The Heat Is On
Jul. 11th, 2023 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tcpipLast Monday was the hottest global average day according to estimates against the instrument record. Until Tuesday, which was hotter still. Wednesday decided to match Tuesday's value, and Thursday decided it could do even better. On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday temperatures dipped slightly and increased again on Monday. But all have been above last Monday's record-breaking value. One can follow the trajectory at the University of Maine's "Climate Reanalyzer", which does area-weighted daily means from the surface, radiosonde, and satellite observations. This sudden increase has been pushed upwards by the natural warming phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), but of course, occurs on top of decades of greenhouse gas emissions and resulting temperature increases. Whilst I am extremely wary of making correlations between local temperature changes and global averages the mildness of Melbourne's winter this year led me to check the temperature record at BOM just as a quick comparison to last year; nine of the eleven days this year have had a higher maximum, and the minimums have been much higher - almost as high as last year's maximums.
Turn the clock back almost forty years to 1986 - I learn about the greenhouse effect for the first time and, by beautiful coincidence, I am living next door to a Perth punk band of the same name in Pakenham Street, Mount Lawley. Several years later, as I'm finishing my undergraduate degree, I would read in Habermas' 1971 social theory book "Legitimation Crisis" which stated that the environment's capacity to absorb heat from energy consumption was an absolute limit on industrial growth. More years pass and one day, on aus.politics on USENET, I encounter my first climate change denier. I am perplexed by their attempt to politicise a question that seemed obviously a matter of science. Of course, it's the practical policy implications that are of concern, not the truth. Shortly afterward I comment: "There will be a year when winter doesn't happen. That will be when people will finally believe that global warming is happening and by then, it will be too late". It is, after all, only in the past two decades that we've truly learned that carbon dioxide, once emitted, remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. Now, as I increasingly dedicate my life to this concern, I rather suspect that my comment of some twenty years ago was optimistic. Locally, I rather suspect we've pretty much seen the end of winter already. Globally, we're in for some real scorchers over the next few years. I'd like to be wrong - I suspect I won't be.
Turn the clock back almost forty years to 1986 - I learn about the greenhouse effect for the first time and, by beautiful coincidence, I am living next door to a Perth punk band of the same name in Pakenham Street, Mount Lawley. Several years later, as I'm finishing my undergraduate degree, I would read in Habermas' 1971 social theory book "Legitimation Crisis" which stated that the environment's capacity to absorb heat from energy consumption was an absolute limit on industrial growth. More years pass and one day, on aus.politics on USENET, I encounter my first climate change denier. I am perplexed by their attempt to politicise a question that seemed obviously a matter of science. Of course, it's the practical policy implications that are of concern, not the truth. Shortly afterward I comment: "There will be a year when winter doesn't happen. That will be when people will finally believe that global warming is happening and by then, it will be too late". It is, after all, only in the past two decades that we've truly learned that carbon dioxide, once emitted, remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. Now, as I increasingly dedicate my life to this concern, I rather suspect that my comment of some twenty years ago was optimistic. Locally, I rather suspect we've pretty much seen the end of winter already. Globally, we're in for some real scorchers over the next few years. I'd like to be wrong - I suspect I won't be.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-13 09:34 am (UTC)And yes, it's always about politics from the deniers. Me? I was a denier until 2009. I still thought we should do the whole renewables thing anyway, for good and sufficient reasons, but ... yeah.
Problem is ... the science has been well and truly In. For a long time. Listen to the deniers and it's always UN World Government blah blah blah. The fact that the UN couldn't run a bath doesn't seem to have crossed their tiny minds. Conflationism and tribal thinking really are the curse of the age :/
no subject
Date: 2023-07-13 02:40 pm (UTC)And as the weight of science becomes stronger and stronger the deniers are becoming stranger and stranger. Once there were some serious questions of whether the entire thing was being over-rated (especially during the "hiatus" in the 00s).
Now it's global conspiracies among meteorologists who are changing the instrument record for some agenda - to keep their jobs or something.
I wonder what the progression will be from here.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-14 04:05 am (UTC)The problem is that (a) my old university can't be bothered teaching chemistry any more, and most people only do chem at school, if at all. And .... (b) fluid mechanics and heat transfer... well, the Navier-Stokes equations are scary. Even the Stefan-Boltzmann Law is a bit scary. Since you've recently graduated in Climate Science you may have the ear of some of these folks. Here is what I might suggest, if I may:
Look, the mechanics of heat transfer and all the rest of it are very complex. Because climate science is still new it took a long time for the collective penny to drop that the oceans were the key to it all. To nail the deniers once and for all, we need to keep it simple. Here's my simplified Climate Science for dummies:
Absolutely Undeniable facts:
1. The oceans really are warming.
2. Glaciers and polar ice really are shrinking.
Point 1 is why we get more weather extremes. Given that point 2 is absolutely happening at a frightening rate, the oceans ought to be cooling. Because of hydrogen bonding, water has eight times the specific heat of most metals. Every tonne of ice which melts absorbs two gigajoules of heat from the surroundings. (This is why when you hold melting ice in your hand it feels freezing cold.) Around the melting glaciers and ice caps there are big pools of cold water. But overall the oceans are heating up. If that doesn't scare the pants off you then it really should.
Now you can always assemble an army of footnotes to counter some of the more intelligent queries, like what about sunspots and what about the Medieval Warm? These at least are fact-based rather than fantasy. But I would suggest that something like the above ought to be the main PR offensive.
Good luck!
no subject
Date: 2023-07-14 11:52 pm (UTC)They sure are.. and after 1000 years after emission, 40% of them remain in the atmosphere.
Your trajectory is, as I am sure you know, a little unusual and you already had a good understanding of the scientific principles and could work from there.
The thing about your "absolutely undeniable facts" - and they are - is the scientifically challenged will respond "it's just a natural cycle" and "we can't do anything about it anyway".
Oh, and I certainly have quite an army of references that I've accumulated over the years; a very big text file and my searching skills are pretty good. :)
no subject
Date: 2023-07-15 04:07 am (UTC)