A Change in the Wind

Climate Stability to Vanish in the 2020's: Dr. Jeff Masters

Dr. Jeff Masters, a scientist, hurricane watcher, founder of a national Internet weather site, and as respected as any meteorologist in the public eye known to this journalist, predicts when climate stability will collapse:

There were 88 presentations on arctic sea ice at the 2008 AGU [American Geophysical Union] conference. None of the presenters expressed the view that the current long-term decline in arctic sea ice was almost entirely natural, or that we can expect the decline to reverse this century. Sea ice experts do blame part of the decline on natural variability in the weather, but we wouldn't be where we are now without the warming caused by human-emitted greenhouse gases. One view (Stroeve et al., 2007) is that human-emitted greenhouse gases are responsible for 47 - 57% of the arctic sea ice loss since 1979. Heat-absorbing black soot from fires and pollution settling on the white ice is thought to also be a significant contributor.

The consensus I heard at the AGU conference among arctic sea ice experts was that the summertime sea ice will be gone by 2030. If they are correct, we can expect a period of significantly accelerated global climate change to begin 10 - 20 years from now. Arctic sea ice is one of the critical components maintaining the stability of our current climate. Once the the ice is gone, the climate will become unstable, with highly unpredictable results. It is true that Earth's past has many examples of warmer climates that evolved due to natural causes where life flourished, and we shouldn't fear the new, stable climate we will eventually arrive at centuries from now. However, life on Earth is adapted to the current climate. The changes that will occur during the transition will be extremely disruptive to Earth's ecosystems and the humans that rely on them for life. If one were to rate the destructive capability of climate change the way we rate hurricanes, I would rate current climate change at the "Invest" or "tropical disturbance" stage--the climate change storm is just beginning to organize. But the coming climate change storm is destined to hit our children with the full fury of intensifying hurricane.

If Masters is right we have about ten years to get ready for a different planet.

Battle of the Climate Headlines: Wa-Po vs. WSJ

From the Washington Post, yesterday:

New Analysis Brings Dire Forecast Of 6.3-Degree Temperature Increase

Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.

From the Wall Street Journal, today:

Leaders Drop Climate Deadlines

Prospects for securing a global agreement this year to attack climate change dimmed Friday, as the Group of 20 largest economies asked their finance ministers for a "range of possible options" to finance deployment of technology to curb greenhouse gases, but dropped demands that a final proposal be drafted before the world climate summit in Copenhagen in December.

Regardless of the climactic trends, the political trend is all too obvious.

Doesn't put our species in a good light, to  do nothing as the world melts.

Guess that's obvious -- sorry.

SoCal Megadroughts and Megafires: Caused by Climate Change?

On an insufferably hot Santa Ana condition day in SoCal, it's worth asking if the fire season we face this year is directly linked to the lack of rain we've experienced for the last three years, and, more broadly, from the "megadrought" identified by numerous researchers this century.

Here's what that long-term drought looks like in graphic form. The chart comes from a huge and challenging study by SoCal fire expert Jon Keeley at the USGS, available on his page, called Large, high-intensity fire events in southern California shrublands: debunking the fire-grain age patch model.

Looks pretty ominous doesn't it? Roughly speaking, a sixty-year drought.

But Keeley, who in the paper points out that decades-long droughts and monster fires have occured in SoCal well before the American way of life took hold on this land, stresses that it's too soon to say whether or not climate change is responsible for the megadroughts and megafires:

Whether or not these extraordinary droughts and the
fires accompanying them are due to anthropogenically
induced climate change, as may be the case in high
elevation western forests (Westerling et al. 2006), is not
known. We contend that there is a causal
relationship between this drought and the large number
of megafires in recent years, but it is too early to
tell if this drought is part of an anthropogenically driven
climate change induced trajectory of continued drought,
or part of a natural cycle.

Keeley and his co-authors go on to warn that climate change is probably making things worse overall in SoCal, but they certainly defy the cliche of researchers eager to attribute all disasters to global warming.

Australian Winter Turns Apocalyptic: Global Warming Blamed

Is my headline an exaggeration of reality? 

If you ask a denier site such as Watts Up With That, no doubt they would scoff, and say it's the usual natural variability.

But deniers not only ignore the bad news about global warming obvious to most people on the ground, in places like Sydney and SoCal, they cynically mislead shamefully often.

For instance, in this headline they misquote Bill Patzert of the Jet Propulsion Lab to imply that he questions the reality of global warming, though Patzert has made amply clear to myself and countless other reporters that global warming is a reality of the utmost seriousness, and the author of the post no doubt knows that.

