Tag Archives: Climate Change

500,000 people evacuate massive 2-week long flood; 40+ dead.

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Excessive warmth attributable to global warming and a stalled weather system, also attributable to global warming, have caused a weather system in over southeast China to dump rain since May 12th. A million people are in the impacted area, ahlf of them have had to move or have been rescued, and the 2-6 inches of daily rain continues. 25,000 homes have been destroyed.

This area has recieved huge investments over the last few decades, since a huge 1998 storm killed thousands and caused 26 billion dollars in damage. They now fear that the present flooding will be as bad.

Here’s some video (with some out of date information on casualties and damages):

Sources:

Massive, Two Week Long China Flood Sends Half a Million Fleeing, Destroys More Than 25,000 Homes

Half a million evacuated as China braces for more flooding

April 2014 tied April 2010 as Warmest April on Record

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A few days ago I noted that April 2014 was one of the warmest Aprils on record. This morning, NOAA has released its data showing that April was actually a bit warmer than I had suggested.

NOAA has already stated that “The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces was the fourth highest for March on record, at 0.71°C (1.28°F) above the 20th century average of 12.3°C (54.1°F)” and “The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for the January–March period (year-to-date) was 0.60°C (1.08°F) above the 20th century average of 12.3°C (54.1°F), the seventh warmest such period on record.”

Moments ago, NOAA stated: “The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for April 2014 tied with 2010 as the highest on record for the month, at 0.77°C (1.39°F) above the 20th century average of 13.7°C (56.7°F).”

And, it has been tweeted:

So, 2014 is turning out to be quite a warm year, and this is before the effects of a very likely El Ninño have kicked in (see also this for more on El Niño). Should the El Niño develop to a high level of intensity, as many think may happen, 2014 may end up being the warmest year in the instrumental record (going back to the late 19th century).

Jeff Masters has more here on Wunderblog.

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.

Lennart Bengtsson Joins, Quits Denialist Think Tank, Cries McCarthyism UPDATED

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The Global Warming Policy Foundation is an organization of mainly economists dedicated to mucking up the development and advancement of good science-based policy related to climate change. It is a denialist “think” tank.

A couple of weeks ago, Swedish meteorologist Lennart Bengtsson joined the GWPF. This was a little surprising, but not totally surprising. It was surprising because Bengtsson is scientist and the foundation is anti-science and, as I noted, mostly economists. (Well, they are sort of like scientists too, but a different kind of science.) It was not surprising because Bengtsson has positioned himself as a “skeptic,” claiming that his skepticism is the good kind (all scientists are skeptical) but really, he has expressed doubt about the validity of much of the standing mainstream climate science, especially the use of models. He is a #Faupause-er, claiming that a decrease in the rate of increase of surface temperatures (which is only part of the global warming picture) suggests that global warming is less of a thing than we all know it is.

Then, just now, Bengtsson resigned from the GWPF citing harassment by scientists. One of the specific actions he refers to is a colleague suggesting he might withdraw as a co-author given Bengtsson’s affiliation with a rather rabid anti-science organization.

The denialists have taken off with this, following Bengtsson’s lead. From Bengtsson’s resignation letter:

I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years.

Under these situation I will be unable to contribute positively to the work of GWPF and consequently therefore I believe it is the best for me to reverse my decision to join its Board at the earliest possible time.”

What happened here is simple to understand. A member of the scientific community who was retaining discredited ideas about climate change took one step too far, literally joining with the anti-science community. Colleagues complained about his choice, which is something they not only can, but should do. If the reports are correct, one of those individuals considered distancing himself from the GWPF, which is probably the ethical choice. In response, the denialist community, including Bengtsson (who has now apparently proven himself to be a member of that community) is calling foul. But really, what is the mainstream scientific community supposed to do? Is a professional gasp at a clearly inappropriate decision by a scientist really McCartyism? No, clearly it is not.

The Daily Mail, which I usually don’t refer to, claims that Bengtsson’s climate science colleagues inferred or stated that the mainstream science community is respectable, and Bengtsson’s move to join the GWPF was silly, and apparently one blogger described him as a crybaby. Some told him that the GWPF was a questionable organization. That sounds like a lot of people trying to impress on him that his legitimacy as a member of the scientific community may be affected by sidling up to an explicitly anti-science organization.

