Let’s call it: 30 years of above average temperatures means the climate has changed

If you’re younger than 30, you’ve never experienced a month in which the average surface temperature of the Earth was below average.

Each month, the US National Climatic Data Center calculates Earth’s average surface temperature using temperature measurements that cover the Earth’s surface. Then, another average is calculated for each month of the year for the twentieth century, 1901-2000. For each month, this gives one number representative of the entire century. Subtract this overall 1900s monthly average – which for February is 53.9F (12.1C) – from each individual month’s temperature and you’ve got the anomaly: that is, the difference from the average.

The last month that was at or below that 1900s average was February 1985. Ronald Reagan had just started his second presidential term and Foreigner had the number one single with “I want to know what love is.”

These temperature observations make it clear the new normal will be systematically rising temperatures, not the stability of the last 100 years. The traditional definition of climate is the 30-year average of weather. The fact that – once the official records are in for February 2015 – it will have been 30 years since a month was below average is an important measure that the climate has changed.

Temperature history for all Februaries from 1880-2014  NCDC

How the Earth warms

As you can see in the graphic above, ocean temperature doesn’t vary as much as land temperature. This fact is intuitive to many people because they understand that coastal regions don’t experience as extreme highs and lows as the interiors of continents. Since oceans cover the majority of the Earth’s surface, the combined land and ocean graph strongly resembles the graph just for the ocean. Looking at only the ocean plots, you have to go all the way back to February 1976 to find a month below average. (That would be under President Gerald Ford’s watch.)

You can interpret variability over land as the driver of the ups and downs seen in the global graph. There are four years from 1976 onwards when the land was below average; the last time the land temperature was cool enough for the globe to be at or below average was February 1985. The flirtation with below-average temps was tiny – primarily worth noting in the spirit of accurate record keeping. Looking at any of these graphs, it’s obvious that earlier times were cooler and more recent times are warmer. None of the fluctuations over land since 1976 provide evidence contrary to the observation that the Earth is warming.

Some of the most convincing evidence that the Earth is warming is actually found in measures of the heat stored in the oceans and the melting of ice. However, we often focus on the surface air temperature. One reason for that is that we feel the surface air temperature; therefore, we have intuition about the importance of hot and cold surface temperatures. Another reason is historical; we have often thought of climate as the average of weather. We’ve been taking temperature observations for weather for a long time; it is a robust and essential observation.

Temperature history for every year from 1880-2014.  NOAA National Climatic Data Center

Despite variability, a stable signal

Choosing one month, February in this instance, perhaps overemphasizes that time in 1985 when we had a below average month. We can get a single yearly average for all the months in an entire year, January-December. If we look at these annual averages, then the ups and downs are reduced. In this case, 1976 emerges as the last year in which the global-average temperature was below the 20th century average of 57.0F (13.9C) – that’s 38 years ago, the year that Nadia Comaneci scored her seven perfect 10s at the Montreal Olympics.

I am not a fan of tracking month-by-month or even year-by-year averages and arguing over the statistical minutia of possible records. We live at a time when the Earth is definitively warming. And we know why: predominately, the increase of greenhouse gas warming due to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Under current conditions, we should expect the planet to be warming. What would be more important news would be if we had a year, even a month, that was below average.

The variability we observe in surface temperature comes primarily from understood patterns of weather. Many have heard of El Niño, when the eastern Pacific Ocean is warmer than average. The eastern Pacific is so large that when it is warmer than average, the entire planet is likely to be warmer than average. As we look at averages, 30 years, 10 years, or even one year, these patterns, some years warmer, some cooler, become less prominent. The trend of warming is large enough to mask the variability. The fact that there have been 30 years with no month below the 20th century average is a definitive statement that climate has changed.

To see a cooler Earth any time soon, you’ll need to carve one out of ice.  Kirsten Spry, CC BY-NC-SA

The 30-year horizon

There are other reasons that this 30-year span of time is important. Thirty years is a length of time in which people plan. This includes personal choices – where to live, what job to take, how to plan for retirement. There are institutional choices – building bridges, building factories and power plants, urban flood management. There are resource management questions – assuring water supply for people, ecosystems, energy production and agriculture. There are many questions concerning how to build the fortifications and plan the migrations that sea-level rise will demand. Thirty years is long enough to be convincing that the climate is changing, and short enough that we can conceive, both individually and collectively, what the future might hold.

Finally, 30 years is long enough to educate us. We have 30 years during which we can see what challenges a changing climate brings us. Thirty years that are informing us about the next 30 years, which will be warmer still. This is a temperature record that makes it clear that the new normal will be systematically rising temperatures, not the ups and downs of the last 100 years.

Those who are under 30 years old have not experienced the climate I grew up with. In thirty more years, those born today will also be living in a climate that, by fundamental measures, will be different than the climate of their birth. Future success will rely on understanding that the climate in which we are all now living is changing and will continue to change with accumulating consequences.

