Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumA Discussion of the Intensity of El Nino/La Nina Events Under the Volatile Climate Conditions.
The paper I'll briefly discuss in this post is this one: Increased variability of eastern Pacific El Niño under greenhouse warming (Cai et al, Nature 564, pages 201206 (2018))
There's a large number of abbreviations in the text: SST = Sea Surface Temperature; CP = Central Pacific; EP = Eastern Pacific; ENSO = El Nino Southern Oscillation.
From the introduction:
Imagine that...
...Important issues in Climate Science.
It appears that computational modeling of these events has proven problematic and the authors set out to improve the situation by the use of sophisticated statistical analysis, principle component (PC) analysis and empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis.
A graphic touching on the subject:
The caption:
The statistical analysis involves all sorts of cool mathematics but this graphic cuts to the chase with modeling of the last century and this century, the one in which we bet the whole farm, well all the farms and all of the planet on the hope that so called "renewable energy" would save the day without interfering with our lifestyle including trips to our favorite restaurant. The statistical output is related to an "E-index" which refers to the relative amplitude of the El Nino Southern Isolation, and thus the size of the swings in the intensity of the destruction it causes Take a peak and weep:
The caption:
So called "renewable energy" didn't save the day, and clearly it isn't saving the day, and it won't save the day, but let's not let that change our minds about anything. It's not like data and results count.
While we tend to focus on California, its droughts, fires and floods, in terms of feedback loops the droughts in South Eastern Asia, owing to the carbon release associated with fires there are far more significant, since they involve rain forests. The worst such El Nino event there in the 20th century probably occurred in 1998, a remarkable year in the history of our destruction of the planetary atmosphere. In that year, carbon dioxide concentrations rose by an astounding 2.93 ppm in a single year! Well it was outstanding...
...We're doing a great job at solving the problem. 2.93 in a single year isn't such a big deal any more. In the whole 20th century we had four years, including 1998, that had single year increases greater than 2.00 ppm, this from 1958 to 1999, if I have my math right, 41 years. In the first 18 years of the 21st century, we've had 11 such years, two of which were greater than 1998. In 2015 carbon dioxide concentrations rose 3.05 ppm; in 2016 they rose 2.98 ppm.
(This data can all be found on the website of the NOAA carbon dioxide observatory at Mauna Loa.)
If you find any of this depressing, don't worry, be happy. Someday you might be able to afford to own a Tesla car, in which case none of this will be your fault; it will be the fault of those Chinese people who make the crap, you know, the Santa Claus place mats and inflatable plastic snowmen for your lawn, stuff like that, that you buy when you drive your wonderful Tesla car to the mall at Christmas time.
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
I hope your Christmas shopping is going well. Don't forget to pick up a "Sierra Club" Calendar.
Enjoy the coming solstice; it's only 8 days until the days start growing longer, which is great for all those wonderful solar cells in the Northern Hemisphere.
TexasTowelie
(112,123 posts)La Niña in the title?
NNadir
(33,512 posts)I wasn't in a good mood while writing this and got sloppy.
TexasTowelie
(112,123 posts)even though it was my minor in college. However, you would have driven my Spanish professor crazy with that blunder. I'm fortunate that I don't have any need to delve into either subject in depth anymore.
NNadir
(33,512 posts)...learned to speak Spanish. I've sometimes managed to get the basic ideas in text from a working knowledge of French but my knowledge is otherwise very weak and I would not be surprised if I appalled a Spanish professor.
As for chemistry, the beautiful but vastly underappreciated science, no one can really "keep up."
I'm not particularly smart, but my saving grace is that I have spent my life reading things that seem beyond me when I first encounter them. Eventually the important parts leach into my consciousness.