Tag Archives: Climate Change

Breaking: Former Obama Campaign Staff’s Letter on Keystone XL

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A letter signed by (so far) 145 former Obama campaign staff calls on President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. There is no doubt that President Obama’s action on climate change will be a large part of his legacy, and at this point, President Obama’s position on Keystone XL is unclear. It is true that the Obama administration is doing some good things (like this) but building the Keystone Pipeline is one of the worst things he could allow to happen.

Frustrated with this situation, the people who helped put President Obama in the White House, twice, are speaking out. Here is the letter:

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama,

On November 7th, the day after Election Day, we took a break from entering last-minute data or cleaning our OFA field offices and crowded around iPhones and laptops to listen to you talk.From strip malls, grungy basements, and non-descript headquarters in our adoptedcommunities of Petersburg, VA or Manchester, NH or Aurora, CO, we paused for five minutes tohear from the man who inspired us to leave our homes and give every last ounce of energy tore-elect our President, a leader so awe-inspiring that we’d tear up just knowing he’d be in our zip code. You told us on the phone that day, “When I was your age, I had this vague inklingabout making a difference, but I didn’t know how to do it…I ended up becoming a communityorganizer.” So did we.

It’s in that spirit that we write to ask you to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. We trust you tomake the right decision after you weigh all arguments, but one thing you taught us as organizersis that nothing can stand in the way of millions of voices calling for change. Mr. President, weare just a few of the millions of young people across the country who are frightened at theprospect of runaway climate change. One of the reasons we came to work for you in the firstplace is because we trust you understand how big this challenge is.

You can help cement your legacy as a climate champion by rejecting this pipeline. You alreadyknow all the reasons we can’t afford this pipeline — that it will lock in gigatons of carbon pollutionover the next four decades and that it could spill into our nation’s most valuable water sources –we’re just asking you to think of us when you make up your mind. Dozens of supporters acrossthe country told us they were casting their ballot for someone they could count on to make thetough calls when it came to our security and our health care and our climate. They voted for you,Mr. President, because we told them you’d be on the right side of history when you had to makethese calls. Because we knew you’d do the right thing and stop this pipeline.

You closed out our call on November 7th by saying to us, “Over the last four years when peopleask me how do you put up with the frustrations of Washington, I just look to you. I think aboutwhat you guys are going to do. That’s the source of my hope and my inspiration, and I know thatyou guys won’t disappoint me.” For so long you have been the source of our hope andinspiration. Please don’t disappoint us. Reject Keystone XL.

Sincerely,

Then there are 145 signatures (see this document)

If you are a former Obama campaign staffer, you can click here to add your name.

HERE is the press release from We Are Power Shift

The Ocean is the Dog. Atmospheric Temperature is the Tail.

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Let me ‘splain.

If you want to know exactly where your dog is, you could put at GPS sensor in the middle of it’s body, perhaps near the pancreas. It would give you an average position for your dog, and would be most accurate most of the time.

If you put the GPS sensor on the tip of the dog’s tail, and used that to estimate where your dog is, you would be nearly wrong much of the time, even if over the long term this would be a good estimate for where your dog has been.

More importantly, if you wanted to measure the movement of your dog, the GPS sensor in the middle of the dog’s body would tell you pretty accurately if the dog is moving or still. But a GPS sensor on the tip of the dog’s tail would often indicate movement when the dog is, essentially still (but wagging its tail).

The question has been brought up: Is global warming stalled? People suggest this because atmospheric temperatures have not gone up as much as they might be expected to go up if we used a straight line matched to the last 30 or 40 years of data. Like this:

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(That graph is from here.)

Thinking that this means that global warming has stalled, however, is like thinking that your dog is on the bottom step of your porch jumping up and down, when really, it is on the top step of your porch sleeping (and the dog’s tail is hanging down by the lower setp, wagging because it is having a happy-dream).

When the sun’s light reaches the earth, a certain amount of it bonces off shiny things and goes back into space. The light that does not bounce off is absorbed momentarily by atoms and converted to heat. That heat eventually goes out into out space as well, but it takes time. Greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere cause the departure of the heat to slow down. Increased greenhouse gasses have caused the entire system to heat up because the atmosphere does a poorer job conducting this heat to the upper reaches of the atmosphere and beyond.

But, only a tiny percentage of the sun’s energy that is converted to heat actually contributes to warming of the atmosphere and thus to things like how hot it is outside, or how much evaporation there is (which causes both drought and heavy rain, depending). About 93.4% of this energy actually goes into the ocean, 2.3% into the air, and the rest into other things.

For this reason, when you focus on just the heat in the atmosphere (or, for that matter, just the atmosphere and the surface of the sea), to measure or describe global warming, it is like tracking the tip of your dog’s tail to determine its location, instead of the body of the dog. It will work, and over time be a good approximation of global warming/dog location, but over shorter time scales, looking only at the atmosphere/tail will show more variation than is useful in answering the important questions.

Those important questions being “Is global warming continuing?” and “Where is my dog?”

Don’t let the tail wag the dog.

Dog Tail Photo Credit: buzzsnap via Compfight cc

Why you sound so stupid when you say “global warming has stopped”

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Science is good at seeing things that you can’t really see. For example, science can provide an accurate three dimensional model of a critically important molecule even though no one has ever directly seen what this molecule looks like. That three dimensional model of the molecule can be used to understand things such as a) how life works and b) how to address some important disease.

Science can measure the exact proportions of each of several elements that are invisible that make up the air. We can sense the air but we can’t see Nitrogen vs. Oxygen vs. CO2 in the air, while Science can. Science can ascertain the invisible and the unpalpable. The actions and effects of those elements in the air are critically important. Were it not for Science’s ability to “see” them we would understand very little about some very important things.

There is a neat device some biology teachers use to get this point across. It is called The Ob=Scertainer. It is a device that demands that a student make the leap from thinking that if you can’t see something you can’t “see” it, to understanding that we can “see” what we can’t “see” if we are just a little smart about it. Or more accurately, if something does not leap to full realization of your usual senses, that does not mean it can’t be understood and no conclusions can be reached about it.

Before I describe that device, a small digression.

Years ago I was teaching a seminar in which we read a paper that would fit well into the modern “skeptics” community (I don’t mean science denialist here, but rather, regular skeptic) very much on the hyperskeptical end of the skeptical spectrum. The paper was about a certain skeleton found at a certain site, a very important one. Everybody who was anybody thought this skeleton was a burial, where a dead guy was put in the ground and covered over. The author of the paper argued that you could not say this. Every tiny bit of evidence that the skeleton was a burial was examined by the author and discounted. At the end there was not one stitch of evidence left uncriticized, unquestioned, in this paper. The students in the seminar all agreed that this set of bones was not a burial, and indeed, may not have even been an articulated skeleton.

One example of the critique involved the measurement of the distance between bones that normally adjoin in the human body. In most cases the distances between articular surfaces was outside the range found in normal humans, suggesting that the “skeleton” may not be “articulated.” In my view, all of these arguments were irrelevant. The bones were all in approximately the right place, the individuals was in a fetal position, sort of, and although it was not clear that there was a hole dug (the nature of the excavation did not allow this) there was a scattering of stones on top of the bones, which were then in turn buried over 60,000 years or so of accumulation of sediment above the skeleton.