Story: TheConversation

We’ve totally underestimated how much plastic we are dumping into the oceans

For more than 40 years after the first reports of plastic pollution in the oceans, scientists struggled to put a precise value on the amount of plastic waste entering the marine system.

Initial estimates only accounted for plastic from ships dumping has since been banned—but land impacts weren't factored in until now.

A study of mismanaged plastic waste generated from the world's coastlines estimated that between 4.8 to 12.7 million metric tons enter the oceans annually, or roughly five trash bags full of plastic for every foot of coastline in the world.

When broken down by country, more than half of the top 20 countries in regard to mismanaged plastic waste are in Asia, with China responsible for more than a quarter of the plastic entering the ocean with 2.4 million metric tons. Even worse, at most 2 percent of the ocean's plastic is at the surface, often in large masses of garbage at the center of oceanic gyres such as the Great Pacific garbage patch.

The United States is 20th on the list, and even though it has the largest rate of daily waste production per capita, only 2% of it is mismanaged, or about 750,000 metric tons. In comparison, more than 2.8 million metric tons of plastic are recycled every year; however, this is only nine percent of all plastic waste produced in the country.

While ramping up cleanup projects to remove the current plastic waste would help reduce the environmental impact, the study points to stopping mismanaged plastic waste at its source as a more viable solution. Even just reducing waste generation to 2010 levels would reduce the amount of plastic in the oceans projected for 2025. If not, we're likely to see double the garbage by then.

Credits: BusinessInsider

If we came across alien life, would we even know it was alive?

Scientists have found life on Earth in extreme environments like this Yellowstone hot spring, but alien life might be more elusive.

If we came across alien life, would we even know it was alive? That was a central question posed at a session here yesterday at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes Science). All known life on Earth fits a particular mold, but life from other planets might break free from that mold, making it difficult for us to identify. We could even be oblivious to unfamiliar forms of life right under our noses.

All life as we know it follows a standard protocol, known as the “central dogma,” using DNA and RNA to store genetic information, and translating that into proteins. And all living things rely on the same handful of chemical elements. So, when searching for life in remote or extreme environments scientists typically look for signs of the kind of life we’re familiar with. But, “if we have other organisms out there that do things just slightly differently, we might miss the boat,” geobiologist Victoria Orphan of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena told attendees.

Biologists have proposed the existence of a “shadow biosphere” an undiscovered group of living things with biochemistry different from what we’re used to. Most of life’s diversity on our planet is too small to see, making microbes the most likely place to look for these new types of life. Already, new discoveries are shaking our beliefs about what life is. Recently discovered giant, amoeba-infecting viruses blur the line between life and nonlife although they rely on their hosts for essential biological functions, the bacteria-sized viruses have complex genomes. Such unexpected discoveries suggest that we shouldn’t define what we are searching for by what we know is already out there, Orphan said.

But it’s hard to search for something if you don’t know what it is. One general hallmark to look for, said planetary scientist Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, is a system that is out of equilibrium. Life takes in and uses energy, altering its environment in the process. Without life, for example, our planet would not have an oxygen-rich atmosphere, as chemical reactions tend to deplete oxygen. The proliferation of left-handed amino acids is another example we see on Earth; life is made up of left-handed amino acids, but not their mirror-images. Such a lopsided situation is an indication of an environment out of whack and perhaps life.

However, what we can search for also depends on what’s practical. As a result, NASA’s strategy for searching out life on other planets has generally been to “follow the water,” looking for life similar to that on Earth, Porco said, because that's what we know how to find. Porco called on other scientists on the panel to come up with a “working definition” of life that could give planetary scientists guidance as to what else they should look for. For example, on other worlds, life might form in liquid hydrocarbons instead of water, such as on Saturn's moon, Titan. Different markers might reveal life in hydrocarbon seas.

Rather than searching for new forms of life on Earth or in the stars, other scientists study the question from the bottom up, looking for possible precursors of life. Chemist David Lynn of Emory University in Atlanta points out that misfolded proteins like the those implicated in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's show some similarities to life, namely that they can generate diversity in the different ways that they fold, and can undergo chemical evolution, in which those folded proteins are selected not genetically, but chemically. Such precursors could form complex chemical networks, which might be the foundation of radically different life elsewhere in the universe.

Biochemist John Chaput of Arizona State University, Tempe, takes the approach of working backward from the central dogma, asking if early life could have used a simpler precursor to RNA and DNA. He studies threose nucleic acid, which is not found in nature but can be synthesized in the lab. It forms a similar structure to DNA, but with a different backbone and would've been simpler to produce and replicate on primordial Earth. “Life did not choose DNA or RNA out of chemical necessity,” he said. “There may have been many alternative paths to the evolution of life.”

Credits: ScienceMAG

Is Alaska Losing Its Snow?

