Novarupta-Katmai eruption (13-15km3) was bigger than Pinatubo (10km3), but higher latitude (Kodiak Island), while Santa Maria in Guatemala was about the same size eruption and latitude as Pinatubo.
Interesting, I've studied glacier response in Greenland, were the 1930's warming is particularly well expressed (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL085954). From the literature, I had gathered the warming was mostly attributed to AMO. Wish I'd known this during my PhD!
In particular he made estimates of global temperature by consulting almanacs and searched for biases by constructing marine datasets and city datasets (IIRC). His estimate of global warming (Edit: not global worming!) compares tolerably well modern estimates:
Guy is awesome! Its just not that relevant for this piece since I'm looking at our most comprehensive modern estimates (and we live in an era with a lot more digitized records than he ever had access to).
Thanks, Zeke. Next I'd like to see an explanation of the relative stability of global temperatures between 1937 and 1976, or the actual decrease in temperatures between 1941 and 1964. I think the generally accepted story is the increase in sulfate aerosols over that time frame, but I'd like to see a more systematic analysis.
1. "maybe the modern warming isn’t fully human-driven after all"
2. "around half of the warming comes from greenhouse gases, with sizable contributions from natural forcings and (likely) internal variability, and is partially offset by human emissions of aerosols"
So, it's not a maybe. You a confirming that at least that early 20th century warming was partly natural. There is nothing skeptical about this statement, in my opinion. So, we have 0.16+0.06-0.14=0.08 degrees of warming from all human impacts, i.e. CO2, CH4 and aerosols. Which is less than 0.12 C from natural forcings.
Did I get that right? I'm asking b/c I didn't follow where "about half is attributable to human forcings and half to natural forcings" came from. Looks like 40/60 to me.
Nice analysis, Zeke. The early 20th century is more pronounced if you factor in less accumulated reflective aerosols and greater carbon sinks back then.
It seems likely the mechanized arms races both wars fostered, resulted in rapidly growing particulate emissions as the combatants frantically scaled up their industrial output.
Oh! Turn everything into a non-stop factory. Plunder and raze Earth for more arms. Plunder and raze the enemy. We love the smell of napalm as wars rage.
I would think they put a tiny tick upwards in Earth's temp and a longer lasting one in ruined carbon sinks.
I understand why you chose 1900-1945 ".. to give the early-century warming its strongest case"), but what jumps out to me is that modeled temperature rise seems significantly lower than observed temperature rise in the 1920-1945 period when there no major eruptions. So I wonder if looking the longer period with volcanic eruptions is giving a somewhat false sense of extent to which this early 20th century warming can be explained - because model is "helped" by the large volcanic eruptions. I understand multidecadal natural variability can matter a lot and uncertainty in obs, but I still wonder....
Wrote a fictional reply to this. A bill arriving where nobody planned for it — I put it on a kitchen table in Lake Charles, Louisiana. A widow, a non-renewal notice, and a column of premium numbers her late husband started keeping in 1994. The column is a time-series. It only goes one way. Fair warning: it's an American mailbox, politics included, because that's what was in it. The system doesn't stop at the weather.
In a post on X on Thursday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright wrote that Dr. Wielicki “is an honest scientist who follows the data wherever it leads.” - NYT.
It would be nice if climate scientists started portraying adaptation solutions in the mix of their onslaught of graphs, i-told-you-sos, and claim to care.
Earth is 🔥. We know that. Please use your intelligence and inside climate data knowledge to help with solutions to stop the burn right now.
Jeff, you're smart and creative, but once again I must respectfully disagree. We all do as we must, even when the only choices are 'bad' and 'worse'.
Call me Mr. Adjectives and Adverbs. Speaking as someone with two M.S. degrees, half a PhD, and 30 years hewing wood and drawing water in federally-funded earth-science laboratories, AFAICT the physical climate science community in which Drs. Dessler and Hausfather are peers is dedicated to basic, rather than applied, science: constrained by training and peer discipline to explaining what's happening geophysically, and what may happen next depending on a rapidly expanding, multi-dimensional cone of possible future scenarios. Professional 'natural' (i.e. physical) scientists *must* be cautious about public advocacy, and especially careful not to stand on their scientific reputations when they're not under peer review. They *must not* be seen as politically biased. No less than the epistemological authority of science itself is at stake!
Applied scientists, e.g. engineers, take what basic science offers them, rather than doing their own. They are freer, and even obligated, to propose various engineering solutions, which Zeke has written about from his professional standpoint (https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-geoengineering-question). His review is pretty cautious, though!
