Human-caused global heating breaks clear from nature, studies find

Global heating in recent decades is of a pace and magnitude that's unique in at least the past two millennia, with human-caused climate change now "overwhelming" natural variability, new research has found.

German police find a new use for their water cannons
 amid record-breaking heat in that country on Wednesday.
Those heat records, though, may last just one day.

According to three papers published in Nature and Nature Geoscience on Thursday, international teams of scientists used seven different statistical techniques to reconstruct global temperature during the so-called Common Era starting 2000 years ago.

Read the story from The Age by Peter Hannam - “Human-caused global heating breaks clear from nature, studies find.”

Finding common ground amid climate controversy

Scientists have been researching human-caused climate change for more than 50 years, inexorably fitting together puzzle pieces of atmospheric composition, interactions between different parts of the Earth system, rates of change, and feedback mechanisms.

Their efforts have led to huge strides in understanding of the Earth. But one variable stands out as perhaps more stubborn than the rest; a factor that defies laws of physics: human behavior. A number of physical scientists have wandered into the unfamiliar territory of social science as they try to understand what leads people to accept or reject the findings of scientific endeavors. They’ve learned that to better grapple with the problems of human-driven climate change, they must also learn more about what makes humans “tick.”

That’s one of the motivations behind the recent Yale Climate Connections “Common Ground” series, the subject of a brief video made as part of a presentation in December 2017 at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, AGU. The ideological stalemate around climate change in the U.S. by now is sadly familiar, with an intractable gulf separating the ranks of — by whatever terms seem adequate or inadequate — “believers” and “doubters.”

Read the Yale Climate Connections story by Karin Kirk - “Finding common ground amid climate controversy.”

Three 2016 extremes 'not ... possible' without human warming

For the first time, an annual report issued by the American Meteorological Society has found that the extreme magnitudes of three weather events in 2016 “was not possible without the influence of human-caused climate change.”

Explaining Extreme Events of 2016 from a Climate Perspective, published as a supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), is AMS’s sixth annual report on extreme weather events. It was officially released and presented on December 13 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in New Orleans.

The report includes 27 peer-reviewed scientific papers. Authors of those papers examined 21 different extreme weather events around the globe in 2016 – including wildfires in North America and Australia, droughts in South Africa and Brazil, cold snaps in Eastern China, and an anomalous body of warm water in the Pacific Ocean.

Read the Yale Climate Connections story by Bruce Lieberman - “Three 2016 extremes 'not ... possible' without human warming.”

Climate Change Fingerprints Confirmed in Lucifer’s Wicked Heat: Europe’s Record Hot Summer Made Much Worse by Human Activity.

Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, senior
researcher at the Royal Netherlands
 Meteorological Institute (KNMI).

Scientists with World Weather Attribution (WWA), using a combination of observed temperature data and climate models, have concluded that human-caused climate change made the record-breaking 2017 summer temperatures in the Euro-Mediterranean region at least 10 times more likely. WWA is an international coalition of scientists focused on assessing possible climate change in uences on extreme weather events.

“We found clear evidence of human influence on this summer’s record warmth — both in the overall summer temperatures and in the heat wave dubbed Lucifer,” said Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI). "In many towns and cities across Southern Europe, there is now a one in 10 chance of seeing a heat wave as hot as we saw during this past summer every summer,” van Oldenborgh added. “In the early 1900s, a summer like the one we just experienced would have been extremely rare.”

Read the World Weather Attribution story “Climate Change Fingerprints Confirmed in Lucifer’s Wicked Heat: Europe’s Record Hot Summer Made Much Worse by Human Activity.”

Global Warming Behind Record-Breaking Climate Events Worldwide: Here's The Evidence

Are extreme weather conditions such as droughts, heat waves, intense storms triggered by human-caused climate change?

Extreme weather conditions and
climate change equate.

This is a question that Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, and his research team always get.

But the answer to this seemingly simple question is never simple. In fact, scientists, in the past, generally avoid linking specific climate or weather events to global warming because of several different factors that cause them. But that was before.

Read the Tech Times story - “Global Warming Behind Record-Breaking Climate Events Worldwide: Here's The Evidence.”

For the first time on record, human-caused climate change has rerouted an entire river

A team of scientists have documented what they're describing as the first case of large-scale river reorganisation as a result of human-caused climate change.

A close-up view of the ice-walled canyon at
the terminus of the Kaskawulsh Glacier, with
recently collapsed ice blocks, taken in 2016.

They found that in mid-2016, the retreat of a very large glacier in Canada's Yukon territory led to the rerouting of its vast stream of meltwater from one river system to another - cutting down flow to the Yukon's largest lake, and channelling freshwater to the Pacific Ocean south of Alaska, rather than to the Bering Sea.

