Hurricanes and floods - USA

As a follow up to my last article, there's one topic you won't read much of at WUWT, and that's extreme weather. So far, there's not been a single mention of Hurricane Joaquin. That system is currently poised to hit the Bahamas, and is making people on the east coast of the USA a tad nervous. Most particularly because it's very difficult to know whether it will go up the coast or veer out to sea.

Source: EarthWindMap

Coincidentally, the hurricane (as a tropical low) appeared about the same time as a new paper in PNAS, about how rising sea levels and changing tropical cyclones are increasing the risk of flooding in New York City. In the abstract, the authors write how "flood risk has greatly increased for the region; for example, the 500-y return period for a ∼2.25-m flood height during the pre-anthropogenic era has decreased to ∼24.4 y in the anthropogenic era."  500 years to 24.4 years is a huge change. You can read about the paper at The Carbon Brief, where Robert McSweeney writes:

Rising sea levels and changing tropical cyclones are pushing New York City coastal floods to new heights, says a study published today.

Floods hitting the city are now more than a metre higher than before humans had an influence on the climate, the research shows, increasing the risk of coastal defences being overwhelmed.

Read the full article - it's detailed and well written.

Reference

Andra J. Reed, Michael E. Mann, Kerry A. Emanuel, Ning Lin, Benjamin P. Horton, Andrew C. Kemp, and Jeffrey P. Donnelly (2015) "Increased threat of tropical cyclones and coastal flooding to New York City during the anthropogenic era", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,doi/10.1073/pnas.1513127112

• Climate change is raising the risk of coastal floods in New York City, study finds - article by Robert McSweeney at The Carbon Brief.

It's not my fault, sez E. Calvin Beisner, on Syrian drought and conflict

Is Anthony Watts trying to send a message? Was I was off track when I wrote yesterday that "I'm not suggesting that Anthony Watts is part of the Cornwall Alliance or CFACT. "? He's followed up his article from CFACT with an article from the pseudo-religious political group the Cornwall Alliance.

Drought implicated in the Syrian conflict

There is a new paper in PNAS, which is getting a bit of publicity. Anthony Watts has already had a protest article by Pat'n Chip of the CATO Institute, and now has another.

The paper, was by Colin P. Kelley of the University of California, Santa Barbara and co-authors from Columbia University NY. It reports research that suggests that the 2007-2010 drought in the greater Fertile Crescent, which was the most severe in the instrumental record, was made 2 to 3 times more likely with CO2 warming than by natural variability alone. The authors conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict.

The supplementary information shows a timeline of events. As always, click to enlarge it:

Fig. S1. Timeline of events leading up to the civil uprising that began in March 2011, along with a graph depicting the net urban influx (in millions) of Syrian IDPs and Iraqi refugees since 2005. Source: Kelley15 SI.

Last year an article on the Red Cross website stated in part:

Between 2006 and 2013, 60% of the Syrian territory experienced the worst long-term drought and the bigger reduction of agricultural crops since thousands of years. The drought in Syria this year is expected to cause an 18% reduction in wheat and 65% decrease in barley production. 

The PNAS paper isn't the first to report on the impact of the drought in Syria. Last year there was a paper by Peter Gleick in the AMS journal "Weather, Climate and Society", which discussed how water shortage was one of the factors contributing to conflict in the region.

Last century, the Arctic had the lowest sea ice in the past 646 years

Anthony Watts has been keeping a relatively low profile lately.  Oh, he's put up plenty of weird articles such as those by greenhouse effect denier Tim Ball with his wacky conspiracy theories.  But Anthony himself hasn't been jumping in feet first too often in the last few days.  I've noticed more than once recently when he doesn't take much of a stand.  Instead he gives only a slight hint to his readers of the line he expects them to take.  (I guess he's getting weary of people pointing out just how silly he can be.)

