A warming world

[Suff]

Before we hit the winter maximum in the Arctic and the Daily Manipulate tries to tell us "it's a record" (well it might but there will be no record this year), It's time to look at how unseasonably warm it is up there.

The Cryosphere Today page shows that we are in uncharted low ice conditions for this time of year.

The AMSR-2 satellite images shows us why...

And the DMI SST data shows us how ridiculously hot the Atlantic side is... Yep that really is +6C water just off the south of Svalbard and it really is +4C water in the Baltic up to the Arctic Circle....

Interesting weather this year. The 2015 melting season was weak in the Atlantic because it was so cool. The winter has been the polar (yes pun all groan at once), opposite....

Add to that the fact that our solar output for cycle 24 (scroll down for the charts), is about half what it was in cycle 23 and there you are. Man made warming ready to go....

[Workingman]

Sorry Suff, but you will not win over the general public with such links; the vast majority do not understand them and cannot be bothered to try.

They, the links, will be scientifically correct, but the average Jane or Joe will not connect to them - they are the ones to be won over..

For me, what needs to be done, is for the science to be linked to actual events - and that is difficult. If that means naming storms, so be it. The scientific evidence needs to be brought down to the level of the ordinary man and woman.

As things stand there is an us and them scenario - Us, being the believers, Them, being the deniers.

[Aggers]

I agree with Frank.

I can't make heads or tails of the information given on those links.
What on earth is a Cryosphere.

These scientist want to learn how to present information in a way
that can be understood by the average 'man in the street', instead
of trying to show us how clever they are.

[Suff]

I take it that people can read a chart which shows the yellow line (current year), below all other years in the record. This is the record in which we’ve actually been able to record it. These kind of line charts are fairly standard and the simplest way to represent that data.

Granted that the picture of the ice in the Arctic is not really that much use to anyone who does not follow it, but it does illustrate the point if you know what to look for. I did assume that with a coloured temperature graph and scale it would be self explanatory. Blue starts about 6C. It’s blue around Svalbard. That means the sea is 6C around Svalbard instead of 2M of pack ice. Normally that sea would be -2 or less. Which is an 8C higher than normal state. I did think that it would be obvious that the sea water, well inside the Arctic circle, in the middle of a polar winter, should not be so far above freezing. I know that, to me and you WM, this is incredible because we have taken the time to research what it should be. However I did expect that it would have some impact.

Aggers, I’ve been reading and working with this stuff for so long it’s easy to forget that people don’t know the terms. So I hopped onto the NSIDC (US National Snow and Ice Data Center), as they usually have decent explanations. As I read the start of the paragraph my heart fell. It didn’t really mean much to me. They were describing in scientific terms why they used the word “sphere”… However the latter part was better.
[url]https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/glossary/C?keys=&page=1
]quote] the term refers collectively to the portions of the earth where water is in solid form, including snow cover, floating ice, glaciers, ice caps, ice sheets, seasonally frozen ground and perennially frozen ground (permafrost).[/quote][/url]

As you can imagine, trying to explain that every time you want to talk about an area of long term snow cover or glaciers or floating ice caps, it is much easier to use the term Cryosphere. Of course the person you are talking too needs to understand it….

WM you talk about trying to communicate to people. But unless they are interested they are simply not going to take it in. Like the fact, I read last night, that the temperatures in the Arctic have been warmer than average for more than 500 consecutive days. A vitally important piece of information but “Joe public” is not going to be interested unless you can translate that into specific events as you suggested.

So, if we say “Storm Frank was a result of Global Warming”, what happens next? What happens next is that the denialists pull up 100 weathermen who give 1,000 reasons for why you can’t blame the climate for “One Storm”, there are too many variables.

OK so let’s try this the other way. The way the scientists have worked out.

Ask me if the current number of storms battering the UK and flooding all those homes would have happened without Global Warming. The correct answer is “Almost certainly not”. Those same weather men would then be put on the spot to find a weather term which would explain storm after storm running up the East coast of the US and slamming into the UK, overwhelming drainage designed for normally excessive weather and flooding people out. Which it would be impossible for them to do.

Win for the Climate Change group you would think?

But at what cost? Now let’s take this analogy and apply it to sea level rise. So when the London Barrier is overtopped because sea level rise reached a predicted point 30 years early, the Scientists will be able to say “Almost certainly not”, the weather men won’t be able to put it on a 10,000 year storm so that’s a win isn’t it?

But what about all those people flooded out?