In other words, the skeleton was to me clearly a burial, and the students had all been talked out of thinking this by a hypercritical, almost post-modern attack on the original conception. Which is a good thing, even if it is wrong. Evidence unassailed is never as good. But still, the thing was probably a burial.

So, I did this. I told the students that I was going to buy a beer for everyone in the room except the one person who was under 21, and she would have a non-alcoholic beverage of her choice. But only under one condition. Everyone was to write on the index cards I was passing out whether or not they thought this skeleton was a burial (write “burial”) or not (write “not burial”), without anyone else seeing their card. If everyone had the same exact opinion, everyone got a drink. Otherwise, nobody got a drink.

The cards were distributed, stuff written on them, and collected. The decision was unanimous. When push came to shove, when something very important (a beer) was at stake, each student decided that the burial was a burial.

Because a) it was a burial and b) the scales had cleared from the eyes of the students.

Now, back to this device that biology teachers use sometimes.

The Ob-Scertainer.
The Ob-Scertainer.

It is a box with a certain shape inside. The space inside the box has various little walls or pegs or whatever inside the hollow area. Inside the box is a ball bearing that can move freely around in two dimensions. By tilting the box this way and that one can get a sense for what sorts of obstructions are inside the box, and attempt to draw a map of the interior space.

The students are in this way challenged to draw a two dimensional model of something they can’t see using indirect (and admittedly fuzzy) evidence. It takes time, there are sometimes errors, but they manage.

Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh are in a boat. They are in the middle of a deep, cold lake. If the boat sinks they will die of hypothermia and their corpses will sink to the bottom. There is a device in the boat that will sink it instantly, or alternatively, propel the boat to the safety of the shoreline where there are three martinis waiting for them, but it all depends on all three of them correctly answering a question. Notice that this is different from the scenario above, where the students only had to all agree. The students in my seminar were in fact interested in the truth, while the three people in this boat in this lake are not. So getting it right is the thing.

The question is, “Is global warming real, human caused, and important, yes or no.”

They don’t know who is asking the question. It could be the Heritage Institute, it could be Michael Mann with his finger on a remote that operates the device. But they are told that the best available science will be used to determine if they are wrong or right.

They will all answer “yes.”

Scientists know that greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are increasing in the atmosphere. They know that this increases the amount of the sunlight that gets converted to heat staying around on the Earth longer, as opposed to going into outer space. They know that this heat is distributed among several parts of the earth approximately as follows:

  • Ocean 93.4%
  • Atmosphere 2.3%
  • Everything else 4.3%

Everything else includes the land surface of the earth and various ice sheets and so on.

Over the last several decades the overall temperature of the atmosphere, that 2.3% part of the equation, has gone up on average. Given any reasonable time period, i,e 10 or 15 years, it really has never gone down, though it has failed to go up very much now and then. The overall trend is up.

However, we have really good measurements (for the last several decades) for the Atmosphere, and for the surface of (but not the deeper parts of) the Ocean. This means that when the heat goes up more than expected in the Atmosphere, which it has done now and then, we can guess that this involves less heat going into the Ocean or to those other things. Conversely, when the temperature goes up less in the atmosphere than expected, we can guess that the “missing” heat went into the Ocean or one of the other places heat might go. For example, the heat in the atmosphere has not gone up over the last few years as much as predicted by drawing a straight line covering the last few decades, but instead,

  • Greenland ice cap has lost a lot of ice (which takes up heat).
  • The Arctic sea has lost a lot of ice (which takes up heat).
  • The few measurements in the deep ocean that we have show that it has gained a lot of heat.

It all makes sense and pretty much fits together, but there are many who claim that “global warming has plateaued” or that there is a “hiatus” in global warming.

See the extra heat going into the ocean? From Balmeseda, Trenberth and Kallen, 2013. Distinctive climate signals in reanalysis of global ocean heat conent. Geophysical research letters 40(1-6).
See the extra heat going into the ocean? From Balmeseda, Trenberth and Kallen, 2013. Distinctive climate signals in reanalysis of global ocean heat conent. Geophysical research letters 40(1-6).

OK here’s an analogy. You make $50,000 a year. You pay out 10,000 in taxes. Then, suddenly, taxes go up and now you are paying $20,000 a year in taxes. Would you claim that $10,000 a year has disappeared into thin air? No. The money still exists. Its just not you YOUR pocket (you are the Atmosphere) It is now in the Government’s pocket (the Government is the Ocean). And, in fact, since you are so small and the Government is so big, this shift in heat, er, money, will be noticed by you (the person) a lot, but very little by the big giant government.

People can see or feel when it is hot and cold, to a lesser extend they can know when there is drought, when there are major storms, when there are fires, and if they are paying attention they can observe when the sea rises up and eats part of New Jersey. But they can’t see when the surface of the earth, the ground, below your feet, goes up a half a degree, or when the ocean at depth gets a tiny bit warmer. They can see, on the news, the melting of the Arctic ice, but they may not “see” (as in “get”) the connection whereby Arctic ice melts and sucks energy out of the atmosphere that might otherwise have been a heat wave in Paramus.

But Science can see that!

There is not a hiatus in global warming. There is not a plateau in global warming. Global warming has not stopped. However, climate change (including and especially global warming) is one or two orders of magnitude more complex that, say, the plot of this book:

Global warming is slightly more complicated than this, despite the usual commentary by conservative columnists in The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.
Global warming is slightly more complicated than this, despite the usual commentary by conservative columnists in The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, who apparently can’t find their belly buttons.

But you wouldn’t know that from what we often see in the press, among commenters who demand that global warming be simple, or at least, exploit the belief that it is simple to misconstrue the meaning of any evidence of complexity. Shame on them.

The Ob-Scertainer requires that a student admit that she or he can know something unseeable. Modern medicine does that too. As does every electronic device you use, pretty much. And so does understanding climate change.

We don’t have time any more to mess around with denialism, false balance, and willful ignorance. Get on board or get a D, or even an F.

Graph of global temperatures from HERE.

CNBC stands for Could Not Be Correct?

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… or Climate Noobs Bork Climate-science?

… or Can’t News Be Correct?

(add your own below)

The thing is, CNBC, which is supposed to be a news station, is fueling public misunderstanding of climate science. This is bad journalism, and virtually criminal given the importance of climate change and the need for good science based policy related to climate change. We are long past the point where we can tolerate false balance, astro-turfing, and rating mongering. We need to have a good public understanding of climate science, we need it now, and we need “news” organizations like CNBC to stop doing what they are doing.