Today's article about a temperature reconstruction in the Arctic is an example.  Anthony Watts posts a press release about this paper in PNAS by Jochen Halfar et al.  He provides one clue about how he wants his rabble to react by using the words "hockey stick" in his headline (archived here):

Inverse Underwater Hockey Sticks?

Apart from the headline, Anthony only provides one other little clue to tell his tamed denialati how to behave.  Anthony squeezes the word "claim" into a comment at the bottom of the copied press release (claim is a code word widely used by all and sundry, including HotWhopper, to mean "false claim" as in "that's what they claim, ahem".)  Anthony copies the following from PNAS, but prefaces it with his "They claim":

Significance
The most concerning example of ongoing climate change is the rapid Arctic sea-ice retreat. While just a few years ago ice-free Arctic summers were expected by the end of this century, current models predict this to happen by 2030. This shows that our understanding of rapid changes in the cryosphere is limited, which is largely due to a lack of long-term observations. Newly discovered long-lived algae growing on the Arctic seafloor and forming tree-ring–like growth bands in a hard, calcified crust have recorded centuries of sea-ice history. The algae show that, while fast short-term changes have occurred in the past, the 20th century exhibited the lowest sea-ice cover in the past 646 years.

From the above text, you are probably getting an inkling of what the researchers did and what they found.

The algae in question is called Clathromorphum compactum and can live for more than a thousand years.  The analysis can be compared to using tree rings to obtain information about past climatic conditions.  Here are some excerpts from the University of Toronto press release:

Almost 650 years of annual change in sea-ice cover can been seen in the calcite crust growth layers of seafloor algae, says a new study from the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM).

“This is the first time coralline algae have been used to track changes in Arctic sea ice,” says Jochen Halfar, an associate professor in UTM’s Department of Chemical and Physical Sciences. “We found the algal record shows a dramatic decrease in ice cover over the last 150 years.”

With colleagues from the Smithsonian Institution, Germany and Newfoundland, Halfar collected and analyzed samples of the alga Clathromorphum compactum. This long-lived plant species forms thick rock-like calcite crusts on the seafloor in shallow waters 15 to 17 metres deep. It is widely distributed in the Arctic and sub-Arctic Oceans.

Divers retrieved the specimens from near-freezing seawater during several research cruises led by Walter Adey from the Smithsonian.

The algae’s growth rates depend on the temperature of the water and the light they receive. As snow-covered sea ice accumulates on the water over the algae, it turns the sea floor dark and cold, stopping the plants’ growth. When the sea ice melts in the warm months, the algae resume growing their calcified crusts.

This continuous cycle of dormancy and growth results in visible layers that can be used to determine the length of time the algae were able to grow each year during the ice-free season.

You can read more here at the University of Toronto.

From the WUWT comments

The article generated quite a few comments.  Below is a sample (archived here).

milodonharlani has an awful lot to say in the comments.  In his first contribution he decides that he likes this paper because it mentions the Little Ice Age.  But it doesn't mean what he thinks it means.  He says:

November 18, 2013 at 5:51 pm
Great to have some actual climate science practiced & published now & then.
As expected, the Little Ice Age had already begun by the 1360s, & Arctic ice cover has decreased during the past 150 years, as climate recovered from the LIA, which ended around 1860, after double bottoming during the sunspot Minima of Maunder c. 1645-1715 & Dalton c. 1790-1830.

Just the normal fluctuations of the Holocene, although with a disturbing longer-term (millennial scale) downtrend.

John, for some unknown reason thinks that Michael Mann doesn't accept the Little Ice Age when in fact he's contributed a lot to the world's understanding of it - for example see here and here.  And John would be very much mistaken if he thought this Arctic study in any way refuted the shape of the hockey stick.  He says:

November 18, 2013 at 5:58 pm
Once again, someone tell Michael Mann that the Little Ice Age really existed.
Too bad the mainstream media, when the pick up on a study like this, refuse to examine how it relates to the iconic hockey stick.

