Yves here. While most of you were distracted by the war in Ukraine (or alternatively, minimizing engagement with the Internet to preserve your sanity), we have some very very bad climate developments in the Arctic and Antarctic, even by the standards of “bad climate news” having become normalized. This post recaps what happened and explains why.
By Bob Henson. Originally published at Yale Climate Connections
The bloodless term “anomaly” doesn’t do justice to the stupendous temperature departures seen across parts of both the Antarctic and Arctic in mid-March 2022. With the initial shock now behind them, scientists are taking stock of exactly what happened and what it might portend.
The observations from both polar regions – especially the Antarctic – would be almost laughable if they weren’t so unsettling. Even as some of the scientists working in these remote areas shared humorous takes on the bizarre warm-ups, one could find plenty of angst, as temperatures in the Antarctic soared to levels that were in some cases virtually unthinkable just a few days beforehand.
The Arctic’s warm spell was impressive in its own right. An atmospheric river (or AR, a narrow plume of warmth and moisture that typically pushes toward higher latitudes) surged from the North Atlantic well into the Arctic Ocean on a track running just east of Greenland. The AR was associated with a powerful mid-latitude cyclone that produced the lowest atmospheric pressure ever recorded in Greenland: 934.1 mb at Ikermiuarsuk, beating a value of 936.2 mb set at two locations in 1986 and 1988.
As the AR pushed north, temperatures rose close to the freezing point near the North Pole. Several stations in Svalbard, Norway – an archipelago that includes one of the world’s northernmost cities, Svalbard – set all-time records for March, with readings as high as 42°F.
Not far from Svalbard, heavy rain was observed atop sea ice by an ongoing field project called HALO-(AC)³ designed to investigate such warm intrusions along with cold air outbreaks.
I’m just finishing a couple of weeks of fieldwork at 78 degrees N, in Svalbard.
This was my 6th trip, and the 2nd when I was here for a record high temperature.
33% seems like a kind of high ratio, is all I’m saying. pic.twitter.com/UHQR4PSIP4
— Drew Steen (@drdrewsteen) March 18, 2022
Very sharp drop in #Arctic sea ice area (red line) around Svalbard this month – e.g., in response to conditions from the anomalous warm air advection event…
[Graphics available from https://t.co/xJOV1kldhl] pic.twitter.com/F1mw4DT2OA
— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) March 21, 2022
When It’s 60 Degrees Above Average
Even more impressive was the freakish warming at Earth’s South Pole. An atmospheric river originating near southeast Australia surged across much of the vast, barren landscape of East Antarctica, the coldest large plateau on the planet.
“This Antarctic heat wave definitely changes what we thought was possible for Antarctic weather,” tweeted Jonathan Wille (Université Grenoble Alpes).
Winds and temperature at 850 hPa, 18 UTC 17 March 2022, showing intrusion of unusually warm air over Antarctica.
animatinoo from https://t.co/1HnaYW59zf pic.twitter.com/g1W7Ws2xL8
— Dr. Mathew Barlow (@MathewABarlow) March 21, 2022
East Antarctica doesn’t get gradual springs and autumns, to put it mildly. Instead, months of winter darkness switch abruptly into summers with near-constant sunshine and temperatures still frigid but far warmer than in winter. The winter cool-down arrives only a few weeks later.
In the case of March 2022, just days before the southern autumn equinox of March 20—a time when temperatures have normally plunged close to winter levels—the atmospheric river spread warmth-trapping clouds and moisture well inland across East Antarctica.
As a result, temperatures soared to levels as much as 50°F or more above average over broad areas on March 18 and remained far above average for several days.
- At Vostok, a Russian weather station launched in 1957, the high of –17.7°C (0.1°F) on March 18 smashed the record for any March by 26.8°F and came in roughly 63°Fabove the average daily high. The 26.8°F represents the largest margin in world history for breaking a monthly record at any site with at least 40 years of data, according to Maximiliano Herrera, an expert on international weather records. It’s also the only time Vostok has gotten above zero Fahrenheit outside of December or January, never mind mid-March. Vostok’s all-time high is –14°C (6.8°F).
