NextGen Climate is releasing a new ad during tonight’s World Series. Here it is, narraged by Woody Harrelson and directed by Darren Aronofsky:
Tag Archives: Climate Change
Candidates dodge & deny threat of climate change
The debate is over. The scientific consensus is that anthropogenic global warming is real. But GOP politicians either don’t get that or are willing to lie about it. LOL GOP:
Climate Science Ice Bucket Challenge The Complete Collection
I am going to try to keep all the climate science ice bucket challenges here as they occur. At present there are quite a few individuals who have not yet answered the challenge. I’m sure they will. Some of them, in the Northern Hemisphere, may be waiting for it to get colder so the act becomes more meaningful.
Anyway, here’s what we’ve got now. If I’m missing someone, please add a link in the comments!
It all started with Andy Lee Robinson “Arctic Sea Ice Death Spiral” challenge…
Andy donates to the Dark Snow Project and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, challenges David Rose, Paul Beckwith, and Jason Box.
Jason Box “Arctic Sea Ice Bucket Challenge” Dark Snow Project
donates to ALS, challenges Peter Sinclair, Dane Nuccitelli, John Cook
Peter Sinclair, sternly, of “This is not Cool”, for the Yale Forum on Climate Change…
donates to ALS, the Dark Snow Project and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. Challenges: Everyone! Plus, Jeff Masters, Rob Honeycutt and Mauri Pelto
Dana Nuccitelli of the Guardian
… donates to ALS, the Dark Snow Project and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. Challenges Michael Mann, Katharine Hayhoe, and Kevin Cowtan.
Mauri Pelto, doing a stylish striptease…
…donates to Challenges Tom Hammond, Olier Grah, Megan Pelto.
Kevin Cowtan, imported Ice to carry out the challenge…
… and donates to ALS, the Dark Snow Project and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. Challenges Mark Richardson, Robert Way, and Catie Murphy.
John Cook of Skeptical Science …
… donates to ALS, the Dark Snow Project and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. He challenges Stephan Lewandowsky, John Bruno and Gavin Cawley.
Stephan Lewandowsky appears to get away…
… with meeting the challenge and not getting wet. Or does he?
Judith Curry Scores Own Goal in Climate Hockey
Did you ever read a textbook on economic history, or an in-depth article on the relative value of goods over the centuries expressed in current US dollars? Have you ever encountered a graphic that shows long term trends in rainfall patterns or other climate variables, using a couple of simple lines, designed to give a general idea of relative conditions during different eras? Here are a few examples of what I’m talking about.
This is a graphic made by a major investment firm culling information from dozens or perhaps hundreds of sources into a single graphic. This is the graphic as it was initially provided by the researchers
This is a graph of oxygen concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere. It is culled from a large number of different sources. This is the graphic, based on numerous proxyindicattors, as published in a peer reviewed paper:
This is a compilation from many different sources of stock market values assembled to show waves in stock market behavior over the last few centuries:
This is a set of climate related variables show in relation to human “civilization” over 18,000 years (n.b.: the term “civilization” is reserved in archaeology and prehistory for specific phenomena which did not occur before about 10,000 years ago).
In all these cases complex sources were culled in the peer reviewed literature 0r professional research literature, and turned into summary views of something happening over time. The graph itself is meant to show a derived variable, not the underlying complexity of the data. The graph is the sausage. The making of the sausage is laid out in the original documents, in some case in the peer reviewed paper the graphic appears in.
Here, Judith Curry makes the argument, in an excessively tl;dr blog post, that climate scientist Michael Mann acted inappropriately, perhaps fraudulently, or perhaps as a matter of scientific misconduct, when the IPCC published a version of his famous Hockey Stick Graph that instead of looking like this:
Looked like this:
For the record, here is the original version of that graphic from the peer reviewed paper. Note that it indicates where the data come from but that was back in the late 20th century when in order to have color graphics in your paper you had to hire monks to draw them and there weren’t any monks available.
And here is the same graph in a similar updated paper a year later, looking much better:
And, at the time of the publication, owing to the costs of monks and such, color versions of the graphics were made available. This is what anyone who wanted to could look at at the time:
Mann’s graphic representation of climate change, the Hockey Stick, is not fraudulent. But it is verified, real, and important. There are people in the climate discussion who make up graphs, of course (see this) but Mann is not one of them.
