Tag Archives: Climate and weather

Arctic Emergency: Scientists Speak

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Lots to talk about here:

Published on Aug 1, 2014
Arctic Emergency: Scientists Speak On Melting Ice and Global Impacts (1080p HD)

This film brings you the voices of climate scientists – in their own words.

Rising temperatures in the Arctic are contributing the melting sea ice, thawing permafrost, and destabilization of a system that has been called “Earth’s Air Conditioner”.

Global warming is here and is impacting weather patterns, natural systems, and human life around the world – and the Arctic is central to these impacts.
—————————————-­———
Scientists featured in the film include:

– Jennifer Francis, PhD. Atmospheric Sciences
Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University.

– Ron Prinn, PhD. Chemistry
TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

– Natalia Shakhova, PhD. Marine Geology
International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

– Kevin Schaefer, PhD.
Research Scientist, National Snow and Ice Data Center.

– Stephen J. Vavrus, PhD. Atmospheric Sciences
Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison

– Nikita Zimov, Northeast Science Station, Russian Academy of Sciences.

– Jorien Vonk, PhD. Applied Environmental Sciences
Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University

– Jeff Masters, PhD. Meteorology
Director, Weather Underground

First 2014 Atlantic Tropical Storm??? IMPORTANT UPDATE

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Maybe yes, maybe no. Good chance, yes.

It is too early to call, but the blob I mentioned the other day has turned into a spiral and is starting to get organized. Forecasters at NOAA think there is an 80% chance this low pressure phenomenon will be a tropical storm by the 4th of July. They are also, somewhat vaguely, saying that it will move south, then northward, then northwest, which puts the storm off the coast of the US Mid-Atlantic or Southeast somewhere. Given that the storm is not moving in a consistent direction steered by well defined one directional forces, this should be very hard to predict this early.

This afternoon there should be an aircraft taking a closer look, assuming development continues. By tomorrow mid day, I suspect, we’ll know a lot more, between the collection of new data, the runs of more models, and the behavior of the proto-storm itself.

But yes, this could be Atlantic Storm 1, Arthur, a menacing off coast storm but almost certainly NOT a hurricane, as it will be moved too far north to really turn into one.

UPDATE: The NWS is now more certain about the disturbance turning into a Tropical Storm:

1. Shower and thunderstorm activity has increased in association with
a low pressure area located about 125 miles east of Melbourne,
Florida. Environmental conditions are becoming more conducive for
development, and only a slight increase in organization would result
in the formation of a tropical depression. This system is moving
southwestward at around and 5 mph but is expected to turn westward
tonight and northward by Wednesday near the east Florida coast. A
turn toward the northeast near the southeastern U.S. coast is
expected by Thursday. An Air Force Reserve reconnaissance aircraft
is en route to investigate the disturbance. If this system becomes
a tropical cyclone, a tropical storm watch could be required for
portions of the central or northern Atlantic coast of Florida.
* Formation chance through 48 hours…high…80 percent.
* Formation chance through 5 days…high…80 percent.

UPDATE 2 (Monday evening): Check out Paul Douglas’s blog at Star Tribune for details. It is still too early to have high confidence, but there is a good enough chance that there will be a named storm menacing the US Southeast/Mid Atlantic coast on or around the 4th that if you live in that area you might consider the waterproof bratwurst for your picnic.

For reference, here is the list of storm names for the 2014 Atlantic Hurricane Season:

Arthur
Bertha
Cristobal
Dolly
Edouard
Fay
Gonzalo
Hanna
Isaias
Josephine
Kyle
Laura
Marco
Nana
Omar
Paulette
Rene
Sally
Teddy
Vicky
Wilfred

US Drought Over Time

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I made a movie you might enjoy. There may be something else out there like this, probably better than this one, but it is still cool. I downloaded all the PDF files from the US Drought Monitor archives, using the version of the connected US that has only the year, month, and day on the graphic. Then I slapped them in iMovie and sped the animation up by 800% over the default 1 sec. per pic. I do not have today’s rather horrifying image on it, which I’ve placed above.

Here’s the movie:

Meteorologist Paul Douglas on Atheist Talk This Sunday

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This Sunday morning, on Atheist Talk radio, I’ll interview Paul Douglas, America’s favorite meteorologists (at least when the weather is good).

When I first moved to Minnesota, which happened to be during a period of intense Spring and Summer storminess for a few years in a row (including this event which wiped out Amanda’s dorm long before I ever met her), I spent a bit of time while searching for a place to live watching the local news, to get a feel for the place. Coming from the Boston area, where the main local news stations aggressively compete with each other using their meteorologists, I found it interesting that there was a huge range of variation in the weather reporting in the Twin Cities. One weather team stood out above the others, led by Paul Douglas, who at the time was on WCCO (CBS). That station quickly became my go-to place for news and weather because of the quality of Paul’s weather reporting.