Janice Moore leaves her god out of it for a change and wails and shouts:

November 18, 2013 at 6:03 pm
A bona fide question from a non-scientist:

Re: “Longer periods of open and warm water result in a higher amount of algal magnesium.” (emphasis mine)

How do they know that the controlling variable is not the temperature of the water? How do they know that sea ice extent (i.e., amount of light) is a significant causation?

Isn’t a parallel (and erroneous) assumption commonly made about the controlling cause of tree ring width?

In other words….

How does this study prove ANYTHING?

(A kind soul later pointed out to Janice Moore some facts about photosynthesis.)


lowercasefred says "it's soot!":

November 18, 2013 at 6:45 pm
Q: How do they know the decreased ice cover is the result of climate warming instead of soot?
A: They don’t.

Manfred is happy enough with the research paper.  He's a greenhouse effect denier and would be happy with anything as long as "it's not CO2".  Manfred says:

November 18, 2013 at 7:55 pm
Another study matching well with either the sun or black carbon and not so well with CO2 as the main drivers in the Arctic.

Katherine is one who doesn't like unqualified "unprecedenteds", even when they are qualified in a time context and says:

November 18, 2013 at 7:58 pm
Their proxy covers less than 650 years and they have the gall to use “unprecedented”?! What idiots.

Appropriately named Mushroom George thinks the same algae must live in the southern oceans.  I doubt it, George.  In any case the seas around Antarctica tend to be free of ice in summer.  Mushroom George says:

November 18, 2013 at 8:07 pm
Recently, sea ice area increases in Antarctica seem to balance out most of the sea ice decreases in Uncle arctica. I would like to see algal growth rates from both poles compared.

Dr. Bob didn't bother reading the article but still says "scientists don't know nuffin'":

November 18, 2013 at 8:23 pm
Is there any data supporting the hypothesis that growth rings are directly proportional to temperature, sunlight penetration or maybe perhaps dissolved CO2. Unless you can prove that growth rings are proportional in width to some factor, it is hard to say anything about these data. It seems to me that people take for granted proportionality when they don’t have proof of concept.

I've run out of puff and can't be bothered reading any more comments.  You can read them archived here if you want to.  A few people are showing signs that their brain hasn't completely atrophied, but some those same people seem to think the scientists have no brains at all.

A little bonus for sticking through to the end

I'll leave you with a bonus.  There was a rather strange diversion in the comment thread, right into creationism.  Since it's been slow at WUWT lately, I'll copy it here.  Always good to read one ratbag science denier arguing with another ratbag science denier to see which is the bigger ratbag.  By the way - I think Stephen Meyer and David Berlinski must be creationists of one form or another :)

Janice Moore says (excerpt):

November 18, 2013 at 7:38 pm
Dear Milodon Harlani,
Have you ever watched the videos I linked? Every time I ask that, you do not answer. Did you think I did not notice? I think that, if you look into it, you will find that Dr. Stephen Meyer’s and Dr. David Berlinski’s credentials provide an excellent basis for their scholarship.

You accuse me of not learning, but you refuse to watch the lectures I posted (I only re-posted them because from your remarks, it was pretty clear that you had not watched them). How do you know that they are not well-reasoned and persuasive without listening to them?

milodonharlani says (excerpt):

November 18, 2013 at 7:54 pm
I don’t need to look into it, Janice Moore, because I’m thoroughly familiar with their total lack of credentials. They practically no knowledge of biology, except just enough to know that they are lying shamelessly, but don’t care, because they’re paid to hoodwink suckers like you. I’ve listened to their pack of lies for over a decade. To call their mendacity “scholarship” is the deepest possible insult to every scholar who has ever lived.

I don’t refuse to listen to your pathetic videos. I’ve heard them & talked to them in person. They’re paid liars, plain & simple.

I’m not the least bit in danger. It is you whose soul is in mortal danger. Your heroes are liars against the God of creation, Janine Moore. I pray you learn that before it’s too late.

