Heat Wave In Russia – Is It From Global Warming?
Guest Post by Dr. Roger Pielke Senior, University of Colorado
Image: NASA Earth Observatory. This map shows temperature anomalies for the Russian Federation from July 20–27, 2010, compared to temperatures for the same dates from 2000 to 2008. The anomalies are based on land surface temperatures observed by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Areas with above-average temperatures appear in red and orange, and areas with below-average temperatures appear in shades of blue. Oceans and lakes appear in gray.
There has been considerable discussion of the heat wave in Russia and of the floods in Pakistan and China as to whether these events are from global warming. Examples of this in the media include
Will Russia’s Heat Wave End Its Global-Warming Doubts? By Simon Shuster / Moscow
Climate change whips up floods, fire and ice by Brian Sullivan and Madelene Pearson
The second article starts with the text
CLIMATE change has been blamed for floods that have killed thousands and left millions homeless from Pakistan to North Korea, fires and a heatwave in Russia that have left 5000 dead and disrupted global food markets, and a severe tropical storm threatening Bermuda.
and includes the statements
The weather drew comment from officials and activists at international climate change talks in Bonn.
One US delegate said Russia’s heatwave and the recent floods that have devastated Pakistan are ”consistent with the kind of changes we would expect to see from climate change and they will only get worse unless we act quickly”.
A new article in the Economist
Green View: A taste of things to come
has a more complete discussion for these weather events. Excerpts from the article includes the text
“The immediate cause of the problems is the behaviour of the jet stream, a band of high-level wind that travels east around the world and influences much of the weather below it. Part of the jet stream’s meandering is tied to regular shifts of air towards and away from the pole, called Rossby waves. The Rossby waves set up wiggles in the jet stream, wiggles which, left to themselves, would move westward. Since the jet stream is flowing eastward, though, the net effect of the Rossby waves varies. When the waves are short, they go with the jet’s flow and the resultant wiggling heads downstream to the east. When they are long they go against the flow, and the jet’s wiggling is transmitted upstream to the west. In between, there is a regime in which the waves move neither west nor east, and the weather stays put.”
Part of the straightforwardness of that analysis is that it treats all the previous years equally. When instead Dr van Oldenborgh takes into account that there has been a general warming trend over those past 60 years the heatwave starts to look less improbable—more like the sort of thing you might expect every century. As the warming trend continues in the future, the chances of such events being repeated more frequently will get higher. A single heatwave cannot be said to have been caused by global climate change; but what is known about climate change says such heatwaves are now more probable than they were.
The intensity of this heatwave has been remarkable. It is hotter than at any time in the instrumental record. According to an analysis by Geert Jan van Oldenborgh of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute a straightforward comparison of the temperatures seen this summer with those of the past 60 years suggests that a large patch of Russia is experiencing temperatures which might be expected only once every 400 years or so. Some places within that patch are hotter than might be expected over several millennia.
In a world where greenhouse warming gets stronger, the tropics expand—an effect the beginning of which has already been observed. The paths of the jet streams to the north and south of the tropics will change in response to this. What that means for the interactions between jet streams and Rossby waves that lead to blocking, though, is unclear. Tony Lupo, an atmospheric scientist from the University of Missouri, has been looking at the question with some Russian colleagues. He says their climate modelling provides some reason to believe blocking effects might become more common in a warmer world, but also less forceful.
The attribution of the heat wave to atmospheric blocking this summer is a scientifically sound conclusion. The heat can occur from
- the advection of hot air from lower latitudes on the west side of a warm core anticyclone
- from compressional warming due to sinking air in the troposphere associated with the warm core anticyclone
- from a larger portion of solar insolation going into sensible versus latent surface heating as result of dry soils and stressed vegetation that occurs due to the absence of rainfall associated with the core of these anticyclones
- from added heating of the atmosphere from the absorption of solar insolation by aerosols from forest fires that occur in this dry environment.
[for a discussion of warm core anticyclones, see
Pielke Sr., R.A. 2002: Synoptic Weather Lab Notes. Colorado State University, Department of Atmospheric Science Class Report #1, Final Version, August 20, 2002.]
