How much have temperatures risen and how much additional warming could eventuate over the next decade? The image on the right shows a potential global temperature rise by 2026 from pre-industrial levels. This rise contains a number of elements, as discussed below from the top down.

February 2016 rise from 1900 (1.62°C)

The magenta element at the top reflects the temperature rise since 1900. In February 2016, it was 1.62°C warmer compared to the year 1900, so that's a rise that has already manifested itself.

Rise from pre-industrial levels to 1900 (0.3°C)

Additional warming was caused by humans before 1900. Accordingly, the next (light blue) element from the top down uses 0.3°C warming to reflect anthropogenic warming from pre-industrial levels to the year 1900.

When also taking this warming into account, then it was 1.92°C (3.46°F) warmer in February 2016 than in pre-industrial times, as is also illustrated on the image below.

Warming from the other elements (described below) comes on top of the warming that was already achieved in February 2016.

Rise due to carbon dioxide from 2016 to 2026 (0.5°C)

The purple element reflects warming due to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 2026. While the IEA reported that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions had not risen over the past few years, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have continued to rise, due to feedbacks that are kicking in, such as wildfires and reduced carbon sinks. Furthermore, maximum warming occurs about one decade after a carbon dioxide emission, so the full warming wrath of the carbon dioxide emissions over the past ten years is still to come. In conclusion, an extra 0.5°C warming by 2026 seems possible as long as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and oceans remain high and as temperatures keep rising.

Removal of aerosols masking effect (2.5°C)

With dramatic cuts in emissions, there will also be a dramatic fall in aerosols that currently mask the full warming of greenhouse gases. From 1850 to 2010, anthropogenic aerosols brought about a decrease of ∼2.53 K, says a recent paper. While on the one hand not all of the aerosols masking effect may be removed over the next ten years, there now are a lot more aerosols than in 2010. A 2.5°C warming due to removal of part of the aerosols masking effect therefore seems well possible by the year 2026.

Albedo changes in the Arctic (1.6°C) 

Warming due to Arctic snow and ice loss may well exceed 2 W per square meter, i.e. it could more than double the net warming now caused by all emissions by people of the world, calculated Professor Peter Wadhams in 2012. A 1.6°C warming due to albedo changes (i.e. decline of both Arctic sea ice and snow and ice cover on land) therefore seems well possible by the year 2026.

Methane eruptions from the seafloor (1.1°C)

". . we consider release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage as highly possible for abrupt release at any time," Dr. Natalia Shakhova et al. wrote in a paper presented at EGU General Assembly 2008. Authors found that such a release would cause 1.3°C warming by 2100. Note that such warming from an extra 50 Gt of methane seems conservative when considering that there now is only some 5 Gt of methane in the atmosphere, and over a period of ten years this 5 Gt is already responsible for more warming than all the carbon dioxide emitted by people since the start of the industrial revolution. Professor Peter Wadhams co-authored a study that calculated that methane release from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean could yield 0.6°C warming of the planet in 5 years (see video at earlier post). In conclusion, as temperatures keep rising, a 1.1°C warming due to methane releases from clathrates at the seafloor of the world's oceans seems well possible by the year 2026.

Extra water vapor feedback (2.1°C)

Rising temperatures will result in more water vapor in the atmosphere (7% more water vapor for every 1°C warming), further amplifying warming, since water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas. Extra water vapor will result from warming due to the above-mentioned albedo changes in the Arctic and methane releases from the seafloor that could strike within years and could result in huge warming in addition to the warming that is already there now. As the IPCC says: "Water vapour feedback acting alone approximately doubles the warming from what it would be for fixed water vapour. Furthermore, water vapour feedback acts to amplify other feedbacks in models, such as cloud feedback and ice albedo feedback. If cloud feedback is strongly positive, the water vapour feedback can lead to 3.5 times as much warming as would be the case if water vapour concentration were held fixed", according to the IPCC. Given a possible additional warming of 2.7°C due to just two elements, i.e. Arctic albedo changes and seafloor methane, an additional warming over the next decade of 2.1°C due to extra water vapor in the atmosphere therefore does seem well possible by the year 2026.

