2015 will be remembered as a year with notable and amazing weather events. Consider the image below, which shows northern hemisphere temperatures at the end of December. A North Atlantic storm then centered over Iceland generated counterclockwise winds that pulled warm air into the Arctic. The winter storm was no slouch. It developed so rapidly some weather observers called it an example of ‘bombogenesis.’ The barometric pressure fell to about 920 mb. Hurricane force winds struck Greenland. By comparison, Hurricane Sandy’s pressure was about 945 mb just before it went ashore in New Jersey and New York. And Sandy was a superstorm.

As the winter storm intensified, counterclockwise winds carried tropical air into the northern latitudes. This was aided by an unusual kink in the jet stream. The result? Temperatures near and maybe even above freezing. At the North Pole. In December. Temperature swings at the North Pole are not uncommon, and are usually on the order of 30 degrees F, from -30 to 0 degrees F. This December, the temperature was about 60 degrees F above normal. The North Pole was warmer than most of Canada.

To be fair, a December temperature near freezing at the North Pole is not unprecedented. It seems that has occurred three times since 1948. But it truly is rare.

December 2015 was the warmest calendar month, ever, in the 136 years of reasonably reliable temperature records. 2015 was the all-time warmest year on record. Here are some of the 16 all-time high temperature records set throughout the year:

• Indonesia – 103 F, October 28,
• Dominica – 96 F, October 4,
• US Virgin Islands – 96 F, September 11,
• Hong Kong – 100 F, August 8,
• Vietnam – 108 F, May 30, and
• Ghana – 110 F, April 10.

2016 will be the second year in a major El Nino event. Historical trends suggest that the second year shows more atmospheric warming than the first. Atmospheric warming apparently lags a bit behind the ocean surface warming characteristic of an El Nino event.

Extreme weather events occurred throughout the year. There were nine (!) category five tropical storms, two tropical cyclones in the Arabian Sea, record rainfall (20 inches over three days) in South Carolina, the strongest hurricane on record (Patricia) in the western hemisphere. The image below, taken from the International Space Station, shows Tropical Cyclone Bansi, in January 2015, the first of the nine category 5 storms.

 There were 24 multi-billion dollar weather related disasters during the January – November period, including:

• Wildfires in Indonesia ($14 billion)
• Drought in the Western US ($4.5 billion)
• Typhoon Soudelor, western Pacific, ($3.2 billion)
• Flooding, southeast US ($2 billion), and
• Wildfires, California ($2 billion).

The arctic regions are the warmest they have been. Records are kept in terms of a polar year, from October to September. This last polar year (October 2014 to September 2015) was the warmest in the one hundred years of records. The arctic region is now about 5 to 6 degrees F warmer than it was a century ago.

It has become increasingly clear that the string of severe storms, warmer temperatures, and arctic ice melts are related to the rise in greenhouse gasses, in particular carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. Last May, for the first time, the world-wide average concentration of carbon dioxide passed 400 parts per million (ppm). We will never see an average concentration below 400 ppm again. Neither will our children, nor their children. The carbon dioxide concentration has increased by 120 parts per million since pre-industrial times. Half of the increase has happened since 1980. The graph below shows carbon dioxide concentrations as measured at Mauna Loa, in Hawaii. The red dots are monthly averages; the black dots represent seasonally adjusted averages. Atmospheric carbon dioxide decreases during the northern hemisphere summer as plant growth occurs.

You might think presidential candidates would take note of things like this. Senator Mario Rubio dismisses global warming since “I am not a scientist.’(He’s not an admiral, either. I wonder who he would seek advice on naval matters from – a truck driver?)  I can’t figure out Donald Trump’s position on this. Senator Cruz dismisses the idea, and repeats the claim that satellite data, over a 17 year period, show no increase in temperature.

Senator Cruz’s statement about the satellite measurements is a perfect example of what has come to be called zombie science –statements that have long been discredited by climate and other scientists reappear again and again, like zombies from the dead.

Satellite temperature measurements, to be sure, have proven to be tricky, and it took some time for experts to understand all the data quality issues involved and come up with reliable temperature estimates. The satellites do not measure temperature directly. Rather, they measure radiant emissions from oxygen molecules by microwave sensors. Emission strength can be used to infer temperature – the warmer the oxygen, and hence the atmosphere, the greater the emission. Different microwave channels measure oxygen emissions at different levels of the atmosphere, and can cover the whole earth (depending on the satellite’s orbit).

Converting the recorded microwave emissions to atmospheric temperatures has proven challenging. The emissions data has to be processed via several algorithms to remove the effects of atmospheric moisture, which of course varies in time and space. Corrections also have to be made for orbital drift, diurnal effects, sensor calibration issues, sensor – target geometry, different sensors on different satellites, among other factors.

