Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A new study claims that while the US West will feel the impact of Climate Change by 2028, Southern Great [Plains] region won’t notice Climate Change until 2074.
When will the US feel the heat of global warming?
For the Great Plains, natural variability will dominate until late this century.
JOHN TIMMER – 3/21/2018, 6:55 AM
By increasing the energy stored in our atmosphere, climate change is expected to generate more severe storms and heat waves. Severe storms and heat waves, however, also happen naturally. As a result, it’s tough to figure out whether any given event is a product of climate change.
A corollary to that is that detecting a signal of climate change using weather events is a serious challenge. Are three nor’easters in quick succession, as the East Coast is now experiencing, a sign of a changing climate? Or is it simply a matter of natural variability?
A team of researchers has now looked at heat waves in the US, trying to determine when a warming-driven signal will stand out above the natural variability. And the answer is that it depends. In the West, the answer is “soon,” with climate-driven heat waves becoming the majority in the 2020s. But for the Great Plains, the researchers show that a specific weather pattern will push back the appearance of a warming signal until the 2070s.
…
To quantify this difference, the authors developed a simple measure: the year in which half of the heat waves wouldn’t have qualified as heat waves if it weren’t for the influence of climate change. For the US West, that point was crossed in 2028. The West was followed by the Great Lakes, which crossed the threshold a decade later in 2037. But the Great Plains were on a completely different schedule. In the Northern Plains, the 50-percent threshold wasn’t crossed until 2056, while the Southern Plains didn’t have a clear signal of climate change until 2074.
…
So why is internal variability so significant in the Great Plains? The researchers suggest two potential causes of these regional differences. One is a difference in the flow of air across the continental US, something that may be changing with our warming climate. If the prevailing winds become more erratic, then it’s possible that they would bring cooler air across the Plains more often. The alternative is soil moisture. This takes up heat from the air and ground as it evaporates, which would counteract some of the heating caused by greenhouse gases.
…
Read more: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/when-will-the-us-feel-the-heat-of-global-warming/
The abstract of the study;
Early emergence of anthropogenically forced heat waves in the western United States and Great Lakes
Climate projections for the twenty-first century suggest an increase in the occurrence of heat waves. However, the time at which externally forced signals of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) emerge against background natural variability (time of emergence (ToE)) has been challenging to quantify, which makes future heat-wave projections uncertain. Here we combine observations and model simulations under present and future forcing to assess how internal variability and ACC modulate US heat waves. We show that ACC dominates heat-wave occurrence over the western United States and Great Lakes regions, with ToE that occurred as early as the 2020s and 2030s, respectively. In contrast, internal variability governs heat waves in the northern and southern Great Plains, where ToE occurs in the 2050s and 2070s; this later ToE is believed to be a result of a projected increase in circulation variability, namely the Great Plain low-level jet. Thus, greater mitigation and adaptation efforts are needed in the Great Lakes and western United States regions.
Read more (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0116-y
So much for the climate emergency – if the study is correct, if you live in the Southern Great Plains and you are lucky enough to live until 2074, you might notice the weather has warmed slightly.
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Wow. Climate prediction is amazingly precise!! They can tell us natural variability will override global warming in the Great Plains until 2074, but they can’t tell us if El Niño will bring rain or drought, or what year it’ll happen next.
Yes WOW! All this and a bag of chips. But since every hot day is the hottest evah, and is climate change; they cannot predict wet or dry or even hot or cold days more than a week or 10 days. And sometimes the forecast keeps changing up and through the last of the week.
Truly, claiming they can forecast “climate” through 2074 is a fraud and a hoax.
It is simply results of models which are based on models that nature has disproven in the current satellite record. It showcases the pattern of circular logic as revealed by this study:
https://www.academia.edu/36025745/CIRCULAR_REASONING_IN_CLIMATE_CHANGE_RESEARCH?auto=download&campaign=weekly_digest
I “borrowed” this one. It seems to fit.
“We’re familiar with the body’s immune system. It mounts a reaction to intruders, and in the process it swings into a full inflammatory response. Swelling occurs. Fever. The result, if the immune system is healthy, is the banishing of the intruders and a return to well-being. The body gains a victory—and the person builds confidence in his ability to stave off attacks.
“The mind has the potential to operate in a similar fashion. But there are prerequisites. The mind needs basic ideas and principles on which to erect its response.
“These basics are inherent in a healthy mind: the desire for freedom, for self-sufficiency, for the creation of a desired future, for committed work in that direction.
