The New Normal -- Literally

We have arrived at an interesting place. ENSO and the solar cycle are the two major short-term influences on global temperatures (absent a major volcanic eruption.) They are now both as neutral as neutral can be:

Zero point zero. ENSO is balancing on the head of a pin. Now the solar cycle:

Looking at the smoothed values, the peak of the last solar cycle hit about 190, and the trough was at about 70. The average is (190 + 70)/2 = 130. And where is the blue line now? Right about 130.

Temperatures are as normal as they are gonna get. Shall we take a peek out into the world and see how the new normal is treating it?

Greenland still looks bizarre:

It's no longer melting over 96% of its surface . . . that's a comfort. But it's hard to look at these albedo numbers and think that all is well. This is some disturbing shit. A difference of 5% in the albedo compared to the average? That's a lot of joules . . . right where we don't want them.

Looking northwards, Dr. Jennifer Francis has a great presentation on how the changes in the Arctic are changing our weather. Key slide here:

And speaking of extremes, the contineintal US had its hottest July ever, and more importantly, drought and heat in the US have sent food prices skyward:

In July, food prices jumped 6%, after three months of declines, according to the United Nations' monthly Food Price Index released Thursday. The main drivers behind the increase? Grain prices. And more specifically, corn prices, which have hit record highs in recent weeks.

According to the U.N. report, global corn prices surged nearly 23% in July, exacerbated by "the severe deterioration of maize crop prospects in the United States, following drought conditions and excessive heat during critical stages of the crop development."

Since we so recently learned that big thunderstorms can chew up the ozone layer over North America, perhaps we should check on thunderstorms in our new world:

 Note that the graph ends in 2011. The crazy thunderstorms that have wracked the Midwest and Northeast over the last two months don't show up yet.

Torn to pieces by an Arctic cyclone, the thin sea ice up north is rapidly giving up the ghost.

Both the cyclone, and the thinness of the ice that got walloped, were fueled by Arctic warming and accelerate it further.

In the upper left you can see a huge chunk of the ice sheet break off and go its own way. This is not, to say the least, a common occurrence, and the ice sages at Neven's seem to be in agreement that this has never been seen before in thirty years of satellite observations.

Both solar activity and the ENSO index are still rising. Be interesting what the world looks like in an extra-warm year, won't it?

Unintended consequences watch: ozone-eating derechos

Strong summer thunderstorms that pump water high into the upper atmosphere pose a threat to the protective ozone layer over the United States, researchers said on Thursday, drawing one of the first links between climate change and ozone loss over populated areas.  

Thus the NYT. From the abstract:

 The observed presence of water vapor convectively injected deep into the stratosphere over the United States fundamentally changes the catalytic chlorine/bromine free radical chemistry of the lower stratosphere by shifting total available inorganic chlorine into the catalytically active free-radical form, ClO. This chemical shift markedly affects total ozone loss rates and makes the catalytic system extraordinarily sensitive to convective injection into the mid-latitude lower stratosphere in summer. Were the intensity and frequency of convective injection to increase as a result of climate forcing by the continued addition of CO₂ and CH₄ to the atmosphere, increased risk of ozone loss and associated increases in UV dosage would follow.

 The questions this study poses raises are:

* Will stronger storms, one expected effect of global warming, seriously damage the ozone layer above the United States or other temperate or tropical regions?
* If so, how much damage?
* If the damage is serious, how much skin cancer for humans and animals? How much DNA damage to plants?

You can be certain that the final toll, whatever it is, is not factored in to any of the cost/benefit analyses of cutting greenhouse gas emissions. And you can be reasonably confident that "unintended consequences" like this will continue to bubble to the surface if, in less than an eyeblink of geologic time, we transform the Earth's climate into something last seen when dinosaurs roamed.

Nature is dangerous and powerful; that has not and will not change. But in the last 13,000 years of human history, humans have learned a great many of nature's dirty tricks and we have built a civilization around outwitting them. We help been helped in this by 8,000 years of extreme climate stability. All of our experience as a civilization, the some total of recorded history, all that we have managed to do in fostering health and prosperity in the teeth of indifferent nature have come during that flat line of global climatic stability.

Now we are changing the game to a game we've never played before and don't know the rules of. We are charging into the realm of the unknown unknowns, and even if we were to do everything right from this point, the coming centuries would be full of monsters of our own creation.

Ozone recovery will accelerate global warming

The Montreal Protocol is one of the great success stories in global environmental protection. In 1987, the world's government recognized the threat of ozone-depleting chemicals and agreed to phase them out. The treaty to that effect came into force in 1989 and now has 196 signatories. It can be done.

Unfortunately, the necessary and desired recovery of the ozone is going to slightly accelerate global warming, as ozone is itself a greenhouse gas. A recent study (h/t AGWObserver) quantifies this warming:

Tropospheric temperature response to stratospheric ozone recovery in the 21st century – Hu et al. (2011) “Recent simulations predicted that the stratospheric ozone layer will likely return to pre-1980 levels in the middle of the 21st century, as a result of the decline of ozone depleting substances under the Montreal Protocol. Since the ozone layer is an important component in determining stratospheric and tropospheric-surface energy balance, the recovery of stratospheric ozone may have significant impact on tropospheric-surface climate. Here, using multi-model results from both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC-AR4) models and coupled chemistry-climate models, we show that as ozone recovery is considered, the troposphere is warmed more than that without considering ozone recovery, suggesting an enhancement of tropospheric warming due to ozone recovery. It is found that the enhanced tropospheric warming is mostly significant in the upper troposphere, with a global and annual mean magnitude of ~0.41 K for 2001–2050. We also find that relatively large enhanced warming occurs in the extratropics and polar regions in summer and autumn in both hemispheres, while the enhanced warming is stronger in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere. Enhanced warming is also found at the surface. The global and annual mean enhancement of surface warming is about 0.16 K for 2001–2050, with maximum enhancement in the winter Arctic.” Hu, Y., Xia, Y., and Fu, Q., Atmos. Chem. Phys., 11, 7687-7699, doi:10.5194/acp-11-7687-2011, 2011.

Full text here. At the time of the IPCC's 2007 report, the effects of ozone on warming were held to be doubtful:

Hence, the net heating or cooling is subject to large uncertainty, and available model simulations do not give a consistent picture of future development of ozone, particularly in the Arctic.

While the IPCC models do include the recovery of the ozone layer (and are among the resources used by the authors), it seems fair to say that if this result holds up, we are looking at more warming "in the pipeline" than projected in the Fourth Assessment Report; a not-insignificant 0.03C/decade, or 15% of the overall expected trend of 0.2C/decade.