[TheClimate.Vote] February 6, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/February 6, 2019/

[Washington Post Opinion]
*The glaring hole in Trump's address: Climate change*
By Ishaan Tharoor - February 6

President Trump's State of the Union address Tuesday night zigzagged 
between paeans to unity and sops to his hardcore base. He eulogized 
World War II soldiers and then wheeled on immigrants and leftist rivals 
at home. But absent amid the nativist demagoguery and partisan jockeying 
was any reference to the threat looming above all others: climate change.

That's no surprise. Trump is an avowed climate skeptic who casts 
environmentalist efforts as challenges to American sovereignty, not ways 
to stave off a planet-wide disaster...
- -
Now, with Democrats in control of the House of Representatives, Trump's 
climate denial is being thrown in his face. Democrats will hold the 
first House hearing on climate change in six years on Wednesday. And at 
the State of the Union itself, they brought in a host of academics and 
activists focused on the climate as their guests.

"The climate-themed invitees run the gamut, from longtime climate 
activist Bill McKibben, who was invited by Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), to 
relative newcomers such as Varshini Prakash, co-founder of the Sunrise 
Movement, who got a seat from Sen. Edward J. Markey (Mass.)," noted Dino 
Grandoni of The Washington Post's Energy 202 newsletter.

"Instead of tackling the problem head-on, President Trump is burying his 
head in the sand and handing out favors to his friends in the coal 
industry," Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who invited University of 
Washington climate scientist Lisa Graumlich as her guest, said in a 
statement.

For some, there's no time left to debate with climate change deniers. 
While the United States shivered, Australia experienced its hottest 
January on record, a volatile period that saw vast wildfires in 
Tasmania, epic floods in the country's northeast that brought crocodiles 
into town streets and searing heat and drought that led to the mass 
deaths of fish in parched rivers.

Experts in Australia warned that whole swaths of the country's coastline 
could become uninsurable. For right-wing Australian Prime Minister Scott 
Morrison, who came to office thanks in part to a party revolt against 
his predecessor's climate activism, it presents an intensifying 
political headache.

"It's extremely inconvenient for any government that does not have a 
cogent answer for what they'll do about climate change, to see the 
effects of climate change putting more and more people and homes at 
risk," said Greg Mullins, a decorated former Australian fire chief, to 
the Sydney Morning Herald. He added that fire seasons "are longer, more 
severe" and that blazes are "much harder to put out." This seems also 
true in California, beset by increasingly devastating wildfires each year.
- -
For Trump, that may be a timeline of no consequence to his political 
career. But his inaction and indifference is already part of a broader 
political legacy likely to be remembered in decades to come.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/02/06/glaring-hole-trumps-address-climate-change/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7a888ca5f9c30
- - -
[The Washington Post]
*The Energy 202: Democrats spotlight climate change with their State of 
the Union guests*
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2019/02/05/the-energy-202-democrats-spotlight-climate-change-with-their-state-of-the-union-guests/5c58687f1b326b66eb09860b/?utm_term=.acb81bb4c353


[Oregon, New Mexico, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Idaho, Michigan]
*These governors are showing what happens when you campaign on climate 
action and win*
There's a flurry of green political news at the state level...
- - -
State progress will eventually carry the feds along
What do all these recent developments tell us? First, the clean energy 
tide is unstoppable. The 19 states in the US Climate Alliance represent 
an enormous market that clean energy technologies are in no danger of 
saturating any time soon. There is nothing but running room, and as 
clean energy grows and gets cheaper, the market will expand.

The call for 100 percent clean energy is practically Democratic 
orthodoxy at this point. And Trump's wan attempts to save coal look 
sillier and sillier.

And as Portland and King County show, in the most liberal areas of the 
country, the fight against fossil fuel supply -- the mines, wells, 
railroads, and export terminals -- is growing faster than anyone 
expected. It doesn't enjoy nearly the consensus that demand-side 
measures (like carbon pricing and clean energy mandates) do, but it is 
making remarkable strides. My prediction: It won't be long before "keep 
it in the ground" is the new marker of lefty climate commitment.

