ClimateSpot: current weather and climate stories

Summer Sizzle

2010-08-02T16:17:00.000-07:00

Todd's Conservation Minnesota outlook for the Twin Cities and all of Minnesota

Tuesday: Very warm and humid. Looking brighter, but an isolated PM shower or storm still possible. High: 91

Tuesday Night: Partly cloudy and mild. Low: 70

Wednesday: Stray PM storms possible, otherwise warmer and still humid High: Near 89

Thursday: Mostly sunny and comfortable. High: 84

Friday: Looking dry and pleasant. High: 84

Saturday: Warmer with more humidity and a few pop-up storms possible. High: 85

Sunday: Scattered showers and thunderstorms. High: 89

Monday: Front moves through, probably dry, but warm. High: 87

The Summer Sizzle

Not sure I'd want to take a cruise in the Caribbean at this time of the year, but if you're brave enough to skirt through growing and swirling clusters of thunderstorms in the warm oceans waters, you might find some mighty fine deals. An active 2010 Atlantic Hurricane season is expected, but has been fairly dull to start. Officially, we are starting the third month of a long 6 months season, which wraps up on the 30th of November. Alex, a category 2 hurricane, fizzled along Mexico's northeast shore in the Gulf of Mexico and Bonnie, only beefed up to tropical storm strength. Interestingly, this is pretty close to average. Things begin to ramp up significantly in August and September as the upper level winds in the tropics die down and the ocean waters hit their max temp. According to the National Hurricane Center, an average of 2.8 storms form in the month of August and September, the most active month, sees an average of 3 named storms. By September 24th, the average season has 4 hurricanes. Unfortunately, I fear the worst is yet to come.

Closer to home, a steamy, sticky sun will rule the roost for a couple of days, but sunny, less humid air will slide in by the end of the week. Have a good Tuesday - Todd Nelson

Calculate Your Heat Index

If you know your current temperature and relative humidity, you can use this table to approximate your current heat index.

HEAT - The #1 Non-Severe Weather Related Cause of Death

From NOAA: "The National Weather Service statistical data shows that heat causes more fatalities per year than floods, lightning, tornadoes and hurricanes combined. Based on the 10-year average from 2000 to 2009, excessive heat claims an average of 162 lives a year. By contrast, hurricanes killed 117; floods 65; tornadoes, 62; and lightning, 48.

In the disastrous heat wave of 1980, more than 1,250 people died. In the heat wave of 1995, more than 700 deaths in the Chicago area were attributed to heat. In August 2003, a record heat wave in Europe claimed an estimated 50,000 lives. Read more on HEAT from the National Weather Service:

Even though it'll be hot the next couple of days here in Minnesota and Wisconsin, the good news is that it won't be as hot as what folks are seeing just to the south. Take a look at all the heat related watches and warning to the south:

In these locations, heat indices have been consistently running above 100 degrees and as high as 125 degrees in Gulf Shores, Louisiana. This is dangerous heat, which can quick lead to heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Know the warning signs:

Atlantic Acting Up

Tropical Depression #4 developed in the Atlantic Basin on Monday as is forecast to become Tropical Storm COLIN early Tuesday morning. See the forecast track below:

The image below shows where August cyclones typically form and where they typically track:

Pakistan Flooding

The death toll in Pakistan due to some of the worst flooding decades now stands at 1,100 - read more from MSNBC here:

A bridge is washed away following flooding in the Swat region of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province on Monday. The United Nations and the United States announced $10 million in emergency aid for Pakistan on Sunday. (Photo Courtesy: W. Khan / EPA)

Russian Wildfires

From Boston.com: "To date, over 1,500 homes have been destroyed and 40 lives have been lost. as wildfires continue across over 300,000 acres." Read more and see more pictures from Boston.com here:

(Photo Courtesy: NASA - Smoke seen via visible satellite over Russian nearly 23,000 miles above the Earth's surface)

Climate change climbdown: scientists agree to reexamine data

2010-02-25T11:28:00.001-08:00

CLIMATE scientists are to re-examine 150 years of global temperature records in an attempt to regain the public trust rocked by revelations about errors and withheld data.

The Met Office put forward the proposal, which was accepted, at a meeting of the World Meteorological Organization this week.

In a document entitled Proposal For A New International Analysis Of Land Surface Air Temperature Data, the Met Office said: “We feel it is timely to propose an international effort to re-analyze surface temperature data in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organization.” The new assessment would be independent and based on publicly available data that could be challenged by climate-change skeptics.

Met Office spokesman John Hammond said: “The assessment would bring together the best scientists from the top meteorological institutions around the world.”

And he said they would be using data collected worldwide, dating back as far as 1850.

The re-analysis is designed to support claims put out by the Inter governmental Panel On Climate Change but could overturn the widely believed theory that global warming is man-made. The World Meteorological Organization said the Met Office proposal had been approved in principle by delegates at a meeting in Turkey this week.

(Personally, I think this is a very good idea. Open the entire process up for public inspection. Shine a light on the scientific method and how "good science" is performed. This is a necessary step to regain public trust on this issue. The entire article in the UK's "Express" is here).

Snow job: winter weather doesn't disprove climate change

2010-02-23T19:55:00.000-08:00

First in an occasional series.

The Claim

"It's the most severe winter storm in years, which would seem to contradict Al Gore's hysterical global warming theories." -- Sean Hannity, Fox News host

"Historic snow storm in Washington -- third this year -- where is Al Gore to explain it snows this heavily as a sign global warming is imminent." -- Newt Gingrich, former Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives

The Context

A harsh winter in Washington, D.C., has, predictably, been the source of plenty of Al Gore jokes. Many climate skeptics have held up recent snow storms as evidence that climate change is not actually happening.

The Evidence

First things first -- weather is not climate. But the likelihood of certain weather patterns is determined by climate. What we've seen in the snow-covered middle Atlantic this winter isn't just possible in a warming world, but it was actually anticipated.

Let's go straight to the U.S. Global Change Research Program's very useful synthesis report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. On the subject of winter storms, it says: "There is also evidence of an increase in the intensity of storms in both the mid- and high-latitude areas of the Northern Hemisphere, with greater confidence in the increases occurring in high latitudes. The northward shift is projected to continue, and strong cold season storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent, with greater wind speeds and more extreme wave heights. " (Emphasis ours.)

(The complete article at onearth.org is here).

Antarctic ice melting supports global warming

2010-02-23T19:50:00.001-08:00

A new study of Antarctic ice suggests that in spite all the fuss around climategate, the controversy over whether scientists have withheld facts casting doubt on the theory of global warming, there continues to be evidence that the world is heating up. The latest evidence is from the US Geological Survey, which said its research is the first to document that every ice front in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula has been retreating from 1947 to 2009, with the most dramatic changes occurring since 1990.

Its latest research, on the southern part of the Peninsula, is particularly alarming, according to the USGS, because that area has the Peninsula’s coolest temperatures. Because the USGS has found ice shelves are retreating in the southern section of the Antarctic Peninsula, it feels certain that global warming is affecting the entire length of the Peninsula. In the words of USGS scientist Jane Ferrigno:

This research is part of a larger ongoing USGS project that is for the first time studying the entire Antarctic coastline in detail, and this is important because the Antarctic ice sheet contains 91 per cent of earth’s glacier ice. The loss of ice shelves is evidence of the effects of global warming. We need to be alert and continually understand and observe how our climate system is changing.

The USGS says the retreating ice shelves could result in glacier retreat and sea-level rise if warming continues, threatening coastal communities and low-lying islands worldwide. It explains the importance of this:

The ice shelves are attached to the continent and aready floating, holding in place the Antarctic ice sheet that covers about 98 per cent of the Antarctic continent. As the ice shelves break off, it is easier for outlet glaciers and ice streams from the ice sheet to flow into the sea. The transition of that ice from land to the ocean is what raises sea level.
(The complete article in the Financial Times is here).

More IPCC Headaches: how reliable is the hurricane data?

2010-02-17T08:34:00.000-08:00

More trouble looms for the IPCC. The body may need to revise statements made in its Fourth Assessment Report on hurricanes and global warming. A statistical analysis of the raw data shows that the claims that global hurricane activity has increased cannot be supported.

Les Hatton once fixed weather models at the Met Office. Having studied Maths at Cambridge, he completed his PhD as metereologist: his PhD was the study of tornadoes and waterspouts. He’s a fellow of the Royal Meterological Society, currently teaches at the University of Kingston, and is well known in the software engineering community – his studies include critical systems analysis.

Hatton has released what he describes as an ‘A-level’ statistical analysis, which tests six IPCC statements against raw data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) Administration. He’s published all the raw data and invites criticism, but warns he is neither “a warmist nor a denialist”, but a scientist.

(The number of intense, category 3-5 hurricanes has nearly doubled since 1970, but it's difficult for climatologists to connect the dots and say that climate change is resulting in MORE hurricanes. In the end it may be that we're loading the dice, warmer ocean water increasing the potential for severe hurricanes, but making the claim that man-made warming is producing more hurricanes can't - yet - be supported by the data). The complete article is here.

Washington's snowstorms, brought to you by global warming

2010-02-16T08:36:00.000-08:00

RIPTON, VERMONT -- You want to hear my winter weather story? No, really, I know you do.

The cross-country ski race I've been training for, set for today high in the Green Mountains: cancelled, lack of snow.

Meanwhile, across the continent, backhoes and helicopters are moving snow down British Columbia's Cypress Mountain in an attempt to cover the Olympic ski courses, and technicians are burying cooling pipes beneath the moguls to keep them from melting. Some climate-conscious jokers put out a video pushing the sport of "bobwheeling" for future snow-challenged Olympiads.

And apparently there was some snowfall in the greater Washington area last week.

When you're trying to launch snowboarding tricks on dry ground and simultaneously shutting down the U.S. government because the snowbanks are casting shadows on the Washington Monument, something odd is going on. This isn't a good old-fashioned winter for the District of Columbia, not unless you're remembering the last ice age. And it doesn't disprove global warming, despite Sen. Jim De Mint's cheerful tweet: "It's going to keep snowing until Al Gore cries 'uncle.' "

Instead, the weird and disruptive weather patterns around the world are pretty much exactly what you'd expect as the planet warms. Here's how it works:

The complete blog post is here.

Scientists dispute climate skeptic's claim that US weather data is useless

2010-02-16T08:12:00.000-08:00

Some amateur climate sceptics have said weather stations across the US are poorly located and thus cannot be relied on. Photograph: Junos/Corbis

It appeared to have shaken the credibility of one of the most important global warming data sets in the world. A blog-inspired campaign by amateur climate sceptics seemed to show that numerous weather stations across the US were so poorly located they could not be relied upon.

But a new scientific analysis, using data from the sceptics, has shown that, if anything, the poorly located stations underestimate warming, rather than exaggerating it.

The US temperature record uses data from thousands of weather stations spread around the country. Their accuracy was called into question following a campaign by climate sceptic Anthony Watts, an ex-weatherman who runs the influential blog WattsUpWithThat.

He set up a site called surfacestations.org for readers to post photos of poorly located weather stations, particularly in places that could be influenced by artificial heat, such as air conditioning units or car parks. The photos were compiled into a book published by the right-wing thinktank the Heartland Institute. In it, Watts wrote: "The conclusion is inescapable: The US temperature record is unreliable. And since the US record is thought to be 'the best in the world,' it follows that the global database is likely similarly compromised and unreliable."

But scientists at the National Climatic Data Centre (NCDC) in North Carolina have analysed the weather station data to see what difference poor location actually makes. Watts had ranked the stations by his estimation of the quality of their location, so Dr Matthew Menne and colleagues compared the results from high- and low-ranked stations. They described their results as "counterintuitive" – poorly located stations were actually more likely to be cooler than those in better locations. This is probably because the poorly located stations are more likely to use more up-to-date measuring equipment called Maximum-Minimum Temperature System (MMTS), which has a slight "cool" bias that is already well documented.

The complete article in the UK's Guardian newspaper is here.

The continuing climate meltdown

2010-02-16T08:08:00.000-08:00

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the "settled science" of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there's no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC's headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously.

Take the rain forest claim. In its 2007 report, the IPCC wrote that "up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state."

But as Jonathan Leake of London's Sunday Times reported last month, those claims were based on a report from the World Wildlife Fund, which in turn had fundamentally misrepresented a study in the journal Nature. The Nature study, Mr. Leake writes, "did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning."

The IPCC has relied on World Wildlife Fund studies regarding the "transformation of natural coastal areas," the "destruction of more mangroves," "glacial lake outbursts causing mudflows and avalanches," changes in the ecosystem of the "Mesoamerican reef," and so on. The Wildlife Fund is a green lobby that believes in global warming, and its "research" reflects its advocacy, not the scientific method.

The rest of the editorial in the Wall Street Journal is here.

Don't confuse weather - climate

2010-02-05T09:28:00.000-08:00

.....Studies from both hemispheres indicate that 95 percent of the world’s alpine glaciers are retreating. Glacier National Park in Montana is down to 26 named glaciers from 150 in 1850. If this trend continues, the park is expected to be ice-free by 2030. Glaciers in the Himalayas are shrinking so rapidly that the summer flow of the major rivers (Indus, Ganges, Mekong, Yellow, Yangtze) they feed may eventually be seriously affected.

Permafrost regions are thawing in high northern latitudes, causing buildings to sink, roads to crumble, and a variety of other troubles for human infrastructure. The great ice sheets are retreating. The Greenland ice sheet melting began to accelerate in the 1990s. Now the margin of the entire ice mass is melting even in its northernmost reaches. The West Antarctic ice sheet has begun extensive melting, mostly since 2000, and the rate of melting has increased since then.

Sea level is rising, and the rate of rise has accelerated over the last century. A tide gauge on a concrete, open-ocean pier in Duck, N.C., indicates the sea level is now rising at a 1 1/2-foot-per-century rate. In the Pacific, atoll nations such as Tuvalu already are being abandoned because of the rising sea. Soon the Maldives must follow.

The summer sea-ice cover of the Arctic Ocean is shrinking and thinning, and may disappear altogether.

So, one can argue for hours regarding whether this year was warmer or colder than last. It really doesn’t matter. We should be reading the planet, not thermometers. The Earth is clearly warming and sea level is clearly rising....

The complete article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution is here.

Is global warming a crock of s&%! ?

2010-01-31T09:28:00.000-08:00

We are being warned and exhorted that, unless serious measures are taken to reverse our contributions to greenhouse gases, humans have put the planet on an unsustainable course for potential crises up to extinction. The irony is that, on the news, there is little agreement on what's caused massive shifts in temperatures over the past millennium.

"Global warming is a crock of s*%t!" When Bob Lutz, vice-chairman of General Motors, said this in February 2008, it immediately became the most widely distributed quote regarding global warming on the Internet. After all, this was one of the major power players in the automobile industry, and he was implying that anyone who believed that global warming was real, man-made, and altering the planet was something akin to a moron. But the problem with that quote is that it's incomplete. I know. I was there.

It was at a small private luncheon at Cacharel in Arlington, Tex., when Lutz uttered those words. But the quote omits what he said next: "Don't misunderstand me, I'm not a climate denier." As he explained to those present, he simply questions the mindset that blames all the climate change of the past few decades on mankind.

Lutz's comments that day were far more balanced and thoughtful than anyone who heard that particular quote might believe. And therein lies the problem with the current discussions on global warming: The media have taken the position that the science is complete and settled. A unanimous agreement that global warming not only exists but is man-made -- and we're almost past the point where we can still save the planet from it. Moreover, anyone who questions those absolute statements is quickly labeled a "Climate Change Denier." This label is intended to shame and discredit doubters, much like 500 years ago when church officials prosecuted anyone who preached the earth was not the center of the universe.

However, labeling to discredit someone by calling them a "denier" is a distorted and completely unjust position to take on such an important subject. In fact, virtually no one believes the earth has not gone through a period of unexplained warming. Therefore, the term "denier" is not just inaccurate, it's a complete and intentional mis-characterization of those wanting more open and honest scientific studies on the subject.

For the complete article in Sci-Tech-Today click here.

Radio operators are the eyes of the National Weather Service

2010-01-31T08:19:00.001-08:00

Even in the age of high-powered Doppler radar, instant communications and the Internet, the National Weather Service and local safety officials still rely heavily on old methods for accurate observations and emergency communications.

Volunteer amateur — or ham — radio operators still play a primary role in providing on-site information about tornadoes and storm conditions to weather forecasters and letting emergency responders know what’s going on.

"There’s nothing like ground troops," said Keith Wells, assistant coordinator with the Tarrant County Office of Emergency Management, who was helping the National Weather Service on Saturday at the annual Skywarn storm spotter training session at Texas Christian University.

"One of the most important things we do all year is train the spotters," Wells said. "When you have a trained observer on the ground at Bryant Irvin Road reporting golf-ball-sized hail or a funnel cloud, that really tells a meteorologist what’s going on."

More than 400 people showed up for the training, most already members of Tarrant County RACES (Radio Amateurs in Civil Emergency Service). The volunteers are willing to fire up their radios and vehicles and often head out looking for storm action to provide instant observations to the weather service.

It’s a service that amateur radio operators have provided locally since the early 1970s.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegraph has the complete article here.

Pentagon review to address climate change for the first time

2010-01-31T08:15:00.000-08:00

The Pentagon is addressing climate change for the first time in its sweeping review of military strategy.

The Pentagon is set to release the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) on Monday, along with the 2011 budget request.

In the review, Pentagon officials conclude that climate change will act as an “accelerant of instability and conflict,” ultimately placing a burden on civilian institutions and militaries around the world.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.), a key architect of Senate climate plans, was the first to draw attention to the significance of climate change in the QDR. Kerry said last week that the QDR will list climate change as a security problem that could claim U.S. lives.