At the time, climate change was on the minds of relatively few people, but it was very much an interest of mine because of my research in palaeoclimate connected to my work on the New England coast and in Central Africa. Also, soon after moving here I was added to the faculty of the Lakes Research Center, a globally recognized paleoclimate facility that focuses on fresh water proxyindicators (mud in ponds and lakes). So, it was rather annoying to see at least one of the Twin Cities meteorologists implying now and then that global warming was some sort of hoax, and in contrast, refreshing to see Paul Douglas speaking of the weather in scientific but understandable terms, and taking note of, and not dismissing, the extreme weather we were having at the time.

Paul got into the broadcast business while still in high school, where he worked for WHEX-AM in Pennsylvania. Later he was to develop a series of weather related and other businesses, earning the appellation “entrepreneur extraordinaire.” He has degrees and certifications in meteorology, worked at KARE-TV in theTwin Cities, WBBM-TV in Chicago, and as mentioned, became chief meteorologist for WCCO-TV. He left that position a few years ago, and weather reporting in the area has not been the same since.

Have you seen the movies Jurassic Park and Twister? Paul’s company Earth/Watch Communications produced the weather visualizations for those films, and Paul appears in a cameo in Twister.

Paul is the author of Prairie Skies and Restless Skies.

If you live in the Twin Cities you know that Paul writes a daily weather blog at the Star Tribune, and this blog is mirrored with a more national version at Weather Nation, which is the company Paul is currently most involved in. Those blogs are unique. A typical post includes a detailed narrative of current weather conditions and weather over the next few days, allowing the reader to get the sense of an expert meteorologist thinking out loud, going through several models, evaluating them, balancing the conflicting data, throwing in a bit of gut feeling, to produce a typically accurate (insofar as it is possible to be accurate) scenario for upcoming weather. Following this, a typical post by Paul Douglas will include a summary of the latest research and findings on global warming, often linking climate change to current weather observations.

Over the last few years, it has become apparent that a phenomenon known as Weather Whiplash, likely a result of climate change, has become the predominant driver of significant weather events. Paul is one of the people who first notice this phenomenon, and his advocacy of the science of climate change and responsible meteorology had certainly helped drive research in this direction.

Readers of this blog and listeners of Atheist Talk will also be interested to know that Paul is a Reasonable Republican (a rare breed) as well as an Evangelical Christian. He has written and spoken about the need for conservatives to embrace climate change, because it is real, and to address it with the assumption that it costs more to ignore it than to tackle it. He is also involved with faith-based activities advocating for applying good science to developing good policy regarding climate change.

I’ll ask Paul about the weather (perhaps he will give us an exclusive forecast!), weather whiplash, his approaches to communicating about climate change, why he got into weather to begin with (I believe there is an interesting story there) and more. See you Sunday Morning!

HERE is how to listen live, which can only be done from Minnesota, so you’d need to have a zip code such as 55344 or something. In case you are asked.

The show will later be posted as a podcast here.

If you have a question you’d like to ask, email it in during or before the show or call during the show at (952) 946-6205.

The Christ Child Cometh.

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… and by that I mean the El Niño phase of the El Niño Souther Oscillation climate pattern.

We have been in an ENSO neutral phase for a while. Climate scientists have a hard time predicting El Niño, which arrives in Summer, Fall, or Winter, this early in the year, but nonetheless most prediction sources, and most models, now tell us that we are likely to have one staring, really, any time, but most likely Summer or Fall. Here’s a graph of several models. The bottom colored area is Le Niña, who we assume was Jesus Christ’s sister, and the top colored area is El Ninño, with the middle part being neutral. What is being measured here is sea surface temperature anomaly in certain areas of the Pacific Ocean.

pauldouglas_1397607481_ElNinoAus

The ENSO is complex and I won’t try to explain it all here, but the bottom line is this: During some periods heat accumulated on the surface of the Pacific is moved by currents (driven by winds) deeper into the ocean. During other periods, El Niño, the heat moves back to the surface again.

It is interesting to note that there are probably two kinds of El Niño: Regular and “Modoki”. Modoki is Japanese for “Similar but different.” So perhaps we can think of Modoki El Niño as Brian. Anyway, the Modoki El Niño is different in a few ways, one of those being that while regular El Niño tends to attenuate Atlantic hurricane activity by causing more tropical storm-killing vertical wind shear, the Modoki variety may enhance the likelihood of landfalling hurricanes in the US. I’ve not seen any predictions that we are more likely to have Modoki El Niño this year, but a paper just coming out on a related topic, that I’m busy writing up suggests that it may be the case.

For more information on this year’s predictions, see these sources:

EL NIÑO/SOUTHERN OSCILLATION (ENSO) DIAGNOSTIC DISCUSSION (NOAA)

El Niño likely to develop in winter (Australian Bureau of Meteorology)

Atlantic Hurricane Season Prediction

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The last hurricane season in the Atlantic was anemic, being one of least active periods on record. This was attributed to extra dust blown off the Sahara which inhibits hurricane development.