There's no way of knowing if these state policies will compensate for 
the lack of federal leadership on climate change. Most of the models 
show the US falling short of its targets.

But models don't capture policies not yet passed, and they don't often 
capture tipping points. As an increasing proportion of the US populace 
is represented by lawmakers who take climate change seriously, the 
rationale for holdouts is shrinking. The plutocratic wall of national 
resistance to sane climate policy cannot hold forever. And when it 
breaks, there will be a flood.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/1/31/18204898/climate-change-policy-governors-oregon-colorado


[it's called climate destabilization]
*Is deep freeze the latest sign climate change is accelerating?*
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/02/deep-freeze-latest-sign-climate-change-is-accelerating


[Paul Beckwith video explains new research]
*Huge Cavity Melted Out in Antarctic Glacier: Part 1 of 2*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTZpGrlihTA
*Huge Cavity Melted Out in Antarctica Glacier: Part 2 of 2*
Paul Beckwith - Published on Feb 4, 2019
Total melt of west Antarctic glaciers would raise global sea levels 
about 5 meters; Greenland glacier melt would add 7 meters; east 
Antarctic plus mountain glacier melt would add 60 meters (total about 72 
meters = 238 feet). I discuss how melt rates of Antarctica glaciers are 
rapidly increasing due to warm salty ocean water incursions under the 
ice; in fact under Thwaites Glacier in west Antarctica an enormous hole 
(about 4 km wide x 10 km long by 300 meters high) has appeared in only a 
few years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpAQi7emaDQ


[philosophizing global warming - video]
*Shed A Light: Rupert Read – This civilisation is finished: so what is 
to be done?*
Churchill College, University of Cambridge
Published on Nov 9, 2018
Rupert Read, Environmental Philosopher and Chair of Green House Think Tank.
The Paris Agreement explicitly commits us to use non-existent, utterly 
reckless, unaffordable and ineffective 'Negative Emissions Technologies' 
which will almost certainly fail to be realised. Barring a multifaceted 
miracle, within a generation, we will be facing an exponentially rising 
tide of climate disasters that will bring this civilization down. We, 
therefore, need to engage with climate realism. This means an epic 
struggle to mitigate and adapt, an epic struggle to take on the 
climate-criminals and, notably, to start planning seriously for 
civilizational collapse.

Dr Rupert Read is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of East 
Anglia. Rupert is a specialist in Wittgenstein, environmental 
philosophy, critiques of Rawlsian liberalism, and philosophy of film. 
His research in environmental ethics and economics has included 
publications on problems of 'natural capital' valuations of nature, as 
well as pioneering work on the Precautionary Principle. Recently, his 
work was cited by the Supreme Court of the Philippines in their landmark 
decision to ban the cultivation of GM aubergine. Rupert is also chair of 
the UK-based post-growth think tank, Green House, and is a former Green 
Party of England & Wales councillor, spokesperson, European 
parliamentary candidate and national parliamentary candidate. He stood 
as the Green Party MP-candidate for Cambridge in 2015.

    "for example, some of the super-rich are buying up property in New
    Zealand and they're probably right in the short to
    medium term. You know they may be able to buy themselves an extra 10
    years 15 years something like that.
    And you know maybe if they're 50 years old or something that's all
    they care about. If that's all
    they care about they are incredibly horrendously selfish. They
    should care for example the very least about their children and
    their grandchildren and
    their great-grandchildren and there is no way you can safeguard
    their future by buying up some fancy property in New Zealand. Right,
    if you actually want to
    take care of your own descendants let alone everybody else in the
    world and all the other animals, if you actually want to take care
    of your own
    descendants the only way you can do it is by saving the collective
    future in that sense we really are all in this together and that
    seems to me a very
    powerful argument which is a key argument that I'm now trying to
    make...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzCxFPzdO0Y&t=3351s