It's sunspots, Watts Up says. Has nothing to do with the atmosphere.

Well, here's a chance to take a look and judge for yourself.

Here's the news from Sydney today, via the BBC:

Australia has experienced its warmest August on record amid soaring winter temperatures.

Climatologists have blamed both the effects of climate change and natural variability.

Australia's Bureau of Meteorology says that August was a "most extraordinary month" with mean temperatures 2.47C above the long-term average.

August in Australia culminated in a record-breaking heat-wave across much of the continent.

In the Queensland town of Bedourie the temperature reached 38.5C. [101F]

Elsewhere, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia have had their warmest winters on record.

That's right: winter.

101.3 doesn't sound so bad...for August. But what if it were February? 

Here's a graph that goes with the story, showing a slight temp trend for Oz winters:

But the irony in the story is found in the caption under the photo at the top of the page: 

Rivers are dry in some areas, and people have been enjoying unusually hot days.

"Enjoying?"

Probably that was the work of some photo editor back in London, who for some reason felt compelled to obscure the nightmarish scene that was Sydney today.

Here's what Sydney really looked like, according to resident Tomhide via Flickr.

"Enjoying?"

Grizzly Die-Off as Salmon Crash: Fish Farms Suspected

A sad story from the Globe and Mail in Canada. Grizzly bears in British Columbia are dead or dying, stream-walkers say, because nine million sockeye salmon expected to return from the ocean this summer have failed to appear.

The cause? The immediate cause for the salmon crash is believe to be sea lice, but experts suggest that the underlying cause is fish farms nearby, which create the conditions in which sea lice thrive. 

Alexandra Morton, who several years ago correctly predicted a collapse of pink salmon runs in the Broughton Archipelago because of sea lice infestations, in March warned the same thing could happen to Fraser sockeye.

She said researchers used genetic analyses to show Fraser sockeye smolts were getting infested with sea lice in Georgia Strait.

“I looked at about 350 of this generation of Fraser sockeye when they went to sea in 2007 and they had up to 28 sea lice [each]. The sea lice were all young lice, which means they got them in the vicinity of where we were sampling, which was near the fish farms in the Discovery Islands. If they got sea lice from the farms, they were also exposed to whatever other pathogens were happening on the fish farms (viruses and bacteria), ” said Ms. Morton in an e-mail. 

That piscine disaster now has led to the vanishing of a charismatic megafauna:

Reports from conservationists, salmon-stream walkers and ecotourism guides all along British Columbia's wild central coast indicate a collapse of salmon runs has triggered widespread death from starvation of black and grizzly bears. Those guides are on the front lines of what they say is an unfolding ecological disaster that is so new that it has not been documented by biologists.

Here's a map that shows the linkage between fish farms, sea lice, and salmon runs. You can tell what the newspaper is thinking....

A New Word for Disaster: Pyrocumulus

This century we as a culture have learned words for a lot of what might be called "new disasters" -- climactic scenarios rarely if ever experienced on the planet in the past, such as Category Five, Sea Level Rise, and Arctic Amplification.

Well, here's another to add to the list: Pyrocumulus. Here's what the pyrocumulus cloud caused by the Station Fire behind Sierra Madre/Altadena looked like a couple of days ago, courtesy of jhapeman.

They say the cloud reached from the ground to 20,000 feet in the air...