Further feedbacks (0.3°C)

Further feedbacks will result from interactions between the above elements. Additional water vapor in the atmosphere and extra energy trapped in the atmosphere will result in more intense storms and precipitation, flooding and lightning. Flooding can cause rapid decomposition of vegetation, resulting in strong methane releases. Furthermore, plumes above the anvils of severe storms can bring water vapor up into the stratosphere, contributing to the formation of cirrus clouds that trap a lot of heat that would otherwise be radiated away, from Earth into space. The number of lightning strikes can be expected to increase by about 12% for every 1°C of rise in global average air temperature. At 3-8 miles height, during the summer months, lightning activity increases NOx by as much as 90% and ozone by more than 30%. The combination of higher temperatures and more lightning will also cause more wildfires, resulting in emissions such as of methane and carbon monoxide. Ozone acts as a direct greenhouse gas, while ozone and carbon monoxide can both act to extend the lifetime of methane. Such feedbacks may well result in an additional 0.3°C warming by the year 2026.

Total potential global temperature rise by 2026 (10°C or 18°F)

Adding up all the warming associated with the above elements results in a total potential global temperature rise (land and ocean) of more than than 10°C or 18°F within a decade, i.e. by 2026. As said before, this scenario assumes that no geoengineering will take place over the next decade.

The situation is dire and calls for comprehensive and effective action as described in the Climate Plan.

Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/june.html

Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/june.html

Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January. Hal Borland
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/june.html

"Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January." -  Hal Borland

Running: June was a pretty good running month with a one week setback where I was sick so I laid off the miles during that week. However, I still managed to get three weeks with mileage around 60 miles, bringing my month's total to 235 miles with a total elevation gain of about 45,000 feet. I did no hiking and my cycling miles were puny = 1.7 miles. My Garmin has been on the fritz, so I am not totally tracking all of my data but so far my elevation gain for the year somewhere near 210,000 ft, which is well over my target for this time of the year. My mileage is also over target, but I do expect to have a slower and milder 2nd half of the year, running-wise.

Reading: In June, I read 6 books. None of them were really very good! I gave all of them 2 stars on Goodreads except for the last two, which I gave three. As before, starred books below are for the RHC and bolded ones are "owned" books. Total RHC books read so far = 12/24 ; total owned books read = 3/12.

In the Unlikely Event
Reminiscence of a Stock Operator
Holy the Firm*
The Disappeared
The Beautiful Mystery
After You

Travel: I actually stayed local two weekends this month, as plans fell through one of the weekends and I was sick on the other. However, the other two weekends were spent up in Tahoe: one in the north and one in the south. Both were beautiful, although running up there still involves a lot of snow scrambling, slipping and sliding and route finding, so runs are a lot more work than normal. One of the days we went on a 26 mile run/slog which ended up taking almost 10 hours, although only about 7 and a half of it was "moving" time. The rest of the time was spent route finding, map gawking and head scratching! However, the scenery was stunning, as you can see from the  Lake Aloha photos below.

Lake Aloha

Lake Aloha

My brother and I met up on one of the "local" weekends and did an anniversary Mt. Diablo hike. Three years ago, on almost the same day, we did a 14 mile run/hike and it was probably about 100 degrees that day. It was during the drought and some of the water fountains were turned off. We remember it as being hot and dry and dusty and unpleasant!! So, the other day I got this photo from Google:

2013

So we decided to try it again! We went for a 12 mile hike and once again, El Diablo lived up to its name. It was hot and dry and dusty and we were so thirsty! How's that for two suckers! The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Fool me twice, shame on me!

2016

How have you been spending your long summer June days? It's mid-year: how are you doing on your yearly goals so far?

Sea ice close to the North Pole looks slushy and fractured into small pieces. The image below shows the situation on July 8, 2016.

Sea ice north of the geographic North Pole. For more on the (geo)magnetic North Pole, see this page. 

For reference, the bars at the bottom right show distances of 20 km and 20 miles. By comparison, sea ice in the same area did develop large cracks in 2012, but even in September 13, 2012, it was not broken up into small pieces, as shown by this image at a recent post.

