It’s almost enjoyable to watch the “no warming for 17 years” crowd predictably fail to update their priors.

Meanwhile let’s hope that “no global warming since 2016” will hold for a while.

Only a month ago – this changes slowly so it’s pretty much what is happening now.

Yes, as far as I understand, it is indeed a highly unusual configuration.

Hiatus? What hiatus?

August 2014 was the warmest August on record. Three of the last 12 months have been the warmest for that calendar month, but one of them (November) was in 2013.

via Scientific American

Improvements in characterizing global interannual variation and trend in global heat flux.

Yes there probably is an upward trend. There is substantial uncertainty in the vertical axis offset, though it probably is warming.

And yes, El Nino years are cooling years. Does this surprise you?

Allan, R. P., C. Liu, N. G. Loeb, M. D. Palmer, M. Roberts, D. Smith, and P.-L. Vidale (2014), Changes in global net radiative imbalance 1985–2012, Geophys. Res. Lett., 41

DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060962

A slightly more complicated graph following up on the previous one showing how much carbon is left to burn, showing that even that one is unreasonably optimistic.

The curve plots a reasonable estimate of the (Bayesian) probability, given available knowledge, of staying within 2 degrees C above the preindustrial global mean surface temperature. Normally, we base our estimates on the 50% line; to have a 50/50 shot of staying under 2 C, we have used up a bit over half of our available emissions.

As David Spratt explains, we don’t fly in an airplane with a 1 in 100,000 chance of falling out of the sky. (We have government regulations for that!) But the usual carbon budget is based on a 50% chance of staying within 2 C of warming. If we take a more, ahem, conservative approach, and stick to only a 10% chance of failure, there is no carbon budget left.

I think there are things that mitigate Spratt’s position. But we shouldn’t forget that in the limit of having perfect information about the system, there’s a something on the order of a 10% chance that we may have already passed the 2 C mark by any reasonable definition.

Tom Yulsman in Discover Magazine:

It’s too soon to tell whether this is just a flash in the pan or the start of a really big melt year. There are examples in the past when “brief spikes of 30 and 40 percent occurred even though the year turned out to be fairly normal,” [NSIDC lead scientist] Scambos told me…

That said, “Persistence at this level would get my attention,” Scambos says.

via Kevin Trenberth

It’s early days and it may not pan out, but we’re still on track for a Super-ENSO.

The image (Slide 43 in this briefing) shows the evolution of the equatorial temperature anomaly through time in the two super-El-Ninos in the observational record, and the evolution to date of the current likely El Nino.

UPDATE: Peter Sinclair has more

(Wandered across my Facebook stream with image credit “Book Liberation Movement”, whoever or whatever that is. But whatever they believe, this particular claim, while not literally true in terms of “energy”, is in an important sense true enough.)

From an interesting article in the National Journal; go read it.

via pewresearch.org

See also this internet classic.