Don’t panic just yet, but it’s worth paying attention to a couple of signs out of the monitoring and forecast community that La Niña (the cool equatorial Pacific that tends toward dry winters here in New Mexico) may be about to sneak in the back door. The latest CPC forecast, out Thursday, said as much:

ENSO-neutral or weak La Niña conditions are likely during the next 6-9 months.

Klaus Wolter’s MEI index, which brings together a number of different measures of ENSO activity, just slipped into the negative (La Niña) phase for the first time in more than a year. One month there does not a La Niña make, but it’s worth watching.

And the Pacific Decadal Oscillation index has also gone negative. I’ve been strongly cautioned against reading too much into the month-by-month PDO numbers, because they’re much more useful as a measure of decadal-scale oscillations (remember their name). But again, worth watching.

I don’t mind saying that Al Zelicoff is a bit of a nut. But I mean that with the greatest respect, because you frankly can’t argue with the results (1.2 meg pdf, and more here). At Al’s ordinary (OK, slightly larger than ordinary) upper middle class Albuquerque home down the street from me, he has slashed his fossil fuel consumption, as the graphs in the pdf linked above show. No particularly wacky adjustments to an ordinary middle class American life required, just a bit of ingenuity. OK, the spreadsheets and sophisticated statistical analysis Al brings to the task are not exactly normal American middle class. This is a guy who pulled out his laptop at lunch (we were eating Thai) to show me his latest weather/energy consumption correlation analysis. But really, what he’s done, anyone could do. Without subsidy:

Much of the southwest – including large swaths of heavily populated California and Arizona are in more or less the same solar flux zone as Albuquerque and there are state-by-state subsidies for installing small PV systems. New Mexico has no such subsidy, and I must admit I’m not a fan of subsidies in any case as they tend to distort markets. Better, I think, to remove the subsidies – both overt and hidden – from fossil fuel costs and their horrific externalities.

Jim Hansen and buds offer an explanation of the 2005 global temperature numbers, in part in response to last month’s Washington Post story on their data. Money quote:

The existing record in the period of instrumental temperature measurements occurred when the 1997-98 “El Nino of the century” occurred on the back of a strong two-decade warming trend; in addition, the global temperature impact of the El Nino, which typically lags the El Nino by a few months, coincided almost precisely with calendar year 1998. As a result, the 1998 temperature jumped about two standard deviations above the prior record. Thus, if the 1998 global temperature level is reached without help from a large El Nino, such a result would be a measure of how intense the underlying global warming trend has become.

As Roger Pielke Sr. loves to point, there’s more to climate than surface temperatures. But it is, after all, where we all live, so in terms of human understanding and experience, the number nevertheless has some relevance. And to the commenter who suggested that “a sample going back to 1880 isn’t very meaningful,” that all depends on what you mean by “meaningful.” Given that human societies make significant decisions on decadal timescales, I would argue that a climate record going back to the 1880s is meaningful. The past century’s climate sure seems meaningful to me.

(hat tip RealClimate)

I’ve been struggling to understand “environmental determinism,” and why some people think it’s so icky. Thanks to Wikipedia, I finally get it. I was stuck on the plain English meaning of the words, and thought I had stumbled down the rabbit hole of some sort of academic argument over the relative importance of environmental boundary conditions and human response in determining the trajectory of societies.

Apparently there’s an older, uglier meaning of “environmental determinism” that explains, for example, why my ancestors who grew up on the beaches of California ended up as lazy surf bums, only interesting in drinking beer and screwing. In other words, to quote the wikipeople, “The basic argument of the environmental determinists was that aspects of physical geography, particularly climate, influenced the psychological temperament of individuals, which in turn shaped the culture and society that those individuals formed.” You can see how that leads you down a racist path in a hurry. I know plenty of surfers interested in other things besides beer and sex. Like surfing, for example.

Dude, no wonder people thought it was icky.

I’ve been guilty in my journalism of playing the “thermohaline card” – using the example of a thermohaline circulation shutdown as an example of the sort of abrupt climate change that could happen unexpectedly as a result of anthropogenic climate change. I never pushed it hard, but I thought it relevant. But a good story from Richard Kerr in the Oct. 21 Science has me convinced I shouldn’t do it again. It’s not that abrupt climate change isn’t an important issue, a legitimate driver behind a “precautionary principle” attitude toward greenhouse gas reduction. But a shutdown of the thermohaline circulation, with the resulting scary European deep freeze scenario, seems less credible than I used to believe:

A precipitous shift in climate could happen again, say researchers, 25 of whom gathered here last summer to discuss abrupt climate change.* But the prime menace no longer lies in the North Atlantic. Instead, a growing contingent of scientists now sees the North Atlantic as no more of a threat than accelerating sea level rise, megadroughts, and monsoon failures. “A few years ago, people thought the [Atlantic circulation] could collapse almost like The Day After Tomorrow,” said paleoclimatologist Julia Hargreaves of the Frontier Research Center for Global Change in Yokohama, Japan. “But a very rapid collapse now seems fairly unlikely under global warming.”

* The “here” he mentions above is the “Abrupt Climate Change: Mechanisms, Early Warning Signs, Impacts, and Economic Analyses,” meeeting in July Aspen under the auspices of the Aspen Global Change Institute.

Dennis Kucinich’s wacky “resolution of inquiry” into What the President Knew About Global Warming and When He Knew It (see Prometheus for background) has been defeated. Comments from House Science Committee chair Sherwood Boehlert (he’s an R), as reported in the committee press release:

I want to make clear at the outset that any debate or vote on this measure should not be seen as any kind of barometer of what the House thinks, or is willing to do about, global climate change. Personally, I support mandatory caps on carbon dioxide, and I think there is growing concern about climate change around the country.

But I don’t think that this resolution would advance the debate on climate change one iota. Rather, this resolution is a broadly drafted, partisan political ploy that tries to create a phony issue about documents. I don’t see how that helps anyone.

It’s difficult even to determine how anyone would comply with the resolution. What documents are being sought? Every Administration document related to climate change and U.S. coasts? How many truckloads of materials would that be?

Moreover, what would we do with this information if we got it? What would we find? What new insight would we arrive at concerning climate change or climate policy? The resolution reminds me about the old line about dogs chasing cars: What would they do if they caught one? What would anyone do if this resolution succeeded?