Thaw Point

(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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

(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

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"

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.

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

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

(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

(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

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.

Could we be wrong about global warming?

Could the best climate models -- the ones used to predict global warming -- all be wrong?

Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.

"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

The article in USA today is here.

Cooling trend does not refute global warming

With the current Cap and Trade legislation pending in Congress many commentators have been presenting the argument that global temperatures have actually been cooling over the last ten (10) years and global warming is not really occurring. While I think that the Cap and Trade bill should not be passed, this argument of cooling temperatures is very misleading.

Let’s take a detailed look at the argument that temperatures are actually cooling. The temperature data from NOAA does show that the average temperature peaked in 1998 and each year since has been cooler than the 1998 peak. This does not, however, represent a cooling trend. Just take a look at the chart of the data. The moving average temperature has clearly been rising. The ‘cooling’ is simply temperatures that have not exceeded a one year spike.

The complete article is here.

Does global warming threaten national security?

The Pew Environmental Group, aided by conservative ex-Sen. John Warner, is launching a new effort to listen and share with the public information on the "critical link" between national security, energy and global warming.

The Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate Change will bring together scientific and military experts to assess possible impacts of rapid warming in various parts of the Earth.

"I spent 30 years in the U.S. Senate working on behalf of our men and women in uniform and on issues related to the impact of climate change on their future military roles and missions," said Warner.

"Leading military and security experts agree that if left unchecked, global warming could increase instability and lead to conflict in already fragile regions of the world.

"We ignore these facts at the peril of our national security and at great risk to those in uniform who serve this nation."

The complete article at SeattlePI.com is here.

Report predicts even hotter southeast in decades to come

Are Middle Georgia summers hot enough for you?

Because according to the U.S. government, they’re going to get hotter.

Due to global warming, the Southeast is likely to see twice as many days a year with temperatures hitting the 90 degree mark or hotter, according to a federal report released last month. The report also predicts that the hottest days will be more than 10 degrees hotter.

The report by the U.S. Global Change Research Program synthesizes the results of research assembled by 13 federal departments and agencies including NASA, the departments of defense and energy, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Research Council. It is the second report ever issued by the federal government on the predicted impacts of global climate change on the United States, and the first one to break down impacts by region.

Click here to read the complete article in Macon.com

Among other things, it shows a sweltering Southeast. The report predicts that by the 2080s, the region will see an increase of 4.5 to 9 degrees in its average temperatures, depending on carbon dioxide emissions. But the extremes of heat will be greater and the heat index higher.

Engineer studying hurricane damage

Photo by Julio Cortez//Houston Chronicle/AP

Kara Bridwell, 26, left, and her brother Paul Bisso, 17, stand on the roof of a neighbor’s house on Sept. 14, 2008, in Surfside Beach, Texas, after Hurricane Ike washed away the home. ORNL aeronautical engineer Andre Desjarlais went to Houston last year as part of a team from the roofing industry to study the damage left by Ike.

OAK RIDGE - As we enter the hurricane season for 2009, building researchers are still learning from hurricanes of the past - including last September's Hurricane Ike.

Andre Desjarlais, an aeronautical engineer who heads Oak Ridge National Laboratory's building envelopes research group, traveled to the Houston area last fall as part of a team from the roofing industry to study damage from Ike, which hit Texas.

Desjarlais' work focused on the vulnerability of buildings with large open areas, such as a garage or loading dock.

The ORNL researcher said high winds may cause those buildings to lose their roofs or suffer unusual damage, even if the construction meets up-to-date building codes. The door to a garage or other open spaces is usually the first to fail, creating additional stress on the building, he said.

The story at knoxnews.com is here.