Catastrophic, abrupt climate change - HAPPENING NOW

Forget any other story you see on this first day of 2015.

This is most of what you need to know. This is what is going to affect your life, more than anything on earth barring perhaps only war and peace.

The climate is changing under our very noses and catastrophic changes in the next decade or so - starting NOW.

Anchorage, Alaska never saw a day below zero in 2014

The Jet Stream was severely deformed again today too, pumping warm Pacific air straight into Alaska and warm Atlantic air straight up over Scandinavia too

Washington Post,

30 December, 2014

The coldest it has been on this day in Anchorage, Alaska, since 1954 is 20 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. The coldest it has been on New Year's Eve in that same time period is even colder: -25. But this year, the lows are expected to be 33 and 27 degrees respectively -- meaning that 2014 will be the first year on record that the temperature didn't drop below zero.

As Alaska Dispatch News notes, the last time the temperature was below zero (again: in Fahrenheit) was Dec. 26, 2013. That was the tail end of a cold snap, of the kind not uncommon in winter -- particularly in Alaska. But ever since, temperatures have been above zero according to readings taken at the airport, with low temperatures reaching zero only once, on February 11.

Complete annual records from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration begin on Jan. 1, 1954. Since then, the number of days Anchorage went below zero each year has dropped from an average of 33.2 in the 1960s to 16 in the 2000s. The year with the second-fewest below-zero days was 2002 (the red line on the graph above).

This is an admittedly arbitrary metric. Zero degrees Fahrenheit is significantly colder than zero degrees Celsius, the freezing point of water. Anchorage is in no immediate danger of becoming a tropical paradise. It's the sort of data point that those seeking bolder action on climate change will embrace, but, as the first chart shows, there's a tremendous amount of volatility in low temperatures, particularly during the winter. One bit of data does not a long-term warming trend make, and next year could very easily see Anchorage experiencing several weeks of below-zero temperatures.

It is, however, the sort of thing that we should expect to see more of. This has been the second-warmest January-to-November period on record in Alaska; ski resorts near Anchorage didn't have enough snow to open for the Thanksgiving holiday. The state has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the country, thawing permafrost and glaciers.

Anchorage's 2014 could be a false alarm; it could be a little spike on the dial. Or it could be the first of many such years to come.

Here is Paul Beckwith on Radio Ecoshock on a startling new NASA study about the Arctic Ice melt HERE

While Much of the U.S. Shivers, Alaskan Fourth Graders Bemoan a Warm, Snowless December on YouTube

NY Times,

31 December, 2014

While most of the lower 48 states are shivering their way into 2015, in much of Alaska the concern is persistent warmth.

Fourth graders at the Kuinerrarmiut Elitnaurviat school in Quinhagak recently caught the attention of some news outlets and climate scientists with a clever video bemoaning a warm and snowless December. The town of about 660 residents, mostly Yup’ik Eskimos, is a mile from the Bering Sea coast.

The video was shot by James Barthelman, a teacher who had a YouTube hit with his class four years ago — Handel’s ‘Hallelujah’ chorus featuring students flipping cards with the lyrics.

Much of southern Alaska has been unusually warm, with Anchorage poised to record its warmest year on record. But efforts to tease out the impact of human-driven global warming in the region are complicated by the big influence around the Bering Sea of natural variations in ocean conditions, including the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

I saw the video after Mike MacCracken, chief scientist for the Climate Institute, brought it to the attention of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Effective Communication of Weather and Climate Information (I’m one of several journalist members).

He described the student video as a “powerful way of communicating how the climate is changing.” I expressed some doubts, noting how much variability there is in Alaskan conditions, so I asked him for a bit more. In his reply, MacCracken (whom I’ve sought out on climate science since 1985) stressed he’s talking about the value of the video in conveying how long-term trends will play out in Alaska:

While winter (or other seasonal) conditions typically vary from year to year, the first effect of climate change is to raise the baseline around which the variations occur. For regions that have winter conditions below normal, the increase in the baseline will more and more often lead to variations taking the temperature to above freezing. This is happening along the coast of Alaska, especially as the sea ice forms later and later each year, creating a situation where the waves from winter storms are no longer being held down by the sea ice, but not actively eroding the shoreline.