CNBC has Joe Kernand, who according to Media Matters

was the most vocal CNBC figure on climate change in 2013, frequently pointing to cold weather to suggest that global warming is not occurring. Kernen has long pushed climate science misinformation. In a 2007 segment, he cited the “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” a movie that promoted discredited claims, to criticize singer Sheryl Crow and “An Inconvenient Truth” producer Laurie David for speaking to college students about climate change. In 2011, Kernen co-authored a book titled Your Teacher Said What?!: Trying To Raise a Fifth Grade Capitalist in Obama’s America that compared climate scientists to “high priests” whose work should not be trusted

CNBC has Larry Kudlow, of The Kudlow Report, who

… campaigned against cap-and-trade in 2009, by denying climate change (“a lot of scientists are now saying … this whole thing is just kind of a scam analysis”) and citing The Heritage Foundation’s exaggerated cost estimates for the proposed cap-and-trade program.

CNBC has Rick Santelli who

…is a regular CNBC contributor who some claim fomented the Tea Party movement with a well-publicized rant against government assistance for homeowners struggling to pay their mortgages. Santelli denies climate change, including saying in 2013, “when it comes to macroeconomics or climate change, I think trying to say that the scientific method is alive and well is a real stretch.”

Meanwhile, from Forecast the Facts:

Climate change is “just kind of a scam analysis” by “high priests,” according to the cable business channel CNBC. The majority of its coverage of climate change casts doubt on the science behind it, a Media Matters analysis found.

Several CNBC figures, including host Larry Kudlow, co-anchor Joe Kernen, and contributors Rick Santelli and Dennis Gartman deny manmade climate change — even arguing with their guests from the business world who talk about the risks climate change pose to the economy.

The only scientist that CNBC hosted on climate change in the first half of 2013 was William Happer, a physicist who has not published any peer-reviewed climate research, and who is the chairman of the fossil-funded George C. Marshall Institute.

Forecast the Facts has a petition you can sign, which reads:

Tell CNBC Chief Executive Officer and President Mark Hoffman:

Tell your on-air personalities to stop promoting global warming denial and start reporting the facts on the economic risks of fossil-fueled climate change.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION

Is Global Warming Causing More and Bigger Fires in Colorado?

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High temperatures and dry conditions have caused the outbreak, increased intensity, and rapid spread of numerous wildfires in Colorado. Again. Fires happen, but the number, size, and intensity of wildfires in the western United States has been very high in recent years, and this is caused by global warming.

Global warming causes more rain and more frequent and more severe storm lines. More rain causes more plant growth in otherwise arid regions, and severe storms knock a lot of that vegetation down. This causes more light to get to the ground, so “ladder” vegetation, which enhances fire spread, increases, and the fallen branches add to the fuel that has already been increased by the increased rainfall.

Global warming causes drought, when it isn’t busy causing rain. So, areas with increased amounts of fuel that has been configured to increase fire intensity and spreadability become tinder-rich. Along with the drought comes increased spring and summer temperatures, also caused by global warming and this dries out the vegetation making it much more likely for fires to start, grow quickly, spread, and become large.

We’ve known this for some time, and there is all sorts of evidence to back up the assertion that global warming is the reason for the fire seasons on steroids effect we are seeing now (links to some of this are provided below).

So, yes.

James West has written a very thorough piece demonstrating all these connections, and more, in Mother Jones: How Climate Change Makes Wildfires Worse.

And here’s some backup information for you:

<li><a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060710084004.htm">More Large Forest Fires Linked To Climate Change</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7334/full/nature09763.html">Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes</a></li>


<li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/04/climate-change-america-wildfire-season?CMP=twt_gu">Climate change causing US wildfire season to last longer, Congress told</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/ES11-00345.1">Climate change and disruptions to global fire activity</a></li>

<li><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012GL051000/abstract">Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes</a></li>


<li><a href="https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/news/1036/record-high-temperatures-far-outpace-record-lows-across-us">RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES FAR OUTPACE RECORD LOWS ACROSS U.S.</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x09-153#.Ubnq5fb7289">Potential changes in monthly fire risk in the eastern Canadian boreal forest under future climate change</a></li>

More on Climate Change here.

Photo Credit: jonathanpercy via Compfight cc

Climate Change News and Notes

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This is what came across my desk this morning. A bit more activity than usual, but not by much. Enjoy. Or, rather, Be Afraid.

Congressman Demands Obama Apologize To Oklahoma For Investing In Climate Change Research

Just as extreme weather season kicks off, freshman Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) demanded that President Obama apologize to Oklahoma for allocating funding to climate change research. Bridenstine, a climate denier who serves on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, plans to introduce a bill that defunds climate change research.

Thousands more forced from home by Germany flooding

Floods continued to devastate communities alongside the surging River Elbe in Germany’s northeastern Saxony-Anhalt state Wednesday.
Hundreds of people are being evacuated from their homes in the towns of Stendal and Aken, with the army using helicopters and amphibious vehicles to help move them to safety….
In total, 45,000 people have been asked to leave their homes in Saxony-Anhalt, the state currently worst affected by the flooding. About 11,500 rescue workers are operating in the area.

German flood damage insurance claims may reach €3bn

Dammage from the past week’s flooding in Germany is expected to lead to insurance claims of up to €3bn (£2.5bn), a credit rating agency has said, as flood levels on the Elbe river in the country’s north appeared to stabilise.

Further south, the peak of the flood on the Danube, Europe’s second-longest river, moved away from the Hungarian capital, Budapest, toward Serbia.

The Elbe, the Danube and other rivers have overflowed their banks following weeks of heavy rain, causing extensive damage in Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia and Hungary.

Fitch Ratings said that the total cost to insurers of the floods in Germany alone is likely to total between €2.5bn and €3bn.

Why Arctic sea ice will vanish in 2013

I am just looking at the “big-picture” using all available data while considering feedbacks that have been incorrectly considered (or unidentified) and in the context of abrupt changes that are CLEARLY documented in climate paleorecords.

I really hope I’m wrong folks but I just don’t see it any other way. Time will tell…but, in any event, we need to have that ‘adult discussion’ ASAP

Arctic

Research Station Evacuated After Ice Melts Underneath It
Research at Russia’s North Pole-40, a station located aboard an ice floe in the Arctic, has ceased following an emergency evacuation of personnel. The ice upon which the station was built had begun to melt at an alarming rate and split into six pieces.

According to ITAR-TASS, a Russian news agency, North Pole-40 had been constructed in October 2012 with the expectation of working through September 2013. Those plans were scrapped in late May, however, after its foundation began melting and the research was quite literally put on thin ice.

Robert Redford Calls on President Obama to Show the Courage of His Climate Convictions

UK Secretary of State for the Environment reveals his depth of knowledge of climate change (not!)

An extraordinary – and worrying – insight into the mind of Owen Paterson, Secretary of State for the Environment here in the UK, was provided during a June 7th edition of the political Q&A programme Any Questions, available on BBC Radio 4 here. The programme is broadcast from a different venue every week and consists of chairman Jonathan Dimbleby and a panel of four politicians and commentators plus a studio audience who ask a selection of topical questions. This edition was from my home town of Machynlleth in Mid Wales and more specifically from the Centre for Alternative Technology, which has been promoting renewable energy and other sustainability issues since the 1970s.

New D.C. monument: The mall flood wall

Taxpayers are paying for the construction of a new wall on the National Mall. Longer than a football field, the wall has not been built to honor the nation’s fallen heroes or great leaders from our past. It has been quietly constructed over the past 2½ years to protect a vast swath of downtown Washington from a devastating flood. No longer a theory, climate change is here. The wall is a small part of the tens of billions of dollars Americans will have to pay in the future just to take the edge off the devastating effects of climate alteration.