- About 350 miles away, on terrain and elevation roughly similar to Vostok, the French-Italian research site Concordia Station (staffed year-round, as is the case for Vostok) set its all-time record high of –11.8°C (10.8°F) on March 18. Data has been collected year round at this site only since 2007, a period too brief for an all-time record to carry too much weight. However, the reading was a mind-blowing 67°F above the daily average high of around –49°C (–56°F).
Pete Akers, a postdoctoral researcher at France’s Institut des Géosciences de l’Environnement, spent weeks at Concordia Station as part of a research expedition in the summer of 2019-20. Akers recounted his experiences in a series of guest posts for Category 6 (the predecessor of this blog).
“I think the biggest thing that people may not realize is just how hard it is to get really warm on the plateau outside of the 45 to 60 days surrounding the solstice [in late December],” Akers said. “The snow is so reflective that it doesn’t hold any heat, and there’s no rock for thousands of kilometers in any direction.”
Moreover, he added, “Concordia is 10,000 feet up and about 700 miles inland, so it’s rarely impacted by [storms] from the coast. The end result is generally a very consistent and stable temperature regime on a seasonal and day-to-day basis.”
By mid-March, when darkness is fast returning, “temperatures are typically almost at the winter minimum, not just halfway between summer and winter. So a proper comparison wouldn’t just be somewhere like Washington, D.C., breaking its all-time heat record in September—it’d be like breaking it in early November.”
Compared to the average -45 °C, this is beach weather for the winter-over crew at Concordia https://t.co/LD8JsSxJYe
— Dr. Jonathan Wille (@JonathanWille) March 21, 2022
Not all of Antarctica was basking in relative warmth. The atmospheric river didn’t extend as far inland as South Pole Station, where readings remained much closer to seasonal averages. Temperatures dipped below -60°C at the South Pole on March 21 even as highs at Vostok and Concordia rose above –26°C, readings that would have set monthly highs had they occurred at the start of the warm spell instead of well into it.
In an ironic twist, the “not-so-cold wave” brought massive amounts of snow to parts of East Antarctica. The atmospheric river squeezed out the snow from the unusually mild air, which was packing more than 0.50” of precipitable water (the amount of moisture in a vertical column of air), as the air was forced onshore and upslope against the high plateau.
The region’s snow cycle is driven largely by light accumulations balanced by sublimation (evaporation of snow into dry air), so this month’s heavy snow was a noteworthy infusion, countered only slightly by pockets of heavy rain and ice melt near the coast.
Based on model reconstructions, Xavier Fettweiss (University of Liège) estimated that March 17 was the Antarctic Ice Sheet’s fourth wettest day overall since 1980.
“Moisture intrusion events and atmospheric rivers — they do happen, but this is just to a different degree of intensity,” Wille told the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang.
Meanwhile, the sea ice that expands and contracts around the continent each year reached its lowest level in 43 years of satellite monitoring on February 25. Unlike the Arctic, the Antarctic had had no sustained decrease in sea ice extent for decades, actually setting consecutive record highs in 2012, 2013, and 2014.
A profound shift then followed, with 2017, 2018, and 2019 placing first, second, and third in sea ice extent minima until this year beat out 2017.
Wow, it’s certainly been a month of extreme events in the #Antarctic – exceptional warmth over the last few days from the atmospheric river (left) and setting an all-time record low sea ice extent (right) pic.twitter.com/K8LDkQ2WSc
— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) March 22, 2022
A Complex Climate-Change Fingerprint
While the March warm blast in the Arctic was highly consistent with regional and global warming, the trends in Antarctica have been less straightforward.
Western Antarctica, and especially the peninsula extending north toward South America, have warmed dramatically since the mid-20th century, outpacing the rate of worldwide warming. By contrast, the South Pole and East Antarctica haven’t seen marked temperature rises in recent decades. One reason is the ozone hole. In the Antarctic stratosphere, human-caused ozone depletion (which is now gradually waning as a result of controls on ozone-depleting emissions) has led to an intensified polar vortex, which has helped to keep cold air pooled over the continent.
Although the atmospheric river of March 2022 was a historically extreme example, it’s not the only time such an amplified weather pattern has pushed warm air well inland across East Antarctica, according to veteran researcher John Turner of the British Antarctic Survey. Turner is lead author of an analysis published in February of an extreme warm-up fostered by an atmospheric river hitting the East Antarctic coast, together with warming induced by downslope flow, that occurred in the first week of December 1989 (just prior to the summer solstice).