[Another from David Wallace-Wells]
*'The devastation of human life is in view': what a burning world tells 
us about climate change*
I was wilfully deluded until I began covering global warming, says David 
Wallace-Wells. But extreme heat could transform the planet by 2100
have never been an environmentalist. I don't even think of myself as a 
nature person. I've lived my whole life in cities, enjoying gadgets 
built by industrial supply chains I hardly think twice about. I've never 
gone camping, not willingly anyway, and while I always thought it was 
basically a good idea to keep streams clean and air clear, I also 
accepted the proposition that there was a trade-off between economic 
growth and cost to nature – and figured, well, in most cases I'd go for 
growth. I'm not about to personally slaughter a cow to eat a hamburger, 
but I'm also not about to go vegan. In these ways – many of them, at 
least – I am like every other American who has spent their life fatally 
complacent, and wilfully deluded, about climate change, which is not 
just the biggest threat human life on the planet has ever faced, but a 
threat of an entirely different category and scale. That is, the scale 
of human life itself.

A few years ago, I began collecting stories of climate change, many of 
them terrifying, gripping, uncanny narratives, with even the most 
small-scale sagas playing like fables: a group of Arctic scientists 
trapped when melting ice isolated their research centre on an island 
also populated by a group of polar bears; a Russian boy killed by 
anthrax released from a thawing reindeer carcass that had been trapped 
in permafrost for many decades. At first, it seemed the news was 
inventing a new genre of allegory. But of course climate change is not 
an allegory. Beginning in 2011, about a million Syrian refugees were 
unleashed on Europe by a civil war inflamed by climate change and 
drought; in a very real sense, much of the "populist moment" the west is 
passing through now is the result of panic produced by the shock of 
those migrants. The likely flooding of Bangladesh threatens to create 10 
times as many, or more, received by a world that will be even further 
destabilised by climate chaos – and, one suspects, less receptive the 
browner those in need. And then there will be the refugees from 
sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the rest of south Asia – 140 
million by 2050, the World Bank estimates, more than 10 times the Syrian 
crisis.

My file of stories grew daily, but very few of the clips, even those 
drawn from new research published in the most pedigreed scientific 
journals, seemed to appear in the coverage about climate change we 
watched on television and read in newspapers. Climate change was 
reported, of course, and even with some tinge of alarm. But the 
discussion of possible effects was misleadingly narrow, limited almost 
invariably to the matter of sea level rise. Just as worrisome, the 
coverage was sanguine, all things considered...

As recently as the 1997 signing of the landmark Kyoto Protocol, 2C of 
global warming was considered the threshold of catastrophe: flooded 
cities, crippling droughts and heatwaves, a planet battered daily by 
hurricanes and monsoons we used to call "natural disasters" but will 
soon normalise as simply "bad weather". More recently, the foreign 
minister of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific offered another name for 
that level of warming: "genocide".

There is almost no chance we will avoid that scenario. The Kyoto 
Protocol achieved, practically, nothing; in the 20 years since, despite 
all our climate advocacy and legislation and progress on green energy, 
we have produced more emissions than in the 20 years before.