So Judith Curry and the flock of winged monkeys and child molesters that comment on her blog are arguing that Mann carried out scientific misconduct when he did something that is normal to do, and in fact, that he didn’t actually do. This is an “own goal” for Curry because it is a clear cut case of making up a version of reality in order to denigrate a fellow scientist and discredit his research on the basis of color coding rather than the science. Curry has credentialed herself a denialist.
(Related: Curry’s Credibility Crumbles by Climate Hawks.)
That. Is. Science. Denialism. Welcome to the list, Judith.
By the way have a look at this image:
If you ever see an image like this used by a climate science denialist, ACCUSE THEM OF FRAUD AND MISCONDUCT because this graph shows NOTHING about the multiple sources used to create the single black line squiggle therefore it is ILLEGAL.
Sorry… I get carried away sometimes. Anyway, I have a pro tip for those who are following along with the climate change discussion: Individuals who study climate change from any perspective (as a climate change scientist, some other kind of scientist, policy maker, communicator, interested citizen) should realize that some depictions or summaries are underlain by extensive and complex literature. A proper scholarly approach, even by an avocational scholar or journalist, requires keeping that in mind and digging beneath the surface where needed. So if you see a monochromatic hockey stick like curve, or any climate squiggle, hopefully there is a reference to where it comes from and then you can dig around and reconstruct the scholarship, if you are reasonably smart, reasonably diligent, not lazy, and well intentioned.
Or you can be one of Judith Curry’s followers and just whine about it.
Finally, here’s a recent version of the Hockey Stick Graph showing the many ways it has been verified. Checkmate, denialists.
Added: Judith Curry Picks A Cheery…
Climate Change Increases Frequency and Intensity of Wildfires
I don’t like the messaging Holdren almost always seems to start with: “While we can’t attribute a single bla bla bla to climate change” (it is not the right way to phrase what is happening, this is a good video just out:
The Consensus on Climate Change
Sadly, a large percentage of Americans are under the impression that climate scientists do not agree on the reality of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). A lot of people are simply wrong about this. They think that there is a great deal of controversy among the scientists who study the Earth’s climate. But there isn’t. One way we know this is from a study done by John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce, called “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature”
In that study, the authors analyzed “the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11,944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’.” They learned that “66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming.” Among the papers that expressed a scientific position on the topic, “97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”
The study was actually a bit conservative, as in order to be counted as part of that ~3% not supporting the consensus position on AGW a paper did not really have to be fully against the idea. Also, since the study was done, the consensus has increased. I asked study author Dana Nuccitelli about more recent changes in consensus, and he told me, “The consensus is growing over time, and reached 98% in 2011 (the last year included in our survey). So by now the minimizers/deniers are probably in the 1-2% range in the peer-reviewed literature (contrary to the ‘crumbling consensus’ claims).”
The other day I was giving talks at a local high school, and between classes, found myself chatting with a science teacher who had just completed a module on climate change and AGW. She asked me, “Isn’t there now research that shows that the consensus isn’t really as high as previously thought? Or is that bogus? Sounds bogus to me.”
Yes. Bogus.
I’m not sure what research the teacher was referring to (it was just something she had heard about) but there is a paper just published in “Energy Policy” by economist Richard Tol, who as far as I can tell has been a naysayer of climate science for some time now. Tol’s abstract says:
A claim has been that 97% of the scientific literature endorses anthropogenic climate change… This claim, frequently repeated in debates about climate policy, does not stand. A trend in composition is mistaken for a trend in endorsement. Reported results are inconsistent and biased. The sample is not representative and contains many irrelevant papers. Overall, data quality is low. Cook’s validation test shows that the data are invalid. Data disclosure is incomplete so that key results cannot be reproduced or tested.
Nuccitelli has responded to Tol’s paper, in a post at Skeptical Science called “Richard Tol accidentally confirms the 97% global warming consensus.”
Concern Tol-ing
Tol is practicing a special kind of science denialism here, sometimes called “seeding doubt” or as I prefer it, “casting seeds of doubt on infertile ground.” In other contexts this is called “concern trolling” or the “You’re not helping” gambit. The first of two paragraphs of the Conclusion section of Tol’s paper reads (emphasis added),
The conclusions of Cook et al. are thus unfounded. There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct. Cook et al., however, failed to demonstrate this. Instead, they gave further cause to those who believe that climate researchers are secretive (as data were held back) and incompetent (as the analysis is flawed).
