Climate Pulse
pulse.climate.copernicus.eu
pulse.climate.copernicus.eu
About ERA5: https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysi...
Unless we can link climate change to the Russia invasion of Ukraine, there seem to be bigger problems right now. Mostly linked to incompetent diplomacy rather than, say, China's industrial successes.
I'm no climate change denier, but it seems weird to attribute this on climate change when it's arguably also caused by poor forestry management practices (ie. suppressing forest fires for decades leading to a buildup of flammable material), if not more so.
[1]: https://www.drought.gov/historical-information?dataset=0&sel...
In the graph that I can't find any pattern or trend. Draught were bad in 2011 and then it improved and then got bad again and seems to be improving for a year.
More worryingly, changing weather conditions suggests more crop losses, which suggest more food insecurity, which suggest more political and social unrest. Strictly speaking, we produce a lot more food than we consume in this country (well, if you like corn, at least), but we've also built a fairly fragile system of monocultures and long supply chains that show up as outsize impacts from relatively minor disruptions (remember when the floods in Thailand meant hard drives were unobtainable for two years?). We're not really built for resiliency these days.
It's unlikely to be an extinction level event (although changing conditions mean different diseases spread in different ways, and one wonders what a couple failed rice crops in China would do for global stability), but it does imply a much shittier future for all of us on a much closer timeline than I think a lot of us were hoping for (I was personally looking forward to living out my golden years in the woods, but they burned down two years ago).
> Huge quantities of particles from Pinatubo's tall ash cloud injected into the global wind system in the stratosphere. These particles affected the weather in two ways. Tiny aerosol droplets reflected sunlight away from Earth causing cooling at the surface. Scientists observed a maximum global cooling of about 1.5°C. Sunsets and sunrises were more brilliant because of the fine ash and gases high in the air.
I wonder if artists painting pleinair before/after the eruption would show the intensity change of sunset/sunrises in their work too.
[1] https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/hazard/stratoguide/pinfeat.html
Should we put the sulfur back? Or maybe something else.
Is it related to El Nino?
How high is the confidence in the global surface air temperature data before the existence of satellites? Because, surely, ground based measurements are going to be less accurate if not completely missing from large chunks of the planet. Antarctica alone is 5.2 million square miles. What percentage of the continent did we have accurate measurements for in the 1950s? What about Asia? How many and how accurate were the air temperature measurements in the first half of the 20th century?
Given the spread of civilisation across the globe and relative nearness of cities to each other (with the obvious exception of Perth, Western Australia) and the "coarseness" of a global mean .. the law of averages and the heat equations provide a mean that has high confidence.
How high? Truly an exercise for the reader .. and the numerate coder with modern GIS datasets who can work backwards from 2022 data for locations only present in 1940 to "guesstimate" a mean for 2022 and compare that with the modern result using high res infill.
It's not like you're the first to raise this "objection".
e.g. "How Well Does the ERA5 Reanalysis Capture the Extreme Climate Events Over China? Part II: Extreme Temperature"
https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000149226/14910548...
>The conclusions are as follows: the original daily temperatures (mean temperature, maximum temperature, and minimum temperature) can be well reproduced by ERA5 reanalysis over China. ERA5 tends to exhibit more misdetection for the duration of extreme temperature events than extreme temperature intensity and frequency. In addition, ERA5 performed best in the summer and worst in the winter
But even in Europe the dataset can have some issues, e.g. https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/14/4/543
> Comparing ERA5 with the other two datasets, ERA5 temperature presents more extreme temperature and small outliers for regions southern of 40° latitude and less extreme temperatures in areas over the Black Sea. In Scandinavia, ERA5 temperatures are more frequently extreme than the observational ones
There are more articles like these on how well ERA5 captures temperature/wind speed/etc, or certain global events, extremes, anomalies, etc., in different locations and time, but I couldn't find more for your other questions (on mobile).
Additionally, you can help make your community resilient for crisis and hardship. For example, reforestation doesn't just help sequester carbon dioxide, it's also stabilizing the local weather and water cycle. Build local community networks, plant trees, prevent soil erosion, rebuild the humus layer, build water retention reservoirs. Incidentally, it's very rewarding to see living things grow and recover. If you have a garden or yard, start there maybe.
But, not by a nuke. Guess that would be new plot.
Is this the case? Does this suggest that our models are wrong or that climate change could be accelerating?
Coal burning for electricity is the single largest source of man-made carbon emissions. If we'd kept going with nuclear the US probably would have phased out coal by the mid-2000s. We also would have built a huge nuclear supply chain, advanced reactor designs, and manufacturing abilities to scale them.
The kicker is that if we'd gone down this path, China and India and other large developing economies would have copied us, taking a head start on nuclear technology by cloning our technology and deployment. Instead of being powered mostly by coal, the rise of China would have been largely powered by nuclear.
Renewable energy wasn't there until very recently. We could probably replace a lot of fossil generation with solar and wind energy today, but this has come far too late to head off a significant degree of climate change.
Oil, gas, and deforestation are also responsible for a lot of emissions, so phasing out coal in the late 20th century would not have stopped climate change. But it would have blunted it significantly.
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-fuel
In that alternate timeline we would have emitted just a bit more than half the CO2 we've emitted to date, and would now today be looking at both the phasing out of oil for automobiles in favor of EVs and the maturation of solar, wind, and grid scale battery storage to further displace fossil generation.
We'd be in the home stretch.
Instead we are now looking at the inevitability of catastrophic climate change, and China is still building new coal plants. (I'm not saying it's China's fault, at least not 100%. I'm saying it's also our fault for poor leadership and for abandoning a key technology.)
AI alarmists should take note. Let's say we ban AI over fear of job losses. How many jobs will be lost when the economy contracts due to demographic effects? How much harder will it be to cope with climate change with a contracting economy loaded with unserviceable debt? Let's not abandon another powerful tool over fear mongering that is significantly less grounded in reality than nuclear fear mongering.
Is this really Gulf Stream turbulent flow?