God has revealed Himself to me through His creation. His Works in creating the universe(s) take precedence over your satanic, bibliolatrous, blasphemous interpretation of His Word. Wake up! You’ve been sold a bill of dangerous goods. Learn actual science instead of false religion. Worship the Creator & not a book written by men (& maybe one woman) trying to grasp the Infinite.

---

J Halfar et al (2013); Arctic sea-ice decline archived by multicentury annual-resolution record from crustose coralline algal proxy; doi: 10.1073/pnas.1313775110 

CO2 is plant food? Not on your nellie, sez Anthony (Pavlov) Watts and his dogs!

Did anyone say deniers are nuts?  Here is a paper not just telling everyone that plants are using a heap more CO2, but quantifying just how much more CO2 has been absorbed.

How does Anthony Watts react?  After all his articles about how "CO2 is plant food", you'd think he'd be shouting from the rooftops that at last those wretched scientists started listening to science deniers, wouldn't you.

But no! He's posted the press release under the headline:

Climate Craziness of the Week: Plants blamed for us not roasting since 1950

Perhaps Anthony didn't like the way the conclusion was worded, although it's on the cards that he hasn't read the paper itself.  He probably just skimmed the press release he copied and pasted.  This call to arms from Anthony Watts is archived here.


Anyway, this is what Elena Shevliakova and her team found:

The results of our study indicate that historical enhanced vegetation growth has avoided release of 251–274 GtC, about an additional 85 ppm of atmospheric CO2 concentration, and a warming of 0.31 ± 0.06 °C. To accurately predict observed trends in both temperature and the atmospheric CO2 concentration over the 20th century, ESMs need to account for the interaction of LUC and enhanced vegetation growth, including vegetation regrowth on the secondary lands. CO2 fertilization is a plausible but debated mechanism for the ongoing land carbon sink. The empirical evidence for enhanced vegetation growth under elevated CO2 remains equivocal (29–32). The model used here does not include nitrogen or phosphorus limitations on carbon uptake. Some modeling (33) and observational (34–36) studies have found that nitrogen availability has not significantly affected global carbon uptake over the 20th century, whereas others have reached the opposite conclusion (37). The magnitude and the sign of the future net land carbon flux will impact the atmospheric CO2 growth rate, climate change, and any efforts to mitigate it. Because of the importance of the land sink in reconciling atmospheric CO2 and climate records, this study adds urgency to independently test and isolate the mechanisms responsible for the growing terrestrial C sink.

So the world would most probably have been quite a bit hotter already if not for the enhanced vegetation growth. You'll notice their caution though.  "The empirical evidence for enhanced vegetation growth remains equivocal." and "The model used here does not include nitrogen or phosphorus limitations on carbon uptake."

The researchers used a coupled climate–carbon cycle model (ESM2G) and gridded land use changes from 1700 to 2005. They "conducted three types of CO2 emissions-driven experiments from 1861 to 2005: historical (EH), historical without LUC (land use change)  (EHnoLU), and historical without the CO2 fertilization effect on vegetation (EHnoFR)".

The full paper is available at PNAS for those who are interested.  It reads well.

Shevliakova, Elena, et al. "Historical warming reduced due to enhanced land carbon uptake." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2013): 201314047. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1314047110

From the WUWT comments

Because Anthony led the way deriding the research, almost all of his fans followed suit.  They are well-trained pups. Here's a selection (archived here):

JohnWho says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:23 pm
“Without plants, Earth would cook under billions of tons of additional carbon”
And who would care?
Without plants, all creatures that rely on the plants would die.
So, even if they “cooked”, who would be around to eat them?
We would not have a runaway carbon cycle without plants – the carbon cycle would quickly cease to revolve, would it not?

MattN says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:24 pm
Dumbest “what if” ever. Complete waste of money.

Bob Tisdale says who needs real science when you've got blog pseudo-science at WUWT?