Rabett Run notes, “The short take on this is that Prof. Bengtsson ran into a wall of disgust from his colleagues which took him by surprise.”

Roger Pielke, Jr, who himself has had his work in climate science (he is an economist) criticized (legitimately) underscores the McCarthyism claim, and doubled down:

Unfortunately, “climate mccarthyism” is not so far off. It has been practiced for a while…

The main problem here is … that the elite in this community – including scientists, journalists, politicians — have endorsed the climate mccarthyism campaign, and are often its most vigorous participants…

The climate issue is coming to represent a globalized version of the US abortion debates. I tell my grad students that there is no use for policy analysts in the abortion debates. I should follow my own advice!

Hot Whopper’s Sou gives some examples of why a scientist might not want to be affiliated, directly or indirectly, with the GWPF:

As to why climate scientists might not want to be associated with the GWPF, this is a sample of the sort of nonsense that Nigel Lawson and his organisation are known for. On the IPCC:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which published on Friday the first instalment of its latest report, is a deeply discredited organisation

Nigel just made that up. The IPCC won a Nobel Peace Prize for heaven’s sake! How about this GWPF article – about the man deniers love to hate. (Archived here):

IS MICHAEL MANN DELUSIONAL OR A DELIBERATE LIAR?
Date: 05/12/11
In my Weekly Standard Climategate 2.0 article I refer to Michael “hockey stick” Mann as the Fredo of the climate mafia, because of his endless bluster and the obvious embarrassment he brings to his fellow scientists.

Expect the Bengtsson story to become denialist yammering fodder. Well, it already is. Expect more.

UPDATE:

One of the complaints made be denialists is, apparently, that Bengtsson was given the shaft by the mainstream scientific community when a paper he submitted to IOP was rejected. Quotes from the peer reviewer comments were used to implicate IOP, the journal, and the reviewer in a McCarthy-istic campaign against Bengtsoon. It turns out that was a lie. The journal rejected Bengtsson’s paper because if fell short of standards, but encouraged him to bring it up to snuff with the implication they would look at it again.

There is a certain ethical question that has to be asked here; was the release of parts of a peer review OK? In any event, once it is released, the journal is obliged to address it, and in so doing, they have to check with the reviewer to see if the confidential review can be released. Well, all that happened, and IOP has put out a press release providing documentation of what really went on behind the scenes.

Here it is:

Statement from IOP Publishing on story in The Times
16 May 2014Bristol, UK

Dr. Nicola Gulley, Editorial Director at IOP Publishing, says, “The draft journal paper by Lennart Bengtsson that Environmental Research Letters declined to publish, which was the subject of this morning’s front page story of The Times, contained errors, in our view did not provide a significant advancement in the field, and therefore could not be published in the journal.”

“The decision not to publish had absolutely nothing to do with any ‘activism’ on the part of the reviewers or the journal, as suggested in The Times’ article; the rejection was solely based on the content of the paper not meeting the journal’s high editorial standards, ” she continues.

“The referees selected to review this paper were of the highest calibre and are respected members of the international science community. The comments taken from the referee reports were taken out of context and therefore, in the interests of transparency, we have worked with the reviewers to make the full reports available.”

The full quote actually said “Summarising, the simplistic comparison of ranges from AR4, AR5, and Otto et al, combined with the statement they are inconsistent is less then helpful, actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of “errors” and worse from the climate sceptics media side.”

“As the referees report state, ‘The overall innovation of the manuscript is very low.’ This means that the study does not meet ERL’s requirement for papers to significantly advance knowledge of the field.”

“Far from denying the validity of Bengtsson’s questions, the referees encouraged the authors to provide more innovative ways of undertaking the research to create a useful advance.”

“As the report reads, ‘A careful, constructive, and comprehensive analysis of what these ranges mean, and how they come to be different, and what underlying problems these comparisons bring would indeed be a valuable contribution to the debate.”

“Far from hounding ‘dissenting’ views from the field, Environmental Research Letters positively encourages genuine scientific innovation that can shed light on complicated climate science.”

“The journal Environmental Research Letters is respected by the scientific community because it plays a valuable role in the advancement of environmental science – for unabashedly not publishing oversimplified claims about environmental science, and encouraging scientific debate.”