Bloomberg’s race to protect NYC from climate change

Drive on 17th Street NW, just south of Constitution Avenue, and you’ll see concrete footings, a mound of dirt and jersey barriers — all part of an oft-delayed project to build a floodwall to protect downtown Washington from a rising Potomac River.

The flood wall, and similar initiatives elsewhere, amount to tacit acknowledgments that the fight against climate change, the cause celebre of the environmental movement for more than a decade, has failed in its primary purpose. In the race to prevent disaster, it’s already too late.

After Sandy, a new threat: Soaring flood insurance

Officials are urging people to elevate their houses now because they are eligible for federal financial aid. About $350 million of New York City’s and $600 million of New Jersey’s Sandy relief funding has been allocated for the repair of single- and two-family homes, which could help defray the cost.

But it’s still unclear how that money will be distributed among individual homeowners, which means many of them could be on their own financially.

The process of house-raising is laborious and prohibitively expensive, especially for working-class people who are already saddled with storm repair costs. Even a small cottage can cost $60,000 to elevate, while a sprawling multilevel home could run upwards of $250,000.

Early Summer Heat Krushes Kansas Records

The preliminary final high temperature at Goodland was 107°, smashing the old record by 7°. Other records were tied or broken in Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas.

…Extreme to Exceptional Drought Across Most of New Mexico…Moderate to Severe Drought All Remaining Areas…

The first 11 days of June brought above normal precipitation to much of central and eastern New Mexico, thanks to severe weather outbreaks on the 3rd, 5th and 7th. The west has experienced mostly below normal precipitation so far.

Unusually massive line of storms aim at Midwest

A gigantic line of powerful thunderstorms could affect one in five Americans on Wednesday as it rumbles from Iowa to Maryland packing hail, lightning and tree-toppling winds.

Meteorologist are warning that the continuous line of storms may even spawn an unusual weather event called a derecho, which is a massive storm of strong straight-line winds spanning at least 240 miles. Wednesday’s storms are also likely to generate tornadoes and cause power outages that will be followed by oppressive heat, said Bill Bunting, operations chief at the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.

Photo from Boston.com of 2008 flooding in Iowa.

The Ice Cap is Melting and You Can Help

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Obviously, you don’t want to help melt the ice cap. But you can help scientists figure out how and why it is happening and to learn important details of what might be one of the most important effects of global warming happening right now.

First, a word on why this is important. Look out the window. If you live in Bavaria, and you look out your window, perhaps you can see fish swimming by because you are in the middle of a huge flood affecting Central Europe. Look out the window. If you live in the American Midwest, it is either raining, about to rain, or it just rained, and you might be experiencing unprecedented flooding. Good luck getting your corn crop in. Actually, it is too late for corn, maybe try the soybeans in a week or two.

Look out the window. If you live in Colorado, you might not see much through the smoke from a nearby wildfire. Look out the window. If you live in the American Southwest or southern California and you have a thermometer outside, maybe it just broke because it was not designed to measure the very high temperatures you are experiencing.

Climate change is causing what meteorologists have been calling “Weather Whiplash” also known as “Weather Weirding.” This includes extreme heat, extreme cold, snow when it is not supposed to snow, way more rain than normally happens, and so on. There are multiple climate change related causes for some of this weather but much of what we are experiencing has to do with a fundamental shift in how the Northern Hemisphere’s temperate weather patterns operate. Normally temperate regions are separated from cooler regions to the north by a jet stream that runs in somewhat wavy line around the entire globe. This division between temperate and sub-arctic air masses exists because of the gradient in temperature from south (warmer) to north (cooler). This is a well understood phenomenon. However, over the last decade, the Arctic region has warmed considerably. This warming initially caused the ice that should cover much of the Arctic Sea, even in the summer, to melt off far more than it ever has during the warm season, which exposes water. Glare ice reflects sunlight back into space, but water absorbs it. Even the wet meltwater on the surface of the Greenland Ice sheet absorbs heat rather than reflects it, as it would were it frozen. So, warming has caused more warming in a seemingly unstoppable positive feedback system. This has gotten worse year after year.

This Arctic warming has proceeded at a pace faster than science. Research cycles take a few years. First, scientists concieve of an idea, get a bit of preliminary funding, then do a preliminary project or two. This refines and verifies their ideas and they seek more funding. Then they begin a longer research project that produces a series of conference papers, the occasional publication, etc. The ideas continue to be refined and adjusted, the bad parts being discarded, the verified parts being built on. Somewhere along the line ginormous computer models are brought into play to develop a more complete understanding of the thing being investigated. These computer models may require time on hard to access ginormous computers. More publications come out. Eventually there is a pretty good widely accepted model for some natural process related to climate change, but that took five years or so. The Arctic warming has proceeded at a pace faster than this model of science can keep up with.

But I digress, slightly. Let’s get back to the jet stream.

Arctic warming has decreased the intensity of the south (warmer) to north (cooler) temperature gradient in the Northern Hemisphere. This has caused the jet stream to change. It has become wiggly-wobbly instead of straightish. The jet stream now has big curves in it, and these curves under certain not-very-uncommon conditions tend to get stuck in place. So, the high winds of the jet stream are still streaming along but the curves themselves tend to move very little or just stay in place. At the turning points of the curvy jet stream form ginormous vortexes of air which promote storm formation. So, we have storminess, and we have storminess stuck in one region of the globe for a long time. This has caused the flooding we’ve seen. Also, the jet stream is less effective as a barrier between the warmer and cooler air masses. So, for example, even while some regions have been experiencing excessive heat, areas that normally would be warming nicely for the spring stayed cool this year. This coolness, strangely, is caused by heat. April, for instance, was very cool in the Upper Midwest of the United States, but to the north it was warmer than it should have been. The total average temperature was increased, but the barrier between colder-cool and warmish-warm broke down, so we had coolish warm in the south and warmish cool in the north. Putting this a different way, if the Arctic is the freezer compartment of your fridge, and Minnesota is the refrigerator, it is like someone cut a hole in the barrier between the freezer and refrigerator compartments. Your ice is wet and melting and your milk has a skim of ice on it.

This is what we think is happening, but as I noted above, the speed with which science can understand major complex systems like the earth’s climate is measured in chunks of years, while the current change is happening very very quickly. This is one of those situations where, if this was a movie, the President of the United States would tell the White House Science Advisor to assemble a team. In the next scene there would be a team of scientists being lowered from a helicopter onto the Greenland Ice Sheet in order to collect critically important data. In the next scene, in the White House Situation Room, the scientists would be delivering the bad news the the President and various assemble high level officials.

“It’s bad, Mr. President,” the crackling voice of the scientist over a barely adequate short wave connection intones.

“Just give it to me straight, no need for sugarcoating,” comes the presidential voice of Sam Waterston, or perhaps Luke Wilson, playing the role of President.

“Well, Mr. ..esident. It’s all …et here.”

“Come again? You’re breaking up.

