The last 10 months have been abnormally warm across Australia and we’ve seen a notable lack of unusually cold weather this winter. Are we heading for the hottest year on record?
The more significant records for this period include:
-- Australia’s hottest day on record;
-- Australia’s hottest week on record;
-- Australia’s hottest month on record;
-- Australia’s hottest summer on record; and
-- Australia’s hottest September to June (10 months) on record.
A feature of the last 10 months has been the persistence of unusually warm temperatures. Every calendar month since September 2012 has had temperatures 0.5°C or more above normal. The result has been a national mean temperature anomaly of +1.03°C for the past 10 months, well ahead of the previous record of +0.94 °C set in 1997-98.
Year to date temperatures deciles for Australia showing that temperatures have been above average to record warm over nearly the whole continent in 2013. Bureau of Meteorology
The record heat has affected rural, regional and urban Australia alike, with many stations setting records. Hobart (41.8 °C) and Sydney (45.8 °C) both recorded their hottest days on record. The last 10 months have seen above-normal temperatures over 97% of Australia; only the Capricornia district of central Queensland has missed out.
The heat has extended to the oceans around Australia, with record warm sea-surface temperatures during summer (January and February 2013) as well as the warmest start to a calendar year (January to June) on record.
The world is on track to become up to five degrees hotter, and sea levels could rise more than 80 centimetres this century, according to a leaked draft of a landmark climate change report prepared for the UN.
There is now a 95 per cent likelihood human greenhouse gas emissions are driving changes being observed globally, which in recent weeks have included extraordinary heatwaves in Asia and Alaska.
That degree of certainty has been revised up from 90 per cent in the last report in 2007, 66 per cent in 2001, and just over 50 in 1995. A sea level rise of up to 82 centimetres, which would have serious impacts on coastal cities everywhere, is now ''unequivocal'', Reuters reported.
But while many forecasts have hardened, the certainty over some of the impacts of global warming has declined, with scientists struggling to predict some local effects including regional changes in rainfall, drought and wild weather.
The final version of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which will cover the expected effects of climate on Australia in coming decades, is scheduled for release in September.
About 200 countries, including Australia, have pledged to hold temperature rises to two degrees by cutting emissions, though few nations are on track to meet that goal.
The federal opposition rejected a report by Fairfax Media on Monday that showed banks and other major investors estimated that about $4 billion in private funding for renewable energy projects would be withheld if the Coalition won office.
This estimate is based on work by market analysts suggesting that regulatory uncertainty and the prospect of unknown returns would stymie investment.
Ice in Antarctica and Greenland is disappearing faster and may drive sea levels higher than predicted this century, according to leaked United Nations documents.
Greenland’s ice added six times more to sea levels in the decade through 2011 than in the previous 10 years, according to a draft of the UN’s most comprehensive study on climate change. Antarctica had a fivefold increase, and the UN is raising its forecast for how much the two ice sheets will add to Earth’s oceans by 2100.
The changes in the planet’s coldest areas are a “very good indicator” of a warming planet, according to Walt Meier, a research scientist with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
“It’s an early warning system,” Meier said by phone from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “When you think about a couple of degrees of warming, in the U.K. or U.S., it’s not something that would be too noticeable, whereas in an area of snow and ice, it can have a huge effect. With sea ice, minus 1 to plus 1 is the difference between skating on the ice and swimming in the ocean.”
‘Climategate’ Scandal
A draft of the study was obtained by Bloomberg from a person with official access to the documents who declined to be further identified because it hasn’t been published. The data on melting ice is included in chapters covering rising sea levels and the planet’s cryosphere regions, the frigid realms of glaciers, permafrost, snow-covered ground and ice sheets.
In its last report the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, was faulted by skeptics of man’s influence in warming the planet for exaggerating how fast Himalayan glaciers were melting and using reports by environmental advocacy groups.
A number of IPCC scientists also were accused of doctoring numbers and hiding data after a trove of emails was leaked in the so-called climategate scandal. Three subsequent probes largely exonerated the researchers while saying they could be more transparent.
A summary of the latest 2,200-page report designed to guide lawmakers worldwide as they work to devise climate policies is due for publication on Sept. 27 in Stockholm after a four-day meeting where the wording will be finalized. Jonathan Lynn, a spokesman for the panel, declined to comment.
Sea Levels
Greenland and Antarctica contain enough ice to raise global sea levels by almost 66 meters (217 feet), a process that would take thousands of years.