“I will tell you that the defense review of the United States Pentagon next week is going to come out and list climate change for the first time as an instability factor that affects our troops and may in fact wind up costing us lives down the road,” Kerry said at a forum hosted by labor, business, veteran and other groups backing climate legislation.

The complete article in the "The Hill" publication is here.

Why has global warming paused? Water vapor may be the answer

2010-01-31T08:11:00.000-08:00

A decline in stratospheric water vapor between 2000 and 2009 followed an apparent increase between 1980 and 2000, a team of scientists has found. That finding may have implications for global warming.

A decade-long plateau in global warming appears to have occurred in large part because the stratosphere – the layer of atmosphere that few but airliners enter – got drier.

That’s an explanation by a team of atmospheric scientists from the United States and Germany. They’ve studied trends in stratospheric water vapor over the past 30 years and calculated the effects of those trends on temperatures.

A decline in stratospheric water vapor between 2000 and 2009 followed an apparent increase between 1980 and 2000, according to balloon and satellite measurements that the team used. The decline slowed the long-term growth in global average temperatures by some 25 percent, compared with the warming one could expect from rising concentrations of greenhouse gases alone, the team estimates.

"There's not a lot of water in the stratosphere. It's extremely dry," says Susan Solomon, an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., who led the team. "But it packs a wallop" in terms of its climatic effects, she says.

Other factors probably played a role as well in the temperature plateau, the team acknowledges.

Another contributor could have been sulfate aerosols from the rising number of coal-fired power plants in China, point out researchers such as Drew Shindell, with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

The complete article in the Christian Science Monitor is here.

Climate change blamed for Olympic snow shortage

2010-01-31T07:39:00.000-08:00

More mud than snow for the '10 Winter Olympics in Vancouver?

The David Suzuki Foundation says global warming and climate change are in part responsible for what's happening to a key Olympic venue.

Olympic organizers are working around the clock to ensure there's enough snow on Cypress Mountain, home to freestyle ski and snowboard events for the Games.

Record warm temperatures and heavy rains this winter have forced VANOC to use bales of hay and to truck in snow to create the courses for the events.

The Games are a perfect catalyst for Canada to take climate change seriously in the long term, according to Ian Bruce, the lead climate change campaigner at the Suzuki Foundation.

"It's crucial, as far as our economy goes here in Canada [and] it's crucial to protect winter sports as far as our culture goes," Bruce said.

The complete article from the CBC News is here.

Scientists "losing climate fight"

2010-01-25T11:11:00.000-08:00

A leading Australian climate change scientist says experts are losing the fight against skeptics, who are distorting the science of global warming.

His comments come as a prominent British climate change skeptic tours the country.

Lord Christopher Monckton has arrived in Australia for a series of lectures and is calling for a royal commission into the science around global warming.

The former journalist and political adviser to Margaret Thatcher says the production of carbon dioxide is not a major problem.

He has attacked the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) after it revised a key finding in its 2007 report which wrongly claimed the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.

But one of the lead authors of the report, Australian Professor Andy Pitman, has defended the overall conclusions of the report.

Professor Pitman was a lead author on the IPCC's 2001 and 2007 reports. He is also the co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.

Professor Pitman says sceptics have used the IPCC's error to skew the climate change debate.

"Climate scientists are losing the fight with the skeptics," he said.

"The sceptics are so well funded, so well organised. "They have nothing else to do. They don't have day jobs so they can put all their efforts into misinforming and mis-communicating climate science to the general public, whereas the climate scientists have day jobs and [managing publicity] actually isn't one of them.

"All of the efforts you do in an IPCC report is done out of hours, voluntarily, for no funding and no pay, whereas the skeptics are being funded to put out full-scale misinformation campaigns and are doing a damn good job, I think.

The rest of the post is here.

"Global warming is a proven fact"

2010-01-25T09:12:00.000-08:00

CHICAGO — More than 40 scientists with expertise in climate, agriculture, soil and entomological science have sent a letter to American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman requesting a meeting to discuss his group’s “inaccurate and marginalized” position on global warming. The Farm Bureau maintains that “there is no generally agreed upon scientific assessment on carbon emissions from human activities, their impact on past decades of warming or how they will affect future climate changes.” According to the scientists’ letter, that assertion ignores the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change, a problem that puts Farm Bureau members at risk. “As scientists concerned about the grave risks that climate change poses to the world and U.S. agriculture,” the letter states, “we are disappointed that the American Farm Bureau has chosen to officially deny the existence of human-caused climate change when the evidence of it has never been clearer.”

The entire article in agweek.com is here.

Warming expected to cut Atlantic hurricane tally, but boost threat

2010-01-25T07:29:00.000-08:00

Andrew Revkin

A new modeling study published in this week’s issue of Science projects a rise of about 30 percent in potential hurricane damage in the western Atlantic toward the end of the century as emissions of greenhouse gases rise. Although the overall number of storms in the region are expected to drop, the number of strong ones — those reaching Category 4 or 5 in the hurricane index — are expected to double from the number produced now, the study says. The projections are based on a midrange scenario for a rise in the heat-trapping emissions linked to global warming.

The two maps below, produced for the study by the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton, are based on a climate model comparing the production of strong hurricanes in conditions mimicking the current climate (basically, average climate conditions from 1980 to 2006) with hurricane production in conditions simulating those projected for the final two decades of the century.

It’s still early days in the effort to understand how hurricanes, which thrive or fade depending on local conditions, will fare in a globally warmed world. But the modeling exercise hints at factors that do seem to make the biggest difference. “What’s really important for Atlantic hurricane activity, what really gets things cranked up, is when the Atlantic warms relative to the rest of the tropics,” said Thomas Knutson, one of the paper’s authors and a climate researcher at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. He said that is what has happened in the real world since 1980, as scientists witnessed a big rise in hurricanes’ energy.

The rest of the New York Times blog article is here.

Evidence for climate change caused by man mounts

2010-01-25T07:25:00.000-08:00

One degree Fahrenheit might not sound like a lot, but picture the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of a cup of water that amount. Multiply that for a swimming pool. Do so again for a planet, say Earth.

For biology and environmental studies professor Dan Perlman of Brandeis University in Waltham, that's the import of a new report citing the past decade as the globe's warmest on record, by nearly one degree.

"That, along with all the other evidence, continues to support the idea that we're in store for something really big here," Perlman said this past week, citing his belief that man-made emissions are artificially warming the Earth. "It's like it's another few bricks in our certainty."

The report, issued Tuesday by the National Climatic Data Center, found that the decade 2000 to 2009 had the highest average temperature dating back to the start of record-keeping in 1880. The decade was 0.96 degree warmer than the 129-year average, breaking the record of 0.56 degree warmer set by the '90s and continuing a trend from the '60s.

Also, while 0.96 degree represents a significant amount of energy, Perlman said, that number is an average for the globe, with some places staying flat or cooling and others, like the polar north, spiking.

"There are some places that are really getting hammered," he said.

Scientists like Perlman and many others attribute most of the warming since the mid-20th century to human activities such as the release of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere through fossil fuel burning. They say the evidence and causal relationships are well-established.

"How certain do you want to be?" asked Larry McKenna, a professor in Framingham State College's department of physics and earth sciences. "We're getting up to the 99 percent level."

The rest of the article is here.

NASA gives global warming theory a boost

2010-01-23T20:25:00.000-08:00

It's one of the most controversial subjects on earth, but if data from NASA

is to be believed, the past decade on the planet has been the warmest ever.

Well, when NASA says ever, that's since records began in 1880 - it has been very very hot at other periods in the earth's history. The earth was molten once, scientists think.

The survey, conducted by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) that 2009 was the warmest year since records began. 2008 was the coolest year of the decade.

James Hansen, who has come under attack from those who dispute global warmings exist, said: "There's substantial year-to-year variabilty of global temperature cause by the tropical El Niño-La Niña cycle. But when we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find that global warming is continuing unabated."

The last three decades, according to GISS data, show that the surface temperature is heating up by 0.36F per decade. GISS says that this means there's a clear warming trend, although things didn't show the same trend between the 1940s and the 1970s.

The rest of the article is here.

The New York Times has an article on the warm decade here.

Military considers global warming threat

2010-01-21T14:52:00.000-08:00

The hand-wringing over global warming is often done by scientists and preservationists, but on Tuesday several high-ranking current and former military men visited Atlanta and talked about the possible consequences for U.S. security.

They imagine disruptions in the supply of food and water that lead to unrest and to conflict around the globe. They see poverty-stricken countries becoming increasingly unstable. And they worry about whole populations on the move, as the seas rise and rivers change their courses.

Rear Admiral David Titley said there is strong evidence that old arctic ice has melted much faster than new ice can replace it. It's a trend that scientists predict could someday yield a rise in sea level by a meter or two, he said.

"I've had people ask me: ‘Why should the Navy care?'" he said. He has a dry response loaded with sarcasm: "Well, we tend to build our bases at sea level."

(The complete article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is here).

Nobel-winning panel's warning on glaciers discredited

2010-01-18T15:22:00.000-08:00

A much-publicized United Nation panel’s estimate about the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers from climate change is coming under fire as a gross exaggeration.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had said in 2007, the same year it won the Nobel Prize, that it was “very likely” that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2030 if current warming trends continue.

That date has been much quoted and a cause for enormous consternation, since hundreds of millions of people in Asia rely on ice and snow melt from these glaciers for their water.

The panel is the United Nations’ scientific advisory body on climate change and it ranks its conclusions according to a probability scale in which “very likely” means there is greater than 90 percent chance that an event will occur.

But it now appears that the estimate about Himalayan glacial melt was based on a nearly decade-old interview of one climate scientist in a science magazine, The New Scientist, and that hard scientific evidence to support that figure is lacking. The scientist, Dr. Syed Hasnain, a glacier specialist with the government of Sikkim and currently a fellow at the TERI research institute in Delhi, studies “index glaciers” and has more recently suggested that only small glaciers would disappear entirely.

The panel is considering whether to amend the estimate or remove it. “We are investigating this issue and our members have been asked for further input,” said Brenda Abrar, a spokeswoman. The panel’s reports are exhaustive compilations of climate science created through the efforts of hundreds of scientists, and no one person can make the change.

The complete article in the NY Times is here.

Good news for the world; bad news for the IPCC

2010-01-17T09:15:00.001-08:00

It’s the best news of the decade so far, but not for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the official ultimate authority on climate science, for it poses a much greater threat to its credibility than the much-hyped “Climategate” emails and puts further questionmarks over its embattled chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

Reports today suggest that the IPCC may soon retract one of the more alarming predictions in its latest massive review of climate science, that the glaciers of the Himalayas are very likely to disappear by 2035, after it was found to be unjustified. That is emphatically good news for the world. At least three quarters of a million people in the most populous part of the planet depend on the glaciers for water: their rapid disappearance would be an unimaginable catastrophe.

Leading glaciologist Prof Graham Cogley of Ontario’s Trent University – who says that, at current rates, the melting might take ten times longer – has been worried for some time about the prediction. At one stage he thought IPCC had wrongly transposed two figures in the date from a 1996 scientific paper that forecast the glaciers’ disappearance by 2350. But the truth is even more embarrassing. It goes back to a story published in New Scientist in 1999 by its excellent environment specialist, Fred Pearce, which reported an Indian glaciologist Syed Husnain as saying they could be gone by 2035. This was mentioned six years later in a campaigning document by the environment group, WWF, and the IPCC then picked it up.

This is serious, as the authority of the IPCC rests on meticulously basing its reports on peer-reviewed literature and, indeed, on taking a conservative view. Traditionally it has erred on the side of caution, sometimes excessively so. In the same report, for example, it grossly underestimated future sea-level rise, by excluding contributions form melting ice from the Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets, though these would be major factors: last December a highly authoritative report suggested that its forecast level should be doubled.

(Potentially embarrassing news for the IPCC, which should have got this - glaring - error, but good news for people living in Asia - the rate of melting of the glaciers in the Himalayas seems to be considerably less than anticipated in the latest IPCC prediction - ultimately giving the world more time to do something about it). The rest of the article is here.

Rising sea level bringing change to coastal life

2010-01-16T09:05:00.001-08:00

WEST LONG BRANCH — Think it's tough to operate a business or invest in real estate in this economy? Just wait until that sea level comes up a few more inches.

Climate change is already forcing subtle adjustments in how people live along the coast, from insurance costs to community planning, according to speakers at a panel on climate-change effects at the Shore, hosted today by Monmouth University's Urban Coast Institute and co-sponsored by the Jersey Shore Partnership and Monmouth-Ocean Development Council.

"Adaptation is already well under way," said Radley Horton, a scientist with Columbia University's Center for Climate System Research and an adviser to New York City's climate change committee.

City planners are looking to protect critical infrastructure from sea-level rise, conservatively projected at 1 to 2 feet in this century, he said.

Even if storms don't increase in strength and frequency, that sea-level rise will mean that today's storm floods of about 8 feet above mean low water will occur five times as frequently, Horton told the gathering in Wilson Hall.

(looking for a solid, long-term investment? Think dikes & levees, technology similar to what the Netherlands tap to keep the North Sea out of their - reclaimed - yards and towns. I'm serious. A slow-motion rise in sea level is underway; this becomes much more critical during hurricanes and even nor'easters that roar up the east coast. It may not seem like much, but even a rise of a few inches makes a significant difference in ultimate damage when storm-induced waves are superimposed on this rise in sea level).

The rest of the article is here.

Meteorologists as climate change deniers?

2010-01-16T09:01:00.000-08:00

A recent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review (http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/hot_air.php) examined the rise in global warming denial among the ranks of TV meteorologists.

It's not just that the climate change deniers (as clunky a label as you'll find) claim that the climate scientists got it wrong; it's not that there was a mistake somewhere, some statistician forgot to carry a two in an important calculation or neglected to convert feet to meters.

No, the accusation is more venomous than that: Human-caused global warming is not an error, it is a hoax. It is an intentional fraud, a worldwide conspiracy.As San Diego weatherman John Coleman wrote in a November 2007 opinion piece, "Global Warming is a nonevent, a manufactured crisis and a total scam." The climate scientists are liars and con men who have no qualms about faking data if it will help assure them funding and continued research grants. It's all about the money. (By this logic, doctors are secretly doing their best to make the public sick, thus ensuring a continued supply of patients and income.)

Curiously, Coleman is not alone; according to a survey conducted by an Emory University researcher, nearly one-third (29 percent) of the television meteorologists he asked responded that global warming was a "scam." That percentage may or many not be representative of all local TV station forecasters nationwide, but it should be cause for alarm.

Coleman's article, which has been widely disseminated and used by critics of global warming, reflects a curious anti-science, anti-academic position.

The complete article at discovery.com is here.

Climate thought of the day

2010-01-16T08:59:00.000-08:00

"I'm not sure we understand all the influences and eventual outcomes of what happens to our atmosphere but I do know that the scientists who are researching it are sincere and genuinely concerned. Throughout history discovery has always had its shadow - people who have difficulties with change. Change is challenging to all of us but for some people losing their anchors (like the world is flat) just messes with their head too much. For the most part people want to project the illusion that nothing is wrong or changing because they can continue along the path of least resistance. Its so much harder and painful to confront change and do what needs to be done. Hands covering ears, shaking head side to side, saying "I can't hear you, I can't hear you."

- John Gitelman

Severe winter storms in Europe don't tell us about GLOBAL climate change

2010-01-14T19:49:00.000-08:00

(interesting article in Media Matters that caught my eye. Everyone is tempted to look out the window and assume the weather floating over their heads has global implications. It's hard - even for meteorologists - to keep a true, global perspective. That's why climate scientists exist - to look at the big, long-term picture. Maybe I'm nuts, but I still believe the vast majority of climatologists who continue to believe that GLOBAL temperatures are warming steadily over time. No vast conspiracy theories - if the planet was truly cooling you couldn't possibly keep 3,000 to 5,000 climate scientists quiet, all towing the line, all "covering up" the truth).

While some of Northern Hemisphere is seeing cold winter storms this year, many parts of globe experiencing temperatures "above normal." In a January 7 blog post, The Christian Science Monitor noted that "[s]ome parts of Northern New Zealand are sweltering in record breaking heat this week. And oddly enough, so are some places in Bulgaria, where a hot spot over the Black Sea has warmed one town to a pleasant 72 degrees. Not bad for a city at the same latitude as Portland, Maine." The Christian Science Monitor also noted, "On Christmas Day, the Australian Weather Bureau reported that Central Pacific Ocean temperatures are now at their warmest in more than a decade. For Australia itself, 2009 was a scorcher, the second hottest year on record after 2005." The U.K. Met Office Hadley Center similarly noted in a January 6 press release that "it is not cold everywhere in the world. North-east America, Canada, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and south-west Asia have all seen temperatures above normal -- in many places by more than 5 C, and in parts of northern Canada, by more than 10°C."

Met Office: Climate change "has to be looked at in a global context and over longer periods of time." The Met Office said in its January 6 press release that "current cold weather in the UK is part of the normal regional variations that take place in the winter season. It doesn't tell us anything about climate change, which has to be looked at in a global context and over longer periods of time."

Globally, 2009 among warmest years on record. A January 5 U.K. Independent article reported: "The Met Office's Barry Gromett said December and January's cold weather was 'within the bounds of natural variability' within a global trend of rising temperatures -- in which 2009 is set to be the fifth warmest year on record." The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has similarly stated that 2009 "will likely finish as the fourth, fifth, or sixth warmest year on record." NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) further noted that based on global surface temperature data through November, 2009 is the fourth warmest year on record.