October 16, 2013 at 1:26 pm
Someone wasted taxpayer dollars for this? Ridiculous!!!

JohnWho has another crack and says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:29 pm
Please, Lord, stop me from reading the above:
“The planet’s land-based carbon “sink” — or carbon-storage capacity — has kept 186 billion to 192 billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere since the mid-20th century,…”
Uh, sure is a good thing those plants did that. Wonder if they were removing carbon from the atmosphere before the mid-20th century, too?

Bob, Missoula agrees with Bob Tisdale that science is for the literate, not the scientific illiterati at WUWT:

October 16, 2013 at 1:30 pm
Bob you said what I wanted to but without cussing.

Sparks thinks all science is a big joke and says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:32 pm
I loved it, needed a good laugh!

Philip Lee is the first person to commend the researchers for (not really) saying that "CO2 is plant food".  But he gets climate models woefully wrong when he says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:34 pm
A useful admission that CO2 is plant food that promotes plant growth (that will provide food for humans) and will limit temperature in ways not modeled by climate models.

richardscourtney isn't shy about displaying his ignorance of climate models either (he seems to think, wrongly, they are "made to fit" the past), and says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:40 pm
Friends:
The report says
“A unique value of this study is that it simulates the past, for which, unlike the future, we have observations,” Saleska said. “Past observations about climate and carbon dioxide provide a test about how good the model simulation was. If it’s right about the past, we should have more confidence in its ability to predict the future.

No competent scientist would utter such nonsensical drivel.

If a model cannot emulate the past there is reason to suppose it cannot predict the future.
But an ability of a model to emulate the past does NOT of itself provide any “confidence in its ability to predict the future”. This is because there are an infinite number of ways to make a model fit the past but there is only one way the future will occur.
Richard

Bennett In Vermont shows off the Dunning Kruger Effect and says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:46 pm
If they had asked an indoor gardener they could have learned that most plants don’t even hit their maximum growth potential until the level of CO2 is above 1200 ppm. That’s when they really start to take off.

Oh well, we can’t let simple facts get in the way of a Mad Magazine style scientific paper.

Tim Collins says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:56 pm
Wow what a lot of words, and I guess salary? In order to state the bleeding obvious except for the absurd postulation that plants will have so much to eat they will stop being carbon dioxide hungry – yeah right.

Stop paying these academidiots now and make them get proper jobs.

Chad Wozniak - does Chad ever think about what he writes?  He writes almost the same lot of words no matter what article he's commenting on:

October 16, 2013 at 2:15 pm
How desperate can these people get?
Will Happer at Princeton must be just shaking his head.

Okay, that's enough.  I'm sure you get the idea.  They'll never be happy these science deniers.  Scientists quantify an effect the deniers have been bleating about incessantly and the deniers still deny.  Like Pavlov's dog trained to growl whenever they come across some real science.  It doesn't matter if they agree with it or disagree.  As long as it's science they'll growl, mock, complain, tell the scientists how wrong they are and wail "if only they'd asked us deniers..."

Black carbon in the Arctic as viewed by WUWT - plus more about soot and methane

Anthony Watts posted an article about a new paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmosphere.

Anthony had a headline: In the Arctic, nearby soot may be a larger forcing than CO2. However there was nothing in his article to support his headline so one can only conclude that he made it up out of thin air in keeping with his latest disinformation push.

Sand, M., T. K. Berntsen, Ø. Seland, and J. E. Kristjánsson (2013), Arctic surface temperature change to emissions of black carbon within Arctic or midlatitudes, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 118, doi:10.1002/jgrd.50613.

It depends on from where the black carbon comes

The researchers set out to quantify the impact of black carbon emissions from different sources - comparing that emanating from within the Arctic with that coming from the midlatitudes. They found that if the black carbon was emitted from within the Arctic, it had "an almost five times larger Arctic surface temperature response (per unit of emitted mass) compared to emissions at midlatitudes".  The AGU report states (my bold italics):

Black carbon emitted within the Arctic is more likely to stay at low altitudes and thus to be deposited on the snow and ice there, whereas black carbon transported into the Arctic from mid-latitudes is more likely to remain at higher altitudes. Because of this, the Arctic surface temperature is almost 5 times more sensitive to black carbon emitted from within the Arctic than to emissions from mid-latitudes, the authors find.

