Paul Douglas from Weather Nation (and elsewhere):
For the 5th time in 23 years, the world’s leading climate scientists have released an update on the state of the climate. WeatherNation Chief Meteorologist reviews the highlights plus shares the panel’s predictions for the rest of the century.
There are at present two systems in the Atlantic that have a good chance of producing tropical storms and possibly, eventually, hurricanes. One is east of the Yucatan, the other is very near the coast of West Africa.
Here’s the report from the National Weather Service. I’ve used a rough routine to convert case so it is not screaming at you (the NWS has not yet implemented the rumored policy of not using ALL CAPS FOR EVERYTHING.
1. The broad area of low pressure in the northwestern caribbean sea is moving toward the west-northwest at 10 to 15 mph. Cloudiness and showers associated with this low continue to show signs of organization…And a tropical depression could form before the disturbance reaches the yucatan peninsula on thursday. After that…This weather system is forecast to move over the gulf of
mexico…Where upper-level winds will likely be a little less favorable for development. This system has a high chance…60
percent…Of becoming a tropical cyclone during the next 48 hours…And a high chance…70 percent…Of becoming a tropical
cyclone during the next 5 days. Regardless of whether or not a tropical cyclone forms…Heavy rains and gusty winds are forecast
to spread over the yucatan peninsula and belize during the next day or two…And interests in these areas should monitor the progress
of this disturbance.2. Cloudiness and showers associated with a low pressure system located a couple of hundred miles southeast of the cape verde islands
remain well organized…And a tropical depression could form later today or on thursday. This system has a high chance…70
percent…Of becoming a tropical cyclone during the next 48 hours. After that…The low will be moving into a less favorable
environment for development. This system has a high chance…80 percent…Of becoming a tropical cyclone during the next 5 days.
Regardless of additional development…This system will likely bring showers and gusty winds to the southern cape verde islands
later today and thursday as it moves westward at 10 to 15 mph. Interests in these islands should monitor the progress of this
system.
Originally posted on Mar 18, 2012
Communications expert George Marshall offers six strategies for talking to people who don’t accept that climate change is happening Drawing on his workshops in climate communications and the latest social research he proposes a respectful approach that responds to their interests and values. He says that you should keep away from an argument about the science and concentrate on the personal journey that led you to accept the problem. Try it and you’ll find it works.
This is early in the year for Atlantic hurricanes, though we are already up to “D” in named storms. The current mane floating around in the Atlantic is “Dorian” which the National Weather Service is shortly going to rename “Dorian The Zombie.” Dorian was a named tropical storm several days ago, disappeared into a system not worth of a name, then re-organized a bit so they are using the name again, and is expected to spit lightly on Florida and then wander off to the Hurricane Graveyard in the mid Atlantic.
In a typical Atlantic hurricane season, we expect to see about 2 named systems by August 1st, 3 by August 13th, so we are pretty much on track in this year which was predicted months go to be a more active than average year. However some meteorologists expect the next several days or weeks to have fewer hurricanes than normal because of a very interesting phenomenon happening right now: The Atlantic is experiencing a kind of dust storm. Normally, a large amount of dust is blown into the air off the surface of the Sahara this time of year, in waves that happen every few days for a period of time. This dust is blown into the atmosphere and falls down wind at various distances, a good amount of it ending up in the Atlantic Ocean. At present a larger than average amount of dust is being kicked up, and has formed a ginormous plume heading for South and Central America. Here is a modeled simulation of what is happening, from NOAA:
I’m not sure how this is experienced on the ground. I imagine that where this cloud encounters rain storms the rain becomes somewhat gritty and dirty. In the air, a cloud of dust like this can actually affect air travel, though minimally. Patrick Lockerby noted this (a couple of years ago) about Saharan dust and air planes:
Although this dust is abrasive, it is much less of a threat to aviation than the dust from a volcanic eruption. Whereas volcanic dust melts in a jet engine and coats the moving parts, sand needs a higher temperature to melt, and so is merely passed through a jet engine. In the case of piston engines, in the air or on land, desert dust can quickly choke an air filter. The effect can range from the stalling of the engine to the somewhat trivial need to change an air filter more often.
I imagine that people living in areas where a lot of this dust is brought to the ground in rain will mainly notice that everything is slightly dirtier rather than cleaner after the storm, like we experience in temperate regions during pollen season.
The reason I mention the dust is is this: there is the possibility that huge plumes of dust in the atmosphere over the tropical Atlantic will reduce the likelihood of tropical storm formation. There may be
…a correlation between hurricane activity in the Atlantic and thick clouds of dust that periodically rise from the Sahara Desert and blow off Africa’s northwest coast. … during periods of intense hurricane activity, dust [is] relatively scarce in the atmosphere, while in years when stronger dust storms rose up, fewer hurricanes swept across the Atlantic….
… this makes sense, because dry, dust-ridden layers of air probably help to “dampen” brewing hurricanes, which need heat and moisture to fuel them. [This] could also mean that dust storms have the potential to shift a hurricane’s direction further to the west, which means it would have a higher chance of hitting the United States and Caribbean islands..
