Climate Letter #1001

This was another day with a massive number of pertinent new stories, in every category of interest.  For example, there must be a dozen or so that just relate to political aspects, which are really heating up.  I am going to give you a list of websites and email sources that I find most valuable, that everyone might as well get familiar with.  You are sure to find a few that are especially close to your own favorite kind of interest, and some that are best for broad coverage.  For commentaries, I will mostly be concentrating on my own favorite interest, which is the science stuff.  Today there is a whopper in that category, discussed below, and I also want to do more with the Weather Map site, or Climate Reanalyzer, with a few suggestions every day about how to get the most out of this fascinating gift from the University of Maine.

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From the Weather Maps:  Start here: http://cci-reanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#SST_anom, Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly.  Scroll down to the global chart.  Notice the cool shades in the Gulf of Mexico and the pathway in the Atlantic that Hurricane Irma advanced through as it intensified.  Very recently both of those areas had unusually warm anomalies.  The two hurricanes sucked much of the heat out of those waters as their source of energy, and obviously did a thorough job.  In fact Irma has kind of spoiled the party for Jose, which is following closely behind.  While you are there, take a quick look at the equator in the Pacific.  All that blue is a La Nina type of signature, leaving no room for El Nino to soon return.  Remember that the pictures on this site all change a bit every day, so don’t wait too long.

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Today’s big story, a feature article written by two well-positioned scientists for Yale e360.  This story is full of arguments for taking strong action on climate change, with emphasis on the long-term outlook.  The neat part it is how they have peppered it with links to well-regarded scientific studies that show how and when the data was gathered.  I am going to open and study many of them a bit later.  The writers have much to say about expectations for sea level rise, including ideas about how unstoppable it looks.  The only disappointment I have with the article is that they did not do the same thing with permafrost studies, the likes of which I have been attending to lately in these letters.  The melting of permafrost is on the same kind of track as the melting of the big ice sheets, fairly slow right now, but likely to speed up in an unstoppable way later in this century and beyond.  It will release CO2 rather than water, lots of it, and methane too, and in some ways the CO2 is even more deadly than water because of all the extra heat that will come with it.  It’s a subject I’m sure you will hear more about.