Climate Letter #1309

Odds now strongly favor the beginning of an El Nino event in December.  It would not be powerful and could peak as soon as February.  Such an occurrence would normally give an extra but small boost to the global temperature average and also to the total level of CO2 emissions.

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Clice Hamilton gives us an update of his views regarding the human response to climate change.  Hamilton is an Australian professor who authored a widely acclaimed book published early last year, “Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene.”  I think his views are very accurate, very realistic, and not particularly reassuring.  Almost every sentence in this post can be held up and quoted.  Here is one idea that caught my eye:  “So the challenge is no longer how to use information to change people’s minds. The challenge is how to change a culture. No one knows how to do that.”
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A new study explains why the Arctic is turning brown, and what it means.  This story was written for The Conversation by the lead author of the study.  The damage being done to vegetation is substantial, caused by a variety of extreme weather events that are expected to continue.  As a result there is much less absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than expected, which would otherwise serve as a counter to gases released by thawing of permafrost.  Current climate models are not reflecting the level of imbalance that was found, making the current carbon budget “dangerously inadequate” due to the absence of an expected sink.
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Scientists are advancing their knowledge of how oceans collect and store CO2.  This is another area of concern for the carbon budget because the amount of natural uptake derived from human emissions is very large and that relationship could be subject to change.  This post reviews a new study considering the biogeochemical effects of seasonality and acidification on processes that are deeply involved.  The scientists believe there are trends now occurring, possibly negative, which need to be better measured and understood for the purpose of making reliable climate forecasts.
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Scientists can now explain how a global cooling trend was converted to a hothouse effect 59 million years ago.  The intensification of deep-water circulation within the Atlantic Ocean had a major effect by causing an expansion of warm surface waters.  There may be lessons applicable to current developments.  “The current rate of climate change by CO2 emissions from human activity by far surpasses the rate of warming during past greenhouse climates. Studying ocean circulation during the most recent greenhouse interval in the geologic past may provide clues as to how ocean circulation might develop in the future, and how heat will be distributed over the planet by ocean currents.”
https://phys.org/news/2018-11-atlantic-ocean-global-circulation-climatic.html
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A scientist and archaeologist combine to give us an overview of the plastics problem and where it is taking us.  Like climate change, it requires a solution of unfathomable scale.
Carl

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