Note: Click here for my new book page: Link  

When I first started keeping this journal it was meant to be a working source of reference material for myself. I quickly realized that this resource was valuable as an outreach tool and created this page. Now I have created a book by the same name; the first in a series (link above.) What follows are my notes on important climate discoveries. I have not spent a great deal of time rewriting and polishing this information, so please forgive the poor grammar and etc.  Far more is discovered here than I note. My articles and essays also contain a lot of information that does not make it into the Chronicles.  Also, right click on the images for a larger version, then click "view image". Usually a larger image is hidden on the server.

December 19, 2011 A Half Billion Trees Have Been Killed by Drought in Texas (Really? That's all?) -- In a preliminary report, the Texas Forest Service says that 100 million to 500 million trees have been killed across Texas. A more detailed evaluation is due out in the spring. What was done this time was a survey of foresters and agriculture specialists across the state. What they found was that 2 to 10 percent of Texas' trees have perished, not including trees killed by wildfire.

Worst hit of Texas' 63 million acres of forested lands include parts of Caldwell and Bastrop counties, southeast of Austin, parts of five counties to the north and west of Houston, including Harris County (the greater Houston area), and much of the forested area between Kerrville and Fredericksburg and the edge of the Central Texas forest west of Junction.

My own personal surveys and scouting for my film work extended from Houston to the edge of the forest west of Junction. These surveys were just windshield surveys, and the extremeness of the kill was about the same from Galveston Bay all the way to Fredericksburg. Beyond Fredericksburg westward, the kill was probably two or three times greater than east. I estimated 500 million trees killed along that east west line from Houston to Junction and 100 miles either side. Making a wild-assed-guess that 70 percent of this area is forested, and a few more than 20 drought killed trees per acre on average would yield a half billion trees.

Texas' 63 million acres of forested land yields 8 drought killed trees per acre according to the Texas Forest Service, or 500 million of the 4.9 billion trees in our state's forest. Considering the average number of trees per acre in Texas is 78, the estimate of 8 trees per acre killed seems quite a bit low to me. My surveys showed a good quarter of the trees along that 330 mile long stretch of road between Houston and Junction were killed, not ten percent.

It seems that there is a bit of conservative estimating going on with the TFS. Natural mortality of trees in a forest is about one percent per year. Stating that the bottom estimate of mortality is two percent is almost certainly far below the actual number of trees killed. 

We will see. Unfortunately, even if the drought eases trees will continue to die. As an example of how hard drought is on trees, one paper I read about forest mortality in Texas tells us that the Central Texas forest is likely still recovering from the drought of the 50s. This paper was written in the 1990s.

http://txforestservice.tamu.edu/main/popup.aspx?id=14954

December 10, 2011 Scientific American Says Atmospheric Capture Infeasible: Conservative Climate Scientists at its Best (Worst) -- I am talking about climate science business as usual.  As in: classic conservative science. These scientists responsible for this report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences are stuck inside of their science as usual box.

This a long and tired debate in the "air capture" of CO2 that compares the world of industrial scale processes to new progressive thinking that utilizes much more "organic" processes that rely on natural forces to do much of the work.  This is a big deal between theoretical thermodynamic theorists and the new rules of climate change. The "snake-oil salesman" inference in the MIT press release (it actually said that) is embarrassingly juvenile and tells us something about the mindset of the scientists that are perpetuating this myth.

The one argument that these theorists never broach is the most important one. This is not about thermodynamic equations. What I mean by this statement is that this is not about theoretical efficiency of process. Certainly, removing CO2 at 0.03 percent concentration in the atmosphere compared to 80 percent concentration in flue gas, is going to be a less efficient process -- based on current, or old school technologies.

It is a simple fact that nearly half of our CO2 emissions are from nonpoint sources like transportation or are because if energy loss from buildings. There is no clear mechanism for removing these emissions at their sources like we can do with  catalytic converters on cars, and it is not likely that there will be a solution in time frames that matter (a few decades.)

These sources will (hopefully) get more efficient and emit less CO2, likely in the future that does measure in decades. But what about the rest of the emissions from cars and that buildings are responsible for? thinking we can reduce them by half in the next twenty years is likely optimistic, but even with a 50 percent reduction, 25% remain.

There is no other way to remove these emissions (pollutants.) To achieve our goals of keeping climate change below the dangerous level (which is probably more realistically "keeping climate change below extremely dangerous levels), we must reduce all emissions to zero and quite likely go even further than that.