Right now, the various forecasting agencies around the world are agreeing that there is a greater than 50% chance, perhaps a 70% chance of an El Nino event happening this year, starting in the Summer or Fall. Traditionally, we think of El Nino events as inhibiting tropical storm and hurricane formation in the Atlantic. Today, a group that predicts hurricane activity in the Atlantic every year has used the likely El Nino event to predict that this year’s season will be relatively low level.

According to this prediction, there will be nine named storms in the Atlantic, three of which will become hurricanes, one of those a major hurricane (Category 3 or above), with a 35% chance of a major hurricane hitting the US coast somewhere.

Personally, I’m not sure about the effects of El Nino, should it occur. There haven’t been that many El Ninos during the period for which there are high quality records. This year’s El Nino, if it materializes, will occur during a period when we are experiencing strange and different things in the Arctic. Many of the teleconnections between El Nino and other conditions elsewhere in the world are highly variable and many are not all that well understood. Overall, with global warming, conditions may simply be different enough this year from any other prior year that predictions may be off. While it makes sense that if there is an El Nino we should expect an attenuated Atlantic hurricane season, I’m not going to be surprised if several of the usual links between El Nino and various weather conditions are different than “usual.”

I visit tropics, tropics visit me.

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I grew up (and beyond) in the US northeast. There, the weather was pretty good at coming at us from the West, though a nor’easter blowing in from the North East (unsurprisingly) was not uncommon in New England. Although I had studied sea level rise and some Pleistocene climate reconstruction, when I first went to the field in Central Africa I was pretty unschooled in areas of climate and weather. I remember the first several days in the Ituri Forest. I though I knew which way was North, South, East, etc. but then I would get turned around because the big storms — that came in every single day in the afternoon — were confusing me. It turns out that on the equator (which I was, almost, 3 degrees north of it) the “trade winds” come in from the east, not the west. So now you know.

I recently spent a few days on the Yucatan and some of that was spent watching clouds. For the first few day, the clouds came from the west and headed east though the surface winds never stopped being from the east-southeast (the direction of the sea). After two days of this, a nice big set of storm clouds formed, not supercells but big cloud formations. One of the clouds dropped a couple of wall clouds, and then a handful of twisters, the non-supercell type that sometimes become water spouts. They existed as thin threads hanging from the clouds for just a few minutes, then disappeared. By the next day, cumulus clouds were coming from the East, not the West, and did so thereafter.

I checked satellite images each day, and I believe this is what was happening: At first I was within the zone where the trade winds blow mostly from West to East, but the line between the meteorological tropics and the sub-tropics shifted past my location at about 20 degrees N. Latitude, so I ended up in the tropics. I’m not going to claim it got warmer, but it might have. I did switch from Beer to Tequila at about that time, so there’s that.

Idealized Trade Winds
Idealized Trade Winds

The Hope Graph

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There’s a thing I’ve been doing every Spring for a few years no, privately. This year I decided to tell you all about it because I think you might find it useful. I call it the “Hope Graph.”

I moved to Minnesota from a slightly warmer climate. The winters here are long, and they are made longer by the local culture. For example, in Minnesota August is a relatively cool month. One gets the impression Fall is coming during the month of August, and the occasional tree or bush that has something wrong with it so it turns red early does not help. (Personally I think we should find and kill all such plants.) Correspondingly, Minnesotans will start to pack up their summer stuff in August as though winter was only a few days away.

Out east, where I’m from, this was a perennial question: “Will we have a white Christmas?” Weather forecasters were required to tell us, starting in early December, whether or not this would happen. People worried about it. Here in Minnesota, that is rarely a question.

Both Fall and Spring here are quick, only a few weeks long. Out east, the crocus push up first, then the daffodils, then the tulips, and it takes up to six weeks. Here in Minnesota they all come up the same day and are then instantly eaten by starving marmots.

The cultural hastening of Winter, the meteorological fact that Winter comes early and leaves late like those unwanted cousins from out of town, and the quickness of the intervening seasons all make Winter loooooooong. Painfully long.

Every now and then, during the Summer, I’ll experience a sudden chill. Not because it is cold, but because it occurs to me that Summer is short, and Winter is Long so no matter what the date is, if it is Summer, the end is near and if it is Winter, the end is not. When that occurs to you in July it feels chilly.

So, here’s what I do. About this time of year, some time in early or mid February, I make a graph. Using climatological data, I make a graph (I’ve done this with a table as well) showing what day we can expect, on average, for the daily high temperature to reach freezing. In theory, five or six days of the daily high reaching about freezing is enough to start the cascade of events that clears the roads and walkways of icy and hard-packed snow. Even when it is a bit below freezing, a patch of open pavement will collect sunlight (when it is sunny) and, combined with the chemical treatment left over from winter, the bare patch starts to grow and grow. A few days in a row of high temperatures reaching about freezing makes the Winter landscape start to look different. Hopefully different.