As shown by above image, by Jim Pettit, Arctic sea ice volume has been in decline for decades. While this may look like a steady decline, chances are that the sea ice will abruptly collapse over the next two months, for the reasons described below.

The animation below, from the Naval Research Laboratory, shows Arctic sea ice thickness for 30 days up through July 8, 2016, including a forecast of 7 days.

Below is a new Naval Research Laboratory image, dated July 4, 2016
and contributed by Albert Kallio with the following description.

NORTH POLE SEA ICE DISAPPEARING VERY RAPIDLY 4.7.2016

Albert Kallio: The upgraded US Navy sea ice thickness system revealed extreme rates of sea ice pulverization and melting on 4.7.2016 which justifies a continued close attention to the developments on the Arctic Ocean. Due to virtually continuous storm centering the North Pole for weeks now, warm water upswells and sea water mixing drives base melting of icefloes besides wave actions that both wash and pulverize broken sea ice. The more pulverized sea ice becomes, the greater its 3-dimensional surface area that sits in water becomes, this easing transfer of heat from ocean to sea ice. In addition, honeycombing of ice also flushes ice with water in a stormy weather. The final factor being that most of sea ice is very recent (seasonal) ice that contain residues of salts, when saline brine is expelled this creates boreholes into ice making it "rotten ice" easily.
https://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/GLBhycomcice-12/navo/arcticictn_nowcast_anim30d.gif

Sea ice decline reflects the extra energy added to the Arctic, as global warming and feedbacks are hitting the Arctic particularly strongly. Three of these feedbacks are depicted in the image on the right.

As the sea ice melts, sea surface temperatures will remain at around zero degree Celsius (32°F) for as long as there is ice in the water, since the extra energy will first go into melting the ice. Only after the ice has melted will the extra energy start raising the temperature of the water.

Sea ice thus acts as a buffer that absorbs heat, preventing sea surface temperature from rising. As
sea ice is busy melting, each gram of ice takes 334 Joule of heat to change into water, while the temperature remains steady at 0°C ( 32°F).

Once all ice has turned into water, all further heat goes into raising the temperature of the water. To raise the temperature of each gram of water by one degree Celsius then takes only 4.18 Joule of heat.

In other words, melting of the ice absorbs 8 times as much heat as it takes to warm up the same mass of water from zero to 10°C. As sea ice disappears, extra energy instead goes into raising the temperature of the water, as depicted in the image on the right, and as further described at the feedbacks page as feedback #14.

Sea ice can reflect as much as 90% of the sunlight back into space. Once the ice has melted away, the water of the ocean reflects only 6% of the incoming solar radiation and absorbs the rest. Albedo change is depicted in above image as feedback #1. As Professor Peter Wadhams once calculated, warming due to Arctic snow and ice loss could more than double the net warming now caused by all emissions by all people of the world.

Professor Peter Wadhams on albedo changes in the Arctic, image from Edge of Extinction

Once the sea ice has disappeared, a lot more energy will get absorbed by the Arctic Ocean, i.e. energy that was previously reflected back into space and energy that previously went into changing ice into water.

Furthermore, as the sea ice disappears, chances increase that storms will develop that come with rain and winds that can batter and push the remaining sea ice out of the Arctic Ocean, while storms can also increase the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere and the occurrence of cirrus clouds that can trap heat.

Methane is a further feedback, depicted as feedback #2 in the image further above. As the water of the Arctic Ocean gets warmer, the danger increases that heat will reach hydrates at the seafloor and that this will trigger release of huge amounts of methane, in an additional self-reinforcing feedback loop that will make warming in the Arctic accelerate further and that threatens to escalate into a third kind of warming, i.e. runaway warming. Peter Wadhams co-authored a study that calculated that methane release from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean could yield 0.6°C warming of the planet in 5 years (see video at earlier post).

As above image shows, methane on July 8, 2016, reached levels as high as 2655 ppb. Such high levels typically occur due to methane hydrates getting destabilized. As the sea ice disappears, the situation could get worse rapidly, as illustrated by the images below.

