Glen Peters is a Senior Researcher at Cicero – The Center for International Climate Research, in Oslo, Norway.
Month: September 2017
Harvey Overwhelms Toxic Sites. Trump EPA Unprepared
Bad enough that Houstonians will be dealing with mud, sludge, sewage, microbial and pathogenic pollution, – but the concentration of petrochemical production in the area means that in addition, an unknown quantity of toxic chemicals is part of the flood’s leftovers.
Not all toxic waste sites are particularly dangerous to the public at large – if they are protected and stable. The danger arises is something occurs to mobilize those toxins in a biologically active form.
Another example of how climate change, because it overwhelms the engineered tolerances of existing infrastructure, makes everything more complicated, more dangerous, more expensive.
As Dwight Chandler sipped beer and swept out the thick muck caked inside his devastated home, he worried whether Harvey’s floodwaters had also washed in pollution from the old acid pit just a couple blocks away.
Long a center of the nation’s petrochemical industry, the Houston metro area has more than a dozen Superfund sites, designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as being among America’s most intensely contaminated places. Many are now flooded, with the risk that waters were stirring dangerous sediment.
The Highlands Acid Pit site near Chandler’s home was filled in the 1950s with toxic sludge and sulfuric acid from oil and gas operations. Though 22,000 cubic yards of hazardous waste and soil were excavated from the acid pits in the 1980s, the site is still considered a potential threat to groundwater, and the EPA maintains monitoring wells there.
When he was growing up in Highlands, Chandler, now 62, said he and his friends used to swim in the by-then abandoned pit.
“My daddy talks about having bird dogs down there to run and the acid would eat the pads off their feet,” he recounted on Thursday. “We didn’t know any better.”
The Associated Press surveyed seven Superfund sites in and around Houston during the flooding. All had been inundated with water, in some cases many feet deep.
On Saturday, hours after the AP published its first report, the EPA said it had reviewed aerial imagery confirming that 13 of the 41 Superfund sites in Texas were flooded by Harvey and were “experiencing possible damage” due to the storm.
The statement confirmed the AP’s reporting that the EPA had not yet been able to physically visit the Houston-area sites, saying the sites had “not been accessible by response personnel.” EPA staff had checked on two Superfund sites in Corpus Christi on Thursday and found no significant damage.
AP journalists used a boat to document the condition of one flooded Houston-area Superfund site, but accessed others with a vehicle or on foot. The EPA did not respond to questions about why its personnel had not yet been able to do so.
“Teams are in place to investigate possible damage to these sites as soon flood waters recede, and personnel are able to safely access the sites,” the EPA statement said.
Continue reading “Harvey Overwhelms Toxic Sites. Trump EPA Unprepared”
Irma Update for September 3
As Climate Change Slams Farming, Farmers (mostly) still Don’t Get it
Look, I get it, the Farmer feeds us all, yada yada. My son’s a farmer.
By and large, agriculture is getting slammed worse than almost any sector of the economy. Yet example after example indicates they’re so far down the Fox News rathole, they don’t know who is doing this to them.
When President Trump announced this week that he was taking the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, there were swift and vocal reactions from many industries —- but most of the organizations that represent American agriculture were silent.
Chris Clayton, though, a veteran reporter at one of the leading farm publications in the country, took to Twitter:
Clayton is a Midwesterner and agricultural policy editor at DTN/The Progressive Farmer. He’s also the author of The Elephant in the Cornfield: The Politics of Agriculture and Climate Change, which describes in detail how farmers and farm lobbyists have dealt — or, more often, refused to deal — with a changing climate.
It has sometimes put Clayton in an awkward spot, as he acknowledged when I reached him this week in his office in Omaha, Neb.
Does it make you nervous, as a reporter at a farm publication, talking about climate change?
All the time. I feel like the guy who has to tell people things they don’t want to hear. But if I simply ignore the topic or ignore the issues, am I doing anybody any favors?
You decided to write a book on climate change during a Farm Bureau convention in 2011, when you were hearing lots of climate change skepticism.