John Metcalfe has put this all together in a post on Quartz, which includes some spectacular photographs of floating Saharan dust from various angles.
WeatherNationTV Chief Meteorologist Paul Douglas looks at how climate change leads to rising sea levels and what coastal cities can expect to see by 2040. Also, more on torrential downpours and record setting rainfalls.
James Hansen, the famous climate scientist and author of Storms of my Grandchildren, talks about the possible role of nuclear power in addressing climate change, and in particular, reducing the release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere.
I think he is far to pessimistic on the use of solar and wind energy than he needs to be and notice that he, and no one else ever, seems to mention geothermal, which could reduce our release of carbon by double digit percentages using existing technology in a few years. Having said that, there is probably no way to solve our energy problem without implementing next generation nuclear power to some degree.
From Paul Douglas:
Just like we read left to right, most weather systems move left to right (West to East). Right now however, the weather pattern is out of whack, moving East to West, creating a monster tropical heatwave for a big chunk of the U.S. WeatherNation Chief Meteorologist Paul Douglas has more on the rare retrograde weather pattern and why it’s important to take the heat seriously, but not lose your sense of humor.
Climate Scientist John Abraham and I just finished a session of FtBConscience on Climate Change and during that session we promised to provide some useful links. We also used some graphics during the session. Below are the links and the graphics!
First, here is the video of the session:
I created a twitter list of people (or organizations) that tweet about current climate change science. If you check this list at any given moment you’ll know the latest climate science news. If you have a suggestion as to who should be added to this list, send me a tweet!
The list is: Climate Change Science
John Abraham and Dana Nucitelli’s blog at the Guardian, mentioned during the session, is HERE. John mentioned his post “Global warming and economists-SuperFreakonomics is SuperFreakingWrong.
I’ve written a few hundred posts on Climate Change over they years on this blog, which are HERE.
If you have a question about climate change, one of the best places to find out a good answer is the web site Skeptical Science. John mentioned this during our session. Pretty much any question you’ll ever hear from anyone about climate change is addressed here, often at multiple levels.
The really cool interactive graphic we used during the session, showing arctic sea ice melt (surface area) over several years, is HERE. I also talked about this graphic in a blog post HERE.
There are a lot of sites, here is just a sampling.
I have a category for climate change graphics here and Skeptical Science has a page of graphics here. These are both science based graphs and memes (which are also science based as well, of course, but in the form of something you can put on your Facebook Page!) The graphics we used during the session are here:
We also showed the jet stream and orital geometry driven delta–18 cycles but those were randomly drawn from the internet and not vetted so I’m not going to include them. To get a jet stream graphic, just google “jet stream” but also, check out this post on the nature of the jet stream and weather: Why are we having such bad weather? which also has a video with Jennifer Francis, mentioned during our session.
If you have other questions, just put them in the comments below.
The video below has meteorologist Paul Douglas talking about the big storm we had in the Twin Cities a few days ago (from his excellent series of climate change and weather related videos). The storm actually followed on a number of days with a fair amount of rain, and up here in the northern part of the Twin Cities, we had a pretty bad blow with high wind gusts and lots of rain the day before. But on the 21st, a storm swept mainly through the Western Suburbs and Minneapolis, but actually a much wider area than that. I drove down to pick up Julia near Roseville yesterday, a couple of days after the storm went through, and had to change directions four times because of roads being closed, three of those due to the storm (one had to do with a stuck semi, I think unrelated). At present over 10,000 Twin Cities people are without power, and we are having a heat wave. At least one major grocery store in the Western Suburbs (probably several but I only have direct knowledge of one) had to throw out huge quantities of food that they could not refrigerate. Many areas of the city of Minneapolis were left essentially un-navigable, due to down trees and power lines. As Paul points out in his video this was roughly like a 20+ mile wide F0 tornado passing through the area. That’s a great analogy for Twin Cities people because we have tornadoes here. As a person from the East Coast, I might also say it was roughly like a somewhat diminutive Category I hurricane going through (though the hurricane would have lasted an hour or more rather than 20 minutes or more at that intensity).
Anyway, have a look at the video, which is produced by Weather Nation‘s Paul Douglas:
Welcome to the new normal.
On Tuesday, President Obama will make a speech outlining his administration’s plans to address climate change. The Right Wing has already responded by calling those concerned with climate change “Terrorists.” How have the progressive and left wings responded? Badly. Very badly. Here is a selection, some paraphrased to ensure anonymity (though these are all public), of comments by people that I know are well meaning climate change activists or otherwise concerned about global warming and such.
If his past proclamations are indicative don’t expect much action.
Don’t hold your breath. He wont do a thing that would make the Oil guys uphappy
Or these strong words and some targeted actions in the near term will allow him to OK Keystone XL
NOTHING will happen under Wbama’s “leadership”. He IS a shill for the CorpoRats.
politicians. They are parasites
Some of these statements, maybe all of them, express perfectly legitimate concerns. The thing is, of all the statements I’ve seen on public media in response to this announcement, almost all of them are of this type. Hardly anyone has said:
“Great, let’s find out what President Obama is going to push for, and make sure he understands that we activists will strongly support this, and work towards those goals.”