Greenland’s contribution to rising sea levels “very likely” rose to an average of 0.59 millimeters a year from 2002 to 2011, from 0.09 millimeters a year in the prior decade, according to the draft. The rate in Antarctica “likely” rose to 0.4 millimeters a year from 0.08 millimeters, it said.
The report defines “very likely” as a probability of greater than 90 percent and “likely” as at least 66 percent.
Greenland may add a total of 4 centimeters to 21 centimeters to ocean levels by the period 2081 through 2100, across a range of carbon-emissions scenarios assessed in the study, compared with the period 1986 through 2005. That’s up from a 2007 forecast of 1 centimeter to 12 centimeters, when the UN carried out its last major assessment of climate science.
Modeling Challenges
Results due to Antarctic ice range from lowering sea levels by 6 centimeters to a 14-centimeter increase. The 2007 report forecast a reduction of 2 centimeters to 14 centimeters, due to higher snowfall than surface melt. The UN said in the earlier report that its understanding of how the southern continent loses ice from glaciers flowing into the sea wasn’t good enough to include in its prediction.
The authors of the latest report said there has been “substantial progress in ice-sheet modeling” since 2007. Even so, there remain “significant challenges” in modeling Antarctic glaciers and ice sheets that terminate at the sea, and the forecast for their contribution to sea levels by 2100 was the same across all different emissions scenarios examined, unlike with Greenland.
“We’ve had a major step forward in our ability to understand” ice patterns in Greenland and Antarctica, Martin Siegert, a glaciologist at the University of Bristol in England, said in a phone interview. “There is more certainty around the data.” Siegert wasn’t involved in the IPCC report.
Melt Season
Other findings in the new report include:
- Arctic sea ice extent “very likely” decreased 3.5 percent to 4.1 percent a decade since 1979, when satellite measurements began. Ice cover at the end of the annual melt season “very likely” decreased at a rate of 11.5 percent a decade.
- The extent of Antarctica’s sea ice “very likely” increased 1.2 percent to 1.8 percent a decade over the same period.
- “Almost all glaciers worldwide have continued to shrink” since the 2007 UN assessment. Their contribution to rising sea levels “very likely” averaged 0.62 millimeters a year from 1971 to 2009.
- More than 600 glaciers have reportedly disappeared “but the real number is certainly higher.”
- There’s “very high confidence” that snow cover has decreased in the Northern Hemisphere since the 1920s.
- There’s “high confidence” that permafrost temperatures have increased in “most regions” since the early 1980s.
“It’s clear that the cryosphere is one of the natural indicators of decadal climate change in the planet,” David Vaughan, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England, and a coordinating lead author of the UN report’s chapter on ice, said in a phone interview. “The changes are very visible.” Vaughan declined to comment on specific findings of the report.
Yep hopefully we can all now start looking into getting real environmental issues into the debate, at least in Australia. I had to educate my own children in this regard as the school curriculum does not these days.
Global warming fuelling tornadoes in Japan Yusuke Tomiyama and Hiroyuki Oyama Publication Date : 04-09-2013
Tornadoes are relatively uncommon in Japan, but they have hit the nation with increasing frequency amid global warming. A tornado ripped through Saitama and Chiba prefectures on Monday, blowing roofs off of buildings and injuring dozens of people. The tornado was spawned by huge cumulonimbus clouds that rapidly developed in the Kanto region on Monday afternoon.
It went on a 10-kilometre rampage, affecting an area from Koshigaya, Saitama Prefecture, and moving northeast to Noda, Chiba Prefecture. According to reports by local governments including those of the two prefectures, more than 600 buildings were damaged, and 64 people had been reported injured as of Tuesday morning.
According to the agency, the average annual number of tornadoes formed over land in Japan is about 20, although the figures vary from year to year. In 2010, when the nation saw a scorching summer, the number was 37, the largest since 2007, when the agency beefed up its monitoring capability for tornadoes.
Doubleview, I like most of your posts but I have to draw your attention to this:
Quote:
About the author: Mike Adams is an award-winning journalist and holistic nutritionist with a passion for sharing empowering information to help improve personal and planetary health He has authored more than 1,800 articles and dozens of reports, guides and interviews on natural health topics, and he has published numerous courses on preparedness and survival, including financial preparedness, emergency food supplies, urban survival and tactical self-defense.
He isn't even close to a climate scientist, it is a beautifully prepared article, but then I've also read beautifully prepared articles claiming lizard people hybrids walk the earth.People on here seem to like graphs:
"If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear." - Gene Roddenberry
"Balloon animals are a great way to teach children that the things they love dearly, may spontaneously explode" -- Lee Camp
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