NOAA: World in 2013 was 4th hottest on record

SETH BORENSTEIN | January 21, 2014

WASHINGTON (AP) — The sweltering year of 1988 first put global warming in the headlines and ended up as the hottest year on record. But on Tuesday, it was pushed out of the top 20 warmest by 2013.
Last year tied for the fourth hottest and 1988 fell to 21st.
The average world temperature was 58.12 degrees (14.52 Celsius) tying with 2003 for the fourth warmest since 1880, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Tuesday.
At the same time, NASA, which calculates records in a different manner, ranked last year as the seventh warmest on record, with an average temperature of 58.3 degrees (14.6 Celsius). The difference is related to how the two agencies calculate temperatures in the Arctic and other remote places and is based on differences that are in the hundredths of a degree, scientists said.
Both agencies said nine of the 10th warmest years on record have happened in the 21st century. The hottest year was 2010, according to NOAA.
The reports were released as a big snowstorm was hitting the U.S. East Coast.
"There are times such as today when we can have snow even in a globally warmed world," said Gavin Schmidt, deputy director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York. "But the long term trends are not going to disappear ... Quite frankly people have a very short memory when it comes to climate and weather."
Those longer trends show the world has seen "fairly dramatic warming" since the 1960s with "a smaller rate of warming over the last decade or so," said Thomas Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. In the past 50 years, the world annual temperature has increased by nearly 1.4 degrees (0.8 degrees Celsius), according to NOAA data.
Unlike 2012, much of the worst heat and biggest climate disasters last year were outside the U.S. Parts of central Asia, central Africa and Australia were record warm. Only a few places, including the central U.S., were cooler than normal last year.
Temperatures that were only the 37th warmest for the nation last year. That followed the warmest year on record for the U.S.
Last year, the world had 41 billion-dollar weather disasters, the second highest number behind only 2010, according to insurance firm Aon Benfield, which tracks global disasters. Since 2000, the world has averaged 28 such billion dollar disasters, which are adjusted for inflation.
Nearly half of last year's biggest weather disasters were in Asia and the Pacific region, including Typhoon Haiyan, which killed at least 6,100 people and caused $13 billion in damage to the Philippines and Vietnam. Other costly weather disasters included $22 billion from central European flooding in June, $10 billion in damage from Typhoon Fitow in China and Japan, and a $10 billion drought in much of China, according to the insurance firm.
Usually the weather event called El Nino, a warming of the central Pacific, is responsible for boosting already warm years into the world's hottest years. But in 2013, there was no El Nino.
The fact that a year with no El Nino "was so hot tells me that the climate really is shifting," said Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M University climate scientist, who was not part of either the NOAA or NASA teams.
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Online:
NOAA climate report: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2013/13
NASA climate report: http://1.usa.gov/1kUFqhj
Aon Benfield climate disasters report: http://bit.ly/KCwbS4

Scientists Generate Magnetic Field by Using Heat Instead of Electricity

October 17, 2013 by Staff

Science

In a newly published study, EPFL scientists have for the first time predicted and experimentally verified the existence of the Magnetic Seebeck Effect.

EPFL scientists have provided the first evidence ever that it is possible to generate a magnetic field by using heat instead of electricity. The phenomenon is referred to as the Magnetic Seebeck effect or ‘thermomagnetism’.

A temperature difference across an electric conductor can generate an electric field. This phenomenon, called the Seebeck effect, lies at the root of thermoelectricity (heat turned into electricity), and is used to drive space probes and power thermoelectric generators, and could be implemented for heat-harvesting in power plants, wrist-watches and microelectronics. In theory, it is also possible to generate a magnetic field by using a temperature difference across an electrical insulator (‘thermomagnetism’). This has been referred to as the Magnetic Seebeck effect, and has enormous applications for future electronics such as solid-state devices and magnetic-tunnel transistors. In a breakthrough Physical Review Letters publication that has been promoted to “Editors’ Suggestion”, EPFL scientists have for the first time predicted and experimentally verified the existence of the Magnetic Seebeck effect.

Thermoelectricity and ‘thermomagnetism’

The Seebeck effect (thermoelectricity) – named after Thomas Johann Seebeck who first observed it in 1821 – is generated when electrons in an electric conductor move as a response to a temperature gradient. On average, the electrons on the hot side of the conductor have more kinetic energy and subsequently move at higher speeds than the electrons on the cold side. This causes them to diffuse from the hot to the cold side, generating an electric field that is directly proportional to the temperature gradient along the conductor.

Using an electrical insulator rather than a conductor, researchers led by Jean-Philippe Ansermet at EPFL have shown that a Magnetic Seebeck effect also exists. Because an insulator does not allow electrons to flow, a temperature gradient does not cause electrons to diffuse. Instead, it affects another property of electrons that forms the basis of magnetism and is referred to as ‘spin’.

In an insulator, a temperature gradient alters the orientation of electrons’ spin. Under certain conditions, this generates a magnetic field that is perpendicular to the direction of the temperature gradient. Similar to thermoelectricity described above, the intensity of the thermomagnetic field is directly proportional to the temperature gradient along the insulator.

First evidence for the Magnetic Seebeck effect

Using an insulating material called YIG (yttrium iron garnet), co-author Antonio Vetrò examined the propagation of magnetization waves along it. What he found was that the direction the magnetic waves propagated along the insulator affected the degree of magnetization loss – a phenomenon called magnetic damping. When the direction of the waves matched the orientation of the temperature gradient along the YIG, then the magnetization damping was reduced; when they propagated to the opposite direction, magnetic damping increased.

The Magentic Seebeck effect combines three distinct fields of physics: thermodynamics, continuum mechanics and electromagnetism. The difficulty lies in that, until now, no-one had ever found a way to consistently unify them. Pursuing this, first author Sylvain Bréchet built upon the work of Ernst Stückelberg (1905-1984), a renowned Swiss physicist who had previously developed a thermodynamical formalism for his teaching. Out of the hundreds of equations that Bréchet produced, one of them predicted that a temperature gradient should generate a magnetic field.

Although at an early stage, this discovery opens new approaches for addressing magnetization damping. This could have a tremendous impact on future devices based on spintronics (Nobel Prize 2007), an emergent technological field that offers an alternative to traditional electronics. In spintronic devices, signal transmission relies on the spin of electrons rather than their charge and movement. For example, the spintronics field is now considering harvesting heat waste coming from microprocessors like those used in personal computers.

Publication: Sylvain D. Brechet, et al., “Evidence for a Magnetic Seebeck Effect,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 087205 (2013); doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.087205

PDF Copy of the Study: Evidence for a Magnetic Seebeck effect

Source: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne—EPFL