Lethal Heating: 01/03/18

03/01/2018

2017 Was The Hottest Year On Record Without An El Niño, Thanks To Global Warming

The Guardian - Dana Nuccitelli

Climate scientists predicted the rapid rise in global surface temperatures that we’re now seeing

Firefighters lighting backfires as they try to contain the Thomas wildfire in Ojai, California on on December 09, 2017. Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

2017 was the second-hottest year on record according to Nasa data, and was the hottest year without the short-term warming influence of an El Niño event:

Global surface temperature data 1964–2017 from NASA GISS, broken out by years with El Niño warming influence, La Niña cooling, or neutral, with linear trends for each category. Trends are 0.17–0.18°C per decade for each category.

In fact, 2017 was the hottest year without an El Niño by a wide margin – a whopping 0.17°C hotter than 2014, which previously held that record. Remarkably, 2017 was also hotter than 2015, which at the time was by far the hottest year on record thanks in part to a strong El Niño event that year.
For comparison, the neutral El Niño conditions and the level of solar activity in 1972 were quite similar to those in 2017. 45 years later, the latter was 0.9°C hotter than the former. For each type of year – La Niña, El Niño, and neutral – the global surface warming trend between 1964 and 2017 is 0.17–0.18°C per decade, which is consistent with climate model predictions.

1964–2017 global surface temperature data from NASA, divided into El Niño (red), La Niña (blue), and neutral (black) years, with linear trends added. Illustration: Dana Nuccitelli

It’s déjà vu all over again
I’ve been writing for the Guardian for almost 5 years now, and every year I’ve had to write a similar headline or two:

Those early years were the height of the denier frenzy about the mythical global warming ‘hiatus.’ At the time, John Abraham and I frequently wrote pieces pointing out that while various factors were temporarily dampening global surface warming, the oceans (which absorb over 90% of the excess heat from the increased greenhouse effect) continued warming rapidly.

Climate scientists predicted this rapid temperature rise
It was only a matter of time until short-term effects stopped holding back the rise of Earth’s surface temperatures. That’s now happened, and as a result we’re seeing unleashed global warming causing record temperatures year after year. In fact, in February 2014 I wrote about a study that predicted this would happen:

the [ocean] heat uptake is by no means permanent: when the trade wind strength returns to normal - as it inevitably will - our research suggests heat will quickly accumulate in the atmosphere. So global temperatures look set to rise rapidly out of the hiatus, returning to the levels projected within as little as a decade.

Temperatures have in fact risen so quickly, it appears to have taken just a few years for that prediction to come true and for the denier focus on the short-term surface warming slowdown to look quite foolish.

2017 – a year of climate denial
Speaking of climate denial, on the 362^nd day of the hottest year on record without an El Niño, the US president tweeted this:

IMAGE

Climate scientist Sarah Myhre aptly described the tweet as “Phenomenally dumb,” for several obvious reasons.
Trump also began the process of withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017, leaving America as the only country in the world denying the urgent need to address global warming. Fortunately, every other nation is taking action to mitigate this existential threat, but there’s a shocking gap between reality and the ‘fake news’ beliefs of arguably the most powerful man in the world.

Feeling the burn of climate change consequences
America was also battered by climate-fueled extreme weather events in 2017. Research has already shown that global warming boosted Hurricane Harvey’s record rainfall (and associated flooding) by about 38%. California’s record wildfire season was similarly fueled by the state’s hot summer. The southwestern states were cooked by record hot summer temperatures this year, and global warming is making droughts in America and Europe worse. America was hit by 15 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2017, and it will likely be the costliest such year on record once all of the hurricane damages are tallied.

Billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the US in 2017. Illustration: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

These extreme weather events are expensive, and they’re a mere taste of what’s to come. Until we manage to cut global carbon pollution, temperatures will continue to rise and climate change consequences will become more severe. While it broke many of today’s records, 2017 is just a taste of what’s to come.

Links

It’s Not Too Late: A Climate Change New Year’s Resolution

InsideClimate News - Nicholas Kusnetz

The technology exists to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and avoid the worst of climate change, scientists say. What’s missing is the ambition.

Among the recommendations for cutting greenhouse gas emissions quickly: boost renewable energy and expand the use of electric vehicles. Credit: David McNew/Getty Images

How's this for a New Year's resolution: Act quickly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—while there's still time to prevent a level of global warming that would make parts of the planet too hot to inhabit, melt glaciers that provide water to billions, flood many of the world's coastal cities and push mass migration to a full blown crisis.
It can't be accomplished in a single year, of course. But there isn't much time.
We have about three years left to bend global greenhouse gas emissions to a downward trajectory if we hope to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, a group of leading climate experts warned in the journal Nature last June. In an article that was both urgent and optimistic, they argued that the daunting task can be met using technologies that are already at hand.
"When it comes to climate, timing is everything," the group, including former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, head of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, wrote. "If we delay, the conditions for human prosperity will be severely curtailed."
So, as 2018 begins, here are some of the goals for 2020 that the optimists presented:

Boost the world's renewable electricity generation to 30 percent of total supply.
Begin to retire all remaining coal-fired power plants.
Expand sales of electric vehicles to 15 percent of new cars.
Provide $1 trillion in financing each year—public and private—for climate action.