However, the statements that the tropics have expanded in recent years and the probabilities that such heat waves are becoming more common has not yet convincingly been made.
Indeed we looked at this issue for the heat wave in Europe in 2003 in the paper
Chase, T.N., K. Wolter, R.A. Pielke Sr., and Ichtiaque Rasool, 2006: Was the 2003 European summer heat wave unusual in a global context? Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L23709, doi:10.1029/2006GL027470
where we found that the 2003 heat anomaly was particularly extreme near the surface (perhaps due to dry soil) but less anomalous in the rest of the troposphere. Our conclusions were confirmed in
Connolley W.M. 2008: Comment on “Was the 2003 European summer heat wave unusual in a global context?” by Thomas N. Chase et al. Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L02703, doi:10.1029/2007GL031171.
We updated our analysis in
Chase, T.N., K. Wolter, R.A. Pielke Sr., and Ichtiaque Rasool, 2008: Reply to comment by W.M. Connolley on ‘‘Was the 2003 European summer heat wave unusual in a global context?’’Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L02704, doi:10.1029/2007GL031574.
In the Chase et al 2008 paper we reported that
Figure 1 updates Chase et al. [2006] through 2006 for 2.0 and 3.0 SD levels and adds to our original conclusion that 2003 was not very unusual in terms of the spatial coverage of extreme depth-averaged temperatures.
and
However, the addition of three additional summers (2004– 2006) to the time series, all of which appear to be relatively warm, now indicates the possible emergence of an upward trend as suggested in previous work [Stott et al., 2004]. For example 2.0 SD warm anomalies now appear to have an upward trend (p = 0.05) though this trend should be viewed with caution because of the small sample size and the dominant effect of data points at the end of the series. The rise in 3.0 SD anomalies comparable to the 2003 heat wave is, however, still insignificant (p = 0.16) and so the increased probability of such extremes with time suggested by Stott et al. [2004] is not yet apparent.
Tom Chase will be updating this analysis through August 2010 in early September when the data becomes available. Then, instead of qualitative claims about an expanding tropics and a greater frequency of heat waves, actual climate data will be available to quantify whether or not the claims made concerning the tropospheric temperature anomalies are robust or not.
We have certainly seen a warm troposphere this year. The July lower tropospheric temperature anomalies were presented in my August 5 2010 post and the global spatial plot is reproduced below
The heat wave in western Russia is clear in the data along with a substantial warm anomaly in eastern Russia and part of China, as are smaller warm anomalies in other locations worldwide. Only Antarctica has a large negative anomaly [although interestingly, Pakistan has a modest below average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly]
This warmth presents an opportunity in the coming months to assess whether this is really related to a long term global warming related effect, or is due to some other aspects of the climate system (perhaps as modified by spatially heterogeneous forcing due to human activity including land use change and aerosols).
If it is a long term global warming signature, than the global average tropospheric warm anomaly will persist when the blocking pattern is removed. If, however, the lower tropospheric temperatures cool to or below their long term average and this heat cannot be found in the oceans, long term global warming cannot be the culprit. I will report on this early in 2011.
Ok
Russia has peat bogs. They have been draining the water. 90 years ago they started taking peat from the bogs to fire electric generation. 4,200 acres are involved in fires now. These fires are far from being only recent events. Men draining bogs is however in the last 200 years. As soon as we drain the everglades, we can have more fires there. And then blame cars. There are more cars in Florida than Russia. Why don’t we have fires down there?
Back in the early 1960’s, there was a song sung by Martha and the Vandellas, called —appropriately enough— ‘Heat Wave.’
Back in those days, heat waves were as common as the dog days of August: No matter where you went, it was hot, muggy, and miserable. A warm breeze felt like a flame thrower, and the only respite was the local swimming hole.
Sleeping was an unholy hell of sweaty misery.
Nothing much has changed, save for the unrelenting rhetoric from the clueless propagandists spouting their usual diatribes.
They have no memories of the distant past, and so have no concept of the likely future.
If they all freeze to death, it will still be our fault.
When the water dries up and the crops die do you think the other 8 billion on the planet are going to go quitely? Think again, they’ll take you all with them in a fit of human revenge as everybody climbs over everybody else in a mad scramble to get to the resources that are left.
