🧵More evidence that albedo changes are behind the “extra unexplained 0.2°C” of warming:

“I’m confident it’s a missing piece. It’s the missing piece,” says Tselioudis, who presented the work last week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.” 2/ Building off his team’s work from earlier this year👇, Tselioudis and co. have found that cloud coverage has fallen by about 1.5% per decade for the last 35 years.

This is a new important paper. It's not good news. It also corroborates much of what @LeonSimons8 has been raising the alarm about over the last couple years about changes to Earth's Energy Imbalance (though this paper focuses on 2023 specifically).

QUICK THREAD 2) Essentially the paper tried to explain the "missing 0.2C" that global climate models appeared to miss out on in 2023 after factoring in all we know about GHGs, El Niño, the peak of the Solar Cycle, Hunga Tonga, and even the Shipping Aerosols changes from IMO 2020.

🧵Thread with examples of why it’s dumb to say “CO2 is only 0.04% of the atmosphere, so it can’t possibly have an effect!”

It’s time to just ignore the “400ppm is too small to have an impact” meme…
Caffeine

🧵I've posted a lot of scary papers about AMOC collapse recently. And I've corresponded with some leading scientists. It is scary, no doubt about it.

This thread shows there are some scientists who are not yet convinced, or are at least skeptical that AMOC is on a death-spiral. 2) Latif et al. 2022 argue that changes in the AMOC may be primarily driven by natural fluctuations rather than being solely or predominantly a consequence of human-induced climate change.

Further, they write "A relatively stable AMOC and associated northward heat transport during the past decades is also supported by ocean syntheses combining ocean general circulation models and data, hindcasts with ocean general circulation models forced by observed atmospheric boundary conditions, and instrumental measurements of key AMOC components. Neither of these datasets suggest major AMOC slowing since 1980, and neither of the AMOC indices from Rahmstorf et al. or Caesar et al. show an overall AMOC decline since 1980."

It's time for another AMOC Collapse thread!

This includes some clarifications on the TIMING of a potential tipping vs. collapse and their *impacts*, based on a conversation I've had with a co-author of the recent pre-print "Probability Estimates of a 21st Century AMOC Collapse" 2/ First, there's been a lot of confusion in the media and especially here on social media about what the pre-print meant by "The collapse time is estimated between 2037-2064... with a mean of 2050". The AMOC current is bi-modal, so generally it's ON or OFF, and once it passes a tipping point, MODELS suggest that there's a roughly 100-year freefall period towards collapse. Many were unclear (and I admit, I was not fully clear myself, and I apologize) on whether this implied that the *tipping point* has already occurred roughly 70 years ago and therefore that the current itself would be 'OFF' by 2050, or whether the *tipping point* was likely to be reached around 2050, meaning the full shutting off of the current would till be over a Century from now, closer to 2150.

I have now confirmed that it is THE LATTER. That is, to the extent that this MODEL reflects what happens in reality (which is indeed unlikely since it is indeed just a model), the *model year* 1758 in van Westen et al. 2024 roughly corresponds to the 'mean AMOC collapse time' of 2050 in the Smolders et al. 2024 pre-print.

1/ I’ve been wondering a bunch of things about a potential AMOC collapse: "When will it tip?" "What are the most likely effects?" "Can we stop it?" So I looked for answers in the many scientific papers published on this. Here’s a super plain language thread with what I found.🧵 2/ WTF is the AMOC? It’s the ‘Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation’, which is a fancy name for an important ocean current that effectively serves as a ‘heat pump’ for Earth - bringing warm surface water from the tropics Northward, releasing its heat, sinking, then bringing deeper cold water back South.

🧵Here's a little story about a scientific paper from 20 years ago that sought to cast doubt on @MichaelEMann's famous 'Hockey Stick' warming graph by reworking his original data set. Now, 20 years out *even this same revised dataset* now very clearly shows.... a Hockey Stick! 2) In 1998 Mann and colleagues published a very important paper in Nature. They conducted an impressive study compiling temperature reconstructions for the last 6 Centuries, and found a startling 'hockey stick' shape: The world was warmer than it had been in nearly 600+ years!

A very important paper was published yesterday, discussing the feasibility of limiting global warming to 1.5°C when considering a range of existing constraints.👇

The findings are indeed daunting, but maybe not as hopeless as many on this website seem to imply...

Quick 🧵 2/ The study reviews chances of keeping global warming to within Paris Agreement bounds of 1.5C to 2.0C given the latest understandings of 5 key constraints: geophysical; technological; institutional; socio-cultural; and economic...

Was last week's heat dome unprecedented? NO, not by a long shot!

So why are most climate scientists very ALARMED about the warming signal they see in the historical record?

Because when you consider scale and temporality, the warming trend is clear, and alarming indeed!
🧵

https://twitter.com/ChrisMartzWX/status/1804186399433986475

2/ There've been many June heatwaves like this in the US before. And, the daily mean temp anomaly for Wednesday, June 19th (the peak day of the heat dome) wasn't very exceptional in much of the US East... (for that given day of the year).

