Climate Letter #1171

Heat and drought, working in combination, have become the norm in the American southwest.  “Past southwestern droughts were notable for declines in precipitation. But today’s droughts are different…..Even in wet years, which will still occur as the climate changes, warmer conditions dry out the landscapes.”  See how a river bed (the Rio Grande) looks when no water is flowing.
http://nmpoliticalreport.com/836022/as-warming-continues-hot-drought-becomes-the-norm-not-an-exception/

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How Arctic sea ice is getting younger and thinner, and why that is a problem (Scientific American).  “Since 1984, the percentage of multiyear ice cover has declined from 61 percent to just 34 percent…..And the oldest sea ice—ice that’s been frozen for at least five years—now accounts for just 2 percent of the ice cover.”  We could see ice-free summers by the end of this century.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/arctic-sea-ice-is-getting-younger-here-is-why-that-is-a-problem/
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What happens to the aerosol effects when the burning of fossil fuels is stopped?  The aerosols that reflect sunlight back to space will stop being produced along with the greenhouse gases, with opposite effects on climate.  From this report we hear that, “Removing aerosols induces a global mean surface heating of 0.5–1.1°C, and precipitation increase of 2.0–4.6%. Extreme weather indices also increase.”  One big difference is that aerosols tend to fall out of the atmosphere within just a few days after being produced while gases remain far longer, thousands of years for a substantial part of the CO2.  On balance, a massive reduction of all these emissions in a short number of years could result in an extra half degree of global warming almost immediately, with much of the increase concentrated in the northern hemisphere.  (This report just lays out the problem in detail but does not discuss the potential for geoengineering remedies that are being studied elsewhere.)
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Paleoclimate science:  Earth’x climate history has been affected by a 405 thousand year cycle that is an extra part of the Milankovitch cycles.  Evidence is found in cores of rocks all the way up to 215 million years old that show a regular periodicity along with a cyclical pattern of wet and dry periods.  This knowledge is not relevant to our current problems but it can help to explain certain unusual features of the past few million years, which may be relevant to understanding the kind of climate we might expect with a CO2 level that has pushed past 400 ppm and is heading for 450.  (See the final story below.)
https://climatenewsnetwork.net/planetary-climate-influence-has-age-old-effect/
–For those interested, here is a more detailed account showing the way this information was gathered, with many comments from the authors of the study:
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A distinguished French scientist, who has written extensively about Earth’s climate history for over twenty years, made observations in a study published last year about how the the 405 thousand year cycle has had a direct impact on the way carbon is distributed on Earth’s surface.  At this link you can see the abstract and then open a link to the pdf of the full study, which happens to be of great interest simply because of several charts it contains.  In particular they show how Professor Paillard reconstructs the history of atmospheric CO2 for the past 4 million years, based on all of the data he has gathered and evaluated for his research.  Amazingly, over that stretch of time. there are no peaks showing above 400 ppm, and the highest part of the basic trend is pictured around 360.  You might keep these images in mind when you hear about estimates of temperatures and sea level in Pliocene times from other sources—and remember where we are with CO2 today.
https://www.clim-past.net/13/1259/2017/
Carl

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