How many WUWT readers understood what was written?

The first thing that struck me in the comments was that I don't think either Anthony or his readers understood the study or what it found.  Going by the headline, Anthony was just aiming for more disinformation and didn't bother to read what he copied and pasted.  His readers were no better. So far, I only counted three responses (out of 26) that demonstrates that any reader has understood the research or the findings.

The second thing that struck me in the comments, was the inability of some people to hold two complementary ideas in their brain at the same time.  It is as if there is only room for one.  This disability is interesting in the context of Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians.  (See here for a summary in the context of climate science denial).  Altemayer talks of the RWA's as being recognised for their ability to hold two conflicting ideas in their brain at the same time.  For example, they can swear black and blue that earth is warming because of the sun and in the next breath they'll swear black and blue that the earth isn't warming and then say that it's cooling and then say it's warming but it's caused by ENSO or the PDO.

Maybe the head of the RWA is so full of conflicting notions that it has no room for complementary notions.

Here is an example from Bob who says (extract):

August 13, 2013 at 6:37 pm CO2 doesn’t seem to be working all that well as the cause, so we need to switch to carbon, I suppose....

Here are more comments from the WUWT crowd, but this time to demonstrate how WUWT readers don't bother to read or understand before jumping in feet first:

Owen in GA hasn't bothered to read the WUWT article and hasn't understood what the research was about.  He seems to think it was just to see if black carbon caused melting:

August 13, 2013 at 6:21 pm  I don’t see why they didn’t expect to see this. Ice has an almost perfect reflection surface, put something that is almost a perfect black body on top of it and absorbed energy changes as far as is possible. I would have to run a series of experiments to put actual numbers on it, but the common sense factor of this seems evident. Occasionally the universe throws a curve ball at ya, but usually only on really large or really small scales.

For starters - Owen in GA hasn't bothered to read what the researchers were studying.  Next he's incorrect saying "ice having an almost perfect reflective surface".  Ice does have high albedo compared to, say, the open ocean.  But it's not perfect and is less than snow.  Owen in GA immediately doubles up on his lack of understanding by telling the researchers how they should have done their research.  It would help a bit if he learnt that "alot" is two words not one (yeah, I'm being petty now):

August 13, 2013 at 6:29 pm  The problem here though is they do all their “experiments” in a computer rather than in the universe. Would have to see the methodology to see if they used any actual observations such as solar intensity, shine angle, carbon absorption rate/conversion of effective solar to temperature and length of day. Such a simple model could tell you alot about what effect black carbon “might” have, but until you instrument the heck out of a patch with alot of black carbon and a control patch with little to no black carbon and measure the actual on the ground effect you have not done a real experiment.

Owen in GA throws in the towel and says:

August 13, 2013 at 6:48 pm  I don’t know why this article bugs me so much. I read them all, but only comment occasionally when something either grabs my funny bone or sticks in the craw.

Maybe it's because Owen in GA didn't bother to digest the article and the research findings.

Wyguy declares himself as one of the 8% Dismissives and says:

August 13, 2013 at 7:02 pm “Black carbon ….. is one of the major causes of global warming, after carbon dioxide emissions.” When I read that, I quit reading. The author(s) lost all credibility in my eyes.

Impact of cutting soot and methane - not as much benefit as previously thought

There are a couple of more interesting comments, though.  This time about a PNNL study on the impact of cutting soot and methane emissions, which has recently been published in PNAS and is discussed here in Scientific American.  You can read the press release from PNLL here.  An excerpt:

Cutting the amount of short-lived, climate-warming emissions such as soot and methane in our skies won't limit global warming as much as previous studies have suggested, a new analysis shows. The study also found a comprehensive climate policy (including methane) would produce more climate benefits by 2050 than if soot and methane were reduced alone.

