One thing I don’t like about living in the southeast U.S. is the humidity. So, when the first really dry air arrives, it makes me happy. Just in time for the start of Fall. 🙂

Here’s an animation of the NAM-WRF 4 km model forecast of 2 meter (basically, surface) dewpoint temperature from this morning I put together from imagery produced by Weatherbell.com, showing the dramatic drop in humidity as the Canadian air invades most of the East and Southeast:

The time step is hourly through the 36 hour forecast (Monday evening) then 3 hourly through 60 hours (Tuesday evening).

Maybe I’ll call it Can Air (2014).

The massive King Fire 60 miles east of Sacramento, CA was deliberately set on Sept. 14, and still remains mostly uncontained due to the drought and shifting winds.

It has burned over 120 square miles of forest, including some homes, and has required the use of a record amount of fire retardant dropped from aircraft.

The MODIS instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites captured the following three images as the fire progressed, with winds eventually blowing smoke over much of Northern California, including the San Francisco Bay area:

While as many as 100,000 people gather in New York City tomorrow to march for the use of more unreliable and expensive energy, over 300,000,000 people will be staying home.

The marchers will be relying on fossil fuels for transportation to get to the event, and relying on mostly fossil-fueled electricity to power their cell phones. They will be enjoying food and drinks which similarly relied on fossil fuels for growing, processing, and transportation. Their clothing relied on fossil fuels.

Their health care and entire standard of living that allows them the luxury of attending the march required abundant and affordable fossil fuels.

Most of these marchers have romantic, emotional, uninformed attitudes about energy. I get letters and emails from them sometimes, advocating nonsensical solutions to the global warming problem, like increased reliance on “anti-gravity”.

After I appeared on a TV talk show with Daryl Hannah a few years ago she told me, “We just need to switch to solar and wind power now”. Such misinformed and naive attitudes are pervasive in the Green movement.

I suspect engineers and others who actually make the country run will not be well represented at the march tomorrow. My father used to say, “those who can, do…those who can’t, teach”. The marchers are trying to teach us how we should live our lives, when they have no clue what life would be like if they got their way.

Someday we will have a realistic, affordable, abundant energy alternative to fossil fuels. But that day is not here yet. And its arrival cannot be legislated or negotiated with a treaty.

It will arrive not through the efforts of politicians and actors, but through the hard work and technical knowledge of geeks (probably employed by a fossil fuel company) seeking to meet the energy demands of every human on Earth. A demand which will never go away, because energy is required for everything we do.

As Germany and other countries rapidly backtrack on their commitment to the use of renewable energy, finding just how expensive and economically damaging it is, we Americans are allowing ourselves to be railroaded into a similar, bleak future.

And maybe that’s the real goal of the People’s Climate March.

Several people have noted the apparent mis-match between the NCDC report of all-time record warmth of global average sea surface temperatures in August, and the satellite tropospheric temperatures which are nowhere near a record.

But, as I have cautioned, there tends to be a time lag between SST warming and atmospheric warming…typically 1 month during non-ENSO conditions, and 2-3 months during ENSO. Furthermore, tropospheric temperature variations are somewhat larger than the SST variations that drive them, making direct comparison of the numbers more difficult.

You can get around both of these problems by plotting one versus the other on a graph to see if the latest behavior departs from the normal relationship previously displayed by the two variables (ocean surface temperature and oceanic lower tropospheric temperature).

If you also “connect the dots”, you get what’s called a phase space diagram. If we make such a plot for the 1997-98 super-El Nino, the 2009-10 El Nino, and the current (still weak) El Nino, it looks like this:

The time lag of tropospheric temperature behind ocean surface temperature causes a curved trajectory in the data, as I’ve indicated with the light gray line.

What is interesting is that the “record warm” SST month of August, 2014 seems to be an outlier, with the SSTs being too warm (or the tropospheric temperatures too cool) compared to the usual behavior.

Barring some mistake in data processing, the only explanation I have for this is the possibility I blogged about yesterday, that near-record low ocean winds are allowing excessive surface warming while transferring less energy through convection to warm the troposphere. As I also mentioned yesterday, such an excursion would be due to natural variability…not due to “extra” carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which basically remains unchanged from one month to the next.

The fortuitous revelation of record warm sea surface temperatures in August, only days before Climate Summit 2014, begs the question — why?

Why were SSTs so warm? (Not “Why announce it just before Leonardo DiCaprio’s coronation?”)

As readers here know, I follow the “ocean products” produced by RSS from the SSM/I and SSMIS satellite sensors, and a curious thing has been shaping up in the last few years.

Global average ocean surface wind speeds have been decreasing. In fact, August 2014 had the lowest surface wind speed in about 25 years.