July 5, 2016, sea surface was as warm as 17.1°C / 62.7°F at green circle, i.e. 13.7°C / 24.7°F warmer than 1981-2011. 

These high sea surface temperature anomalies are the result of warmer water getting carried by the Gulf Stream below the sea surface of the Atlantic Ocean into the Arctic Ocean. The water carried into the Arctic Ocean is both warmer and saltier than the water at the surface, as the fresh cold meltwater forms a lid at the surface. At areas around Svalbard where the sea is rather shallow, the warmer water comes to the surface. These high anomalies thus indicate how much warmer the water now is that is entering the Arctic Ocean, as discussed in earlier posts such as this one.

image from previous post

The rapid recent rise in ocean heat is illustrated by above image, showing that oceans on the Northern Hemisphere in May 2015 through April 2016 were 0.93°C warmer than the 20th century average, whereas for the equivalent 2012 period the anomaly was merely 0.46°C. In other words, there now is more ocean heat, making the possibility of methane hydrates destabilization more threatening.

Meanwhile, the speed at which the Arctic is warming is changing the jet streams, as discussed by Paul Beckwith in the video below, following Paul's earlier video that's included in an earlier post.

There are many indications that changes to the climate are accelerating, causing extreme weather events to hit with increasing strength and intensity. Water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas and for each degree Celsius that temperatures rise, the atmosphere can hold 7% more water vapor, which will also lead to stronger storms such as cyclones. On the image below, typhoon Nepartak is approaching Taiwan, with wind speed as high as 103 mph or 165 km/h, and with cloud water as much as 9 kg per square m on July 7, 2016.

Nepartak approaching Taiwan on July 7, 2016, with wind speed as high as 103 mph or 165 km/h (left panel), and with cloud water as much as 9 kg per square m (right panel)

NASA image

According to NASA, very powerful storms near the center of Nepartak's circulation were found to be dropping rain at a rate of over 193 mm (7.6 inches) per hour. Tall thunderstorms called "hot towers" were found to reach heights of 17.0 km (about 10.5 miles).

The image on the right shows a thermal image of Typhoon Nepartak on July 7 at 17:45 UTC. The colder the cloud tops, the higher they are in the troposphere and the stronger the storms.

On July 7, 2016, at 1500 UTC, Nepartak's maximum sustained winds had reached 150 knots (172.6 mph/ 277.8 kph), generating waves as high as 48 feet (14.6 meters).

Strong storms can bring water vapor high up into the stratosphere, contributing to the formation of cirrus clouds that trap a lot of heat that would otherwise be radiated away, from Earth into space.

Altogether, the combined global temperature rise due to global warming and feedbacks could exceed 10°C or 18°F within a decade, as discussed in previous posts such as this one.

The situation is dire and calls for comprehensive and effective action as described in the Climate Plan.

Links

• The North Geographic Pole, the North Magnetic Pole and the North Geomagnetic Pole
http://wdc.kugi.kyoto-u.ac.jp/poles/polesexp.html

• Three Kinds of Warming in the Arctic
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2016/02/three-kinds-of-warming-in-arctic.html

• NASA: Napartak (July 9, 2016)
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/napartak-nw-pacific-ocean

• Jim Pettit Climate Graphs
http://iwantsomeproof.com/3d/siv-ds-weekly-3d.asp

Here’s a chance for the Tory selectorate to prove they’re not just right-wing shadows of Momentum.  Will they take it?

1.              The Tory grassroots voted overwhelmingly for Leave.  Theresa May didn’t.

2.              The Tory grassroots is as representative of the electorate as a whole as your slightly loopy grandparents who are appalled at all these gays and rather regret having to leave the 1950s.  Andrea Leadsom voted unapologetically against gay marriage.

3.              The Leave campaign which received so many Tory votes was notable for  a number of porkies which quickly became apparent after they won – the most obvious being that £350 million pounds a week that isn’t going to fund the NHS because it doesn’t actually exist.

4.              Andrea Leadsom has had to busily revise her CV because the original, declaring her to have managed million pound investment funds and manage hundreds of people in major teams, wasn’t actually quite 100% accurate.  Turns out she didn’t.  Do either.