In fact, we need to do more than that. I assure you of the following: President Obama and his people both in the White House and in the political machine are watching. If they see strong and effective support for initiatives announced on Tuesday, this will give them a clue that if the administration ends up nixing Keystone XL, that they will get support for that as well.
Or, they could see a lot of belly aching and whining like we are seeing so far, and not gain the resolve they would need to have in order to do the right thing on Keystone.
Having said that, I don’t want to give you the impression that this is all about Keystone. It is about whatever it is that is announced. Regardless of Keystone, we want better and more effective regulations on coal burning plants, even if Ben Stein sees fit to call those of us who want that “terrorists.” Regardless of Keystone, we want far more effort put into developing alternatives and renewables. Regardless of Keystone, we want new efficiency standards. And so on.
It might be true that the Obama administration has done much less than we would like about climate change. I say “might” because I’m thinking that you’re thinking that the Obama administration has done nothing at all, and you’d be wrong. They’ve actually done things, and perhaps you just don’t know about them. It is also true (no qualification here) that we are concerned that the Obama administration will not nix Keystone XL. But, again (OK, so there is a qualification) you might be thinking that the delay in addressing Keystone means that they are just putting off the bad news, and Obama fully intends to support it. In that case, you would be wrong again; we simply do not know what is going to happen with Keystone, and the delay is not (necessarily) a political strategy, but rather, more or less, process. You can pretend there is no process but there is one.
Here’s the thing: In a couple of days from now, President Obama is going to announce some things. These will be good things. You might not think they are good enough, you might think they mean nothing if Keystone is not addressed, you might think all sorts of other things. But, if you are actually, truly, interested in addressing climate change and concerned about global warming and our planet’s future, not to mention our species’ future, then you will need to get over yourself.
This is not about you and your dissatisfaction with the government, politicians, Washington, or a particular president. So, please stop making this about you. Make this about the planet, and the future, and our children’s future. In order to prepare yourself for this, I offer the following evaluative quiz:
People interested in serious, effective climate change activism will take what happens on Tuesday and _________
Select only one answer to complete this statement:
b) carry out the most effective possible actions to increase the likelihood that pro-environment and pro-energy efficiency and anti-global warming initiatives come to fruition, which might involve fighting congress, will involve fighting the deniers, and will involve fighting the oil companies.
Correct answer: b
Listen: The right wing is already off the mark. They are running full steam down the field intent on intercepting this particular pass. Meanwhile, the progressives are sitting on the bench crying in their beers and feeling sorry for themselves. This is not good, and frankly, it is more than a little embarrassing.
Time to put on the big boy pants, people! When opportunity knocks, that is not a cue to complain about the door knocker.
A paper came out in today’s Nature about glacial melting and its contribution to sea level rise. This paper does not present new research, but rather summarizes and evaluates the last several years of research on modeling and measuring contiental glaciers and their dynamics.
From the Abstract:
Since the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, new observations of ice-sheet mass balance and improved computer simulations of ice-sheet response to continuing climate change have been published. Whereas Greenland is losing ice mass at an increasing pace, current Antarctic ice loss is likely to be less than some recently published estimates. It remains unclear whether East Antarctica has been gaining or losing ice mass over the past 20 years, and uncertainties in ice-mass change for West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula remain large. We discuss the past six years of progress and examine the key problems that remain
There are many difficulties with measuring and understanding the dynamics of melting of large continental glaciers, the large ice sheets that cover Antarctica and Greenland. As ice melts from these glaciers, they grow lighter and this allows the underlying bedrock to rise up, and conversely, if snow is added to the surface this increases the amount of depression of the underlying bedrock. For this reason you can’t just measure the surface of the ice to estimate how much has been added or removed. When ice melts on the surface, some of it travels down into the glacier and some comes right off the surface. The ice that goes into the glacier may cause deeper ice to melt, or it may provide lubrication to the base of moving streams of ice. As a glacier loses mass at the edge through calving of ice bergs, and the margin retreats away from the sea, the degree of calving, which is an ice-ocean interaction effect probably decreases. Large masses of ice are “grounded” at the outer margin on a “grounding line” beyond which is floating glacier (not sea ice, but large masses of ice undercut by the sea). The grounding line can move towards the sea or away from it, and the dynamics of this movement are complex and difficult to model or measure. Many of the Antarctic grounding lines occur on surfaces that slope downwards in the inland direction, which makes the dynamic a bit more complicated to measure.
Major changes that have improved estimates include adding dimensions to some of the models, such as considering both vertical and horizontal forces along grounding lines. Also, newer models use a finer resolution. However, the increase in resolution is thought to be insufficient; current models are not calculated at fine enough resolution to include numerous smaller ice streams that are narrower than the sampling density of the models.
It appears that the range of uncertainty of ice-melting models has improved significantly over the years so greater confidence in their predictions may be warranted. The best estimates of future contribution to sea level rise of melting glaciers is still highly variable, however.