Behavioral scientists OTOH, including economists and "political scientists" (only superficially oxymoronic), study and even make proposals to cap the trend of GMST *collectively*. Their consensus is that mitigating anthropogenic climate change is a *collective action* problem, not a scientific or engineering one. While warning the public about their intersubjectively-verifiable findings is crucial, I really hope US members of the basic climate science community don't start campaigning for Democratic politicians: it would be disastrously counter-productive!
Sorry, but I think "in the mix of their onslaught of graphs, i-told-you-sos, and claim to care" is unfair to Zeke and his exhaustively trained, mutually disciplined, professionally reticent peers!
I agree Mal. I wanted to delete the comment 5 mins after posting but on this android mobile app I can't.
Mea Culpa. I like Zeke and all the climate scientists. Each has a unique way. I posted in frustration over these relentless heatwaves and wanted water to douse the fires out with
The climate scientists are doing great. The system at large sucks because I do get climate amxiety, ecobanxiety, and climate stress.
And, like sn idiot I take it on those who want to help.
Thank you Mal.. lol am a "missing page", too. Just kidding. Have you ever immediately wanted to retract a post and realized you couldn't and prayed no one would read it? Guilty here. I gotta go w/o emotion when I post because emotion can also work against you ( am avid about emotion in reporting)
So, definitely are you Mal. Birds of a feather must stick together. TY for the rara avis compliment..must admit I had to loom it up but my Latin etymology recollection gave me a hint.
"Now do the same analysis using temperatures that weren't tampered with (adjusted and homogenized)."
Wow. You've resurrected a classic undead denialist meme, long since iteratively slain by actual climate scientists. It's harder to kill than Rasputin! You must have missed the Berkeley Earth project, launched by genuinely skeptical physicist Richard Muller in 2012, to produce a thoroughly quality-assured, accurate, global land and ocean temperature database. Our host participated, thereby establishing his own sterling scientific reputation!
Muller expected to find that GMST had not risen as fast as the consensus of working climate specialists claimed. Anthony Watts, pseudoskeptical MC of the Watts Up With That (WUWT) blog who thought the temperature record was tampered with, enthusiastically supported Muller's project, promising to accept the results no matter what they showed. When they showed the peer consensus was accurate, Muller changed his mind, saying he was no longer a climate-science 'skeptic'. Watts, OTOH, said the project was flawed because "it examined data over 60 years instead of the 30-year window that was the basis for his research and some other peer-reviewed studies" (NYTimes). Yet Watt's own 2011 paper concluded there was no warming bias in the consensus temperature record! Despite Watts's public backpedaling, the Berkeley Earth temperature record is now considered canonical by the international climate-science community.
LOL! After writing my previous comment, I asked Grok, Elon Musk's purportedly unwoke LLM, to "analyze the 'global temperature record has been tampered with to show warming' meme" (https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_48c9d77f-4561-4e2e-b7fe-d3229d74e653). Grok thoroughly fisked the claim, beginning with:
"This is a long-running conspiracy narrative, often pushed by figures like Tony Heller (aka Steve Goddard), who highlight cherry-picked station adjustments or before/after graphs. It gained traction via 'Climategate' (2009 hacked emails) and selective claims about data 'tampering'..."
Continuing:
"Why Adjustments Exist (They Are Not 'Tampering')..."
And concluding:
"Bottom line: The 'tampered to show warming' meme overstates and misrepresents routine corrections. Global warming is real, driven primarily by human greenhouse gases, confirmed by raw data, multiple datasets, and non-temperature indicators. Adjustments improve accuracy rather than invent the trend. Skepticism of specific claims or policy responses is reasonable; blanket dismissal of the data isn't supported. Always check primary sources and full context for station histories."
Regarding average monthly and yearly temperatures, the average can easily be specified more precisely than the individual measurements contributing to it.
Damn, I have always wondered about that!
Novarupta-Katmai eruption (13-15km3) was bigger than Pinatubo (10km3), but higher latitude (Kodiak Island), while Santa Maria in Guatemala was about the same size eruption and latitude as Pinatubo.
Interesting, I've studied glacier response in Greenland, were the 1930's warming is particularly well expressed (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL085954). From the literature, I had gathered the warming was mostly attributed to AMO. Wish I'd known this during my PhD!
Zeke, Good Evening, Thank you for your analysis of this interesting period.
I had expected to see some mention of the work of Guy Callendar whose 1937 paper I made a précis of here.
https://protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com/2021/02/21/guy-callendar-precis-of-his-foundational-paper-on-global-warming/
In particular he made estimates of global temperature by consulting almanacs and searched for biases by constructing marine datasets and city datasets (IIRC). His estimate of global warming (Edit: not global worming!) compares tolerably well modern estimates:
https://protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/image_2021-02-21_184518.png
Any thoughts?