Let’s get straight that Cook et al is not flawed, despite Tol’s complaints.
Tol’s main complaint is in the coding of the abstracts. He claims that it is imperfect. Well, duh. This is, essentially, social science research, and coding of text is imperfect. Tol makes the claim that the imperfections, if corrected, might bring the consensus down to a dismal 91%. I’m pretty sure he’s wrong about that, but if he is right, we are not impressed.
Tol’s key point is that the papers that are coded as not making a claim include some that do. He then incorrectly calculates how many of of those, if coded “correctly” there would be, and using this, downgrades the consensus to 91%
Nuccitelli explains in detail, in his post, how Tol’s re-analysis is badly done (see the amazing graphic at the top of this post) (go read it) and notes:
In reality, as our response to Tol’s critique (accepted by Energy Policy but not yet published) shows, there simply aren’t very many peer-reviewed papers that minimize or reject human-caused global warming. Most of the papers that were reconciled ‘towards stronger rejection’ went from explicit to implicit endorsement, or from implicit endorsement to no position. For abstracts initially rated as ‘no position,’ 98% of the changes were to endorsement categories; only 2% were changed to rejections.
Nuccitelli also notes that a separate study indicates that Tol’s method is flawed in the sense that no matter what data are used, the consensus will be decreased as an artifact of the methodology. Nuccitelli notes “…by making this mistake, Tol effectively conjured approximately 300 papers rejecting or minimizing human-caused global warming out of thin air, with no evidence that those papers exist in reality. As a result, his consensus estimate falls apart under cursory examination.”
Amazingly, when the Consensus research team fixed Tol’s methodology but applied the same question about coding papers in the no-position category, and re-calculated the percent consensus, it went up by 0.1%. Also, as Nuccitelli points out the Cook et al paper is not alone, and there have been a number of other studies that show essentially the same level of consensus among papers and/or scientists.
So, the consensus is real and isn’t going away. As is also the case with Anthropogenic Global Warming.
A Call To Arms about Climate Change
Tens of millions of red blooded Americans, Tea Partiers, were called to Washington DC the other day to overthrow the government. A few hundreds or so showed up.
Now, Bill McKibben, of 350.org, is calling Americans to New York City, not to overthrow the government but to talk some sense into it. I’ll bet more than a few hundred people show up!
McKibben wrote an item for Rolling Stones that you should read HERE.
This is an invitation, an invitation to come to New York City. An invitation to anyone who’d like to prove to themselves, and to their children, that they give a damn about the biggest crisis our civilization has ever faced.
My guess is people will come by the tens of thousands, and it will be the largest demonstration yet of human resolve in the face of climate change. Sure, some of it will be exciting – who doesn’t like the chance to march and sing and carry a clever sign through the canyons of Manhattan? But this is dead-serious business, a signal moment in the gathering fight of human beings to do something about global warming before it’s too late to do anything but watch. You’ll tell your grandchildren, assuming we win. So circle September 20th and 21st on your calendar, and then I’ll explain.
350.org has a page devoted to the march, HERE. Please click through and get busy!
The Facebook Page is HERE.
The image above is from an earlier march, details here.
Energy Connections: Shocking climate change vs. shocking solar power
One of the most important realizations of climate change research is exemplified in this graphic from Weather Uderground:
The point is this. The PETM (Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, millions of years ago) was a period of high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere which caused significant warming. It is an example of both relatively rapid and intense climate change caused by CO2 acting as a greenhouse gas. The red line is, of course, our current estimated rate of change given current rates of release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere. This gives scientists pause because the rate of change in a system is often a more significant factor than the state of a system after the change. A simple example is motion. Assume you are standing on a commuter train moving at 50 km/h. If the train suddenly sped up to 100 km/h it might knock you down and even cause injury. But if the train increased its speed by 1 or 2 km/h every minute or so, you would not even notice and eventually you would be cruising along happily at double the speed.
It isn’t just the high rate of change in climate that concerns us. It is also the fact that this rate of change has never been observed in nature; we have no record of such a rapid and large change happening in the paleo record. For many aspects of the Earth’s climate system, we simply don’t know what would happen under such rapid change because there is no point of reference, no precedent, for such a thing.