Even after I correct for the typically lower wind speeds that occur with El Nino approaching (-0.5 m/s wind decrease per unit Multivariate ENSO Index value), it’s still at near a record-low since the satellite record began:

For those wondering what these wind fields look like, here are the average gridpoint wind speeds for August (1 m/sec is about 2 knots), both as absolute values and as anomalies (departures from the mean):

Why is Wind Speed Important to SST?

Wind-driven evaporation is the largest source of heat loss from water bodies, including the global oceans. Assuming a global average rate of ocean surface heat loss of 90 W/m2 (which is mostly evaporative), the August value of about 4-5% below the long-term average would mean about 4 W/m2 less cooling of the ocean surface.

Importantly, this 4 W/m2 reduction in heat loss is LARGER than the supposed anthropogenic radiative forcing of about 2.3 W/m2, the IPCC’s RCP6 current radiative forcing value. (The true radiative imbalance is actually less than that because warming has offset some of it with increase IR emission to space). The net result that the wind speed effect is probably at least 4 times the anthropogenic effect.

So, what’s my point? Natural variations in all kinds of things are going on, including a reduction in wind-driven evaporation, which likely contributed to “record warm” SSTs in August.

I have no strong opinions of why the reduction in wind speeds is occurring. Usually the best guess in climate is that it’s part of some cycle that will reverse itself at some point. Only time will tell.

Next Tuesday’s UN climate conference in NYC (called Climate Summit 2014) is for politicians, celebrities, and rent seekers. It’s not about climate science, nor Saving the Earth from “carbon emissions” of fossil fuels.

Here are ten ways to tell the United Nations really isn’t interested in climate per se. Some of us suspected over 20 years ago this would happen, back when the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was being formed to help combat “global warming”.

1. There is no way with current technology to get beyond 15%-20% renewable energy in the next 20 years or so….and even that will be exceedingly expensive. No matter how much you care about where your energy originates, physics and economics trump emotions.

2. The UN doesn’t care that global warming stopped 17 years ago. It doesn’t matter. Full steam ahead.

3. The UN’s own climate models have grossly over-forecast warming. Doesn’t matter. Full steam ahead.

4. Scientists and politicians have had to resort to blaming severe weather events on climate change. Like, we never had severe weather before? Really? (Oh, BTW, severe weather hasn’t gotten worse.)

5. The UN Climate Summit participants’ “carbon footprints” far exceed those of normal people…and they don’t care. Flying jets all over the world, traveling and dining in style, and telling a billion poor they can’t have inexpensive electricity? That’s the moral high ground?

6. Leonardo DiCaprio, UN’s Messenger of Peace. Al Gore, Nobel Peace Prize and crony capitalist. ‘Nuff said.

7. The leaders of Australia, China, India, Canada, and Germany are opting out of Tuesday’s meeting. They have real problems to attend to, not manufactured ones.

8. A UN official admitted the climate goal was wealth redistribution. Naomi Klein has admitted what Obama, Kerry, and Clinton won’t admit: it’s about stopping Capitalism. Unless you are a crony capitalist friend getting green energy subsidies.

9. What they can’t admit is that global greening and increasing global crop productivity is the result of us putting some of that CO2 back where it was in the first place – in the atmosphere. I’m still predicting some day we will realize more CO2 is a good thing.

10. The UN’s climate reports exaggerate and misrepresent the science. For example, the warming of the deep oceans over the last 50 years is described in terms of gazillions of joules (which sounds impressive) rather than what was actually measured…hundredths of a degree (not so impressive). The resulting average planetary energy imbalance, if it really exists, is only 1 part in 1,000.

As I’ve said before, I really don’t care where our energy comes from, as long as it is abundant and inexpensive. But telling the poor they can only have concierge energy – if they can pony up enough money — will end up killing people. Lots of people.

And that’s what the U.N. should be concerned about…not having meetings in Bali and Cancun.

I’d like to take you through a little thought experiment.

We all know that global warming has been on hiatus – set on pause – however you like to characterize the lack of significant warming, for over 15 years. Depending on how you do the statistics, the vast majority of the climate models used to guide our energy policy have over-predicted the surface warming trend since the satellite record began way back in 1979.

Oh, and those aren’t just failed forecasts…they are failed hindcasts. Even knowing the answer, the climate modelers can’t explain why the Earth hasn’t warmed as fast as it was supposed to.

The most cited potential reason for this unexpected inconvenience is that the oceans have been taking up the extra heat and replacing it with cooler water from the ocean depths. In that scenario, the natural ocean surface-cooling mechanism now in progress (if it exists) will eventually go back to normal, and surface warming will return with a vengeance. Just you wait and see.