WMO: "2000-2009, The Warmest Decade." In a December 8, 2009, press release, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported that "[t]he decade of the 2000s (2000-2009) was warmer than the decade spanning the 1990s (1990-1999), which in turn was warmer than the 1980s (1980-1989)." On December 8, 2009, NOAA also stated that according to a preliminary analysis by the National Climatic Data Center, "[t]he 2000--2009 decade will be the warmest on record, with its average global surface temperature about 0.96 degree F above the 20th century average. This will easily surpass the 1990s value of 0.65 degree F." Bloomberg further reported on December 8, 2009, that "[o]f the 10 hottest years on record, nine occurred in the 2000s, according to the Met Office, which said it expected temperatures to keep rising as a result of greenhouse-gas emissions." The article further noted that "[g]lobal temperatures are expressed by the Met Office as an 'anomaly' from the long-term average. The 2000s were about 0.4 of a degree warmer than the 1961 to 1990 average, eclipsing the record 0.23-degree temperature anomaly of the 1990s, it said."

Click here for the rest of the article at mediamatters.org.

Hot Air: why don't TV weathermen believe in climate change?

2010-01-08T10:07:00.000-08:00

(This article hit close to home. I still can't understand why more professional TV meteorologists believe that climate change is a "scam" or a "conspiracy." Proficiency in short-range weather forecasts doesn't automatically give legitimacy to their climate credentials. I do not [for an instant] consider myself a climate "expert". But I have tried to keep up with climate science, true peer-reviewed research, professional journals, etc. I don't see any evidence of a widespread cover-up or a concerted effort to mislead people about what is happening, over long periods of time, to our atmosphere. Greenhouse gases have spiked by 38% in the last 150 years, there's no debate about that. The oceans have [apparently] reached their limit in being able to absorb excess CO2. Why is it so difficult for so many people to believe that a big uptick in man-made greenhouse gases might have an impact on long-term climate? I see what's happening in Alaska, the thinning of arctic ice, thousands of glaciers melting worldwide and shake my head. The evidence is there, for people who TRULY want to find the truth. I just don't get it, and I've become increasingly frustrated by recent sideshows and diversions [the recent hacking of scientific e-mails in the U.K. suspiciously timed pre-Copenhagen]. I've more or less become resigned to the fact that we probably won't take action, in a meaningful, global way, before reaching some sort of "tipping point." My fear is that withing 10-20 years, certainly within our lifetime, we'll have to mobilize to deal with the impact of warming, we'll probably have to get very serious about adapting to a warmer, stormier, more violent world, with even more crazy/random weather events. I wish I could be more optimistic - but this entire topic has degenerated into a political litmus test and TV tabloid freakshow. It's a very complicated scientific process, and - sadly - people are being distracted from what is really going on. Local TV meteorologists aren't helping the process, injecting personal opinion in place of hard, sound science. In the end the truth will come out. And I fear it won't be pretty). Sooner or later professional climate scientists will be able to say "we told you so". Count on it).

_________________________________________________________

The small makeup room off the main floor of KUSI’s studios, in a suburban canyon on the north end of San Diego, has seen better days. The carpet is stained; the couch sags. John Coleman, KUSI’s weatherman, pulls off the brown sweatshirt he has been wearing over his shirt and tie all day and appraises himself in the mirror, smoothing back his white hair and opening a makeup kit. “I kid that I have to use a trowel, to fill the crevasses of age,” he says, swiping powder under one eye and then the other. “People have tried to convince me to use more advanced makeup, but I don’t. I don’t try to fool anyone.”

Coleman is seventy-five years old, and looks it, which is refreshing in the Dorian Gray-like environs of television news. He refers to his position at KUSI, a modestly eccentric independent station in San Diego whose evening newscast usually runs fifth out of five in the local market, as his retirement job. When he steps in front of the green screen, it’s clear why he has chosen it over actual retirement; in front of the camera he moves, if not quite like a man half his age, then at least like a man three quarters of it. His eyes light up, and the slight stoop with which he otherwise carries himself disappears. His rumble of a voice evens out into a theatrical baritone, full of the practiced jocularity of someone who has spent all but the first nineteen years of his life on TV.

By his own rough estimate, John Coleman has performed more than a quarter million weathercasts. It is not a stretch to say that he is largely responsible for the shape of the modern weather report. As the first weatherman on ABC’s Good Morning America in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Coleman pioneered the use of the onscreen satellite technology and computer graphics that are now standard nearly everywhere. In 1982, chafing at the limitations of his daily slot on GMA, Coleman used his spare time—and media mogul Frank Batten’s money—to launch The Weather Channel. The idea seemed quixotic then, and his tenure as president ended a year later after an acrimonious split with Batten. But time proved Coleman to be something of a genius—the channel was turning a profit within four years, and by the time NBC-Universal bought it in 2008 it had 85 million viewers and a $3.5 billion price tag.

Those were the first two acts of Coleman’s career. On a Sunday night in early November 2007, Coleman sat down at his home computer and started to write the 967 words that would launch the third. “It is the greatest scam in history,” he began. “I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming: It is a SCAM.”

What had set him off was a football game. The Eagles were playing the Cowboys in Philadelphia on Sunday Night Football, and as a gesture of environmental awareness—it was “Green is Universal” week at NBC-Universal—the studio lights were cut for portions of the pre-game and half-time shows. Coleman, who had been growing increasingly skeptical about global warming for more than a decade, finally snapped. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” he told me. “I did a Howard Beale.”

Skepticism is, of course, the core value of scientific inquiry. But the essay that Coleman published that week, on the Web site ICECAP, would have more properly been termed rejectionism. Coleman wasn’t arguing against the integrity of a particular conclusion based on careful original research—something that would have constituted useful scientific skepticism. Instead, he went after the motives of the scientists themselves. Climate researchers, he wrote, “look askance at the rest of us, certain of their superiority. They respect government and disrespect business, particularly big business. They are environmentalists above all else.”

The Drudge Report picked up Coleman’s essay, and within days its author was a cause célèbre on right-wing talk radio and cable television, beaming into Glenn Beck’s TV show via satellite from the KUSI studios to elaborate on the scientists’ conspiracy. “They all have an agenda,” Coleman told Beck, “an environmental and political agenda that said, ‘Let’s pile on here, we’re all going to make a lot of money, we’re going to get research grants, we’re going to get awards, we’re going to become famous.’”

Along with the appearances on Beck’s and Rush Limbaugh’s programs came speaking offers, and soon Coleman was on the conference circuit, a newly minted member of the loose-knit confederation of professional skeptics. (Coleman insists his views on climate change are apolitical, and says he has turned down offers to speak at Tea Parties and other conservative events.) His interviews and speeches that have been posted to YouTube have, in some cases, been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

The rest of the article in the Columbia Journalism Review is here.

Experts: cold snap doesn't disprove global warming

2010-01-06T21:27:00.000-08:00

Beijing had its coldest morning in almost 40 years and its biggest snowfall since 1951. Britain is suffering through its longest cold snap since 1981. And freezing weather is gripping the Deep South, including Florida's orange groves and beaches.

Whatever happened to global warming?

Such weather doesn't seem to fit with warnings from scientists that the Earth is warming because of greenhouse gases. But experts say the cold snap doesn't disprove global warming at all — it's just a blip in the long-term heating trend.

"It's part of natural variability," said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. With global warming, he said, "we'll still have record cold temperatures. We'll just have fewer of them."

Deke Arndt of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., noted that 2009 will rank among the 10 warmest years for Earth since 1880.

Scientists say man-made climate change does have the potential to cause more frequent and more severe weather extremes, such as heat waves, storms, floods, droughts and even cold spells. But experts interviewed by The Associated Press did not connect the current frigid blast to climate change.

So what is going on?

The complete story from abcnews.com is here.

Extreme weather: why has Mother Nature gone bonkers

2010-01-06T21:25:00.001-08:00

Mother Nature is in a very, very bad mood.

Much of the Northern Hemisphere is in the grip of arctic air and record snowfalls that have been inflicting hardship and havoc from China to Russia to Western Europe and over to the American Plains.

Meanwhile, the Southern Hemisphere has been experiencing a warmer than average summer.

Planetwide, the weather has become remarkably unpredictable.

There are few precedents for the global sweep of extreme cold and ice that has killed dozens in India, paralyzed life in Beijing and threatened the Florida orange crop. Chicagoans are taking shelter from a potentially deadly freeze, Paris is enduring sunny Siberian cold and Poland has counted at least 13 deaths in record low temperatures of about 13 degrees below zero. A string of deadly avalanches in northern Italy's Alps led to seven deaths.

The complete article on Foxnews.com is here.

60 Amazing Satellite Images of Earth

2009-12-23T07:51:00.000-08:00

Looking at nature from different perspectives can create stunning compositions for your photographs.

This couldn’t be more true than when we look at our planet from outer space and appreciate the reality of its beauty from such an incredible and rarely seen perspective.

The images in this compilation are from the Landsat 7 satellite and were created to introduce the general public to the Landsat Program.

Various combinations of the eight Landsat 7 spectral bands were selected to create the vivid RGB composites that we have featured.

Here are 60 absolutely stunning images of the Earth as seen from outer space. Click on the images for large resolution versions which you can use as wallpapers. (thanks to Gizmodo for the link).

Acid oceans, the "evil twin" of climate change

2009-12-19T08:08:00.000-08:00

In this photo taken Oct. 30, 2009, Research Director for the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Andrew DeVogelaere paddles his kayak at the sanctuary in Monterey, Calif. Far from Copenhagen's turbulent climate talks, the sea lions, harbor seals and sea otters reposing along the shoreline and kelp forests of this protected marine area stand to gain from any global deal to cut greenhouse gases. (AP Photo/John Helprin)

MONTEREY BAY NATIONAL MARINE SANCTUARY, Calif. — Far from Copenhagen's turbulent climate talks, the sea lions, harbor seals and sea otters reposing along the shoreline and kelp forests of this protected marine area stand to gain from any global deal to cut greenhouse gases.

These foragers of the sanctuary's frigid waters, flipping in and out of sight of California's coastal kayakers, may not seem like obvious beneficiaries of a climate treaty crafted in the Danish capital. But reducing carbon emissions worldwide also would help mend a lesser-known environmental problem: ocean acidification.

"We're having a change in water chemistry, so 20 years from now the system we're looking at could be affected dramatically but we're not really sure how. So we see a train wreck coming," said Andrew DeVogelaere, the sanctuary's research director, while out kayaking this fall with a reporter in the cold waters.

Nothing in the treaty negotiations specifically addresses the effects of carbon absorption in the oceans on marine life, which studies show is damaging key creatures' hard shells or skeletons.

Oceans absorb about 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere from human activities each year, says a new U.N. report released at the Copenhagen talks this week. That helps slow global warming in the atmosphere, the focus of the Copenhagen talks.

But carbon dissolving in oceans also forms carbonic acid, raising waters' acidity that damages all manner of hard-shelled creatures, and setting off a chain reaction that threatens the food chain supporting marine life, including the lumbering sea mammals along the 276-mile coast of the California sanctuary and the rest of the U.S. West Coast.

By 2100, the report said, some 70 percent of cold water corals — a key refuge and feeding ground for commercially popular fish that also are food for the seals and otters — will be exposed to the harmful effects.

Click here for the complete article.

Wind shear determines whether man-made pollution strengthens thunderstorms

2009-12-19T07:41:00.000-08:00

ScienceDaily (Dec. 17, 2009) — New climate research reveals how wind shear -- the same atmospheric conditions that cause bumpy airplane rides -- affects how pollution contributes to isolated thunderstorm clouds. Under strong wind shear conditions, pollution hampers thunderhead formation. But with weak wind shear, pollution does the opposite and makes storms stronger.

The work improves climate scientists' understanding of how aerosols -- tiny unseen particles that make up pollution -- contribute to isolated thunderstorms and the climate cycle. How aerosols and clouds interact is one of the least understood aspects of climate, and this work allows researchers to better model clouds and precipitation.

"This finding may provide some guidelines on how man-made aerosols affect the local climate and precipitation, especially for the places where 'afternoon showers' happen frequently and affect the weather system and hydrological cycle," said atmospheric scientist Jiwen Fan of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. "Aerosols in the air change the cloud properties, but the changes vary from case to case. With detailed cloud modeling, we found an important factor regulating how aerosols change storms and precipitation."

The rest of this fascinating article is here.

Many goals remain unmet in 5 nations's climate deal

2009-12-19T07:22:00.000-08:00

President Obama with Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao, across from him, the prime minister of India, Manmohan Singh, right, and other world leaders at the Copenhagen climate summit on Friday.

COPENHAGEN. President Obama announced here on Friday night that five major nations, including the United States, had together forged a climate deal. He called it “an unprecedented breakthrough” but acknowledged that it still fell short of what was required to combat global warming

The agreement addresses many of the issues that leaders came here to settle. But it has left many of the participants in the climate talks unhappy, from the Europeans, who now have the only binding carbon control regime in the world, to the delegates from the poorest nations, who objected to being left out of the critical negotiations.

By the early hours of Saturday, representatives of the 193 countries who have negotiated here for nearly two weeks had not yet approved the deal and there were signs they might not. But Mr. Obama, who left before the conference considered the accord because of a major storm descending on Washington, noted that the agreement was merely a political statement and not a legally binding treaty and might not need ratification by the entire conference.

The three-page accord that Mr. Obama negotiated with the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa and then presented to the conference did not meet even the modest expectations that leaders set for this meeting, notably by failing to set a 2010 goal for reaching a binding international treaty to seal the provisions of the accord.

The complete New York Times article is here.

Click here for the full text of President Obama's statement, announcing a preliminary climate change agreement.

Weathering a storm of stupidity

2009-12-17T07:48:00.000-08:00

Children try to catch fish at a partially dried-up pond in Yingtan, Jiangxi province August 13, 2009.

The spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought. --P.B. Medawar

So what's next? A series of essays by Sarah Palin about the Large Hadron Collider and the mysteries of dark matter? An MIT lecture series by Rush Limbaugh regarding the thermodynamics of black holes? A Festschrift of Sean Hannity's scholarly articles on plate tectonics and volcano formation? Glenn Beck performing live heart-lung transplants on Fox News?

Everybody understands that these things couldn't happen. That when it comes to serious scientific endeavor, years of study and professional apprenticeship are required. In a word, expertise.

Ex-beauty contestants, drive-time DJs, TV sports announcers, hairstylists, newspaper columnists -- basically anybody whose math skills topped out in the 10th grade -- rarely have anything substantive to add to the sum of technical and scientific knowledge. That's what they most resent about it.

It's not impossible that such persons could educate themselves sufficiently to have an informed opinion, but it's rare. Most of us, most of the time, are like historian and blogger Josh Marshall: "The fact that the vast majority of people with specialized knowledge in the field think there's a problem is good enough for me," he wrote. "I can't be knowledgeable about everything. And I'm comfortable with the modern system in which the opinions of really knowledgeable people with expertise counts more in cases like this than people who know nothing at all."

Unless and until, that is, scientific endeavor impinges upon either A) religious belief, or B) the ability of tycoons to keep making money in precisely the way they or their ancestors have always made their money. Then it's every man and woman a climatologist, and every genuine expert an "elitist" enemy of God and the American way -- creationism with a thermometer.

(As a born-again Christian I see a need for religion and science. Each has it's place. What is troubling, terrifying to me, and many others who respect the scientific method, is the willingness of so many otherwise thoughtful, rational, logical people to "look away" and grasp at straws, rather than confronting what the evidence and science is telling us. Turning this into a political litmus test, a test of one's conservatism or liberalism, totally misses the point. The climate is changing, morphing. Some of this may be "natural", yes, but I don't find it far-fetched that a 38% increase in greenhouse gases correlates well with the 10 warmest years on record, all observed since 1998. The rest of the article is here).

Dome homes could be hurricane-proof

2009-12-16T07:16:00.000-08:00

By Adam Hooper

LAKE CHARLES, LA (KPLC) – It is not your typical looking home. But, according to builder David Smith, when it is all finished, your home could begin to save you money.

"This is energy efficient. It will save you any where from 50 percent or better on your electricity costs alone," said David Smith of Smith Family Dome Home Builders.

Besides looking different, a dome home is constructed quite different as well.

"We take a material and we inflate it like a balloon. Then we spray it with a polyurethane foam. We run rebar, and then we spray three and a half to five and a half inches of concrete on the inside," said David Smith.

According to David, dome homes are rated to withstand a category 5 hurricane, and an F5 tornado. For people living along the coast, this could be the answer.

"If you don't want to have to pack your things up and travel, if you want to protect your family and your belongings, you can stay in this house through anything," said David Smith.

And, for those who may be apprehensive about living in a concrete dome, when it is all done, it can look as normal as any other home.

"You can come out from the dome itself and make any kind of designs that you want. You can make the aesthetic appearance anything that you want," said David Smith.

(Call me crazy, but I don't think I want to live in a place where the only way to survive a category 4-5 hurricane is by living in a dome-home. Be sure to send this article to any friends/family in Florida.)

2009-11-26T18:28:00.000-08:00

The ongoing debate/firestorm over the recent hacking of climate-related e-mails has lead me to post a few thoughts and responses I've sifted through in recent days, for better or worse. Here goes...

"As a sociologist, I can't imagine what's so unusual about these emails. Science is messy. The brilliance of science as a system isn't its individual findings, but rather how their iterations function as a whole to produce general truths. This is because SCIENCE IS MESSY.

Before deciding to hop on the academic track, I used to be a carpenter. Guess what? Carpentry is messy too. Life is messy. At the end of the day, despite countless dismays, and conversations about how this house will never stand, none of the houses I ever built came crashing down. Why? Because there are a lot of nails and joints in there, and one piece cut too big or too small doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of difference in the end."

- anonymous

From Peter Watts, scientist and author:

"Science doesn’t work despite scientists being asses. Science works, to at least some extent, because scientists are asses. Bickering and backstabbing are essential elements of the process. Haven’t any of these guys ever heard of “peer review”?

"That’s how science works. It’s not a hippie love-in; it’s rugby.