But there is another graph that also shows a very high rate of change, in a different system, that may allow us to feel a bit better. One way to avoid such an increase in release of fossil Carbon is to rapidly transition to non-Carbon sources of energy such as solar. One way for that to happen is if solar energy become economically more viable very quickly. Ideally, the rate of change in the economic viability of solar energy would be very fast, enough to knock you off your metaphorical feet. And, apparently, that is the case. From a study described here:
There are caveats, as noted. But solar power is, seemingly going to have its day in the sun sooner than later.
Will Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos be a turning point in science denialism?
Neil DeGrasse Tyson on CNN:
And while we are on the topic, Carl Sagan, of the original Cosmos, on climate change:
See also this from Chris Mooney at Mother Jones.
And just for the heck of it, here’s my interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson from 2011.
Using the Bible to Resist Climate Change Action
From Climate Desk:
How high can the sea level rise if all the glacial ice melted?
NOTE: I’ve rewritten this post and redone the graphic. The original map on which I based the reconstruction, provided by the USGS, is distinctly different than the one the USGS provides today. The difference is, in fact, rather dramatic. In comparing the older and newer versions of the maps, I have decided to assume the later, more recent, version is more correct. I admit to being a little annoyed at the USGS providing a truly bogus map on their web site, but that is water under the bridge, as it were. So, the following post is edited a bit and a new graphic is provided. Thanks to wehappyfew for pointing out the likely error on the map.
There have been times in the past when there was very little ice trapped in glaciers. During this time, sea levels were higher because that water was in the ocean (most of it, anyway). It has been a long time since then. However, with global warming, more and more glacial ice is returning to the sea and this contributes to sea level rise.
The amount of fossil carbon that needs to be released into the atmosphere to cause most of the glacial ice to melt is not known. We can’t directly use ancient time periods to assess modern sea level rise by measuring the sea levels from those periods because there has been too much other stuff going on in ocean basins and along current coast lines. But, we can estimate that there was very little glacial ice during, for example, the early Eocene, and the transition of Carbon in the atmosphere to the formation of glaciers might be under 800 ppm. So, if we double the current amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, maybe that would melt all the glaciers. There was more methane in the air at that time as well, but we are releasing plenty of methane as we also release Carbon, so that’s not much of a problem. The biggest factor is probably this: The configuration of continents have changed since that time to increase the likelihood of glacial formation at the poles, so returning to some Eocene (or other) atmospheric CO2 value may result in much less melting. But that’s OK, because we can certainly increase the amount of carbon to more than around 800 ppm!
If we release CO2 at approximately modern rates (baed on population size), and have population increase up to a point, thus increasing CO2 release (in other words, do nothing significant to mitigate Carbon release, increase the number of people actively releasing it, and population goes up towards 8 or so billion) we can reach over 1000 ppm by 2300 AD, or sooner. That’s surely enough to melt most of the glaciers except bits and pieces in the coldest regions of Antarctica.
It is estimated (see this web page.) that there is about 80 meters of ocean trapped in glacial ice. There are plenty of web sites out there that allow you to add ocean height to see how coastal regions would change, but the ones I know about don’t go to 80 meters. So, to find out what North America would look like, I found a map that has pixels to indicate altitude, with different colors representing topography, at a fine enough level to work with.
The USGS has a map with color coded topography. There is a color break at 60 meters, which is much less than the maximum possible sea level rise. The next break is at 114 meters. That is higher than sea levels will rise. However, if sea level rises to about 80 meters, it will do so unevenly (it may, for example, be much higher in the Carolinas). Then, as sea level rises, the land will be pushed down various amounts by the weight of the water, so 80 meters might be considered a minimum estimate of rise in some areas. Even more important, I suspect, erosion would cause important changes. If you look at, say, a 60 meter topo line in a region made of something other than hard rock, you have to assume that transgression of the sea including the effects of erosion would move way inland in some cases, beyond that topo line.