“Incursions of warm air seem to be regular if not frequent occurrences,” Turner wrote in an email. “Why such high temperatures occurred [this month] across such a large area needs investigating once all the data have been brought together.”
Climate models are really cool, example #9754:
We can use large ensembles to get a better sense of the odds of the types of temperature extremes that we saw in Antarctica this week. https://t.co/50tIbITarX
— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) March 22, 2022
There’s no obvious reason, other than the backdrop of general global warming, why the Arctic and Antarctic would happen to set such eye-popping warmth records within days of each other. The hemispheric climate regimes of north and south are largely distinct. Phenomena centered on the equator, such as El Niño and La Niña or the Madden-Julian Oscillation, can have impacts extending to both northern and southern latitudes. But scientists haven’t yet identified any single culprit that would be expected to cause such dramatic warm extremes near both poles at nearly the same time.
In fact, La Niña events, such as the one that’s been in place most of the time since 2020, tend to produce colder-than-normal seasonal averages in Antarctica, according to David Schneider, a National Center for Atmospheric Research expert on factors that shape Antarctic weather and climate.
Only a few months ago, the South Pole had its coldest average winter temperature(April-September) in 65 years of record keeping, with a six-month average of -78°F (-61°C).
Over the longer term, though, early-winter readings below -50°C at the South Pole have become significantly less frequent over the last couple of decades, according to a paper published in February and led by Linda Keller of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Big Takeaway: Don’t Be Too Surprised
Above all, what the twin polar warmings reinforce is that, more than ever, we can expect the unexpected in a warming atmosphere. Wille likened the extremity of the Antarctic warm-up to the similarly out-of-bounds heat observed in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia in the summer of 2021, with both occurrences seemingly implausible until they happened.
“For me, it’s hard to feel surprised by events like this anymore,” Schneider wrote in an email. He pointed out that studies of past climate indicate that, at times when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were similar to their current values of around 420 parts per million, the Antarctic Ice Sheet was significantly smaller.
“How exactly [the ice sheet] loses mass, and how quickly it happens, are fascinating scientific questions,” Schneider wrote.
Speaking on a personal level, he added: “The question of ‘Will humanity do anything meaningful to slow down self-imposed rapid climate change?’ is a question that I grapple with daily.”
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So far, I’ve just read the headlines on this as I find the bad news in the world overwhelming at the moment. By any reasonable measure, this should be the most important event of the year. But… well, its a grey rhino.
It needs to be emphasised over and over that the climate does not change slowly over time like geology. Even many scientists go around with this false model in their heads of climate changing slowly over decades and centuries. Even back in the 1980’s when I spent time looking at cores taken from peat bogs and lake beds it was very clear that climate changes can be startlingly abrupt. Far, far faster than people can adapt. We have no idea whats about to hit us.
The most recent evidence out there, from pollen samples in Israel, to stalagmite samples in the Peloponnese, to diatom samples in the mud under the Mediterranean, to measuring historic river flows in Iraq and Egypt, etc., seems to show that the first Dark Ages was caused by an abrupt climate change that cause severe famine and mass migration – and that climate change happened in ONE generation. I don’t know how long the climate change lasted but it did take about 500 years for the areas around the Mediterranean to recover.
Things don’t look good for humanity. It appears that we are more interested in creating new famines for the world instead of preparing for the huge famine that is looming. It is probably too late to stop it now.
While this is undoubtedly true, all of the talked of abrupt climate changes I know about entail glacial breakdown which released an enormous amount of cold water.
I haven’t read anything similar on the top end of warming – the only places in the world with outflow that have anything close right now are Greenland and west Antarctica. Which I mean Greenland is on its way to shutting down the Atlantic current but…
Do you know of any other abrupt triggers from history?
I know all the tipping points to but expect most to take decades to play out. Which is still far too fast to adapt, but nothing like the records showing 2C+ drop within two years or whatever that these continent sized glacial breakdowns created
Well this certainly qualifies as abrupt warming
Some models and informed speculation show if we really crank up the CO2 we can get both a rapid freeze due to Atlantic current shutdown and a rapid rise only a few decades later. That’d be fun
The freeze would be “local” to wherever the disappeared Atlantic current no longer carries heat to.