Dr. Jeff Masters on the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

Dr. Jeff Masters, best known as a hurricane watcher for Wunderblog, is respected enough across the political spectrum such that it is possible -- not likely, but possible -- that his warning about the dangers of replicating the PETM will be taken seriously. So it's worth a look.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, humans have pumped about 500 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. There are about 5,000 gigatons in the planet's coal reserves, while oil and traditional natural gas deposits are hundreds of gigatons each (Rogner, 1997). Given that humans are now adding about 10 gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere each year (Global Carbon Project, 2007), we will surpass the 1,000 gigaton mark 50 years from now at current emission rates. This is at the lower end of the 1,000 - 2,000 gigatons of carbon that are estimated to have been added to the atmosphere during the PETM--the most extreme natural global warming event of the past 65 million years. Though our view of events so long ago is very fuzzy, the PETM should serve as a cautionary tale. We cannot rule out the possibility that continuation of our current rates of fossil fuel burning will lead to an extreme climatic warming event like the PETM. In particular, we need to keep a careful eye on the huge reservoirs of methane hydrate stored in marine sediments (500 - 10,000 gigatons of carbon) and stored in permafrost (7.5 - 400 gigatons). Continued warming of the planet could trigger substantial releases of these massive reservoirs of greenhouse gases, leading to a repeat of the PETM event. However, a 2008 study by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP, 2008) concludes that there is currently no evidence that a sudden catastrophic release of methane stored in ocean sediments or in permafrost will happen over the next century. It should take at least a century for global warming to penetrate the deep oceans and permafrost regions containing these significant reservoirs of methane hydrates. The study concludes, "Catastrophic release of methane to the atmosphere appears very unlikely in the near term (e.g., this century)...Although the prospect of a catastrophic release of methane to the atmosphere as a result of anthropogenic climate change over the next century appears very unlikely based on current knowledge, many of the processes involved are still poorly understood, and developing a better predictive capability requires further work. On a longer time scale, methane release from hydrate reservoir is likely to be a major influence in global warming over the next 1,000 to 100,000 years". So, the bottom line is: don't expect global warming to be able to cause huge releases of methane hydrates in the coming century, such as may have occurred during PETM. But it is wise to ponder that a release of greenhouse gases similar in magnitude to what we are doing now coincided with the most extreme global warming event of the last 65 million years. We should not be surprised if our human greenhouse gas emissions cause a similar massive climate perturbation over the next 1,000 years, leading the dawn of a new geological era--the Anthropocene.

Masters notes that the PETM was an extinction event, but mostly for plankton species. However:

The PETM did not cause mass extinctions on land of plants and animals, but a major turnover in mammalian life occurred at that time. Many of today's major mammalian orders emerged in the wake of the PETM. The new geological era it ushered in, the Eocene, is named for the Greek goddess of the dawn (Eos), since this was the dawn of the era of large mammals.

Maybe we should try to avoid another extinction event, even if our species might survive?

Just wondering...

Swine Flu Exposes Media Weakness

As has been reported on Grist last week and in more detail today considerable evidence points to the possibility of a link between a ginormous Smithfield factory pig farm in the Vera Cruz area and the outbreak of the swine flu in Mexico. A couple of examples from Tom Philpott's post today in Grist:

On Monday, Mexican authorities revealed that at least one victim of the original outbreak definitely had the same strain of swine flu now wreaking havoc in Mexico City—and his is the earliest known case of the disease. The Associated Press reported Monday that:

Mexican Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova said tests now show that a 4-year-old boy contracted swine flu in Veracruz state, where a community has been protesting pollution from a large pig farm, at least two weeks before the first death confirmed by the Mexican government. The farm is run by Granjas Carroll de Mexico.

The question now becomes: Did the outbreak that started in February and killed three kids involve swine flu—or was the 4-year-old boy’s infection an isolated case? If not—if the La Gloria epidemic turns out to be ground zero of the infection—could the swine-flu outbreak have originated literally in the shadows of Granjas Carroll’s hog confinements?

Philpott also links to a public health paper that shows how flies -- vast swarms of which were reported in the area of the factory farm in Mexico -- could be a vector for the disease.

The paper, “The Animal-Human Interface and Infectious Disease in Industrial Food Animal Production: Rethinking Biosecurity and Biocontainment” (PDF), points to a concrete example of flies acting as a flu vector:

[R]esearch conducted during an HPAI outbreak in Kyoto, Japan, in 2004 found that flies caught in proximity to broiler facilities where the outbreak took place carried the same strains of H5N1 influenza virus as found in chickens of an infected poultry farm.

The public-health scientific community has been sounding the alarm for years about the potential for bio-catastrophe brewing on industrial animal farms. The Graham/Sibergeld paper crystallizes those concerns. I’ll tease out a few key themes.

Untreated manure in lagoons, pointed to by La Gloria residents as a health hazard, can indeed contain flu strains.

Animal biosolids contain a range of pathogens that may include influenza viruses, which can persist for extended periods of time in the absence of specific treatment.

Yet conventional news outlets, from first-rate newspapers to right-wing tabloid sites such as Drudge, despite spending thousands upon thousands of column inches on warnings, face masks, travel restrictions, and such, have only begun to even mention the possible cause of the pandemic.

To be fair, the Associated Press did bring up the possible link (above), the NYTimes mentioned the possibility, and apocalypse maven Mike Davis discussed the possible link to factory farms in a backgrounder for The Guardian:

Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger that "the continual cycling of viruses … in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human transmission." The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (cheaper than humane environments) was sponsoring the rise of resistant staph infections, while sewage spills were producing outbreaks of E coli and pfiesteria (the protozoan that has killed 1bn fish in Carolina estuaries and made ill dozens of fishermen).

