The New Normal: 2013 Aus Heatwave Unprecedented

[lobosrul]

In related news, holy crap a dust storm off the coast of NW Australia!

http://www.b.weather.com/news/dust-s...ralia-20130110

I thought that was a giant tidal wave at first glance. Didn't think a dust storm over water was possible. Living in New Mexico, I've been through a few dust storms, but nothing compared to that.

[macdoc]

Clearly a front carrying the dust as it hit the coast - the Aussies do take extreme weather to the extremes.

[Puppycow]

More pictures here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2...-under/100437/

[lionking]

Dust storms aren't new. I worked in the city centre of Melbourne when this one came along, soon before the Ash Wednesday bushfires in February 1983.

[macdoc]

Great shot - no they are not new tho might be a bit more extreme with the wind force as frontal gradients increase.

[bit_pattern]

Originally Posted by lionking

Dust storms aren't new. I worked in the city centre of Melbourne when this one came along, soon before the Ash Wednesday bushfires in February 1983.

http://i1054.photobucket.com/albums/...7d49ede059.jpg

Epic! Thanks for that!

[lionking]

22C in Sydney and 46C in Bourke! 16C in Adelaide and 43C in Moomba. Amazing state ranges.

[a_unique_person]

Originally Posted by DC

i dislike this event hunting. whenever there are events that might be a partial result do to AGW, some jump up and yell, look thats AGW.
the deniers do the same, whenever there is a cold wave they jump up and say ha, AGW is falsified.
i think this is very unscientific on both sides. and especially as we have the science on our side, we do not need this event hunting. it makes us prone to misstakes, which then gives amunition to the deniers.

For one thing, the number of record lows is outnumbered 4 to 1 by record highs. The last extreme temperature event was only three years ago, not a century ago.

[Roger Ramjets]

Originally Posted by lionking

Dust storms aren't new. I worked in the city centre of Melbourne when this one came along, soon before the Ash Wednesday bushfires in February 1983.

http://i1054.photobucket.com/albums/...7d49ede059.jpg

Apparently that dust storm was very long lived and traveled a great distance, because the exact same one was spotted again in Iraq, in 2005!

http://www.militec-1.com/emails/05_01_05.html

[lionking]

Originally Posted by Roger Ramjets

Apparently that dust storm was very long lived and traveled a great distance, because the exact same one was spotted again in Iraq, in 2005!

http://www.militec-1.com/emails/05_01_05.html

Well I'm pretty sure the one I posted wasn't photoshopped because I experienced it.

[lionking]

Another photo. I guess we're off topic though.

[macdoc]

Quote:

i dislike this event hunting. whenever there are events that might be a partial result do to AGW, some jump up and yell, look thats AGW.

The insurers are best to look at for a pragmatic approach and they of course are very concerned about "events" like Sandy which had a "component" of AGW.
Warmer Atlantic and blocking high frequency.

Quote:

These high numbers can be contributed to the fact that cities are becoming larger, attracting more people and sparking infrastructure growth, and climate change. When a natural disaster strikes, the dense population and asset concentration leads to losses. These losses can severely impact not only a country's economy, but its population as well.

http://www.swissre.com/rethinking/cl...disaster_risk/

Quote:

REPORT AIR DATE: Nov. 21, 2012
Climate Change Causes Insurers to Rethink Price of Risk After Hurricane Sandy

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/busin...nse_11-21.html

[a_unique_person]

Originally Posted by LTC8K6

Yes, it sounds very much normal to me.

The fact that the avg temp rises and falls seems perfectly normal to me.

It mystifies me that anyone is concerned that it's currently rising.

Now, back when they were concerned that it was cooling, I was a child and that scared me.

There was an idea it might cool, and it was investigated. They revealed nothing concrete. The idea that it would warm was investigated, here we are 40 years later, they were right that time. CO2 is making it warmer. It's not just warmer, the extremes are deadly, and massively disrupt the economy and natural world.

[macdoc]

Quote:

There was an idea it might cool, and it was investigated. They revealed nothing concrete.

This is somewhat incorrect and misleading.
Global cooling was and is a very real phenomena determined to be the result of S02 emissions - the issue was in which anthro influence would dominate and consensus and reality was that C02 would be the dominate forcing.

Quote:

One of the sources of this idea may have been a 1971 paper by Stephen Schneider, then a climate researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, US. Schneider's paper suggested that the cooling effect of dirty air could outweigh the warming effect of carbon dioxide, potentially leading to an ice age if aerosol pollution quadrupled.

This scenario was seen as plausible by many other scientists, as at the time the planet had been cooling (see Global temperatures fell between 1940 and 1980). Furthermore, it had also become clear that the interglacial period we are in was lasting an unusually long time (see Record ice core gives fair forecast).