The current estimates of contributions to sea level rise in mm per year from various studies are between 0.59 and 0.82 from the major ice sheets, between 0.71 and 1.4 for ice caps and glaciers, about 1.1 for thermal expansion, and a negligible but positive amount from changes in terrestrial water storage. These modeled amounts sum to 1.66 mm per year or 3.11 mm per year depending on the set of sources that are used. The observed change in sea level rise over the period from 1993=2008 is 3.22, so there is good agreement though the models are a bit light.
These numbers are small, but they are larger than previous estimates and observations. Still, compared to the potential sea level rise when one considers that the ice in the continental glaciers equals several meters of ocean water, near future sea level rise may be expected to be relatively low if these models are correct and account for everything. Over a century of time, this amounts to about 300 mm, or one foot, of sea level rise. If, however, oceans are warming more than the air at present and a few more episodes of that occur over the next century, this may be considered a minimal estimate. One foot does not sound like a lot of sea level rise, but it is enough to remove extant barrier beaches. Also, flood tides would not be increased by one foot, but rather, more exponentially. This is how a sea level rise of about this order of magnitude over the last century managed to contribute to the flooding of the lower Manhattan subway tunnels when the region was struck by Hurricane Sandy last year.
But there is a problem. Several areas of uncertainty exist in the models that are currently in use, and my impression is that these areas of uncertainty could be associated with dramatic errors in sea level rise estimate. The dynamics of grounding line changes, the role of lubrication at the base of glaciers (which can cause ice streams to speed up on their way to the sea) and the effects of warm currents shifting their position in Antarctic to cause more melt at the boundaries are among those factors that are least known and that have the highest uncertainty. Also, the seaward edge of continental glaciers are not only held in place by their grounding line on the continent, but also by more distal parts of the floating segment of the glaciers being pinned on prominence. As far as I know the effects of pinning being disrupted or lost are not included in any of the models. Also, I’m pretty sure that the effects of sea level rise on grounding and pinning have not been adequately addressed.
That these issues may be a problem is empirically suggested. The paleo-record shows that continental ice melting and associated sea level rise may occur in fits and starts, with steady melting punctuated by brief periods of extreme melting. The current models don’t seem to predict this sort of event, though these events probably happen.
Hanna, E., Navarro, F., Pattyn, F., Domingues, C., Fettweis, X., Ivins, E., Nicholls, R., Ritz, C., Smith, B., Tulaczyk, S., Whitehouse, P., & Zwally, H. (2013). Ice-sheet mass balance and climate change Nature, 498 (7452), 51–59 DOI: 10.1038/nature12238
Photo Credit: christine zenino via Compfight cc
I think most people will agree that in North America (and other places) we’ve been having some bad weather. Some of the weather is not necessarily intrinsically bad … so what if it is a little cooler or a little warmer than you expect. Aridity? Deserts are nice! Extra rainfall? Great for the plants. But actually that sort of thing has its down side since important systems like agriculture, the water supply, and Spring Break work reasonably well because of expectations that might not be met if the weather is different.
Other weather is intrinsically bad. I’d mention tornadoes but at the moment climate and weather experts are not at all agreed on whether or not we are having more, worse, bigger, or otherwise badder tornadoes and if there are differences in tornadoes this decade compared to earlier decades, why that is the case. But other things can be pointed to. Superstorm Hurricane Sandy was the hurricane that should not have gone where it went, should not have been so strong, perhaps should not have been at all. Droughts. Widespread wildfires caused by droughts. Lots and lots and lots of rain causing widespread flooding. Heat waves and cold waves. As a category of things that can happen, these things are in the “bad weather” category, and it is reasonable to ask why they are happening so much “these days.”
It is possible that these changes in weather, or more exactly, these examples of rapidly changing weather that have come to be known as “Weather Whiplash,” are caused by global warming which in turn is caused by the unchecked release of large amounts of fossilized carbon into the atmosphere with the burning, by humans, of fossil fuels. But before I get to that argument (short answer: Weather Whiplash is caused by global warming, but hold on just a sec..) I want to point something else out that is very important.
I want to point out the problem of understanding shifting conditions. Let’s say you are a storekeeper and every day you make a certain amount of profit. How much you make each day varies a great deal owing to a large number of factors. I knew a guy who worked in a camera shop just off Wall Street. He would sell no cameras for days on end and then suddenly sell a gazillion cameras. That would be on a day that the stock market went way up and traders felt flush, and went and bought the expensive cameras and lenses they had been coveting for weeks. I know people who had businesses on Cape Cod and how much money they made on a given weekend depended on the weather forecast for “The Cape” shown to Boston area audiences on Friday (regardless of the actual weather itself, generally). But underlying all this is another set of factors that do not vary day to day or hour to hour (or week to week or even seasonally). One is the overall long term state of the economy (how much stuff do people buy, based on how free they feel with their cash). Another is the overall demand for your particular goods, which may vary little if you sell food but a lot if you sell some trendy widget.
