A Change in the Wind

Vorticity: Sandy turns on New York and New Jersey

Superstorm Sandy as seen in graphics based on the storm: Spooky beautiful.

[Fascinating post by Andrew Freedman with great videos from Mel Shapiro and team.]

In the vernacular, Shapiro remarked to an interviewer at the US funded research station NCAR:

Then, a few hours before landfall, Sandy began a sharp curve toward the west, moving toward the heart of the approaching midlatitude trough of low pressure. In Shapiro’s view, this marked an apparent warm seclusion trying to take place on top of the storm’s fast-decaying warm core.

I asked Shapiro how often he’s seen a storm like Sandy. He replied, “Never.”

Gives an idea: Shapiro's motion graphics are far more compelling (if a little cumbersome to load). Final image, which graphs Sandy's "vorticity," is perhaps the most compelling of all.

Santa Ana winds, Ventura County, and fire: 2013

A couple of weeks ago I published a long story about climate change in Ventura County today but didn't mention shifts in the timng of Santa Ana winds. This despite the fact that from talking to Alex Hall of UCLA, a couple of years ago, I knew that evidence suggests that Santa Ana winds now can come later in the year than the fall. (Which was when we most experienced these notorious winds in the past.) And even though this shift had been confirmed by talks with representatives from the Ventura County Fire Department. Today a spokesperson for the VCFD commented on the winds and the major wildfire -- the Camarillo Springs fire -- we had this week:

"We're seeing fires burning like we usually see in late summer, at the height of the fire season, and it's only May," said Tom Kruschke.

It's a good example of the complexity of climate change, or a goof on my part, but in either case raises the question -- what is going on with these winds? When I talked to Hall, he suggested that we may see fewer Santa Anas in September and October, and more later in the year. (Though he certainly didn't mention May!) He told KQED's Climate Watch in 2011:

“When you have a changing climate, the land surface is warming up a lot more rapidly than the ocean, and that tends to weaken this mechanism,” Hall told me. That could mean fewer of these seaward blasts, at least during the winter months, as a kind of consolation.

“In trying to understand how fire will behave in the future, we have to look at the effect of precipitation on the fuel loads and we have to be looking at the effect of Santa Anas on fire behavior,” said Hall. “So I think there are some really interesting questions to look at.”

Hall pointed out to me to another of Santa Ana virtues: Offshore winds tend to blow grit and dust into the ocean, adding nutrients, and cleaning the air. Change need not be disaster, in other words.

Another example of this was mentioned in the Los Angeles Times this morning. Despite consuming 28,000 acres of vegetation and forcing the evacuation of 5000 people, this fire hasn't hurt any person, and hasn't destroyed a single house. Given the scale of the blaze, that's darn impressive.

Related articles

You: Southern California fire season off to a sinister start

California wildfires: Pictures and video of devastation as Santa Ana winds fan inferno's flames

Wildfire on California coast: On Day 2, more Santa Ana winds (+video)

Southern California Wildfire Prompting Evacuations

The Wind from Nowhere: the first natural disaster novel?

J.G. Ballard, although slotted as a science-fiction writer, is in some senses a writer who has lost all faith, in God or man. Perhaps it's natural, then, that he was one of the first (perhaps the first) to write a novel about a natural disaster that overtakes the world: The Wind from Nowhere. 

What's fascinating is that, as the title hints, there is really no reason given for this wind that comes, reaches hurricane speeds...and continues to increase to unimaginable strengths. The will of the author comes out in the determination to see his premise carried through, plausible or not, because it's what he wants to express. (As Spielberg showed in Empire of the Sun, Ballard had lost all innocence long before.)

What's fascinating/horrifying to me is the drama of people seeing their belief systems torn away. It's not pretty, but it's not forgettable, either. 

"On the whole, people had shown less resourcefulness and flexibility, less foresight, than a wild bird or animal would. Their basic survival insticts had been so dulled, so overlaid by mechanisms deisgned to serve secondary appetites, that they were totally unable to protect themselves...they were the helpless victims of a deep-rooted optimism about their right to survival, their dominance of the natural order which would guarantee them against everything but their own folly, that they had made gross assumptions about their own superiority.

