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If you have watched the news at all in the last two weeks, you know that there was a huge underwater volcanic eruption near Tonga in the South Pacific Ocean on January 15, 2022, that spewed ash and gases into the atmosphere. It blew with such force that the sound of the eruption was heard in Alaska thousands of miles away and the atmospheric pressure wave it set off has traveled around the earth as many as ten times according to satellite and ground-based sensors. With such a large signal, you might wonder what impact the eruption could have on our weather and climate for the next year. In this post, we will explore how volcanoes in general can affect the climate around the world and whether the Tonga eruption is likely to change our gardens’ climate this year.

*Flowers growing under the volcano. Source: cogdogblog, Commons Wikimedia*

What do volcanic eruptions emit into the atmosphere?

When volcanoes erupt they put out both ash and gases. The ash is made of tiny particles of rocky material from solidified lava and sometimes pieces of the volcano destroyed by the eruption. These particles are carried downwind in a direction determined by the winds at the heights to which the ash can rise. In a long eruption, the plume of ash can blow in a different direction each day, covering the ground when it falls back to earth. Usually ash does not rise very high in the atmosphere because it is quite heavy and so most of it falls out in just a few days.

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Possible Future Trends of CO2 Concentration and Global Temperature

September 10, 2020

Possible Future Trends of CO2 Concentration and Global Temperature

Wildfire smoke and power line, northern California. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Carbon dioxide gas (CO2) has been accumulating in the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution (~1750), because increasingly voluminous fluxes of that gas have been exhausted from the lands and the oceans, and are beyond the capacity of natural CO2 sinks to absorb completely.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, carbon would cycle through a variety of processes that sustained the continuation of life, death, evolution and rebirth, and that all meshed into one grand balance. That balance is called the Carbon Cycle.

The explosive growth of human activity, numbers, exosomatic power, economic wealth, military overkill, and hubristic political pretensions, all spring from the access to and profligate use of heat-energy liberated from fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is the exhaust fume from our Promethean exertions for greater conquests — and wealth.

The carbon dioxide exhausted by our civilization’s generation of heat-energy, and from our massive exploitation of once virgin land areas, is an increasingly destabilizing perturbation of the Carbon Cycle. This perturbation is called Anthropogenic Emissions.

The imbalance of the Carbon Cycle reverberates through the natural world in many ways that are increasingly harmful and dangerous to Planet Earth’s habitability for ourselves and for many other animal and plant species. The central reality of this complex of growing threats to the viability of the Biosphere is called Global Warming.

Carbon dioxide gas traps heat radiated towards space, as infrared radiation from the surface of Planet Earth, reducing our planet’s ability to regulate its temperature by cooling to compensate for the influx of solar light that is absorbed by the lands and the oceans, and stored by them as heat.

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Climate Change Parallax

April 15, 2019

Climate Change Parallax

There exists a very seductive delusion that once we cool (or heat) the planet to the proper temperature that the majority of our ecological ills will be over. This is a dangerous self-dectption. “Climate change” per se is not the problem. Temperature fluctuations (increases) reflect underlying carnage caused to nature by excessive human activity.

Once “global warming” has been defeated, and temperatures have been restored to “normal” levels, it will be clearly evident that nothing has been solved. Environmental deterioration will continue its ugly descent. Here is a small itemization of conditions that will not be addressed by a “normal climate”:

+ Concrete. The manufacture and overuse of concrete represents perhaps the leading edge of ecological destruction. Endless earth surfaces are being ripped apart and mined to obtain the literal mountains of sand used in concrete manufacture. The manufacture of the cement component is energy intensive and releases voluminous harmful by-products into the air and water. The impervious surfaces created all over the world by indiscriminate use of concrete are entombing the planet in sterile death.

+ Plastic. The ubiquity and environmental chaos of plastic has been endlessly documented and need not be addressed here. The point is that once temperatures (climate change) have been restored, all of the environmental repercussions of plastic will remain behind.

+ Habitat destruction. The sine qua non of understanding what is happening to the livability of planet Earth is to recognize that the very land itself, the soil, the surface, the natural face of land itself, continues to be devoured by “growth”. The surface of the Earth is going under, taking with it all of the wonderful aspects of a living breathing natural world, sucking it into an ecological black hole.

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Global Warming ‘Hiatus’ Is the Climate Change Myth That Refuses to Die

March 10, 2019

Global Warming ‘Hiatus’ Is the Climate Change Myth That Refuses to Die

The record-breaking, El Niño-driven global temperatures of 2016 have given climate change deniers a new trope. Why, they ask, hasn’t it since got even hotter?

In response to a recent US government report on the impact of climate change, a spokesperson for the science-denying American Enterprise Institute think-tank claimed that “we just had […] the biggest drop in global temperatures that we have had since the 1980s, the biggest in the last 100 years.”

These claims are blatantly false: the past two years were two of the three hottest on record, and the drop in temperature from 2016 to 2018 was less than, say, the drop from 1998 (a previous record hot year) to 2000. But, more importantly, these claims use the same kind of misdirection as was used a few years ago about a supposed “pause” in warming lasting from roughly 1998 to 2013.