“In the absence of these strong fundamentals, the mind will not mount a direct immune response against intruders. It will be clueless.”
A condition of being clueless is “ignorance.” Believing you have a clue while believing things that are not true is “delusional”. Is paranoia a communicable social disease of the mind?
Pop Piasa: I downloaded the paper. It looks interesting. I’ve often commented on the circular reasoning involved. Thanks.
Sheri, you made my day. Pass it on.
No, natural variation always will dominate. Sometimes it will be in the direction of apparent rising temperatures and sometimes it will be in the direction of apparent falling temperatures. You can’t just say that, when natural variation goes your way, then it’s all CAGW.
Exactly Richard. I’m just shaking my head at this ridiculous piece of ‘research’, a prime example of the foolish arrogance that seems to pervade climate change science. It’s incredible to think that these people actually get paid to work on stuff like this.
“By increasing the energy stored in our atmosphere” is a new one.
Yeah that started my eyeballs rolling.
I immediately googled the author’s name to find out how anyone could write a first line like that. Turns out the guy is PhD biochemist working as senior editor at ARSTechnica in NYC.
What a blunder.
This is not an uncommon misunderstanding though, that the global warming is about increasing the energy stored in the atmosphere. You could think so because warmer air holds more energy than cold air. And if water vapour increases, then the latent heat increases.
The mistake comes in ‘stored’, because air doesn’t store much heat more than for some hours. I remember reading about a rough calculation on how long the atmosphere would last if the Sun was put out. It is not so long before the nitrogen and oxygen would precipitate down. The seas would remain liquid a long time under an ice cover. They ‘store’ some heat.
Mark – just what do you think heat is? It is a measure of the average kinetic energy of the atoms and so if the temperature goes up then the energy stored goes up as well.
Germonio,
If you knew anything at all about our planet’s climate system you’d recognize that compared to the oceans, the atmosphere doesn’t store heat. And the sun’s SW radiation passes mostly right through it to warm the water and land surfaces, where heat really is stored.The atmosphere is the Long wave radiation conduit-barrier through which (by convection and radiation) the final radiative heat transfer must occur back to space for equilibrium. The atmosphere only slows that heat transfer process down. Its storage is miniscule compared to the ocean and land surfaces heated by solar SW energy.
Yes technically it stores heat, but to emphasize such a minor contribution in your lead sentence demonstrates the author (Dr John Trimmer in this case) doesn’t know jack shit about what he is writing about.
Joel,
The point of the first sentence is to point out that increased energy in the atmosphere is likely to lead to an increased number of major weather events like storms or heatwaves. It has nothing to do with whether or not orders of magnitude more energy is stored in the ocean. If the article was talking about hurricanes then it might start “by increasing the energy stored in the ocean”.
Geronimo
Heat is not stored in the air, it is being transported from a source to a point of dissipation.
Regards
Heat is energy in transfer. It is transient and cannot be stored. Go back and study physics before commenting.
Gemonio, that more warming means more and bigger storms is often claimed by you alarmists.
Unfortunately the real world once again fails to follow the example of the models.
Storms have not been increasing, or getting bigger.
“By increasing the energy stored in our atmosphere, climate change is expected to generate more severe storms and heat waves.”
What’s wrong with that statement?
Does that mean we can store excess solar and wind derived electricity in ‘the Cloud’? Wow! No batteries needed!
+1 I may have to borrow that one some time. 😉
Solid matter has a thousand times higher heat storage ability than air.
Water has a four thousand times higher heat storage ability than air.
Heat in the air will be gone with the wind….
That was well put.
This bloke is out of his specialty and wanted to show it with a snappy opening line, I guess.
It’s kind of like a carpenter writing plumbing regulations
…Not that one of the best carpenters I know in’t a plumber by day, but needs help with electrical. The important point is not to pontificate about the other crafts’ jobs unless you’ve really done them.
“Great Plains” is the correct spelling, please fix.
[Done. .mod]
Maybe it’s a pun of the cargo cult science of climate modeling?
Priceless.
Yeah, thats it… 😉
Hey Eric, maybe you can fish out my long comment out of the spam folder. I probably used too many expletives to describe this paper by Hosmay Lopez at Univ of Miami. That poor guy is probably just trying to keep the paycheck coming and a little job security to pay the bills. Sad what the demand for rent seeking for job tenure does to good people in academia these days.
Without reading the paper, it seems that they’ve run climate model runs for different “climates” and come up with incompatible answers. If that’s the case it’s pure junk.
“By increasing the energy stored in our atmosphere…”
Right off the bat, the writer goes off into pseudoscience.