Now they were paying the price for this, in truth reaping the whirlwind!"

Ballard later called his first novel "just a piece of hackwork." The exclamation mark above does have that ring, but the book itself is more original that he dare admit. The characters are just okay, but the plot refuses to quit, which brings on a kind of terror. 

Why you don't want to be drinking cyanobacteria: ALS

This story by a writing mentor, Wendee Nicole, just won a best science story of the year award from the Society of Journalists and Authors. It's horrifying (but fascinating too) to think that a bacteria could be paralyzing people, or giving them Alzheimer's, and the revelation of that story; well, it's jaw-dropping.

A small sample:

Although frequently called blue-green algae, cyanos are actually bacteria that photosynthesize, or create food from light, which is why early scientists classified them as algae. Modern genetics shows they share no evolutionary lineage with algae; the classification is as scientifically accurate as calling a dog a plant.

Cyanobacteria produce a host of nasty compounds, including neurotoxins that derail nervous systems, hepatotoxins that damage liver function, and tumor promoters. Their blooms have poisoned wildlife and caused massive fish kills. In humans they can cause rashes, numbness, vomiting, and sometimes long-term liver or nerve damage. While “death by pond scum” has never appeared in an obituary, that could change: not only are blooms increasing worldwide, but scientists predict they will worsen as the climate warms and nutrient levels rise, when, for example, fertilizers from America’s breadbasket run into the Mississippi River and down to the Gulf of Mexico. Recently, burgeoning cyano blooms in the Great Lakes have garnered attention.

Based on the work of this man, Paul Cox, the story developed over many years, and ran into a lot of resistance, but now the tap water/ALS idea is being studied at twenty schools around the country. 

As they say, read the whole thing.

Contrarian environmentalist: George Monbiot on nuclear

The case for nuclear power. from Fred Pearce, following the lead of George Monbiot at The Guardian: 

"The problem is the same in the energy debate. Many environmentalists who argue, as I do, that climate change is probably the big overarching issue facing humanity in the 21st century, nonetheless often refuse to recognize that nuclear power could have a role in saving us from the worst.

For environmentalists to fan the flames of fear of nuclear power seems reckless and anti-scientific.

Nuclear power is the only large-scale source of low-carbon electricity that is fully developed and ready for major expansion.

Yes, we need to expand renewables as fast as we can. Yes, we need to reduce further the already small risks of nuclear accidents and of leakage of fissile material into weapons manufacturing. But as George Monbiot, Britain’s most prominent environment columnist, puts it: “To abandon our primary current source of low carbon energy during a climate change emergency is madness.”

[George] Monbiot attacks the gratuitous misrepresentation of the risks of radiation from nuclear plants. It is widely suggested, on the basis of a thoroughly discredited piece of Russian head-counting, that up to a million people were killed by the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. In fact, it is far from clear that many people at all — beyond the 28 workers who received fatal doses while trying to douse the flames at the stricken reactor — actually died from Chernobyl radiation. Certainly, the death toll was nothing remotely on the scale claimed.

“We have a moral duty,” Monbiot says, “not to spread unnecessary and unfounded fears. If we persuade people that they or their children are likely to suffer from horrible and dangerous health problems, and if these fears are baseless, we cause great distress and anxiety, needlessly damaging the quality of people’s lives.”

One sure result of Germany deciding to abandon nuclear power in the wake of last year’s Fukushima nuclear accident (calamitous, but any death toll will be tiny compared to that from the tsunami that caused it) will be rising carbon emissions from a revived coal industry. By one estimate, the end of nuclear power in Germany will result in an extra 300 million tons of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere between now and 2020 — more than the annual emissions of Italy and Spain combined."

Yeah, but Chernobyl [here's the first picture taken after the meltdown]:

It's taken from a helicopter. The fogginess in the pic? Radiation.  