That’s not alarmism. That’s factism.
The world may get hotter. I won’t get drier as a result. Indeed the increased atmospheric water feedback is a key plank in the AGW theory. It will rain more, which may not be a good thing. There may be isolated areas which dry up, but there will be dry areas that become wetter.
Food production in the hot regions will be more than compensated for by increased production in what are currently cool zones. How many of the world’s hot zones are currently unproductive?
What other “resources” could possibly be affected by climate? Iron? Sand? Aluminium? Really, even if AGW comes along, a resource crisis is the last problem.
You are alarmist, sorry. Malthusian alarmist, in fact. And Malthusian alarmists have been railing – incorrectly – since Malthus started.
AGW or no AGW, the sky is not about to fall.
Stephen Wilde says: “Thanks Geoff but I’ve noticed that and consider it to be a short term effect of the recent El Nino which has more power in the southern hemisphere and so gives a harder push poleward than in the north.”
The 2009/10 El Nino had more power in the Southern Hemisphere than the Northern Hemisphere? Not in terms of SST anomalies:
http://i35.tinypic.com/mm8zes.jpg
And not in terms of TLT anomalies:
http://i34.tinypic.com/2u8w008.jpg
Please document whatever other variable you may be referencing.
If research reveals a global warming signal in this it must also explain the killing cold in South America concurrent with the Russian heat wave.
R. Gates: You wrote, “With the natural cycle of the growing La Nina, slated to last until early 2011, it seems perhaps an odd time to be looking for missing heat in the oceans, and perhaps a foregone conclusion that you’d not find missing heat during a La Nina episode (if indeed, SST’s were the location in the oceans you’d go looking for this heat).”
I believe Roger is writing of Ocean Heat Content and not SST.
oakwood
August 14, 2010 at 1:32 am
Thank you for the link.
Спасибо за ссылку
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=0&u=http%3A%2F%2Ftherese-phil.livejournal.com%2F171196.html&sl=ru&tl=en&swap=1
It’s iCO2 now, it’s very clever, it can choose to bunch up together and warm up different parts of the globe.
Moscow’s always been hot in summer, it’s inland, I mean if you cut more trees down and put more concrete, drain the peat, fire all the fire wardens you will get fire!
I was in Moscow about 10 years ago, and it was boiling, was wearing shorts I remember clearly that I was because I wasn’t allowed into some of the churches because I was wearing shorts. Just because it gets cold there in winter doesn’t mean it can’t get hot in summer, it’s an inland city.
Neil T
Let’s talk global dimming
The aerosol component of an eruption, resulting mainly from the emission of SO2 and H2S, affect the Earth’s radiation balance, principally by reflecting sunlight back into space and cooling the planet. By serving as cloud condensation nuclei, sulfate aerosols are believed to change the microphysical structure, water content, lifetime, and extent of clouds. Not only the type and magnitude but also the location of an eruption are thought to determine its climatic impact.
When sulfur dioxide (boiling point at standard state: -10°C) reacts with water vapor, it creates sulfate ions (the precursors to sulfuric acid), which are very reflective; ash aerosol on the other hand absorbs ultraviolet.
Ash aerosol absorbing UV is probably the best kept secret of the CAGW alarmists. Ash aerosol in the troposhere, down where we are, will cause significant warmings when absent reflective sulfate aerosols at or near stratospere level. CO2 is not a very powerful GH gas, and an extremely low percentage of our total atmosphere.
Evidence has been accumulating for decades that volcanic eruptions can perturb climate and possibly affect it on long timescales.
The gangsters who thought this whole CAGW scheme up cannot tax volcanoes for profit for their emissions. But people on the other hand can be taxed once convinced their emissions are this huge problem. I used to believe we were a huge problem, but not anymore.
Your just going to have to look for yourself and this is a place to start.
http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/find_eruptions.cfm
You should be able to see how the numbers and VEI volume of global eruptions have increased in the last 3 decades with the climate more perturbed along with it. Also…
Volcanic Gases and Their Effects
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/index.php
NeilT
your predictions on increasingly extreme weather events are from the same source as this prediction.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
And are just as reliable 😉
Scarlet Pumpernickel says:
August 14, 2010 at 4:28 am
“So why does CO2 only heat up a little spot in Russia and not the whole globe? I mean it does heat up the air everywhere doesn’t it?”