The oceans are 1000 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere.
To John Timmer: It’s the oceans, Stupid.
But then this is all just model madness and the cargo cult science behind it. Here they are claiming they are parsing out regional differences of North American climate in 2075 to 2100. My BS meter just broke with this statement;
But then John Timmer, the author of this intro at ARSTechnica* needs to stick to biochem/biology writing, as he obviously has not taken the time (as I have and many other PhD biologists/biochems have done) to study and understand climate modeling via GCMs and it immense problem of tuning to expectations. If he had, he’d realize the climate GCMs are the archetypal definition of Dr. Feynman’s cargo cult science.
All my calculations show Great Plains “over-riding” in 2073…looks like fake news…
How about this:
It’s all due to natural variability. And, so is climate change.
BINGO!
If natural variabilities are suppressing the effects of GHGs now, why wouldn’t we consider the possibility that they were able to amplify them from 1978-1998?
I think it must be a Red Statew / Blue state phenomenon. The Blue states out west and in the Great Lakes region have bought into the climate change Bullshit already.
Great Lakes region all blue? Hardly!
In Illinois, the collar counties around Chicago are blue.
The rest of the state is red – farm country, corn, wheat, soybeans.
Same thing with Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York.
You must have not paid attention to the vote counts on election night 2016, joelobryan.
I didn’t say All Blue. But I did think about poor Wisconsin and Gov Scott Walker’s fight with the public unions to keep his state purple.
It’s just that man-made climate climate change is just that — Mannmade. And the humans in the Blue States are going to feel its pain sooner (much sooner in California) than the Red States if the climate hustlers aren’t put in jail for defrauding the US taxpayers.
Uhhhm, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio all voted for Republican President Trump. Not ‘blue’…. nope.
Yeah, right. Models that cannot predict something like the El Nino are so precise that they can predict weather sixty years out. If you believe that, do you want to buy into my venture in voodoo accupuncture?
Nothing less than climatism hocus pocus and wand waving, funded fiddling with crystal bollox models and a whiff of current empiricism for the veneer of plausibility, while claiming some mystical insight into what the weather looks like in more than fifty years. File under ‘climafiction’ and move on.
“If the prevailing winds become more erratic, then it’s possible that they would bring cooler air across the Plains more often.”
Is a statement like that even remotely possible to be called science?
No doubt it was peer reviewed. And how cool is that?
No peer review. Just an editors commentary. That was written by John Timmer, PhD, Biochemistry in his ARS Technica summary of this work by Lopez, et al.
Well you gotta admit somebody peered at it and thought it was cool but perhaps it was really just peek reviewed.
It’s getting lots of “pee review” here. You know, since it’s getting pissed on a lot. Does that count?
“…Are three nor’easters in quick succession, as the East Coast is now experiencing, a sign of a changing climate? Or is it simply a matter of natural variability?…”
The hypothesis is that more CO2 causes more warmth, not more cold. So the only possible answer to this question, from their own perspective, is “natural variability”. Sooner or later they will catch up with everyone else and accept that the warmth we’ve been enjoying has also been due almost entirely to natural variability.
Natural variability doesn’t work for the pseudoscientist rent seekers because the socialist politicians that fund that junk science need anthropogenic attribution and an alrmist message. Anthropogenic climate change fearmongering is after all just a Trojan Horse carrying a socialist poison pill for Western democracy.
You dont need to have a degree in critical thinking to work out that the more you explain the Pause as ‘natural variability’ the more you open the original ‘climate change’ up to ‘natural variability’.
The degree of doublethink necessary to believe the current meme, is massive.
People manage it though. Its unprecedented.
Hi Leo – you wrote:
“People manage it though. Its unprecedented.”
Maybe unprecedented, but they came close with the ban on DDT:
Radical environmentalists are the great killers of our time, ranking with Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.
The banning of DDT greatly increased malaria in the tropics – a global-scale holocaust based on false environmental alarmism. Below is a graph that quantifies the number of DEATHS EACH YEAR FROM MALARIA – between one and two million.
Note how malaria deaths increased steadily since 1980 (or earlier), after the banning of DDT in 1972, and how malaria deaths declined after DDT was re-introduced.
See the red area of the graph – that is CHILDREN UNDER 5 YEARS OF AGE – FOUR AND UNDER – JUST BABIES FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! Yes I am upset. This holocaust was preventable, and easily so.