Much is made, by the denialist crowd, about how the atmosphere is unpredictable, about how we can’t model the Cryosphere because we don’t really know how it behaves. About how the atmosphere is so huge that we can’t calculate how the sun and the clouds and everything else works on it…

Right. Here’s another “normal human” piece of communication. If you hold up a standard Basket Ball and consider it’s size, relative to the Earth, the Atmosphere would be a layer 1/8th of an inch thick around the basket ball…

I’ve given up trying to convince people about what they should already have known 20 years ago. I’m just reporting what is happening, for the fun of reporting the changes ongoing…. During the last storm to run up from the Atlantic, over the arctic, the North Pole recorded temperatures slightly over 0C for a short time. The Scientists report this as an anomaly (a difference from the norm), of 20C. In fact, at this time of the year, it would not be unreasonable for the North Pole to be -90C. So I see that as a possible change in temperature change close to that of boiling water. Over millions of square miles a temperature raise between 20C and 90C.. If that doesn’t communicate the sheer scale of the energy being retained by our planet due to CO2 emissions from humans I have absolutely no other way of showing it.

Anyway, for anyone interested in following up, both Cryosphere today (linked above) and the University of Bremen (linked above), have historical archive data to compare with previous years. Ditto the DMI has archives of data for Air temperature, Ice Area and Sea Surface Temperature. All you have to do is go to the home pages and navigate the links…

[pederito1]

If it means we are not going to get any snow here this winter, I refrain from making any further comment.

[Suff]

I do admit that I thought having people flooded out 4 times in the same winter would have raised more questions as to why there was so much water falling from the sky.

Apparently it only raised the question as to why the government and councils couldn't just make it go somewhere after it fell.....

Oh well.

In Australia, after 11 years of drought, the people finally started to rumble on about water management between the east and the west (which had plenty of water or even too much). Then it rained for two years and it was all shelved. Now they are back into drought again. 2 years of wet was not anything like enough to recover 11 years of drought, but that's how people think.

Then next 11 year drought will see conditions massively worse than the previous one. Yet none of the work is being done to head off that disaster before it arrives. Once it is there it will always be a situation of too little too late as they try to recover from it. The UK has done the same, years of drought brought in talk of a transnational pipeline to distribute excess water around the country. The drought goes away and it is shelved again.

As the Victorians knew, you do the engineering in the good times preparing for the bad times. Because when the bad times are there, there is no time to do the engineering.

Hey, Ho. Today we seem to be fully in the mode of doing the engineering after the disaster, not even during. The Thames barrier was a case in point. The 20th century seminal engineering feat to control water in the Thames. Yet, in fact, it was an after the fact attempt to stop London flooding.... All over again.

There may be minor upsides in the lack of colder weather, but they will be more than balanced out by extra dry spring, summer fires and total flooding in the autumn/winter...

Welcome to our warming world...

[Workingman]

WM you talk about trying to communicate to people. But unless they are interested they are simply not going to take it in.

And that, for me, is the big problem: how do we get people interested?

I came across this with my own children. I wanted to get my children deeper into subjects than they were being taught in school. I especially wanted them to know more about the sciences, geography and history, but it was an uphill struggle. TV was the obvious medium, yet everything was being delivered in an Open University sort of way, and by presenters who were clones of Patrick Moore. It was all very preachy and very dry - a real turn off.

Then came along a new breed of presenters, who in turn spawned the likes of Kathy Sykes, Jim Al-Khalili, Alice Roberts, Brian Cox, et al. The new style was inclusive and drew in the the mildly interested and the disinterested alike. They did not succeed by dumbing their subjects down, they did it by explaining things in the language of the people and by simple, but practical, examples of more complex thoughts and processes.

This is how I see the global warming/climate change debate having to go in order to get those who haven't the slightest clue at least a little bit interested.

[Suff]

One of the big problems is that the communication of information from the scientific community has, generally, been designed to communicate with other scientists, not mere mortals. This is changing as they realise that the scientific consensus is close to 100% (climate scientists the rest don’t count at all). So now they have twin paths of communication, one for the scientists to communicate the technicalities and one for the public in general.

But, again, it’s hard. A lot of the terms used have been created to save dozens of words, like the Cryosphere term. OK it’s simple, hear it once and remember it when explained. But disinterested people are not really interested in even hearing it once.

It’s also hard when people are so self centred. They want to know it is going to be a disaster in the next 5 years or they are, simply, not interested. It’s too far away. Granted communicating that you are selling out your grandchildren to pay for your convenience and cheap energy today is not likely to be welcomed; which makes it really hard to make the point that 20 years from now things are not going to look so good.

Many people already believe that the scientists have already been on that kick for far too long. After all they told us 20 years ago the same thing and look, the world didn’t end. But the point is they didn’t say the world would end, they said things would be worse. Nobody even seems to remember that over 14,000 people died in France in the 2003 heat wave. Even less remember the people in the UK who died as a result, even though I remember a neighbour who died of breathing difficulties during the 2003 summer.

Or the 2010 massive Russian forest fires which took huge military resources to finally bring under control and even then it was a close run thing. 56,000 people died from the effects of the smog and the heat wave.

Nowadays, every year almost, people are dying of heat prostration in Pakistan and India. Places where people are used to heat and know how to deal with it. But they just can’t cope with 55C temperatures day and night for weeks on end. It was the 30C temps at night which killed the French, not the 45C – 50C temps during the day. That you can get away from if it cools at night.