What about the place that a disappeared Atlantic current no longer carries heat away from? Wouldn’t the section of ocean whose heat drives the Atlantic current forward to begin with just get hotter and hotter, and gas off more and more water vapor, which would fuel bigger better storms around that section of ocean?
So . . . colder “here” and hotter “there” at the same time.
I’m not a climatologist and the issue of triggering points is I think not an area with a lot of consensus. In the immediate aftermath of the last ice age there was a lot of instability with a series of very sudden switches from cold to warm, dry to wet. In northwestern Europe there was also a very sudden change around 4,000BP (I can’t recall the precise date), which seems to have led to widespread famine – its visible in pretty much all peat bog cuttings in northern Europe. More recent ones seem to have been related to vulcanism, but to what degree a major volcano ’causes’ a change or simply acts as the forcing on an existing processionals is something I think still hotly debated.
But regional changes have always been very common. Pollen records and peat records show often very rapid changes – literally over a year have taken place many times in the past. In early history this simply meant people had to move on to somewhere else. This simply isn’t possible now. Its not possible for wildlife either. We don’t need global temperature changes for climate change to be a catastrophe – we just need sharp regional changes in major agriculture areas or highly populated areas.
And what about impacts of comets and asteroids? If you want to get your yaya’s out for instant climate change, check out the work of Randall Carlson on YouTube.
You do not need to be a climatologist to convince yourself of one tipping point we seem to be fast approaching:
Fill a pot with water and add some ice cubes. Allowing time for the temperature to reach equilibrium, measure the temperature of the water in the pot. Now place the pot on your stove and begin heating it while monitoring the temperature of the water. I believe you will notice an interesting change around the time all the ice is melted. Think of the heat coming in from the sun as your stove, the ice caps as your ice, and the oceans as your water.
Also see: “Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change Anticipating Surprises (2013)” available as a pdf from the National Academy Press http://nap.edu/18373. Chapter two of this report covers Abrupt Changes of Primary Concern. Dr. White, one of the authors of this report also provides an entertaining and accessible presentation of some of the material in this report in his 2014 Nye Lecture presented to the Fall Meeting of the AGU [American Geophysical Union] : “Abrupt Change — Past, Present, Future” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRs4kIthJ9k
I have not kept up with the most recent reports from the IPCC or recent publications. However I believe Hansen et al. “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 ◦ C global
warming could be dangerous” http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/16/3761/2016/ remains a moderately accessible review of rapid paleoclimate changes and impacts. I do not believe the present understanding of what tipping points lead to the changes described has advanced much beyond what was known in 2016 when Hansen et al. was published.
Great post, Jeremy.
I like to use the example of picnic-table iced tea.
Take a glass of iced tea, and place it on top of the picnic table on a warm summer day. Put a thermometer in it.
Come back every 10 minutes, and record the temperature of the tea.
You’ll note that the temp stays roughly the same, maybe 40-45 degrees, until the ice melts.
Then the temperature….goes up, and fast. Within just a few minutes, that iced-tea is … ambient temperature tea. Warm.
Why?
There’s this notion of “heat of fusion” – e.g. the amount of energy it takes to get ice to transit from solid to liquid.
It takes about 334 joules (units of energy) to convert a gram of ice to a gram of water. The heat (energy) to make that conversion is absorbed from the immediate environment.
For comparison, it only takes 4.1 joules to increase the temperature of a gram of water by 1 degree F.
It takes 83 x more energy to melt ice – to move from 32 to 33F, than it does to move from 33 to 34 or 97 to 98, etc.
83 times. That’s a big number.
The act of melting ice absorbs an enormous amount of heat before the water / air that ice is immersed in rises in sensible (measurable by thermometer) heat.
That means that all that ice-cover at the poles and mountain-tops is acting like a dam, holding back temperature increase.
That’s part 1 of the significance of ice melting. The other one is that dark sea water absorbs light, and re-radiates that light as heat. As the ice melts, more dark-colored, light-absorbing sea-water is exposed.
Ice is white; it reflects most of the sun’s radiation _before_ it’s absorbed and re-radiated as heat (infrared). When sea-water absorbs the sun’s light, and re-radiates it as heat, most of that re-radiated heat is radiated laterally and down, into the sea, heating the sea-water.