So, since we are at present looking for an 80 meter contour line easily located on the right scale map, and we only have 60 and 114, but the real contour line we are probably looking for is higher than 80, we could round UP to 114. But that would almost certainly depict inundation of areas that won’t actually be inundated. So, what I’ve decided to do is to put the ocean at 60 meters, then make a grey area (to reflect, well, this being a grey area!) between 60 meters and 114 meters. With ALL of the ice melted, the shoreline will likely be somewhere in this grey area, probably covering all of it (and more?) along the south coast and probably much less in Maine. Either way, Florida is toast. Wet soggy toast.
Also, I decided to focus in on this map a bit and depict the US east of the Rockies. At this scale, the west coast is fairly uninteresting using this method (the continental margin is right at the coast, so it is very steep). And, the transgression effect, the sea moving laterally across the land after a rise, is probably very locally variable and unpredictable there anyway.
One of the interesting things I discovered is that when defining the zone between 60 and 114 meters, that turns out to be a fairly narrow strip along much of the coast. This is what one would expect if somewhere in that zone is the original high strandline from the last time sea levels were that high (a few million years ago or so). So that’s cool.
This is a VERY ROUGH approximation. Just for fun.
“It is not my job to learn the science. It is my job to call for the execution of scientists”*
… James Delingpole’s Hate Speech in the UK Telegraph
This is James Delingpole demonstrating his prowess when it comes to understanding and commenting on climate science. Dellingpole is the one on our right:
OK, now that we’ve established Delingpole to be a misinformed misguided intellectual lighweight, let’s look at his latest piece from the UK Telegraph:
Should Michael Mann be given the electric chair for having concocted arguably the most risibly inept, misleading, cherry-picking, worthless and mendacious graph – the Hockey Stick – in the history of junk science?
Should George Monbiot be hanged by the neck for his decade or so’s hysterical promulgation of the great climate change scam and other idiocies too numerous to mention?
Should Tim Flannery be fed to the crocodiles for the role he has played in the fleecing of the Australian taxpayer and the diversion of scarce resources into [bla bla bla]It ought to go without saying that my answer to all these questions is – *regretful sigh* – no…. it would be counterproductive, ugly, excessive and deeply unsatisfying.
The last thing I would want is for Monbiot, Mann, Flannery, Jones, Hansen and the rest of the Climate rogues’ gallery to be granted the mercy of quick release. Publicly humiliated? Yes please.[bla bla bla] But hanging? Hell no. Hanging is far too good for such ineffable toerags.
… it would be nice to think one day that there would be a Climate Nuremberg. But please note, all you slower trolls beneath the bridge, that when I say Climate Nuremberg I use the phrase metaphorically.
A metaphor, let me explain – I can because I read English at Oxford, dontcha know – is [bla bla bla]
… Our culture deserves better than to have the terms of debate dictated by malign, politically motivated, professional offence-takers….Let’s stop surrendering and start fighting back.
My only response to this (because I have more interesting things to do) is the following. Imagine a call for violence and death and so on such as this coming after, rather then before, some nut bag actually kills a climate scientist? Or, to put it in more realistic terms, imagine an analogous (you know what an analogy is, right?) stream of hate speech about, say, how bad Democrats are (by a Rush Limbaugh type character) just AFTER the Gabby Gifford shooting, or a rant from a frenzied fundy on how great it would be to kill abortion providers just AFTER such a doctor is killed, or a rant from some libertarian yahoo about how teachers and schools all suck and shooting a few would be beneficial just AFTER the Sandy Hook Massacre. Think about this and then go read this man’s hate post.
Delingpole’s rant is manic and over the top. Some are calling for the Telegraph to sack him. I’m not. I’m calling for his editors to sit down and speak with him about therapy options. I do think the calls for his removal are well grounded. I just think it should be plan B and not plan A.
Meanwhile, my friend Joe Romm, author of Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Apparently Delingpole thinks it is perfectly fine to “metaphorically” mark some politicians in cross-hairs. And the response to Palin’s misuse of the “blood libel” metaphor again underscores the fact that metaphors can hurt.
By the way, Delingpole’s whole notion that this is somehow a “liberal war on metaphor” is laughable. Who precisely gets so worked up over the term “denier,” arguing (weakly I believe) that the term inherently must connect one to a Holocaust denier?
What really is a difference between all of Delingpole’s noxious metaphors, including his wish for a “Climate Nuremberg” and the Heartland Institute comparing “Climate Science Believers And Reporters To Mass ‘Murderers And Madmen’
(click on over to Joe’s post to see the traphic he provides to illustrate this point)
Also, check out Delingpole’s main target, Nobel Laureate Professor Michael Mann’s twitter feed for his reaction.