In the absence of good information, how do you know if your business is about to either tank, because people stopped buying your goods, or take off, because people can’t get enough of your goods? If your sales shift a great deal in one day, is that enough information? No. If your sales shift for an entire week, does that tell you something? Maybe, probably not. Most likely, you can identify normal pseudo-cycles, ups and downs, that occur in your business and estimate their length. Some factors cause your business to go up and down over scales of weeks, some over scales of days. Perhaps you can estimate that if you get an average amount of business over six months, and that is higher or lower than the previous six months, then you can say that a basic shift has happened.
Weather has cycles and pseudo-cycles just like businesses do, and they run over the course of days, seasons, years, and somewhat longer cycles that have to do with the position and relationships of major high pressure systems that shift around over cycles of five to fifteen years, and a few other thigns.
Now think about what we expect from global warming.
A simple yet usable model is this: More CO2 in the atmosphere = more heat (energy) in the atmosphere = climate change. But the expected climate change is not linear. Models that seem to work together with direct observation show us that more CO2 has resulted in aridity and wildfires in certain areas. But if we go back in time to when there was even more CO2 in the atmosphere, it seems like everything was wetter, so the whole drought and wildfire thing may be something that gets worse and worse through the 21st century, but at some point is replaced by a whole different set of problems. With respect to sea level rise, which I think is one of the biggest problems we face, it is not likely that the continental glaciers will melt steadily. Most likely they will melt, once their melting really gets going, both steadily and in fits and starts, causing the occasional large rise in sea level.
In other ways, the climate system is likely to change rapidly from one state to another. We are seeing the melting of Arctic Sea Ice each year doing this now, going from one system where there was melting and re-freezing at a certain rate, and changing to a completely different system. Along with this we may be seeing a fundamental long term shift in the nature of Arctic air masses from one way of being to another.
It is like making ice cream, or butter, shaking catchup out of a bottle, or going steady. You work on it and work on it and work on it and all you have is cream and ice, or cream in the churn, or catchup stuck in the bottle, or a friend. Then, suddenly, you have ice cream, or butter, catchup spewing out all over the place, and a significant other. There are many things in life that work this way, where there is not a steady change over long periods of time, but rather, a lot of one thing followed by a sudden shift to a whole different kind of other thing.
So, here’s the problem. If cycles of normal climate change are in the order of a dozen years, but a particular true shift in the basic pattern of climate takes, say, five years and thereafter everything is different, how do you know it happened? How do you know that the “new normal” is a long term change rather than a temporary shift?
There are two ways to know this. One is to wait and see, but if you were thinking of doing something about it but only taking action after you are sure, this is foolish. The other is to use reason and science and stuff to figure out what is going on and then make your best estimate of the situation.
And this brings us back to Weather Whiplash, the New Normal, and the nature of the climate change we may very well be experiencing now. There is an explanation for Superstorm Hurricane Sandy, for Nemo and some of the other storms we’ve had over the last year or so, and for the strange spring and early summer we are experiencing now, and please don’t forget, the strange winters and summers we’ve been having for the last few years. This explanation applies mainly to the Northern Hemisphere and has to do with the Arctic and the Polar Jet Stream.
The Earth’s climate operates as a mechanism for moving excess heat form equatorial regions towards the poles in air and oceanic currents. In the atmosphere, part of this happens when warm tropical air rises and moves away from the equator, drops, and then flows back towards the equator. Farther from the equator, a separate cycling of air currents is thus set up, where air moves up then south at altitude, then drops along side that first cycle of air. Then, there is a third similar giant rotating donut of air closer to the poles. At those positions where the air is moving up, there tend to form high pressure systems, and where the air flows away from these high pressure ridges or mounds, low pressure systems develop. If you stand back and look at the Earth from a distance you can see bands of wet and bands of dry, and regions where certain kinds of storms (like hurricanes, for example) tend to be confined.
The jet streams form at the boundaries between these large scale systems, at altitude, near the top of the troposphere. The jet streams don’t really shape the larger scale systems; rather, they exist because the larger scale systems exist. But once they are in place, the jet streams can determine what happens in those systems.
One of the major jet streams is the Polar Jet Stream that separates temperate regions form more arctic regions. This boundary between two major air masses, defined by that jet stream, can be thought of as analogous to the partition that separates the freezer compartment in the top of a typical refrigerator from the fridge part down below. With this partition in place, the stuff in the freezer stays very cold, and the stuff in the refrigerator stays less cold. If you kept all the cooling coils in place but removed that partition, the difference between the freezer and refrigerator compartments of your Frigidair would be reduced significantly.
Another thing the Polar Jet Stream does is to generate the overall shape of the boundary between temperate and more northerly air masses. The jet stream can be straight, like a big ring around the earth, or it can be all wavy, with major undulations north and south. In the latter case, these undulations can move around the planet or they can sit in place. When they sit in place, they may cause an entire region to be habitually wet, or dry, or more importantly cool or warm, for a long period of time. (This is called “blocking.”) The shape and movement pattern of the Polar Jet Stream ultimately determines the overall pattern of weather everywhere in temperate and subarctic regions.