“Wet. It’s all ….et …ere. The …eenalnd ice …ap. …elting faster than we … …aster than we …ought..”

“Can’t we have a better connection?” yells the frustrated President.

“Aaaaaaaarg…..” The last words from the science team. But don’t worry, they’ll make it back in time for the chief scientist’s teenager’s graduation party but that will involve falling though several holes in the ice and enlisting the aid of a band of Inuit hunters.

The thing is, in real life, it does not work that way, and we are behind in understanding what is happening in the Arctic. One of the most important things happening up there is the melting of the surface of the Greenland glaciers, which, in turn, might be caused by a newly discovered phenomenon known as Dark Snow.

With climate change we have more dust from drought-stricken regions and lots of soot from widespread wildfires. This stuff settles on the otherwise highly reflective snow and ice of the Greenland glacier and causes the conversion of sunlight, which would otherwise reflect away into space, into heat, and that heat melts the ice and snow, turning it into liquid water. Liquid water then continues to absorb more sunlight, converting it into heat. This causes more Arctic warming which may contribute to more dust and soot, and so on and so forth in a vicious positive feedback cycle. And by “positive” we do not mean “positive in a good way.”

John Abraham, a climate scientist at St. Thomas University, has just put up a blog post that provides an excellent overview of the problem in Greenland and the Dark Snow Project, which is a crowd funded project designed to understand what is happening there, being run by scientist Jason Box:

… Box has assembled a team of scientists and communicators to collect and analyze samples from key locations on the ice sheet, and report those results directly to the public. The plan is to arrive in Greenland in late June, just as the peak melting season and fire season coincide. Box will be joined by Bill McKibben, who will be covering the research for Rolling Stone, and videographer Peter Sinclair, whose series of climate change videos on YouTube has gained high praise from climate scientists.

Here is John Abrahamn’s blog post: Why Greenland’s darkening ice has become a hot topic in climate science: Darkening causes the snow to absorb more sunlight which in turn increases melting

I strongly urge you to click through to John’s post, read about Greenland and Dark Snow, then click through the link he provides to the Dark Snow project and give them five dollars!!!

…

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What are you doing staring at this blog post. CLICK HERE NAO!!!

Weatherman Bob and the Green Screen

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Weatherman Bob disappeared today. He was consumed, or maybe absorbed, by his Green Screen. A Green Screen is a screen, green in color, with special properties. A TV studio camera and the equipment it is hooked to replace the green screen with an imaginary background. So, a person who is not green can stand in front of the Green Screen and to the TV viewer it will look like the person is standing in front of something else. This is how weather reporters on TV ply their trade. They look like they are standing in front of a map of the region showing cold fronts and warm fronts and temperatures and pictures of a kitten buried in snow or a Minnesotan scooping up golf ball size hail while wearing shorts and a furry hat. And today, Weatherman Bob’s Green Screen consumed or absorbed him. It was pretty funny.

I first saw Bob about a dozen years ago when I moved to a new town. There were two weather reporters who seemed to be able to predict the weather reasonably well, on two different stations. One of them was Bob, the other one was Doug. Both of these are made up names. I remember the first time I looked at the weather in this town. I had been out driving and was caught in a severe thunderstorm, on the highway. After I got through that I was driving into town and I saw a giant spinning cloud in the sky. It was just like a tornado but horizontal and at high up. I thought, “Wow, the people in this town don’t know how lucky they are. Where I come from it is not every day you get to see something like that!”

Later I got home and turned on the TV and there was Doug the Weatherman showing a picture of the giant horizontal tornado thing. “This is something you don’t see very day!” he was saying. He gave the thing an official name which I no longer remember, and said, “This is like a giant horizontal tornado up high. They rarely ever come down to the ground but when they do it is bad news.” A minute later I changed the channel and there was Weatherman Bob giving his version of the weather. He did not mention the giant horizontal tornado, but he did say that jury was still out on global warming.

And so it went for a dozen years. If I watched Weatherman Doug he would always say something interesting and informative about the weather. He once told me to get into the basement and I did right away, though the tornado missed us by a few blocks. Every time I watched Weatherman Bob he would not say anything interesting about the weather, but he would occasionally say something snarky about global warming, about how the jury was still out.

As time went by I watched Weatherman Bob less and less and Weatherman Doug more and more. Basically, I only watched Weatherman Bob when I had to. Meanwhile, I noticed that Weatherman Doug started to show up on various other TV shows as an expert on weather and he would speak truthfully and thoughtfully about global warming. Weatherman Bob stayed on his regular TV show.

Then global weirding happened. One day a few years ago the weather got strange and it has not stopped being strange since then. The latest version of global weirding was to have Central Europe turn into a large lake where there used to be many cities and towns and a medium size river. Here in my town, we became surrounded by rain storms. There are rain storms to the north of us, rainstorms to the south of us, rainstorms to the east and to the west of us. Frequently, there are rainstorms right on top of us.

On weather radar the rain storms look like green. When the rain is more severe it looks yellow, but mostly it is just different shades of green. One of those shades of green is very much like the green of the green screen.

So today I was at the Gym on the treadmill and off in the distance there was a TV with the news. It was the station with Weatherman Bob. Right in the beginning of the news show, they went to Weatherman Bob and he was standing in front of his green screen, showing the weather radar. There was green everywhere and he was pointing to it and gesticulating. Every now and then they switched back to the news anchors and they looked concerned. Then they would go back to Weatherman Bob and he would be pointing to the green radar images all over his Green Screen, and he also looked concerned.

Then they went on to other news but in a few minutes they went back to Weatherman Bob, and this time there was even more rain shown on the radar. The whole region was covered with it almost. And he gesticulated and the anchors looked concerned. Then they went on to some other news stories.

A while later they went back to Weatherman Bob and this time the Green Screen was almost entirely green with radar-rain, and Weatherman Bob was gesticulating, but this time he seemed to be a bit green around the edges himself, almost as though the green screen was bleeding onto him and not keeping him nice and separate from the imaginary image. I don’t know what he was saying but I imagined him saying something about how this odd weather pattern was not due to global warming. Then they went on to some other news stories.

Then, at the very end of the news show, they went back to Weatherman Bob one more time. The green radar totally covered the Green Screen. Weatherman Bob gesticulated at it. His edges became even greener and suddenly everything but his face and hands disappeared into the background. They cut to the news anchors for a moment. One of them was staring towards where we assume Weatherman Bob was standing with his mouth wide open and a shocked expression on his face. The other anchor had pulled out her cell phone and was dialing 911. They both looked concerned.

When they cut back to Weatherman Bob his hands had already disappeared and his face was now just a circle with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. He was shouting something that I could not hear because I was seeing this at the Gym and I did not have a radio tuned to that TV station with me, and then his face disappeared. Later, I found this weather forecast, the last one ever made by Bob the Weatherman on YouTube and watched it again with the sound on so I could hear it.

Weatherman Bob’s last words, as he was consumed, or maybe absorbed, by his Green Screen, was “The juuuurrrryyyy … is stiilllll ooooouuuuuuutttt!!!!”

Weird, huh?

Just for fun:

What’s going on with the Arctic Sea ice?