Oddly enough, we were at a convention in Atlanta, where a freak ice storm shut us in. I was stuck at a bar, a Trader Vic’s, and got into a long conversation with friends who were analysts and lobbyists for Farm Bureau. [The group represents mainstream commodity farmers.] And I felt like the issue was not being fully addressed by farm groups.
The attitude you were hearing at the convention was ‘efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emission are a bad thing and we’re just against them?’
Continue reading “As Climate Change Slams Farming, Farmers (mostly) still Don’t Get it”
Has Trump Sent a Science Denier to Head NASA?
Waiting for the Friday-before-Labor-day news dump might have seemed like a good idea till Harvey showed up.
FYI, Climate Hawks has a petition drive against this appointment.
WASHINGTON — Jim Bridenstine, the Oklahoma Republican congressman President Trump tapped late Friday as NASA’s next administrator, is someone who champions commercial access to space, thinks a return to the moon is vital to U.S. strategic interests, and has dismissed the science behind climate change.
If the Senate confirms the 42-year-old former Navy flier, he would be the first elected politician to hold a job that’s been the purview of scientists, engineers and astronauts.
Bridenstine, who sits on the House Science, Space and Technology and the Armed Services committees, doesn’t have a formal science background. His last job before being elected to represent Oklahoma’s 1st District in 2012 was as executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum & Planetarium.
It is Bridenstine’s 21-month stint as the executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum that is at issue and an official statement from Board Chairman Barbara Smallwood was distributed that begins, “The Tulsa Air and Space Museum is neither for nor against any candidate in any election.”
“While at the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, Jim Bridenstine developed the QuikTrip Air and Rocket Racing Show and the Land the Shuttle Campaign, both of which garnered tremendous visibility for the Tulsa Air and Space Museum. While Mr. Bridenstine was executive director attendance increased at the museum. In August 2010 Mr. Bridenstine voluntarily resigned from his position as Executive Director at the Tulsa Air and Space Museum in order to follow his orders in the Navy Reserves. “
In direct response TASM board member James E. Bertelsmeyer, released the following:
“As a longtime supporter of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum (TASM), it is my opinion that the best day for the museum was the day that Jim Bridenstine left.
“While these issues have since been corrected by his successor, during Jim’s tenure at TASM, as I recall, the membership numbers were down, employee and volunteer morale was very low and the finances and certainly the financial reporting were arguably the worst they had been in recent years.
“While I respect Jim’s service to our Country as an aviator, I can’t imagine how he is qualified to run a Congressional District if, in my judgment, he can’t effectively manage our Air and Space Museum,” Bertelsmeyer wrote.
The planetarium at TASM is named after Bertelsmeyer.
Q: Do you believe that human activity is contributing to climate change?
A: No. The Earth’s climate has always varied substantially as demonstrated by pre-industrial human records and natural evidence. There is no doubt that human activity can change local conditions, but on a global scale natural processes including variations in solar output and ocean currents control climatic conditions. There is no credible scientific evidence that greenhouse gas atmospheric concentrations, including carbon dioxide, affect global climate. I oppose regulating greenhouse gases. Doing so will significantly increase energy prices and keep more people in poverty.
In the Senate, Bridenstine will likely face stiff opposition from Democrats, in particular for climate-contrarian comments he made in 2013, during his first term in House, while lobbying for additional support for weather research. “Mr. Speaker, global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago,” he said. “Global temperature changes, when they exist, correlate with Sun output and ocean cycles.”
Continue reading “Has Trump Sent a Science Denier to Head NASA?”
Next Up: Irma
Very nice explainer from Hampton Roads, Va TV Meteorologist Tim Pandajis.
Looking at Hurricane Irma, possible tracks over coming week, and larger concepts of weather prediction/modeling.
UPDATE:
Hurricane Irma’s intensity continues to fluctuate and is expected to strengthen over the next few days, and may be a formidably intense hurricane when it nears the Leeward Islands next week.
The center of Irma is located just over 1,300 miles east of the Leeward Islands and is moving west at 10 to 15 mph.
Irma’s intensification paused on Friday after intensifying from a tropical storm Wednesday to Category 3 hurricane Thursday in just 30 hours.
