A Change in the Wind

The Control of Nature: Rachel Carson

Fascinating little known fact: Rachel Carson's last great book was called "Silent Spring," but the title she first chose for it was "The Control of Nature." She believed that humanity was making a huge mistake when it came to the world around us, applying chemicals recklessly to the natural world and to our foods, and, sick with cancer, she didn't hold back. 

Along with the possibiilty of the extinction of manking by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm -- substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heridity upon which the shape of the future depends.

Carson was thinking of DDT, but she could easily have been describing the endocrine disruptors of today, many of which we consume in our food, and which are believed (by researchers such as Bruce Blumberg) to have a generational effect. Our consumption of substances such as BPA, for instance, could mean permanent alternation of the genetic code of our grandchildren. Think of it! 

[from a compelling new biography, On a Farther Shore, by William Souder]

On "weather whiplash" in Midwest: Jeff Masters

Climate change skeptics often scoff at the idea that climate change could lead to extremes of both drought and flooding. It is counter-intuitive, but all too real a phenomenon.

Dr. Jeff Masters gives it a name -- "weather whiplash" -- and explains how it happens: 

I'm often asked about the seemingly contradictory predictions from climate models that the world will see both worse floods and worse droughts due to global warming. Well, we have seen a classic example in the Midwest U.S. over the past two years of just how this kind of weather whiplash is possible. A warmer atmosphere is capable of bringing heavier downpours, since warmer air can hold more water vapor. We saw an example of this on Thursday morning, when an upper air balloon sounding over Lincoln, Illinois revealed near-record amounts of moisture for this time of year. The precipitable water--how much rain could fall if one condensed all the water vapor in a column above the ground into rain--was 1.62", just barely short of the Illinois April record for precipitable water of 1.64" set on April 20, 2000 (upper air records go back to 1948.) Thursday's powerful low pressure system was able to lift that copious moisture, cool it, and condense it into record rains. So how can you have worse droughts with more moisture in the air? Well, you still need a low pressure system to come along and wring that moisture out of the air to get rain. When natural fluctuations in jet stream patterns take storms away from a region, creating a drought, the extra water vapor in the air won't do you any good. There will be no mechanism to lift the moisture, condense it, and generate drought-busting rains. The drought that ensues will be more intense, since temperatures will be hotter and the soil will dry out more.

The new normal in the coming decades is going to be more and more extreme flood-drought-flood cycles like we are seeing now in the Midwest, and this sort of weather whiplash is going to be an increasingly severe pain in the neck for society. We'd better prepare for it, by building a more flood-resistant infrastructure and developing more drought-resistant grains, for example. And if we continue to allow heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide continue to build up in the atmosphere at the current near-record pace, no amount of adaptation can prevent increasingly more violent cases of weather whiplash from being a serious threat to the global economy and the well-being of billions of people.

It's hard to comprehend the scale of the threat, as is so often the case with climate change. Here's a NASA image, from the Precipitation Measurement Mission, to try to help:

Related articles

'Weather whiplash' swamps Midwest

Wild Weather Swings May Be a Sign of Climate Change

Extreme Drought To Extreme Flood: Weather Whiplash Hits The Midwest

The Drought-Stricken Midwest's Floods: Is This What Climate Change Looks Like?

Texas-sized drought of 2012: Fluke or global warming?

The extreme drought of 2012, which persists into 2013 in about half the country, was just a fluke, says a massive report by dozens of government scientists, helmed by Martin Hoerling. Hoerling is an expert in general circulation models and projections, specializing in the Southwest, and a believer in global warming.

As Seth Borenstein wrote for the AP:

Last year's huge drought was a freak of nature that wasn't caused by man-made global warming, a new federal science study finds.

Scientists say the lack of moisture usually pushed up from the Gulf of Mexico was the main reason for the drought in the nation's midsection.

Thursday's report by dozens of scientists from five different federal agencies looked into why forecasters didn't see the drought coming. The researchers concluded that it was so unusual and unpredictable that it couldn't have been forecast.

"This is one of those events that comes along once every couple hundreds of years," said lead author Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Climate change was not a significant part, if any, of the event."

But Kevin Trenberth, who has published more than 400 papers on climate, and is a leader at the National Center for Atmospheric, criticized the report for narrow-mindedness. From Andrew Freedman's story at Climate Central: 

Kevin Trenberth, a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a frequent critic of Hoerling's work, blasted the report's conclusions in an online commentary. "The question never addressed is what does global warming and human influences bring" to the High Pressure areas typically associated with extreme heat and drought events, Trenberth said. 