Best wishes
Michael
Guy is awesome! Its just not that relevant for this piece since I'm looking at our most comprehensive modern estimates (and we live in an era with a lot more digitized records than he ever had access to).
"His estimate of global worming"
I'm not sure I want you to fix that typo. 😁
Thanks, Zeke. Next I'd like to see an explanation of the relative stability of global temperatures between 1937 and 1976, or the actual decrease in temperatures between 1941 and 1964. I think the generally accepted story is the increase in sulfate aerosols over that time frame, but I'd like to see a more systematic analysis.
Putting 2 and 2 together. Or rather 1 and 2:
1. "maybe the modern warming isn’t fully human-driven after all"
2. "around half of the warming comes from greenhouse gases, with sizable contributions from natural forcings and (likely) internal variability, and is partially offset by human emissions of aerosols"
So, it's not a maybe. You a confirming that at least that early 20th century warming was partly natural. There is nothing skeptical about this statement, in my opinion. So, we have 0.16+0.06-0.14=0.08 degrees of warming from all human impacts, i.e. CO2, CH4 and aerosols. Which is less than 0.12 C from natural forcings.
Did I get that right? I'm asking b/c I didn't follow where "about half is attributable to human forcings and half to natural forcings" came from. Looks like 40/60 to me.
Nice analysis, Zeke. The early 20th century is more pronounced if you factor in less accumulated reflective aerosols and greater carbon sinks back then.
Maybe the 2 world wars 🤔 created an uptick in warming back then.
It seems likely the mechanized arms races both wars fostered, resulted in rapidly growing particulate emissions as the combatants frantically scaled up their industrial output.
Oh! Turn everything into a non-stop factory. Plunder and raze Earth for more arms. Plunder and raze the enemy. We love the smell of napalm as wars rage.
I would think they put a tiny tick upwards in Earth's temp and a longer lasting one in ruined carbon sinks.
Yep. War is at least as old as the free market, probably older than our species.
Does loss of sequestration from cutting down forests come into the calculation? Is it a human activity forcing?
I understand why you chose 1900-1945 ".. to give the early-century warming its strongest case"), but what jumps out to me is that modeled temperature rise seems significantly lower than observed temperature rise in the 1920-1945 period when there no major eruptions. So I wonder if looking the longer period with volcanic eruptions is giving a somewhat false sense of extent to which this early 20th century warming can be explained - because model is "helped" by the large volcanic eruptions. I understand multidecadal natural variability can matter a lot and uncertainty in obs, but I still wonder....
Wrote a fictional reply to this. A bill arriving where nobody planned for it — I put it on a kitchen table in Lake Charles, Louisiana. A widow, a non-renewal notice, and a column of premium numbers her late husband started keeping in 1994. The column is a time-series. It only goes one way. Fair warning: it's an American mailbox, politics included, because that's what was in it. The system doesn't stop at the weather.
https://rossboulton1.substack.com/p/we-arent-stupid-the-premium?r=2leuaj&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Our problems are solved!
In a post on X on Thursday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright wrote that Dr. Wielicki “is an honest scientist who follows the data wherever it leads.” - NYT.
It would be nice if climate scientists started portraying adaptation solutions in the mix of their onslaught of graphs, i-told-you-sos, and claim to care.
Earth is 🔥. We know that. Please use your intelligence and inside climate data knowledge to help with solutions to stop the burn right now.
Jeff, you're smart and creative, but once again I must respectfully disagree. We all do as we must, even when the only choices are 'bad' and 'worse'.
Call me Mr. Adjectives and Adverbs. Speaking as someone with two M.S. degrees, half a PhD, and 30 years hewing wood and drawing water in federally-funded earth-science laboratories, AFAICT the physical climate science community in which Drs. Dessler and Hausfather are peers is dedicated to basic, rather than applied, science: constrained by training and peer discipline to explaining what's happening geophysically, and what may happen next depending on a rapidly expanding, multi-dimensional cone of possible future scenarios. Professional 'natural' (i.e. physical) scientists *must* be cautious about public advocacy, and especially careful not to stand on their scientific reputations when they're not under peer review. They *must not* be seen as politically biased. No less than the epistemological authority of science itself is at stake!
Applied scientists, e.g. engineers, take what basic science offers them, rather than doing their own. They are freer, and even obligated, to propose various engineering solutions, which Zeke has written about from his professional standpoint (https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-geoengineering-question). His review is pretty cautious, though!
