Jennifer Marohasy

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Climate Update: Ole Humlum

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Dear all.

Please find below a link which will take you directly to a monthly newsletter (ca. 1.3 MB) with meteorological information updated to December 2011:
http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_December_2011.pdf

All temperatures in this newsletter are shown in degrees Celsius.

Previous (since March 2009) issues of the newsletter, diagrams and additional material are available on http://www.climate4you.com/

All the best, yours sincerely,
Ole Humlum

Ole Humlum, Professor of Physical Geography
Department of Physical Geography, Institute of Geosciences
University of Oslo, Norway

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. George B says

    Some of those data (at least the ocean heat content data) have been updated recently. I am waiting with bated breath for the sea level update from U. Colorado. I believe we will see a continuation of the drop.

    What all of this is showing is that the latest 30 year period of warming ended in 2002-2003. If the system behaves as it has in the past, we are due for a roughly 30 year hiatus of that warming. But there are also indications that we may be on the edge of a significant cool-down the likes of which we have not seen in 400 years (since the last time we had a significant, unexpected, and still unexplained cooling).

  3. spangled drongo says

    But when the worst case scenario for the “or not” argument is warming at night time, in winter, in high latitudes, then any rational person, while worried about the potential of both possibilities, should be more worried about cooling than warming.

  4. spangled drongo says

    A new [to me] green NGO called Greencross is starting a campaign called “witness king tides” whereby everyone goes out and photographs todays king tide.

    This is a good idea insofar as people are encouraged to take note of what is really happening around them — provided they do it long term before drawing any conclusions.

    http://www.facebook.com/GreenCrossAus

    http://www.witnesskingtides.org,

    Todays king tide, while not listed to be as high as the Christmas Day tide, was actually higher in my NOTW and got to within 100 mm of the king tides of 49 years ago.

    Maybe the neg IPO c/with stronger winds is starting to mound up the seas along the east coast similar to the pre ’70s decades.

  6. George B says

    Yes, Kuhnkat, I have been watching that. We are currently at an all time record low average global temperature at 14,000 feet since 2002, but that’s not saying much. We would have to rely on a different data set for comparison to previous periods but what I am not liking is the steady rate of drop. It has been a steady drop since the start of January. 2008 was the previous coldest in that data set during the la nina event that year. We don’t really have a strong la nina, just a mild one currently. One would have to go to radiosonde data to go back before 2002.

  9. George B says

    Kuhnkat, it looks like it gets more pronounced at higher altitude. At channel 8 (45,000 feet) current temperatures are dramatically colder than 2008. What we are going to see from that cooling is more vigorous storms until ground temperatures catch up. Right now we have a situation where the air aloft is VERY cold. That means more vigorous convection and colder cloud tops. There are two ways you can increase storm intensity: you can increase surface temperatures or decrease temperatures aloft. Both accomplish the same thing, they increase the difference in temperature between the ground and the cloud tops. The greater this difference in temperature, the more powerful the storm. Most of the surface is ocean. It takes the ocean a while to cool. Air cools quickly at altitude but is warmed by the ocean near the surface. So the first response you have to a solar driven cooling event is a cooling of the upper atmosphere. This will increase storm activity and speed the transportation of heat energy from the ocean to high altitude where it will be radiated to space from the cloud tops (bypassing nearly all of the atmospheric CO2) at 46,000 feet you are above 85% of the Earth’s atmosphere (and CO2).

    A liter of water evaporating absorbs 2260 kJ of heat energy with NO CHANGE IN TEMPERATURE! That is simply the latent heat of evaporation. Simply changing state from liquid to vapor removes 2260 kilojoules of energy from the ocean. That water then convects upward. When that liter of water condenses, it releases those 2260 kilojoules of energy into the surrounding atmosphere (which causes even MORE convection!) where that energy is finally radiated out at high altitude bypassing most of the atmospheric CO2. That is Earth’s natural refrigeration system. It is a natural evaporative refrigeration system using water as a working fluid (as opposed to ammonia for commercial refrigeration plants, but water has MORE latent heat than ammonia does so it is a more efficient refrigerant but does not work over as wide a temperature range as ammonia).

    The hotter you try to get the surface of Earth, the more evaporation will try to cool it.

  11. George B says

    Interesting graphic showing latest global surface temperature anomaly (departure from 1981-2010 average) and forecast through 1 Feb.

    http://policlimate.com/climate/gfs_t2m_bias.html

    Global temperatures falling like a rock. Note this is not absolute temperature, it is relative to the historical average for each day so seasonal fluctuations are not reflected in these graphs. This is departure from average for global mean temperature.

  12. kuhnkat says

    George B,

    yup, apparently those really cold upper air temps are causing a significant Ozone hole in the Arctic this year which is definitely not a common occurance!!

    http://earthsky.org/earth/first-ever-arctic-ozone-hole-how-it-formed-what-it-may-mean

    Then again, it may not mean as much as these guys think:

    http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/ozone-hole-and-anti-hole/

    Except for the hole itself, which is seasonal, ozone is actually thinner over the tropics!!!