Ah, Scarlet, you need to study more on political science!!!!
Let me lay it out for you;
-Every “Department of Climate Change” (no, not dept. of silly walks) in every western nation has a little knob in the head office.
For the UK this was controlled by the (Milli) band of brothers.
-By turning this knob you can control the CO2 heat effect.
Dont you remember Merkel and Brown arguing who could promise the most number of celsius reduction? 2 or 3 degrees, wasnt it? Now, how do you think they could promise such a thing without that knob? QED.
TomRude, you’re right, heat doesn’t come from the south but from… the north ! 😉
Am sad, it seems nobody here read Marcel Leroux and his theory of Mobile Polar High. Dynamic Analysis of Weather and Climate, 2nd edition (2010) is great, and his Global Warming: Myth or Reality? is a must !
An introduction with this online article : “The Mobile Polar High: a new concept explaining present mechanisms of meridional air-mass and energy exchanges and global propagation of paleoclimatic changes”. Here : http://bit.ly/9XTMmN
Bob Tisdale said:
“The 2009/10 El Nino had more power in the Southern Hemisphere than the Northern Hemisphere? Not in terms of SST anomalies:
http://i35.tinypic.com/mm8zes.jpg”
Assuming the blue line is the Southern Hemisphere it looks like SST was quite strong enough a few months ago to have the observed effect. The oceans form a larger proportion of the southern hemisphere and will not need such a large anomaly to have the observed effect on the jets.
Note that the recent AAO spike is an exception to the generally more negative AAO since the turn of the Century so the background trend of a more negative AAO stands despite the recent spike.
Seeing the more recent drop the positive AAO anomaly is going to disappear soon enough.
The red line is skewed by the still warmish northern seas left over from earlier El Ninos but because northern oceans form a smaller part of the northern hemisphere the effect on the jets is less pronounced.
Ouchchen kindly referred to this:
“The Mobile Polar High: a new concept explaining present mechanisms of meridional air-mass and energy exchanges and global propagation of paleoclimatic changes”. Here : http://bit.ly/9XTMmN
From about 20 years ago.
I think that is support for my more recent contentions about the way the air circulation patterns are affected from above.
All one then needs to do is propose variable rates of energy release from the oceans and describe the interaction to lead to the general thrust of my NCM (New Climate Model).
When that paper was written we had far less data about the extent of SST variability around the globe on multidecadal timescales.
From that paper:
“The polar latitudes appear as the key control
of the earth climate, in the past as in the present:
they observe the HIGHEST VARIATION OF INSOLATION,
they store the captured water potential, they give
the MPHs their initial power, and thus they govern
the Intensity of the general circulation, at the
seasonal scale as at the palaeoclimatic scale.”
Furthermore they would be highly sensitive to the strength of the temperature inversion at (and the height of) the tropopause. A warmer stratosphere would lead to a more negative polar oscillation and a cooler stratosphere a more positive polar oscillation exactly as observed in the late 20th Century as compared to now.
The trouble is that according to established climatology a more active sun is supposed to lead to a warmer stratosphere. I think there has been an error there.
Cassandra King says:
August 14, 2010 at 5:52 am
….The saddest thing about this episode is the utter lack of disciplined scientific method, the narrow perspectives and the refusal to look at the issue in anything other than a very limited way…
Very sad indeed and an indictment of the modern scientific standards or lack thereof and I would have expected more from Roger Pielke senior and his university, very lazy and poor article IMHO starting out with a predetermined conclusion and then filtering out or excluding unwanted or contradictory evidence. Sorry but that is not science as I understand the term, it is simply narrative building and narrative support.
__________________________________________________________________-
I most certainly agree. Roger Pielke senior should have known better than to post a half baked, under researched article here at WUWT. It might fly at less rigorously checked sites but not here.