I want to personally recognize the radical environmental movement for the key role it played in the banning of DDT and the resulting deaths of millions of people from malaria, especially children under five years of age. After this holocaust became fully apparent, many greens continued to oppose DDT, based on flimsy evidence and unsupported allegations.
DDT was only re-introduced circa year 2002. Malaria deaths declined after that. The battle against malaria continues.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1566107003466856&set=a.1012901982120697.1073741826.100002027142240&type=3&theater
It’s fantastic how precise climate projections have become. Our children won’t know what faulty climate projections are.
We know exactly how faulty they are. They are all total garbage.
“The future is certain, it is only the past which is unpredictable”
Someone wants a job till 2070 to wait for a sign.
This appears to be one of those “I don’t really have anything important to say, but I have to publish SOMETHING so as to keep my job” articles, more than anything else.
Every time I see words like quantify, corollary, team of whatevers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, I become suspicious of whether any actual research is being done, and think that it’s a stop-gap effort to keep the job for another year.
January 1, 2075 is going to be ugly.
I’m forecasting cold night in Times Square. But no one will see the Ball Drop because the solar panels won’t power the lights at midnight.
They’ll just ban night time lighting, except for official government functions.
That way the batteries will be enough to last all night.
It is interesting to see the evolution of the narrative:
First, warming was too big to be explained by natural variability.
Then, the warming wasn’t as big at natural variability after all
Now, the warming won’t even be detectable for another decade. Or six.
LOL
“But keeping the funding coming and we’ll keep researching the imminent doom.”
– signed: The Rent Seekers.
LMAO. Climate Change TM – the chameleon of sciences.
If what he said is true, I’ll be 133 years old then and will probably have other things on my mind, like making it to the year 2100. I look forward to lying out in the warm sunshine, working on my tan.
Claim: Natural variability will dominate until after I am retired, and likely dead.
Test
Are any of you reading this on your phone and getting popup saying your phone is 28.1% damaged due to viruses. I scanned my phone and it seems ok. My research indicates that it usually originates from the visited website. Has something hijacked this site – or is one of the advertisements going stray?
If it’s just me – I’ll deal and try to figure out what the issue is. but if it is lots of us then we should see this site gets fixed. Makes it almost impossible to read an article any more.
Could be that the mobile site certificate is expired (shows a 12/31/2017 expiry date). An expired certificate can lead to warnings that don’t have anything to do with the actual problem.
I was getting this last week. Only on this site. My phone is an ancient Galaxy S4, stuck at Android Lollipop. Using Lookout and the default Samsung Internet browser.
So I reset the phone back to its original defaults using the recovery partition. After setting it all back up again, the phone was working a lot better and a new app appeared from Samsung. It reported that it had “protected me” so I assume it detected a malicious ad. Since then, no popups. No ” You won the Facebook lottery!” or “Your phone is infected!” Lots of ads and it often reports “website stopped responding” but eventually it gets there.
These ads never appear on any of my desktop or laptop machines. Never in Edge or on Safari. Only on the phone.
I suspect that a malicious ad is targeting this site, either a deliberate cyber attack or just someone who is trying to make a buck by tapping into a popular site. I never saw the attack on other sites. And it can’t be simply a rogue app I installed because it still appeared after a factory reset.
You can completely block all ads or block JavaScript as others have commented, but the site proprietor does accrue some slight income from the ads. So I don’t want to do that even though it would make the articles easier to read.
The moral is: keep your device updated, use a security app that scans your browser, and enjoy.
My phone is getting pop ups congratulating me on winning a prize on some competition or I just have been selected at random to maybe win something, I have not clicked on them but just shut them down and reported the adverts which might be doing this.
Try turning off JavaScript. Worked for me.
Its starting to sound like the Nibiru cataclysm, every time it doesn’t happen they put it off 50 yrs 😛 About the time this prediction could be verified I suspect we will have already heard once again how the sun had dimmed and the Earth is heading toward ice age. In its lovely cycle the Earth will prove them fools once again and warm back up:)
What matters is not energy stored in the atmosphere, but ,energy gradients.
Thus the Northern hemisphere ‘stores’ more atmospheric energy in summer. But the wind speed and vigor of mid-latitude weather systems actually decreases due to the reduced temperature differential between the Polar and more Southerly regions. Winter storms are stronger. This is standard text book stuff.
“the time at which externally forced signals of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) emerge against background natural variability (time of emergence (ToE)) has been challenging to quantify”
Because you’ve spent all that time abreviating (ACCToE) sound like something Ash Williams used in Evil Dead 2
I think you meant III (AKA “Army of Darkness”).