Speaking of heartbreaking: For the child...and the wind

From a collection of poems about the end of the world, in the inevitable New York Times: 

LEAVE A MESSAGE

When the wind died, there was a moment of silence
for the wind. When the maple tree died, there was always a place
to find winter in its branches. When the roses died, I respected the
privacy of the vase. When the shoe factory died, I stopped listening
at the back door to the glossolalia of machines.
When the child died, the mother put a spoon in the blender.
When the child died, the father dug a hole in his thigh
and got in. When my dog died, I broke up with the woods.
When the fog lived, I went into the valley to be held
by water. The dead have no ears, no answering machines
that we know of, still we call.

From Bob Hickok.

NorCal preps for promised ARKstorm: 12 Inches?

CA has had no significant extreme weather since December 2010, when a series of atmospheric rivers took an unexpected tour fhrough Southern California.

Both the precipitation totals and the graphics for "ARKstorms" are jaw-dropping. In 2011, the USGS issued a massive report on an ARKstorm that left the entire Central Valley approximately six inches deep in water, forced the evacuation of Sacramento -- including the government -- for over a year, and would have destroyed the California economy, if the California in that era had a full-scale economy.

That was in 1862, when it poured buckets for twenty-eight days virtually without a stop. It could happen today; in fact, it happens every 180 years or so. Some suggest chances for these storms have improved as warming puts more water vapor in the atmosphere. Should that kind of "big one" return, the disaster experts say it would break up the California economy, send the US into a recession that could be major, and probably damage the world economy. 

This time the ARKstorm, as the Weather Service wonkily terms them, has Sacramento in its sights.  and residents are being told to prepare for twelve inches of rain and power outages. 

But rain is also predicted for SoCal, so I can't be too upset about it...

Thought experiment: Imagine the end of NYC by drowning

Can't really do it, can you?

Don't worry, it's not you, it's us. 

If we can’t imagine our own deaths, as Freud insisted, how can we be expected to imagine the death of a city?

From a great op-ed/essay by James Atlas. In today's New York Times, of course. With an image to match...

Cutting government in a time of "natural" disasters

Krugman has some words for it (Sandy vs. Katrina): 

Consider, in particular, the history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Under President George H. W. Bush, FEMA became a dumping ground for unqualified political hacks. Faced with a major test in the form of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the agency failed completely.

Then Bill Clinton came in, put FEMA under professional management, and saw the agency’s reputation restored.

Given this experience, you might have expected George W. Bush to preserve Mr. Clinton’s gains. But no: he appointed his campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, to head the agency, and Mr. Allbaugh immediately signaled his intention both to devolve disaster relief to the state and local level and to downgrade the whole effort, declaring, “Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level.” After Mr. Allbaugh left for the private sector, he was replaced with Michael “heckuva job” Brown, and the rest is history.

Like Mr. Clinton, President Obama restored FEMA’s professionalism, effectiveness, and reputation. But would Mitt Romney destroy the agency again? Yes, he would. As everyone now knows — despite the Romney campaign’s efforts to Etch A Sketch the issue away — during the primary Mr. Romney used language almost identical to Mr. Allbaugh’s, declaring that disaster relief should be turned back to the states and to the private sector.

The best line on this, I have to admit, comes from Stephen Colbert: “Who better to respond to what’s going on inside its own borders than the state whose infrastructure has just been swept out to sea?”

Ted Rall has a drawing: 

Rall's viewpoint arguably is less political and richer in environmental detail, but also more difficult to contextualize and/or verify. 

"Every hurricane is a fluke" -- Atmospheric scientist

"Every hurricane is a fluke, to some degree," said Adam Sobel, an atmospheric scientists at Columbia in New York, in a fascinating discussion around the question: Is New York becoming a hotspot for tropical cyclones?

Short answer (from Will Oremus) is: No. 

Here, via Wikipedia Commons, is an image of hurricane tracks in the Atlantic, 1851-2005.

How did the experts track hurricanes from 150 years ago? Ask the smarties at the National Hurricane Center to find out.