However, Schneider soon realised he had overestimated the cooling effect of aerosol pollution and underestimated the effect of CO2, meaning warming was more likely than cooling in the long run. In his review of a 1977 book called The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age, Schneider stated: "We just don't know...at this stage whether we are in for warming or cooling - or when." A 1975 report (pdf format) by the US National Academy of Sciences merely called for more research.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...the-1970s.html

S02 drops out tho and C02 does not.
S02 pollution ( acid rain ) was cleaned up in the first world in the Clean Air campaign
As the offsetting cooling of S02 was removed the warming trend emerged as a stronger signal - the reality is that C02 persists in the atmosphere.
Even now S02 injection into the stratosphere is being touted as a way to blunt the pace of global warming - a relatively cheap form of geo-engineering.

Even now the Asian Brown cloud and other aerosols produced from emerging nations are a great uncertainty as to the pace of change.
So saying there was nothing concrete implies that it was not a real phenomena when indeed is was and still is. Every time a volcano like Pinatubo goes off there is a dip in global temps for a couple of years and those are easily observed now.
The tools for observing those impacts have greatly improved in the 40 years but aerosols are a complex issue in assessing future climate.

Quote:

Aerosols

Atmospheric aerosols — airborne liquid or solid particles — are a source of great uncertainty in climate science. Despite decades of intense research, scientists must still resort to using huge error bars when assessing how particles such as sulphates, black carbon, sea salt and dust affect temperature and rainfall.

Overall, it is thought that aerosols cool climate by blocking sunlight, but the estimates of this effect vary by an order of magnitude, with the top end exceeding the warming power of all the carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by humans.

One of the biggest problems is lack of data. "We don't know what's in the air," says Schmidt. "This means a major uncertainty over key processes driving past and future climate."

To measure aerosols in the sky, satellite and ground-based sensors detect the scattering and absorption of solar radiation. But researchers lack enough of this kind of data to complete a picture of aerosols across the globe. And a complex set of coordinated experiments is required to determine how aerosols alter climate processes.

Some aerosols, such as black carbon, absorb sunlight and produce a warming effect that might also inhibit rainfall.

Other particles such as sulphates exert a cooling influence by reflecting sunlight.

The net effect of aerosol pollution on global temperature is not well established. And various studies have produced conflicting conclusions over whether global aerosol pollution is increasing or decreasing.

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/1001...l/463284a.html

The known physics is C02 and in general the observed reality has exceeded the projections somewhat. ie the IPCC has been conservative - much of this in regards to the Arctic. The projections from the 80s held up well but were on the conservative side under predicting what actually occurred.

A major unknown area are the aerosols - certainly cleaning up SO2 in the 70s and 80s set the C02 warming signal to emerge robustly.
Getting the tools and experiments in place to track the impact of aerosols in their various roles, some warming, some cooling is an ongoing process. Some areas of China tho are receiving 25% less incoming solar reaching the ground due to aerosols.

I think your comment opens the door that "they were wrong".....the usual unqualified sound snips the denier community loves. We continually see it trotted out by the deniers - even recently in this thread.

Stressing that global dimming was and is indeed a real phenomena and has been outweighed by the impact of accumulating C02 closes that door.

[aleCcowaN]

Originally Posted by LTC8K6

Now, back when they were concerned that it was cooling, I was a child and that scared me.

Really!?

I was so scared that I thought that becoming a sled dog trainer would be the only job opportunity available by 2000

[Damien Evans]

Originally Posted by ThunderChunky

And it's still early winter...imagine how hot it will be during the summer!


39 degrees? Our LOW was 44 degrees today in Los Angeles.

This is either a terrible joke or profoundly stupid.

[r-j]

Or both!

[bit_pattern]

An interesting piece on the role that ocean heat content played in the 2013 heatwave

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Ocea...Australia.html

[macdoc]

Quote:

Record-breaking temperatures are now the norm

* 18:00 15 January 2013 by Peter Aldhous
* For similar stories, visit the Climate Change Topic Guide

Video: How climate change is both global and local
Interactive map: "Your warming world"
http://warmingworld.newscientistapps.com/

that interactive map is neat.

[aleCcowaN]

Originally Posted by macdoc

that interactive map is neat.

Yes, indeed. Thank you for that!

With just moving the cursor to where the Brazil Current (southern counterpart of the Gulf Stream) meets the Malvinas/Falkland Current (a unique configuration of currents) allowed me to understand why the climate changed here so quickly from 1976 to 1985 (temperatures climbed 2°C during those years and have remain there ever since)