This extraordinary mild winter in North America, followed by an unprecedentedly warm march, has shocked a lot of people who formerly dismissed the reality of climate change.
In addition, several years of violent tornado seasons have many asking if we are entering a “new Normal” in regard to our seasons.
For this two part series, I interviewed a number of climate scientists and experts from around the country, and found some surprising answers.
Part two is available at the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media.
Month: April 2012
Debate Long Over for Militaries, Intel. The Question is: Who Controls a Climate Altered World?
While denialists obediently click thru the anti-science blog-sphere, and memorize the latest diversionary squibs from Fox and Friends, the serious people of the world are preparing for the consequences of climate change.
The tragicomedy element is that, much of this activity is devoted to anticipating a need to protect soon to be opened oil resources in the melting arctic ocean. Fossil fuel companies continue to bankroll the climate denial industry, even as they map out their plans for exploiting changes they’s assured us are not happening.
YOKOSUKA, Japan — To the world’s military leaders, the debate over climate change is long over. They are preparing for a new kind of Cold War in the Arctic, anticipating that rising temperatures there will open up a treasure trove of resources, long-dreamed-of sea lanes and a slew of potential conflicts.
By Arctic standards, the region is already buzzing with military activity, and experts believe that will increase significantly in the years ahead.
Last month, Norway wrapped up one of the largest Arctic maneuvers ever — Exercise Cold Response — with 16,300 troops from 14 countries training on the ice for everything from high intensity warfare to terror threats. Attesting to the harsh conditions, five Norwegian troops were killed when their C-130 Hercules aircraft crashed near the summit of Kebnekaise, Sweden’s highest mountain.
The U.S., Canada and Denmark held major exercises two months ago, and in an unprecedented move, the military chiefs of the eight main Arctic powers — Canada, the U.S., Russia, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland — gathered at a Canadian military base last week to specifically discuss regional security issues.
None of this means a shooting war is likely at the North Pole any time soon. But as the number of workers and ships increases in the High North to exploit oil and gas reserves, so will the need for policing, border patrols and — if push comes to shove — military muscle to enforce rival claims.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30 percent of its untapped natural gas is in the Arctic. Shipping lanes could be regularly open across the Arctic by 2030 as rising temperatures continue to melt the sea ice, according to a National Research Council analysis commissioned by the U.S. Navy last year.
Wildlife and Ag Disaster Looms as UK Drought Deepens
As the US has seen one of the strangest springs ever, the UK sinks into one of the driest seasons in memory. The continuing whipsaw from one extreme to another will be the subject of my two new videos, to be released later today.
Though most of the South and East is in desperate need of rain, with hosepipe bans in place, if the deluge comes at once it could be more of a danger than a blessing.
April showers are expected to continue over the next few weeks. The real risk is at the end of summer when the ground is likely to be baked hard.
At the end of the last major water shortage in 1976, the minister of drought, Denis Howell, became minister of floods within days of his appointment as the heavens opened. The floods in the summer of 2007 also came after two years of dry weather made the ground hard. At the moment most of the east of the country, from the Humber to Kent, is in drought.
Four months of sustained rainfall will be required to refill reservoirs and rivers that are lower than they were in 1976.
Most of England is now in drought and the dry spell could last beyond Christmas, the Environment Agency will announce on Monday, as government officials started planning for a long-term water shortage that could be disastrous for wildlife, the landscape and farming.
Large swaths of the Midlands and the south-west have entered officialdrought status, meaning water companies in those areas can apply to place restrictions on water use for households and businesses. This could mean an extension of the hosepipe bans in the south of England.
The drought now extends from Cornwall to Kent, East Anglia to Shropshire and Herefordshire, and as far north as Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and North Yorkshire. Even parts of Wales – normally one of the wettest parts of the UK – are reporting ill-effects from the dry spell. The smattering of rain in many areas over Easter gave little respite from low river flows and falling groundwater levels, with only England’s northernmost counties still getting enough wet weather.
While rain over the summer and autumn could alleviate the water shortages, officials are planning for the third dry winter in a row, which could devastate wildlife and farming. Only a very wet autumn and winter could prevent the drought stretching into next year. Soils are so dry that they will need a prolonged heavy soaking to recover, while levels at reservoir across much of England are so low they will take time to replenish.
Trevor Bishop, head of water resources at the Environment Agency, warned the outlook was bleak. “A longer term drought, lasting until Christmas and perhaps beyond, now looks more likely, and we are working with businesses, farmers and water companies to plan ahead to meet the challenges of a continued drought,” he said. “While we’ve had some welcome rain recently, the problem has not gone away and we would urge everyone – right across the country – to use water wisely now, which will help prevent more serious impacts next year.”