Now, remember that the position and shape, and movement pattern, of the Polar Jet Stream is determined by high pressure ridges and the low pressure systems they set up (more accurately, these things interact). High pressure systems are relative; A warmish region of the earth, warm relative to nearby cooler regions, will set up a high pressure system. So, during the summer, land masses tend to create high pressure relative to nearby oceans, but during the winter, the oceans may create stronger high pressure relative to land.
And at this point we can see how climate change caused by CO2 increases create Weather Whiplash and other effects.
Warming conditions have caused the Arctic sea to have much less sea ice on it for much longer periods of the summer. This, in turn, allows more sunlight to heat the arctic, because less sunlight is reflected away by shiny ice, and more sunlight provides heat to the sunlight absorbing open water. This changes the relationship between high and low pressure areas in the Northern Hemisphere. This, in turn, has caused the Polar Jet Stream to freak out. Sometimes it is very wavy, often it is blocked, and sometimes it is simply weakened to the point that it almost goes away and allows the freezer and refrigerator compartments to meld.
Cool weather in the United States is not really cool wether. It is the more even, less compartmentalized, distribution of heat across the region north to south. Everything is on average warmer (because of warming) but there is not a very stark boundary between the northern colder regions and the more southerly warmer regions. Last April when we were busy getting snowed on every few days in Minnesota, the Arctic was warmer (but still cold) than it normally would be. Last fall, the shape of these weather systems caused Superstorm Hurricane Sandy to be stronger, and to fail to do what these storms normally do: head north by northeast and dissipate. Instead, the storm turned left and blotto’ed New York, Connecticut and New Jersey.
Peter Sinclair of Climate Denial Crock of the Week, famous for his videos, in a post on Weather Whiplash, has produced a video that covers some of this very nicely:
So, lets get back to the original question. Why are we having such bad weather? Because the system that is usually in place, with a strong Polar Jet Stream that tends to be linear during the summer, has changed to a different system where the Arctic Oscillation … a high-low pressure system pattern … has shifted to a “negative” configuration because of warming of the Arctic sea. This different system has a number of effects that combine with other effects of global warming to produce strange weather. Those other effects include there being more energy in the atmosphere, and more moisture concentrated in more discrete dense patches, which therefore also means some very dry conditions. Blocking may have caused dry conditions to persist longer over selected areas than otherwise, and at the moment, blocking and added moisture seems to be causing the midsection of the United States to become the world’s largest water park. And, between storm fronts, the overall weather of the region is cool, yet the storm systems are very energetic.
Weather Whiplash. It makes sense because everything that is happening conforms to expectations based on what we know about climate and weather. Will this really be the “new normal?” Is a few years in a row of a strange acting Polar Jet Stream and that other stuff the result of a fundamental change in the way our climate system works, or is it just a typical variation that we can expect to happen now and then. Well, if this was a typical variation of the type we normally see on occasion, there would be less incredulity among climatologists, meteorologists, and forecasters. It makes more sense to explain Weather Whiplash as a new state that the climate has shifted to (mostly, expect some more back and forth, I assume) because of the unchecked release of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels by humans.
Several environmental advocacy groups are asking the US State Department to launch an investigation over the State Department’s handling of the Keystone XL review.
This is a bit nuanced but important, and I want to make clear what is going on here.
Normally, environmental impact assessments are done by private contractors ultimately hired by the entity that is building the project that could have the impacts. I often hear people complain that Trans Canada, the group that wants to build the Keystone XL pipeline across the United States to allow the export of it’s bitumen (a kind of soft coal like oily thing) overseas to places like China and Europe, “hired the contractor” that did the environmental impact assessment, and therefore they are corrupt and evil and so on and so forth. But this is how it works. The entity doing the work is responsible to pay for and supply support for the review. There is nothing wrong with that.
Also, there is a more specific allegation that individuals who work for the contractor that did the Keystone XL Pipeline review have worked previously for Trans Canada and other oil interests and therefore the are corrupt and evil and so on and so forth. This, in itself, is also incorrect. Yes, those individuals have worked for Trans Canada and other oil interests, but this is normal, expected, and in fact, a good thing. You really don’t want to have individuals with zero experience working on these important jobs, and you really don’t want to have an industry where people get trained up, with advanced degrees and apprenticeship, to work in a given sub sector of environmental management, then allow them to have one contract then put them on an ice flow.
Having said all that, which is true and must be kept in mind when complaining about Trans Canada and Keystone XL, there is a problem. The system where corporations hire contractors to look into environmental effects is corruptible. This isn’t the most corruptible way to do this. If government agencies did the work themselves, or hired subcontractors, that would be corruptible too. There is no way to do this that is not corruptible.
For this reason, regulatory agencies are supposed to keep a close eye on what happens. There are forms that must be filled out honestly that might reveal potential conflicts of interest, for example. Once these forms are in the hands of the appropriate regulatory agencies, their veracity must be checked, and if there is any problem, that must be very closely looked into.