5.              Tory grassroots occasionally latch on to genuinely loopy ideas, like the one that suggests we’d all be much happier paying privately for our health care.  One of Andrea Leadsom’s signature policies is to do with babies’ brains.  No, I’m not entirely sure either.

6.              After the hustings when Andrea competed against four other Tory MPs, one cabinet minister noted that “only four of them were sane”.  Don’t know who he meant.

7.              Theresa May once suggested that people saw the Tories as “the nasty party”.  Ooops.

8.              Andrea Leadsom dislikes gays, isn’t keen on Europe, is distinctly incurious about the world around her, is a social reactionary, thinks the EU is just going to hand us a great deal on a plate and, in the words of the great right-wing commentator Douglas Murray, confuses stubbornness for principle.   Tory members are cut from an entirely different cloth.

9.               Andrea Leadsom has no appeal to young people (Young Tories who wear bow-ties don’t count).  Neither does the Tory party.

10.          So, over to 150,000 Tory electors for the choice of our next Prime Minister.  Looks like a clear wrap for Theresa May (erm….).  Glad we’ve all managed to “take back control” though. Wouldn’t like to think what would happen to Britain if those meddlesome Eurocrats were in charge with their silly ideas on regulation, open borders and international co-operation.  Hurrah for democracy.

Embed from Getty Images

The Chilcot Report is, as expected, damning of Tony Blair's government and its decision to support America in a war of invasion  against Iraq.  There isn't much that is positive to be taken away from the report, from the war's inception, to its execution and through to its long drawn out, disastrous aftermath.

But Blair did not act alone.  Indeed, it is his slavish desire to show solidarity with the American administration and inability to temper - even a little - that administration's determination on war that is such a contributory factor in his overall failure.

Chilcot is damning about the awful aftermath of the invasion in Iraq.  As well he should be.  But the real responsibility - if we accept that Blair was a mere cipher in this regard - lay with the ultimate planners of the war, and none was more involved than George W Bush's Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.

It is worth briefly recounting why the Iraq invasion turned that country into such a ruinous state in so rapid a time.

Once determined on war, Donald Rumsfeld was also determined that it should be fought with as few men as possible.  Having scythed through Baghdad, Rumsfeld’s forces were then confronted with a horrendous security operation, and faced with the Secretary’s unyielding demand that this too be undertaken with the most underwhelming force possible.  Rumsfeld, indeed, even stopped one division from going to Baghdad at all, in the belief that it was an unnecessary expenditure. 

The man in the Pentagon thus hamstrung the very forces he had sent into Iraq right from the start. There was worse to come, though, in the form of his sweeping aside of the cautious but politically aware team of American reconstructionists who were in Baghdad and headed by Jay Garner, in favour of the brash, arrogant and wholly unsuited Paul Bremer.  Bremer, a man of supreme egoism who likened himself to General MacArthur, insisted on complete authority to run Iraq.  It couldn’t have gone to a less qualified individual.  Bremer had no knowledge whatever of the Middle East – unlike Garner and his team, or the Iraqi originally slated to be a co-leader, Zalmay Khalilzad.  His foreign experience had been as a chief of staff to Henry Kissinger, and an ambassador to the Netherlands.  It was this lack of any prior involvement in Mid East affairs that endeared him to the ever cretinous Rumsfeld. 

Bremer arrived in May 2003 to an urgent need to establish some sort of authority in Baghdad. His predecessors, Garner and Khalilzad, had been making some useful moves to incorporate previous Iraqi civil servants and military commanders into a new governing authority.  Bremer swept this aside, since he had arrived determined to stamp his authority on Baghdad by dismissing the whole of Saddam Hussein’s political and military structure.  His first order was thus to bar the top four levels of Saddam’s Baath Party from holding any government office.  As the CIA station chief in Baghdad noted, Bremer had just disenfranchised 30,000 people.

