New pages added

I have just added a two new pages to the site each with a single post titled Election 2013 Reps and Election 2013 Senate. These pages are a resource for anyone wanting to know where their local federal Member and Senators stand on the issue of climate change. Feel free to direct people to them in the lead up to the federal election.

U.S. Geological Survey: Warmer Springs Causing Loss Of Snow Cover Throughout The Rocky Mountains

pA new U.S. Geological Survey study finds, “Warmer spring temperatures since 1980 are causing an estimated 20 percent loss of snow cover across the Rocky Mountains of western North America.” The USGS explains, “The new study builds upon a previous USGS snowpack investigation which showed that, until the 1980s, the northern Rocky Mountains experienced large [...]/p

via U.S. Geological Survey: Warmer Springs Causing Loss Of Snow Cover Throughout The Rocky Mountains.

fish on the move

A new paper just published in the journal Nature demonstrates how the movement of fish away from the equator towards the poles is disrupting ecosystems in that they are not being replaced as they move. The authors of the study also demonstrate how fish movement can be used as a proxy for ocean temperature. Here is the abstract…

Marine fishes and invertebrates respond to ocean warming through distribution shifts, generally to higher latitudes and deeper waters. Consequently, fisheries should be affected by ‘tropicalization’ of catch (increasing dominance of warm-water species). However, a signature of such climate-change effects on global fisheries catch has so far not been detected. Here we report such an index, the mean temperature of the catch (MTC), that is calculated from the average inferred temperature preference of exploited species weighted by their annual catch. Our results show that, after accounting for the effects of fishing and large-scale oceanographic variability, global MTC increased at a rate of 0.19 degrees Celsius per decade between 1970 and 2006, and non-tropical MTC increased at a rate of 0.23 degrees Celsius per decade. In tropical areas, MTC increased initially because of the reduction in the proportion of subtropical species catches, but subsequently stabilized as scope for further tropicalization of communities became limited. Changes in MTC in 52 large marine ecosystems, covering the majority of the world’s coastal and shelf areas, are significantly and positively related to regional changes in sea surface temperature. This study shows that ocean warming has already affected global fisheries in the past four decades, highlighting the immediate need to develop adaptation plans to minimize the effect of such warming on the economy and food security of coastal communities, particularly in tropical regions.

The Washington Post has a good write up here.

more records fall.

It seems that AGW keeps producing new weather records. Sydney is experiencing its longest late season warm spell on record with 26 consecutive days with temperatures greater than 20 degrees. Ocean temperatures off Sydney are also 3 degrees C above normal. Peter Hannan writing for the Sydney Morning Herald reports

Climate change will cause widespread global-scale loss of common plants and animals, researchers predict

When I first started this blog, my intention was to focus mainly on the effect of climate change on the ecological world. I started out by collecting a number of references to papers that demonstrate range shifts and behavioural changes in various species caused by anthropogenic climate change. That list can be found here. The blog then morphed into a place where I could vent my frustrations about idiotic AGW deniers and more recently focus on Australian politicians and their position on the the scientific consensus that AGW is real and serious. I am pleased to occasionally get back to looking at the impacts of climate change on the natural world because idiotic deniers cannot argue that species haven’t moved or undergone phenological changes because the evidence for these things is unequivocal. Plants, animals, fungi and bacteria cannot be accused of lying or falsifying data or selling out their morals or any other of the ridiculous claims deniers make about scientists. So, to the following article. I welcome any deniers who wish to discuss why the biologcal world is doing what it’s doing. Much as I like going to the circus and watching the clowns throw buckets of confetti at each other.

Climate change will cause widespread global-scale loss of common plants and animals, researchers predict.

NewsDaily: Experts: CO2 record illustrates ‘scary’ trend

From NewsDaily, an article that explains simply, the significance of passing the 400ppm mark in global CO2 concentration.

NewsDaily: Experts: CO2 record illustrates ‘scary’ trend.

climate change for dummies – no models or IPCC

Ok dummies, this is for you, courtesy of Peter Hadfield (Potholer 54)….

 

Two predictions – NG progress article

This is probably stating the obvious, but the deniers aren’t going to like a new progress article just released by Nature Geoscience prior to the Pages2K consortium online journal club presentation.  Available here.  The title of the presentation is “How has the Earth’s climate changed in the past 2000 years?” Here is the Abstract…

Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between ad 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions. Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period ad 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.

Uh oh! No globally synchronous MWP? The deniers won’t like that. It won’t stop the hard core idiots from ignoring that important piece of information though. So, my two predictions. 

1. Steve McIntyre will write a post hinting at some sort of conspiracy by Nature Geoscience to mislead readers by calling the article a Progress Article as opposed to a Research Article based upon his interpretation of what the criteria are. The link I provided above has a comment section where Steve goes about setting this up.

2. Watts, Nova et al will look at this particular graph…

and they will focus on this bit….

and they will use the word “decline”. Of course they will fail to understand what the graph actually is or how it should be interpreted. Hint: It isn’t temperature.

What I like about this progress article is this clear and succinct part of the conclusion…

The area-weighted average of the best estimate of past temperature from all seven regions indicates that 1971–2000 was warmer than any other time in nearly 1,400 years (Fig. 4b), keeping in mind that this analysis does not consider the uncertainty associated with the temperature estimates, and that the reconstructions are of different lengths. Area-weighted averages of the three alternative reconstructions generally support this result (Supplementary Fig. S5). Large uncertainties remain, especially during the first millennium, when only some regions are represented. Regardless, the global warming that has occurred since the end of the nineteenth century reversed a persistent long-term global cooling trend. The increase in average temperature between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries exceeded the temperature difference between all other consecutive centuries in each region, except Antarctica and South America.