In reading about warming, you will often come across analogies from the 
planetary record: the last time the planet was this much warmer, the 
logic runs, sea levels were here. These conditions are not coincidences. 
The geologic record is the best model we have for understanding the very 
complicated climate system, and gauging just how much damage will come 
from turning up the temperature. Which is why it is especially 
concerning that recent research into the deep history of the planet 
suggests that our current climate models may be underestimating the 
amount of warming we are due for in 2100 by as much as half. The authors 
of one recent paper suggested that slashing our emissions could still 
bring us to 4 or 5C, a scenario, they said, would pose severe risks to 
the habitability of the entire planet. "Hothouse Earth", they called it....
- - -
Between that scenario and the world we live in now lies only the 
question of human response. Some amount of further warming is already 
baked in, thanks to the protracted processes by which the planet adapts 
to greenhouse gas. But all of the paths projected from the present will 
be defined by what we choose to do now. If we do nothing about carbon 
emissions, if the next 30 years of industrial activity trace the same 
arc upward as the last 30 years, whole regions will become unlivable as 
soon as the end of this century. Of course, the assaults of climate 
change do not end at 2100 just because most modelling, by convention, 
sunsets at that point. In fact, they could accelerate, not just because 
there'd be more carbon in the atmosphere then, but because increased 
temperatures could trigger feedback loops that might send the climate 
system spiralling out of control. This is why some studying global 
warming call the hundred years to follow the "century of hell"...
- - -
These are just a few of the reasons to believe that climate nihilism is, 
in fact, another of our delusions. What happens, from here, will be 
entirely our own doing. The planet's future will be determined in large 
part by the arc of growth in the developing world – that's where most of 
the people are, in China and India and, increasingly, sub-Saharan 
Africa. But this is no absolution for the west, which accounts for the 
lion's share of historical emissions, and where the average citizen 
produces many times more than almost anyone in Asia, just out of habit. 
I toss out tons of wasted food and hardly ever recycle; I leave my 
air-conditioning on; I bought into bitcoin at the peak of the market. 
None of that is necessary, either.

But it also isn't necessary for westerners to adopt the lifestyle of the 
global poor. It's estimated that 70% of the energy produced by the 
planet is lost as waste heat. If the world's richest 10% were limited to 
the average European footprint, global emissions would fall by a third. 
And why shouldn't they be? Almost as a prophylactic against climate 
guilt, as the news from science has grown bleaker, western liberals have 
comforted themselves by contorting their own consumption patterns into 
performances of moral or environmental purity – less beef, more Teslas, 
fewer transatlantic flights. But the climate calculus is such that 
individual lifestyle choices do not add up to much, unless they are 
scaled by politics. That should not be impossible, once we understand 
the stakes.

Annihilation is only the very thin tail of warming's very long bell 
curve, and there is nothing stopping us from steering clear of it.
This is an edited extract from The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story Of The 
Future, by David Wallace-Wells (Allen Lane, £20). To order a copy for 
£15, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/02/the-devastation-of-human-life-is-in-view-what-a-burning-world-tells-us-about-climate-change-global-warming


[In the New Yorker, of course]
*The False Choice Between Economic Growth and Combatting Climate Change*
By Carolyn Kormann - February 4, 2019
In 1974, the economist William Nordhaus described the transition from a 
"cowboy economy" to a "spaceship economy." In the former, he wrote, "we 
could afford to use our resources profligately," and "the environment 
could be used as a sink without becoming fouled." But, in the spaceship 
economy, "great attention must be paid to the sources of life and to the 
dumps where our refuse is piled." He added, "Things which have 
traditionally been treated as free goods--air, water, quiet, natural 
beauty--must now be treated with the same care as other scarce goods." 
Toward the end of his landmark paper, "Resources as a Constraint on 
Growth," Nordhaus discussed the possible adverse effects of energy 
consumption, most notably the "greenhouse effect." From a "rough 
calculation," he found that the atmospheric concentration of carbon 
dioxide would increase by more than forty per cent in the next sixty 
years. "Although this is below the fateful doubling of CO2 
concentration," he wrote--scientists had already predicted that such a 
doubling could cause the polar ice caps to melt catastrophically--"it 
may well be too close for comfort." He was prescient. We are now 
dangerously on track to hit his estimate, four hundred and eighty-seven 
parts per million, by 2030.