Hey Deniers. Corn Called. CO2 Not all That Good for Plants.
Global warming may initially make the grass greener, but not for long, according to new research results.
The findings, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, show that plants may thrive in the early stages of a warming environment but then begin to deteriorate quickly.
“We were really surprised by the pattern, where the initial boost in growth just went away,” said scientist Zhuoting Wu of Northern Arizona University (NAU), a lead author of the study. “As ecosystems adjusted, the responses changed.”
Ecologists subjected four grassland ecosystems to simulated climate change during a decade-long study.
Plants grew more the first year in the global warming treatment, but this effect progressively diminished over the next nine years and finally disappeared.
The research shows the long-term effects of global warming on plant growth, on the plant species that make up a community, and on changes in how plants use or retain essential resources like nitrogen.
“The plants and animals around us repeatedly serve up surprises,” said Saran Twombly, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research.
“These results show that we miss these surprises because we don’t study natural communities over the right time scales. For plant communities in Arizona, it took researchers 10 years to find that responses of native plant communities to warmer temperatures were the opposite of those predicted.”
A hard freeze has wiped out a big portion of the cherry crop in Northwest Michigan this spring. The area produces more than half the state’s cherries that end up in desserts, juice and as dried fruit.
An historic early warm-up in March left fruit trees vulnerable to frost once the weather turned cooler again.
Temperatures broke records for the month of March across the Great Lakes region.Climate researchers say there’s never been anything like it going back more than a hundred years.”We’re seeing history made before our eyes at least in terms of climatology.”
Jeff Andresen is the state’s climatologist and professor of geography at Michigan State. “And in some ways if we look at where our vegetation is and how advanced it is, it’s probably a month ahead of where it typically is.”
Andresen is careful to point out that this year’s early warm-up is an extreme weather event.
He says it far outpaces the previous warmest March on record in 1945. He can’t say it’s a direct result of climate change. But it fits the predicted long term pattern of change that includes extreme fluctuations.
During one period, there were several straight days of above 80 degree daytime highs and nighttime temperatures in the 60’s.
Continue reading “Hey Deniers. Corn Called. CO2 Not all That Good for Plants.”
Heartland’s Truth-Challenged Harrison Schmitt Trolls NASA Nursing Home for New “List of Scientists”
I won’t bother to link to it here, but you may be hearing on the inter-tubes about a “list of NASA Scientists” who deny global warming.
When you want to present something as “scientific” that strays far beyond the boundaries of the mainstream, you have to take your “scientists” where you can get them. In the past, we’ve seen climate deniers present petition lists of orthodontists, podiatrists, and veterinarians as “proof'” of a controversy about climate change.
Now, Harrison Schmitt, ex-astronaut, and a board member at the Oil and Tobacco shilling Heartland Institute, whose own shaky scientific integrity is documented in the video above, has apparently trolled the ranks of retired right wing NASA engineers (don’t see any climate specialists on this list) for yet another anti-factual denialosphere non-news story. Schmidt was famously rejected for a post heading the New Mexico Department of Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources after accounts of his scientific distortions surfaced. He is also noted for appearing on the Moon-bat Conspiracy theory Alex Jones show to discuss his theory that the “environmental movement has been taken over by communists”.
Presumably, Schmitt and Heartland will be following up with a list of Doctors who prefer Camels.
Matt Groening Reveals Where Springfield is. Tennessee Confirms Where Dogpatch is.
Well, now we know! In an interview with Smithsonian, creator Matt Groening revealed which of the United States’ many Springfields is home to the iconic dysfunctional family.
Place your bets, because here’s the answer…
“Springfield was named after Springfield, Oregon,” Groening said—and Simpsons fans everywhere exhaled.
Tennessee enacted a law Tuesday that critics contend allows public school teachers to challenge climate change and evolution in their classrooms without fear of sanction.
Republican Gov. Bill Haslam allowed the controversial measure to become law without his signature and, in a statement, expressed misgivings about it. Nevertheless, he ignored pleas from educators, parents and civil libertarians to veto the bill.
The law does not require the teaching of alternatives to scientific theories of evolution, climate change and “the chemical origins of life.” Instead, it aims to prevent school administrators from reining in teachers who expound on alternative hypotheses to those topics.
