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Australia has been suffering its worst heatwave on record, the first time temperatures exceeded 110 F for 3 days running. It’s been so hot that on Thursday, the low at Melbourne airport was 87 F.

Australia is the canary in the coal mine for climate-driven desertification. The astonishing decade-long drought in southern Australia was declared ‘worst on record’ last year. My headline quote is from the UK’s Independent story, which notes:

Australia, the driest inhabited continent on earth, is regarded as highly vulnerable. A study by the country’s blue-chip Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation identified its ecosystems as “potentially the most fragile” on earth in the face of the threat.

Australia is but the first and most seriously impacted of the arid sub-tropical (and near-sub-tropical) climates that are facing horrific desertification from climate change. For instance, Lester Snow, Director of California’s Department of Water Resources said Friday

We may be at the start of the worst California drought in modern history.

Two years ago, Science (subs. req’d) published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” — levels of aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas to California. The UK’s Hadley Center warned in November 2006 that their research predicted multiple permanent Dust Bowls around the planet on our current emissions path:

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“Arctic Ice Volume Lowest Ever as Globe Warms: UN,” is how Reuters reported it today. Sorry I missed that in writing my earlier post on the 2008 report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), but it was buried deep in the press release (see below).

Note that the WMO is making a stronger statement than the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) did in October (see NSIDC stunner: Arctic ice at “Likely Record-Low Volume”).

The NSIDC figure compares ice age in September 2007 (left) and September 2008 (right). It shows the sharp increase in thin first-year ice (red) and the decline in thick multi-year ice — both “second-year ice” (orange) and “third-year and older ice” (yellow). “White indicates areas of ice below ~50 percent, for which ice age cannot be determined.”

The WMO release says of the Arctic:

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Unfortunately, the greatest warming in 2008 came in the worst possible place for humanity — the Siberian tundra. That’s clear from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies report on the meteorological year, December 2007 through November 2008:

The remarkably widespread warming in the land of the permafrost permamelt should be the big global warming story because:

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s annual climate report tells the warming tale:

• “For November alone, the month is fourth warmest all-time globally.” This comes on the heels of last month’s report of the second warmest October on record. Since the deniers have become overly fond of 60-day trend lines (see here), one can safely conclude they will be reporting that the earth is a over-heating again.

• “The global land surface temperature for 2008 was the fifth warmest, with an average temperature 1.44 degrees F (0.80 degree C) above the 20th century mean of 48.1 degrees F (9.0 degrees C).” Looking at the land data alone is one way to factor out the cooling impact of the La Niña that gripped the Pacific in the first half of the year.

And the United States saw another record-breaking year for extreme storms:

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NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center reports:

Based on preliminary data, the globally averaged combined land and sea surface temperature was the second warmest on record for October and ninth warmest on record for the January-October year-to-date period.

Given that this report is just out, I’m assuming they have sorted out the data entry issues that briefly caused problems for NASA (see here and here). Also worth noting from the NCDC report:

• According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the October 2008 Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent, which is measured from passive microwave instruments onboard NOAA satellites, was the third least October sea ice extent on record, behind 2007 and 2006. Average ice extent during October 2008 was 8.4 million square kilometers, which is 9.5 percent below the 1979-2000 average. Sea ice extent for October has decreased at a rate of 5.4 percent per decade, since satellite records began in 1979.
• El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions remained in a neutral phase during October.

Since interest in the monthly temperature reports is so keen these days, let me repeat the key points from my an earlier post on the monthly data. While the monthly data doesn’t tell us much about the climate, the peer-reviewed scientific literature has a couple of interesting forecasts for the next decade:

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The corrected NASA temperature data for October is out here. It looks to be around the sixth warmest October on record, although interestingly (though not unexpectedly, see below), the five warmest Octobers on record are all from the previous 5 years.

I don’t normally blog on the NASA monthly data, but the tiny temporary tizzy-inspiring data entry trouble NASA had a couple of days ago warrants follow up (see “The hottest October on record?“). You can read the ongoing back-and-forth in the comments section of RealClimate’s “mountains and molehills” post.

I will wait for NOAA’s monthly National Climatic Data Center update in a few days — and then the final year end data from NASA and Hadley — before drawing any significant conclusions. But assuming these numbers don’t change much, it is worth noting that now the last two months and three of the last four have had a pretty big temperature anomaly, which suggests we may be be over the cooling effects of the La Niña earlier this year.

I would add that we would expect the greatest warming trend in the Arctic because the loss of sea ice exposes the open ocean directly to the air. Unfortunately, there are exceedingly few temperature stations over the Arctic. So while anomalously warm Octobers are going to be the norm, the current data sets probably underestimate northern hemisphere autumnal warming. But don’t tell that any deniers or delayers, unless you want to put them into a tiny temporary tizzy. That is NASA’s job!

As Jeff Master, our favorite meteorologist and hurricane blogger, wrote yesterday:

This year is now the only hurricane season on record in the Atlantic that has featured major hurricanes in five separate months. The only year to feature major hurricanes in four separate months was 2005, and many years have had major hurricanes in three separate months. This year’s record-setting fivesome were Hurricane Bertha in July, Hurricane Gustav in August, Hurricane Ike in September, Hurricane Omar in October, and Hurricane Paloma in November.

Because global warming will be cooking the Atlantic hurricane forming region year-round for the foreseeable future, we can expect this deadly record to be repeated many times. A recent study offered “the firmest evidence so far that global warming will significantly increase the intensity of the most extreme storms worldwide” (see “Nature: Hurricanes ARE getting fiercer — and it’s going to get much worse“).

