JAMES HANSEN: A New Frontier?

Hurricane Calvin was once up to 125 MPH.  Now down to a tropical storm and positioned 230 miles due south from where I am composing this posting.

The rain and floods were not much.  I almost could have gone golfing.  From where I sit composing this blog, here is a photo towards the eye of Calvin.

Three sports events of note this weekend:

• The Women's World Cup will begin with New Zealand vs Norway at 3 AM EDT tomorrow morning (9 PM Hawaii tonight) and U.S. vs Vietnam at 9PM EDT (3PM Hawaii) Friday.  Not sure if she will start, but Trinity Rodman is a rookie on the American team.  Yes, daughter of Dennis Rodman, here with her mother.
• The Tour de France bike race ends on Sunday, with a recap on NBC at 5PM EDT (11AM Hawaii).  The entire race can be seen on Peacock and USA.
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  The Open tees off at Royal Liverpool from 4AM EDT Thursday (10PM Hawaii tonight) on the USA channel.  Your NBC channel will then show the entirety (8 hours the first weekend night, meaning from Friday night, and 7 hours on Saturday night through Sunday morning) from 7PM EDT (1AM Hawaii).  Rory McIlroy won last weekend at the Scottish Open, so is favored to hoist the Claret Jug on Sunday.

I'm on James Hansen's mailing list, and this was his latest:

The Climate Dice are Loaded. Now, a New Frontier? 13 July 2023 James Hansen, Makiko Sato and Reto Ruedy

Andy Revkin recently asked whether the “climate dice” have become more “loaded” in the last 15 years. Climate dice were defined[1] in 1988, after we realized that the next cool summer may cause the public to discount human-caused climate change. The answer is “yes,” the dice are more loaded as we will explain via the shifting bell curve (Fig. 1). The shift is large enough that most people notice the change, but that doesn’t prevent a person with a bias from taking the cool June in the U.S. this year (Fig. 2) as proof that global warming predictions were wrong – and, of course, a loose cannon on Twitter has done just that. That’s nonsense, of course. On global average, June 2023 was easily the warmest June in the historical record, as we will illustrate below. What to do about loose cannons? Censor them?  Nope, for this leads to enforced conformity, which has serious consequences. You can't censor a loose cannon.  Focus on educating those people who are open-minded. In testimony to Congress in 1988 and 1989, and in a paper attached to the 1989 testimony, we noted that global warming causes wet places to get wetter and dry places to get drier.  Thus hand in hand with all this heat this summer, you keep reading about floods, everywhere.  To the right above, photo of Makiko Sato. Kerry Emanuel of MIT used sea surface temperature increases from our 2×CO2 experiment to estimate the effect on maximum intensity of tropical cyclones. Minimum sustained surface pressure fell from 880 mb to 800 mb and maximum potential wind speed increased from 175 to 220 miles per hour.  No serious hurricanes this year, but it's still July.

Are we entering a new climate frontier? Suspicion is that we are, something not seen in the past million years. Figure 3 argues so because in the Earth Energy Balance, global warming will worsen if we continue to add more energy on balance into the atmosphere. This current El Nino will only accelerate the warming.

Fig. 3. 12-month running-mean of Earth’s energy imbalance from CERES satellite data[5] normalized to 0.71 W/m2 mean for July 2005 – June 2015 (light blue bar) from in situ data.[6]

Figure 5 shows this acceleration in the yellow area.

Fig. 5. Global temperature relative to 1880-1920. Edges of the predicted post-2010 accelerated warming rate (see text) are 0.36 and 0.27°C per decade.

[1] Hansen, J., I. Fung, A. Lacis, D. Rind, S. Lebedeff, R. Ruedy, G. Russell, and P. Stone: Global climate changes as forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies three-dimensional model. J. Geophys. Res., 93, 9341-9364, 1988. [2] For example, belief that we can still solve the climate problem via just greater reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Or belief that borrowing enough money from our grandchildren to build solar panels and windmills as fast as possible will significantly reduce global CO2 emissions. Or that support for nuclear power is “not needed” because solar power is so cheap (Nuclear power is a needed carbon-free complement to renewables and viable scenarios for decarbonized electricity include an increasing role for modern nuclear power, but there is a total disconnect with financing (Bowen, M. and K. Guanio, 2023: A critical disconnect: Relying on nuclear energy in decarbonization models while excluding it from climate finance taxonomies, Commentary, Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.).  [3] Hansen J, Sato M and Ruedy R 2012 Perception of climate change Proc Natl Acad Sci 109 14726-14727 E2415 [4] Global warming of 1.2°C since 1880-1920 has brought global temperature to at least the level of the prior interglacial period, the Eemian, about 120,000 years ago. The Eemian was one of the warmest interglacials in the last million years. [5] Loeb, N. G., Johnson, G. C., Thorsen, T. J., Lyman, J. M., Rose, F. G., & Kato, S., Satellite and ocean data reveal marked increase in Earth’s heating rate, Geophys. Res. Lett. 48, e2021GL093047, 2021. [6] von Schuckmann K, Cheng L, Palmer MD et al. Heat stored in the Earth system: where does the energy go?, Earth System Science Data 2020;12:2013-41  [7] Grantham, J., The Race of Our Lives Revisited, GMO White Paper, August 2018. [8] Global warming in the pipeline, draft paper, criticisms welcome Nothing to do with the above.....but, how to vacuum your dog.

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