Anyone following this site knows the ocean oscillations have recently changed, and during the last half of the 20th century the sun has been very active according to this paper and NASA This is no longer true as we enter the new century according to the Solar Dynamics Observatory Mission News So with major changes in two of the biggest drivers of the climate, the oceans and the sun, why the heck would anyone expect the weather patterns to remain the same?
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution even wrote an article about it.
Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried?
“Most of the studies and debates on potential climate change, along with its ecological and economic impacts, have focused on the ongoing buildup of industrial greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a gradual increase in global temperatures. This line of thinking, however, fails to consider another potentially disruptive climate scenario. It ignores recent and rapidly advancing evidence that Earth’s climate repeatedly has shifted abruptly and dramatically in the past, and is capable of doing so in the future.
Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earthvs climate can shift gears within a decade….
But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy makers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world leaders may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur…“
Whenever the CAGW scientists mention the sun they are always are quick to point out the TSI varies by less than 0.1% over the solar cycle.
They never mention what it looks like over the entire Holocene:
Temperature and precipitation history of the Arctic
“..Solar energy reached a summer maximum (9% higher than at present) ca 11 ka ago and has been decreasing since then, primarily in response to the precession of the equinoxes. The extra energy elevated early Holocene summer temperatures throughout the Arctic 1-3° C above 20th century averages, enough to completely melt many small glaciers throughout the Arctic, although the Greenland Ice Sheet was only slightly smaller than at present… As summer solar energy decreased in the second half of the Holocene, glaciers reestablished or advanced, sea ice expanded, and the flow of warm Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean diminished. Late Holocene cooling reached its nadir during the Little Ice Age (about 1250-1850 AD), when sun-blocking volcanic eruptions and perhaps other causes added to the orbital cooling, allowing most Arctic glaciers to reach their maximum Holocene extent…”
Now the CAGW scientists are screaming because we are recovering from ” Late Holocene cooling… (about 1250-1850 AD), when sun-blocking volcanic eruptions and perhaps other causes added to the orbital cooling, allowing most Arctic glaciers to reach their maximum Holocene extent…”
This paper by pro-CAGW scientists agrees with the above paper:
Lesson from the past: present insolation minimum holds potential for glacial inception (2007)
“Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial. Our findings support the Ruddiman hypothesis [Ruddiman, W., 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261–293], which proposes that early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started….”
Too bad Roger Pielke senior is wearing AGW blinders, they get in the way when doing science.
Stephen Wilde: Regarding your August 15, 2010 at 10:29 am reply here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/14/pielke-sr-on-heat-wave-in-russia/#comment-457682
Thanks for replying but, my comment was in response to your statement, “Thanks Geoff but I’ve noticed that and consider it to be a short term effect of the recent El Nino which has more power in the southern hemisphere and so gives a harder push poleward than in the north.”
I noted and illustrated that the SST anomalies and TLT anomalies in the Northern Hemisphere had a significantly stronger response to the 2009/20 El Nino than the Southern Hemisphere (sorry about forgetting to color code the title block, but you were right). This contradicted your statement, and I asked, “Please document whatever other variable you may be referencing.”
Please do so. Your reply does not. Your reply, without a link to some kind of data, appears to be speculation.
Bob,
Southern hemisphere: Small anomaly, large oceanic effect on jet streams.
Northern Hemisphere: Large anomaly, small oceanic effect on jet streams.
The reason being the different ocean/land distributions.
The evidence is that produced by you and Geoff. Geoff points out that the AAO is currently more positive from the recent El Nino than is the AO. You point out that the AO is not as positive as the AAO despite a greater northern hemisphere SST and TLT response.
The reason is the different hemispheric jet stream responses to the differing proportions of ocean in each hemisphere. In the northern hemisphere a greater proportion of temperature variability is land induced which does not have the same jet stream shifting power as ocean induced temperature variability. I suspect that the difference is humidity based. Water vapour being lighter than air ocean induced high humidity/high temperature effects will have more effect on the global air circulation systems than land induced low humidity/high temperature effects. Also, land effects decline at night but ocean effects are persistent day and night.
You can call it speculation if you wish but I see it as a reasonable interpretation of the same sources that you rely on. My interpretations may differ from yours but that’s science for you.