Chicago Climate Course

With the overwhelming quantity of global warming material on the Web, it's a lot of work to separate the Drudge Sludge from the Real Deal. CapitalClimate has a set of links to various climate tutorials and references in the left column of this page. A post today at RealClimate points out that David Archer of the University of Chicago has now uploaded video of his entire course called Global Warming. The course description:

This 10-week course for non-science majors focuses on a single problem: assessing the risk of human-caused climate change. The story ranges from physics to chemistry, biology, geology, fluid mechanics, and quantum mechanics, to economics and social sciences. The class will consider evidence from the distant past and projections into the distant future, keeping the human time scale of the next several centuries as the bottom line. The lectures follow a textbook, "Global Warming, Understanding the Forecast," written for the course.

The files are in Quicktime format (m4v), which should be iPod compatible.

New Satellite Data Contradict Antarctic Ice Loss Assumptions

Update: SkepticalScience puts some additional context on the new results:
East Antarctica is now losing ice

Original post:
A paper published online this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, "Accelerated Antarctic ice loss from satellite gravity measurements", shows increased rates of ice reduction in Antarctica. The data from the GRACE satellite confirmed earlier indications of ice loss in West Antarctica at the rate of 132 gigatonnes of ice per year. More surprising, however, was the result that East Antarctica, which had been considered stable, is also losing ice mass. The rate of decline in East Antarctica is estimated at 57 gigatonnes a year. The estimates, based on satellite data from 2002 to 2009, show the maximum loss rates in coastal areas.

Lead author Jianli Chen of the University of Texas Center for Space Research said:

While we are seeing a trend of accelerating ice loss in Antarctica, we had considered East Antarctica to be inviolate. But if it is losing mass, as our data indicate, it may be an indication the state of East Antarctica has changed. Since it's the biggest ice sheet on Earth, ice loss there can have a large impact on global sea level rise in the future.

Image (click to enlarge): GRACE estimate of Antarctic ice loss, from University of Texas at Austin Center for Space Research

Winter 2009-1010 Update: El Niño Influence Continues

See here for other seasonal forecasts, including the current winter energy forecast.

NOAA's Climate Prediction Center winter 2009-10 outlook, updated this morning, continues to expect a pattern strongly affected by El Niño. Like the preliminary outlook issued a month ago, the latest one features warmth from Washington and Oregon southeastward through the Rockies, northern Arizona, and New Mexico and across much of the Midwest to Wisconsin and Michigan. Cool temperatures are predicted from the Gulf Coast through the Southeast to the Mid Atlantic area as far as extreme southern Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Also consistent with a persistent El Niño is a precipitation pattern with above-average amounts from California through most of Texas, the southern Gulf Coast states, Florida, and the southeastern Atlantic coast.

The main difference from the previous outlook is an increase in the probability for warmer than average temperatures to 50% or above in North and South Dakota, Minnesota, and northernmost Wisconsin and Michigan.

Images (click to enlarge): U.S. winter 2009-2010 temperature and precipitation outlook and most recent Pacific sea-surface temperature (SST) departures from average, from Climate Prediction Center/NOAA

October Global Temperature Sixth Warmest

Click here for other seasonal weather analyses

The National Climatic Data Center preliminary analysis for October was posted late Friday. Unlike the cold average for the U.S., the average global temperature for land and ocean combined was 0.57°C (1.03°F) above the 20th century average of 14.0°C (57.1°F). This makes it the sixth warmest in history. The average land temperature alone was also the sixth warmest, while the average ocean temperature was the fifth warmest. For the year to date, the January through October average is tied with 2007 as the fifth warmest. (Note: The preliminary analysis was made before data from Canada were available, so global averages may change slightly.)

Other than the U.S. and northern Europe, nearly all land areas were warmer than average. The warmest regions relative to normal were in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, particularly Alaska and northern and eastern Russia. In the Southern Hemisphere, New Zealand reported the coldest October in 64 years, with some all-time record low October temperatures. On the other hand, Darwin, Australia had its warmest month since records began in 1941:

The previous record for the month of October and for any month of the year was 34.4°C, most recently in October 2008. This October, the daily maximum temperature during the month reached 35.0°C on 13 days, the highest on record for any month, and there were another 4 days with 34.9°C.