"This is how it works: you put your model out there in the coliseum, and a bunch of guys in white coats kick the shit out of it. If it’s still alive when the dust clears, your brainchild receives conditional acceptance. It does not get rejected. This time."

"As for me, I’ll follow the blogs with interest and see how this all shakes out. But even if someone, somewhere, proves that a handful of climatologists deliberately fudged their findings — well, I’ll be there with everyone else calling to have the bastards run out of town, but it won’t matter much in terms of the overall weight of the data. I went running through Toronto the other day on a 17°C November afternoon. Canada’s west coast is currently underwater. Sea level continues its 3mm/yr creep up the coasts of the world, the western Siberian permafrost turns to slush. Swathes of California and Australia are pretty much permanent firestorm zones these days. The glaciers retreat, the Arctic ice cap shrinks, a myriad migratory species still show up at their northern destinations weeks before they’re supposed to. The pine beetle furthers its westward invasion, leaving dead forests in its wake— the winters, you see, are no longer cold enough to hit that lethal reset button that once kept their numbers in check.

I could go on, but you get my drift. And if the Climate-Change Hoax Machine is powerful enough to do all that, you know what?

They deserve to win."

- Peter Watts (his complete post regarding "email-gate" can be found here).

I received a couple of e-mails from climate change deniers positively giddy about the recent hacking of e-mails from scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. For people who consistently doubt the veracity of the science surrounding anthropogenic climate change this was the "smoking gun" many had been waiting for, seeming to PROVE that a handful of scientists were secretly plotting and scheming, "manipulating the numbers" to skew the science in favor of man-made climate change. But a closer inspection of the e-mails shows something much less dramatic: that science is inherently messy (because scientists are - surprise! - just as human as the rest of us). They bicker, complain, compete, gossip and vent occasional bursts of rage at professional deniers intent on interfering with their research. I find the timing of all this very curious: with a global climate change summit at Copenhagen just a few weeks away. My hope is that this [pr mess] will shine a bright light on the huge and growing body of science, the mountain of mounting evidence, that people will look at this topic with fresh eyes. My fear is that this will only increase the decibel level of the shouting underway, entrench the skeptics and further embolden the conspiracy theorists who see deception under every rock. The evidence is there, for people truly willing to look. It's easier to follow incendiary blogs and TV talking points than it is to truly sift through the science and assess the evidence objectively. All of us bring along our own biases, even scientists. But when scientists are wrong their peers, their competitors, take JOY in pointing out their mistakes and errors. As you'll see below, science is messy, but the PROCESS eventually comes up with truth, however impermanent. Isaac Newton was a complete jackass (from what I've read) but his theory of gravity still holds up pretty well. For those who see these leaked e-mails as evidence of a vast conspiracy all I can say is be patient. His theory has stood the test of time. Only time will tell if climate change science is the "hot air" skeptics believe it to be. To those who still doubt, all I can say is be prepared for more unpleasant symptoms, bizarre storms, floods, droughts, super-hurricanes and climate oddities in the years ahead. This is a slow-motion transformation, but the paradox remains: by the time the last piece of the (climate) puzzle falls into place it will be far too late to do anything about it. We'll have no choice but to adapt, take it on the chin. I hope we come to our senses before we reach that inevitable "tipping point", but I'm not longer optimistic we'll be able to save ourselves (from ourselves).

For more information on this hacked e-mail tempest in a teapot, including 60 mb worth of leaked e-mail text (most of it mind-numbingly dull) click here for a long, detailed post from boingboing.com's Maggie Koerth-Baker. If you're looking for more ammunition, a point-by-point refutation of all the claims and counterclaims dredged up by persistent deniers, click here to read "How to talk to a climate change skeptic" at scienceblogs.com.

So much for the increasingly partisan, angst-ridden subject of climate change. It's easier to shift gears and focus on weather, which may or may not be safer ground, something almost all of us can agree on. BTW, our record-warm November is not necessarily evidence of climate change. One month doesn't prove anything (even though we're seeing temperatures more than 10 degrees above average, even though November is turning out to be warmer than all of October!) One month does-not-a-trend-make. This is weather, not climate. It's true that Novembers are trending warmer, with less snow, the past 10 consecutive Novembers warm enough to play golf. Ask your grandfather how often he got out to play golf in November when he was growing up. One storm, one week, one month, even an entire season or year doesn't prove anything. What's critical is not what's happening over Minnesota, but the global snapshot, over many years - decades. All of us are armchair experts on weather, the day to day fluctuations and variations. Few of us possess the tools to be able to monitor the entire planet over a long period of time, objectively, comprehensively. I rely on the thousands of PhD climate scientists worldwide who do this for a living. In this crowd, in spite of what you may have read, there is still widespread agreement that the changes are real, happening even faster than the latest 2007 IPCC report predicted across in northern latitudes and polar regions. Sorry, I'll throw my hat in with these guys and gals until a better theory comes along to explain what we're witnessing on a planetary scale.

Hacked e-mail is new fodder for climate dispute

2009-11-22T13:34:00.000-08:00

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: November 20, 2009

Hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

The e-mail messages, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.

Some of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by the skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them.

The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument. However, the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists.

In several e-mail exchanges, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and other scientists discuss gaps in understanding of recent variations in temperature. Skeptic Web sites pointed out one line in particular: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” Dr. Trenberth wrote.

(A smoking gun that disproves climate change, evidence of massive scientific cover-up? I doubt it - but I fear it's more ammunition to fuel conspiracy theories, leading to more delay, more confusion, more obfuscation and denial. The complete New York Times article is here).

Changes in the climate and a windier Great Lake

2009-11-22T13:30:00.000-08:00

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

Published: November 16, 2009

Chalk up another effect of climate change: it’s getting windier over Lake Superior.

That is the conclusion of a study by scientists who have looked at the effects of increasing surface water temperatures in the lake and air temperatures over it. The water has warmed faster than the air, creating instability in the air mass that results in stronger winds.

Ankur R. Desai of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an author of the study in Nature Geoscience, said the effect was due to ice, or lack of it.

“Less ice in the winter means stronger winds in the summer,” Dr. Desai said.

Ice coverage of Lake Superior has declined in recent decades, which means that the lake starts to warm sooner, becoming stratified. The earlier this stratification occurs, Dr. Desai said, the warmer the top layer gets in the summer.

Data from buoys and satellites showed that this warming outpaced that of the air above it. That means the thermal gradient between the two was reduced.

The rest of the New York Times article is here.

Climatologists baffled by global warming "time out"

2009-11-20T14:17:00.000-08:00

A Sunny Mystery. Could the sun be responsible for the apparent "pause" in global warming? Perhaps. The lack of sunspots on the surface of the sun has been striking in recent years. A lack of sunspots often correlates with colder periods here on the Earth. Could there be factors beyond man-made greenhouse gases to explain what's happening on a global scale? Absolutely.

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.

(It's true that - averaged over the entire planet - global temperatures appear to have plateaued for the first decade of the 21st century, although profound changes continue to be witnessed in far northern latitudes - from Greenland to Alaska and the depth/quality of arctic ice). To read the entire article in Germany's premier investigative news magazine, "Der Spiegel" click here.

In nod to global warming, Navy prepares for an "ice-free" Arctic

2009-11-18T19:53:00.001-08:00

The dwindling Arctic ice cap has launched an international race for control of northern waters: Russia, Canada, Denmark, and even China are hustling to expand their military presence, plant flags and eye those 90 billion barrels of natural gas under the cap. Now the U.S. Navy’s getting ready for the thaw, with a strategic plan to maximize the U.S. stake up north.

The Navy’s Arctic Roadmap (.pdf), written by the recently launched Navy Task Force Climate Change (TFCC), opens with an acknowledgment that worldwide temperatures are on the rise — especially up north. “The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. While significant uncertainty exists in projections for Arctic ice extent, the current scientific consensus indicates the Arctic may experience nearly ice-free summers sometime in the 2030s,” the document notes.

Then the Arctic Roadmap sets out a three-phase plan to secure U.S. interests in the Arctic. Because there’s a lot at stake under that melting cap: energy reserves, transport lanes and potential territory disputes.

(With a son at the U.S. Naval Academy this article definitely caught my eye. I wonder how much oil might be lurking under the North Pole? I fear we may soon find out. The complete article can be found at Wired.com by clicking here).

Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across USA

2009-11-14T19:57:00.000-08:00

This graphic shows the ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States from January 1950 through September 2009. Each bar shows the proportion of record highs (red) to record lows (blue) for each decade. The 1960s and 1970s saw slightly more record daily lows than highs, but in the last 30 years record highs have increasingly predominated, with the ratio now about two-to-one for the 48 states as a whole. (Credit: Copyright UCAR, graphic by Mike Shibao)

ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2009) — Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.

"Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States," says Gerald Meehl, the lead author and a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting."

The study, by authors at NCAR, Climate Central, The Weather Channel, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters. It was funded by the National Science Foundation, NCAR's sponsor, the Department of Energy, and Climate Central.

If temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and lows being set each year would be approximately even. Instead, for the period from January 1, 2000, to September 30, 2009, the continental United States set 291,237 record highs and 142,420 record lows, as the country experienced unusually mild winter weather and intense summer heat waves.

(Check out the ratio of record highs to record lows in the graphic above. It's pretty obvious that something is going on, with more than twice as many record highs as lows in the last decade. Climate "deniers" insist that global temperatures have leveled off or even fallen, but then why is the ratio of records so out of whack? Another important piece of the climate puzzle). The complete article is here.

Paying the climate change premium

2009-11-05T08:56:00.000-08:00

Ready to have your insurance rates go up? That’s what one industry group says will happen as climate change disrupts the world’s weather.

The Association of British Insurers said the cost of flood and windstorm damage would rise for insurers as global temperatures increased.

This would lead to higher premiums for consumers and a restriction of cover as insurers would need more reserves.
…
“These findings have serious implications for insurers, householders, businesses and governments,” said Nick Starling, the ABI’s director of general insurance and health.

“The continued widespread availability of property insurance in the future depends on taking action now to manage the threats of climate change.”

We normally think of the insurance industry as conservative, but when it comes to climate change, it’s been extremely aggressive. After all, that’s what the insurers do: analyze and seek to minimize risk–and global warming has made them increasingly worried about their bottom line. In fact, it’s the industry’s very conservativeness that made it one of the first to bang the drum about the perils of a warming world.

For example: Swiss Re, the world’s largest re-insurer, keeps three climatologist on staff. It has tracked rising damages from natural disasters for decades. Something like 20 years ago, it released its first report warning of the road that lay ahead. The graph up above is from a report they released on the future impacts of climate change.

The rest of the article is here.

Survey: Economists see threat in climate change

2009-11-05T07:55:00.001-08:00

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Researchers who deal in cold numbers rather than warming climates believe the "significant benefits from curbing greenhouse-gas emissions would justify the costs of action," a new survey finds.

In fact, the survey of economists finds 94% believe the U.S. should join climate agreements to limit global warming.

The survey results to be released today come as debate over the economics of global warming moves center stage in Washington, D.C. Republican senators boycotted a hearing Tuesday over an Environmental Protection Agency analysis about the costs of a clean-energy bill. In addition, the United States and European Union are preparing for a December meeting in Copenhagen to discuss a climate treaty.

"An economist tree hugger is an imaginary creature," says Michael Livermore of New York University's Institute for Policy Integrity, which conducted the survey. "But we found that economists really see climate change poses a lot of risk to the economy."

The survey approached the 289 economists who had published climate-related studies in the top 25 economics journals in the past 15 years. About half, 144, responded, and 75% agreed or strongly agreed on the "value" of greenhouse-gas controls.

The complete article in USA Today is here.

Arctic sea ice reaches third lowest minimum extent in '09

2009-10-18T19:58:00.000-07:00

On Sept 12, 2009, the extent of sea ice in the Arctic reached the third lowest level ever recorded since satellite records began in 1979. The National Snow and Ice Data Center estimates that the overall extent dropped to 5.1 million square kilometers, well below the average minimum extent of 6.71 million square kilometers (1979-2000). Only 2007 and 2008 have had lower ice extents. The small increase in 2009 was mostly due to ice spreading caused by strong polar winds. Ice concentration and thickness, however, have not increased, making predictions about a rebound in Arctic ice premature at this moment.

NOAA has the full story (complete with an animation showing this year's retreat of sea ice) here.

Global surface temperature was second warmest for September

2009-10-18T19:55:00.001-07:00

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the second warmest September on record, according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Based on records going back to 1880, the monthly National Climatic Data Center analysis is part of the suite of climate services NOAA provides.

NCDC scientists also reported that the average land surface temperature for September was the second warmest on record, behind 2005. Additionally, the global ocean surface temperature was tied for the fifth warmest on record for September.

Global Temperature Highlights

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was 1.12 degrees F above the 20th century average of 59.0 degrees F. Separately the global land surface temperature was 1.75 degrees F above the 20th century average of 53.6 degrees F.
Warmer-than-average temperatures engulfed most of the world’s land areas during the month. The greatest warmth occurred across Canada and the northern and western contiguous United States. Warmer-than-normal conditions also prevailed across Europe, most of Asia and Australia.
The worldwide ocean temperature tied with 2004 as the fifth warmest September on record, 0.90 degree F above the 20th century average of 61.1 degrees F. The near-Antarctic southern ocean and the Gulf of Alaska featured notable cooler-than-average temperatures.

The complete article from NOAA is here.

Our Three Bombs

2009-10-07T14:33:00.000-07:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: October 6, 2009

I am a 56-year-old baby boomer, and looking around today it’s very clear that my generation had it easy: We grew up in the shadow of just one bomb — the nuclear bomb. That is, in our day, it seemed as if there was just one big threat that could trigger a nonlinear, 180-degree change in the trajectory of our lives: the Soviets hitting us with a nuke. My girls are not so lucky.

Today’s youth are growing up in the shadow of three bombs — any one of which could go off at any time and set in motion a truly nonlinear, radical change in the trajectory of their lives.

The first, of course, is still the nuclear threat, which, for my generation, basically came from just one seemingly rational enemy, the Soviet Union, with which we shared a doctrine of mutual assured destruction. Today, the nuclear threat can be delivered by all kinds of states or terrorists, including suicidal jihadists for whom mutual assured destruction is a delight, not a deterrent.

But there are now two other bombs our children have hanging over them: the debt bomb and the climate bomb.

As we continue to build up carbon in the atmosphere to unprecedented levels, we never know when the next emitted carbon molecule will tip over some ecosystem and trigger a nonlinear climate event — like melting the Siberian tundra and releasing all of its methane, or drying up the Amazon or melting all the sea ice in the North Pole in summer. And when one ecosystem collapses, it can trigger unpredictable changes in others that could alter our whole world.

To read the rest of the Op-Ed in the New York Times click here.

Climate change threaten's America's National Parks

2009-10-07T14:22:00.000-07:00

Yellowstone is losing its white-bark pines (whose nuts are an important food source for the park's grizzlies). Rocky Mountain National Park is losing most, if not all, of its mature lodgepole pines. Mesa Verde has already lost most of its pinon pine trees. And more than trees are suffering from climate change: We might pack it in and pack it out, but human-generated greenhouse gas emissions have put our national parks in big trouble.

National Parks in Peril: The Threats of Climate Disruption, a report released by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization in collaboration with the National Resources Defense Council on October 1, identified the 25 national parks most adversely affected by climate change. Though the report stresses that all 391 parks are threatened, the report’s authors established 11 different types of risk to assess which parks were in the greatest danger. Whether it be due to loss of ice and snow, higher seas and coastal storms, intolerable heat or other factors, these parks are feeling the affects of a warming climate, now:

-Acadia National Park
-Assateague Island National Seashore
-Bandelier National Monument
-Biscayne National Park
-Cape Hatteras National Seashore
-Colonial National Historic Park
-Denali National Park
-Dry Tortugas National Park
-Ellis Island National Monument
-Everglades National Park
-Glacier National Park
-Great Smokey Mountains National Park
-Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore
-Joshua Tree National Park
-Lake Mead National Recreation Area
-Mesa Verde National Park
-Mount Rainier National Park
-Padre Island National Seashore
-Rocky Mountain National Park
-Saguaro National Park
-Theodore Roosevelt National Park
-Virgin Islands National Park/Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument
-Yellowstone National Park
-Yosemite National Park
-Zion National Park

The report appealed to the Obama administration, Congress, and the National Park Services Department to accept that human disruption of the climate is the greatest threat ever to our national parks. It urges them to consider and implement 32 actions specific to national parks, including setting aside additional national park land, making a national commitment to becoming carbon neutral at all park sites, drastically lowering greenhouse gas emissions (20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 based on current levels), and accelerating the implementation of clean energy technologies.

The report closes with a quote from Mike Finley, the former superintendent of Everglades, Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks:

The establishment and protection of the National Park System is one of the best ideas that America has institutionalized. Our parks provide inspiration, education, and enjoyment. Moreover, they represent some of our greatest resources of genetic and biological diversity and intact ecosystems. They are our seed banks for restoring the nation’s lands and waters already ravaged by our careless development and the early impacts of climate change. In one sense, they represent a life boat for our biological future. We need to take immediate action to reduce our use of fossil fuels and the resulting climate disruption before we sink our life boat and destroy the values and purposes of our national parks for future generations.

Looking for ways you can keep our parks from sinking under the weight of climate change? Check out:

Save Yellowstone and the Greater Rockies

The Rocky Mountain Climate Organization

National Resources Defense Council

And look for tips to green up your life in BACKPACKER's Green Scene.

-Jessie Lucier

National Parks in Peril

For the complete PDF click here.