So I figure out when that date is and the nice thing about it is that that date is always pleasantly sooner than one might expect. At present I calculate that date to be about February 23rd. That’s just around the corner! If this is a perfectly average year, between about February 23rd and, say, February 28th, the pavements should mostly clear, except in shady areas, of hard packed snow and ice.

Then I figure out when the date is that the average low temperature will be about freezing. A few days of the low temperature being at or above freezing signals one of the most important unofficial holidays of the year: Point Out Dog Doo Day! This is of course the traditional day when the snow banks start to melt enough that the dog doo deposited throughout the winter begins to emerge, and we can walk around in a light jacket on the melted-off sidewalks pointing it out to each other.

This of course is no longer what happens with leash laws and poop-scooping city regulations, but it is still a great tradition.

By my calculations, Point Out Dog Doo Day should be around April 3rd or a bit after … if temperatures this year are perfectly average.

It is a bit depressing that the time span between Pavement Melt Off and Point Out Dog Doo Day is well over a month. But this is the Month of Hope. Hope that our year will be average. Or above average.

The following graph is the Hope Graph for the Twin Cities, Minnesota (click on the graph to embiggen):

The Hope Graph
The Hope Graph

This is generated using data from here. For your local area, you can find your own data. The experience of doing so will be good for you.

Of course, this all assumes average temperatures. We are currently under the spell of the Arctic Vortex, so nothing is average right now. On the other hand, the Northern Hemisphere is experiencing one of the warmest winters ever. This might mean that if the Arctic Vortex moves off the upper Midwest, we’ll experience an accelerated Spring.

Or, so, we can hope.

Rush Limbaugh and the Liberal Polar Vortex

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Here’s the thing: Shauna Theel has a video on the Polar Vortex vs. Rush Limbaugh:

Published on Jan 9, 2014

Media Matters Climate & Energy Program Director Shauna Theel debunks Rush Limbaugh’s conspiracy that the “polar vortex” was created by the media to lie to you about climate change.

Peter Gleick previously posted this Google Ngram on the term “Polar Vortex” and al Roker tweeted about it as well:

Here’s a bigger copy of Peter’s ngram:

BdasLh9CEAAiai7

Have Dragons, Orcs and Wizards caused climate change?

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A new study has been published demonstrating, among other things, that the climate of Middle Earth has strong analogies in certain areas of Modern Earth. In particular, climate modeling indicates that The Shire is most similar to either Lincolnshire or Leicestershire in the UK or the vicinity of Dunedin in New Zealand. Mordor is most analogous to Los Angeles and western Texas or Alice Springs in Australia.

Radagast the Brown
Radagast the Brown
But I think the most interesting conclusion of this research is about forest cover in Middle Earth. Based on advanced climate modeling, the paper’s author, Radagast the Brown (Rhosgobel, nr. Carrock, Mirkwood, Middle Earth) claims that the entire region would be covered in forests “had [they] not been altered by dragons, orcs, wizards etc.”

But this research is not without controversy. Climate science skeptic Ufthak, Orc of the Tower of Cirith Ungol, claims that this research is “… nothing more than the stinking drivel of some self aggrandizing wizard, like the rest of ’em, he thinks he can be so smart but I’ll show him smart when I get my hand on his spindly neck, arrrg. They thought I was dead but I’ll show them who be dead, yes I will.”

Ufthak claims to be writing a blog post critiquing Radagast’s model. “It’s a model, he says. I’ll show him a model. I’ll model my hands around his spindly neck, I will. Arrrg.”

Within the more mainstream scientific community, however, there is general acceptance of Radagast’s findings, though not perfect agreement. “This form of modeling is powerful, but nothing in this world is perfect,” Gandalf the Grey told me in a Skype interview. “Keep it secret. Keep it safe.” On further questioning about what that even means, Gandalf became circumspect and I could get nothing more out of him.

Smaug could not be reached for comment, but an emissary of the Elves is quoted as saying of the climate controversy, “It is not our fight.”

This paper is part of a growing body of writing on the Science of Middle Earth, including recent work on the geology of the Lonely Mountain.

Will Global Warming Induced Weather Whiplash Strike The Northeast Next Week?

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There is a storm (this one) moving across the southern part of the United States that forecasters predict will turn north over the Atlantic and menace the east coast somewhere between Northern New England and Washington DC or Virginia, possibly much of that area. The storm may develop, forecasters say, into a Nor’easter. I looked at the predicted Jet Stream configuration for next Wednesday and I noticed that is will be all curvy-durvy like it has been so often lately. This curvy jet stream is so much more common these days because, climate scientists think, of the phenomenon of Arctic Amplification. This is when the Arctic warms more than other parts of the globe, relatively, causing a shift in the way large scale weather patterns set up. The curvy jet stream blocks weather patterns, making them stay in place for much longer than they otherwise would. Flooding in Calgary and Colorado this summer, and a number of other major weather disasters, were caused by this.