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Since 2001 the amount of Arctic Sea ice that has melted during the summer has generally increased. There may have been a long term trend in melting of ice in the northern hemisphere generally, including mountain glaciers, the Greenland glaciers, and seasonally, Arctic Sea Ice. But the seasonal melting of Arctic Sea ice seems to represent a metastable shift unprecedented in available data. There is probably a tipping point followed by positive feedback. From 2001 onwards, the amount of sea ice melted each summer has gone up, and this has resulted in two related effects: 1) The total amount of sunlight sent back into outer space by reflection from ice and snow has gone down and 2) the amount of warming of the Arctic Sea itself by that non-reflected sunlight has gone up. The result is a graph like this one (hat tip Arctic Sea Ice Blog):

One of several graphs showing the 1979-2001 average for sea ice VOLUME in the Arctic compared to each subsequent year plotted separately. The present year, with the error bars, is the predicted extent.
One of several graphs showing the 1979-2001 average for sea ice extent in the Arctic compared to each subsequent year plotted separately. The present year, with the error bars, is the predicted extent.

Another view shows the numbers somewhat differently. The grey areas show the confidence limits for the 1979-2012 means, so it includes the reduced years, in volume, with the last four years plotted and the present year shown not as an estimate but as the actual measurement. This shows that we are on track to have a lot of melting:

BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrentV2_CY

These data include both good news and bad news, depending on how you want to spin it. The good news is that the seasonal reduction in sea ice volume is not lower then, or not a lot lower than, last years, so maybe we are seeing a leveling off in this phenomenon. The bad news comes in two parts. First, the volume of sea ice includes old ice, which tends to be thicker, and much of that has already melted away, so it can’t melt again because it is already gone. Second, being at the extreme low end of a disturbing trend does not mean that the trend is not disturbing. (See more discussion here.)

Let’s look at extent. This graph from the National Snow and Ice Data Center shows extent (not volume):

Screen Shot 2013-06-05 at 10.41.54 AM

N_stddev_timeseries

This shows that the current year is on track to look like last year. Notice the big dip last year’s ice took in just a few days from now. It will be interesting to see what the current year’s ice extend does over this same time frame. One of the differences between last year and this year is winds. There was a lot of wind facilitating the breakup of ice last year, but this years the winds are described as “slack.” Related to this, last year June had warmer temperatures over the ice. The last month this year has been relatively cold.

The next four weeks will be interesting to watch.

The 1970s Ice Age Myth and Time Magazine Covers – by David Kirtley

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This is a guest post by David Kirtley. David originally posted this as a Google Doc, and I’m reproducing his work here with his permission. Just the other day I was speaking to a climate change skeptic who made mention of an old Time or Newsweek (he was not sure) article that talked about fears of a coming ice age. There were in fact a number of articles back in the 1970s that discussed the whole Ice Age problem, and I’m not sure what my friend was referring to. But here, David Kirtley places a recent meme that seems to be an attempt to diffuse concern about global warming because we used to be worried about global cooling. The meme, however, is not what it seems to be. And, David places the argument that Ice Age Fears were important and somehow obviate the science in context.

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h3>The 1970s Ice Age Myth and Time Magazine Covers
– by David Kirtley

A few days ago a facebook friend of mine posted the following image:

From the 1977 cover we can see that apparently a new ice age was supposed to arrive. Only 30 years later, according to the 2006 cover, global warming is supposed to be the problem. But the cover on the left isn’t from 1977. It actually is this Time cover from April 9, 2007:

As you can see, the cover title has nothing to do with an imminent ice age, it’s about global warming, as we might expect from a 2007 Time magazine.

The faked image illustrates one of the fake-skeptics’ favorite myths: The 1970s Ice Age Scare. It goes something like this:

  • In the 1970s the scientists were all predicting global cooling and a future ice age.
  • The media served as the scientists’ lapdog parroting the alarming news.
  • The ice age never came—the scientists were dead wrong.
  • Now those same scientists are predicting global warming (or is it “climate change” now?)

The entire purpose of this myth is to suggest that scientists can’t be trusted, that they will say/claim/predict whatever to get their names in the newspapers, and that the media falls for it all the time. They were wrong about ice ages in the 1970s, they are wrong now about global warming.

But why fake the 1977 cover? Since, according to the fake-skeptics, there was so much news coverage of the imminent ice age why not just use a real 1970s cover?

I searched around on Time’s website and looked through all of the covers from the 1970s. I was shocked (shocked!) to find not a single cover with the promise of an in-depth, special report on the Coming Ice Age. What about this cover from December 1973 with Archie Bunker shivering in his chair entitled “The Big Freeze”? Nope, that’s about the Energy Crisis. Maybe this cover from January 1977, again entitled “The Big Freeze”? Nope, that’s about the weather. How about this one from December 1979, “The Cooling of America”? Again with the Energy Crisis.

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Now, there really were news articles in the 1970s about scientists predicting a coming ice age. Time had a piece called “Another Ice Age?” in 1974. Time’s competition, Newsweek, joined in with “The Cooling World” in 1975. People have collected lists and lists of “Coming Ice Age” stories from newspapers, magazines, books, tv shows, etc. throughout the 1970s.

But if it was such a big news story why did it never make the cover of America’s flagship news magazine like the faked image implies? Perhaps there is more to the story.

In the 1970s there were a few developments in climate science:

  • Scientists were finding answers to the puzzle of what caused ice ages in the past: variations in earth’s orbit.
  • Scientists were gathering data from around the world to come up with global average temperatures, and they found that temperatures had been cooling since about the 1940s.
  • Scientists were realizing that some of this cooling was due to increasing air pollution (soot and aerosols, tiny particles suspended in the air) which was decreasing the amount of solar energy entering the atmosphere.
  • Scientists were also quantifying the “greenhouse effect” of another part of our increasing pollution: carbon dioxide (CO2), which should cause the climate to warm.

The realization that very long cycles in earth’s orbit could cause the waxing and waning of ice ages, coupled with the fact that our soot and aerosols were already causing cooling, led some scientists to conclude that we may be headed for another ice age. Exactly when was still a little unclear. However, the warming effects of CO2 had been known for over a century, and new research in the 1970s was showing that CO2 warming would more than compensate for the cooling caused by aerosols, resulting in net warming.

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This, in a very brief nutshell, was the state of climate science in the 1970s. And so the media of the time published many stories about a coming ice age, which made for timely reading during some very cold winters. But many news stories also mentioned that other important detail about CO2: that our climate might soon change due to global warming. In 1976 Time published “The World’s Climate: Unpredictable” which is a very good summary of the then current scientific thinking: some scientists emphasized aerosols and cooling, some scientists emphasized CO2 and warming. There was no consensus either way. Many other 1970s articles which mention a Coming Ice Age also mention the possibility of increased warming due to CO2. For instance, here, here and here.

Fake-skeptics read these stories and only focus on the Coming Ice Age angle, and they enlarge the importance of those scientists who focused on that angle. They totally ignore the rest of the picture of 1970s climate science: that increasing CO2 would cause global warming.