Steven J. Smith1 and Andrew Mizrahi (2013) Near-term climate mitigation by short-lived forcers, PNAS,  doi: 10.1073/pnas.1308470110

Anthony Watts claims he's won the Battle of the Brains ...ha ha ha

Anthony thinks he's clever, cleverer even than Dr Joe Romm

This quote from Anthony Watts (of WUWT) is funny, though once again it's not tagged as "humour".  Anthony decides he is cleverer than 'alarmists', in fact he even thinks he's smarter than Joe Romm and writes:

From the University of Alberta, this news release is making the rounds, but what many of the alarmists don’t get (Joe Romm for example) is that these plants had to have a warm environment to grow in first, then they were covered by ice, emerging again after the LIA ended. Many reports are only looking at the current emergence in a warmer period as if it is unique. – Anthony

Anthony, I believe you'll find, should you ask him, that Dr Romm knows that the bryophyte was not frozen in ice before it was frozen.  I wouldn't mind betting that there might even be one or two of Anthony's Dismissives who would twig to that.

Clever little Anthony is correct when he writes that the bryophytes emerged after the end of the Little Ice Age ended.  They emerged about 160 years after it ended.

It took more than the ending of the little ice age for these mosses to emerge.  It took human activity to heat up the world and cause a widespread and sharply accelerating ice retreat across the Canadian Arctic Archipelago according to the abstract:

Across the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, widespread ice retreat during the 20th century has sharply accelerated since 2004. In Sverdrup Pass, central Ellesmere Island, rapid glacier retreat is exposing intact plant communities whose radiocarbon dates demonstrate entombment during the Little Ice Age (1550–1850 AD)....

What makes this warming unique

As for this warmer period being unique - does anyone think Anthony would be willing to admit its unique features?  Here are some unique features of this warmer period:

• It's the first time ever since Homo sapiens evolved that carbon dioxide has been this high;
• It's the first time in the history of earth in which there has been such a rapid period of warming as a result of human activity;
• This past hundred years marks the first period ever in the history of Earth that any species has had the power to choose whether to end the world as we know it or whether to limit the damage being wreaked upon life on earth.
• It's probably the first major mass extinction event since the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event, which took place about 66 million years ago.
• It would be the first time in the history of earth that a sentient species knowingly and willingly charged full pelt towards its own destruction, if Anthony Watts had his way.

Who's won the Battle of the Brains?

Hands up everyone who thinks Anthony Watts has it all over his scientific dog, Kenji and Dr Joe Romm when it comes to intellect.

Who has the best brain?

---

Now to the unfrozen bryophytes.  Here again is a link to the abstract in PNAS¹.  Below is a repost from The Conversation.

Frozen plants from the Little Ice Age regenerate spontaneously

By Akshat Rathi, The Conversation

Retreating glaciers are proving to be good news for plant scientists. Underneath one such glacier on Ellesmere Island in Canada, researchers have found plants they believe have regrown after being entombed in the glacier for more than 400 years, since a cold period called the Little Ice Age.

These plants are called bryophyte, a group that includes mosses. They are non-vascular, which means they do not have tissue that distributes resources throughout the plant and they do not reproduce through flowers and seeds. They use spores instead. But they also possess the ability to regrow from tiny fragments of themselves through a process called clonal growth. “This ability makes bryophytes pretty tough,” Andrew Fleming, a plant scientist who was not involved in the study, said.

The discovery reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was made by a team led by Catherine La Farge, an expert on bryophytes at the University of Alberta. Because the bryophytes found were not much different from similar variety found in the wild today, La Farge used radio carbon dating to confirm the age of their find.