We cannot remove more than 100 percent of flue gas CO2 from flue gas. Agriculture emissions reductions are not likely to be able to continue to decline with developed world efficiencies if our population grows as forecast. Deforestation emissions suffer from the same challenge only the ability of forests to absorb carbon is now being shown to be in jeopardy with the great forests die-offs across the world and specifically with the flip of the Amazon from a sequestration sink to a source of greenhouse gases nearly as large as that of the United States.

 The warning that are coming true now (made twenty to thirty years ago) as climate change emerges from the noise of weather chaos,  s so many unprecedented droughts, snowstorms, floods, heat waves and insect infestations are becoming more common across the planet, are sobering to say the least.

The feasible path for preventing the complete destruction of the climate that our civilization evolved in now shows we must reduce emissions to zero or less by some time between 2050 and 2100.  What are we supposed to do with the nonpoint sources? We will not stop burning oil and natural gas by 2100 much less coal, how do we account for the emissions from transportation and inefficiency of buildings?

It must be through atmospheric capture. There is no other way. This is a new climate rule. The new climate rules require that we sometimes look at things differently than we have in the past. This is exactly what Broeker and Lackner of Lamont Doherty Research and Columbia University are doing today. They are no longer thinking of CO2 as a thermodynamic problem, but as an equivalent energy problem.  They are asking what is the cost relationship between emitting CO2 and removing it from the atmosphere, not the simple thermodynamic relationship between the chemistry and mechanical  energy needs to run the process.

To put this into common terms, wind energy is now approaching the cost of energy from coal. If we were to supply the average American with all of his or her energy requirements generated from wind it would take the energy found in the wind in area the size of the side of a barn. Compare that to generating energy from fossil fuels and then removing the CO2 from the atmosphere to get an equivalent energy area the size of a barn window. This is what Lackner and Broeker tell us is possible, based on scale sized process experiments funded by Gary Comer (Founder of Land's End.) Emitting CO2 and removing it from the air then becomes twenty or more times more efficient at cooling Earth than generating that energy from wind.

Results from their pilot plant show that a structure the size of the Great Wall of China could remove half of our global CO2 emissions every year.

This is another of those counter intuitive things with climate change like the difference between warming caused by energy generation with fossil fuels vs. warming caused by transportation. Warming caused by transportation is two and a half times greater than that for energy generation which is dominated by the king of dirty fossil fuels -- coal. The reason is that dirty coal emits a huge amount of masking aerosols (nitrogen and sulfur oxides) that cool the planet. Transportation uses relatively clean burning fuels. The difference is that transportation, not coal, is the main culprit in the climate change conundrum.

This evaluation is only valid for the short term (climate short term) because after a few days or months the aerosol pollutants fall our of the sky due to gravity or are neutralized by other chemical reaction in our skies. What this means is that once the math is done in about fifty years, king coal will regain it's seat as the most warming economic sector, but not until then. considering the climate short term is at high risk of crossing tipping points, we can not afford to be addressing coal emission unless we address transportation sectors with two and a half times more resources.

The bottom lines is that we must get moving with the industrialization of air capture.

It's important to note that air capture will not "empower" citizens to do nothing about climate change for whatever backward reasoning that may be conjured up by those who use this scare tactic.  In 100 years this may be the case, but not until then. The infrastructure that we have to build to remove our gaseous carbon pollution from the air, treat it and dispose of it, is not of the "energy too cheap to meter" ilk. Implementation of this technology will be similar in cost and time-to-build as our wastewater collection and treatment systems -- not a trivial undertaking. The costs of this wastewater infrastructure are:

Richard Alley, one of the  most important Greenland ice scientists in the world, tells us in his new book Earth: the Operators Manual, that the cost of our wastewater collection and treatment infrastructure and it's time-to-build was similar to what we can expect with our new CO2 pollution collection and treatment infrastructure. This is about 1% global annual GDP for 100 years. No trivial amount, but an entirely achievable goal, one that has been achieved several times over in the last century with infrastructures for potable water, electrical generation, transportation, telecommunications, etc.

An important aside: if it turns out that the installation of our CO2 pollution collection and treatment infrastructure a trivial thing, and atmospheric removal of CO2 DOES allow citizens to freely emit CO2 that is then inexpensively removed from the air at a far less cost than by generating that electricity from a more expensive technology, what's wrong with that?