Hurricane Harvey did not Cause Climate Deniers, but it certainly Made Them Worse
Subconsciously aware of their culpability in history’s greatest crime, we can expect climate deniers, at least the old ones, not to change, that would be too painful – But rather, to spend the shriveled remainders of their lives waving their arms, and gnashing their teeth.
Science deniers were so put out by the deadly rains from Hurricane Harvey that they lost their sense of sight. Now we can’t say that Hurricane Harvey caused climate science deniers, they’ve existed since we changed climate in a big way. We can say that Hurricane Harvey hasn’t improved them.
Joe Bastardi, a science denying weather forecaster, got all excited and wrote a dumb article that was copied and pasted in the deniosphere. Danny Hayes first alerted us here at HotWhopper. It took some time before it was copied and pasted at WUWT (archived here). It was in response to an article in the Guardian, by Professor Michael Mann. The Guardian article had the following:
In case you’re a science denier, let me repeat that headline and sub-head:
It’s a fact: climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly
We can’t say that Hurricane Harvey was caused by climate change. But it was certainly worsened by it
In the article, Professor Mann explains why the flooding from Harvey was worsened:
- Sea level rise – partly from climate change and partly from subsidence
- Higher sea surface temperatures meant more moisture in the atmosphere
- Higher sub-surface sea temperatures gave even more fuel to Harvey
In addition to the above factors, Professor Mann put forward two other factors why the storm stalled and hung about for days. One that has been predicted in models, and the other, which he said was more tenuous, but appears to be a factor in this case, and has been described previously in the scientific literature.
The first pattern:
The stalling is due to very weak prevailing winds, which are failing to steer the storm off to sea, allowing it to spin around and wobble back and forth. This pattern, in turn, is associated with a greatly expanded subtropical high pressure system over much of the US at the moment, with the jet stream pushed well to the north. This pattern of subtropical expansion is predicted in model simulations of human-caused climate change.
The second, if more tenuous pattern, that resulted in Harvey stalling and dumping so much water over Texas, was described in a recent paper in Scientific Reports:
More tenuous, but possibly relevant still, is the fact that very persistent, nearly “stationary” summer weather patterns of this sort, where weather anomalies (both high-pressure dry hot regions and low-pressure stormy/rainy regions) stay locked in place for many days at a time, appears to be favoured by human-caused climate change. We recently published a paper in the academic journal Scientific Reports on this phenomenon.
The last paragraph emphasises that it’s not possible to say that Harvey was “caused” by climate change (who knows if that particular hurricane would have appeared at this particular time without climate change). What can be said is that the impact of Harvey was made worse by climate change. He wrote:
In conclusion, while we cannot say climate change “caused” Hurricane Harvey (that is an ill-posed question), we can say is that it exacerbated several characteristics of the storm in a way that greatly increased the risk of damage and loss of life. Climate change worsened the impact of Hurricane Harvey.
A strawman from Joe Bastardi and Anthony Watts
Joe Bastardi and Anthony Watts decided to build a strawman. The ludicrous nature of their attempt was immediately apparent. You’ll recall how the Guardian article had in the sub-headline and the article, that “We can’t say that Hurricane Harvey was caused by climate change.” So what was Anthony and Joe’s headline? Look and see.
Michael Mann’s claims that Harvey was caused by global warming are destroyed by an operational meteorologist
Continue reading “Hurricane Harvey did not Cause Climate Deniers, but it certainly Made Them Worse”
NPR Science Friday: Harvey and Climate Change
Andrew Dessler, Katharine Hayhoe, and Daniel Cohan in The Conversation:
Hurricane Harvey has taught us many lessons, but the most valuable may be the oldest lesson of all, one we humans have been learning – and forgetting – since the dawn of time: how much we all have to lose when climate and weather disasters strike.