From the information I’ve seen, it seems almost 100% likely that the process of arranging for the second Keystone XL environmental impact assessment involved some serious mistakes, and there is almost as good of a chance that those mistakes involved purposeful manipulation of information by the environmental contractor as well as by the State Department itself.
I’m not going to try to prove this to you or even summarize the information because it is all well laid out in THIS PDF of a letter from Bold Nebraska, Center for Biological Diversity, Environment America, Friends of the Earth, League of Conservation Voters, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Nebraska Farmers’ Union, Public Citizen, Sierra Club and 350.org. It would appear that the contractor, ERM, failed to disclose its ties to the American Petroleum Institute, TransCanada and other companies that stand to benefit from Keystone. There may be nothing wrong with having those ties but they must be disclosed so they can be looked into and monitored. Also, the State Department employees attempted to cover these ties up during the review process, which implies collusion between the regulatory agency and the contractor.
Go read the letter and learn all the details.
Then, you might want to sign this petition from Friends of the Earth to “Tell Secretary of State John Kerry: Investigate Big Oil’s Influence on the Keystone XL Review.”
Private contractors hire other private contractors to do environmental review, and this process is overseen by regulatory agencies, with the State Department in this case being a regulatory agency. But who oversees that process, to makes sure it stays clean, fair, and legal? Well, you, the citizen. And who helps you do that? Organizations created by citizens, such as those noted above.
So that’s what is happening now. Time to act. Your move…..
You’ve gotta love South Minneapolis.
My friend Sharon Sund passed me an email this morning about an Organizing for Action meeting in South Minneapolis to discuss climate change activism. Sharon and I had been talking about local climate change activism earlier in the week so she thought I’d liked to go to this meeting and see what they are up to.
Organizing for Action(OFA) is an offshoot of the Obama campaign, a grassroots non profit that is separate from any campaign committee (so they don’t support or run candidates) that organizes in favor of Obama’s issues like getting some sensible gun regulation or immigration reform passed in Congress, or keeping Obama care intact.
The organizer of the event described OFA’s structure and purpose, gave a bit of a pep talk, and then opened it up for discussion.
I was the first person to speak up, and after making a brief remark about some interesting climate science related news I won’t bother you with here, I brought up Keystone XL pipeline. I noted that it would be awful nice and a lot easier to get a climate change component of OFA going if Obama would just come out and say “no” to Keystone. The official OFA response, blew me away. Keystone XL might be someone’s personal issue, and that was fine, but since the President was neutral on it at the moment, OFA was as well.
Now, I don’t want to take credit or breaking the meeting. Had I not said something about Keystone, the guy next to me, or the woman behind me, or the guy two seats down, or the woman across the room, or any one of the 30 hard core activists attending the meeting, would have. I know this because once Keystone was brought up, and the need for Obama to take a stand, and in particular, oppose the pipeline was mentioned, everybody in the room had something to say, clearly indicating that they had all thought about it quite a bit.
Keystone is not a personal issue. It is the key, urgent, not-to-be-ignored grassroots issue that OFA and Obama should be all over.
I kinda feel bad for the organizer because he was swamped. I think we stayed on keystone for about an hour. He would say, “OK, let’s move on to a different issue. Sally, did you have something, I saw your hand up?” and Sally would say something very brief not about keystone, and then, “Well, I was in Nebraska last month chaining myself to construction equipment to stop the pipeline …” and then it would be back to the Keystone XL Pipeline. Or the organizer would say, “Oh, Bill, I see you’ve had your hand up,” and Bill would say, “Yeah, that idea of having house meetings to discuss climate would be good. This way we can get together and plan an organized push to get the President to do the right thing on the Keystone Pipeline..” and so on and so forth.1
There are two things that I now know for certain. The first, which I learned tonight, is that Obama for America will not have an effective climate change component if Obama does not come out in opposition to Keystone. Every single one of those activists is involved in a half dozen different projects, some focused on one issue, other on many, that they devote considerable time to, and that they regard, quite rightly, as very important. Many of the individuals in the room are heavily involved already in climate change activism and are already working with existing political groups, churches, or other organizations on climate change (our local 350.org guy was there for example). These climate change activists don’t need the OFA, though the OFA needs them. In fact, the meeting organizer had noted how great it was when OFA engaged in a new issue, and brought new volunteers into the fold in so doing. Most importantly, this little meeting tonight was a microcosm of the larger political landscape. Obama has to lead on climate change. He’s taken a few steps in that direction. And we’re all waiting around for the next couple of steps. Right now, Obama has not moved forward enough for us to find any space behind him so that he can actually lead us.
The consensus at tonight’s meeting was this: The local Minneapolis OFA has to take a message back to Obama and OFA headquarters: Yes, of course we’ll help. But first you need to get your head out of the sand. In particular, the Alberta tar sands. And then we will do more than help. We’ll carry you.
The second thing I know for certain, but that I didn’t learn from this meeting because I already knew it is this: The people of South Minneapolis (and adjoining inner ring suburbs) are awesome.2
See also: Obama’s decision on the Keystone Pipeline IS a legacy making or breaking thing.