*Note: The quote in the headline is a paraphrase. It’s a rhetorical device I learned in school.
Treatment of Climate Change and Hockey Stick Controversy in Wikipedia
The current Wikipedia entry for Climate Change has about 7000 words on that one page (including notes, all the other words that show up on Wikipedia pages). The current Wikipedia entry for the Hockey Stick Controversy has about 25,000 words in all.
The controversy over one aspect of climate change, the basic observation of temperature change known as the hockey stick graph, is certainly not more complex than, more important than, or harder to explain than climate change as a whole. Is this a failing of Wikipedia? A success for the Climate Science Deniers who are also hoping to have the conversation about “the controversy” be an order of magnitude lengthier in our schools than any discussion of climate change? A random occurrence? I’m thinking a little of all three.
25,000 vs 7,000. Holy crap. Would someone who works with Wikipedia please see to this? Thank you.
Climate and Weather: Does your TV weather reporter get it?
You hear, again again, that climate and weather are not the same thing. This has led to assertions such as “you can’t attribute a single weather event to climate change.” But climate and weather are not distinctly different. Climatologists and meteorologists have made statements like this because people do confuse and conflate current conditions and weather forecasts on one hand with climate systems and climate change observations and modeling on the other. Saying “climate and weather are not the same thing” is a convenient segue into a discussion of how certain conclusions may be invalid or at least, underpowered. For example, we have seen that certain types of American voters change their opinion about global climate change depending on the current weather. Those who self identify as Independents “believe in” climate change if had been unusually hot over the previous 48 hours, but if it had been cooler than expected over that period of time they don’t accept the truth of climate change as readily. This is conflating and confusing weather and climate in respect to one of the most important differences between the two: time scale.
Weather and climate can be thought of as two sides of the same coin. That analogy is limited but useful. So, if one is going to walk around with weather in one’s pocket, there’s going to be climate in there too, just like if you are going to walk around with maple leaves in your pocket there’s going to be some loons in there at the same time. One can also think of weather as the short term and, possibly, geographically smaller face of climate, the latter being big in time and space. Thus, thinking of the two as “not the same thing” would be like thinking of the tail of a tiger as not the same thing as a tiger. That is somewhat true but if you yank on the tail, there will be a tiger there asking questions about that.
Over the last several months, we have done a pretty good job of putting aside the incorrect notion that a particular weather event can’t be linked to climate change. There are minimally two ways that the two are linked for a given weather event. One is that a weather event is what it is because of energy (heat) in the air and on sea and land (but mainly sea) surfaces and the distribution of water vapor in the atmosphere. Both of these things, heat and water, are different now than they were 100 years ago, or 30 years ago, because of climate change. Therefore, every single weather event, being functions of heat and water distribution and dynamics, is different than previously because of climate change. Some say that the extra energy raises the baseline for weather, but I don’t like that analogy because it is directional. Raising the baseline sounds like everything will then be more of something, more of the same thing (more hot, more wet, for example). But in fact, weather with climate change can be more wet or more dry (really, both, at the same time but in different places, or both in the same place but at different times) because of the reconfiguration of the water cycle due to climate change. Same with heat. Under climate change, we have increased extremes of both heat and cold (though on average conditions are warmer, but you need to average things out to see that). So the “raised baseline” explanation makes it harder for people to understand both floods and droughts as well as both heat waves and cold snaps, as being more severe as a result of climate change.
Rather than referring to a raised baseline, I’d rather refer specifically to a change in the configuration of heat and water. That is more accurate and people can understand that. To use a more appealing metaphor, one could say that when the various elements of the climate system, as a committee of forces and raw materials, sits down at the table to make the weather these days, that committee consists of individuals with much more polarized attitudes so the result is a bigger range of outcomes. Classically, we anthropomorphize the elements, Old Man Winter, the North Winds, giants bowling in the sky; Under climate change these characters are feeling their oats and demanding more, and the result is less compromise and more fluctuation between extreme outcomes.