At the time, the alleged pause was cited by many people sceptical about the science of climate change as a reason not to act to reduce greenhouse pollution. US senator and former presidential candidate Ted Cruz frequently argued that this lack of warming undermined dire predictions by scientists about where we’re heading.

However, drawing conclusions on short-term trends is ill-advised because what matters to climate change is the decade-to-decade increase in temperatures rather than fluctuations in warming rate over a few years. Indeed, if short periods were suitable for drawing strong conclusions, climate scientists should perhaps now be talking about a “surge” in global warming since 2011, as shown in this figure:

Global temperature observations compared to climate models. Climate-disrupting volcanoes are shown at the bottom, and the purported hiatus period is shaded. 2018 values based on year to date (YTD). NASA; Berkeley Earth; various climate models. Author provided

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The end of the Little Ice Age

December 20, 2018

The end of the Little Ice Age

The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a recent and significant climate perturbation that may still be affecting the Earth’s climate, but nobody knows what caused it. In this post I look into the question of why it ended when it did, concentrating on the European Alps, without greatly advancing the state of knowledge. I find that the LIA didn’t end because of increasing temperatures, decreasing precipitation or fewer volcanic eruptions. One possible contributor is a trend reversal in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation; another is an increase in solar radiation, but in neither case is the evidence compelling. There is evidence to suggest that the ongoing phase of glacier retreat and sea level rise is largely a result of a “natural recovery” from the LIA, but no causative mechanism for this has been identified either.

The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of lower global temperatures defined by temperature reconstructions based mostly on tree ring proxies. Figure 1 shows the results of fifteen such reconstructions for the Northern Hemisphere with three instrumental records added after 1900 (data from NOAA/NCDC). The period of lower temperatures between about 1450 and 1900 roughly defines the LIA, but the high level of scatter (cunningly muted by plotting the more erratic reconstructions in lighter shades) makes it impossible to pick exact start and stop dates:

Figure 1: Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions over the last 2,000 years

Because of the problems with temperature reconstructions this post concentrates on the European Alps, where long-term instrumental records – some going back to the early 1700s – provide information on temperature and precipitation changes around the time the LIA came to an end. Another reason for concentrating on the Alps is that almost half of the world’s glaciers that have long-term monitoring data are located there.

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Record High Temperatures: Toxic Slime Spreads Across Oceans as Climate Disruption Continues

November 1, 2018

Record High Temperatures: Toxic Slime Spreads Across Oceans as Climate Disruption Continues

It is August 30. I’m in Anchorage, Alaska, and it’s hot. Very hot. In fact, it’s the fourth straight day of record high temperatures, amidst a year that has seen record high temperatures becoming normalized across the entire state.

Two days ago, this city (the most populous in Alaska) saw a record high temperature of 78 degrees, which beat the previous record by a whopping seven degrees.

Last night, I returned here from a trip with the US Geological Survey (USGS), during which we measured the Gulkana Glacier in the Eastern Alaska Range. Almost needless to say, the glacier, like thousands across this northernmost state, is melting rapidly and is in full retreat.

I asked one of the USGS researchers studying this glacier to share his feelings about what is happening to the glaciers in his home state of Alaska.

“You see stuff and it’s hard to believe it sometimes,” Shad O’Neel, a USGS research geophysicist says as we sit talking in a meeting room at the USGS office complex in Anchorage. “The scale that is happening, like hiking into Gulkana [Glacier], the stream you follow up to it, it branches into two before you get to the glacier.”

As we talk, we are both cognizant of the fact that it is warming rapidly outside, and the forecast is for more of the same.

“When I was in grad school, the terminus of the glacier was at that river branch, which is now one kilometer from the terminus,” he says. “Last year I was there, and I realized it wasn’t that long ago I was in school, and now look at how much ice is just gone. It’s a lot of ice.

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The Great Drought

October 26, 2018

The Great Drought

Photo Source NASA Goddard Space Flight Center | CC BY 2.0

The most hazardous global warming risk for society at large is widespread loss of grain production because of a synchronized worldwide drought. It would be a colossal killer. It’s happened before, known as The Great Drought 142 years ago.

Unmistakably, droughts feed off global warming and world temps are heading up, not down. Thus, droughts are intensified by temperature increases. If the same conditions as the drought of 1876 recurs, it would likely be a nightmarish scenario.

Fortuitously, ever since The Great Drought of 142 years ago, droughts have been regional, e.g., when Russia experienced wheat shortages in 2011 as a result of extreme drought, which led to the Arab Spring, other countries like Brazil and the U.S. picked up the slack. The world continued spinning!

But, what if a severe drought hits the planet once again on a global basis like The Great Drought of the late 19th century? Then, what happens?