The researchers dubbed the reorganisation an act of "rapid river piracy," saying that such events had often occurred in the Earth's geologic past, but never before, to their knowledge, as a sudden present-day event. They also called it "geologically instantaneous.”

The process that would ordinarily take thousands of years - or more - happened in just a few months in 2016.

Read Chris Mooney’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “For the first time on record, human-caused climate change has rerouted an entire river.”

Climate change: ‘human fingerprint’ found on global extreme weather

The fingerprint of human-caused climate change has been found on heatwaves, droughts and floods across the world, according to scientists.

Villagers use part of a damaged railway track to cross
 floodwaters in Sultan Kot, Sindh province after
torrential monsoon rains triggered Pakistan’s
worst natural disaster on record in 2010.

The discovery indicates that the impacts of global warming are already being felt by society and adds further urgency to the need to cut carbon emissions. A key factor is the fast-melting Arctic, which is now strongly linked to extreme weather across Europe, Asia and north America.

Rising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have long been expected to lead to increasing extreme weather events, as they trap extra energy in the atmosphere. But linking global warming to particular events is difficult because the climate is naturally variable.

The new work analysed a type of extreme weather event known to be caused by changes in “planetary waves” – such as California’s ongoing record drought, and recent heatwaves in the US and Russia, as well as severe floods in Pakistan in 2010.

Read Damian Carrington’s story on The Guardian - “Climate change: ‘human fingerprint’ found on global extreme weather.”

EPA Chief Scott Pruitt Disputes Carbon Dioxide’s Role in Global Warming, Contradicting His Own Agency's Research

Today Scott Pruitt, the recently appointed head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, stated in a CNBC interview that he does not believe that carbon dioxide is one of the primary contributors to global warming.

The new head of the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, is in
conflict with he own agency's advice.

According to a partial excerpt of Pruitt’s interview posted on The Hill, Pruitt stated the following:

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see … But we don’t know that yet … we need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

The Hill also points out that Pruitt gave the interview outside of a fossil fuel industry conference that he will be speaking at this week.

Pruitt’s statement runs contradictory to his own agency’s research. The EPA has already concluded that carbon dioxide is the primary driver of human-caused climate change since the Industrial Revolution and especially since the mid-20th century. According to the EPA website:

Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change. CO2 is absorbed and emitted naturally as part of the carbon cycle, through plant and animal respiration, volcanic eruptions, and ocean-atmosphere exchange. Human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use, release large amounts of CO2, causing concentrations in the atmosphere to rise.

Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased by more than 40% since pre-industrial times, from approximately 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv) in the 18th century to over 400 ppmv in 2015. The monthly average concentration at Mauna Loa now exceeds 400 ppmv for the first time in human history. The current CO2 level is higher than it has been in at least 800,000 years.

Read the DeSmog Blog story - “EPA Chief Scott Pruitt Disputes Carbon Dioxide’s Role in Global Warming, Contradicting His Own Agency's Research.”

Parts of United States are heating faster than globe as a whole

Global surface temperatures in July 2016 according to
NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
The Earth isn’t warming uniformly; some regions
are heating faster than others.

Global warming obviously refers to temperature increases across the entire globe. We know the Earth is warming, we know it is human-caused, we have a pretty good idea about how much the warming will be in the future and what some of the consequences are. In fact, when it comes to the Earth’s average climate, scientists have a pretty good understanding.

On the other hand, no one lives in the average climate. We live spread out north, west, east, and south. On islands, large continents, inland or in coastal regions. Many of us want to know what’s going to happen to the climate where we live. How will my life be affected in the future?

This type of question is answered in a very recent study published by scientists from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The team, which includes Dr. Raymond Bradley and researcher Dr. Ambarish Karmalkar looked specifically at the Northeastern United States. They found that this area will warm much more rapidly than the globe as a whole. In fact, it will warm faster than any other United States region. The authors expect the Northeast US will warm 50% faster than the planet as a whole. They also find that the United States will reach a 2 degree Celsius warming 10–20 years before the globe as a whole.

Read John Abraham’s story in The Guardian - “Parts of United States are heating faster than globe as a whole.”

New wind patterns cause longer flights worsening climate change

L

onger flights would burn more fuel and contribute more to climate change, a study suggests

Flights over the Pacific Ocean have gotten longer due to climate change-related changes in wind patterns, a shift that could be mirrored in other regions across the globe, according to new research.

Air travel currently accounts for more than 3% of the carbon emissions driving human-caused climate change, and the study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, suggests a feedback loop where longer flight times lead to greater carbon emissions and vice versa. If flight lengths continue to grow as climate change intensifies, so will the industry’s carbon emissions.

Read the Time story - “How Climate Change Could Make Your Flights Longer”.