So the cycle turns. The scientists predict more dire circumstances and the people just assume it’s going to be another “nothing” like the last predictions. I must admit I often wonder how you can turn tens of thousands (probably the better part of 100,000 over a decade), of dead people into “nothing”…

The short version of the communication is this. We are going to see More drought, More storms, More flooding, More wildfires and More heat waves with thousands of deaths. Not in 25 years, 50 years or 100 years but Right the Hell NOW. It’s already started, we are already in the cycle and we are going to be impacted by it. It may be 10 year cycles now but it will be 5 year cycles soon. Also each cycle will happen on different years. So heat one year, Storms the next, flooding the next, Crippling winter the next, Drought the next…. And so on. Imagine that in a 5 year cycle. You never get a rest. If it’s not heat exhaustion, your house is blowing away, or flooded out, or frozen to a block of ice, or your water is on standpipes….

Spread it out over a decade and it’s enough for people to forget. Shrink it to 5 years and it will just seem like one disaster after another.

Now here’s the fun point. The off switch comes 1,000 to 10,000 years from now if we stop right now…

That should be simple enough. Clear enough language. Something everyone should sit up and take notice of. Everyone should be worried and trying to find out what they can do to make it better.

What are most people doing? They’re looking in the press to see the next “Weatherman” who disagrees with the “climate” models (Weathermen have NO say on this whatsoever, so anyone who is putting up a Weatherman as a “scientist” with a different view is lying to you), so they can go back to a “normal” life. The problem is that for the majority of people who live in the UK it will seem like a normal life. For now! It’s only those who are flooded, blown away, burned out or out of water who will realise. Because it does not happen to them again in the following 5 years, even they will assume that it was “just bad luck”. Until it comes back 5 years later even worse than last time…

After all, how many of you were directly impacted by the storms we have had over the last couple of months?

All the information is there, people just have to go and look. But they won’t. Therefore they won’t demand that their local and central government, instead of just taxing them, carries out the infrastructure projects which will insulate them from what is surely to come. After all, 2ppm of CO2 over the next decade is not going to make much difference. However a fully integrated system of water and sea defences designed to manage, control and flow excess water away from danger points would make the lives of everyone in the UK much better in the short term future.

Think I’m mad? The Dutch are 10 years into a 50 year integrated plan to do just that. They will manage and flow the excess water from Germany and Belgium through their borders and out to the sea. Their goal is management, not containment or reaction once the flooding has begun. They recognise that their entire society could be crippled by just one serious flood and, so, are doing something about it.

If you don’t know the issues and don’t care enough to know what the possible answers are, then you are going to get what people want you to accept. Low power light bulbs and Electric vehicles….. ROTFLMAO. That’ll stop the floods, Tornados, hurricane force winds, droughts….. Yep, why not do what the government wants rather than tell the government what you need?? Because not knowing what is coming and what needs to be done about it is, simply, allowing someone else to determine your own future….

In the end I should not care. I have taken care to buy a property so far from water, in the right lay of the land, so that flooding is extremely unlikely, on land which is well protected from storms, with it’s own water source which did not dry up in 2003 and with enough land to provide food, in an area capable of feeding us all as well as exporting food. I have independent power (for a time) and I will have more when I get the latest run of DIY work out of the way.

To be honest I should just sit back and say “Don’t want to know what is coming? Suffer”. I don’t find I can do that. Also it is one of my hobbies so I talk about it from time to time…

[Workingman]

You make many salient points in your post, Suff, but I will stay with this one:

Yep, why not do what the government wants rather than tell the government what you need?? Because not knowing what is coming and what needs to be done about it is, simply, allowing someone else to determine your own future….

It is the reason to get more and more people interested. Without knowing something of what needs to be done people become passsive players in the game. They have to be persuaded, somehow, because the fact is that they are the biggest of big majorities in all of this. We believers and deniers are very minor by comparison.

How that can be done, short of handing out magic wands, beats me, but we must try. When I sit in a pub or a waiting room and something comes on the TV about this happening over there and climate gets mentioned I see four basic attitudes. Those, like us, tend to ask questions about what the cause(s) could be. Deniers tend to dismiss things out of hand. The third type go along the line of "Give it a rest" because every mention of climate for every event sounds to them like crying wolf. Then there are those who totally ignore the news; they cannot even be bothered to lift their eyes from book, magazine or smartphone.

The largest group from the third and fourth types are typically under 40, and it will be they and their children who will suffer directly from what is coming. They are the ones who will be at panic stations attempting to undo what has been done. Can we make them see it before it is too late? Not if we keep on as we are doing.

[Aggers]

I think the future looks pretty grim.

As well as global warming, we have worldwide population growth, and the so-called Islamic State.

I fear that life's not going to be very pleasant later on.