Those efforts can help reach a peak in global emissions by 2020, but it's only a start.
To have a good chance of avoiding dangerous warming, scientists say, emissions of greenhouse gases must effectively hit zero within the next few decades—at the latest, sometime in the second half of this century. If we can't halt the burning of fossil fuels that rapidly, and many people think we won't, we'll likely need widespread use of technologies that capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks and bury it in the ground, or find other ways of removing it from the atmosphere.

We Are Not on Track
An International Energy Agency analysis, which assumes all nations will meet the pledges they made as part of the Paris climate agreement, projects global CO2 emissions in 2040 will be slightly higher than today.
The most recent "gap report" of the United Nations Environment Program, an annual estimate of how far we are falling short, found that without further cuts, the world would likely warm 3 degrees by 2100. The Paris goal is to limit warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius since the start of the industrial era.

According to the World Resources Institute, the United States is very likely to fall short of its targets, which the Trump administration has abandoned. It would have fallen short even under President Obama's policies, which Trump is now working hard to undo, including its centerpiece, the Clean Power Plan, which was designed to regulate emissions from power plants.

Signs of Hope
There are glimmers of hope, however. In the United States, many states, cities and companies have pledged that they are "still in" for meeting the Paris goals.
Global emissions from fossil fuels, cement and other industrial sources, which make up about 70 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, had held steady for three consecutive years—before increasing again last year by an estimated 2 percent.
Anthony Hobley, chief executive of Carbon Tracker, a British research and advocacy group, said we're in the midst of an energy "paradigm shift" as wind, solar and natural gas become cheaper than coal.

"I think the good news is the direction of travel is clear," said Hobley, one of the authors of the Nature paper. "The challenge is to speed up that transition and make it go faster, and that's where all the efforts on policy and advocacy should be focused."

Kelly Levin, a senior associate at the World Resources Institute, said that while there are some modeling scenarios suggesting it's still possible to limit warming to less than 2 degrees even if we delay action, it would require more drastic cuts that would imply much greater costs and risk of economic disruption.
That would probably involve a greater reliance on what are called "negative emissions technologies," such as carbon capture and sequestration, or far-reaching changes in agriculture and forestry. It's a tempting idea—for the first time, it got a chapter in the UN's gap report. There's just one problem: despite decades of research and pilot projects, no one has yet been able to make this technology work on a larger scale at a cost that's practical.
So, watch closely to see if emissions continue rising this year.
"We are going to have to deal with a lot of disruption, and of course the people who will get hit the hardest are the poorest and most vulnerable," Hobley said. All the other pressing global issues—poverty, migration, disease—he said, "all of those things will suffer, and we'll lose progress in all those areas if we have an unstable and disruptive climate."
For now, it's not too late.

Links

Building Code Not Ready For Climate Change

The Australian - Robyn Ironside

The Nest House by architect Shaun Lockyer

Australia’s building design rules need a major overhaul to help future-proof homes and buildings for climate change.
The national president of the Australian Institute of Architects, Richard Kirk, said regulations did not allow for the types of innovation needed to mitigate the anticipated climate shift.
“The most important issue facing Australia is getting authorities to appreciate the very short time frame in which our climate will change,” Mr Kirk said.
“It’s very real, and it’s very tangible and we need to make sure the community as a whole is developing housing stock for climate change. It’s not about red tape, it’s about education and getting people prepared for the dramatic change in climate.”
He said as well as a doubling of insulation, regulators needed to consider innovations like “precinct cooling systems” through cities.
“To build a house now that’s not anticipating a shift in temperature is crazy,” said Mr Kirk.
“The great thing about regulation is it’s a way of getting a critical mass so when you go to market the actual cost doesn’t shift dramatically.”
Other changes Mr Kirk would like to see ingrained in the building code related to sustainability and energy generation.
“The Paris Accord seeks to have every new building carbon-neutral,” Mr Kirk said. “One of the great initiatives we’ve been undertaking with our work is to try to open buildings up. All buildings should be able to be opened so you can use natural ventilation. It’s not only more efficient, it’s healthier.”
His views were shared by Brisbane-based residential architect Shaun Lockyer, who said regulations were not in step with modern, sustainable design.
“A lot of legislation tries to prevent the worst thing happening rather than encouraging the best design solutions,” Mr Lockyer said.
“The most highly awarded architects in the country, lauded as innovators of residential design, most of their houses can’t get building approval because they simply don’t comply with any of the deemed regulations.
“Instead they have to manipulate interpretations in the code to scrape through the certification process and get finance.”
He said an example was the requirement for any windows opening to a void in the house to be restricted to a 120-millimetre gap.
“You can have a hole in the wall but if you have a window in that same hole, it cannot open more than 120 millimetres,” Mr Lockyer said.
“That’s what we’re dealing with.”
He said building codes tended to look back rather than ahead.
“A lot of the planning schemes in our cities talk about how houses should emulate something else that was built 100 years ago; they’re all about retaining the character,” said Mr Lockyer.
“We need to have planning schemes that talk about how will live in 100 years.”
But Master Builders deputy executive director Paul Bidwell said the current code worked well, and ensured new homes were built to a “six star environmental standard”.
He said any further changes to make new houses carbon-neutral would probably mean extra costs.
“Our experience is in many of these things the costs far outweigh the benefits, so a comprehensive cost/benefit analysis would need to be done,” Mr Bidwell said. “At the heart of the building code is safety and we think it responds very well to the risk of more floods and cyclones.”

Links