The purpose of the image of the two Time magazine covers, and of the Coming Ice Age Myth, is not to show the real history of climate science, but to obscure that history and to cause confusion. It seems to be working. Because today, when there really is a consensus about climate science and 97% of climatologists agree that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is leading to climate change, only 45% of the public know about that consensus. The other 55% must think we’re still in the 1970s when scientists were still debating the issue. Seems newsworthy to me, maybe Time will run another cover story on it.

To learn more see:

Why are we having such bad weather?

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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.

The Takedown Of A Novel’s Page By Facebook Bullies

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A friend of mine, Gareth Renowden, wrote a novel called The Aviator (The Burning World). It is a post-climate change story, set in the future, and it is a good one. I highly recommend it. Gareth is also an activist who puts considerable effort into climate change. Some time in the last few hours, the Facebook page Gareth had created to promote his novel was taken down by Facebook. From Gareth’s blog post on the matter:

Yesterday The Aviator‘s Facebook page disappeared. When I logged in to check the page I was greeted by a message that said the page was being removed because it had been identified as carrying material related to bullying. There was a button labelled “appeal”, so I pressed it. That’s all. No contact information, no detail of the complaint. Nothing. Except that I was also prevented from posting or sharing anything on Facebook for 12 hours. The page no longer exists, and I am annoyed.

So: why did this happen?

Gareth is well known to the science denialist community, and I strongly suspect that climate change denialists are behind this. This is what they do. They bully people. There are a lot of bullies on the Internet and they know no constraint and have no sense of ethics or responsibility to the Internet community. An overlapping and similar set of bullies attacked my my book as well which was meant to be a fundraiser for the Secular Student Alliance. And, they were successful. The attacks on me and my book were not especially effective and the bullies did not accomplish anything, but the level of support I saw from my own secular community when I was under attack was anemic at best, and made me realize that being part of a community of activists who don’t know how to activate was a waste of time. (This is why I now spend most of my activist time in the climate science area, and regional progressive politics.)

Anyway, Gareth is not at all certain as to what really happened to his facebook page. He suggests it might be a matter of Facebook being bad at what it does, but leaves open the possibility that this was a coordinated (and apparently successful) attack by science deniers on a piece of literature … a sort of vigil ante book burning … using Facebook as an unwitting pawn.

If that is the case, there is a lesson here. Never give Facebook any money. If this is how a “client” (a free unpaid user) is treated, is there any guarantee that a paid user, someone who buys facebook ads, would be treated any differently? Once again, Facebook has shown itself to be ineffective at what it does. Effort spent on Facebook, and money spent on Facebook, is effort and money at risk of being tossed aside because Facebook is unable to tell the difference between a page promoting a novel and a page that bullies, when actual bullies come along and lie.

I’m not sure what can be done about this at the present time. If Gareth comes up with a strategy other than ignoring Facebook henceforth (which is what I would recommend) I’ll let you know. In the mean time, show the bullies who burned this particular book that they can’t win, and get yourself a copy of The Aviator! It really is a good book.

Also, in the mean time, I’ve got something else for you to read. I’m working on a piece of fiction that is set in a post-apocalyptic utopian world, in which everything is fine, and that’s a huge problem. It is a climate change novel, so if you are one of the denialist bullies, this will be a future target for you, piece of literature you can burn along with your precious fossil fuels. Below, I’ve got a passage from an early draft to give you a flavor and hopefully amuse you a little. The scene takes place about 150 miles north of what is now Laramie Wyoming, in the Spring, in the year 2546. Enjoy.

The group was easy to locate from some distance owing to the toddler who frequently cried or screamed, and otherwise, was very loud. If there was an animal out there that habitually ate people, all the people would be eaten, Bale thought, owing to these toddlers. Bale approached the group the long way, allowing her to put several patches of vegetation between them, and watched for a while. The toddler was being taken care of by an older brother, just a few years older but acting very responsibly and trying to keep the little one from harming himself more than necessary on sharp rocks and thorny bushes. Then there were three girls, one half way in age between the toddler an the toddler’s caretaker, one older, just coming of age, and one full grown but young woman, and that is who Bale had come for.

Bale placed one of her arrows across the bow, and pulled enough to test the string and determine that she could fire the arrow full strength. With the arrow half cocked in this manner, she moved from her hiding place behind some bushes to the next clump of vegetation, a small mound of soil with a cowlick of tall grass on top of it. In order to not be seen, Bale had to push herself into the dirt and line her body up to be invisible from the direction of the people. She watched for a full ten minutes, and again, tested her arrow against the bow.

At one unlikely moment, all five of the people she was watching were preoccupied, although each with totally different thing. The toddler was sitting on the ground screaming with his eyes closed. The boy was looking for something to amuse the toddler with, facing away form Bale. The younger girl kid was hiding her face as part of a game she was playing with the teenager who was now looking in the opposite direction, and the young woman was taking a nap half in the shade of a creosote bush. Bale took the moment to move like a snake to the next place where she had cover, and now there was one large clump of vegetation between her and the woman under the creosote bush. Again, she tested her bow and arrow. She looked at the young sleeping woman, and she looked at her arrow, and decided to change ammo. She slipped this arrow between her belt and the small of her back where it would be handy and drew a different arrow out of a quiver, and tried that one. Good. Straighter, the fletching was in better shape. She would not miss with this one.

Then, Bale aimed. She took a careful bead and drew the arrow as tightly as it could be drawn and then held perfectly steady. She waited a full minute to make sure that everything was lined up right, her body still invisible to the group, her arrow, her quarry. Then, without moving a muscle in her body she let out a very loud shout.

“Zeta!!!”

And this caused the young woman to suddenly sit up underneath the creosote bush, striking her head on the thorny branch and getting her hair stuck. Cursing, rare among Gem Deva, ensued, and she pounded the ground with her foot. Suddenly, owing to the loud raucous coming from the creosote bush, a young peccary that had been hiding in that last clump of vegetation started, and began to take flight. But just as quickly as the peccary stood to run, it was impaled by Bale’s first arrow, and just as the Peccary started to turn its direction out of fear, Bale’s second arrow had it in the throat and it went down in the dust.

Zeta, the girl in the bush, had extracted herself from the killer vegetation and sat, still somewhat stunned by hearing her name coming from a direction in which there seemed to be no person. At this point, Bale stood, and shouldered her bow. She walked briskly towards Zeta, and half way there bent down to pick up her prey by it’s hind feet, and dragged it the rest of the way to where Zeta sat. By this time the two of them were grinning from ear to ear.

“This is for your father,” Bale told the young woman. “I hope your siblings can carry it to his camp, so you and I can take a walk.”

In Gem Devan culture, “taking a walk” was a euphemism. In a society where everyone slept in a minimalistic hut within a few feet of the next hut, certain things were done not so much at home, but … well, while taking a walk.

The two boys and two girls were also grinning, and each of them came over to Bale and gave her a long and strong hug, and exchanged words of greeting. Except the toddler, he was busy eating some ants.