The plants were trapped during a period known as the Little Ice Age, between the 16th and 19th centuries, when glaciers were growing in size. Arctic glaciers have recently been retreating and, since 2004, the rate of ice melt has increased dramatically. La Farge is hopeful that, in addition to these plants, the melting glaciers will release other interesting flora and fauna of that time.

When these bryophytes were found they were blackened, but sported a hint of green. 

See to the right of the rock in the middle. Catherine La Farge

This discovery does not displace the record of the oldest frozen plant to be regenerated. That belongs to a 32,000 year old specimen of Silene stenophylla, which was regrown by using tissue extracted from its frozen seeds.

These bryophytes are also not the hardiest plants we know. That title belongs to what are commonly known as resurrection plants, which are able to survive extreme dehydration. Some of these are commonly found in deserts, such as Selaginella lepidophylla found in Chihuahuan Desert on the border of Mexico and the US.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

¹. Catherine La Farge, Krista H. Williams, and John H. England (2013) Regeneration of Little Ice Age bryophytes emerging from a polar glacier with implications of totipotency in extreme environments, PNAS,  doi:10.1073/pnas.1304199110

Help the Snowshoe Hares

Pretty animals, aren't they.

Not that we can do much in the short term, but couldn't we try a bit harder to give them a few extra days protection each year?

Color-Changing Hare Can't Keep Up With Climate Change

Photo credit: D. Gordon E. Robertson adapted by HotWhopper.

Mills et al Camouflage mismatch in seasonal coat color due to decreased snow duration
PNAS 2013 110 (18) 7099-7100; doi:10.1073/iti1813110

Another WUWT Fail! What is Willis Missing?

Willis Eschenbach has written an article about a recent PNAS paper, Homogeneous record of Atlantic hurricane surge threat since 1923 by Grinsted et al, which finds:

that warm years in general were more active in all cyclone size ranges than cold years. The largest cyclones are most affected by warmer conditions and we detect a statistically significant trend in the frequency of large surge events (roughly corresponding to tropical storm size) since 1923. In particular, we estimate that Katrina-magnitude events have been twice as frequent in warm years compared with cold years (P < 0.02).

Click here to download the paper and supporting info.

What is Willis missing?

In a strong surge in overconfidence, Willis makes up two charts of the surge indices listed Table S2 in the supporting info (he didn't get the paper itself).  He says he sees no trend, and asks:

What am I missing?

The emperor has no clothes...

I wonder how long it will take before someone tells him what he's missing - like he should have seen already if he'd bother to read the supporting info that he got his data from.  Or even if anyone goes to the paper and supplementary info that the fourth WUWT commenter kindly links to, and reads it. (So far ignored by the next 35 47 commenters.)


Here is what Willis was missing, staring him right in the face in the middle of page 1 of the supporting paper he downloaded, under the heading S2. Events with the Largest Surge Index: (my bold and italics)

...In Table S2 we have also calculated accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) and USACE over the week centered on the date shown. We caution against comparing the relative rank of individual events. The surge index ranking reflects the impact at the specific tide-gauge locations and therefore should not be interpreted as a storm ranking. The purpose of this list is to demonstrate that the surge index truly captures cyclone activity, rather than providing a storm severity ranking.

Still, Willis got what he was looking for...

No worries, Willis got his pseudo-analysis wrong, but he is generating the comments he's looking for - including some completely unrelated to storm surges in the Atlantic: "Arctic ice recovery continues" (huh?), "grant money", "they just make it up", "How can they claim the opposite??", "where's the hockey stick".  

Mike M is particularly hot and bothered, demanding the Governments of China, Finland, Sweden and the UK appear before the US Congress and refund his tax dollars, writing "If they are lying on our tax dollars then haul the responsible gov agency in front of Congress and demand they either back up their claim or forfeit anymore funding for 10 years."

Willis shows just how easy it is to fool fake skeptics.  (Willis has always suffered from Surges in Overconfidence.)

Update: Apparently Pielke Jr has been taking potshots as usual.