The report, Trenberth said, "fails completely to say anything about the observed soil moisture conditions, snow cover, and snow pack during the winter prior to the event in spite of the fact that snow pack was at record low levels in the winter and spring."

Trenberth has a least one point I can speak to, and bring in the work of John Neilsen-Gammon of Texas A&M, the state climatologist of Texas, to verify. I saw a big presentation he gave at the American Meteorological Society on the drought that struck Texas last year (and which has persisted into 2013 in much of the state). 

Neilsen-Gammon said that about 20% of the drought could be attributed to global warming, which indirectly tends to support Trenberth's view. But more directly, Neilsen-Gammon said that they knew in Texas in the fall of 2011 that Texas would go into drought in 2012 because the ground was so dry that there would not be enough moisture in the air to make possible a significant amount of rain. That's what Trenberth alluded to in one of his points. 

What caused this dryness? Well, might not record-breaking heat have something to do with it? And might not record breaking heat waves have some connection to global warming? 

But Hoerling et al certainly looked at soil moisure, and the lack thereof in Texas can clearly be seen in some of their own slides (from the report, which looks unusually clear and well presented). 

So I must read this report, first. For myself and perhaps for some of you. 

Fracking in Ventura County: the next oil boom?

Great op-ed from Marianne Ratcliff in today's Star on fracking in Ventura County. How much fracking is going on, and how much more will be going on? Difficult to say. According to her research, most wells in this area have already been fracked -- but that's not to say that more couldn't be, or couldn't be hazardous. 

Fracking is such a proven method of increasing oil and gas production in the Silverthread lease in Upper Ojai that it is the rare well that has not been fracked, according to a 1975 Society of Petroleum Engineers report on the Ojai Silverthread Field.

Ambitious energy companies are reporting plans in company prospectuses and investor reports, such as the one published in March 2012 by Underground Energy Corp., reporting that Occidental Petroleum Corp.’s Vintage Production California LLC subsidiary, the largest Monterey landholder in the Ventura, Los Angeles and San Joaquin basins, has “200,000 acres and 520 drilling targets de-risked for oil-prone shale development.”

"De-risked?" For them or us? Here's a map from CNN, showing the oil formation overlaid on the state.

Will attend the meeting on Tuesday, in which the county will hear from its legal counsel on fracking locally. All but one of the supervisors want to know more...as do some of us. 

Climate change: it's not the heat, it's the humidity

At least when it comes to working outdoors. An interesting study published this month in Nature looks at how rising levels of heat and humidity will impact work in military and civilian sites, and draws a broad conclusion: 

  By   2100   under active mitigation (Fig. 1c), the high stress of present-day India
 (green   Fig. 1b)   expands   over   much  of  Eurasia   and  the   greater
 Caribbean region (green in Fig. 1c). Under the highest scenario
 considered, by 2100 (Fig. 1d) much of the tropics and mid-latitudes
 experience months of extreme heat stress, such that heat stress in
 Washington DC becomes higher than present-day New Orleans,
 New Orleans exceeds present-day Bahrain, and Bahrain reaches a
 WBGT of 31.5 ◦C. 

WGBT stands for Wet Bulb Global Temperature, a measure developed in the l950's by the Marine Corps to avoid heat stress injuries. Anything above 88 degrees F or 31 degrees C is considered hazardous, which means much less capacity for work out of doors for police, construction work, athletes, etc.  

Under two difference emissions scenarios, the study finds that labor loss due to heat stress doubles by 2050. Looking further into the future, later the ability to work out of doors falls dramatically, by 75% in warm months in places like Washington, D.C. 

Won't have as big an effect on white collar labor, due to air conditioning. A new social justice issue. 

Seasonal Forecaster: Cold winter for Eurasia, Northeast

In his talk at the American Meteorological Society convention Tuesday, Judah Cohen repeated a forecast made in December -- that Eurasia and New England -- will likely have a cold winter this year.

He' laid it out the fundamentals of his new prediction idea about ten years ago in the Journal of Climate, although since then he's brought out a Snow Advance Index and with a fellow researcher at his firm has a Polar Vortex Index in the works. That index appears to be demonstrating predictive skill thirty days out.

He made the essential point that ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) forecasts are skillful mostly for the West Coast in winter, and less so for the rest of the nation, whereas the nature of his polar vortex/snow advance projections speak for New England and Europe in winter. He also suggested that the global climate models have difficulty capturing heat exchanges at high altitudes at the poles.