H2O is an interesting substance. The heat releases/absorption involved in phase changes are enormous. I have a passing interest in thunderstorms. The amount of heat released in an average storm is very large. The same order of magnitude as the energy released by each of the WW2 atomic bombs.
https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-total-energy-of-a-thunderstorm-calculated
‘climate changes can be startlingly abrupt’
Add to that sudden phenomena like those described in this post plus cyclones, tornadoes etc that are becoming increasingly weird and destructive.
Last year we had a phenomenon I had never seen in central Spain with snow accumulation and a long lasting temperature inversion. It was called ‘Filomena’ and the snow storm sprawled lots of pine trees not used to such snow load. This year, we are having sandstorms from Sahara as I have never seen (particularly in winter). Interestingly these two different outcomes come from similar atmospheric processes (low pressure vortexes sagging from the arctic to very low latitudes) last year closer to the Canary Islands brought snow and this year, closer to Morocco bringing sand.
And we just had a freak tornado outbreak here in Minnesota last December 15:
It was the first time tornadoes have ever struck in December (and a full month after the previous record latest tornado of the year) and less than a week after the previous storm dropped 20in / 50cm of snow on the eastern side of the Twin Cities (which all subsequently melted in our fastest recorded snow melt).
Indeed, this is the exactly the kind of things we might have to get used to see. Unexpected and damaging.
Freak is the new normal. It will be hard to retro-fit existing houses to withstand the F6 and F7 tornadoes of the future. But new houses should be built to withstand the F6 and F7 tornadoes of the future. At least climate change realists should have such houses built for themselves. And withhold the information on how to do it from the climate change denialists.
Building underground or into the sides of canyon walls looks to be the optimal strategy in heavy tornado zones. Just don’t forget to factor in drainage. Building underground in a valley floor is sub-optimal technique. Go up the hills a bit and dig in there. Still do not forget to build with drainage in mind. Tornados seem to be associated with strong storms, as in lots of water crying from the sky. Round here, and especially in old New Orleans, building up on piers was simply a compensating strategy for occasional floods. I have read about New Orleans in the seventen and eighteen hundreds experiencing several feet of water :in the streets,” and under the houses, during big storms and during the spring flood. As N’Awlins learned the other day, tornados go where they want, when they want.
I see that not once was there mention of the on-going earth magnetic excursion. This has significant effect on the upper atmospheric solar control.
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.3047701
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016JD024890
Interesting. My reading of the discussion and conclusion is that if there is an upper atmospheric solar control, then it is poorly understood, and a lot more investigation is needed. Perhaps this is why it wasn’t mentioned?
Some light reading material including his book “Weatherman’s Guide to the Sun”
https://www.Suspicious0bservers.org
https://www.SpaceWeatherNews.com
https://www.ObservatoryProject.com
https://www.MagneticReversal.org
Has this Ben Davidson published any peer-reviewed scientific papers?
The scientific community is coming around to Henrik Svensmark’s theory of cosmic radiation’s low-cloud cooling effects. In conjunction with how active the sun is and how that modifies earth’s magnetic field. The current zeitgeist is that Henrik does have a viable hypothesis. In a nutshell, CO2 is not the culprit causing global warming, but rather the effect of global warming caused by a combination of sun activity and cosmic radiation forcing more CO2 into the atmosphere. Certainly that is obvious for methane. However, that still leaves us with global warming made worse by CO2. The mix of weather at the antarctic sounds a little like lake effect snow storms on the inland slopes while the warming oceans are melting the western ice sheets. Almost like a balancing act. And already the once-mild climate enjoyed by Europe is changing to look more like the North American variety of weather. And toss in ARs now. We have no choice but to adapt. It looks like a full time job. A mobilization. Those who argue against CO2 being the problem are wrong because CO2 is something we can control to lessen the effects of global warming. CO2 could even be a long term counterbalance to extreme global cooling and therefore should be conserved always. But we really do need a coherent plan.
I don’t find any evidence that the scientific community is coming around to this theory.
Here is just one of many articles that don’t give the idea much credibility and based in a pretty solid science.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/earth/climate/cosmic-ray-theory-of-global-warming-gets-cold-response/
That sounds like the “denial” stage in the Kubler-Ross ladder of dealing with impending death of the self. At least it sounds that way to me.