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Apple quits the Chamber of Commerce over its "frustrating" global warming denialism

2009-10-06T09:23:00.000-07:00

There has recently been a “business backlash” against the Chamber of Commerce over its refusal to accept the science of global warming and lobbying against climate change legislation. The New York Times reports today that the latest company to join this backlash is Apple, which wrote in a letter to the Chamber that it has been “frustrating” that the business federation has been fighting efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions:

“We strongly object to the chamber’s recent comments opposing the E.P.A.’s effort to limit greenhouse gases,” wrote Catherine A. Novelli, the vice-president of worldwide government affairs at Apple, in a letter dated today and addressed to Thomas J. Donohue, president and chief executive of the chamber. Click here to read the letter.

“Apple supports regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and it is frustrating to find the chamber at odds with us in this effort,” Ms. Novelli continued.

Apple’s resignation was effective immediately, the letter said. The move comes a few weeks after Apple expanded the environmental disclosures on its products.

Apple joins Pacific Gas & Energy, Public Service Company of New Mexico, and Exelon in an ever-growing list of companies who are leaving the Chamber over its ideological opposition to any serious action over climate change.

Update Progressive Media has produced a video detailing how a parade of U.S. companies are leaving the Chamber because of its radical rejection of climate science. Watch it by clicking here.

Did global warming cause the Atlanta flood?

2009-10-06T09:05:00.000-07:00

2:05 pm October 5, 2009, by Jim Galloway, Atlanta Journal Constitution

Stu Ostro, leader of the Weather Channel’s team of tornado, hurricane and climate experts just outside the Perimeter, describes himself as a reformed skeptic when it comes to the topic of man’s impact on climate.

But in a post over the weekend, Ostro raised the ultimate question: “Did global warming ‘cause’ the Atlanta flood?”

The post is long and complex, with charts and graphs as tough to wade through as Pumpkinvine Creek was 10 days ago. But here’s his summary toward the end:

…There’s a straightforward connection in the way the changing climate “set the table” for what happened this September in Atlanta and elsewhere. It behooves us to understand not only theoretical expected increases in heavy precipitation (via relatively slow/linear changes in temperatures, evaporation, and atmospheric moisture) but also how changing circulation patterns are already squeezing out that moisture in extreme doses and affecting weather in other ways.

In other words, the answer is yes.

Off the chain without a 'cane

Stu Ostro, The Weather Channel

That's what the weather was in the Atlanta metro area early last week, and things were wiggy in the U.S. for much of September. Usually during that month when there's wild weather, including precipitation extremes, it's as a result of a hurricane or tropical storm. Not in 2009.

This "ex-skeptic" hasn't blogged about climate change in a while. For that matter, I haven't blogged about anything for a while! Been a bit distracted, but it's time to jump in the water again. Or maybe I should say, time to dust off my Nomex suit and put it on!

Before you fire up the flamethrower, though, let me say what this long entry is NOT about.

It's not about H.R. 2454 (more commonly known as the Waxman-Markey bill).

And I'm not telling you that you can't drive your SUV.

This blog is about the effect of climate change upon day-to-day weather. About physics and thermodynamics not politics.

It was two years ago last week that I first thoroughly laid out the basic premise.

Nothing that's gone on in the atmosphere since then has convinced me otherwise, and I've continued to add gazillions of weather events to this PDF [56MB file, and now up to 529 slides]. My goal has been and continues to be to document and objectively analyze these cases.

There have been anomalies and extremes for as long as there has been weather on the planet; the key is to assess how they are now changing as the climate changes.

To review:

--The global climate is overall warmer than it was in the 1970s. (That shouldn't be too controversial a statement!)

--Technical talk: The atmospheric warming has resulted in an increase in 1000-500 millibar thicknesses. Those increased thicknesses are manifesting themselves primarily by an increase in 500 mb heights (particularly notable in mid-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere), as there has not been a similar rise in 1000 mb heights. Although there is of course natural year-to-year variability, the overall trend at 500 mb has clearly been upward.

Analogy: It's like bread baking in the oven. As it warms, the dough expands in depth. Although the details of the science involved are different, the analogy works, which is that the depth (thickness) of a given layer of the atmosphere is increasing on average as that layer warms. Furthermore, in this case, the bottom of that atmospheric layer (1000 millibars) is not significantly changing, just as the bottom of the bread isn't (in that case, it's fixed by the bottom of the pan).

The rest of this fascinating post at weather.com is here.

New analysis brings dire global forecast of 6.3 degree temperature increase

2009-10-04T05:43:00.000-07:00

By Juliet Eilperin

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 25, 2009

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.

The new overview of global warming research, aimed at marshaling political support for a new international climate pact by the end of the year, highlights the extent to which recent scientific assessments have outstripped the predictions issued by the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

Robert Corell, who chairs the Climate Action Initiative and reviewed the UNEP report's scientific findings, said the significant global temperature rise is likely to occur even if industrialized and developed countries enact every climate policy they have proposed at this point. The increase is nearly double what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change.

"We don't want to go there," said Corell, who collaborated with climate researchers at the Vermont-based Sustainability Institute, Massachusetts-based Ventana Systems and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do the analysis. The team has revised its estimates since the U.N. report went to press and has posted the most recent figures at ClimateInteractive.org.

The rest of the Washington Post article is here.

A spiritual obligation to act on climate change

2009-10-03T20:32:00.000-07:00

We leaders of Colorado faith communities urge Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennet to work for the passage of strong clean energy legislation that addresses climate change. This is one of the dominant moral issues of our time.

Our religious faith deepens an awareness that should be clear to all people: The earth, our home, is a gift. We did not create it or earn it, and we do not own it. So we have a sacred responsibility to be good stewards of that gift.

Further, the earth's resources are finite, and with our technological prowess we have the ability to upset the ecological balance which supports our life on this earth. We must be attentive to the impacts of our activity on the environment, and not foolishly pretend that we are immune from those impacts.

We believe that our planet is in great peril from the threat of climate change. We believe it is real, and that it is to a significant extent human-induced. We accept the vast body of scientific evidence which forecasts severe consequences for the Earth and all its inhabitants if we fail to act.

Our thirst to consume the earth's natural resources, and our reliance on old energy sources which emit greenhouse gases, has led us to a crisis both spiritual and environmental. In view of this, for us as spiritual leaders to remain silent would be an abdication of our responsibilities.

Another consideration for us, and of primary concern, is that all of our religious traditions call us to serve and protect the poor and vulnerable, who contribute the least to this problem yet will suffer the most from the impacts of climate change.

We cannot expect to safeguard our own prosperity and security if we ignore or neglect the plight of the poor and vulnerable around the world, whose numbers will only increase as climate change disrupts lives and livelihoods.

A recent Pentagon report likewise concluded that increasing numbers of conflicts are sure to arise if people are displaced by climate change or forced to fight for dwindling resources such as water and arable land.

(I couldn't agree more, and I'm happy to see churches beginning to take a stand on this issue, which touches on morality, conservation and stewardship). The rest of the article in the Denver Post is here.

Unusual arctic warmth, tropical wetness, likely cause of methane increase

2009-10-02T08:53:00.000-07:00

Unusually high temperatures in the Arctic and heavy rains in the tropics likely drove a global increase in atmospheric methane in 2007 and 2008 after a decade of near-zero growth, according to a new study. Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, albeit a distant second.

NOAA scientists and their colleagues analyzed measurements from 1983 to 2008 from air samples collected weekly at 46 surface locations around the world. Their findings will appear in the September 28 print edition of the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters and are available online now.

“At least three factors likely contributed to the methane increase,” said Ed Dlugokencky, a methane expert at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. “It was very warm in the Arctic, there was some tropical forest burning, and there was increased rain in Indonesia and the Amazon.”

In the tropics, the scientists note, the increased rainfall resulted in longer periods of rainfall and larger wetland areas, allowing microbes to produce more methane. Starting in mid-2007, scientists noticed La Niña conditions beginning, waning and then intensifying in early 2008. This kind of climate condition typically brings wetter-than-normal conditions in some tropical regions and cooler sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. It can persist for as long as two years. In the United States, La Niña often signals drier-than-normal conditions in the Southwest and Central Plains regions, and wetter fall and winter seasons in the Pacific Northwest.

The rest of the NOAA article is here.

Super typhoons rocking the Philippines intensified by global warming

2009-10-01T20:54:00.000-07:00

Typhoon Parma on September 30, bearing down on the Philippines, still reeling from the worst flooding in decades from Tropical Storm Ketsana, which unloaded some 20"+ rainfall amounts on the Manila area. For more information click here for high resolution imagery at Earth Observatory.

Major news sources are all reporting on the recent natural disasters in the Northeast Pacific. Among the earthquakes and tsunamis, the area has also been subject to numerous typhoons.

The Associated Press released today that the people of nearby Manila provinces are evacuating, in the face of heavy rainfall and rising water. They are still recovering from Typhoon Ketsana, which hit the Philippines earlier this week and 386 people were killed. The new storm, called Typhoon Parma, is churning 600 miles of the coast of Manila and is expected to strike the island chain on Saturday, meteorologists say.

Typhoons are very common in the Northeast Pacific this time of year, however the destructive power and stronger than average winds of these super typhoons are interesting to weather scientists. A recent paper produced by Nagoya University in Japan affirmed the role of Global Warming in the appearance of super typhoons like Ketsana, Parma, and Morakot, which hit Taiwan in August.

A super typhoon is a category level for sea cyclones that produce winds over 120 mph. The Japanese study used computer simulations to predict that typhoons with winds as high as 180 mph, F3 out of five on the Fujita Scale, could rock the Pacific by 2074. Researcher Kazuhisa Tsuboki says in an interview with National Geographic, "The most important factor in the creation of the super typhoons is the warming of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific." Climate models in the study professed a rise of almost 4 degrees Fahrenheit in ocean temperatures. Ocean temperatures rise as a result of absorbing heat from the atmosphere. As the atmosphere gets warmer, the ocean gets warmer.

(Interesting story, but the jury is still out on global warming and hurricane intensity. True, the number of Category 4 & 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic and Gulf has DOUBLED since 1970, but climatologists are not convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that climate change is responsible. Remember, most of the warming is at northern latitudes, not in the tropics. I think we'll know within 3-5 years, but for now the possible link between global warming and super typhoons is still very much up in the air).

The rest of the article is here.

Pawlenty's current climate change stance differs from past

2009-09-24T08:05:00.000-07:00

In this photo from July 30, 2009, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty speaks at a luncheon during the Republican National Committee summer meeting in San Diego, Calif., where he used climate change as a punch line. (AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi)

St. Paul, Minn. — President Obama is promising new steps toward capping greenhouse gas emissions, but Gov. Tim Pawlenty is backing away from his earlier support for new regulations to slow global warming.

Since 2006, Tim Pawlenty has been touting clean energy initiatives as a way to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2007, he used his time as chair of the National Governor's Association to suggest ways to improve, develop and advance clean energy. The effort was meant to reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil, but Pawlenty also didn't deny that it was an attempt to clean up the environment.

"The country needs to hear this wakeup call and move boldly and aggressively in this direction," Pawlenty said in 2006. "What people think now will be very different than what people think 10 or 15 or 20 years from now and whatever political stripe you are, you'll look back on these types of initiatives and say 'thank goodness we did that.'"

Pawlenty was a vocal advocate of creating a cap and trade system to curb greenhouse gas emissions. In 2008, he and Janet Napolitano, then Arizona's Democratic Governor, recorded a radio ad urging Congress to address climate change.

Pawlenty has changed. Now, he uses climate change as a punch line.

(I am so disappointed by this turn of events. I like Tim - I consider him a friend; I've always appreciated his moderate, forward-looking policies. He's been a bridge-builder and a visionary when it comes to alternative energy here in Minnesota. That's why I'm so saddened by his apparent shift in policy - to appease those on the far right - the professional deniers, as he looks to make his mark on the national stage. Maybe this is politics as usual, but if it is I want no part of it. Call me crazy, but I expected more.....)

The rest of the MPR article is here.

Precision farming in northwestern Minnesota

2009-09-18T20:03:00.000-07:00

From space, Noreen Thomas’ farm in northwest Minnesota looks like a patchwork quilt. Fields change hue with the season and with the alternating plots of organic wheat, soybeans, corn, alfalfa, flax, or hay. Thomas enjoys this view from hundreds of miles above Earth’s surface—not just for the beauty, but the utility. She is among a growing group of Midwest farmers who rely on satellite imagery from Landsat to maximize their harvest and minimize damage to their fields. It’s become another crucial tool like their tractors and sprinklers.

The top true-color image, taken by the Landsat satellite on September 10, 2009, shows Thomas’s organic farm along the banks of the Buffalo River near the center of the image. Lush green fields dominate the image, though some crops have already been harvested leaving squares of tan and brown. The lower image shows the same scene in false color. Made with infrared light, the false-color image provides a wealth of information about crop conditions.

Fascinating article from NASA's Earth Observatory, the rest of it is right here.

Time to turn back? The most incredible tornado pictures

2009-09-17T08:28:00.001-07:00

Wednesday, 16 September 2009 | 9:46 PM

KOMPAS.com - Running towards a raging twister might seem insane to most people but for one artist, such perils are all in a day's work. Storm chaser Jim Reed has narrowly escaped death twice in his pursuit of the perfect stormy shot.

His experiences have been brought together in the revised and expanded version of his award-winning photo book, 'Storm Chaser: A Photographer's Journey.'

The awe-inspiring images chronicle Reed's travels through more than 2,000 U.S. counties documenting some of America's most deadly and spectacular weather.

'Storm Chaser includes the most memorable photos and experiences of 17 years of photographing wild weather,' said Reed.

'These experiences have shaped and changed my life.'

Re-released in June of this year, the book documents 17 hurricanes, including Hurricanes Charley in 2004, Katrina in 2005 and Ike in 2008.

Encountering hundreds of tornadoes, super-cell thunderstorms and hailstorms that have produced icy orbs twice the size of a softball, Jim's pictures are breathtaking.

(Yes, it's just a matter of time before one of these storm chasers, professional or otherwise, gets whacked by a tornado - or killed by lightning - or involved in a multi-car traffic accident with multiple fatalities. I've tagged along with NSSL scientists 3 times in Oklahoma since 1985, saw a tornado each time, but in every case I wasn't scared about getting sucked up into the tornado. I was TERRIFIED about being hit by a car or pickup traveling at 100 mph trying to intercept a twister and get the "money shot").

The rest of the article is here.

Global warming threatens beer quality

2009-09-15T15:03:00.000-07:00

IF THE sinking Maldives aren't enough to galvanise action on climate change, could losing a classic beer do it? Climatologist Martin Mozny of the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute and colleagues say that the quality of Saaz hops - the delicate variety used to make pilsner lager - has been decreasing in recent years. They say the culprit is climate change in the form of increased air temperature.

Mozny's team used a high-resolution dataset of weather patterns, crop yield and hop quality to estimate the impact of climate change on Saaz hops in the Czech Republic between 1954 and 2006. Best-quality Saaz hops contain about 5 per cent alpha acid, the compound that produces the delicate, bitter taste of pilsners.

(Oh no! For the love of God - and great beer - say it isn't so! For the rest of this profoundly troubling article at newscientist.com click here).

Canada's most deadly natural disasters

2009-09-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

Canada's earliest-known most deadly natural disaster was a hurricane that killed 4,000 people off Newfoundland in 1775, many of them fishermen, when scores of ships were lost. "The Rock" was also hit with Canada's only-recorded earthquake-related deaths, when tsunami waves whipped up on Nov. 18, 1929, under the Grand Banks traveled 300 km across the Atlantic Ocean. They smashed 40 villages, right, killing 30 people.

In addition to the 11 tornadoes that ripped through central and southern Ontario last month, heavily damaging more than 600 homes in Vaughan -- 38 irreparably -- and killing an 11-year-old boy in the town of Durham, deadly disasters since the start of the last century have included:

- Five children and four adults died and 25 people were injured in the Inuit village of Kangiqsualujjuaq, Quebec -- now part of Nunavik -- when tonnes of snow cascaded down the sheer face of a 365-metre-high cliff at 1:30 a.m. on New Year's Day, 1999 and hit the Satuumavik School.

- A January 1998 ice storm blanketed the eastern seaboard, killing 26 people in Ontario and Quebec and knocking out electricity well into the month. Most victims died of carbon monoxide poisoning from heaters, or from hypothermia.

- The Red River in Manitoba overflowed in 1997, submerging parts of Winnipeg and nearby villages. But they're used to it, since the Cree -- who warned early settlers of the danger of the "Miscousipi," or Red Water River -- were first proved right in 1826. Even trains were submerged in the big one of 1950.

- Two major hurricanes caused extensive damage on opposite sides of the country. For five days starting on Sept. 24, 2003, Hurricane Juan blew north from Bermuda and hit Nova Scotia and P.E.I winds as high as 170 km/h, leaving eight people dead and causing $300 million damage. Winds up to 152 km/h swept Halifax's harbour area with wave surges up to 2 metres causing serious erosion, felled trees, knocked out power to 700,000 people in central part of the province, damaged buildings around the city's Bedford Basin, including a hospital, high rises and 36% of the homes. The capital's worst storm since 1893 sank a pleasure schooner and left treasured Point Pleasant Park plus the Public Gardens closed for months. On Dec. 15, 2006, three West Coast storms that reached 120 km/h uprooted or snapped the trunks of 10,000 of its half-million trees (including a 200-year-old hemlock) in 400-hectare Stanley Park, a rural-like oasis on Vancouver's harbour that attracts about 8 million visits a year. A couple in their mid-60s were found dead in Burnaby, believed to be victims of carbon-monoxide poisoning caused by a power outage that left up to 240,000 BC Hydro customers with no electricity.

The complete article in the Edmonton Sun is here.

Arctic shortcut beckons shippers as arctic thaws

2009-09-11T20:45:00.000-07:00

MOSCOW — For hundreds of years, mariners have dreamed of an Arctic shortcut that would allow them to speed trade between Asia and the West. Two German ships are poised to complete that transit for the first time, aided by the retreat of Arctic ice that scientists have linked to global warming.