In the United States, after three years of decline, carbon-dioxide 
emissions increased by an estimated 3.4 per cent in 2018, according to a 
report released earlier this month by the Rhodium Group, a private 
climate-research firm. The authors blame two main factors: a 
particularly cold winter and fast economic growth. In the past two 
decades, the only greater annual gain in emissions was in 2010, when the 
economy was rebounding from the Great Recession. Historically, emissions 
have aligned with the ebb and flow of the economy. In 2018, economic 
growth was driven by a higher demand for energy, trucking and air 
travel, and industrial activity. Companies were manufacturing more 
stuff, including steel, cement, and chemicals. The carbon intensity of 
the power sector, meanwhile, did not decline fast enough to offset all 
those demand increases. As has been common since Nordhaus's 1974 paper, 
the report seems to pit controlling climate change against a growing 
global economy.

The picture could have been much different. Nordhaus went on to publish 
a series of foundational studies on the economics of climate change. In 
1992, he created an integrated economic and scientific model that could 
be used to determine the most efficient ways to cut greenhouse-gas 
emissions. His work--and that of many other economists who followed his 
lead--showed that a low tax on carbon, set to rise slowly over time, 
could be enough to keep emissions at reasonable levels, saving us from 
climate change at little, if any, cost. A "spaceship economy" could 
thrive if governments made sure that companies paid an appropriate price 
for the environmental damage they caused--what would come to be called 
the social cost of carbon. Companies that were most easily able to 
reduce their level of pollution would be incentivized to make the 
greatest reductions, and to invest in cheaper and better 
pollution-reduction systems.The dirtiest activities would be the most 
costly. The tax would promote innovations in new forms of power 
generation and, eventually, a widespread adoption of clean-energy 
technologies. The way to break the chain was to reimagine how we fuel 
the global economy. "It's absolutely the case that emissions and growth 
can be decoupled," Marshall Burke, an assistant professor in Stanford 
University's Department of Earth System Science, told me. He pointed to 
research plotting how thirty-five countries, including the United 
States, did, in fact, experience economic growth in the past fifteen 
years while reducing their emissions--and not solely due to recessions. 
But the decline was not nearly enough. "The technology is available to 
have faster economic growth while reducing over-all emissions," Trevor 
Houser, the head of Rhodium Group's energy and climate team, and one of 
the authors of the report, told me. But the switch to nuclear and 
renewables needs to happen more rapidly. "It takes policy. It won't 
happen through markets alone," Houser said.

In October, Nordhaus and another economist, Paul Romer, won the Nobel 
Prize in Economic Sciences for, respectively, "integrating climate 
change" and "technological innovations" into "long-run macroeconomic 
analysis." The timing of the announcement from Sweden was painfully 
ironic. Hours earlier, the United Nations had released its dire report 
warning that, if climate change's worst impacts were to be avoided, the 
nations of the world had about a decade to revolutionize the energy 
economy. "The policies are lagging very, very far--miles, miles, miles 
behind the science and what needs to be done," Nordhaus said after 
receiving the prize. "It's hard to be optimistic . . . We're actually 
going backward in the United States, with the disastrous policies of the 
Trump Administration." The Obama Administration had, in its final years, 
partially incorporated concepts that Nordhaus had helped to develop, 
such as putting a price on the economic harm that results from every 
additional ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. The price 
was set at forty-five dollars a ton, and used in both regulatory 
cost-benefit analyses, which undergirded new fuel-efficiency standards, 
and the Clean Power Plan, which would have propelled a faster retirement 
of coal-powered electric plants and a broader transition to renewables. 
Just as such policies were "beginning to bear fruit," Houser said, "that 
whole framework was dismantled." Under Trump, the social cost of a ton 
of carbon is as little as one dollar.

As emissions keep growing, and climate change advances, there is less 
and less time to make the necessary cuts. "The pace we needed to decline 
was already much larger than what was happening," Houser told me. "Now 
we have to go even faster to meet our Paris Agreement target by 
2025"--on average, a 2.6-per-cent reduction in annual energy-related 
carbon-dioxide emissions in the next seven years. "That is considerably 
faster than at any point in history," he said. And it will need to go 
even faster if declines in other greenhouse gases, including methane and 
hydrofluorocarbons--which endure in the atmosphere for much shorter 
amounts of time than carbon dioxide but are much more potent--do not 
keep pace.