“I love you, brothers and sisters,” Bale told them, as they turned, sharing the job of carrying the peccary, to deliver the gift to Zeta’s father. She looked at Zeta. Like An Yon, Zeta was the same age as Bale. Unlike An Yon, she was Devan. In fact, the one time prior that Zeta accompanied Bale to West Village, she was mistaken for Bale a number of times. They were the same height, build, had the same overall looks, but really, Zeta was less muscular and had a thinner face and her hair was a shade darker. Or perhaps dirtier.

In fact, at the moment, Bale was the one that was inappropriately dressed and not properly adorned. She was wearing shorts, a skirt, a waistcoat and tunic, all made for her by Lizzie. She wore her old billed hat and googles and two belts, one low over her hips one tight on her waist. She also donned a bandoleer, a small backpack, and several utility satchels attached to these various leather straps and belts.

Zeta, on the other hand, was mostly just wearing her smile. Well, as modest as the next Devan, she wore a loin cloth. But she was covered by a layer of brown dirt and bear grease, which was mostly winter wear but these early summer days had been cool so many of the Deva were wearing the grease-dirt mixture. Underneath, her skin would be very light. Once summer got going, Deva browned nicely and never burned in the sun, and their skin was not affected by the ravages of sunlight as one might expect, considering that they were pale people who lived outdoors and wore little clothing. This could have been partly because the skies were usually cloudy in this region, and partly because of the bear grease and dirt, but was probably just because they had been living in this setting for enough generations to adjust.

Bale took Zeta’s hand and they took a walk. For real. Bale did not tell Zeta at this point what she had come for, but filled her in on the other important things in her life. Zeta did the same, enumerating which cousins were living in their camp now, and which cousins were staying elsewhere, relating who had died recently (no one Bale knew well) and listing off the new babies. The Gem Deva were thinly dispersed on the landscape and often on the move, but in fact, they used the same exact camping spots again and again, and every feature of the landscape they lived on had a name every one knew. So, as Zeta related the recent comings and goings, she referred repeatedly to places that Bale would know, and if a location was mentioned that did not seem familiar to Bale, Zeta would fill in the blank.

“Uncle’s rock? You know, that big rock sticking out of the ground where Zim, my mother’s sister’s son, left that mess after butchering the dead deer he found that nobody could eat because it was too rotten, about a half day’s walk beyond…”

“Oh, right, that rock, just south of Rattler’s Gully.”

“Right. Anyway, that’s were Cousin Zoe-Lan and her family are staying now…”

And so on and so forth for an hour until everybody was caught up with everything.

And by this time they had come to a place where they could sit and watch the sunset, and hold each other to stay warm against the chilling night air, and restore their intimacy. They had not seen each other in two years. They were not betrothed, or a couple in any way. They were just occasional lovers, and had been so since the very day they met many miles east of this spot when they ran into each other on a bounty hunt. Zeta, like Bale, was a hunter. In fact, there were many things they both liked. There were things they both liked to do, and there were things they both liked to have done. So as the red sun slid below the horizon, and the shadows lengthened and softened and finally became one with the night, they did. Those things. A few times.

The walk back to the camp was quiet and comfortable, and lit by a full moon two hours up. Their welcome by the cousins was warm and loving. The peccary was excellent, served with a half a dozen other food items brought into the camp during the day. This group had just moved to this camp, and Zeta should have built a hut for herself and her sister that afternoon, but distracted by Bale’s arrival she never did, so her sister stayed with the toddler and his mom, the toddler’s brother and his two friends who shared a young man’s hut went off to the bush to sleep under the stars, and so the cousins gave Bale and Zeta a hut to share, a fire already built at its entrance and a couple of blankets tossed inside.

“Tomorrow morning,” Bale said to Zeta before they fell asleep. “I’m going to ask you to do something you won’t want to do.”

“That’s OK, sister,” Zeta replied. This was actually a standard Devan way of saying good night, and Zeta gave the standard response. “I hope you let me touch you with my gift.”

“I hope so too,” Bale added, which was not part of the standard good night ritual. “Because I’m actually going to ask you to do something you won’t want to do.” But she said this too quietly for Zeta to hear. Really, she just said it in her own mind. But it was true.

Cosmic Bombardment of the Earth ca 2.2 Million Years Ago?

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There are bacteria that use Iron (and other elements) to make tiny magnets that they carry around so they don’t get lost. (I anthropomorphize slightly.) There are isotopes of Iron that are not of the Earth, but are found only elsewhere in the universe.

Suppose an event happened elsewhere and spewed some of that cosmic Iron isotope, say Fe-60, onto the earth, and the bacteria who were busy making their tiny compasses at that time used some of it. Then the bacteria died and were trapped inlayers in seafloor sediment and later examined by scientists looking for … well, looking for evidence of cosmic events trapped in bacterial compasses!

Well, that happened.

A bit of sea floor was found to have Iron-60 in it a few years back. Iron-60 is radioactive and decays into Cobalt-60, with a known (but only recently known as it turns out) decay rate. That bit of rock was taken as possible evidence of an ancient supernova. The event was tied, conjecturally, to human evolution as all things must be whenever even remotely possible:

Cosmic fallout from an exploding star dusted the Earth about 2.8 million years ago, and may have triggered a change in climate that affected the course of human evolution. The evidence comes from an unusual form of iron that was blasted through space by a supernova before eventually settling into the rocky crust beneath the Pacific Ocean.

…

The team has now analysed a … piece of ocean crust, where the supernova detritus is concentrated into a clear band of rock that can be accurately dated. The researchers found small but significant amounts of an isotope called iron-60 in the rock, which could only have come from a supernova.

“We’ve looked at all the possibilities and we can’t find anything else that could produce such quantities,” Korschinek says.

The human evolution impact idea comes from a possible cooling effect the exploding star would have had on the earth. Back in 2004 it was estimated that the earth would have been bathed in extra cosmic rays for about 100,000 years which would have, it was said, created condensation in the atmosphere which would have cooled the earth. There was a cooling event around that time (but quite possibly well after this date, so don’t hang any hats on this) so I suppose this could be. But, I’m not going to assume that the cooling effects of cosmic rays are a thing at this point. I do know that people have gotten the effects of upper level vapor wrong a few times so I’m going to avoid making any assumptions about that here.

Anyway, last April, a paper was given at the American Physical Society conference giving preliminary findings related to some follow up research. Shawn Bishop and his team obtained a core from the Pacific dating to between 1.7 and 3. 3 million years ago. They sampled it at 100K intervals and extracted and separated out Iron in a way that would show Iron-60 if there was any. And …

“It looks like there’s something there,” Bishop told reporters at the Denver meeting. The levels of iron-60 are minuscule, but the only place they seem to appear is in layers dated to around 2.2 million years ago.

And, the iron was concentrated in the target layers by the action of compass-using bacteria.

Notice the change in date from 2.8 to 2.2. This is, I think, because the half life of Iron-60 was refigured based on some intervening research. Now, the date is probably too late for a significant cooling event. But really, there were a whole bunch of cooling events from somewhere over 5 million years ago to about 2 point something million years ago, and there is a long list of candidates for what caused them, including numerous big volcanoes, continental movements, and now, a supernova.

I don’t think anyone is claiming to know what star exploded.

Photo Credit for picture of fancy science machine: Gottfried not Bouillon via Compfight cc