There continue to be on-going discussions among climate scientists as to the best way to process the emissions data. In fact, the first several years of satellite data did show some atmospheric cooling, an effect not noted in simultaneous radiosonde atmospheric temperature measurements. Improved data processing changed the picture – satellite temperature data show a consistent temperature increase in the troposphere, a trend consistent with simultaneous radiosonde measurements and global climate models.

So, Senator Cruz’s zombie statement is wrong, but to explain why is difficult, as suggested by the discussion above. The satellite data did show cooling, but, after proper corrections, now shows warming. And the fact that the temperature estimates changed plays into the hands of climate change conspiracy theorists.

Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) and chair of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, seems to be a master of the zombie statement. He has a whole book of them. He wrote The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, published in 2012. Go to Amazon.com and search the books section for his name. For a good time, read the reviews.

I was shocked to discover that Senator Inhofe received, between 2011 and 2016, campaign donations of about a half-million dollars from oil and gas companies. Who could have thought that?

Inhofe, as you might have guessed, was against President Obama’s participation in the Paris summit on climate change. In an interview with Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, Inhofe argued that human activities cannot affect the climate as the atmosphere naturally fluctuates between cooling and warming periods.

Inhofe, according to a column in a recent New Yorker by Amy Davidson, seems particularly enamored of the well-established climate fluctuations dating from medieval times. Europe changed from three centuries of relatively warm temperatures (the Medieval Warm Period) to the Little Ice Age, which lasted until about 1850. The transition occurred in the 1310-1320 time frame.

Most climate scientists will tell you weather patterns are likely to change during climate transitions. Davidson describes what happened in Europe. There were three years of heavy rains, 1315 to 1317. The rains caused crops – wheat, barley, oats – to rot in the fields. Widespread food shortages killed, in some parts of Europe, ten percent of the population. The famine is pretty much ignored because the Black Death (1347) and the Hundred Years War (1337 – 1453) visited Europe soon after. Davidson speculates that the population, already weakened by famine, was particularly susceptible to these twin scourges.

Elizabeth Kolbert, in another New Yorker column, describes a contemporary example. (I’m tempted to call her piece the Kolbert Report, but I won’t). Drought from 2007 through 2011 in northeastern Syria, where much of the country’s wheat grows, caused extensive crop failures. Syria’s Minister of Agriculture told the United Nations the drought created concerns, financial and social, that were “beyond our capacity as a country to deal with.” Hundreds of thousands of Syrians abandoned their land and moved to Damascus, Homs, Aleppo and other Syrian cities, where they joined more than a million Iraqi refugees.

Kolbert wonders to what extent this stressor affected the Syrian civil war, and other examples of political unrest, as for example the rise of ISIS. Kolbert quotes Secretary of State John Kerry, in a talk on climate change and national security: “Because the world is so extraordinarily interconnected today – economically, technologically, militarily, in every way imaginable – instability anywhere can be a threat to stability everywhere.”

OK, so there are plenty of reasons to be worried. Are there any reasons to be optimistic? Maybe. Susan Hassol of climatecommunication.org pointed out, in a recent column, that, while many conservatives are climate change deniers, they are also, to a large extent, in favor of technologies like clean energy. She suggests a strategy of not emphasizing the science of climate change, but rather the solutions. She listed reasons to be hopeful; here are some of them.

• The Pope has characterized climate change as a moral issue,
• China has agreed to do something about climate change,
• This year, for the first time, there was economic growth and a decrease in carbon emissions, and
• The Paris Accords.

I hope so.

By the way, 2016 has started out as interesting as well. There have been two named storms in January, one in the Atlantic and one in the Pacific. And Winter Storm Jonas was no slouch.

 

Notes, Sources, Links

The information about the weather, category 5 storms, temperature records, and billion dollar weather events is from Dr. Jeff Masters’ excellent blog at Weather Underground. See www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/.

The Mauna Loa carbon dioxide graph is from www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ To see the current carbon dioxide measurement, go to co2.earth/daily-co2

See the Wikipedia entry on satellite temperature measurements for more information.

Google ‘Inhofe climate change’ for more information on this Senator’s views.

See entries by Susan Hassol at climatecommunication.org for a discussion of zombie science and her list of reasons to be optimistic about global climate change.

See Amy Davidson, The Next Great Famine, in The New Yorker, January 8, 2016, page 17.

See Elizabeth Kolbert, Unsafe Climates, in The New Yorker, December 7, 2015, page 23.