Bremer’s Order No 2 was even more catastrophic.  Despite the talks that had been going on between Garner and Khalilzad and potentially sympathetic Iraqi army commanders, Bremer’s order – drafted by former Clinton aide Walter Slocombe – removed the entire military structure that had existed under Saddam.  The reaction in Iraq was furious, with angry demonstrations in Baghdad and other cities; sixteen US soldiers were wounded by violent protests in Mosul, a matter of particular annoyance to General Petraeus whose forces had up to that point been making some headway in winning over the city’s population.  And if Order No 1 had sent 30,000 officials to unexpected unemployment, Order No 2 did the same for 300,000 well armed soldiers.  It is no surprise to discover that many of those soldiers formed the nucleus of the Islamic Army of Iraq and Syria that is causing so much grief today.

Bremer’s orders, confirmed by Rumsfeld, were ill considered and destructive, but even the logic on which they were based was flawed, not least because Bremer failed to make even the most cursory investigation of the country he had come to rule.  Had he done so, he would have discovered that the Iraqi army’s top ranks had far fewer Baathists than he had thought.  A mere half of the generals,  and only 8,000 of the 140,000 officers and NCO’s were committed Baath Party members.  The Iraqi officers who had been in discussions with Garner and Khalilzad knew this, but Bremer had dismissed their contribution out of hand.  He ended up pursuing de-Baathification of a military that hadn’t needed it. 

There is a final indication – and perhaps an appropriate one – of Paul Bremer’s mendacious ignorance of Iraq and Arab culture.  He and Slocombe had devised a scheme to replace the Iraqi military with a ‘New Iraqi Corps’.  NIC, when pronounced in Arabic, sounds very much like “fuck”.  It is a fitting commentary on a man who has retired into a peaceful life of painting and lecturing in the bucolic countryside of Vermont while the reverberations of his ill-thought out and gung-ho policies continue to condemn thousands of Iraqis to death, torture, or – often at best – a wretched existence carved out in the midst of slaughter, and fear of the ISIL monster which has filled the vacuum he created.   Mr. Rumsfled may not have been in favour of imposing democracy.  The trouble is, he doesn't appear to have been in favour of imposing anything at all.

The book “Cobra II” by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor (chapter 24) provides much of the narrative detail referred to above.

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The Tories are in a better position than the Labour party as they will undoubtedly quickly unite behind a new leader come September.  The question is, who will that leader be and what does it mean for British politics?  At a time when the Labour party is incapable of providing any clear opposition and the Liberal Democrats remain an irrelevance, the choice of Tory leader is crucial for the country. Sadly, the country doesn't choose.  A few thousand Tory activists do.

Forget the MP tallies in the parliamentary vote for the moment.  That they will put Theresa May through with a substantial - even overwhelming - majority supporting her seems likely (at the moment - though the last week has emphasised the unpredictable nature of politics).  Andrea Leadsom looks well set to be her competitor in the run-off amongst party activists.

And here's the thing.  Leadsom may be relatively new to the party, while May has racked up immense service in the voluntary party even before she went into parliament.  But if you have a look at the way the wind is blowing the activists think they could have found their new Thatcher, and it's not the estimable Mrs. May.

The Conservative Home site remains a useful - though admittedly not infallible - bell-weather inidcator of Tory grassroots opinion.  While the focus of the media commentariat is still on the vote amongst Tory MPs, the key vote, the activist vote, is being monitored by Conservative Home.  It shows a serious movement in Andrea Leadsom's favour, as she edges past Theresa May.

A previous poll from the ConHome panel showed Michael Gove as the firm favourite a mere few weeks ago, and even after his dire week he is still holding up well in third place.  The message for the May faction, however, is that they are nowhere near victory in this race.  While she may seem to the non-Conservative onlooker to embody many of the characteristics of a classic Tory leader - strong on national security and law and order, fiscally sound, compassionate but only to a degree, socially pretty conservative in most areas - she has a serious weakness as far as the grassroots vote is concerned.  Two, actually.

The most serious is that, for all her strengths of character and her low profile in the EU campaign, she is a Remainer.  Yes, she has announced that Brexit is it, Brexit is the way.  But the Tory grassroots were implacably for Brexit over many years.  Their euro-scepticism stymied the frequent attempts of the Tories' most popular national politician, Ken Clarke, to become leader.  Their implicit support for the regular bouts of euro-sceptic rebellion undermined John Major and gave rise to David Cameron's catastrophic referendum decision.  They are socially very conservative and tend to a more isolationist global outlook.  And they want someone who reflects their image.  By endorsing the EU, Theresa May has significantly distorted that comforting reflection.