But what if this supposed natural ocean fluctuation, which is supposedly cooling the surface, was reversed?

What if warming was set on fast forward, rather than pause? What if surface warming was progressing faster than 95% of the climate models had predicted, rather than slower than 95% of the models? How would the global warming establishment be playing it?

After watching the IPCC crowd for the last 25+ years, I feel pretty confident they would be falling all over themselves declaring “it’s worse than we thought!” They would be adjusting the sensitivity of their models to produce even more warming.

Yet, they would never substantially reduce the climate sensitivity of their models to produce less warming, as seen in nature. In other words, if warming hasn’t materialized, then we must have faith that it will eventually appear – because the climate system must be really sensitive…

So that the climate researchers’ lives have meaning.

But…if there happens to be *faster* warming than expected, well, the experts would be all too willing to adjust their models to have even greater climate sensitivity.

This is a reflection of the fact that the global warming establishment is biased toward high climate sensitivity. It is a specific example of the tendency of natural scientists to view nature as fragile, full of tipping points and hobgoblins.

That they fancy themselves as objective is embarrassing to me. No, I don’t consider myself completely objective either. But at least I can entertain alternative possibilities regarding the sensitivity of the climate system. If a scientist entertains anything that smacks of “skepticism”, however, they are not allowed to play in the IPCC sandbox.

Both of these scenarios: (1) the lack of significant warming, or (2) rapid warming, could happen with a climate system that warms exactly the same amount in the next 100 years (that is, has the same climate sensitivity). The difference is the timing of natural warming and cooling events, which can last two or three decades.

But it is unsettling how our feelings about climate change (and the political rhetoric and policy changes) can waver based upon what happens over only a year or two. Yet, the rate of both surface and deep ocean warming since the 1950s, after accounting for natural El Nino and La Nina fluctuations, suggests no cause for alarm.

If faster warming does resume in the coming months and years, it’s important to stay focused on the amount of warming…over the long term. Thinking and talking in qualitative terms, like record warm years, can be used to fool and manipulate people’s emotions on the subject.

Even a new “record warmest year”, year after year, is not that significant if the total warming ends up being only 1 deg. C more over the next 100 years.

And until the models can explain what happened in the past they should not be trusted for guiding policy into the future.

The best photos from last night’s K=7 auroral displays are coming in from Scandinavia. Check these out, from Finland, Sweden, Norway…and North America…see more at Space Weather Gallery:

By Peter Rosen, near Stockholm, Sweden:

Katja Moisio, Finland:

Peter Rosen, northern Sweden:

Erling Sverre Nordoy, Tromso, Norway:

Bernt Olsen, Tromso, Norway:

Paul Cyr, Fort Fairfield, Maine:

David McCashion, New Brunswick, Canada:

As predicted, the first of two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the sun produced some good aurora displays last night, as far south as Arizona:

This was taken about the time the NOAA-15 satellite observed a peak activity level of “10” over the Northern Hemisphere.

Here’s a nice photo from Minnesota:

And, where the aurora always seems to be burning up the sky…Fairbanks, Alaska:

From Finland:

And another one from Minnesota (uff da!):

Finally, here’s the source of the CME, sunspot 2158, as photographed by Sergio Castillo a day after it unleashed the “storm”:

Photos courtesy of Spaceweather.com Realtime Image Gallery.

Hopefully, with the second CME event storm arriving today, there could be another good display tonight.

The first of a pair of solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from sunspot AR2158 is supposed to reach Earth tonight, providing auroral displays (northern lights) unusually far south.

According to the most recent advisory from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center,

“…conditions such as these could lead to auroras observed from the middle or southern states.”

Of course, any auroral displays visible in the southern U.S. are exceedingly rare. The last event that far south was October 24, 2011, with aurora visible as far south as Oklahoma and Alabama.

The second of the CMEs is traveling faster than the first, and is supposed to reach Earth about a day later. The probability of more events remains relatively high. According to SpaceWeather.com,

“More radio bursts may be in the offing. Sunspots AR2157 and AR2158 have unstable magnetic fields that harbor energy for strong explosions. NOAA forecasters estimate a 40% chance of X-class flares and a whopping 85% chance of M-flares on Sept. 11th.”

Here’s the latest solar wind model forecast for midnight tonight, showing the passage of the first plasma event from the first CME, and then second one following it:

The model animation is pretty cool, and provides a good conceptual view of how these plasma events exit the Sun and travel toward the Earth.

For those interested in viewing tonight, try NOAA’s Ovation aurora monitoring tool, which is based upon the latest polar orbiting satellite measurements. If that page is not up to date with the latest satellite data, this one usually is.