Show this to a Denier and Stand Back: Margaret Thatcher on Climate Change will Explode Heads
Guess she wasn’t listening to “Lord” Monckton very closely. I’ve been looking for this clip for a while. It shows what the value is of a political leader with a science background. (Thatcher was trained as a chemist)
Worth listening in its entirety, but key passage begins at about 5:40.
Apologize for poor sound synch/quality, if I can fix it I will.
What We Knew in ’81
A lot of people really appreciated getting a look at Mike MacCracken’s 1982 (above) lecture at Sandia Labs, which gave a comprehensive overview of what was then known about climate change. Quite a lot, it turns out.(if you’ve seen it, keep going. if not, watch now. I’ll wait)
RealClimate has just posted a reminder of a similar compilation a year earlier, James Hansen’s 1981 Science piece.
Sometimes it helps to take a step back from the everyday pressures of research (falling ill helps). It was in this way we stumbled across Hansen et al (1981) (pdf). In 1981 the first author of this post was in his first year at university and the other just entered the KNMI after finishing his masters. Global warming was not yet an issue at the KNMI where the focus was much more on climate variability, which explains why the article of Hansen et al. was unnoticed at that time by the second author. It turns out to be a very interesting read.
They got 10 pages in Science, which is a lot, but in it they cover radiation balance, 1D and 3D modelling, climate sensitivity, the main feedbacks (water vapour, lapse rate, clouds, ice- and vegetation albedo); solar and volcanic forcing; the uncertainties of aerosol forcings; and ocean heat uptake. Obviously climate science was a mature field even then: the concepts and conclusions have not changed all that much. Hansen et al clearly indicate what was well known (all of which still stands today) and what was uncertain.
Next they attribute global mean temperature trend 1880-1980 to CO2, volcanic and solar forcing. Most interestingly, Fig.6 (below) gives a projection for the global mean temperature up to 2100. At a time when the northern hemisphere was cooling and the global mean temperature still below the values of the early 1940s, they confidently predicted a rise in temperature due to increasing CO2 emissions. They assume that no action will be taken before the global warming signal will be significant in the late 1990s, so the different energy-use scenarios only start diverging after that.
The first 31 years of this projection are thus relatively well-defined and can now be compared to the observations. We used the GISS Land-Ocean Index that uses SST over the oceans (the original one interpolated from island stations) and overlaid the graph from the KNMI Climate Explorer on the lower left-hand corner of their Fig.6.
For Millennials, A Car Can be Drag City
In an era when you are more likely to get lucky from having an effective social media presence than sparkling hubcaps, fewer and fewer young people are buying into the once enshrined US car culture.
No wonder the Foxis of Evil is panicking about electric vehicles.
Driving is becoming so last century.
Since the end of World War II, getting a driver’s license has been a rite of passage for teens, but that’s less and less the case. The share of people in their teens, 20s and 30s with driver’s licenses has dropped significantly over the past three decades, not only the United States, but also in some other wealthy nations with a high proportion of Internet users, transportation researchers have found.
One possible explanation: Virtual contact through the Internet and other electronic means is reducing the need for face-to-face visits among young people, researchers say.
From 1983 to 2008, the share of 16- to 39-year-olds with driver’s licenses declined markedly, with the greatest decreases among drivers in their late teens and early 20s, according to a study at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor. About 69 percent of 17-year-olds had a driver’s license in 1983. By 2008, that had dropped to 50 percent. Among Americans ages 20 to 24 in 1983, nearly 92 percent had driver’s licenses. Twenty-five years later, it was 82 percent.
The older the age group, the less dramatic the declines, the Michigan study found. But even among 35- to 39-year-olds, there was a 3.2 percent decline in the share of licensed drivers.
More recent data from the Federal Highway Administration indicates the trend has continued, according to a report released Thursday by the Frontier Group, an environmental organization, and the consumer-oriented U.S. PIRG Education Fund. The share of 20- to 34-year-olds without a driver’s license decreased from 89.6 percent in 2000 to 84.3 percent in 2010, the report said.
Dust That Sings
I don’t belong to any religion. Not so much because I rule out that there is an ultimate truth or ground of being, I rather suspect there is, – but more because, like Groucho, I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. Also, I’m not very good at showing up at the same time every week.
I go along with Einstein –
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
And I would add, with Whitman, that I have no need of miracles. “I know of nothing else but miracles..”
..“A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels…”
Whoever put the video above together seems to have touched on that – as does Richard Feynman in the video below.
Enjoy this beautiful day, no matter what the weather, and celebrate it, no matter what your persuasion.