I’m writing this from a village community center in rural Yukon. It’s been transformed into a checkpoint on the Yukon Quest, a 1,000-mile dogsled race from Whitehorse, where I live in the Yukon, to Fairbanks, in the Alaska interior.

Outside right now, it’s -39 degrees Fahrenheit, and it’s been that way through the 48 hours since the race started. The husky teams handle the cold pretty well, but humans and machines are suffering I have to go outside every two to three hours to start my car and let it warm up all the way through to prevent it from freezing solid.

This type of cold used to be standard on the Quest, but the last couple of years have been unusually balmy; last year, the race was unable to finish at its usual location because the Yukon River, normally a frozen highway in February, wasn’t safe for travel. Other sled dog races have been affected by the unusual weather, too: low snow levels in Southcentral Alaska, in the big city of Anchorage and the surrounding country, have wreaked havoc on the racing season.

"Over the last, say, 25 years, there is probably some trend for decreased snowfall in the autumn that is to say the snow is coming later. But if we just look at the total over-winter snow, there is very little trend."

In 2013, the Knik 200 was canceled due to warm weather and lack of snow; in 2014, the Tustumena 200 and the Northern Lights 300 were both canceled for the same reasons, as were high school cross country ski races and a fat-tire bike race. This year, snowless conditions have forced the cancellation of the Norton Sound 450, the Knik 100, and numerous smaller amateur dogsled races and skiing and biathlon events. For only the second time in its history, the Iditarod, the most famous dog sled race in the world, is being forced to change its start location.

The perception in Alaska, from what I can tell as a nearby observer, is that snow accumulation levels are dropping precipitously in the Anchorage area and the surrounding Mat-Su Borough. I called the National Weather Service to see how our perceptions stack up against the data.

“Our climate records here in Anchorage go back to 1916, so we have about a hundred years worth of data,” says Rebecca Duell, a meteorologist at the Anchorage office of the NWS. At the time of my call last week, the Anchorage area had received a total of 19.4 inches of snow since August 1, when the annual count begins. The annual average for this time of year over the past century? Over 50 inches. “So we are 30 inches below average right now,” Duell says.

Up to this point, the 2014-15 season in the Anchorage-to-Willow corridor has the 10th lowest snowfall on record. Some other recent years have been below average, too: in 2013-14, 43.5 inches had accumulated at this point; in 2012-13, 39.8 inches; and in 2010-11, 43.7. On the other end of things, 2011-12 “was one of our snowiest years on record,” Duell says. Ninety-four inches of snow had fallen by this point in that year.

Hugh Neff in an earlier Yukon Quest. (Photo: James Brooks/Flickr)

So what does this all mean? Is Anchorage becoming a snowless winter city? It’s a little more complicated than that, according to Rick Toman, the NWS climate science and services manager for the Alaska region. “Some of what we have going on is that people’s working memory is pretty short,” he says. “Over the last, say, 25 years, there is probably some trend for decreased snowfall in the autumn that is to say the snow is coming later. But if we just look at the total over-winter snow, there is very little trend. In the long term, there’s no trend.”

Anchorage, Toman points out, is coastal: it can go weeks without snow and then get a substantial fraction of its annual snowfall in a one- or two-day storm. That can make it difficult to track season-long trends, since the accumulation is so erratic. “Even though the numbers can look big, you can have long stretches without snow,” he says. “In Anchorage, that’s always been the case.”

That’s small consolation for the race organizers and participants who are seeing their annual events canceled. Even if the overall snow level isn’t decreasing markedly, a shift toward late-season snow would be enough to change the life and culture of Anchorage and the surrounding area in very real ways.

Snow accumulation in and around Anchorage is about 30 inches below average for this time of year, and it’s affecting daily life in the area.

Winter in Alaska means snowmobiling, skiing, snowshoeing, and dogsledding and all of those activities require some snow cover on the ground, not just in March or April but from November or December on. It’s not just a matter of amateur races being canceled, either: snowmobiles, in particular, are a practical form of transport in a rural Alaska winter. People use them to travel around and to or from the more remote communities that aren’t reachable by road. Trappers use them to work their traplines, they’re integral to ice fishing and some seasonal hunting, and many tourism businesses depend on them too.

Of course, the affected area, from Anchorage north to Willow, is Alaska’s most developed, urban area for most residents in that part of the state, a reduced or displaced snow cover will only affect their winter hobbies. But that’s no minor thing in a state that defines itself as a winter playground. As David Hulen, the managing editor of the state’s largest paper, the Alaska Dispatch News, asked on Twitter three weeks back: “Is this just a lousy winter or is the basic nature of this place changing in pretty significant ways?”

Dispatches From a Changing Arctic is a biweekly series of reported stories from Alaska and the three Canadian northern territories.

Lead photo: Susan R. Serna/Shutterstock.

Credits: PSMAG