“With current debate around the dangers of providing a false sense of ‘balance’ on a topic as societally important as climate change, we’re quite astonished that The Times has taken the decision to put such a non-story on its front page.

Please find the reviewer report below quoted in The Times, exactly as sent to Lennart Bengttsson.

We are getting permission from the other referees for this paper to make their reports available as soon as possible.

REFEREE REPORT(S):

COMMENTS TO THE AUTHOR(S)
The manuscript uses a simple energy budget equation (as employed e.g. by Gregory et al 2004, 2008, Otto et al 2013) to test the consistency between three recent “assessments” of radiative forcing and climate sensitivity (not really equilibrium climate sensitivity in the case of observational studies).

The study finds significant differences between the three assessments and also finds that the independent assessments of forcing and climate sensitivity within AR5 are not consistent if one assumes the simple energy balance model to be a perfect description of reality.

The overall innovation of the manuscript is very low, as the calculations made to compare the three studies are already available within each of the sources, most directly in Otto et al.

The finding of differences between the three “assessments” and within the assessments (AR5), when assuming the energy balance model to be right, and compared to the CMIP5 models are reported as apparent inconsistencies.

The paper does not make any significant attempt at explaining or understanding the differences, it rather puts out a very simplistic negative message giving at least the implicit impression of “errors” being made within and between these assessments, e.g. by emphasising the overlap of authors on two of the three studies.

What a paper with this message should have done instead is recognising and explaining a series of “reasons” and “causes” for the differences.

– The comparison between observation based estimates of ECS and TCR (which would have been far more interesting and less impacted by the large uncertainty about the heat content change relative to the 19th century) and model based estimates is comparing apples and pears, as the models are calculating true global means, whereas the observations have limited coverage. This difference has been emphasised in a recent contribution by Kevin Cowtan, 2013.
– The differences in the forcing estimates used e.g. between Otto et al 2013 and AR5 are not some “unexplainable change of mind of the same group of authors” but are following different tow different logics, and also two different (if only slightly) methods of compiling aggregate uncertainties relative to the reference period, i.e. the Otto et al forcing is deliberately “adjusted” to represent more closely recent observations, whereas AR5 has not put so much weight on these satellite observations, due to still persisting potential problems with this new technology
– The IPCC process itself explains potential inconsistencies under the strict requirement of a simplistic energy balance: The different estimates for temperature, heat uptake, forcing, and ECS and TCR are made within different working groups, at slightly different points in time, and with potentially different emphasis on different data sources. The IPCC estimates of different quantities are not based on single data sources, nor on a fixed set of models, but by construction are expert based assessments based on a multitude of sources. Hence the expectation that all expert estimates are completely consistent within a simple energy balance model is unfunded from the beginning.
– Even more so, as the very application of the Kappa model (the simple energy balance model employed in this work, in Otto et al, and Gregory 2004) comes with a note of caution, as it is well known (and stated in all these studies) to underestimate ECS, compared to a model with more time-scales and potential non-linearities (hence again no wonder that CMIP5 doesn’t fit the same ranges)
Summarising, the simplistic comparison of ranges from AR4, AR5, and Otto et al, combined with the statement they they are inconsistent is less then helpful, actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of “errors” and worse from the climate sceptics media side.
One cannot and should not simply interpret the IPCCs ranges for AR4 or 5 as confidence intervals or pdfs and hence they are not directly comparable to observation based intervals (as e.g. in Otto et al).

In the same way that one cannot expect a nice fit between observational studies and the CMIP5 models.

A careful, constructive, and comprehensive analysis of what these ranges mean, and how they come to be different, and what underlying problems these comparisons bring would indeed be a valuable contribution to the debate.

I have rated the potential impact in the field as high, but I have to emphasise that this would be a strongly negative impact, as it does not clarify anything but puts up the (false) claim of some big inconsistency, where no consistency was to be expected in the first place.
And I can’t see an honest attempt of constructive explanation in the manuscript.

Thus I would strongly advise rejecting the manuscript in its current form.

Dark Snow Project

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The Dark Snow Project is staring up again, it being almost summer(ish) in Greenland.

