The Fossil Fuels Derivatives Beast is at it! Greenland Melts, April Record Warmth, Bad Financial Damages Prediction.

Greenland has started to melt again... second majorly abnormal melt spike of the season.

Tip o' the hat to Tom Yulsman at Twitter and dtlange at Robertscribbler.

Source: Twitter: Tom Yulsman @yulsman

Source: Greenland Today, National Snow and Ice Data Center

From Discover: "The Arctic will 'go through hell this year,' says one prominent scientist."

On April 11, a dramatic early spike in melting of snow and ice at the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet prompted a Danish climate scientist to say that she and her colleagues were “incredulous.”
Now, there has been a second bout of unusual melting.

You can see both of them in the graph above from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, or NSIDC. It charts the percentage of the Greenland Ice Sheet experiencing surface melting. In both cases, the thaw exceeded 10 percent of the ice sheet’s area.

Also record warmth (except in Berlin, NY and other areas in northeast North America and in Europe) gripped the globe last month.

Tip o' the hat to redskylite at Robertscribbler.

Source: NASA via the BBC.

The above graphic shows April temps to be 1.11 degrees C (2.0 F) above the 1951-1980 mean, or about 1.33 C (2.4 F) above 1880s values.

From the BBC: "April was the seventh month in a row that broke global temperature records, Nasa figures show."

Last month smashed the previous record for April by the largest margin ever, the data show.

That makes it three months in a row that the monthly record was broken by the largest margin ever.

But in terms of its departure from the 1951-1980 temperature average used by Nasa, April was equal with January 2016.

The Beeb also admits in the above linked article that with the new record temperatures, it will be quite difficult to meet the 1.5 C (2.7 F) goad set by COP21 in Paris last year.

All in all, the first four months of this year are running at 1.43 C (2.6F) above 1880s levels.

And the Fossil Fuels Derivatives Beast will be doing quite a number on global industrial civilization, putting 13 billion people and $US 158 trillion in infrastructure, buildings, farms, etc.

Tip o' the' hat to Ryan in New England at Robertscribbler.

From the Guardian: "Climate change puts 1.3bn people and $158tn at risk, says World Bank."

Source: Tony Karuba/AFP/Getty Images/the Guardian.

The global community is badly prepared for a rapid increase in climate change-related natural disasters that by 2050 will put 1.3 billion people at risk, according to the World Bank.

Urging better planning of cities before it was too late, a report published on Monday from a Bank-run body that focuses on disaster mitigation, said assets worth $158tn – double the total annual output of the global economy – would be in jeopardy by 2050 without preventative action.

“With climate change and rising numbers of people in urban areas rapidly driving up future risks, there’s a real danger the world is woefully unprepared for what lies ahead,” said John Roome, the World Bank Group’s senior director for climate change.

“Unless we change our approach to future planning for cities and coastal areas that takes into account potential disasters, we run the real risk of locking in decisions that will lead to drastic increases in future losses.”

According to the Guardian in this same article, The World Bank Report reveals that the coastal cities are also sinking, compounding the sea-level rise... which will not be uniform across the globe. One country on one continent in particular is really gonna get in trouble...

All courtesy of the Fossil Fuels Derivatives Beast.

It's Happening!

Climate change is paying no attention to Peak Oil -- other than respond positively (read: negatively, for us humans and all other creatures) -- as the present production peak, which may be followed by yet another, higher peak when Iran's oil production comes on line to the market, will spew more CO2 than ever into the atmosphere, assuming the demand that has been destroyed is resurrected. Otherwise the glut of oil will just pile up in storage. But eventually it will be burnt; it's a question of when. The added carbon dioxide, along with the beginning of the failure of so many carbon sinks, has will help the atmospheric carbon dioxide increase to accelerate, as it just did this past year: 4 ppm year-over-year.

Non-tropical Cyclone Frank. Current Pressure 928 mb.
This storm is the size of Europe and is as strong as a major hurricane.
Source: dtlange at Robertscribbler.

Anyway, one of the responses is this wicked non-tropical cyclone the size of Europe in the North Atlantic that has bombed out to 928 mb -- Major Hurricane strength, bringing rain and above-freezing temperatures (34 degrees F = 1 C last night) to the North Pole. Robertscribbler, now the bard of climate change reporters, has this to say:

Warm Storm Brings Rain Over Arctic Sea Ice in Winter

By Robertscribbler, 29 December 2015

The Starks were wrong. Winter isn’t coming. It’s dying.

As The Atlantic so aptly notes, the hottest year in the global climate record is ending with a Storm that will Unfreeze the North Pole. A warm storm that is now predicted to bring never-before-seen above freezing temperatures in the range of 32 to 36 degrees Fahrenheit for the highest Latitude in the Northern Hemisphere by afternoon tomorrow. A storm expected to dump six inches of rain and bring 80 mile per hour winds to a Northern England already suffering the worst flooding events in all of its long history. A storm that will rage ashore in Iceland packing 90-100 mile per hour winds and hurl both heavy rains and snows across that volcanic isle.

The impacts of this storm, which the UK Met Office is now calling Frank, could well be tremendous. Cumbria in Northern England may be set to experience yet another ‘worst flood on record’ — one of three occurring just this month. And the 920 mb range central low of this sprawling system is forecast to rip through the heart of Iceland itself. But the more visible risk of damages to England and Iceland may well pale in comparison to the quiet, yet drastic impacts taking place in the far north. 

As the first front of warm air proceeded over the ice pack to the north of Svalbard, the rains fell through 35-40 degree (F) air temperatures. It splattered upon Arctic Ocean ice that rarely even sees rain during summer-time. Its soft pitter-patter a whisper that may well be the sound to mark the end of a geological age.

What does the beginning of the end of Winter sound like? It’s the soft splash of rain over Arctic Ocean sea ice during what should be its coldest season.

http://robertscribbler.com/2015/12/29/warm-storm-brings-rain-over-arctic-sea-ice-in-winter/

What will Russia do when they can no longer depend on General Winter to kick hordes of invading armies out, like they've had for so long, at least since Napoleon's time.

Of course, Eurasia is not the only place affected by all this weird weather caused by El Nino and a meandering Jet Stream. The Christmas Weekend Storm of the Four Seasons over the US midsection is sending an immense amount of floodwater down Midwestern watercourses into the Mississppi River, flooding lots of floodplains as it goes.

When the water reaches New Orleans about the time of the Martin Luther King holiday. On its way there, it will pass the Old River Control Structure, which keeps the Mississippi from escaping down the Atchafalaya and which almost failed in the 1973 spring flood, and put it to the second worst flood level ever. And although they do not yet anticipate it, the Army Corps of Engineers might open up the Bonnet Carre Spillway and the Morganza Spillway to relieve pressure on this structure and the floodwalls and embankment levees in front of New Orleans.

And this is just two of the many, many meterological phenomena (weather events) which attest to climate change, like the changing intensity of rainfall over England, whose North is badly flooded now: that global warming is happening just as the climate scientists in the past predicted it would.