It’s been six months since I posted this (semi-viral?) thread👇

So let’s take a renewed look: How has the debate between these two competing “climate urgency science narratives” evolved over the last half year?
🧵

https://twitter.com/ryankatzrosene/status/1710108929789759812

1) The thread noted a divide between what I called “accelerationists” who were sounding alarm that 2023’s remarkable warming was the beginning of SOMETHING NEW, and those I (later) called “observationalists”, who claimed 2023’s extreme warmth fits within EXPECTED WARMING trends.

This post by @FoodProfessor claims that the Trudeau Government purposely built the @ClimateInstit and @SP_Inst as part of its "lobbying machine" and that they are "mandated to advocate blindly" for the carbon tax.

This is a baseless claim.

Thread...🧵 1) This story starts in 1988 when the Mulroney government created an Independent advisory council of experts called the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy. For 25 years it produced numerous reports on environmental policy, advising governments.

🧵REQUIEM for a unified green left...

I don't know if the left has ever been unified, but today there seems to be a massive and growing rift about the environment - and especially climate - amongst socialists.

I now worry these differences are irreconcilable... 2. The discord seems to come down to fundamentally different worldviews shaping interpretations and definitions of modernity, development, progress, capitalism, justice, Marx's intentions, strategy, the future...

Many people seem absolutely fed up with "the other side". FED. UP.

It's worth emphasizing that because the scheduled carbon tax rate increase is flat ($15/tonne/year through to 2030), the *relative* weight increase declines over time.

There's a few ways that the carbon tax increase may *feel* less consequential as time goes on. Mini 🧵

https://twitter.com/chrispyross/status/1775271218956161198

First, as Chris has pointed out, this year it's a 23% increase on the tax rate relative to last year. But next year it will be an 18.75% increase and so on until it just stays fixed at $170/tonne - no longer increasing any more, year after year...

Here's the abridged story of how NEOLIBERALISM became dominant (as I understand it). This is also a story with CLIMATE implications.

I draw on works by Harvey, Klein, Helleiner, Ruggie, and others.

(Keen to hear amendments, additions, critiques from fellow political economists) 1) It's 1944 and the soon-to-be victors of WWII gather at Bretton Woods to design the Post-War global economy. They develop an international monetary system largely seeking stability; one that fosters cooperation and prosperity through international trade and growth.

1. Speaking of tipping points: I believe the world has recently tipped into the early stages of one of the most profound transformations humanity has ever endured. It will take place over the next 50 years or so.

🧵on this fascinating and terrifying time to be alive! 2. The transformation is being ushered in by major demographic, technological, and ecological changes. These are mutually-reinforcing in some ways, making the transformation feel lightning fast (in human terms). The late 21st Century will look fundamentally different from today.

OK, let’s talk about the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect…

A thread🧵 2/ It is well known that cities warm more than surrounding rural areas. As the IPCC recently wrote in AR6: “Urban areas experience air temperatures that can be SEVERAL DEGREES Celsius warmer than surrounding areas, especially during the night”

A blast of extreme cold air has plunged deep into central North America. Some places have set record cold temperatures. It turns out there’s a bit of a scientific debate about whether these types of cold snaps can be linked to… *global warming*

🧵on what the science says… The general idea is that melting sea ice within the warming Arctic is causing instability in the jet stream, resulting in large Rossby waves which during the winter season can push frigid Arctic air deep into areas where they wouldn’t in a more stable climate…

https://twitter.com/historian_steve/status/1745920780624711886

This year’s insane heat has coincided with (perhaps driven?) a bit of a wedge between two leading “climate urgency science narratives”…
🧵 On one side there are what we might call “the traditionalists”. These folks emphasize how this heat falls within the boundaries of how we would expect the Earth system to behave given the historical trajectory of fossil Carbon emissions, combined with an El Niño transition year.

I see the "livestock CH4 is/is not the same as fossil CH4" debate has resurfaced again🙄

Y'all! This is very well studied. Here's a thread on the science.

First tho, both these claims are untrue:
- livestock and fossil CH4 are the same
- livestock CH4 doesn't warm the planet 1) A molecule of CH4 emitted by an animal and from a fossil fuel project are very, very similar: One Carbon atom, four Hydrogen atoms. But they are not identical. We know this because they have slightly different carbon isotopic signatures.
doi.org/10.1029/2021GB…

Here's a story: After being emitted, most Methane (CH4) molecules spend about 12 years in the atmosphere before being broken down by a short-lived molecule called Hydroxyl Radical (OH) - a molecule which typically only lives for about 1 second! OH is typically formed by a two-step process in the atmosphere: First, Ozone (O3) reacts with UV light, splitting into O2 + O. Then the rogue Oxygen atom reacts with water vapour (H2O) to create two Hydroxy Radical (OH) molecules...

Sheesh!😲 I spent some time this month reading through the latest scientific literature on how CLIMATE CHANGE and other anthropogenic forces are expected to reshape North America's boreal forest. I didn't realize just how *extensively* human activity was TRANSFORMING it!

🧵 Sadly, domestic forest management and logging, combined with HUMAN-CAUSED GLOBAL WARMING, are on track to COMPLETELY TRANSFORM Canada’s boreal forest this Century! The more extreme climate warming scenarios could "KILL" parts of the boreal [yes, scientists used that word!👀]