The results in the study of the odd 2012 winter are now in. That year, there was a huge spike in melting on the surface of Greenland. (Discussed here.) One idea is that a good part of this melting was caused by extra soot from extensive wildfires in North America, which increased the amount of solar energy collected on the ice surface.

The results confirm this, and the Dark Snow team is returning this year to collect more information.

Here’s a video giving an overview of the project, from Peter Sinclair’s excellent blog:

The Dark Snow project is crowd funded, and you are asked to provide a donation. More information on that here.

Hot April, Hot Year?

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NASA’s instrumental data set for their Land-Ocean Temperature Index, which goes back to 1880, has updated for April, and it appears that this year’s April is the second hottest on record. Also, we had one of the warmest winters on record, despite appearances to the contrary for those who live under the Polar Vortex. Paul Douglas posted the graphic above showing anomalies relative to a 1981-2010 base period for the months of December through February. Note that there is general warmth across the globe with a few cool spots, including a VERY cold region over North America.

If we do have an El Niño this year, 2014 may be propelled into the record books as one of the hottest years for the last century-plus of careful global measurements of surface temperatures. Remember, this does not count deeper ocean temperatures which combined with surface temperatures are almost certainly higher than ever, because like it or not global warming continues apace.

El Nino 2014: Historic?

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The weatherologists have more or less stopped saying there might be an El Niño this year. Now they are saying there will be an El Niño, and they are starting to consider how strong it will be. Well, actually, they’ve stopped doing that too and are now talking about whether it will be a mondo-El Niño or a mondo-mondo-El Niño.

Here is a newly released video by Peter Sinclair and the Yale Climate Forum about the coming El Niño:

I have a prediction to make. First a bit of background.

You know about the so-called “hiatus” in global warming, because every Tea Partier with a mouth is yammering about it. (See this for a nice response to Sean Hannity’s most recent yammering.) There is a slowing down of the increase of what we call “surface temperatures” over the last several years. However, there are at least two major categories of cause to consider when thinking about this slowdown. First, “surface temperatures” do not reflect the totality of global warming. Surface temperature is a summary of several important parts of the planet, mainly the lower part of the atmosphere and the very top layer of the ocean. The vast majority of the heat added to the system by increasing CO2 in the atmosphere actually goes somewhere else; it goes into the oceans. I’ve talked about this problem of measurement here and here. So, we expect that actual “global warming” (the total warming of the Earth because of added CO2) to be one thing, and “surface temperatures” to reflect but not perfectly track that. (Having said that the term “Global Warming” usually refers just to surface temperatures, a terminological glitch, in my opinion, that arises from the historic uses of the terms among scientists.)

The second feature of the so called hiatus, aka #FauxPause, is that even within that part of the planetary system that is measured and summarized as “surface temperature” there are biases. Much of interior Africa and huge regions of the poles are not as accurately measured, or are simply not included in the squiggle that we use to represent global warming. Recent analysis, however, has estimated the degree and direction of that bias, and it turns out that the bias is towards the negative — we have been missing heat. When you put that heat back into the squiggle, the so-called hiatus gets less hiatusy.

What does all this have to do with El Niño? And my prediction? Here’s the thing. El Niño is part of a larger ongoing continuous climatological phenomenon referred to as ENSO. This is a cyclic (but not periodic) phenomenon having to do with surface heat being plowed into the deeper ocean for a period of time then coming out later. When the heat comes out, the “surface temperatures” go up. If we have the mondo-, or especially the mondo-mondo- El Niño people are expecting, a whopping pile of heat that has been hiding in the Pacific Ocean is going to spring from the sea and heat up the air. Expect heat.

In Anthropology we have a concept called the “Nature-Nurture Dichotomy.” You know what this is because you have made references to it frequently in day to day life. Nature is learned, enculturated, received behavior or personality or whatever. If you water your plants more or less they grow more or less. If we raise our children to be more or less violent, we may get a society that is more or less violent. That sort of thing. Nature is the built in part. A gene causes men to be more violent than women, or women to be more nurturing than men. The “men are from Mars” and “women are from Venus” thing is a statement — unsupported by science and way oversimplified to the extent of being stupid and useless, I quickly add — about nature. According to the Nature-Nurture dichotomy model, we, our plants, other living things, can be described as the outcome of innate (genetic) causes and external, learned or environmental causes. Indeed, according to this framework, we can characterize a feature of a person or a plant or whatever as X percent nature and Y percent nurture, adding up to 100%.