The baseline metaphor does work well for certain specific areas of climate, though. For example, as the ice melts every year and reforms on the Arctic Sea, the baseline of ice reduces every year (thus the loss of “old ice”). Or, the sea level rises due to melting glaciers and thermal expansion every year, so the baseline for storm surges and coastal flooding, as well as the twice daily high tide line, goes up over time.
The second major way that climate and weather are linked (not unrelated to the first) is through configuration of major features of the sea and air. This is more complicated, more unknown, more recent, and more scary in some ways. If you follow the news about hurricanes, you’ll hear about a hurricane or tropical storm out in the Atlantic, and notice that the National Weather Service has drawn a line showing where that hurricane will go over the next week or so. That’s pretty amazing when you think about it, given that over time hurricanes go in many different directions along many different paths. But somehow they know where it is going to go and they are generally pretty close to correct these days. They also know how strong or weak the hurricane will get over time.
The way they do this is by understanding the effects of huge masses of air, and the distribution of sea surface temperatures. The Earth’s layer of air is like the surface of a fast moving stream. If you look at the surface of a stream you’ll see that parts of the stream are up high, like a hill, and others are down low. If you look more closely, you’ll see that most of the low parts are moving faster than the high parts, and if there are eddies (whirlpools) they are in the low spots. One could think of the air as acting like this, where the high spots are high pressure systems and the low spots are low pressure systems. In the atmosphere those high areas tend to determine where the low areas are going to form and where they will move, and how fast. A hurricane is just one of the lows, but more concentrated in energy than most (and with a number of other differences). The highs, typically less “visible” to us mere earthlings looking out our window (those are the clear mild days) are mapped at large scale and their configuration used to plot the future course of the big storms. (This is an oversimplification that ignores, fore example, the very important effect of jet streams, which actually require math to understand. I have noticed that any atmospheric system that requires calculus to describe causes severe weather. Just sayin’.)
Although the air covering our planet is very different from a stream surface, it has high and low areas and if you know where everything is on one day, all the highs and lows, you can be sure they are not going to be too different the next day. We also know the direction in which these features will usually move. In other words, the distribution of high and low regions in the atmosphere is measurable and predictable, to a very large degree.
With climate change, the basic configuration of lows and highs changes. We have seen a fundamental change in the way air is distributed in the far north, around Canada, Siberia, and farther north to the Arctic. These days, the air does stuff … climate stuff … in that region fairly often that it used to do only occasionally. A result is that the distribution of warm and cool air is different, thus the heat waves and cold snaps. Another result is the direction in which low pressure systems get steered during certain times of the year and in certain regions; thus, Superstorm Sandy hitting New York and New Jersey. Superstorm Sandy, a hurricane, was supposed to turn right. All the other storms turn right. If a storm hits the Northeastern US it hits it from the south before turning right, but usually a glancing blow or as a much diminished storm. Sandy got big and turned left instead of getting smaller and veering right. Climate change caused that weather event.
I mentioned sea surface temperatures as one of the changes that affects the overall configuration of weather qualitatively and not just quantitatively. Not only is the surface of the ocean generally warmer, but where the warm spots are has changed. Recently, the Gulf Stream has stalled. This means that warm water that normally runs up the US coast and disperses across the North Atlantic is hanging around in the Western Atlantic longer, and that area thus get warmer. For this reason, any of those big tropical storms and hurricanes that normally go north and get weak are going to go north and stay strong, or even strengthen. Then, more of them will turn left instead of right because of the new configuration of air masses. This means that all those people who have moved from New York to Florida over the last 50 year to get near hurricanes can move back to the Northeast and still have their hurricanes!
You can see a pattern here. Climate change alters both quantitative and qualitative aspects of climate. Quantitative changes in weather involve more extreme temperatures (both hot and cold) and more extreme water related conditions (floods and droughts). Climate change alters the qualitative aspects of climate in such a way that what happens where and when has shifted. Quantitaviely, more North American spring and early storms may have more tornados; Qualitatively, tornado alley now includes a big swath of Canada, and Dixie alley (the southeastern tornado region) will probably have more “off season” storms. Quantitatively, we may have more tropical storms form or transition to hurricanes, and those hurricanes may be stronger than before. Qualitatively, where they go seems to have changed; Historically, a very large percentage of Atlantic hurricanes go north, turn right, weaken, and make Iceland and Svalbard foggy and wet, but now some of those storms will stay strong and turn left. We have yet to see if this will qualitatively alter Nor’easters, to bring them ashore more often, but quantitatively storms like Nemo are clearly more common than they were decades ago. The Great Storm of 78 was a once in a lifetime storm that was not expected to happen again any time soon. Since then, that sort of storm has become commonplace in New England.