The risks we face from disasters depend on three factors: hazard, exposure and vulnerability. In the case of Harvey, the hazard was the hurricane with its associated winds, storm surge and, most of all, rain. Houston is one of North America’s biggest metro areas, making 6.6 million people exposed to this hazard. Finally, there’s our vulnerability to heavy rainfall events, in this case exacerbated by the city’s rapid expansion that has paved over former grasslands, overloaded critical infrastructure, challenged urban planning and limited evacuation routes. These three factors explain the immense costs associated with tragedies like Hurricane Harvey.
As atmospheric scientists in Texas, we already know the hazards are real. Once the effects of Harvey have been added up, Texas and Louisiana will have been hit by more billion-plus dollar flooding events since 1980 than any other states.
We also know that many of these hazards are intensifying. In a warmer world, heavy precipitation is on the rise, which increases the amount of rain associated with a given storm. Sea level is rising, worsening the risks of coastal flooding and storm surge. At the cutting edge of climate research, scientists are also exploring how human-induced change may affect storm intensity and the winds that steer the hurricanes.
This is why catastrophes like Harvey – in which every extra inch of rain can lead to additional damage and harm – highlight exactly how and why climate change matters to each and every one of us.
Sensible response?
People know the climate is changing, but they don’t know how serious it is. Over 70 percentof Americans agree that the climate is changing, but less than half of us believe it will affect us personally.
Why? Perhaps because the image we associate most often with a changing climate is not the devastation left by a flood in our own state but rather a polar bear perched on a chunk of melting ice or an African farmer bearing silent witness to the impacts of a disaster that’s taken place on the other side of the world.
As tragedy unfolds, we must focus on the immediate response. But in the weeks and months that follow, we need to remember that, despite our air conditioners, our insurance and the politicized discourse that suggests that the science is somehow a matter of opinion rather than fact, we are incredibly vulnerable to natural disasters – disasters that are increasingly being amplified in a warming world.
Continue reading “NPR Science Friday: Harvey and Climate Change”
Mike Mann: Harvey Not Caused, but Made Worse, by Climate Change
What can we say about the role of climate change in the unprecedented disaster that is unfolding in Houston with Hurricane Harvey? There are certain climate change-related factors that we can, with great confidence, say worsened the flooding.
Sea level rise attributable to climate change – some of which is due to coastal subsidence caused by human disturbance such as oil drilling – is more than half a foot (15cm) over the past few decades (see here for a decent discussion). That means the storm surge was half a foot higher than it would have been just decades ago, meaning far more flooding and destruction.
In addition to that, sea surface temperatures in the region have risen about 0.5C (close to 1F) over the past few decades from roughly 30C (86F) to 30.5C (87F), which contributed to the very warm sea surface temperatures (30.5-31C, or 87-88F).
There is a simple thermodynamic relationship known as the Clausius-Clapeyron equation that tells us there is a roughly 3% increase in average atmospheric moisture content for each 0.5C of warming. Sea surface temperatures in the area where Harvey intensified were 0.5-1C warmer than current-day average temperatures, which translates to 1-1.5C warmer than “average” temperatures a few decades ago. That means 3-5% more moisture in the atmosphere.
That large amount of moisture creates the potential for much greater rainfalls and greater flooding. The combination of coastal flooding and heavy rainfall is responsible for the devastating flooding that Houston is experiencing.
Not only are the surface waters of the Gulf of Mexico unusually warm right now, but there is a deep layer of warm water that Harvey was able to feed upon when it intensified at near record pace as it neared the coast. Human-caused warming is penetrating down into the ocean. It’s creating deeper layers of warm water in the Gulf and elsewhere.
Harvey was almost certainly more intense than it would have been in the absence of human-caused warming, which means stronger winds, more wind damage and a larger storm surge. (As an example of how this works, we have shown that climate change has led to a dramatic increase in storm surge risk in New York City, making devastating events like Hurricane Sandy more likely.)
Finally, the more tenuous but potentially relevant climate factors: part of what has made Harvey such a devastating storm is the way it has stalled near the coast. It continues to pummel Houston and surrounding regions with a seemingly endless deluge, which will likely top out at nearly 4ft (1.22m) of rainfall over a days-long period before it is done.
Continue reading “Mike Mann: Harvey Not Caused, but Made Worse, by Climate Change”