Tropical cyclones are threshold events: If sea surface temperatures are below 80°F (26.5°C), they do not form. Some analysis even suggests there is a sea surface temperature “threshold [close to 83°F] necessary for the development of major hurricanes” (see “Why global warming means killer storms worse than Katrina and Gustav, Part 1“).

Global warming may thus actually cause some hurricanes and some major hurricanes to develop that otherwise would not have (by raising sea surface temperatures above the necessary threshold at the right place or time).

The Wikipedia discussion of the current Atlantic hurricane season notes:

Although not an El Niño or La Niña year, 2008 is the second most destructive [Atlantic hurricane] season on record, behind only the 2005 season, with up to 52 billion in damage.

And, of course, the season isn’t over — the devastation from Paloma is just beginning to be calculated, and more hurricanes may yet develop. Masters notes that Paloma is an unusually strong storm for this late in the season:

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Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, warned

Unchecked climate change will mean that some parts of the world will simply not have enough water to sustain settlements both small and large, because agriculture becomes untenable and industries relying on water can no longer compete or function effectively. This will trigger structural changes in economies right through to the displacement of people as environmental refugees.

While deniers continue trying to confuse the issue by arguing that we don’t know that our current climate is the ideal one, the drought and sea level rise issue render that argument tragically moot.

Humanity has developed around the climate of the last 10,000 years, a climate that has been remarkably stable (see “Must have PPT #1: The narrow temperature window that gave us modern human civilization” — and yes I will restart my “must-have PowerPoints” series after the election).

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When experts talk about how global warming will increase the risk of disease, we usually hear about tropical diseases — dengue fever, malaria, and anything that could be carried by a mosquito (see “Science: Extreme rains supercharged by warming“). We don’t think about our own backyards or street sewers and water resources in the U.S..

As a recent Washington Post article reports, however, we should. As temperatures increase and continental rainfall also gets warmer, waterborne diseases will flourish and without major infrastructure upgrades, our exposure to the diseases will likewise grow.

Simply from increased frequency and severity of torrential downpours, disease will be able to attack us from a growing number of fronts – at the beach, in our drinking water, from our sewers, in seafood, after a mosquito bite. The WaPo article focuses on how urban infrastructure systems are not prepared to handle the weather forecast – the rains will overflow sewer systems and threaten to mix sewage, storm water, and drinking water.

The article reports, “From 1948 to 1994, heavy rainfall was correlated with more than half of the nation’s outbreaks of waterborne illness, according to a 1991 study commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency.” The article’s examples include:

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If you want to know what the U.S. southwest faces in the coming decades if we don’t reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends quickly, just look to Australia:

David Jones, the head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology, said the drought affecting south-west Western Australia, south-east South Australia, Victoria and northern Tasmania “is now very severe and without historical precedent”.

Dr Jones said Victoria had had “the driest multi-year period on record, but also by far the hottest….”

He said temperatures were running at about one degree “above any previous comparable drought. That is substantially hotter, and that one degree is a global warming signal.”

He said the data suggests that for every one degree of warming, there is a 15 per cent decline in run-off, or river flow, in the Murray Darling Basin….

He said a similar drying pattern had been observed in Europe’s Mediterranean, and the south-west in the USA….

The highlighted point is key. Previously, droughts around the world were either cold-whether droughts or warm-weather droughts. In the future, virtually all droughts will be hot weather droughts, which are obviously the worst kind.

He said the current dry was at the extreme end of what the climate models had predicted.

Most of the major predicted climate impacts the planet is now experiencing are at the extreme end of what the models had predicted (see “Are Scientists Overestimating — or Underestimating — Climate Change, Part I“).

Here is more on Australia’s astonishing drought:

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I have resized some pictures from Hurricane Ike — pictures that are likely to become all-too-common sights in the decades to come, assuming we continue our do-nothing climate policy. Larger versions of these photos are available here.

This is Galveston Island:

This is Galveston.

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The best hurricane blog. The National Hurricane Center advisories on Ike.
Here is an image of Hurricane Ike from the International Space Station.

Here are some relevant posts on the hurricane-climate link:

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Nature has published a major analysis that supports my recent 2-parter (Why global warming means killer storms worse than Katrina and Gustav, Part 1 and Part 2). As Nature explains:

… scientists have come up with the firmest evidence so far that global warming will significantly increase the intensity of the most extreme storms worldwide.

The maximum wind speeds of the strongest tropical cyclones have increased significantly since 1981, according to research published in Nature this week. And the upward trend, thought to be driven by rising ocean temperatures, is unlikely to stop at any time soon.

The team statistically analysed satellite-derived data of cyclone wind speeds. Although there was hardly any increase in the average number or intensity of all storms, the team found a significant shift in distribution towards stronger storms that wreak the greatest havoc. This meant that, overall, there were more storms with a maximum wind speed exceeding 210 kilometres per hour (category 4 and 5 storms on the Saffir–Simpson scale)….

“It’ll be pretty hard now for anyone to claim that cyclone activity has not increased,” says Judith Curry, an atmospheric researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who was not involved in the study….

“People should now stop saying ‘who cares, storm activity is just a few per cent up’,” says Curry. “It’s the strongest storms that matter most.”

Again, “More than half the total hurricane damage in the U.S. (normalized for inflation and populations trends) was caused by just five events,” explained MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel in an email. Storms that are Category 4 and 5 at landfall (or just before) are what destroy major cities like New Orleans and Galveston with devastating winds, rains, and storm surges.

The impacts projected for coming decades are quite ominous in a world that currently refuses to take serious action on climate:

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