A modest carbon tax of the sort Nordhaus proposed decades ago--one that 
was then palatable to conservatives--will therefore no longer bring us 
anywhere near the Paris Agreement targets. But it's one of many weapons 
in the arsenal that policymakers need to employ. "The real challenge is 
finding ways to reduce emissions and maintain economic growth on the 
timeline demanded by the nature of climate change," Kenneth Gillingham, 
an associate professor of economics at Yale University, told me. But, as 
much as the costs of climate mitigation will undoubtedly increase, the 
question is whether the benefits of mitigation exceed those costs. "It's 
a straw man--and terrible economics--to just point out the costs while 
ignoring the benefits," Burke said. He and two co-authors published a 
paper in Nature last May that shows that the economic benefits of 
mitigation are going to be much larger than previously believed. Cooler 
temperatures would help maintain and grow productivity, and reducing 
carbon emissions means reducing air pollution--specifically particulate 
matter, or soot--which brings immediate health benefits. They found that 
keeping global warming to one and a half degrees Celsius (which is 
nearly impossible at this point), as opposed to two degrees Celsius, 
would potentially save more than twenty trillion dollars around the 
world by the end of the century, and significantly reduce global 
inequality. Beyond two degrees, they wrote, "we find considerably 
greater reductions in global economic output." If nations met their 
commitments under the Paris Agreement, the world would still see the 
average global temperature rise by two and a half to three degrees 
Celsius, which, according to Burke's paper, would result in a 
fifteen-to-twenty-five-per-cent reduction in per capita output by 2100. 
"To just complain about the costs of this transition and ignore the 
benefits, as is common in the discussion from this Administration," 
Burke said, "is some pretty poor cost-benefit analysis from an 
Administration that prides itself on economic savvy."

As a small but growing coalition of congressional Democrats, led by 
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have outlined as part of their 
Green New Deal, transforming the energy sector--and, really, the entire 
economy, in a just and more equitable way--will require some sort of 
carbon tax (preferably a "fee and dividend" approach, which distributes 
tax revenues as rebates directly to citizens), and also new regulations 
and huge investments. "We can decarbonize the electric sector at a 
fairly low cost," Gillingham told me. "That's where some of the cheapest 
emissions reductions are to be found." Extensive government subsidies 
could hasten the spread of renewables--specifically, solar, wind, and 
batteries--and offset any rise in emissions elsewhere. As Gillingham 
said, "We might want to be careful about fighting climate change by 
preventing people from staying warm in the winter. If a winter is really 
cold enough, emissions increases are to be expected." Still, there are 
ways to reduce the use of fossil fuels in heating; utilities, for 
instance, can create incentive programs so that homeowners have a 
motivation to replace their boilers with electric heat pumps.

Houser told me that total emissions are expected to remain flat in 2019. 
Economists and other market observers predict that over-all economic 
growth will be slower, and the full impact of recent cuts to coal-plant 
capacity (2018 was a near-record year) has not yet been recorded. Still, 
in the absence of major policy changes--which is mostly dependent on a 
new President who makes climate policy a top and urgent priority--there 
is almost no chance that the U.S. will achieve the average emissions 
cuts necessary to meet the Paris targets by 2025. Houser told me that 
our only hope would be extremely favorable market and technological 
conditions. "If, over the next couple of years, no more nuclear power 
plants retired"--more than a dozen are scheduled to retire in the next 
seven years--"wind, solar, and battery prices fall far faster than the 
currently most optimistic projections estimate, it is possible that we 
could come pretty close to meeting the Paris Agreement targets," he 
said. States, cities, and private organizations would also have to pick 
up a tremendous amount of slack from Washington. Even warmer winters 
would help. "Everything would really have to light up in the right 
direction," Houser said. "It's also, of course, possible that, if there 
was a massive global recession, we'd see a significant decline, too. But 
that's not the reason we want emissions to decline."