Second, no matter how quietly (again), Theresa May did support gay marriage.  In the metropolitan, EU supporting part of Britain that is a good thing.  In the Conservative Party, it is a cause of real suspicion.  Before the referendum, nothing alienated David Cameron more from his own party members than his promotion of gay marriage, and it remains significant that he chooses that as one of his signature achievements.

If Theresa May had been facing off a candidate with similar socially liberal tendencies this might not have mattered.  Her support for the EU would still be a stumbling block, but against a Johnson or a Gove there is a chance that her steadier personality and the perception that she is a tough defender of British interests might still have pulled her through.

But May won't be against either of those men.  She will be against a woman who reminds the Tory electorate more than she does herself of their most potent icon.  Margaret Thatcher.

Leadsom is a grassroots member's dream.  They love the fact that she has been "in finance" for over 25 years since nothing screeches success to Tory members more than the ability to make a killing over a long period in the financial markets.  They fully embrace her euro-scepticism, and as the key male leaders of that campaign fall like dominoes, Leadsom's own over-rated role becomes ever more important.  She was a true believer when it still looked like a lost cause.  And she opposed gay marriage.  She will face hostile questioning from a metropolitan media about that, and all the people on social media who aren't members of the Tory party may excoriate her for it, but it is a significant point of unspoken attraction for Tory members.  If homosexual attraction used to be the love that dare not speak its name, genuine hostility towards gay people is the attitude that dare not speak its name within the Tory party.

I would rate Leadsom's chances, over a summer campaign, of gaining a majority of the small Tory grassroots vote as being much better than average.  This race may look like May's to lose, but her star rose only recently, benefitted from Westminster shenanigans, and could dip again as the brighter meteorite of a more clearly Thatcherite lady takes centre stage.

Forget Westminster.  Like the referendum before it, this race is decided amongst ordinary people who have never been plugged in to the Westminster conversation.

The image below shows that Arctic sea ice extent on July 3, 2016, was 8,707,651 square km, i.e. less than the 8.75 million square km that extent was on July 3, 2012.

In September 2012, Arctic sea ice extent reached a record low. Given that extent now is only slightly lower than it was in 2012 at the same time of year, can extent this year be expected to reach an even lower minimum, possibly as low as zero ice in September 2016?

The ice this year is certainly headed in that direction, given that the sea ice now is much thinner than it was in 2012. The image below shows sea ice thickness on July 7, 2012, in the left-hand panel, and adds a forecast for July 7, 2016 in the right-hand panel.

Besides being thinner, sea ice now is also much more slushy and fractured into small pieces. The animation below shows that the sea ice close to the North Pole on July 4, 2016, was heavily fractured into pieces that are mostly smaller in size than 10 x 10 km or 6.2 x 6.2 miles. By comparison, sea ice in the same area did develop large cracks in 2012, but even in September 13, 2012, it was not broken up into small pieces.

One big reason behind the dire state the sea ice is in now is ocean heat. On July 2, 2016, sea surface near Svalbard (at the location marker by the green circle) was as warm as 16.7°C or 62.1°F, i.e. 13.5°C or 24.3°F warmer than 1981-2011. This gives an indication how much warmer the water is that is entering the Arctic Ocean.

As the sea ice disappears, less sunlight gets reflected back into space, resulting in additional warming of the Arctic Ocean. In October 2016, the sea ice will return, sealing off the Arctic Ocean, resulting in less heat being able to escape, at the very time the warmest water is entering the Arctic Ocean from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The danger of this situation is that a large amount of heat will reach the seafloor and destabilize hydrates, resulting in huge abrupt methane releases that will further contribute to warming. When adding in further factors such as discussed e.g. at this earlier post, this adds up to a potential temperature rise of more than 10°C or 18°F compared to pre-industrial times in less than ten years time from now.

The situation is dire and calls for comprehensive and effective action, as described at the Climate Plan.