The carbon skyflooding warmists have a record of successful predictions of climate response to various levels of carbon skyflooding. Do the cosmic radiationist warmists have an equal record of successfull predictions? Or even a record of any predictions at all whatsoever?
I had a quick look at the Wiki article on Svensmark and it sounds like his ideas are controversial at present. Unlike the role of CO2 (and man-made carbon emissions) in global warming, which are proven beyond any doubt. Don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise. I am a meteorologist.
Yes it is controversial. They are accumulating more/better evidence for the theory; but nothing definitive yet. You are correct, the theory has not yet been accepted. I’m not saying Svensmark is correct – I’m saying that even if he turns out to be correct, it doesn’t make any difference for us because CO2 is the only thing we can control – we can’t control our own sun nor cosmic radiation. So we need to address CO2. Yesterday.
This is a reasonable way to look at it. We should all be aware that the people who are advancing the Svensmark theory and will pay to publicise it are doing so in order to sell the case that CO2 levels don’t need to be controlled now, tomorrow, or ever.
It’s no longer the long-haired guys in robes who are saying “The End Is Near”–now it’s the people in white coats in the labs who are saying it. From my vantage point of people around me and via what I learn from media, most human beings are just as oblivious, regardless who’s saying it. There’s no good in trying to finesse this: human beings appear, far more than not, to be short-sighted and focused about 1 foot away from their own skin. Sorry, I’m not a big fan of the “human nature” dismissal, but whatever the cause, that appears to me to be the behavioral norm. Of course there are voices and demonstrations, and there will be more…but we all know the actual power of these, at least to date, is almost entirely symbolic. We are out of time–NOW and that’s a fact. The question isn’t whether we are going to get hammered–it’s too late to avoid that–but just how severely. As always, the nations/peoples of color will “get it” worst and first…but no one, not even the most delusional, self-absorbed 1% celebrities we see in corporate media, will be spared. If there is hope, it is in massive social disobedience, all across the world…and if it happens, spontaneously, there will be the bit of hope that is real.
Sorry, I’m not a big fan of the “human nature” dismissal…
It seems to me just Biblical-based bullshit masquerading as common knowledge, often used to deflect or terminate reasoned discussion or argument.
When someone brings up “human nature” my natural instinct is to put a boot to their ass. So I guess you can say that I’m not a fan of that term either.
You were doing ok until that last sentence. There is no hope. And massive social disobedience would not help either. It will only add to the chaos at hand. There will be massive social disorder, but it will be solely reactionary. As in: we need cheaper bread. Gov’t: sorry there is no bread!
Thank you, Yves.
For the past five or so years, few, if any whales, have migrated from the Antarctic to Mauritius in the southern winter. Locals often sail out and observe from a respectful distance, but it’s not happening any more.
In the 19th century, whalers from New England and Norway would hunt around Mauritius. Some personnel settled down there.
Marie Jana Korbelová is taking us with her? Biden’s baiting Russia is largely to bail-out US fracked LNG/ oil export. Exponential, run-away AGW to follow, from scores-of-thousands of new, leaky overlapping fracked well bores spewing methane as these blow-out, kick & are re-re-fracked & oilgarchs buy up media, legislators, etc. Much of this is happening amidst helpless COVID survivors, now working uninsured 1099 gigs, unable to afford gas, let alone used vehicles with better gas mileage.
https://www.desmog.com/2018/04/11/climate-change-two-degree-warming-fracking-natural-gas-rush-ingraffea/
https://www.postcarbon.org/david-hughes-shale-reality-check-2019/
Add to all this the expected rise in sea levels associated with Polar warming. Sea level rise has been ‘framed’ to conform with the Gradualist theory of climate change. As in, the sea level will rise so many centimeters per decade off into the next century, etc. This ‘event’ supports the Catastrophist theory of climate change. When such processes happen, they happen quickly.
I do worry about such tropical paradises as the Colonel’s Indian Ocean Isles. I hope the locals are planning now for the wetter future.
We’re glad we moved away from the coast.
Stay safe.
Were you able to sell your coastal property to global warming deniers who “don’t believe in global warming”? That would have been the justest and fairest thing to be able to do.