And this all brings up a problem. For some reason, possibly innocent reasons possibly nefarious ones, many TV weather reporters, many of whom are meteorologists, have been on the denialism side of global warming. Here in Minnesota, we once had three main news stations with weather. One of them had a meteorologist who occasionally downplayed climate change (in those days, it was always called global warming) and even got snarky about it. Another weather reporter, who was a meteorologist, seemed to be quit open to the idea that climate was changing. (I never watched the third station so I don’t know what was going on there.) Over time, the former became a more vehement climate change denier, and the latter a more outspoken climate hawk. The former always gave good weather reports. The latter always gave outstanding weather reports. The former is still at his station reporting weather but I think he stopped talking about climate change. The latter is Paul Douglas, who to all Minnesotans is a hero and icon of intelligent weather forecasting.
Then a thing happened that often happens in Minnesota. We are a donor state to the rest of the country. We produce great local politicians, like Hubert Humphrey and Water Mondale, but then thy go off to the White House or Congress and become nationally important. A Minnesotan took the luke warm trend of putting the wheels on your skates in a row and turned that into Rollerblades, which the world has embraced. Many years ago a quiet non-assuming Minnesotan with a cabin on the lake strapped barrel staves to his feet and got his friend to try to pull him around behind the motorboat on a rope. Today, waterskiing is everywhere.
Paul Douglas left his post as meteorologist at WCCO (CBS) a few years ago, and at that point I pretty much stopped watching local news. WCCO still had Don Shelby, and I still had to watch the news for various reasons sometimes, but without Paul giving the weather, really, what’s the point? I can get mediocre weather from the Internet. But Paul had plans, apparently. He founded a new network which you may or may not have heard of called Weather Nation, which is now on several cable channels. It’s like the Weather Channel but different. I don’t get the Weather Channel but I do get Weather Nation, and that’s what I watch. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I tune in when Paul is doing one of his overviews, but usually it is someone else. He’s not the weather forecaster any more, he’s the owner. (And if you knew the details of how he got his start on TV that would be even more interesting!)
Paul raised a lot of interest in climate change when he published a “Message from a Republican Meteorologist on Climate Change” last year. Yes, there are some good Republicans. Well, there’s Paul, anyway. Do read the letter, and send it to all of your Republican friends and relatives!
Paul Douglas was one of a handful of meteorologists featured in a recent NPR report.
Last March, longtime Minnesota meteorologist Paul Douglas, founder of WeatherNationTV, posted an impassioned letter online urging his fellow Republicans to acknowledge that climate change is real.
“Other meteorologists actually emailed me and said, ‘Thanks for giving voice to something I’ve been thinking but was too afraid to say publicly,’ ” he says.
Douglas is part of a group pushing to tighten certification standards for meteorologists.
“If you’re going to talk about climate science on the air,” he says, you would “need to learn about the real science, and not get it off a talk show radio program or a website.”
(Here’s the audio of that report.)
What if. What if over the last few decades most of the TV meteorologists were Paul Douglas, or at least, like him. The general public would have been informed of climate change the best way possible, by understanding the nature of climate and how it is changing from the view of the local weather one experiences. That is possible and reasonable because climate and weather are not different things. They are two overlapping views of the way air and water on this planet work. If every TV meteorologists had been like Paul Douglas over the last 20 years, I’d venture to say we’d be 50 ppm of Carbon Dioxide lower than we are now and more on our way to a green economy. We’d have a chance to address this problem of climate change.
We can fix this whole thing with two simple devices: A time machine and a cloning machine. Somewhere in a small town in Minnesota, perhaps there is some innovative guy named Ollie Knutson working on that….
Wall Street Journal: Misleading Statistics in Climate Change Editorial
The Wall Street Journal recently published and editorial by Bjorn Lomborg which uses misleading statistics to justify utterly inappropriate delays in addressing climate change. I would like to direct you to a response to that editorial:
In WSJ op-ed, Bjorn Lomborg urges delay with misleading stats