I’m not a meteorologist so I feel comfortable going out on a limb to make a prediction about the weather because you can’t possibly think less of me as a weather forecaster if I’m totally wrong. Usually, we make note of the “Weather Whiplash” events, extreme weather caused or enhanced by climate change, after they happen. Here, I’m going to suggest that this curvy jet stream is going to enhance the storm and an especially bad Nor’easter will be closing in on the US east coast just in time to really mess up Thanksgiving; this storm will be bad because the jet stream will pull together southerly moist air and northerly cold air, and keep it all churned up in place for a relatively long time.

And no, I’m not going to bet any money on it. Hell, I might delete this post if I’m totally wrong. Feel free to yell at me in the comments.

Here’s the Jet Stream prediction for next Wednesday from HERE:

ThanksgivingJetStream

(The image at the top of the post is a random bad weather photo of no particular significance.)

About That Global Warming Hiatus… #Fauxpause

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If I want to measure how much business a shopping mall gets, I can stand by an entrance way and count the number of people who go into the mall. If I stop every tenth person on the way out and frisk them for their receipts, I can estimate the per-person amount of money spent, and multiply that by ten to get an idea of how much business is represented by the particular entrance way I am sampling. This would work. I wouldn’t know how much money was spent in the mall because I have no information about other entrance ways, but I could track changes over time in business, and I’d probably be able to pick up weekly patterns and seasonal holiday shopping patterns.

But say one of the anchor stores has a big sale one weekend, and everybody tries to park near that store because they are going to go there. That would bias the relationship between my estimate and the the overall trend. I might see a drop in spending because my entrance way is on the other side of the mall from the anchor store, or if my sampling point is at that store, I might see an increase, and in either case, my estimate may be biased. Or, there may be roadwork on the route to the part of the huge parking lot of the shopping mall nearest my entrance way, causing a reduction of how many customers go into that store. Or a store that sells really expensive stuff and is really successful opens up in part of the mall and, again, depending on my sampling location, I would end up with a biased estimate because I either over-count cash flow from my 1 in ten sampling of recipes, or undercount it, again, depending on my sampling perspective.

This is like trying to estimate changes in the overall temperature of the earth under global warming. The part of the sun’s energy that lands on the Earth heats the surface (and a bit of the atmosphere) and then, that surface heat radiates back into space. Adding persistent greenhouse gasses like Carbon Dioxide slows the escape of this heat from our atmosphere, so there is more heat to warm the atmosphere, the surface of the land, and the surface of the oceans. Some of this heat, especially that which finds its way to the ocean surface, is then subducted into deeper strata. The vast majority of the heat that is found in the deepest parts of the ocean gets there from surface waters, ultimately.

In order to track global warming caused by adding persistent greenhouse gasses you can just measure the temperature of the air at any given point, all day and night and all year, for many years. But since the atmosphere is complex, this estimate would be very inaccurate and increases and decreases over time may be the result of the atmosphere being complex rather than changes in the effects of the greenhouse gasses. So you can measure a thousand points around the globe and average those readings out. But some of the heat might contribute to melting sea ice and glaciers, so you’d have to factor that in too. But some of the heat is held in the sea surface, so it is also necessary to measure the sea surface temperature at many locations. But some of that heat ends up in the deeper ocean, and over time, the rate of transfer of heat to the deeper ocean changes, so you’d better measure that too. And so on and so forth.

Eventually you’ll have enough measurements that you can track the movement of heat between all its reservoirs and get a good total. This would be analogous to placing research assistants at every entranceway to the shopping mall and sampling the receipts of the consumers more densely.

For the last several years the amount of heat that is building up in the atmosphere and the sea surface has been less than the previous several year. This heat has increased over this time, on average, but not as much as previously. However, this estimate misses the heat used to melt sea ice and glaciers, and it also misses the heat that is subducted into the deep ocean. When that is added in, it turns out that over both long and short terms, the amount of additional heat retained on the surface of the earth (including air and water and everything else) because of the additional of persistent greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere has been increasing.

But, there is still a problem with the measurements that have been used to make these estimates. One of the biggest problems is the temperature in the Arctic region. There has simply been less data from this region than elsewhere. Also, a few other areas of the earth, like big chunks of the African Continent, have not been sampled. A new study uses new approaches to fill in these missing blanks. The bottom line is this: The change in temperature of the atmosphere and sea surface, which combined is the most commonly referred to measurement used to track global warming, has been under-estimating the amount of warming over the last several years.

Here’s the info on the paper:

Title: Coverage bias in the HadCRUT4 temperature series and its impact on recent temperature trends

Abstract: Incomplete global coverage is a potential source of bias in global temperature reconstructions if the unsampled regions are not uniformly distributed over the planet’s surface. The widely used HadCRUT4 dataset covers on average about 84% of the globe over recent decades, with the unsampled regions being concentrated at the poles and over Africa. Three existing reconstructions with near-global coverage are examined, each suggesting that HadCRUT4 is subject to bias due to its treatment of unobserved regions.