Back to a blistering review of these scientists' publication: The article is completely biased towards the "dilution principle."  The chemists and mechanical engineers that are doing these counterproductive inside-the-box evaluations are basing their statements on closed-mind thinking. For example: because the CO2 concentration is about 300 times more dilute in the atmosphere than in flue gas, they tell us that the mechanical costs of scrubbing the atmosphere rather than flue gas will need 300 times more energy to move the air with giant fans and then 300 times more energy  to heat it to extract the CO2 and regenerate the sorbent to repeat the process. This thinking is irrational. Of course removing a pollutant that is 300 times less common in a process stream will cost astronomically more than removing the same pollutant in the same media with a concentration that is hundreds of times greater.

The "new rules" tell us however, that atmospheric removal of CO2 will rely mainly on natural forces to move the air (wind) and regenerate the sorbent (starting with sodium carbonate, instead of sodium hydroxide.) ANYTHING OTHER THAN THAT IS PROHIBITIVELY EXPENSIVE, DUH, WE KNOW THAT ALREADY. The "new rules" technology (and man-created energy use required) is completely different than that for flue gas removal.

This report simply does not take this knowledge (this new knowledge) into consideration. It is simply a reiteration of the irrational concerns of the conservative science crowd based on the old thermodynamic evaluation of the old process. What's more, Lackner and Broeker tell us that the number of btu's to remove CO2 from the air using "new-age" climate rules is only slightly greater than to remove it from flue gas like we did in the old days of the 20th century even though the concentration is 300 times greater in flue gas. The side of the barn vs. the barn window analogy is a good way to think of this comparison. So the argument that the old school is using is not even valid any longer.

In other words, treating atmospheric CO2 emitted from fossil fuels is 170 times more efficient than generating energy from wind. Yes this does tell us that we can regenerate as much CO2 as we can remove from the atmosphere, but getting to the end of that equation is one that takes a similar amount of time and investment as getting to the end of the wastewater infrastructure equation. Lackner and Broeker have created scale sized units that demonstrate the validity of this new-age science. Claims in Scientific American and the MIT press release that say otherwise and that also say that this technology is based only on calculations from bench models are simply invalid.

Overall this push by these thermodynamic zealots is very unscientific in its presentation and their refusal to acknowledge the difference in the principles between the two techniques appears representative of the grasping of straws that comes from a losing cause.

Robert Kunzig's biography of Walley Broeker, Fixing Climate, discusses the new rules of atmospheric capture at length.

Richard Alley's, Earth: the Operators Manual, discusses the comparison of our carbon sequestration infrastructure construction relative to that of existing parts of our planet's infrastructure at length as well.

House, et al., Economic and energetic analysis of capturing CO2 from ambient air, PNAS December 2011.

Abstract: hhttp://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/11/28/1012253108.abstract

Press Release: http://web.mit.edu/press/2011/carbon-dioxide-capture.html

Scientific American article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scrubbing-carbon-dioxide-air-too-expensive

November 26, 2011 Globally, Wind Energy to Be Cost Competitive by 2016 Already competitive with subsidies in many places, already competitive in several places without subsidies, Especially to natural gas, wind energy will be competitive world-wide with gas, oil and coal in five years. Bloomberg New Energy Finance issued a statement on November 10 with this news. Wind energy will drop 12% in the next five years allowing it to become cost competitive with natural gas.

The best wind farms in the world already produce energy equal to or less than the cost of coal. In 1984 there were only 0.3 gigawatts of installed wind generators. By the end of 2011 there will be 240 gigawatts installed. The efficiency of wind turbines has nearly tripled over the last 27 years. Operation and maintenance costs of wind farms had decreased by 85 percent over the last 30 years. These trends will continue.

Lead analyst at Bloomberg Justin Wu tells us: "The press is reacting to the recent price drops in solar equipment as though they are the result of temporary oversupply or of a trade war. This masks what is really going on: a long-term, consistent drop in clean energy technology costs, resulting from decades of hard work by tens of thousands of researchers, engineers, technicians and people in operations and procurement. And it is not going to stop: In the next few years the mainstream world is going to wake up to wind cheaper than gas, and rooftop solar power cheaper than daytime electricity. Add in the same sort of deep long-term price drops for power storage, demand management, LED lighting and so on – and we are clearly talking about a whole new game.