Behavioral scientists OTOH, including economists and "political scientists" (only superficially oxymoronic), study and even make proposals to cap the trend of GMST *collectively*. Their consensus is that mitigating anthropogenic climate change is a *collective action* problem, not a scientific or engineering one. While warning the public about their intersubjectively-verifiable findings is crucial, I really hope US members of the basic climate science community don't start campaigning for Democratic politicians: it would be disastrously counter-productive!
Sorry, but I think "in the mix of their onslaught of graphs, i-told-you-sos, and claim to care" is unfair to Zeke and his exhaustively trained, mutually disciplined, professionally reticent peers!
I agree Mal. I wanted to delete the comment 5 mins after posting but on this android mobile app I can't.
Mea Culpa. I like Zeke and all the climate scientists. Each has a unique way. I posted in frustration over these relentless heatwaves and wanted water to douse the fires out with
The climate scientists are doing great. The system at large sucks because I do get climate amxiety, ecobanxiety, and climate stress.
And, like sn idiot I take it on those who want to help.
I apologize to all climate scientists.
Nicely done, Jeff. You're a *rara avis* in the online climate-change interested community (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-norfolk-59176497)!
[Late edit: better link. MA]
Thank you Mal.. lol am a "missing page", too. Just kidding. Have you ever immediately wanted to retract a post and realized you couldn't and prayed no one would read it? Guilty here. I gotta go w/o emotion when I post because emotion can also work against you ( am avid about emotion in reporting)
That's why I do my Substack diving with Chrome on my desktop computer. Comments on posts in blog format are deletable by the commenter.
So, definitely are you Mal. Birds of a feather must stick together. TY for the rara avis compliment..must admit I had to loom it up but my Latin etymology recollection gave me a hint.
"Now do the same analysis using temperatures that weren't tampered with (adjusted and homogenized)."
Wow. You've resurrected a classic undead denialist meme, long since iteratively slain by actual climate scientists. It's harder to kill than Rasputin! You must have missed the Berkeley Earth project, launched by genuinely skeptical physicist Richard Muller in 2012, to produce a thoroughly quality-assured, accurate, global land and ocean temperature database. Our host participated, thereby establishing his own sterling scientific reputation!
Muller expected to find that GMST had not risen as fast as the consensus of working climate specialists claimed. Anthony Watts, pseudoskeptical MC of the Watts Up With That (WUWT) blog who thought the temperature record was tampered with, enthusiastically supported Muller's project, promising to accept the results no matter what they showed. When they showed the peer consensus was accurate, Muller changed his mind, saying he was no longer a climate-science 'skeptic'. Watts, OTOH, said the project was flawed because "it examined data over 60 years instead of the 30-year window that was the basis for his research and some other peer-reviewed studies" (NYTimes). Yet Watt's own 2011 paper concluded there was no warming bias in the consensus temperature record! Despite Watts's public backpedaling, the Berkeley Earth temperature record is now considered canonical by the international climate-science community.
LOL! After writing my previous comment, I asked Grok, Elon Musk's purportedly unwoke LLM, to "analyze the 'global temperature record has been tampered with to show warming' meme" (https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_48c9d77f-4561-4e2e-b7fe-d3229d74e653). Grok thoroughly fisked the claim, beginning with:
"This is a long-running conspiracy narrative, often pushed by figures like Tony Heller (aka Steve Goddard), who highlight cherry-picked station adjustments or before/after graphs. It gained traction via 'Climategate' (2009 hacked emails) and selective claims about data 'tampering'..."
Continuing:
"Why Adjustments Exist (They Are Not 'Tampering')..."
And concluding:
"Bottom line: The 'tampered to show warming' meme overstates and misrepresents routine corrections. Global warming is real, driven primarily by human greenhouse gases, confirmed by raw data, multiple datasets, and non-temperature indicators. Adjustments improve accuracy rather than invent the trend. Skepticism of specific claims or policy responses is reasonable; blanket dismissal of the data isn't supported. Always check primary sources and full context for station histories."
Good luck accusing Grok of 'warmism'!
Ah, sweetie, can't you make an ·honest· living?
Smokey, Good Evening,
You can see an estimate made in 1937 in précis of the work of Guy Callendar here.
https://protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/image_2021-02-21_184518.png
The agreement is pretty good.
Regarding average monthly and yearly temperatures, the average can easily be specified more precisely than the individual measurements contributing to it.
Best wishes.
Michael
Ah, the Sea Lion has arrived. https://wondermark.com/c/1062/