Two alternative approaches for reconstructing global temperatures are explored, one based on an optimal interpolation algorithm and the other a hybrid method incorporating additional information from the satellite temperature record. The methods are validated on the basis of their skill at reconstructing omitted sets of observations. Both methods provide superior results than excluding the unsampled regions, with the hybrid method showing particular skill around the regions where no observations are available.

Temperature trends are compared for the hybrid global temperature reconstruction and the raw HadCRUT4 data. The widely quoted trend since 1997 in the hybrid global reconstruction is two and a half times greater than the corresponding trend in the coverage-biased HadCRUT4 data. Coverage bias causes a cool bias in recent temperatures relative to the late 1990s which increases from around 1998 to the present. Trends starting in 1997 or 1998 are particularly biased with respect to the global trend. The issue is exacerbated by the strong El Niño event of 1997-1998, which also tends to suppress trends starting during those years.

The authors of the paper produced this video explaining what they did, and what they found:

Dana Nuccitelli has written up an excellent blog post explaining this research here: Global warming since 1997 more than twice as fast as previously estimated, new study shows: A new study fills in the gaps missed by the Met Office, and finds the warming ‘pause’ is barely a speed bump.

Stefan Rahmstorf has another excellent writeup, currently in German but you can hit “Translate” on your browser if you don’t read German (I’ll add the english version of it when I get it): Erwärmung unterschätzt

UPDATE: Two more posts on the topic:

At Real Climate: Global Warming Since 1997 Underestimated by Half

At Planet 3.0: The Disappearing Hiatus

UN COP Delegate Yeb Saño Announces Haiyan Hunger Strike

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Trigger warning: Truth and pain.

Published on Nov 11, 2013
Philippines delegate Naderev (Yeb) Saño, announces his decision to go on hunger strike on the first day of the COP19 Climate Change Summit in Poland, 11 November 2013.

Making an impassioned plea for action by the conference, he said that he would be fasting in solidarity with his country-folk until action to prevent climate change is forthcoming.

Saño received a standing ovation after describing the hardship suffered by Filipino’s, including members of his own family, due to the “colossal” typhoon Haiyan which recently hit his country.

Should There be a Category 6 for Hurricanes?

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Should there be a Category 6, or even a Category 7, to classify extra bit tropical cyclones like Haiyan?

Some tropical cyclones labeled Category 5 are much stronger than others. It has been suggested that we would be smart to extend the system to have a Category 6 and maybe even a Category 7 to allow the additional severity of these storms to be indicated when they are being spoken of in the news or by officials in charge of scaring people into doing the right thing, like running away or staying indoors.

There is resistance to this proposal that comes from two mostly distinct places. One is the community of those who deny the science of climate change, or climate change itself, or science itself. Their motivation is to not allow the so called “alarmists” (those who are alarmed at the changes happening on our planet) to have a tool to point out that severe weather can be very severe indeed. The other is the subset of meteorologists who are actually correct, in a way, when they point out that the Saffir Simpson scale, the scale with the five categories, can’t be extended because of the way it is built, but who are very incorrect, I think, when they point out that extending the scale would damage the most important available tool for scaring people into running away (or staying indoors).

The reason the Saffir Simpson scale can’t be extended is this. The scale has five categories of hurricanes. The first category, Category 1, is the category a hurricane that is at or near the minimum level of strength can be and still be called a hurricane. The top category, Category 5, is the level of strength at which a hurricane flattens a wood-frame suburban American neighborhood and takes out the overhead utilities to the extent that nearly full replacement, not just putting up a few new lines, is required. In other words, from the point of view of the vast majority of Americans living in regular homes or townhouses around the country, a Category 5 hurricane is total destruction of your way of life. You have to move, rebuild, live in a FEMA trailer for a while, etc. From the point of view of the citizen, the rescue workers and first responders, the parts of the government that are in charge of taking care of the refugees, and the meteorologists who discuss these things on the TV, a Category 5 hurricane is effective at the top category because it is as bad as it gets.

I would like to point out three reasons that this is wrong. I’m not actually going to suggest that we replace the Saffir Simpson scale with a different measure. Rather, I’m going to suggest that we add new measures and use them (there already are other ways to measure hurricanes).

The first thing that is wrong is that people are already stupid about hurricanes. The meteorologists don’t want to make a Category 6 or 7 because they don’t want a Category 5, which is total destruction of your American Dream, to look smaller. They want Category 5 to look extra bad because it is, in fact, about as bad as it gets. However, people already don’t get Category 5. For one thing, people think that a hurricane “arrives” when it makes landfall. This landfall thing is a thing Meteorologists use. This is when the eye reaches the shoreline. There are important meteorological things that happen when the eye reaches the shoreline and it is highly convenient and very polite of these monster storms to have something that serves as a virtual point on the map indicating their center so we don’t have to have an endless debate about when the storm “arrives.” But if you are sitting there on the coastline thinking that the hurricane that is bearing down on you hasn’t gotten there yet when the eye is 20 miles away but 130 mph winds are taking off your roof and a storm surge has already broken the dike and all the escape routes are already flooded then you don’t understand that hurricanes are huge. And, I’ve seen meteorologists standing in the 100+ mph winds talking about how the hurricane has not arrived yet, and we’ve all seen the Bush administration claim that Katrina did not cause flooding in New Orleans because the flooding happened before the hurricane arrived, because she had not made landfall yet.