The second aspect of climate change that is likely affecting Alaska more and more is the apparent tendency of warming in the Arctic and warmer sea surface temperatures in the Pacific to contribute to larger waves in the jet stream. The resulting larger waves, which also seem to persist for longer because they move more slowly west to east, tend to push warm air into the Arctic (e.g., over Alaska) later and later into the year, leading to very warm conditions and the later and later freezing of the land surface and later accumulation of snow. While this may initially seem beneficial, transportation and movement of wildlife across the tundra is made much easier when the land surface (and rivers) are frozen over.

Such large variations of the climate likely won’t occur every year over the next few decades given the limited global warming to date, but it would seem likely such conditions will occur more and more frequently as global warming continues, disrupting both social systems and ecosystems.

For more on Alaska’s variable, but warming climate, scan “Climate of Alaska: Past, Present and Future,” a recent presentation by Uma S. Bhatt, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Here are her takeaway points:

- Alaska has warmed but not in a simple manner.

– Alaska represents a complex location climatologically, impacted by various circulations.

– Climate research results are not always easy to explain in a simple way. We usually add many caveats!!

– Conclusions based on the preponderance of evidence suggest humans have impacted the climate. Controversy arises as people translate the science into policy change?

Quinhagak, interestingly, is the site of a prototype octagonal, foam-insulated home designed by the Cold Climate Housing Research Center. (Winter in the area is plenty cold, even if December hasn’t been.)

For more on Quinhagak and climate change, you can read an interesting 2011 article by two University of Alaska, Fairbanks, researchers working with locals to map changes in permafrost, coastlines and other landscape features.

Update, 12:45 p.m. | Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University, sent this helpful note:

These are the kinds of unusual events where people really feel the climate system. It’s nice to have this particular discussion in the context of a pleasant example like this video, because in many other cases extreme climate events have resulted in acute humanitarian disasters. The public interest in understanding the possible role of climate change in influencing these kinds of extreme events has inspired concerted effort in the scientific community over the past decade, and that effort has really ramped up over the past few years.

In my research group, we are focused on understanding whether global warming has influenced the probability of a given kind of extreme event (such as the probability of a warm December in Alaska). The first question that we want to answer is how rare is that event in observed record: Is this event the most extreme? Has it happened once in a century, or once every 20 years? Once we have used real observations to understand the probability in the historical record, then we can use climate models to compare the probability in the current climate (in which global warming has occurred) with a climate in which there was no human-caused global warming. For these kinds of really rare events, the scientific answer is often that there is no discernible difference in probability. But in many cases, there is a discernible difference. When we communicate with the public, I personally think that it is very important that we are clear about how we are going about asking the scientific question, and where we can objectively detect a human influence and where we can’t.

It is also important to communicate that because these rare events often result from a confluence of complicated factors, the absence of evidence of human influence in one factor should not be confused with evidence of absence of influence on the whole event. The current California drought is an important example where there are many contributing factors, and it takes time to understand and evaluate each one. Just because a study is released concluding that one factor doesn’t show a human influence, that doesn’t mean that the event hasn’t been influenced by global warming. In fact, we now have evidence that some aspects of the California drought have very likely been influenced by global warming, while others have likely not been influenced. There are very real decisions that depend on having accurate, understandable information about the influence of global warming on these kinds of extreme events. As scientists, if we want to serve the public discussion in a constructive manner, we have to find a way to better communicate the subtleties of how both climate variability and climate change can influence these events.

For the links in this article, go to the original

2014 officially the warmest year on record

With seven consecutive months of new high temperatures, NOAA says this year's record was fueled by the warming oceans.

Here is Paul Beckwith on Radio Ecoshock on a startling new NASA study about the Arctic Ice melt HERE