The ships started their voyage in South Korea in late July and will begin the last leg of the trip this week, leaving a Siberian port for Rotterdam in the Netherlands carrying 3,500 tons of construction materials.

Russian ships have long moved goods along the country’s sprawling Arctic coastline. And two tankers, one Finnish and the other Latvian, hauled fuel between Russian ports using the route, which is variously called the Northern Sea Route or the Northeast Passage.

But the Russians hope that the transit of the German ships will inaugurate the passage as a reliable shipping route, and that the combination of the melting ice and the economic benefits of the shortcut — it is thousands of miles shorter than various southerly routes — will eventually make the Arctic passage a summer competitor with the Suez Canal.

“It is global warming that enables us to think about using that route,” Verena Beckhusen, a spokeswoman for the shipping company, the Beluga Group of Bremen, Germany, said in a telephone interview.

(I wonder how the deniers are going to explain this one. Click here for the rest of the article in the Science section of the New York Times).

Widespead arctic wildlife changes seen with global warming

2009-09-10T20:38:00.000-07:00

Scientists carrying out studies of wildlife in the Arctic say global warming is causing dramatic changes in animal and plant life, threatening some species with extinction.

The report is a compilation of studies of Arctic eco-systems by an international team of scientists who have been collaborating during the fourth International Polar Year,which ended in 2008.

Eric Post, a professor of biology at Penn State University and leader of the study team, says previous research has focused on the non-living or abiotic effects of global warming on the Arctic, including the melting of sea ice and subsequent rises in seawater levels. But Post says this is the first comprehensive report investigating the sweeping impacts of climate change on eco-systems and living creatures in the north polar region, including:

"Fresh water systems, terrestrial systems, resident species, migratory species, birds, mammals, plants, pretty much everything. It seems like wherever you look in the Arctic right now, things are changing quite rapidly," he said.

The rest of the article from the Voice of America can be found here.

Station fire 71% contained as weather turns in firefighters favor

2009-09-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

Aftermath. From NASA's low-orbiting "Terra" satellite you can easily see the thousands of acres of land blackened, scorched by the recent fires. Less wind and higher relative humidity from an onshore wind flow in recent days has helped firefighters get the conflagration under control.

The Station fire is now 71% contained, fire officials said today, as cooler weather allow firefighters to set back fires on the massive blaze's eastern flank.

Officials also said the number of dwellings destroyed in the fire was 81, up from 78.

The fire battle has been hampered in recent days by winds. As a result, firefighters were not able to conduct a scheduled burnout operation east of Mt. Wilson on Wednesday.

“Most of the work is really being done inch by inch,” said David Ortiz, a Station fire spokesman. “It’s really steep terrain.”

Despite the winds, officials increased containment Wednesday from 62% to 71%.

The fire killed two Los Angeles County firefighters. Officials have classified the fire as arson.

(Source: L.A. Times)

As Gulf hurricanes get larger, tornado threat increases

2009-09-10T20:08:00.000-07:00

Tornadoes that occur from hurricanes moving inland from the Gulf Coast are increasing in frequency, according to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. This increase seems to reflect the increase in size and frequency among large hurricanes that make landfall from the Gulf of Mexico. The findings can be found in Geophysical Research Letters online and in print in the September 3, 2009 issue.

“As the size of landfalling hurricanes from the Gulf of Mexico increases, we’re seeing more tornadoes than we did in the past that can occur up to two days and several hundred miles inland from the landfall location,” said James Belanger, doctoral student in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech and lead author of the paper.

Currently, it’s well known that when hurricanes hit land, there’s a risk that tornadoes may form in the area. Until now, no one has quantified that risk because observations of tornadoes were too sporadic prior to the installation of the NEXRAD Doppler Radar Network in 1995. Belanger along with co-authors Judith Curry, professor and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Tech and research scientist Carlos Hoyos, decided to see if they could create a model using the more reliable tornado record that’s existed since 1995.

Click here for the rest of the article.

Research suggests urban sprawl, wet falls & winters affect severe weather

2009-09-10T20:03:00.000-07:00

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., Sept. 8 (AScribe Newswire) -- Previously rare big city storms - like a tornado Aug. 19 that downed trees and ripped off roofs in downtown Minneapolis and the powerful thunderstorms in New York City a day earlier - may not be so unusual anymore.

As large urban areas continue to expand, they appear to influence tornadoes and other severe weather, research suggests. Cities could be even more at risk if located in a region experiencing a wet fall or winter, according to researchers from Purdue University and the University of Georgia.

One study by professors Dev Niyogi at Purdue and Marshall Shepherd at Georgia found that drought in the fall and winter appears to decrease the number of spring and summer tornadoes in the U.S. Southeast. It is possible that particularly wet fall and winter seasons may lead to more tornado activity but this is less conclusive and is the subject of ongoing research.

The research could eventually contribute to a system for predicting the severity of tornado season in the same way meteorologists and climatologists project hurricane season.

The rest of this fascinating article is here. Interesting theory - time will tell whether there really is a firm, undeniable connection.

Weather presenters grapple with uncertain climate

2009-09-08T17:52:00.000-07:00

GENEVA — Familiar faces and voices took to the stage at the World Climate Conference over the past week as weather presenters grappled with a core issue, how best to inform their audience about climate change.

Wedged between the pondered complexity of climate scientists and the demands of the average viewer or listener for certainty come rain or shine, the weather men and women act as a go-between -- and the scapegoat if the forecast errs.

"The truth is we're the ones out there and the face they trust," remarked US TV weather anchor and meteorologist John Toohey-Morales during the Climate Broadcasts Forum in Geneva.

After two decades in the geopolitical and research arena, the science behind climate change is more conclusive and reliable than ever, meteorologists and officials said.

"Imagine farmers being able to determine what to plant and where based on drought forecasts three to five years out," said Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Weather forecasts have gained a degree of reliability that allows presenters to give their audience an idea how to dress or tend livestock for the next day or five.

But climate predictions seasons, years or decades down the road are another matter.

(Very interesting article - meteorologists, who specialize in weather, looking out the next 7 days or so, are not - automatically - experts on climate. It would be a little like saying a doctor who is a general practitioner is, by default, a gifted surgeon. That's a tough leap to make. BTW, I've never pretended to be a climatologist, either. I've been following the science (peer-reviewed science, not blogs and talking points put out by industry groups with a strong desire to maintain the status quo).

Click here for the rest of the article.

Arctic offers more evidence of human influences on climate change

2009-09-08T16:34:00.000-07:00

A new study indicates that Arctic temperatures suddenly increased during the last 50 years of the period from A.D. 1 to the year 2000. Because this warming occurred abruptly during the 20th century while atmospheric greenhouse gases were accumulating, these findings provide additional evidence that humans are influencing climate.

Incorporating geologic records, biologic records and computer simulations, the study reconstructed Arctic summer temperatures at a resolution down to decades, and thereby extends the climate record a full 1,600 years beyond the 400 year-long record that was previously available at that resolution. This newly lengthened record shows that recent warming was preceded by a cooling trend that lasted at least 1,900 years and should have continued throughout the 20th century. These results indicate that recent warming is more anomalous than previously documented, says Darrell Kaufman of Northern Arizona University—the lead author of the study.

Click here for the complete article in U.S. News & World Report.

Global warming has made Arctic summers hottest in 2,000 years

2009-09-03T20:59:00.000-07:00

Global warming has nullified the effect of increasing distance between the sun and Earth during the Arctic summer solstice. Photograph: National Science Foundation

Warming as a result of increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has overwhelmed a millennia-long cycle of natural cooling in the Arctic, raising temperatures in the region to their highest for at least 2,000 years, according to a report.

The Arctic began to cool several thousand years ago as changes in the planet's orbit increased the distance between the sun and the Earth and reduced the amount of sunlight reaching high northern latitudes during the summer.

But despite the Earth being farther from the sun during the northern hemisphere's summer solstice, the Arctic summer is now 1.2C warmer than it was in 1900.

Writing in the US journal Science, an international team of researchers describe how thousands of years of natural cooling in the Arctic were followed by a rise in temperatures from 1900 which accelerated briskly after 1950.

The warming of the Arctic is more alarming in view of the natural cooling cycle, which by itself would have seen temperatures 1.4C cooler than they are today, scientists said.

The rest of the article in the U.K.'s Guardian newspapers is here.

The New York Times examines the latest research findings here.

A top 10 list no state wants to be on

2009-08-27T21:59:00.000-07:00

State-by-State Temperature Increases

Below are the top ten states for predicted temperature increases. Download the analysis and see what’s predicted for your state.

1. Kansas	10.4
2. Nebraska	10.3
3. Iowa	10.2
4. South Dakota	10.0
5. Oklahoma	9.9
6. Missouri	9.9
7. Illinois	9.6
8. Nevada	9.4
9. Utah	9.4
10. Colorado	9.3

"If current trends continue, the weather and landscapes of the future will be nearly unrecognizable compared to what we are used to."

— Jonathan Hoekstra, director of climate change for The Nature Conservancy

What will temperatures be like in your state in 100 years? If current trends continue, chances are they’ll be much hotter than they are today — especially if you live in the American Midwest.

A new analysis of U.S. climate projections from The Nature Conservancy finds that temperatures in the worst-hit states could be up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than present-day levels by the year 2100.

Kansas, Nebraska and other Great Plains states would be the hardest-hit by climbing temperatures, according to the analysis. But temperatures everywhere could rise by 3 degrees Fahrenheit or more, meaning all of us would feel the heavy impacts of climate change:

Hot summer temperatures could arrive three weeks earlier and last three weeks longer in the Northeast, with more days averaging above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
In the Northwest, higher temperatures could contribute to earlier spring snowmelt, increasing the risk of forest fires and summer drought.
Water could become more and more scarce in the Southwest as temperatures climb and spring snowmelt declines.
Rising sea levels and increased storm surges could threaten low-lying coastal areas in the Southeast.

The complete story (and new research findings from the Nature Conservancy) can be found right here.

Wind farms can appear sinister to the weatherman

2009-08-26T19:49:00.000-07:00

FILE - In this May 19, 2006 file photo, a group of 260-feet tall wind towers are silhoutted against a bright orange sky at the Elk River Wind farm near Beaumont, Kan. The spinning blades atop 200-foot towers might appear to the naked eye as ... well ... spinning blades. But to Doppler radar, wind farms appear as a splatter of green, yellow, orange and red _ much like a violent storm or even a tornado. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, file)

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — Wind farms have been blamed for disrupting the lives of birds, bats and, most recently, the land-bound sage grouse.

Now the weather forecaster?

The massive spinning blades affixed to towers 200 feet high can appear on Doppler radar like a violent storm or even a tornado.

The phenomenon has affected several National Weather Service radar sites in different parts the country, even leading to a false tornado alert near Dodge City, Kansas, in the heart of Tornado Alley. In Des Moines, Iowa, the weather service received a frantic warning from an emergency worker who had access to Doppler radar images.

The alert was quickly called off in Kansas and meteorologists calmed the emergency worker down, but with enough wind turbines going up last year to power more than 6 million homes and a major push toward alternative energy, more false alerts seem inevitable.

New installations are concentrated, understandably in windy states like Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and Iowa, all part of Tornado Alley.

(Crazy huh? Now I've heard everything! Click here for the rest of the story).

Researchers find lighter winds blowing across huge areas of the USA

2009-08-26T15:16:00.000-07:00

In a Dec. 30, 2008 file photo, two wind turbines stand near a traditional windmill on a farm near Mount Carmel, Iowa. A first-of-its-kind study suggests that average and peak wind speeds have been noticeably slowing since 1973, especially in the Midwest and the East.

WASHINGTON -- The wind, a favorite power source of the green energy movement, seems to be dying down across the United States. And the cause, ironically, may be global warming -- the very problem wind power seeks to address.

The idea that winds may be slowing is still a speculative one, and scientists disagree whether that is happening. But a first-of-its-kind study suggests that average and peak wind speeds have been noticeably slowing since 1973, especially in the Midwest and the East.

"It's a very large effect," said study co-author Eugene Takle, a professor of atmospheric science at Iowa State University. In some places in the Midwest, the trend shows a 10 percent drop or more over a decade. That adds up when the average wind speed in the region is about 10 to 12 miles per hour.

For the rest of this thought-provoking AP article click here.

(This article definitely made me do a double-take. It makes some sense, meteorologically. The northern latitudes are warming much faster than the low latitudes, which is [theoretically] resulting in less of a temperature contrast from north to south, from southern Canada into America's heartland. That, in turn, would/should result in lower wind speeds. The greater the temperature contrast, the stronger the winds blow to keep the atmosphere in state of equilibrium. More warming north = smaller temperature contrast = less wind)

Climate change opens arctic route for German ships

2009-08-23T09:05:00.000-07:00

BERLIN (Reuters) - Two German ships set off on Friday on the first journey across Russia's Arctic-facing northern shore without the help of icebreakers after climate change helped opened the passage, the company said.

Niels Stolberg, president and CEO of Beluga Shipping GmbH, said the "Beluga Fraternity" and "Beluga Foresight" left the Russian port of Vladivostok on the historic and cost-saving journey with cargo picked up in South Korea bound for Holland.

The melting of Arctic ice as a result of climate change has made it possible to send Beluga's multi-purpose heavy lift ships along the legendary Northeast Passage, Stolberg said.

Beluga got Russian authorities' clearance to send the first non-Russian commercial vessels through the route on Friday.

The Northern Sea Route trims 4,000 nautical miles off the usual 11,000-mile journey via the Suez Canal -- yielding considerable savings in fuel costs and CO2 emissions, he said.

"Russian submarines and icebreakers have used the Northern Route in the past but it wasn't open for regular commercial shipping before now because there are many areas with thick ice," Stolberg told Reuters in an email interview.

Here is the complete Reuters article.

Study: climate change means more heavy rain

2009-08-23T09:02:00.000-07:00

Record rainfall led to disastrous flooding across much of Iowa in 2008, including the town of Cedar Rapids. Scientists say climate change will lead to an increase in heavy rainfall events for most of the world.

Climate change will lead to an increase in heavy rainfall events across most of the world, according to a study published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Caltech.

The computer models used in the study predict that areas such as North America can expect a significant increase in heavy rain.

How much rain? The study suggests that precipitation in extreme events will increase by about 6% for every 1.8 degree rise in global temperature. A global temperature increase of anywhere from 2 to 11 degrees is expected by 2100, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Overall, while the pattern is clear and consistent outside of the tropics, climate models give conflicting results within the tropics so more research will be needed to determine the outcomes in those regions.

The primary reason for the precipitation increase is that warmer air can retain more water vapor than cooler air. So as the climate heats up, "there will be more vapor in the atmosphere, which will lead to an increase in precipitation extremes," says study co-author Paul O'Gorman of MIT.

The USA Today article is here.

Review of Cleveland rainfall records indicates climate change has already arrived

2009-08-23T08:59:00.000-07:00

A climate-change storm isn't coming. It's already here.

That's the conclusion drawn by some climate scientists - and supported by an independent analysis of National Weather Service rainfall records by The Plain Dealer.

The rainfall records reveal an increasing number of days each year with heavy storms - those quick, violent bursts that drop a large amount of rain in a short time. Those types of storms more often also lead to damaging and expensive suburban flooding - and conversely, dangerously dry periods or even drought in between.

The complete article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer is here.

Minneapolis tornado, New York City's violent winds, Anchorage's tremors

2009-08-20T07:30:00.000-07:00

Twin Cities Doppler Radar display around 2 pm yesterday, showing a tight velocity "couplet" over south Minneapolis. The bright red area is wind moving away from the Doppler site in Chanhassen, the bright green smudge is high velocity air moving toward the radar - evidence of a small, tight, vigorous mesocyclone, a rotating thunderstorm capable of damaging winds, in all probability, an EF0 or EF1 tornado. We were in a "slight risk" of isolated severe storms, according to SPC. But no watches were in effect at the time the tornado touched down, the local NWS would issue a tornado warning for this cell approximately 15-20 minutes later, around 2:20 pm, after the circulation had passed directly over downtown Minneapolis (debris was spotted from a number of downtown high-rise office buildings!) Thankfully it was a "minor" tornado - had it been a major tornado there would be a lot more red faces today.

Nature reminded several American cities of its powerful presence in the last 24 hours.

Both Minneapolis and New York City are cleaning up, the former after a tornado struck south of downtown on Wednesday, the latter after a storm brought hurricane-force winds Tuesday night that toppled scores of trees in Central Park, including giant American elms more than 100 years old.

Meanwhile, Anchorage, Alaska was shaken on Wednesday by a magnitude 5.0 earthquake which apparently jangled some nerves but didn't break anything.

According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Minneapolis tornado destroyed trees and caused some damage to buildings but caused no injuries.

An excerpt:

"This dispels myths that tornadoes don't hit urban areas, they go where they want to," said Pete Boulay, assistant state climatologist. "It doesn't happen very often, but they do happen."

Northbound Interstate 35W at Hwy. 62, already a tangled mess at the southern edge of Minneapolis because of construction, is closed due to flooding.

Central Lutheran Church in downtown had an old copper steeple damaged, and two tents used for entertaining also were struck. One was blown into the street and the other was collapsed, said church spokesman Joe Bjordal. The tents were set up in connection with the national gathering of about 2,000 at the Evangelical Church in America at the Convention Center. "We're thankful that nobody was hurt," Bjordal said.

Representatives on the convention floor could hear rain on the roof, but only became aware of the turbulence outside when unofficial convention-goers were moved in from the outside corridors for their safety.

(There is still some question about whether the wind damage in Minneapolis was caused by a real tornado or straight-line winds, a "wet downburst", I've heard a number of competing theories. But after looking at the video [check it out on WeatherNation's main web site here], after hearing the reports from survivors - those in the path of the storm - AND - after seeing the Doppler SRV, storm relative velocity image from 2 pm yesterday, sorry, I don't think there's any question this was a tornado).