No good mountaineer. All we ever got were “give away price” offers. Basically, the coast is divided between enclaves of high rollers, who can aford to take the loss if it happens, or dirt poor service workers crammed into apartment projects, and cheaply built ones at that. Due to the tightening of the “rules” concerning construction close to the coast, only the well off can now afford to build or buy there. Poor to lower middle class folks are priced out of the market.
One reason that there is a flood of low wage workers from “south of the border” here in the North American Deep South is that “ordinary” people cannot afford to start families and purchase housing at what the prevailing wages have sunk to. Many have moved away in search of the tattered remnants of the American Dream. (We moved inland almost a hundred miles in search of the tattered remnants of “dry living.” Now we do battle with various sorts of Karens and Exceptional PMCs. [Sorry to any real Karens. It’s not personal. You go with the meme you have to hand.])
Marie Jana Korbelová is taking us with her? Biden’s baiting Russia is largely to bail-out US fracked LNG/ oil export. Exponential, run-away AGW to follow, from scores-of-thousands of new, leaky overlapping fracked well bores spewing methane as these blow-out, kick & are re-re-fracked & oilgarchs buy up media, legislators, etc.
https://www.desmog.com/2018/04/11/climate-change-two-degree-warming-fracking-natural-gas-rush-ingraffea/
https://www.postcarbon.org/david-hughes-shale-reality-check-2019/
https://giphy.com/gifs/nasagoddard-nasa-goddard-sea-ice-l2SpLN6gQZm9A43ZK
Mr. or Ms. Tsari: From all that I know, of all these thoughtful comments, yours are most wise. I empathize with pitiable Princess Cassandra.
You’d have to have BEEN there, I guess?
https://prospect.org/environment/oil-company-profit-gouging-began-with-the-cares-act/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/05/14/pipeline-politics-from-afghanistan-to-gaza/
This sentence should be recalled when there are discussions of geoengineering:
“Above all, what the twin polar warmings reinforce is that, more than ever, we can expect the unexpected in a warming atmosphere.”
I believe expecting the unexpected clearly suggests we do not understand climate systems well enough to confidently attempt to control them.
The “unexpected” isn’t “unexpected” if we “expect” it. That conundrum shows the limitations of the language.
We understand climate systems well enough to understand that if we retain more heat at the surfacesphere, that certain predicted results ( which have already happened and are happening stronger and more) will keep on happening even moremoremore.
The level of the warmists’ understanding of these systems is shown by the number of correct predictions the warmists have made. Language games may well be employed to obscure that basic fact.
Yeah, but is it really “mind-boggling”?
Maybe its “mind-buggering”.
It buggers the mind.
The unprecedented temperatures in east Antarctica northwestern Canada and other places are an example of what I call in my book a Climate Vocabulary of the Future ‘punctuated disequilibrium’
. . . ” Speaking on a personal level, he added: “The question of ‘Will humanity do anything meaningful to slow down self-imposed rapid climate change?’ is a question that I grapple with daily.”
Humanity-at-large? Humanity as a unitary whole? No. Why? Humanity is divided into mutually hostile gangs and factions and classes. Some of those gangs and factions and classes want to re-cool the global.
Others want to keep heating up the global. Which set of gangs and factions will win the power struggle to set global climate-affecting policy and action? That is probably one of those questions which, to take Trotsky or whomever it was who said that out of context, is not decided by elections but will be decided by civil war. Or rather, a series of civil wars all over the earth.
If the control-global-warming factions, gangs and classes can suppress or exterminate the let-global-warming-rip gangs, factions and classes . . . . so that the let-global-warming-rip gangs, factions and classes are no longer physically alive to prevent climate action, then climate action will be taken.
Otherwise, it won’t be. Certainly not as long as the let-global-warming-rip supporters are alive to prevent climate policy action.
Perhaps the supporters of stop-global-warming can achieve a sort of virtual extermination of the enemies of life on earth by working out how to seccede themselves and their sub-societies and sub-regions from the let-global-warming-rip economy and create separate survival economies among themselves, and then turn those separate survival economy-societies into fortresses from which to launch raids against the let-global-warming-rip mainstream economy with the hope of destroying it from functional existence, thereby destroying its supporters’ ability to keep warming the global.
I posted this before. But it pretty much says everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvFy2TuPDaw
PPS: I am a meteorologist. And this is NSFW if your employers are touchy about profanity. Could also be problematic if they are touchy about reality.