Climate Letter #2109

One of my favorite science writers is Bob Berwyn, whose posts appear every few days in the Inside Climate News website (which also has many other good reporters besides Bob.)  Berwyn is special because of his uncanny knack for emphasizing scientific points that are commonly overlooked by other writers, and even by scientists themselves.  In today’s post he makes a point about global temperature averages that I think is quite original, in the sense that no one else has written about it using the same kind of terms.  2021 was in many ways a rather cool year, but it ended up as the sixth warmest on record. The Southern Hemisphere as a whole had a few bad heat waves but otherwise reported minimal gains most os the time compared with the averages from three decades back. A medium-scale La Nina event has had an important cooling effect on ocean surfaces in the SH and done nothing to bring up averages in the NH.  So what did bring the total global average up so much? 

As Berwyn points out, with an assist from climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck, it was largely the effect of a large number of specific and unusually powerful heat wave extreme events that occurred, most of which were over continental lands in the north. His article, entitled “Last Year’s Overall Climate Was Shaped by Warming-Driven Heat Extremes Around the Globe,” is found at this link:  https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14012022/heat-extremes-2021/. Here are a few salient quotes:  “Earth’s annual average temperature checkup can mask a lot of the details of the climate record over the previous year, and 2021 showed that deadly heat-related climate extremes happen, even if it’s not a record-warm year……Last year, the climate was metaphorically shouting to us to stop the warming, because if we don’t, the warming-related climate and weather extremes will just get worse and worse…..July 2021 ended up being the single hottest month for Earth since measurements started….. 1.8 billion people in 25 countries—about a quarter of the world’s population—experienced a record-warm annual average in 2021.” (July was especially troubled by a series of, major heat waves.)

James Hansen has also just published his review of global temperatures for 2021, which contains a number of other points of interest plus a prediction about 2023:  https://mailchi.mp/caa/global-temperature-in-2021.  Hansen reminds us again of the extraordinary theme that was quietly announced in a monthly report last summer, “Accelerated warming of the past seven years requires an explanation.  The big jump above the trend line (Fig. 1) is not caused by the ocean exhaling heat. On the contrary, ocean heat content and Earth’s energy imbalance increased markedly. As discussed in July Temperature Update: Faustian Payment Comes Due[5] last August, that accelerated warming seems to be caused by a decrease of human-made aerosols.”  Hansen goes on to say he , based on does not think greenhouse gas concentrations have increased enough to cause such a spike in warming over the last seven years.

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I think Berwyn and Hansen both make valid points, but there is one more factor involved that both of them have overlooked—the greenhouse energy effect of precipitable water (PW). This effect has been enhanced in recent years, such that it adds relatively more and more to the total amount of energy absorbed by the surface. It acts independently as an accelerator, based on the accelerated activity of atmospheric rivers (ARs) in the upper part of the atmosphere. Its effectiveness increases, for one thing, because PW is what ARs are made of, and AR volumes are increasing. PW has the same effect as water vapor, but fewer limitations in effective amounts of concentration when the upper atmosphere is employed as a conduit. Poleward extensions of the distribution of these rivers adds to the effectiveness of a given concentration of PW. When high level concentrations are created in unfamiliar quantities over regions in the mid to upper latitudes they produce the amount of extra greenhouse energy required for the formation of heat waves below. They also contribute to the amount of energy that ends up being stored in the ocean depths.

Carl

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