Any amelioration of this new pathogen ecology would have to confront the monstrous power of livestock conglomerates such as Smithfield Farms (pork and beef) and Tyson (chickens). The commission reported systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers.

Yet the plodding nature of conventional news coverage seems to allow discussion of cause only on the editorial pages, as in an excellent op-ed piece in today's Los Angeles Times by Wendy Orent, who has written books on the subject of pandemics:

So why are some of the Mexico strains so lethal? The answer may lie in the virus' possible origin: a giant Veracruz pig farm that raises almost a million pigs a year. According to Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN, an environmental organization, reports have been coming in for months of the appalling conditions in the Perote Valley where the farm is located. Locals report a fearful stench, hosts of flies and, since December 2008, serious respiratory disease that sickened 60% of the community. One of those cases, a 5-year-old boy who has since recovered, had the H1N1 swine flu virus. Other samples have disappeared, Kuyek says, and most people were never tested.

Influenzas that have their origins in huge, crowded animal farms are often more virulent than other flu strains. Germs that kill their hosts quickly tend not to thrive; their hosts die before there is time to pass the virus on. But on crowded farms, the next snout is an inch away, and even virulent strains can gain a foothold. It is the same type of conditions that produced deadly avian influenza in giant poultry farms in Asia over the last 10 years.

Can't we open our minds to the possibility of such a link without leaping to a conclusion?

Apparently not. But it is a good reason to revisit The Meatrix: Revolting (the sequel):

Arctic Ice-Free in Summer of 2013?

According to a Canadian expert who has spent the last ten summers on a remote island in the once-frozen north with his research team, the Arctic could be ice-free by the summer of 2013:

OTTAWA (Reuters) - The Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region's sea ice cover in summer could vanish as early as 2013, decades earlier than some had predicted, a leading polar expert said on Thursday.

Warwick Vincent, director of the Center for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec, said recent data on the ice cover "appear to be tracking the most pessimistic of the models", which call for an ice free summer in 2013.

The year "2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction. But each year we've been wrong -- each year we're finding that it's a little bit faster than expected," he told Reuters.

Vincent was interviewed by the wire service after giving a presentation to the Canadian parliament. He has been summering for ten years on Ward Hunt Island, 2500 miles north of Ottawa, where when he started ten years ago the maximum temperature in the summer was five degrees Celsius.

The high last summer?

20 degrees (equivalent to 68 Fahrenheit).

Over to you, George Will...

Lovelock Predicts Global Warming Will Kill Billions

Seasoned journalists tend to look down on the Q & A format as useful only for those who can't really write, but when it comes to truly original thinkers -- such as James Lovelock, famous for the Gaia idea that the earth is a self-regulating system -- I dare disagree.

It's difficult to hear "the voice" of genuine originals in brief snippets of quotes; frankly, they deserve a chance to speak at greater length. A good example is this alarming interview by New Scientist with Lovelock, in which he casually forecasts the death of billions of people this century, but at the same time offers an alternative to disaster.

Do you think we will survive?

I'm an optimistic pessimist. I think it's wrong to assume we'll survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It's happening again.

I don't think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing's been done except endless talk and meetings.

Best of all, Lovelock as briefly as possible explains the "deep time" reason why so many scientists are so worried:

How much biodiversity will be left after this climatic apocalypse?

We have the example of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event 55 million years ago. About the same amount of CO₂ was put into the atmosphere as we are putting in and temperatures rocketed by about 5 °C over about 20,000 years. The world became largely desert. The polar regions were tropical and most life on the planet had the time to move north and survive. When the planet cooled they moved back again. So there doesn't have to be a massive extinction.

I commend New Scientist for their open-mindedness, but must chide them for failing to distinguish (as Lovelock does) between the end of life as we know it (our civilization) and the end of our species ("mankind").

"One Last Chance to Save Mankind" was their headline, but as Andy Revkin and countless other scientific experts have said, the existence of our species is not threatened. Yet somehow, despite The Road and countless other harrowing stories of the apocalypse, the other obvious possibility -- the collapse of our way of life -- seems impossible for most non-scientists to believe. The New Yorker, for instance, last week sneered at "the doom boom" (not on-line).

Jeez, I'd think after seeing our economy melt down in a matter of months to a fraction of its former self, the possibility of disaster might become more realistic. But to TNY, evidently not...