The explanation for these "winter severity" forecasts is not simple, but here's a look at the warm Arctic/cold continents idea from NOAA, and here's an excellent story on Cohen from Wired, that teases out the various threads, and the connection to global warming.

Plus, an impressive graphic he gave to the magazine, showing how warming upsets the apple cart (the polar vortex) in the Arctic, leading to the famed Snowmaggedon of 2010.  

The broad effects of global warming have been predicted for decades; now the shorter-term consequences are becoming easier to understand. Could this lead to the end of denial?  

To wipe out coastal cities, burn the fossil fuels: Hansen

In his latest posting, James Hansen looks at ice sheet loss in Greenland and Antartcia, and warns of the possiblility of an exponential ice sheet loss rate.

Posing the question, he asks:

A crucial question is how rapidly the Greenland (or Antarctic) ice sheet can disintegrate in response to global warming. Earth's history makes it clear that burning all fossil fuels would cause eventual sea level rise of tens of meters, thus practically wiping out thosands of cities located along global coast lines. However, there seems to be little political or public interest in what happens the next century or beyond, so reports of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) focus on sea level change by 2100; i.e. during the next eighty-seven years. 

He adds an alarming graph, looking at the possibilities mathematically, charted against known satellite records, but writes that exponential ice sheet loss -- although looking all too likely -- is not yet certain. 

Bill McKibben makes a related point with a graph in the Washington Post (click to enlarge). He writes:

"This shows that fossil fuel companies have five times more carbon in their reserves than even the most conservative governments think would be safe to burn." 

 

Maybe stories are just data with a soul: Brené Brown

Great talk from Brene Brown on vulnerability (not to mention shame, guilt, and fear). All the good stuff. Especially applicable at Christmas: 

Am I alone in struggling with vulnerability? No. So this is what I learned. We numb vulnerability -- when we're waiting for the call. It was funny, I sent out something on Twitter and Facebook that said "How do you define vulnerabilty? What makes you feel vulnerable?" And within an hour and a half, I had 150 responses. Having to ask my husband for help because I'm sick, and we're newly married. Having to initiate sex with my husband, initiating sex with my wife, being turned down, asking someone out; waiting for the doctor to call back; getting laid off; laying people off -- this is the world we live in. We live in a vulnerable world. And the way we deal with it is we numb vulnerabilty.

By the way, born readers, you don't have to listen to TED talks. You can read them. It's much faster, and of course it makes a person far less vulnerable to the emotions of shame, guilt, fear, and regret.

Just so you know. In case you feel, you know, vulnerable to any of that. 

h/t: Kim Maxwell

Arctic Sea Ice or Siberian Snow best for winter forecasts?

At the AGU went looking for leading sea ice extent researcher Jen Francis at Rutgers, who has become known for arguing that the extent of sea ice/Arctic Amplification alters the jetstream (making it "wavier") and leads to extreme weather in places like the Northeast and northern Europe. 

Or, as she told the NYTimes this spring, during a heat wave: 

“This means that whatever weather you have today — be it wet, hot, dry or snowy — is more likely to last longer than it used to,” said Dr. Francis, who published a major paper on her theory a few weeks ago.

“If conditions hang around long enough, the chances increase for an extreme heat wave, drought or cold spell to occur,” she said, but the weather can change rapidly once the kink in the jet stream moves along.

Then along comes Superstorm Sandy, and she thinks that's related too: 

Blocking happens naturally, of course, but it’s very possible that this block may have been boosted in intensity and/or duration by the record-breaking ice loss this summer. Late-season hurricanes are not unheard of either, but Sandy just happened to come along during this anomalous jet-stream pattern, as well as during an autumn with record-breaking warm sea-surface temperatures off the US east coast. 

As the story by Justin Gillis mentions, not everyone in the field agrees. While visiting with Francis, and trying to understand what she might know about warming on the West Coast, I happened to see her being asked questions by another highly-respected winter forecaster Judah Cohen. 

These two agree that the warming of the Arctic impacts weather in the Northeast and Europe, but Francis is more focused on Arctic Amplification, Rossby waves, and sea ice extent, and Cohen is more focused on snow cover in Siberia. 

That's his graphic, from his slides and from a first-rate profile and Q&A in the Washington Post. Amazing to stumble across two of the top researchers in the field chatting about their methods. 

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...