The nature-nurture dichotomy is a falsehood. It is wrong. It is incorrect. It is not supported by the data. This is not to say that there are not “built in” features of living systems and “environmental” features of living systems. But, the stark distinction between the two, the lack of consideration of interaction between the two, and the simplified partitioning of causality to add up to 100% between the two are all demonstrably wrong. Not only are those things wrong, but Nature-Nurture dichotomy thinking is misleading.

What does this have to do with El Niño and global warming and stuff?

If global warming was not happening, the surface temperature measurements would look like a flat squiggle over time, going up and down but averaging out over just a few years or a decade or two. There are many “natural” features of the climate system that act like this, such as the strength of the sun or the effects on surface temperatures of aerosols (i.e. volcanic dust). ENSO is such a thing, a natural squiggling of effects on surface temperatures.

Human release of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere is also a squiggle, potentially varying from year to year, but the effects of CO2 release have been to increase the baseline temperature over time.

The following graph is a made up version of this. The squiggles in the lower part of the graph represent a set of natural factors that influence the final outcome; they vary with their own up and down pattern. Just above that is a single upward tending variable. The line in the topmost part of the graph is the sum of all of these.

The_Nature_Of_Climate_Squiggles

When temperatures started to flatten out over the last few years (they did not decrease, and they kept rising, but at a slower rate) climate change denialists made the claim that this was because anthropogenic global warming (represented by that middle, upward trending line in the made up graph) wasn’t real. Climate scientists argued that there were two or three reasons the graph flattened out a bit. One of those reasons is the simple, overarching claim that natural variation (like ENSO) makes the graph squiggle up and down independently of anthropogenic global warming. The climate scientists were correct, the science denialists were wrong, of course.

Now, with ENSO about to produce an El Niño, we are probably going to see the squiggle that is the sum of all squiggles squiggle upward, perhaps rather dramatically. The heat that has been hiding in the ocean will return to the “surface” (lower atmosphere and top layer of the oceans).

I predict that denialists will claim that this is not global warming, but rather, natural variation, so therefore global warming is not real.

The first part of that is sort of true, but if so, it was ALSO TRUE that the flattening out of the overall surface temperature curve, and much or all of the squiggle in that line over many decades, is explained by natural variation.

In other words, denialists will have ended up saying: “The pause is true because AGW is not true. The upward swing in 2014/5 is not real because is is natural.”

Climate scientists will say “The pause was an artifact of the natural process of heat plowing into the ocean and the resurgence of surface temperatures in 2014/5 is due to the natural process of that heat coming back to the surface, all of this playing out on a generally upward trending surface temperature graph.”

See the difference?

I’d like to add, taking the aforementioned anthropological perspective, that the nature-nurture (natural/anthropogenic) dichotomy is actually present in this argument and mucking it up a bit. The resurgence in temperature increase we are likely to see over the next year or so is not a “natural” occurrence in that the actual heat is “natural.” Some of that heat, we humans made. So you can’t really call it natural variation. This is more of a linguistic point than anything else, because the natural variations of which we speak are “variations” more than they are “natural” or “not natural.” And the science of climate is, like science in general, all about variation. In the end, the trend of temperature change over the last half of the 20th century up to the present and for decades to come is an increase (a kind of variation) pretty much all caused by human release of CO2 and related effects. In the end, the squiggly nature of the line that represents that trend will end up being a combination of natural features and changes in the human effect. This has been true for decades, it is true right now, and it will continue to be true for a long time.

Al Roker better ask President Obama about Benghazi!

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As you know, the National Climate Change Assessment report is out. I’m actually rather overwhelmed with it all. It is a turning point by way of full acknowledgment of the importance of climate change and the need to act. Good for you, government of the United States!

One small item has crossed my desk this morning tangential to the assessment but so deliciously hilarious that I did not want to let it pass without comment.

Part of the roll out of the assessment will involve President Obama speaking with meteorologists across the country. Friend of mine made the remark that Fox News wanted the meteorologists to ask Obama about Benghazi.