  13. kuhnkat says

    Neville,

    sorry to disagree with you, but, that isn’t Boiling Oceans Hansen, that is Coal Trains of Death Hansen!! Let’s not forget Travesty Trenberth and An Inconvenient Moron Gore either!! 8>)

  14. Neville says

    KKat I still say my boiling oceans comes before your coal trains of death, but anyhow we can agree that we’re dealing with the full delusional looney.

    But what about our GAIA brain Timmy Flannery, he’s right up there with your Jimmy. This interview is a gem. BTW this numbskull is our chief CC commissioner, chosen by Juliar and her clueless govt to explain CAGW to the poor bloody taxpayer.

  16. George B says

    Well, we have a double whammy (as we say in the US) here. It takes solar UV light to create ozone. We are currently experiencing a very weak solar cycle and the UV portion of the spectrum is very weak. So ozone production will generally be low.

    It is also well known that colder polar air results in faster ozone destruction. As there is no sunlight at the pole in winter, ozone can not be created. The polar jet keeps that air sequestered from ozone rich air from lower latitudes, so, you get an ozone hole. We now know that CFCs are likely to have little to no impact on the size of “the ozone hole” and the entire exercise of banning them was folly.

    What generally causes these sorts of very expensive failures of logic is when politics and a certain social narcissism combine to cause some expensive “mitigation” to be employed that has no bearing on the problem at all. Basically it goes like this: The first time we looked we saw an ozone hole (oh, noes!!!1!!). The next year it got bigger (OMG, it’s getting worse, we’re all gonna die!). So you have a certain faction self-loathing faction that believe anything that changes is bad and all change is our fault (or worse, that we are CAPABLE of having any significant impact on that change). So you have a combination of self-loathing and a feeling of omnipotence working together. (my race is bad, my culture is bad, my country is bad, my economic system is bad, etc. combined with “the ozone hole must be caused by something we are doing, what could it be, lets give out lots of money in research grants to find out what it is”, combined with “oh, it must be Freon, no sense arguing, the science is settled, lets ban it and kill some astronauts!” followed by “oh, it wasn’t Freon after all, it’s completely natural and varies considerably, no, you can’t have your Freon back, that would amount to us admitting a mistake and people possibly doubting global warming).”

    SO now you have people in the odd position of having to defend the Montreal in the face of no change whatsoever in the ozone holes now having to defend Kyoto in the face of global cooling because they can’t admit they were wrong on either (narcissists are NEVER wrong, only misunderstood).

    The whole thing is one big, giant, expensive folly that should make anyone’s eyes water at the price tag that accomplishes absolutely nothing.

  18. kuhnkat says

    Neville my good man, be reasonable now, it will take ca number of coal trains of death before the oceans boil!! 8>)

  19. spangled drongo says

    Lindzen’s adaptive iris is really what it all boils down to. Personally, I have always thought that when the clouds cover the sun it changes the temperature much more noticeably than when the clouds cover the sky at 4am.

    David Evans at Jo Nova:

    “Notice that the skeptics agree with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO2; they just disagree just about the feedbacks. The climate debate is all about the feedbacks; everything else is merely a sideshow. Yet hardly anyone knows that. The government climate scientists and the mainstream media have framed the debate in terms of the direct effect of CO2 and sideshows such as arctic ice, bad weather, and psychology. They almost never mention the feedbacks. Why is that? Who has the power to make that happen?”

  20. George B says

    “Notice that the skeptics agree with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO2; they just disagree just about the feedbacks”

    Well, here’s the thing. Climate response to CO2 is logarithmic. So if we have an increase from 280 ppm to 390 ppm (increase of 110 ppm) it includes nearly all the change that would be expected from a doubling of CO2. In other words, the impact if increasing CO2 by the remaining 170 ppm would be minimal. In fact, the more CO2 you pour into the atmosphere, the less impact the annual contributions have. So it gets more and more difficult to increase temperatures by CO2 as time goes by.

    More importantly, and the thing that blows their policy justification completely out of the water is the fact that human CO2 emissions declined in 2009 and atmospheric CO2 rise continued unabated. No change. Something else is the source of the CO2. Human emissions apparently have little impact.

    If we go from 280 to 560 ppm, we might get 1.5 degrees of change (assuming their feedback projections are fairy stories, which they appear to be) It would take going all the way to 1120 ppm to get another 1.5 degrees of rise. We will never get to 1120 ppm because we will likely run out of fossil fuel by then. CO2 emissions from fossil fuels is a temporary problem and the CO2 emissions are on balance likely to be more beneficial than harmful.

  21. spangled drongo says

    Also Hansen has tried to sell us the AGW hypothesis based on his predictions but as Feynman said:

    “It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period.”

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