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Archives for mai 2022

Unforced Variations: May 2022

7 May 2022 by group

Sorry for delay posting this month, but we’ve been considering how (or if) to go forward with open threads and comments. Looking at the multitude of constructive comments on the “End of blog comments” thread, it’s clear that many people appreciate the possibility of comments here, but that too often it disappoints by devolving into tedious bickering. There were many theories for why! Without necessarily subscribing to any particular diagnosis (there are many that capture some elements of what happens), we have decided to continue with comments for the time being, but with a few modifications.

To encourage people to post less often, but more substantively, we will limit commenters to one comment a day (so make it count!). Additionally, we will try to enforce a ‘one comment, one point’ rule to avoid people just cramming ten comments into one. Moderation of insulting, abusive, or just tedious comments will continue. Think more ‘Letters to the Editor’ than graffiti on the bathroom wall. This will hopefully also allow for more engagement from the RC scientists.

Back in the day, one of the goals of setting up the ‘Forced Variations’ threads was to segregate the more contentious arguments around solutions into one place, but that seems to have run it’s course. Thus we are going to revert to a single open thread, with a slightly broader climate theme than previously. Comments on generic political arguments or other issues that are not directly tied to climate will still be excluded.

We will let this play out for a couple of months and then reevaluate. Let us know what you think.

So with no further ado, let this month’s open thread begin…

Filed Under: Climate Science, Comment Policy, Open thread, Solutions

River Ice break-up trends 2022

4 May 2022 by Gavin

As in previous years, the spring break-up of river ice on the Tanana River at Nenana and the Yukon River at Dawson City in Canada (new! h/t Ed Wiebe), is a great opportunity to highlight phenology that indicates that the planet is in fact reacting to the ongoing global warming. As we’ve done in previous years, the Nenana dates can be plotted and show a clear trend towards earlier break-ups (by about 8 days/century over the whole record, or 13 days/century since 1975).

Nenana Ice Classic break up dates since 1917.

2022 was on trend, and in 2014, I noted that May 3rd was the most likely date given the trends until then.

Dawson City in the Yukon is about 250 miles east of Nenana which is close enough for the seasonal anomalies in climate to be quite highly correlated. So one might expect that the break-up dates would be similarly correlated… and indeed they are:

Break up dates at Nenana and Dawson City

The ice at Dawson breaks up on average 3.8 days later than the ice at Nenana (5.1 days this year), but the correlation between the two series is an impressive 0.82. There have been 15 times the ice went out within 24 hours of each other and in 1963 they broke up less than 3 minutes apart! The trends are likewise very similar 7.7±3.8 days/century for Nenana, compared to 6.5±3.1 days/century since 1917. This pretty much puts paid to the occasional claim of the urban heat island in Fairbanks affecting the water and causing the trend.

[Update: I misunderstood the Yukon river break up website, and erroneously stated that the break-up was on May 2nd. It was not. I’ll update this again when it has. Apologies.]

[Update II: The Yukon river ice broke up on May 7, and I’ve updated the graph and text.]

Filed Under: Climate impacts, Climate Science, Instrumental Record Tagged With: nenana, yukon

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