365 Days of Climate Awareness 127 – Return to Climate Annals

This is another post where I beg your pardon as readers, explain a previous false start, and begin again with a steadier approach (like I did in post #3 after plunging into really obtuse details about climate modeling to start the whole series). When I began a string of annals-type posts about the state of the US climate from 2010 forward, I hadn’t thought through what data to present, and how to present it. The result was a few willy-nilly posts which wouldn’t add up to much in terms of education. I needed to go into some background on extreme events—the frequent topic of annual and monthly reports—and develop the narrative framework.

So here I am again, about to unleash a run of climate annals on you, but in a more compact and comprehensive way, so you the readers will be able to make some useful comparisons between years and identify patterns. My primary goal in this entire 365 Days series is to help make people more interested and discerning observers of the climate and of reporting on it.

With tomorrow’s post, #128, I’ll begin the annals, starting with 1998. I go back that far because that’s the first year when NOAA began publishing its State Of The Climate monthly and annual reports. They’re brief but very informative. Like any annals, the reports were written at the time, not from a future perspective looking back. I attempt to put such a historical perspective on them, but will, to keep posts brief, still go year-by-year. Two posts will be devoted to each year: first, the US report, and then the global report. So to come from 1998 to the present will require 48 posts.

From there, I’ll be able to look a little more broadly at our recent climatic period, and some of the decadal-scale trends we’ve lived through in recent times, and then move onto where I began the entire series: on climate modeling, and how scientists try to look forward based on existing data and mathematical formulas.

This part of the series is, frankly, a learning exercise for me too. I studied oceanography in graduate school, and since then geology and ocean engineering. So the general topics and background explainers I spent most of the first hundred posts on were general knowledge I gained along the way. But moving now into specific climatic events, on both the national and global scale, is fresh synthesis for me too. It’s exciting!

But real excitement can’t obscure that we have a very real fight on our hands, to save our country and our global society from autocratic, profiteering bad actors who know and care nothing about the natural world and our place in it. Having fun along the way is no sin, but information and learning have to play a role in accomplishing real change.

Tomorrow: US state of the climate, 1998.

Be brave, and be well.