Carolyn Kormann is a staff writer at The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-false-choice-between-economic-growth-and-combating-climate-change


[Tamino, the Master Debunker, takes on Spencer, the master propagandist]
*Roy Spencer Hot Under the Collar about Down Under*
Posted on February 5, 2019
Evidently, Roy Spencer was so mightily annoyed at Australians and their 
Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) that he has made his dissatisfaction clear.
He objects to their using the word "record" so often, when talking about 
the hot temperatures this January. He definitely objects to talk about 
how heat waves are related to man-made climate change, with distaste for 
the phrase "Australia's Extreme Heat is a Sign of Things to Come" when 
used as part of the title of an article in the Guardian. And, he 
complains about "alarmists" not knowing the difference between climate 
and weather.

In my opinion, the most revealing part of Roy's post is this sentence 
about records:
But how is one to know what records are due to the human-component of 
global warming versus Mother Nature?

Roy, I think the one confusing "climate" and "weather" is you. Let me 
paraphrase your sentence:

But how is one to know what home runs are due to the steroids versus 
Mother Nature?

What's that, Roy? Were you about to say that steroids don't cause 
baseball players to hit home runs? That the very question "What home 
runs are due to the steroids versus Mother Nature?" is really kinda stupid?

Don't be so hard on yourself.

Just how extreme was Australia's January, anyway? And … did it have 
anything to do with man-made climate change? Let's see what the data 
from BoM (the Bureau of Meteorology) has to say. Here's the yearly 
average high temperature anomaly in Australia, from 1910 through 2018, 
averaged over the entire continent:

It certainly fluctuates from year to year. After all, as Roy Spencer 
would remind us, there's still weather happening.

But Roy doesn't mention the other part of the data: the trend. It's not 
fluctuation, instead it's an actual change, not just in what happens, 
but in what things are and are not likely to happen. As this trend 
continues, extreme heat is literally "a Sign of Things to Come."

That trend is definitely upward, not downward. It definitely shows 
acceleration, it's not linear. Since 1910, high temperatures in 
Australia have risen an average of 1.6°C.

But wait, weren't we just talking about January? That's the peak of 
summer for those southern-hemisphere folk. Problem is, that that level 
of fluctuation in a single-month average is bigger than the fluctuation 
level in a whole-year average, and the high noise level makes it harder 
to see whatever signal is there. Let's look anyway -- here are monthly 
averages for Januarys only, from 1910 through 2018:

Even with the higher noise level, we can still confirm that the trend is 
definitely upward. That's climate change. As this trend continues, 
extreme heat is literally "a Sign of Things to Come."
But wait, I only showed the data through 2018. Weren't we talking about 
this year? I should add that value to the graph; here you go:

Was the extremity of that final value "due to the human-component of 
global warming versus Mother Nature?" That's a stupid question.
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2019/02/05/roy-spencer-hot-under-the-collar-about-down-under/


*This Day in Climate History - February 6, 2005 - from D.R. Tucker*
February 6, 2005: Chris Mooney points out the numerous falsehoods in the 
recently released Michael Crichton novel "State of Fear."
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/02/06/checking_crichtons_footnotes 


/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

/Archive of Daily Global Warming News 
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html> 
/
https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote

/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe 
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request> 
to news digest./

*** Privacy and Security:*This is a text-only mailing that carries no 
images which may originate from remote servers. Text-only messages 
provide greater privacy to the receiver and sender.
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain must be used for democratic 
and election purposes and cannot be used for commercial purposes.
To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote 
<mailto:contact at theclimate.vote> with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe, 
subject: unsubscribe
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at 
https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for 
http://TheClimate.Vote <http://TheClimate.Vote/> delivering succinct 
information for citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List 
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously restricted to 
this mailing list.