a surprising amount.