I know this makes a number of people uncomfortable - no severe watches or warnings were in effect at the time, no local media was on the air giving advance notice of this potentially dangerous/deadly situation. A lot of people would LOVE for this to go away, or be designated as straight-line wind, which doesn't have quite the stigma, or impact of a TORNADO. I'll be amazed if it was anything but a small EF0 or EF1 tornado. BTW, the rest of the article from NPR is right here.

Big tropical storms in the Atlantic hit a 1,000 year high

2009-08-16T16:36:00.000-07:00

The people of U.S. Gulf Coast have felt unusually battered by big storms during the past few years. Now, it turns out their instincts are right.

A new report in the scientific journal Nature indicates that the last decade has seen, on average, more frequent hurricanes than any time in the last 1,000 years. The last period of similar activity occurred during the Medieval Warm Period.

The study is not definitive, but it is a unique piece of work that combines an analysis of sediment cores from inland lakes and tidal marshes with computer modeling and finds a "striking consistency" between the two, the authors suggest.

The use of sediment cores to place and date ancient storms -- called "paeleotempestology" -- is becoming an increasingly useful tool in the broader effort to try to reconstruct the history of hurricane activity in order to better predict a future potentially influenced by climate change.

The complete ABC News story is here.

Considering a tornado chasing vacation?

2009-08-16T15:38:00.000-07:00

A group from Silver Lining Tours scanned the skies over eastern Colorado in June for signs of a tornado.

“WE’VE got to go right now, folks,” Roger Hill shouted on a recent Monday afternoon in Scott City, a beautiful speck on the map of western Kansas. “We’re going east. The eastern storm is a monster.”

After waiting hours on a sultry day — first at a Pizza Hut, then at a Dairy Queen — we finally heard the words we had been waiting for. We were on the second day of a tornado chase in the Great Plains led by Mr. Hill and David Gold, owners of Silver Lining Tours, a 12-year-old company that specializes in extreme-weather travel, and it seemed that our quarry was finally within reach.Along on the journey were seven tourists, from Oregon to England — each had paid $2,200 for a six-day storm-chasing vacation devoted to seeing some of the world’s worst weather up close — and me, a reporter shadowing their experiences for two days. It was not, as you might imagine, a typical vacation. As Russell Glenister, from London, told me, “Most of the time when you tell people you’re chasing tornadoes, they think you’re crazy.”

(I have chased tornadoes on 3 separate occasions, and gotten "lucky" each time, although the truth of the matter: I had to invest a couple of weeks each time I went out before I actually saw a tornado. The first few days you invariably see hail, rainbows, thunderheads of every possible shape and dimension - a LOT of false alarms. If you know what you're doing and how to approach a severe local storm the threat to life and property is fairly small and manageable. The biggest risk is being hit by lightning, or some yahoo driving at 100 mph + to try and intercept a twister and get the money shot! It is the most amazing visceral rush you can ever imagine - a buzz to end all buzzes! Not sure you have to pay thousands of dollars to see a tornado - one of the cheapest, most effective ways to see a tornado is to fly to Oklahoma City, rent a car [never use you own car, the hail damage risk is off the scale!] and drive down to NSSL, the National Severe Storms Lab in Norman, Oklahoma, and TAG ALONG with the pro's. That's right, stalk the pros! The best time to go is late April into mid May. If you spend at least 2 weeks in Oklahoma, and are willing to drive a rental car (fast) into Texas, Kansas, Nebraska - if you're tenacious, you WILL see a tornado!)

For the complete New York Times article from Brian Stelter click here.

10 things weather forecasters won't say

2009-08-14T07:51:00.000-07:00

1. “Long-term forecast? Your guess is as good as ours.”

WEATHER FORECASTERS have gotten pretty good at nailing the outlook two to three days ahead. The problem is, “everyone wants to know what the weather is going to do next weekend,” says Paul Karpowicz, president of the Meredith Broadcasting Group, and forecasting the weather a week or more down the road isn’t so easy.

Eric Floehr, founder of ForecastAdvisor, which tracks the accuracy of predictions, looked at high-temperature forecasts from the National Weather Service, AccuWeather and other organizations for 2008 and compared their
numbers with actual temperatures. When predicting highs for the following day, they were off by about three degrees; when forecasting nine days out, they missed by nearly seven degrees. Doug Young, performance branch chief at the National Weather Service, says his organization’s precipitation forecast for seven days out is only 55 percent accurate. “You’re almost flipping a coin at that point,” he says. Ray Ban, consultant for The Weather Channel, says the best forecasters can do is try to convey the uncertainty of long-range predictions.

2. “We’re pretty accurate—as long as the sun is shining.”

ONE OF THE MOST important things forecasters can do is tell you when bad weather is on the way. Unfortunately, they’re not very good at predicting rain. That’s especially true in summer, when most rainfall comes from thunderstorms, which are small, unpredictable and hard to track. It’s often difficult to tell where they’re headed or whether they’ll produce any rain. Most models for forecasting weather divide the country into a grid of squares that cover about 55 square miles each, though some have smaller squares. Whatever the square’s size, rain, snow, sun and temperature are forecast as a whole for each one. Since most thunderstorms are smaller than the squares, it’s tough to predict exactly where it will rain. “Forecasters are terrible at telling you if rain is going to fall where you live tonight,” says William Gallus, a meteorology professor at Iowa State University.

(The author is a bit harsh in spots, but yes, we need to take our lumps, like any other profession. Then again, you have to be borderline insane to even contemplate wanting to predict the weather. The rest of the article from smartmoney.com is here.)

Antarctic glacier "thinning fast"

2009-08-14T06:52:00.000-07:00

David Shukman joined a team surveying Pine Island glacier in 2004

One of the largest glaciers in Antarctica is thinning four times faster than it was 10 years ago, according to research seen by the BBC.

A study of satellite measurements of Pine Island glacier in west Antarctica reveals the surface of the ice is now dropping at a rate of up to 16m a year.

Since 1994, the glacier has lowered by as much as 90m, which has serious implications for sea-level rise.

The work by British scientists appears in Geophysical Research Letters.

The team was led by Professor Duncan Wingham of University College London (UCL).

Calculations based on the rate of melting 15 years ago had suggested the glacier would last for 600 years. But the new data points to a lifespan for the vast ice stream of only another 100 years.

The BBC article is here.

The cold facts about melting glaciers

2009-08-14T06:44:00.000-07:00

Host: Jessica Robertson

Most glaciers in Washington and Alaska are dramatically shrinking in response to a warming climate.

USGS scientist Edward Josberger discusses research from the past 50 years to measure changes in the mass (length and thickness) of three glaciers in Alaska and Washington. These are the longest such records in North America and among the longest in the world.

To hear the entire podcast - direct from the scientists who have been studying these key glaciers in Washington and Alaska (which respond to "climate", not day to day fluctuations in "weather") click here.

America's National Parks: canaries in the climate change coal mine

2009-08-09T22:27:00.000-07:00

"The house of America is founded upon our land and if we keep that whole, then the storm can rage, but the house will stand forever." – President Lyndon B. Johnson

Despite the easy association of American culture with prosperity and modernity, historically, it was America’s National parks that were seen as a reflection of national character, as well as national priorities.

Travel to America’s National Parks, and you are quickly reminded that it is not our wealth, not our cars, not our designer boutiques, our high rise buildings or our suburban homes that define America. Rather, as so many have said, it is these parks that are the crown jewels of our country.

I was reminded of this over the last two weeks as I hiked through the lunar landscape of Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park and the pine forests, streams and crystal blue lakes of California’s Yosemite National Park.

The rest of the article is here.

Drought still effects Minnesota's lakes and streams

2009-08-07T22:59:00.000-07:00

A dry summer and fall means water levels on Minnesota lakes and rivers are down. The flow on the Mississippi River near Little Falls Minnesota is about half of what it should be this time of year. (MPR Photo/Tim Post).

No doubt you've noticed that Minnesota is in the middle of a snow drought. With the exception of far northern Minnesota, much of the state is without snow. This precipitation-free winter is no help to the region's already parched soil. Minnesota suffered through a hot dry summer, and received little relief in the form of rain this fall. Weather watchers say come spring the region will be really dry.

Little Falls, Minn. — A flock of geese gathers on the frozen Mississippi River near downtown Little Falls. The river's coating of ice cracks and shifts as it's warmed by the December sun. This winter scene hides the fact that water levels on the Mississippi, and most of the other rivers and lakes in Minnesota, are down because of drought.

Upstream near a dam the signs of drought are easy to find. Minnesota Department of Natural Resources hydrologist Tim Crocker scrambles down a boulder-strewn riverbank and stands on rock that would normally be under water.

The rest of this (excellent) MPR report on the lingering drought can be found here.

DNR Graphic showing the Departure from Normal of Rainfall for the period April 1 to August 3. Note the 7-9" rainfall deficit for the Twin Cities metro area, with a 7" deficit near Alexandria. It's going to take more than a couple of thunderstorms to make up for this - although Fridays waves of heavy/severe storms certainly did put a dent in the drought!

For a thorough, exhaustive update on the drought of '09 compiled by the Minnesota Climatology Working Group click here.

The top 5 ways the "birthers" are like the global warming deniers

2009-08-07T22:33:00.000-07:00

The people who refuse to accept the reality that President Obama was born in the United States share much in common with those who refuse to accept the reality that humans are dramatically changing the climate.

5. Both groups are impervious to the evidence. During the campaign, "Obama released a certification of live birth, which is the official document you get if you ask Hawaii for a copy of your birth certificate," as Salon explains. Further, "state officials have repeatedly affirmed its authenticity and said they've checked it against the original record and that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii." Politico labels this "seemingly incontrovertible evidence." Similarly, the reality of human-caused warming has been overwhelmingly demonstrated and affirmed by the peer-reviewed literature, the hundreds of scientists who review and report on that literature periodically as part of the IPCC process and the more than 100 world governments (including the Bush Administration) who approved the 2007 IPCC summary reports word for word (see "Absolute MUST Read IPCC Report: Debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly" and "Can you PROVE to me that global warming is being caused by mankind?"*).

Joseph Romm is the Editor for ClimateProgress.org. The rest of his story is here.

Climate change melting US glaciers at faster rate, study finds

2009-08-07T21:54:00.000-07:00

A composite image showing South Cascade glacier in Washington state (year 2000, left, 2006, right). A new study today found a sharp rise in the melt rate of three key American glaciers over the last 10-15 years. Photograph: USGS

Climate change is melting America's glaciers at the fastest rate in recorded history, exposing the country to higher risks of drought and rising sea levels, a US government study of glaciers said today. The long-running study of three "benchmark" glaciers in Alaska and Washington state by the US geological survey (USGS) indicated a sharp rise in the melt rate over the last 10 or 15 years.

Scientists see the three - Wolverine and Gulkana in Alaska and South Cascade in Washington - as representative of thousands of other glaciers in North America.

"The observations show that the melt rate has definitely increased over the past 10 or 15 years," said Ed Josberger, a USGS scientist. "This certainly is a very strong indicator that climate change is occurring and its effects on glaciers are virtually worldwide." The survey also found that all three glaciers had begun melting at the same higher rate - although they are in different climate regimes and some 1,500 miles apart.

The complete article at the U.K's Guardian is here.

The Los Angeles Times has a slightly different angle; the report tracked 3 "benchmark glaciers" over the span of 50 years.

2009-08-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

What's Inside a Hurricane?

Eastern Pacific Hurricane Felicia made headlines recently as it quickly become a category 4 hurricane (sustained winds of 140mph) within a days time. NASA has a nice 3D view of Felicia here, check it out:

The Atlantic Hurricane season began June 1st, but has yet to see its first named storm of 2009. On average, we should have seen the first named storm July 10th. Still, it remains "All Quiet on the Western Front".

The Inflection is Near?

2009-08-02T00:05:00.000-07:00

Minnesota's own Thomas Friedman wrote an excellent column back in March which I felt compelled to re-post, in light of the previous (Joe Romm) blog equating the global economic bender we've been on with a Ponzi scheme.

Friedman writes, "What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

The thermometer record (worldwide) goes back to the mid 1800s, but we have reliable "proxy data" going back hundreds of thousands of years: tree rings, ice core samples, fossilized sediment from lake bottoms. Call me crazy, but do you see anything unusual about this graph?

Climate change deniers like to point out that Earth has cooled since 1998. Not true. We were in the midst of a Super-El Nino in 1998 which compounded and amplified the warmth observed on land and at sea. But climate scientists all agree that the decade from 1998-2007 was warmer than the previous decade, from 1989-1998 - that decade was warmer than the previous 10-year span, and so on, going back to the mid/late 70s.

Friedman's entire article in the New York Times is here.

Move over Madoff. Introducing the Mother of all Ponzi Schemes (sadly, Mother Nature doesn't do bailouts)

2009-08-01T23:21:00.000-07:00

From Joe Romm's blog article, "Is the Global Economy a Ponzi Scheme?"

"By enriching those who did the most plundering the most, we enabled them to fund lobbying and disinformation campaigns to convince substantial fractions of the public and media that there is no Ponzi scheme — that global warming is “too complicated for the public to understand” and nothing to worry about. In our case, investors (i.e. current generations) are paying themselves (i.e. you and me) by taking the nonrenewable resources and livable climate from future generations. To perpetuate the high returns the rich countries in particular have been achieving in recent decades, we have been taking an ever greater fraction of nonrenewable energy resources (especially hydrocarbons) and natural capital (fresh water, arable land, forests, fisheries), and, the most important nonrenewable natural capital of all — a livable climate."

(A climate Ponzi Scheme? I chuckled when I read the headline, but after reading this carefully I have to admit that all of us have been suckered. The western world has been binging on cheap energy, we are, in a very real sense, "paying ourselves" with wealth from future generations. It's good to be a little skeptical in life, to not take anything at face value. I wish someone had taken me aside and explained about those nasty Nigerian e-mail scams before I sent along my social security number and Am Ex information. Duh! After reading this post I am more convinced than ever that there really is no free lunch. Actions have consequences. My father, who fled Communists in East Germany, who's relatives were hung for conspiring to assassinate Hitler, taught me this at a tender age. He's very conservative in his politics - always has been. On more than one occasion he reminded me to "never take my freedom for granted." But as I keep [pleading] with my father, climate change transcends day to day politics. Science and politics can be oil and water. Some day soon we're all going to wake up with a severe headache, a global fever, and wonder in an acrimonious cry how we got here? How were so many of us deceived and deluded by a handful of professional deniers, lobbyists and "flat Earthers" into not taking meaningful action sooner? Temporary insanity? Fear of the unknown? It defies common sense. Galileo was persecuted for believing the science, that the earth rotated around the sun, and not vice versa. He risked everything to make his point and elevate our understanding of how the universe really works. There are still notable gaps in that understanding. We're learning more and more about climate, and how rapid industrialization and massive spikes in carbon-based energy consumption are impacting climate today. Like the tobacco lobbyists in the 70s who kept doubt and uncertainty alive "you can't PROVE that smoking causes lung cancer, can you?" the current energy lobby and their scientifically-challenged SWAT teams of bloggers are keeping an undercurrent of doubt and uncertainty going. Yep, this cool spell PROVES that global warming is a scam! Never mind the 80s and 90s in Alaska and the Canadian Yukon and Siberia, that's just an inconvenient nugget of irrelevant information. If you're worried about climate change that makes you a flag-waving liberal, you're somehow swept up in the religion of global warming, one of those brainwashed Gore sycophants. Oh how I love labels and stereotypes. Both sides are guilty of this. It's sad that we have "sides" at all. O.K. Time to freshen up my lungs with a case of cigarettes, then head outside to watch the sun do circles around the Earth. Sounds like a good time huh?) - P.D.

Is the Global Economy a Ponzi Scheme?

Joe Romm, Physicist, Climate Expert, climateprogress.org

Yes, homo “sapiens” ~~sapiens~~ have constructed the grandest of Ponzi schemes, whereby current generations have figured out how to live off the wealth of future generations. Yes, we are all in essence Madoffs (many wittingly, most not) or at least his most credulous clients. What comes next will be the subject of a multipart series.

I had been planning to write something on this for a while when NYT columnist Tom Friedman interviewed me for “The Inflection Is Near?” which appears in today’s New York Times:

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.

“You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate …’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

A few years ago I thought that aggressive action by governments around the world to push clean energy could spare the public dramatic lifestyle changes in the coming decades, but I have been convinced otherwise by

the failure of U.S. leadership [thank you George W. Bush and the conservative ~~movement~~ stagnation]
the remarkable shift in our understanding of climate science in the past two years (here, here, and here)
China’s decision to join the Ponzi scheme full throttle and emulate our rapaciousness (see here and here), and
a recent, brilliant talk I heard (a teaser for a future post).

The adults, in short, are not standing up. Sadly, most haven’t even taken the time to understand that they should (see “Most opinion leaders just don’t get global warming“).

And so every generation that comes after the Baby Boomers are poised to experience the dramatic changes in lifestyle that inevitably follow the collapse of any Ponzi scheme.

This global Ponzi scheme is not just a metaphor (see “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor”), but for me a central organizing narrative of how to think about the fix we have put ourselves in (see How Lincoln framed his picture-perfect Gettysburg Address, 4: Extended metaphor).

What exactly is a Ponzi scheme? Wikipedia has a good entry:

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors rather than from profit. The term “Ponzi scheme” is used primarily in the United States , while other English-speaking countries do not distinguish colloquially between this scheme and pyramid schemes.

The Ponzi scheme usually offers abnormally high short-term returns in order to entice new investors. The perpetuation of the high returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors in order to keep the scheme going.