So, now we might say something like “a Category 3 hurricane will come ashore on the Louisiana-Mississippi border” and people who live a ways away have to be reminded “oh, and there will be hurricane force winds over there where you live too” as though this was a separate thing. Hurricanes are not eyes of hurricanes, and the wind field of a certain category of hurricane can very large or very small, and what you have to do because a hurricane is coming may be very unconnected to to simplified and incorrect conceptualization of the hurricane that the Saffir Simposon scale or the Storm Stud on the beach gives you.

On top of this, the Saffir Simpson scale refers only to maximum sustained wind, not the size of the wind field, the intensity of storm surge, or the location and extent of coastal flooding, or the rain and subsequent flooding which may depend on topography, and the tornadoes that spin off, etc. etc. It is only telling us one thing, telling it to us poorly, ignoring things that are more important, and ignoring the context of ignorance and confusion that surrounds these storms.

And speaking of ignorance, there is this: People misunderstand storms. Should a scale of measurement of a storm’s effects be designed to accommodate ignorance, or to accommodate the need to measure the storm’s effects?

Anyway, those are the first two reasons to not fetishize the Saffir Simpson scale. It is part of the ignorance, not an anecdote to it, and it ignores some of the most imprtant aspects of the storm, or at least, fails to correlate well with those things.

The third reason Saffir Simpson is sometimes problematic is because it is, explicitly, a level of destruction meter and it sometimes does a poor job at that. Notice that the number of miles per hour that the winds much reach to jump to the next category is not linear. Some of the categories are 19 mph ‘wide’ and some are 24 mph ‘wide.’ This is because Saffir Simpson categories are not wind speed categories no matter how much they look like they are. They use windspeed but they are categories of destructiveness. Here is the Saffir Simpson scale, officially, from the National Weather Service:

  • Category 1: Very dangerous winds will produce some damage: Well-constructed frame homes could have damage to roof, shingles, vinyl siding and gutters. Large branches of trees will snap and shallowly rooted trees may be toppled. Extensive damage to power lines and poles likely will result in power outages that could last a few to several days.

  • Category 2: Extremely dangerous winds will cause extensive damage: Well-constructed frame homes could sustain major roof and siding damage. Many shallowly rooted trees will be snapped or uprooted and block numerous roads. Near-total power loss is expected with outages that could last from several days to weeks.

  • Category 3: Devastating damage will occur: Well-built framed homes may incur major damage or removal of roof decking and gable ends. Many trees will be snapped or uprooted, blocking numerous roads. Electricity and water will be unavailable for several days to weeks after the storm passes.

  • Category 4: Catastrophic damage will occur: Well-built framed homes can sustain severe damage with loss of most of the roof structure and/or some exterior walls. Most trees will be snapped or uprooted and power poles downed. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.

  • Category 5: Catastrophic damage will occur: A high percentage of framed homes will be destroyed, with total roof failure and wall collapse. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last for weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.

See how I did that without even mentioning wind speeds? Notice that these categories are levels of destruction mainly of human-made structures. Saffir and Simpson did not invent destruction. They did not invent wind speed. What they did was to list levels of destruction that make sense, like how bad the power outages will be or whether or not houses will get knocked down just here and there or everywhere, and how long after the disaster everything will be a mess. Then, Saffir and Simpson linked these categories of destruction to wind speed thresholds that do not form even categories. This is not a set of wind speed categories. This is a set of categories indicating levels of destruction that, of course, go up with more wind speed but not in a linear fashion.

I note that when asked about a Category 6 storm Simpson had this to say, quoted in Wikipedia:

According to Robert Simpson, there are no reasons for a Category 6 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale because it is designed to measure the potential damage of a hurricane to manmade structures. Stating that “…when you get up into winds in excess of 155 mph (249 km/h) you have enough damage if that extreme wind sustains itself for as much as six seconds on a building it’s going to cause rupturing damages that are serious no matter how well it’s engineered”

As brilliant as the Saffir Simpson scale is, there is a problem with categorizing levels of destruction beyond the fact that much of the destruction and death may be flooding which is not addressed directly by the system. A hurricane in a hilly third world country with a lot of erosion due to deforestation, and where people live in homes that can be blown down more easily, are not going to experience the same level of destruction as people who live in a first world country with the experience of a major typhoon and who rebuilt their homes to be concrete bunkers with storm shutters and excellent drainage systems in place (a friend of mine lives in a home on Osaka that is built like this; there was a major typhoon there years ago and this is how people there rebuilt). Saffir Simpson has its uses but these uses to not apply globally or across time as conditions change.