I assumed he was joking. But, he was not joking: Fox Host Wants TV Meteorologists To Ask Obama About Benghazi Today (VIDEO)

Personally, I think it is wonderful that FOX wants Al Roker to ask President Obama about Benghazi. I hope he does. They can have a laugh about it. Except it won’t be funny.

“How’s the weather in Benghazi, Mr. President?”

“They’re expecting more drought, probably will cause major civil strife, another civil war in the Middle East. Because of Climate Change. How’s the weather in New York, Al?”

“Expecting very high storm surges over the next few years. Otherwise mild today.”

Energy and Climate Change Items of Interest

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Every one of these is a topic I’d like to write an entire blog post about but I don’t have time right now. So, YOU write the blog post!

In Michigan there is an emerging debate and discussion about using the Vast Forests in that state to provide energy. This is a good idea because it does not involve the release of fossil Carbon from fossil fuels. It is a bad idea because it involves the release of Carbon currently trapped in a medium term and important Carbon sink. It is interesting because it highlights a key feature of the whole energy and climate change thing. Sun makes burnable stuff, we burn it. This is just another version of this where we would be relying on trees, and on whatever level of efficiency forests provide. I assume we can build a better mousetrap than this.

In Minnesota, Xcel Energy has broken a record:

MINNEAPOLIS — Xcel Energy issued a press release Wednesday declaring that it had achieved a milestone when 46 percent of customers’ electricity needs in the Upper Midwest were met by wind energy at 3 a.m. Sunday.

That’s an all-time high for Xcel, which recently was named the nation’s top wind power provider for the 10th straight year. At the time of the record, 1,622 of 3,512 megawatts were being produced by wind turbines.

It has been windy in Minnesota over the last few days! Anyway, details here.

When an oil spill or similar environmental disaster happens we are assured that new technologies will make such a thing much more unlikely in the future. Well, “New “Safer” Tank Cars Were Involved in Lynchburg, VA, Oil Train Fire.”

And while we are speaking of accidents, “Accident Leads to Scrutiny of Oil Sand Production” and “Fracking disposal wells may cause quakes 30 miles away, researchers say“.

Climate change and President Obama’s legacy:

The satellite images viewed by President Obama before a meeting with eight Western governors were stark, showing how snowpack in California’s mountains had shrunk by 86 percent in a single year.

“It was a ‘Houston, we have a problem’ moment,” recalled White House counselor John D. Podesta, one of two aides who briefed the president that February day. Obama mentioned the images several times as he warned the governors that political leaders had no choice but to cope with global warming’s impact.

Read Juliet Eilperin’s interesting essay in the Washington Post.

Hydro power is “Carbon Free” but also can be environmentally destructive, and it only provides a small amount of our electricity. But, we could in theory get more. A “DOE study suggests America’s rivers are troves of vast untapped hydropower potential and developing many of them could help combat climate change by using renewable energy to reduce reliance on coal-fired power plants that emit climate-changing greenhouse gases.” Climate Central item is HERE.

And finally, Some see proposed wind farm as a threat in Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge. I’ve been planning to write up a 10,000 Birds post updating this topic, so maybe that will be my next post there. In the mean time I want to make a proposal. Invent a wind turbine that is very visible to birds. It will be less efficient than other turbines. So what? We need the clean energy, we can pay more for some of it. Just invent the damn thing. I have a design in mind, if you are a serious engineers in the wind power area contact me and I’ll tell you how it works. We’ll share the patent.

Government Responsibility in Addressing Weather Disasters

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The US National Weather Service does a pretty good job at predicting weather, but there are problems. In fact, we are behind compared to other nations, and parts of our infrastructure is deteriorating. Paul Douglas has been telling people for some time that we need to pay attention to our aging satellite system, and here Kate Sheppard talks about the slow but steady development of legislation to advance our storm prediction abilities:

Michael Mann Receives NCSE Friend of the Planet Award

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The National Center for Science Education, the nation’s leading organization in support of science education, has awarded Professor Michael Mann the coveted Friend of the Planet award.

From the NCSE

Climate change deniers have faced a similarly impressive foe: Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State. More than almost anyone else, Mann has been the public face of climate science. The author of more than 160 peer-reviewed papers, Mann has appeared before countless Congressional committees, battled climate change deniers in court, and written breakthrough books (such as The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars). Along the way, Mann co-authored the report that won the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. NCSE’s Friend of the Planet award will join a crowded trophy case.