Record warm temperatures have continued into November in Australia, where Adelaide in South Australia has recorded its first ever spring heatwave of 8 consecutive days above 35°C; 5 consecutive days are required for a heatwave, and the previous record was 4 in 1894.

Images (click to enlarge): October 2009 global temperature departures from average, historical departures since 1880; from National Climatic Data Center

Winter 2009-2010 Outlook Update: Local TV Forecasts

NOAA's 2009-2010 winter outlook was issued October 15. Here are some local TV weather outlooks:

• Utica, NY (WKTV, Channel 2)
  
• Pittsburgh (WTAE, Channel 4)
  
• York/Lancaster/Harrisburg, PA (WGAL, Channel 8)
  
• Cincinnati (WCPO, Channel 9)
  
• Charleston, WV (WSAZ, Channel 3)
  
• South Bend, IN (WNDU, Channel 16)
  
• Milwaukee (WTMJ, Channel 4)
  
• Madison, WI (WMTV, Channel 15)
  
• Wausau, WI (WSAW, Channel 7)
  
• Wichita Falls (KAUZ)

Like a Stopped Clock, WaPo Finally Gets One Right

Despite a sorry history of giving excessive op-ed space to climate "experts" George Will and Bjorn Lomborg, the WaPo finally gets it right for once. In today's Outlook/used-to-be Book World section, Neil Irwin, an economics reporter, gives the authors of Superfreakonomics some of their own medicine (How Freakonomics got super, freaky and scary):

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner are to blame for the global financial crisis.

See, back in 2005, they wrote "Freakonomics," a wildly successful book brimming with interesting stories about why incentives matter and how actions have unintended consequences. Indeed, incentives do matter, and actions (or publications) do have unintended consequences: Their book made economists around the world more inclined to come up with cute little analyses of the business of being a drug dealer or the impact of a first name on a child's success. And that distracted them, so they didn't notice the giant housing and credit bubbles that in hindsight were plain to see. A global collapse ensued.

More seriously, Irwin exposes the book's errors on prostitution and drunk walking before taking on the climate issue:

Both of those problems are mild compared with the ones in the penultimate chapter, in which the authors bring their oh-so-clever approach to the climate debate. The standard strategy for preventing potentially catastrophic global warming, one advanced by an overwhelming consensus of climate scientists and environmental economists, is to put in place policies to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide humankind emits. That's apparently too conventional for Levitt and Dubner, who spend the vast majority of their chapter (with time taken out for potshots at Al Gore) examining the work of scientist/entrepreneur Nathan Myhrvhold's crew, a group that is exploring the idea of pumping sulfur into the upper atmosphere and other neat tricks that just may be cheaper, easier ways to combat global warming.

It would be great if one of those schemes turns out to work. Fantastic, even. But Levitt and Dubner seem to simply presume that because one of them might work, Gore et al. are foolish to push to reduce emissions. It is like a family declining to save for college because their 10-year-old Little Leaguer with a decent arm may end up getting a full baseball scholarship.

This review follows closely after Elizabeth Kolbert's demolition of the book in the current New Yorker. Kolbert takes off from the Freakos' analysis of the 19th century New York horse manure crisis to conclude:

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

Kolbert held an online discussion of the subject on November 11.

Trimming the Astroturf: Physics Society Rejects Anti-Science Petition

The American Physical Society (APS), an organization of professional physicists, announced Tuesday that it had rejected a petition attempting to repeal the group's 2007 statement on climate change:

The Council of the American Physical Society has overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to replace the Society’s 2007 Statement on Climate Change with a version that raised doubts about global warming. The Council’s vote came after it received a report from a committee of eminent scientists who reviewed the existing statement in response to a petition submitted by a group of APS members.

The petition had requested that APS remove and replace the Society’s current statement. The committee recommended that the Council reject the petition. The committee also recommended that the current APS statement be allowed to stand, but it requested that the Society’s Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) examine the statement for possible improvements in clarity and tone. POPA regularly reviews all APS statements to ensure that they are relevant and up-to-date regarding new scientific findings.

DeSmogBlog has a link to an analysis [2MB pdf] by John Mashey exhaustively deconstructing the petition and its signers.

The Wascally Wabbit comments:
The American Physical Society Stays Real.

PhysicsWorld says:
APS rejects plea to alter stance on climate change.

Science Magazine's ScienceInsider blog has a brief report:
APS Council Rejects Bid to Soften Society Statement on Global Warming