The reason people are asking about a new category is this: We may need a new baseline. This is true with climate change in general. If we normally get Category 1 through 5 storms and the 5’s are rare and only barely go over the line that defines a Category 5 storm on the Saffir Simpson scale, then we don’t need to change. But if there is an increasing number of storms that turn into super storms and go many tens of miles over the Category 5 line, as Haiyan did (with wind speeds of 195 mph, enough to make it a Category 6 or even 7, if we extended the scale) then we should acknowledge the shifting baseline by adding a category or changing the system.

I think we should keep Saffir Simpson because it is already in use, but add categories every 20 mph as needed. But in addition we should add or begin to use more of the other ways of measuring a hurricane, that indicate the overall strength and size of the beast. The general public might be too stupid, according to some, to handle even a tiny bit of complexity, but if you live in a hurricane prone area knowing that hurricanes have two or three pertinent characteristics is important and you better know that. Knowing what a given hurricane that is coming your way looks like is important and you better know that. Knowing that the total energy of a storm is X, the likely destructive force is Y (from a modified Saffir Simpson that has more categories), that you are in a zone of likely wind strength of Z and if you are on the coast likely storm surge of F sounds like an awful lot to know, but it is less information and less complicated than the following:

  • The average bread recipe.
  • The variables you used to chose your last car.
  • Using the TV remote.
  • How to use a pull tab or slot machine.
  • Managing death certificates and other paperwork of your relatives who died because they didn’t pay attention to the hurricane.

WUWT Science Denialist Blog Hits New, Historic Low

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At this moment, there is a guest post over at WUWT blog downplaying the size, strength, wind speeds, overall effects, and even the death toll of Super Typhoon Haiyan. Even as the monster storm steams across the sea to it’s next landfall (probably as a huge wet tropical storm, in northern Vietnam and southern China), Anthony Watts and his crew are trying to pretend this monster storm didn’t happen, and instead, that it was a run of the mill typhoon.

At the moment, nobody is really saying that Haiyan’s strength, size, power, or even existence is specifically the direct result of global warming, although it is of course impossible to remove the effects of global warming from ANY weather event because global warming is part of climate change and guess what … weather arises from the climate. The climate has changed, so ALL of our weather is affected by climate change.

This offensive post is preemptive denial, but it is denial that throws the lives and suffering of millions of people … of which thousands have lost relatives … under the bus. So that Anthony Watts and his guest poster Paul Homewood can … can do what? Feel smart? Take a shot at the reality of climate change? Pretend severe weather does not matter? What? Maybe they don’t like people who live in the Philippines.

Haiyan will be measured and remeasured over coming days, but it really is looking like it will be one for the record books. But Watts and Homewood don’t care about a big storm this year, or the fact that there have been several big storms in the Pacific, because there were a lot of Pacific typhoons in 1964, before fossil fuels were discovered by humans and thus unlinked to climate change. … ;( … Haiyan will be measured in terms of the death toll and destruction to property and forests, and it will be one of the worst typhoons ever, probably. But Watts and Homewood don’t want storms to be important for the simple reason that the best models strongly suggest that there will be more storms … especially in the Pacific, where Haiyan struck, over coming decades because of the changes to climate that humans are carrying out and that Anthony Watts and Paul Homewood deny to be real.

Update on Haiyan/Yolanda Death Toll

The final figures are not likely in but the numbers have stabilized and we can now probably put a number to the human toll of this storm that will not change dramatically in the future, at least in terms of orders of magnitude. The current “official” death toll in the Philippines from Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan is 6,009 with 1,779 missing and 27,022 injured, with the largest concentration of casualties in Eastern Visayas. This comes from a December 13th report of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, which you can (probably) download here. If you do download it expect to see slightly different numbers as the report seems to be updated dynamically. Wikipedia, which references the same report, gives slightly different numbers (higher for dead and injured, same for missing). Regardless of these smaller changes, we can say that the total casualty number for this typhoon is well over 30,000 with over 6,000 dead. With so many people missing we may guess that the number dead is somewhat over 7,000.

Watts needs to take this offensive and absurd post off of his site. Homewood needs to apologize, and to do so sincerely. But before they do that, go have a look. It will probably make you throw up a little in your mouth.

There is one funny thing. Homewood takes the Daily Mail to task for getting numbers wrong and exaggerating the severity of the storm. I don’t know if the Daily Mail got it right or wrong because I don’t read the drivel they publish in that rag, and I don’t normally read the drek Watts publishes on his horrid site, and the two together is just too much, so I skipped that part. But the Daily Mail is one of those rags that often publishes climate science denialism and the nefarious and mean spirited denialists like Anthony Watts often use such sources to make their point. But here apparently the sensationalism of the Daily Mail contradicts the made up crap Watts puts on his blog. Somehow the expression “You gotta dance with the one that brung ya” comes to mind.