Congratulations Michael!

Here’s a few videos:

Clean Energy Tipping Point

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Investment in and development of clean energy seems to be undergoing a transition, and this is reflected in a number of items that came across my desk this morning. Without attempting any serious analysis, here’s a brief summary.

Clean Energy investments have fallen over the last couple of years, leading some to assert that the transition to non fossil sources of energy is in trouble. But there is an excellent argument that the exact opposite is true. What has really happened is that the cost of implementing new clean energy projects has dropped dramatically, so the cost of investment has dropped dramatically. Therefore, the absolute cost of investment can drop while the effective level of investment … in terms of units of energy … goes up.

From an article in World Resources Institute’s blog, by Letha Tawney, Bharath Jairaj and Xuege (Cathy) Lu:

The recent fall in clean tech investments is partly driven by the fact that renewable energy has become much cheaper in the past few years. You can buy more energy output for less cash than you could have two or four years ago. At the 2014 Future of Energy Summit earlier this month, Michael Liebreich, founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), said that roughly 80 percent of the reduced investment in clean energy over the last two years is due to these price reductions. Solar module prices, for example, have declined by about 80 percent since 2008. Increased competition among wind energy suppliers has also reduced prices. Research from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) finds that wind energy prices could drop from 10-30 percent further in the medium to long-term.

Meanwhile, from Scientific American’s ClimateWire, we learn that Solar Power Grows 200 Percent in Only 4 Years.

Driven by an explosion in photovoltaics, the U.S. solar sector has emerged “from a relatively small contributor to the nation’s total electric capacity into a one of comparative significance,” the Energy Information Administration reported this week in its latest Electricity Monthly Update.

Since 2010, EIA said, U.S. solar capacity increased 418 percent from 2,326 megawatts, accounting for 0.2 percent of total U.S. electric generation, to today’s 12,057 MW, or 1.13 percent of U.S. generation.

Over half of this capacity increase has occured in home and businesses involved in utility net metering programs whereby excess production is sold to the utility at reasonable rates. A good deal of this has occurred in California (38% of the US total).

It would make sense for Libertarian-leaning individuals, such as those who make up the Tea Party, to be on board with this sort of thing because it fits with their philosophy so well. One wonders, then, why the right wing is so opposed to even recognizing the importance of climate change, let alone doing something about it. But it turns out that the logic of home grown energy has not been entirely lost on that sector of society. According to an item in Slate by Josh Voorhees,

Last week…klahoma lawmakers quietly voted to reverse a nearly four-decade-old law that had barred utility companies from charging customers who install solar panels on their homes more than those who don’t. The bill… would have effectively cleared the way for utilities in the Sooner State to force homeowners who install solar panels to pay for both the electricity they buy from the grid and for a portion of the electricity they sell back to it.

The vote marked a rare victory for power companies in their quest to stymie the growth of the rooftop solar industry. It also represented a sharp departure from the wave of well-publicized, big-dollar federal and state efforts currently aimed at making solar energy cost competitive with more traditional energy sources like coal and natural gas…

Then, on Tuesday, to the surprise of pretty much everyone involved, Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Mary Fallin, issued an executive order largely undercutting the provision, dealing an unexpected defeat to major utilities and their deep-pocketed backers—a group that includes the Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council, a powerful national membership group for conservative state lawmakers.

So, there you go.

Atlantic Hurricanes and El Niño

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I have a little “science by spreadsheet” project for you, concerning the relationship between El Niño and Atlantic hurricanes.

The chance of an El Niño event happening this year seems to go up every few days, with most, perhaps all, climate models suggesting that El Niño will form this Summer or Fall. Climate experts tell us that there are typically fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic during El Niño years. So, I was interested to see how many fewer. Also, there appears to be a different kind of El Niño that happens sometimes, perhaps more often these days as an effect of global warming, which is variously referred to as Modoki or Central Pacific El Niño. The definition of this type of event, and even whether or not it is real, is not well established, but it has been said that the effect of this version of El Niño on Atlantic hurricanes is different.