Added: See also OFA Refuses To Push On Keystone
and
OFA Refuses To Push On Keystone
1Those were not the actual names of participants or what they said. Since I’m not prepared to report those things exactly, I’m just wildly paraphrasing to make the point.
2A word I’ve probably used four times in my entire life. Just so you know.
Probably.
The Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University makes annual predictions of hurricane season activity, and they released one of these predictions today. This particular group has a good track record, although I would worry that they tenaciously hold to the idea that global warming is not a factor in hurricane development despite the fact that some of the factors (a disrupted ENSO and high SST) that are most affected in the Atlantic by global warming actually drive their predictions. Still, their predictions seem to be based on good empirical data and are probably robust. (Other season forecast information is to be found below).
El Nino conditions tend to reduce hurricane activity, and the warmer the waters in the North Atlantic, the more likely hurricanes are to form from tropical depressions, the stronger they are likely to be, and the longer they are likely to last.
This year, El Nino conditions are unlikely to develop, and sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic are unusually high as they have been for a few years.
The TMP has released this PDF of their report, which states:
We anticipate that the 2013 Atlantic basin hurricane season will have enhanced activity
compared with the 1981-2010 climatology. The tropical Atlantic has anomalously
warmed over the past several months, and it appears that the chances of an El Niño event
this summer and fall are unlikely. We anticipate an above-average probability for major
hurricanes making landfall along the United States coastline and in the Caribbean.
Coastal residents are reminded that it only takes one hurricane making landfall to make it
an active season for them, and they need to prepare the same for every season, regardless
of how much or how little activity is predicted.
TMP predicts that there is a 72% chance of at least one category 3 or above hurricane landing somewhere on the US coastline (the average probability over the last century is 52%). There is a 48% of such a landfall along the Atlantic coast plus Florida not counting the panhandle (compared to the century average of 31%) and a 47% probability for the Gulf Coast on the Florida Panhandle and points west to Brownsville (compared to 30%). The chance of at least one category 3 or stronger hurricane hitting points in the Caribbean is 61% (compared to 42%).
The forecast predicts that there will be 18 named storms active over 95 days, of which 9 will be hurricanes, active over 40 days, of which 4 will be Category 3 or above.
The Weather Channel is saying the following about the 2013 season:
The Weather Channel released its first 2013 Atlantic hurricane season outlook on April 8, 2012, calling for another active season.
The forecast calls for a total of 16 named storms, 9 of which are expected to become hurricanes, including 5 major hurricanes (Category 3 or higher on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale).
These forecast numbers are above the long-term average from 1950-2012 (12 named storms, 7 hurricanes, 3 major hurricanes) and slightly above the averages for the current active era from 1995-2012 (15 named storms, 8 hurricanes, 4 major hurricanes).
The Weather Company’s WSI says this:
Weather Services International (WSI) expects another active tropical season this year, with 16 named storms, nine hurricanes, and five intense hurricanes expected (16/9/5). This compares to the 1950-2012 normals of 12/7/3 and the more recent “active period” (1995-2012) normals of 15/8/4.
Researchers at UCL, UK (PDF) predicts 3-4 “intense hurricanes” out of 7-8 hurricanes with 15-16 tropical storms:
The TSR (Tropical Storm Risk) April forecast update for Atlantic hurricane activity in 2013 continues to
anticipate an active hurricane season to moderate probability. Based on current and projected climate
signals, Atlantic basin tropical cyclone activity is forecast to be about 30% above the 1950-2012 longterm norm but slightly below the recent 2003-2012 10-year norm. The forecast spans the period from 1st
June to 30th November 2013 and employs data through to the end of March 2013. TSR’s two predictors
are the forecast July-September trade wind speed over the Caribbean and tropical North Atlantic, and the
forecast August-September 2013 sea surface temperatures in the tropical North Atlantic. The former
influences cyclonic vorticity (the spinning up of storms) in the main hurricane track region, while the
latter provides heat and moisture to power incipient storms in the main track region. At present, TSR
anticipates both predictors will have a small enhancing effect on activity.
Weather Underground’s MAweatherboy1 posted this last month:
I foresee a season that will see near to above average activity. One of the main factors we look at to determine this is the ENSO, which involves the temperature of waters in the Pacific Ocean. Warm Pacific waters, called El Nino if the anomaly is greater than 0.5 degrees Celsius, tend to suppress activity in the tropical Atlantic, while cooler than average Pacific waters, called La Nina if the anomaly is greater than 0.5 degrees Celsius, tend to enhance activity. … This year, I am expecting a very neutral ENSO, with average, season-long (June 1-November 30) Pacific water temperatures that are in the key regions likely not averaging more than 0.2 degrees Celsius above or below average, although I would favor the cooler end of that range if anything. The Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) is an important component in determining ENSO. Positive SOI values promote cooler Pacific waters, and vice versa. SOI values have been mostly negative this winter, though not by much, and I do not foresee any huge changes in this. Neutral conditions like this tend to promote near normal, or in some cases above normal activity. The record breaking 2005 hurricane season was primarily influenced by neutral ENSO conditions.
Photo Credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video via Compfight cc