Short Takes - 05

The signal that the ENDGAME has started.

The diagram at the left shows a final position. In this case, seeing that he was lost, the white player had resigned the game before all of the frontiers between the opposing groups had been filled in. If the game had continued to its conlusion, and the score tallied, black would have won the game by a margin of about 11 points (black had captured and removed five stones during the game, while white had captured and removed 2). GO makes chess seem simplistic. At 13 I was winning chess tournaments around my state. Then I discovered Avalon Hill wargames and Go.

Is generally when players start making ENDGAME moves.

Let's consider the board and the moves the players are making.

THE CLIMATE CRISIS.

2025 is starting off with the global ocean about +0.25°C HOTTER than 2023. It takes a MASSIVE amount of energy to warm up the oceans that much.

The GREEN line is 1998. The hottest year of the 20th century. The YELLOW line is 2016. 2016 was the back half of a MONSTER El Nino. It started off hot and then got about +0.25°C hotter. However, by the end of the year the oceans had cooled about -0.5°C. 2023 (PINK line) started off cooler than 2016 BUT averaged about +0.5°C hotter. 2024 cooled off about -0.25°C by the end of the year but still averaged about +0.6°C hotter than 2016.

“How much?”, you might want to know. This being something of CRITICAL importance to what the rest of your life is going to be like.

Well, the Ocean Heat Content (OHC) numbers for 2024 came out today (January 10th) and it is NOT GOOD. Wow, it is so “not good” that it changes the rest of my article. Take a look at this.

Remember, 2023 represents an increase of about 15Zj (Zettajoules) of HEAT added to the global oceans. That works out to about 3.4 Hiroshima bombs (HIROs) worth of HEAT for every square mile of open water on the planet. Now consider the line for 2024. The amount of HEAT in the oceans is RAPIDLY INCREASING.

Even worse, 2024 was an El Nino year. The Global Mean Surface Temperature, the part we mean when we say +1.6°C over baseline, went up in part because 2024 was an El Nino year.

El Nino years represent HEAT bleeding out of the Pacific and warming up the planet. That cools down the ocean.

In 2024, despite dumping a huge amount of heat, the global oceans got HOTTER. Since the oceans were “dumping heat” the amount of ENERGY going into them had to have increased.

CO2 levels surged in 2023 because the Terrestrial Land Carbon Sinks failed almost completely.

World’s forests failed to curb 2023 climate emissions, study finds. — Reuters 072924

However, even assuming the worst case numbers for climate sensitivity, that increase cannot even begin to account for this amount of ENERGY going into the oceans. Dr. Elliot Jacobson has set it at a rate of +20 HIROs per second to reach the 2024 level of ocean heat.

This suggests that the deterioration of the Albedo has continued. A LOT more ENERGY is going into the Climate System in addition to the Energy getting trapped by the increasing levels of GHGs.

Hansen estimates that the dimming of the ALBEDO has increased the Energy Flow into the Climate System an amount equivalent to a jump of +100ppm in CO2 levels.

“The proximate cause of the (warming) acceleration is increase of Earth’s energy imbalance, specifically a substantial darkening of the planet (decreased albedo) equivalent to a CO2 increase of more than 100 ppm.” From: Global Warming Acceleration: Causes and Consequences

From now till the end of March the oceans in the Northern Hemisphere are going to warm up again. Here’s the BIG question.

Are the oceans going to cool off in 2025 OR are they going to get even hotter?

Look at how much hotter the oceans are than the 1991–2020 average. Imagine how much hotter that is than the 1950–1980 average. Even worse, image how much hotter that is against a 1850–1900 average.

The global ocean is about +0.3°C hotter than it should be according to the “mainstream” climate science models. Mainstream climate scientists have actually started admitting that “something” may be “off” in their models.

Climate Models Can't Explain What's Happening to Earth

Global warming is moving faster than the best models can keep a handle on.

www.theatlantic.com

“Fifty years into the project of modeling Earth’s future climate, we still don’t really know what’s coming.”

“Some places are warming with more ferocity than expected. Extreme events are taking scientists by surprise.”

“Right now, as the bald reality of climate change bears down on human life, scientists are seeing more clearly the limits of our ability to predict the exact future we face.

“The coming decades may be far worse, and far weirder, than the best models anticipated.”

“When this scientific endeavor first started, the models were meant to imagine what global temperatures might look like if greenhouse-gas emissions rose, and they did a remarkable job of that. But models are, even now, less capable of accounting for secondary effects of those emissions that no one saw coming, and that now seem to be driving important change.”

Here's an OMG moment.

“Some variables are missing from climate models entirely. Trees and land are major sinks for carbon emissions, and that this fact might change is not accounted for in climate models.”

But it is changing: Trees and land absorbed much less carbon than normal in 2023, according to research published last October. In Finland, forests have stopped absorbing the majority of the carbon they once did, and recently became a net source of emissions, which, as The Guardian has reported, swamped all gains the country has made in cutting emissions from all other sectors since the early 1990s.

Got that? The changes in the forests have swamped ALL of their “emissions reduction” efforts for the last 30 years. The planet is now working against us and our goal of “net zero” is becoming an illusion impossible to achieve.

The interactions of the ice sheets with the oceans are also largely missing from models, (Gavin) Schmidt (Head of GISS and a Moderate) told me, despite the fact that melting ice could change ocean temperatures, which could have significant knock-on effects. Changing ocean-temperature patterns are currently making climate modelers at NOAA rethink their models of El Niño and La Niña;”

NOAA, initially predicted that La Niña’s cooling powers would kick in much sooner than it now appears they will.

They HOPED that 2024 would act like 2016 and that the La Nina pattern that's formed would cool the planet down to a GMST of around +1.3°C above baseline. That would have been a +0.1°C jump from 2020’s +1.2°C over baseline GMST. A Rate of Warming of about +0.025°C/year or about +0.25°C/decade.

That's still a BIG acceleration in the Rate of Warming since 2010 (+0.18°C per decade) BUT the mainstream models cannot account for 2024’s sustained warmth and GMST of +1.6°C over baseline.

A sustained JUMP in the GMST like +0.4°C in 4 years (2020–2024) implies that either a new forcing has been added to the Climate System OR that warming was being “masked” by a cooling effect which suddenly stopped.

That's a BIG problem for the Moderate faction in climate science. They have decided what “mainstream” climate science WAS for the last 40 years. A big JUMP in the GMST like this implies the mainstream climate models are WRONG.

2025 will tell us just HOW BAD things actually are.

From Hansen’s latest post: Climate Change at the International Court of Justice December 9th 2024. Hansen and EVERYONE else in Climate Science is PRAYING that the La Nina pattern will cool things down in 2025. That the BLUE line will “top out” and then drop down to the PINK line. That would be a RoW of +0.32°C per decade.

This is my analysis.

This is what I see.

This is my “Crisis Report”.

— rc 011025

Personal Notes:

Consider this a “Short Take”. The OHC numbers are OMG bad. It implies that 2025 will be like 2022. A La Nina year where global temperatures actually increase.

No cooling off. Just lots of HEAT building up in the oceans and a MONSTER El Nino slouching towards Bethlehem.