In our case, investors (i.e. current generations) are paying themselves (i.e. you and me) by taking the nonrenewable resources and livable climate from future generations. To perpetuate the high returns the rich countries in particular have been achieving in recent decades, we have been taking an ever greater fraction of nonrenewable energy resources (especially hydrocarbons) and natural capital (fresh water, arable land, forests, fisheries), and, the most important nonrenewable natural capital of all — a livable climate.

The rest of Joe's thought-provoking post is here.

Thaw Point

2009-07-31T23:16:00.001-07:00

(The past few weeks we've been tracking temperatures in the 70s and 80s precariously close to the Arctic Circle. The Canadian Yukon has experienced 90s in recent days! Kind of cool, huh? Not really. Here's what makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand straight up. Unusually warm spells WAY north, unnaturally far north, may release prodigious amounts of methane, a GHG, greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The more methane released, the warmer it gets, the warmer it gets, the more methane is released....and so on. This is an example of "positive feedback", a runaway cycle that worries climate experts. What keeps these guys (and gals) awake late at night? The notion that unusual warming unusually far north is leading us closer to a "tipping point", a point of no return. That's why this article, coming after a spell of record warmth across FAR northern Alaska and Canada, caught my eye).

The Arctic tundra is one of the world’s most extensive ecosystems, and the frozen soil known as permafrost, which underlies it, can be hundreds of metres deep. But as the world warms up in response to the millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases being poured into the atmosphere each year, so does the permafrost. As the permafrost thaws, bacteria start chewing up the organic matter it contains. This releases yet more carbon dioxide, as well as methane, another greenhouse gas, which has 25 times the warming potential of CO₂. Edward Schuur of the University of Florida in Gainesville, a doyen of the field, estimates that the world’s permafrost contains twice as much carbon as its atmosphere. If even a fraction of that were released as CO₂ and methane, it would be bad news.

Nor is that all. Thawing permafrost also leaks nitrates and phosphates into the tundra, allowing novel plant species to get a foothold in what was, to start with, a fairly spartan habitat. It distorts the Earth’s surface, too, creating a landscape of domes and pits known as thermokarst because of its resemblance to the karstic terrain of limestone-rich parts of the world. This changes the tundra’s ecology. It also plays havoc with human structures, such as buildings, roads and pipelines, that sit on top of it. For all of these reasons, then, more research is needed into this icy realm. And that is the object of a project with the unsnappy name of Spatial and Temporal Influences of Thermokarst Failures on Surface Processes in Arctic Landscapes, which was kicked off by a group of scientists who gathered in late June at the Toolik Field Station in northern Alaska.

The complete Economist article is here.

Climate activists in denial

2009-07-30T21:14:00.000-07:00

The phrase “climate change denier” has a nasty ring to it. It links those who dispute mainstream science on global warming with “Holocaust deniers”. They are not just wrong, it implies, they are evil.

But the climate change lobby is in the grip of its own form of dangerous fantasy. It is in denial not about science – but about international politics.

At the moment, efforts to deal with global warming are focused on a huge international summit in Copenhagen in December. But the chances of Copenhagen delivering a deal that meets the goals for carbon dioxide emissions set by the United Nations Panel on Climate Change is vanishingly small. In private, many climate change activists will admit this. But Copenhagen is the only game in town – so they keep playing.

The first UN agreement on climate change was struck in Rio back in 1992. But in the intervening years, the rate of CO2 emissions has risen steadily – seemingly undeterred by huge emissions of hot air at UN conferences.

It was convenient to blame the lack of international progress on George W. Bush. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House will not be the game-changer that many climate change activists hoped for. The House of Representatives in Washington has passed a bill to limit carbon emissions. But its provisions are so mild that they seem unlikely to make much impact. The climate change lobby hoped that if the US took the lead with new laws, the rest of the world would respond. There is little sign of this.

*I found this article to be on the money, and terribly depressing. I think there is more than a glimmer of truth to this. Doing the right thing - for future generations - will be terribly expensive and politically risky, requiring a level of international agreement that may just be wishful thinking at this point. In an age of massive deficits, economic malaise, special interests lobbying - in most cases, successfully - to retain the current status quo, and a rather alarming level of scientific ignorance, the odds are stacked firmly against the upcoming Copenhagen meeting resulting in any true global breakthroughs. Scientific ignorance? A recent study highlighted 88% of America's professional scientists who believe climate change is real and the planet is warming. By comparison 49% of Americans believe global warming is real. That disparity fills me with confidence. Tomorrow maybe I'll regain some sense of (naive) optimism, but today I'm bummed. The scope of this problem is so big, so reliant on America's best minds coming together (the energy equivalent of America's 1969 moon shot), so dependent on a level of international cooperation - it would be almost impossible to achieve, even if the global economy was rocketing along at breakneck speed!

As it is, I'm increasingly convinced that we will have to adapt. There, I said it. There is probably only so much we can do to mitigate the warming, in spite of good intentions and promising (renewable) technologies. We will have to figure out how to survive, and hopefully thrive in a warmer, stormier world. The thing is, America will be able to do just that. We have the wealth, we have the entrepreneurs to adapt, to build levees and dikes along America's coastline, to develop new, drought-resistant crops, enhanced infrastructure able to withstand more flash flooding....we'll eventually figure it out and adjust.

Unfortunately (and here is where this becomes a moral issue) the nations likely to experience the most horrific symptoms of warming are also the poorest. There will be mass migrations on a scale that have never been seen before - endless searches for clean water and reliable food supplies that may spark riots, civil wars, regional conflict.

The rest of this (thoroughly depressing, but dead-on) article is right here.

Disaster insurance losses close to $11 billion in first half of '09

2009-07-30T08:48:00.001-07:00

By Geir Moulson, Associated Press

BERLIN — Natural disasters and severe weather caused insurers above-average losses of $11 billion in the first half of this year, with a winter storm in southwestern Europe and tornadoes in the U.S. incurring heavy costs, a leading reinsurer said Monday.

Munich Re AG said the costs between January and June were "somewhat above the average for the same period in the past 10 years" of about $10 billion.

Total economic losses, including losses not covered by insurance, were $25 billion, far below the average of $42 billion, Munich Re said. The number of people killed in natural disasters was 3,000 — compared with a 10-year average for the January-June period of 24,000.

However, many of this year's disasters so far hit relatively well-insured areas.

The most expensive single event was a winter storm which hit northeastern Spain and southwestern France in late January and caused insured losses of $2.3 billion, Munich Re said. Total economic losses were $3.8 billion.

Click here for the complete article in USA Today.

Off the chart drought in Texas, tornadoes in New York

2009-07-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

MSNBC has an alarming report about the extreme weather conditions happening across the country. In Texas, half the corn crop is dried up, lakes have disappeared, cattle ranchers are selling cows early because there is no grass to graze on, and 77 counties are designated as having exceptional or extreme drought conditions. Historians say this drought is virtually unprecedented, and there is no relief in sight.

Click here to watch video of the historic drought gripping the southern third of Texas. Nothing short of a couple of hurricanes or tropical storms will provide relief anytime soon.

Scientists expect wildfires to increase as climate warms in coming decades.

2009-07-30T08:37:00.000-07:00

This graph shows the percentage increase in area burned by wildfires, from the present-day to the 2050s, as calculated by the model of Spracklen et al. [2009] for the May-October fire season. The model follows a scenario of moderately increasing emissions of greenhouse gas emissions and leads to average global warming of 1.6 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2050. Warmer temperatures can dry out underbrush, leading to more serious conflagrations in the future climate. (Credit: Loretta Mickley, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)

ScienceDaily (July 29, 2009) — As the climate warms in the coming decades, atmospheric scientists at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and their colleagues expect that the frequency of wildfires will increase in many regions. The spike in the number of fires could also adversely affect air quality due to the greater presence of smoke.

The study, led by SEAS Senior Research Fellow Jennifer Logan, was published in the June 18th issue of Journal of Geophysical Research. In their pioneering work, Logan and her collaborators investigated the consequences of climate change on future forest fires and on air quality in the western United States. Previous studies have probed the links between climate change and fire severity in the West and elsewhere. The Harvard study represents the first attempt to quantify the impact of future wildfires on the air we breathe.

The complete article at ScienceDaily.com is here.

Revealed: the secret evidence of global warming the previous administration tried to hide

2009-07-27T21:44:00.000-07:00

Satellite images of polar ice sheets taken in July 2006 and July 2007 showing the retreating ice during the summer. Photograph: Public Domain.

Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months.

The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanise Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

One particularly striking set of images - selected from the 1,000 photographs released - includes views of the Alaskan port of Barrow. One, taken in July 2006, shows sea ice still nestling close to the shore. A second image shows that by the following July the coastal waters were entirely ice-free.

The photographs demonstrate starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic. More than a million square kilometres of sea ice - a record loss - were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year.

The complete article in the U.K Guardian is here.

Strong evidence that cloud changes may exacerbate global warming

2009-07-27T21:38:00.000-07:00

This image shows unique cloud patterns over the Pacific Ocean of the coast of Baja California, an area of great interest to Amy Clement and Robert Burgman of the University of Miami and Joel Norris of Scripps Oceanography, as they study the role of low-level clouds in climate change. (Credit: NASA)

ScienceDaily (July 24, 2009) — The role of clouds in climate change has been a major question for decades. As the earth warms under increasing greenhouse gases, it is not known whether clouds will dissipate, letting in more of the sun's heat energy and making the earth warm even faster, or whether cloud cover will increase, blocking the Sun's rays and actually slowing down global warming.

In a study published in the July 24 issue of Science, researchers Amy Clement and Robert Burgman from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and Joel Norris from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego begin to unravel this mystery. Using observational data collected over the last 50 years and complex climate models, the team has established that low-level stratiform clouds appear to dissipate as the ocean warms, indicating that changes in these clouds may enhance the warming of the planet.

The complete article in ScienceDaily is here.

Texas drought could be the worst ever

2009-07-27T21:26:00.000-07:00

(The drought gripping the southern 1/3 to 1/2 of Texas is described as "extraordinary", the worst in 50 years or more. A slow-moving tropical storm or hurricane might help, but no rapid improvement is expected before sometime in 2010 at the earliest).

LUBBOCK, Texas — Drought in Texas has led to an estimated $3.6 billion in crop and livestock losses, and without ample rains, the year's final tally could top the state record set in 2006, Texas agriculture officials say.

Crops and rangeland are scorched from lack of rainfall and record triple-digit temperatures throughout parts of Texas — the nation's second-largest agriculture state behind California. Much of the central and southern parts of the state have been in the two most severe stages of drought for months.

Agriculture officials in the state, which leads the nation in cotton and cattle production, estimated Monday that total crop losses attributed to the drought that started in November have reached $2.6 billion. Livestock losses have reached an additional $974 million. And officials have not yet tallied how much ranchers will lose from having fewer cattle to breed or from selling calves earlier than usual because they don't have pasture on which their animals can graze.

It could be two years before a reduced beef supply and higher prices hit the grocery store, said Travis Miller, a drought specialist with the Texas AgriLife Extension. He noted that many cattle being sold at Texas sale barns will end up in states where grazing lands are better.

The complete USA Today article about this historic drought is here.

Drizzle causes emergency in Chilean city

2009-07-27T21:24:00.001-07:00

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — In one of the driest regions on Earth, even a drizzle can cause an emergency.

Less than 1/100th of an inch of rain fell on the Chilean port city of Iquique Monday afternoon, accompanied by moderate winds of about 10 mph, according to the country's weather service. That was enough to knock out power to several neighborhoods and to damage the roofs of 4,000 houses, said Gov. Miguel Silva.

Schools were closed Tuesday so that officials can repair the damage.

The city of 170,000 people in northern Chile is in the heart of the barren Atacama Desert, squeezed between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean. It averages about 0.02 inch of rain a year, according to University of Chile meteorologists.

Houses in the region are not built to resist rain and their roofs often have no slope for runoff.

New NOAA chief brings attention to "dead zones"

2009-07-22T16:54:00.000-07:00

By JANET McCONNAUGHEY
Wednesday, July 22, 2009 6:15 PM CDT

The "dead zone" off the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, where there is too little oxygen in the water for anything to live, is getting new federal attention under President Barack Obama's administration.

Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has scheduled a teleconference Monday with Nancy Rabalais, who has been studying the problem, called hypoxia, since 1970 and is currently measuring this year's hypoxic area.

"We've got a new administration, a little more environmentally conscious," NOAA spokesman Ben Sherman said Wednesday. "Dr. Lubchenco is a research scientist who has studied the dead zone. She believes it's a national issue, not just a Gulf of Mexico issue."

Lubchenco, Rabalais and other officials and scientists planned to announce the zone's current size and talk about its implications and plans to reduce it.

"We want to raise some of the issues behind it and some of the debate about the changes needed to shrink it," Sherman said.

R. Eugene Turner, the Louisiana State University scientist who first linked the dead zone to nutrient runoff from the vast Mississippi River basin, said, "It's the first time anybody in NOAA has done this. I think they're raising the visibility a little bit."

In 2008, 415 coastal areas worldwide _ 131 of them in North America or the Caribbean _ either had documented dead zones or such high nutrient levels that hypoxia was likely, according to the World Resources Institute and Robert Diaz of Virginia Marine Institute.

The complete article is here.

2009-07-20T17:15:00.000-07:00

Celebrating 40 years - Apollo 11

Check this out:
http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/apollo11Splash/index.html

Here's more on the Apollo 11 mission:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/40th/index.html

The astronauts that landed on the moon want astronauts to fly to Mars:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8158519.stm

Countering the contrarians on global warming

2009-07-18T22:10:00.000-07:00

Just how hot is it going to get?

That’s what everyone wants to know, and the focus of a lot of research. But parsing through the science can present some problems, with plenty of opportunity for mischief.

Aaron Huertas has been in this game for a while, so he figured there might be problems as soon as he saw the headline on the release from Rice University: “Global warming: Our best guess is likely wrong.”

The text of the release, which was promoting a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, noted that climate models can’t explain all of the heating indicated in the geologic record of a warm period some 55 million years ago. And one of the scientists who did the research told Reuters that this could mean current forecasts are underestimating how hot Earth’s atmosphere will get in the future.

But Huertas, press secretary at the Union of Concerned Scientists, figured the initial headline from Rice University might be used by those skeptical about climate change — he calls them contrarians because he feels all scientists are skeptical — to argue that the carbon dioxide generated by human activities isn’t to blame for global warming.

The complete text of the Reuters blog is here.

Comforting the child who fears global warming

2009-07-18T22:03:00.000-07:00

(I wrestle with this question myself, so I was happy to see a thoughtful article at OregonLive.com addressing the issue. On the one hand you want to tell the truth, and explain a). what the scientists who study this believe, and b). the limits of science, but that can be difficult, especially with a small child. Should you candy-coat it (a little) and be reassuring. I think so - odds are we'll figure it out, even if we go kicking and screaming into a new, green, renewable economy. I thought this was some well-balanced advice. For the complete article click here).

In the car, on the our way to get gas, the 4-year-old asks:

"Dad, how far does outer space go?"

And in the kitchen, while making brownies:

"Mom, what happens to your stuff when you die?"

Good questions, honey.

I know, too, the questions will only get bigger. I'm sure I'll hear the one I fear the most while gardening or some such:

"Mom," she'll start, "this global warming thing? Even if we immediately stop producing C02, the earth will continue to warm, so aren't we in trouble no matter what?"

Even though I won't have an absolute answer, I don't want her to lose sleep on it.

"Cooling trend" and global warming

2009-07-16T21:50:00.000-07:00

(I found this to be a thought-provoking blog from Harry Fuller at ZDNET. To see the original post click here).

I found an interesting fact-based argument on the “cooling trend” that is frequently used to “refute” global warming warnings. Here’s the link, complete with charts. His basic argument: using the 1998 peak makes recent years look cooler, but take a loooooonger look and the curve is distinctly toward hotter times ahead. That means the refuters of global warming may have to fall back on the “bad data from bad thermometer” argument as only a small minority of voters seems to be buying the eco-nuts’ conspiracy theory.

Then there is the nagging issue of the disappearance of the glaciers and ice sheets, from Alps to Greenland to Arctic. If you don’t want to accept global warming, the argument can basically be “hard cheese, some things come and some things go.” But that gets dangerously close to admitting evolution. Be interesting to see survey of global warming deniers and natural evolution deniers and see if there could be anybody able to pretzel his or her mind around those two positions simultaneously.
STANDARD BOILER PLATE
This verbiage will now be attached to any blog I do about global warming. It’s amazing to me that somebody who can apparently read and then post comments still wonders in public why global warming matters on a technology web site. But I am naive, always assuming everybody’s paying attention.
It’s because of money. If global warming has enough acceptance among corporations, the public and even pols, there will be more money spent on green tech, wisely or unwisely. If oil prices stay low and most people don’t care a fig about global warming, green tech will have a difficult time succeeding, regardless of its merits. Not every good idea succeeds. VCs usually invest where they think there’s best chance for a good return. In greentech as in any tech the winners will often be determined by luck, brilliance, timing, happenstance and even marketing. Behind it all will be the money and behind that: whether the evidence for global warming and curtailing pollution drive action or is written off as claptrap.

A newsman since 1969, Harry Fuller has worked for CBS, ABC, CNBC Europe, CNET and was founding news director at TechTV. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

Email Harry Fuller

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Bill Gates envisions fighting hurricanes by manipulating the sea

2009-07-15T20:53:00.000-07:00

If you thought domination of the world's software market was cool, get a load of Bill Gates' next technological vision: giant ocean-going tubs that fight hurricanes by draining warm water from the surface to the depths, through a long tube.

A second tube could simultaneously suck cool water from the depths to the surface.

Microsoft founder Gates and a dozen other scientists and engineers have a patent pending for deploying such vessels, which they say would collect water through waves breaking over the walls of the tub. Some variations have the water moving through turbines on their way down, which would in turn generate electricity to suck up the cooler water. The article is here.