World population was only 1.4 billion when The Great Drought of 1876-78 killed 5.5 million in India alone, 50 million worldwide, but today’s world population is 4.5xs larger. Does this mean that global famine redux would bring in its wake 225 million deaths, or more? (Source: Researchers Say an 1800s Global Famine Could Happen Again, State of the Planet, Earth Institute/Columbia University, Oct. 12, 2018)

Answer: First, hit the big red button that bonks the clarion bell in the public square to awaken people to the fact that the human footprint, in part and increasingly, negatively influences climate change for the first time since Adam & Eve. Given enough time, anthropogenic global warming itself will hit the drought hot-stuff button. That’s one reason for nations of the world to commit to omitting fossil fuels, which emit CO2, which blankets the upper atmosphere, retaining way too much heat. It’s called “global warming.”

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Analysis: Why scientists think 100% of global warming is due to humans

December 15, 2017

Analysis: Why scientists think 100% of global warming is due to humans

The extent of the human contribution to modern global warming is a hotly debated topic in political circles, particularly in the US.

During a recent congressional hearing, Rick Perry, the US energy secretary, remarked that “to stand up and say that 100% of global warming is because of human activity, I think on its face, is just indefensible”.

However, the science on the human contribution to modern warming is quite clear. Humans emissions and activities have caused around 100% of the warming observed since 1950, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) fifth assessment report.

Here Carbon Brief examines how each of the major factors affecting the Earth’s climate would influence temperatures in isolation – and how their combined effects almost perfectly predict long-term changes in the global temperature.

Carbon Brief’s analysis finds that:

Since 1850, almost all the long-term warming can be explained by greenhouse gas emissions and other human activities.
If greenhouse gas emissions alone were warming the planet, we would expect to see about a third more warming than has actually occurred. They are offset by cooling from human-produced atmospheric aerosols.
Aerosols are projected to decline significantly by 2100, bringing total warming from all factors closer to warming from greenhouse gases alone.
Natural variability in the Earth’s climate is unlikely to play a major role in long-term warming.

Animation by Rosamund Pearce for Carbon Brief. Images via Alamy Stock Photo.

How much warming is caused by humans?

In its 2013 fifth assessment report, the IPCC stated in its summary for policymakers that it is “extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature” from 1951 to 2010 was caused by human activity. By “extremely likely”, it meant that there was between a 95% and 100% probability that more than half of modern warming was due to humans.

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Global Warming and Food Prices

March 15, 2016

Global Warming and Food Prices

Given that we all have to eat and that there are some concerning environmental developments out there, here’s an interesting question: has global warming led to higher or lower food prices (thus far)?

As always the answer depends on how this affects the balance between supply and demand. Assuming that demand grows steadily each year broadly in line with population (income effects aside), the major price swings should thus come from the supply side.

As we all know growing food is sensitive to variations in the climate, and since discussing future global warming scenarios usually involves some type of natural catastrophe, we speculate that most people would expect that food prices increase as the world gets warmer and vice-versa.

We decided to test this hypothesis using a very narrow set of (oversimplifying) assumptions.

First, let’s start with the measurement of global temperatures. There are several ways to go about this. Given the debate around some ground weather stations being affected by the gradually changing environment around them (such as urbanization, new industrial developments) and their limited geographical representation, we decided to use global temperature data provided by satellite measurements (for both land and sea, since we extract food from both).

This series is regularly updated by the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The graph above shows monthly readings as a deviation from (a positively sloped) trend line since November 1978. The data is fairly noisy but we can note in the first half of the series plenty of cooling observations interspersed with occasional warm spells, and the opposite occurring since the mid 1990s.

The next step is to find a proxy for food prices. We decided to use the Producer Price Index portion for processed foods and feeds in the US (not seasonally adjusted), as provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The climate emergency: time to switch to panic mode?

March 15, 2016

The climate emergency: time to switch to panic mode?

The latest temperature data have broken all records (image from “think progress“). At best, this is an especially large oscillation and the climate system will be soon back on track; following the predictions of the models – maybe to be retouched to take into account faster climbing temperatures. A worst, it is an indication that the system is going out of control and moving to a new climate state faster than anyone could have imagined.

James Schlesinger once uttered one of those profound truths that explain a lot of what we see around us: it was: “people have only two modes of operation: complacency and panic.”

So far, we have been in the “complacency” mode of operation in regard to climate change: it doesn’t exist, if exist it is not a problem, if it is a problem, it is not our fault, and anyway doing something about it would be too expensive to be worth doing. But the latest temperature data are nothing but spine-chilling. What are we seeing? Is this just a sort of a rebound from the so-called “pause”? Or something much more worrisome? We may be seeing something that portends a major switch in the climate system; an unexpected acceleration of the rate of change. There are reasons to be worried, very worried: the CO2 emissions seem to have peaked, but that didn’t generate a slowdown of the rate of increase of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. If nothing else, it is growing faster than ever. And then there is the ongoing methane spike and, as you know, methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

What’s happening? Nobody can say for sure, but these are not good symptoms; not at all. And that may be a good reason to switch to panic mode.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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