Vocal Voices

All that hot air

In Paris, just last year, they were having high level, urgent talks no how we could reduce our CO2 output so that the planet did not warm beyond 2C, over preindustrial levels, by 2100…

Great, good goal, way to go, loads of talk and grandstanding and very little movement. Just like every single one since Kyoto.

So what is the reality? We have some figures blaring in the press today; I saw it on the news this morning on the way into work. 1.35C higher…. So, really, since preindustrial, we’re trying to reduce it to 2C or absolute disaster will strike. Everyone agreed it will happen, just not how we avoid it.

Now, back to that 1.35C figure. If you read below the headlines you read that it was the 1951 to 1980. Now the youngsters might think that before 1951 was actually the Stone Age but we do know better. Here’s two nested comments from one of the climate sites I contribute to.

GISS just came in with an anomaly of a staggering +1,35oC above the 1951-1980 average which translated to pre-industrial value for 1881-1900 period gives an anomaly of +1,63oC. Incredible!!!

And in the Northern Hemisphere it was +1,90oC giving a variation from the pre-industrial mean of +2,18oC.

Now we come to semantics. This current warmth for 2016 is driven by a pretty large El Nino, about the 3rd largest in the last 50 years. In fact the last El Nino like it was 1997/8 and we all know that was a hottest year on record way above all the others. It is also true that temperatures crashed in 1999 to 2004.

But the real news is not that we have hot years and cold years and El Nino causes hotter years. The real news is that it only took 15 years to make the 1998 El Nino “bulge” into the average annual temperature. 2005 equalled 98, 2013 was so close it was pretty much in the same ball park and 2014 and 2015 exceeded it in temperature.

It may be that 2016 goes right off all known scales by a big margin and it will be overblown in the press to a fare thee well. Followed by stories of “cooling” in 2017-2019 as the El Nino turns negative and things cool. But that won’t be the really big news. The really big news will be ignored as it always is.

What is the really big news? That is the fact that the El Nino of 2016 will become the average temperature of 2031 and onwards. No matter what every nation on the earth does about it in the intervening time. The current balance of gasses absolutely guarantee that.

And to go back to the beginning of this article and follow down, that means that the global average temperature will be approx. 1.63C above preindustrial and the Northern Hemisphere average temperature will be circa 2.2C above preindustrial.

Probably another 15 years for global but almost 70 years before the Paris Climate agreement says it’s going to happen for the NH.

Happy days….

Don't forget the latest CO2 figures from NOAA.

2016: 402.6ppm. 2012: 392.3ppm. 1800 or thereabouts: 280ppm.

A 100 point rise in just over 200 years, then a 10 point rise in only four years.

"It's explosive compared to natural processes." say NOAA.

Keep it up, say economists, we need global economic growth.

Workingman wrote:Keep it up, say economists, we need global economic growth.

I know it's a disaster isn't it...

Then we have the wonders of sea level rise....



Remember the Australian floods in 2010/11. That was that 6mm of global sea level, which was evaporated due to the extremely high ocean temperatures, falling back to earth. The graph tells it all. The Skeptics had a field day when the levels dropped 6mm. Not a peep was heard from them when the aftermath and the final analysis was done. As you can see from the graph, in 2011 global sea levels rose 1mm per month for 10 months...

Global sea level rise from 1870 to the 1950's was somewhere between 1mm and 1.7mm per year. Today it's averaged down to 3.2 over multiple decades and that figure is not going to drop, it can only go up in the medium term.

Of course if you take a more recent graph, you get



That SLR between start 2008 and end 2015 is averaging about 4.75mm per year. But if you look even closer, the beginning of 2014 to the end of 2015 is around 8mm per year. Or put another way, 8cm per decade or about 64cm by 2100. I guess an even better way of putting it is 27cm (almost a foot) by 2050. I'm sure that has a much greater impact.

Especially as the IPCC is working on 30cm by 2100!!!!! The IPCC figure is calculated that the vast majority of that rise will happen in the latter half of the 21st century... On the current trajectory we could see 20cm per decade or more by 2080 and that would mean all bets were off.

That second chart has the El Nino chart at the bottom and you can see the size of our current Nino and the fact that it is nowhere near over yet....

As the article is entitled. Must be all that hot air then...