The data used for this analysis covers the period from 1950 to 2012, simply because that is the range of years for which El Niño and hurricane data are readily available for copy/paste into the spreadsheet. Aside from numbers of hurricanes, we’ll look at the Accumulated Cyclone Energy index (ACE). This is a value calculated from the storms that occur, using measures of wind speed over the life of the storm. Since tropical storms and hurricanes vary in ways not captured by simply counting them, or even by counting them by standard categories (one through five), this measure is a better reflection of overall major storminess in the region. The following figure shows the relationship between ACE and frequency of hurricanes in the Atlantic Basin. Please keep in mind that the clear relationship between these numbers is a given: ACE is calculated, essentially, from Number of Hurricanes together with a measure of hurricane strength, so the same variable (number of hurricanes) is on both axes of the graph. The purpose of this graph is to give an idea of the variation of hurricane frequency around the measurement of overall energy in the system, so this really mainly shows how complex the manifestation of hurricanes in a given season is.

Screen Shot 2014-04-23 at 8.40.47 AM

Now let’s look at the relationship between the number of named Atlantic tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes, in El Niño, no-El Niño, and CP El Niño years, as well as the ACE.

Screen Shot 2014-04-23 at 8.25.41 AM

Without bothering with any statistical tests or other mumbo-jumbo (this is Science by Spreadsheet, after all) we can see that the number of named storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes, as well as the ACE index, are all higher in years that do not have an El Niño. But, it is also apparent (again, no statistical tests) that the difference is not huge. In other words, if you live in a hurricane susceptible area, and you are thinking that you’re not going to have a problem with hurricanes this year because there will probably be an El Niño, think again. There are still going to be hurricanes. Also of interest is that CP El Niño years, of which there are only a few, are like regular El Niño years though maybe the reduced number of major hurricanes is a real phenomenon. (Also note, in these data most of the “CP El Niño” years are also El Niño years, but not all, in case you were trying to add up the values of N.)

Another way of looking at the same data is to ask what percentage of named storms develop into hurricanes, or major hurricanes, under these different ENSO conditions. Here are the percentages:

Screen Shot 2014-04-23 at 8.35.27 AM

So, just over half of the named storms develop into hurricanes in an average year, regardless of El Niño, and about a quarter into major hurricanes. CP El Ninño years seem to show, as we saw above, less development of major hurricanes. But, the total number of these years is small, so this may mean nothing.

Remember last year’s Atlantic hurricanes? No, nobody else does either. It was an anemic year for Atlantic hurricanes. This is attributed to the giant plume of Saharan dust that attenuated tropical storm development in the basin that year. It might be reasonable to say that the number and intensity of hurricanes per year is highly variable for a lot of reasons, and factors such as Saharan dust may have very large impacts on hurricane formation. In other words, the variation introduced into the system by El Niño may be important but not overwhelming.

In order to look at the overlap between El Niño and non El Niño years, I made this frequency histogram:

Screen Shot 2014-04-23 at 9.34.30 AM

(Note that this frequency histogram uses intervals of 3 years; the one year on “30” is a year with 28 storms, falling into the interval 27.1 to 20. Science by spreadsheet has its limitations.)

There is a certain amount of overlap. Extremely active Atlantic hurricane seasons seem to only occur in non-El Niño years, over on the right side of the graph, but the distributions of named storm frequency is not separate and distinct. Another way of looking at this is to note that the range of number of named storms per year for non El Niño years is 4-20, while the range of number of named storms for El Niño years is 6-18.

Sea surface temperatures influence Atlantic hurricane formation. Here’s a graph from someone else’s spreadsheet showing this relationship:

"A graph showing the correlation between the and the number of major hurricanes which form in the Atlantic basin. Moving averages for AMO are by the years' average indexes, 5 years before and 5 years after, not the provided 121-month smoothing."
“A graph showing the correlation between the and the number of major hurricanes which form in the Atlantic basin. Moving averages for AMO are by the years’ average indexes, 5 years before and 5 years after, not the provided 121-month smoothing.”
:

Clearly, a large proportion of hurricane frequency is explained by variations in sea surface temperature. Clearly, Saharan dust explains some of the variation. El Niño also explains some of the variation, but it is only part of the story.

AMO-Hurricane graph
El Ninño year data
Tropical storm data
CP El Ninño data