Bloomberg Energy: http://bnef.com/PressReleases/view/172

November 20, 2011 IPCC Special Report SREX, Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation  
A classic report, full of conservative information created by committee. Not that the IPCC does not represent the best science that we have. It's just that these guys do things by enormous committees and compromise is the standard operating procedure when creating policy, or anything really, by committee.

So what does this report mean? Honestly, my focus is on impacts happening now. I did read the Summary for Policy Makers though. One statement stood out, relative to impacts happening now; "For the high emissions scenario, it is likely that the frequency of hot days will increase by a factor of 10 in most regions of the world." Conservative?  Yes.

The USGS tells us that 100 degree days will increase ten-fold across almost the entire country by the decade beginning 2080. (See entry for November 21, 2009.) This finding would support the SREX, except that it is based on one of the middle of the road scenarios, not a higher emission scenario. A higher emissions scenario means higher temperatures.

Diffenbaugh and Ashfaq tell us that some parts of the North American southwest will see the hottest season of the last 60 years repeated ten times during the decade of the 2030s -- as in, every year of the 2030s will be as hot as the hottest season of the last 60 years. See entry for July 8, 2010:  Time frames are everything. Except when the science tells us that things will be ten times worse than they are now based on a middle of the road climate scenario, like Diffenbaugh and Ashfaq have done.

April 7, 2011; a paper in Climate Change, a Wiley Interdisciplinary Review, tells us that by 2035 (the decade 2021 to 2030), Dust Bowl conditions will dominate a majority of the United States. In other words, Dust Bowl conditions will be the typical condition: the average, the normal condition, in just 24 years. Some years will be cooler, but just as many will be more extreme. This is another instance of extraordinary climate change happening far ahead of the conservative assessment process suggestion. This one too is based on the middle of the road scenario, not the worse-case scenario. I can not emphasize enough that our emissions are following the worst-case scenario, not one of the middle of the road scenarios.

And this year in Austin, and all across Texas (see entry for October 1, 2011) we experienced our first summer that was ten times more extreme than average. This year we had 90 days of 100 degree heat. Normally, we average 11 days of 100 degrees or above. Technically of course, 90 days of 100 degree heat is only 8.2 times more than our average of 11 days of 100 degree heat, but if you suffered through it like we all did in Central Texas, it was every bit as extreme as ten times more extreme than normal.

SREX Report: http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/

Global Change Research Program

Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, A State of Knowledge Report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2009, page 90.

http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts

Diffenbaugh and Ashfaq, Intensification of hot extremes in the United States, Geophysical Research Letters, July 2010

Dai, Drought under global warming - a review, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews - Climate Change, p 45-65, January-February 2011

November 15, 2011 Large-Scale Ecoregime Change Underway in the North American West
It's been happening for more than a decade. Drought, insects and disease are recreating the landscape of western North America. A paper out of Oregon State tells the story: "A huge “migration” of trees has begun across much of the West due to global warming, insect attack, diseases and fire, and many tree species are projected to decline or die out." These forests have been where they are (or where they once were) for millennia. Now abrupt climate change is causing a massive ecoregime change, unlike anything mankind has ever experienced.

This ecoregime change is what ecologists call it when an ecosystem changes to a different ecosystem. In its most extreme form called desertification, this can be thought of as a line of sand dunes marching across a forest, completely extinguishing all life previously known in the forest ecosystem. This may seem extreme, but in reality, the paper says that many of our forests across the North American West are at risk of being replaced by grassland. The great conservativeness of course, this study was done with the A2 scenario: one of the middle of the road scenarios. Our climate, pushed hard by our society, with decades if not generations of warming to come from already emitted greenhouse gasses, is tracking the worst-case scenario path.

Extra - Local Bulletin, Austin, Texas: The great forest die-off began in Austin with the drought of 2005/6. Our forests are not as severely impacted as those of the Rockies and the Southwestern U.S. -- yet.  This latest drought, the third in row, was quite likely twice as extreme as the drought of record here in Central Texas: the Drought of the 1950s. Visibly, to civilians, little has changed. That's the trouble with outreach and forest mortality. Once a tree dies and its leaves come off, it tends to quickly disappear back into the forest. the limbs of a tree simply have much less visible mass than all those leaves. In addition, surviving neighboring trees rebound rapidly. The dead trees leaves a hole that it full of water, light and nutrients. Neighboring trees soak it up in a process that foresters call "release." The term was coined to describe increased tree growth when a forest is selectively logged. the trees that remain are released. 

Forest die-of from drought, insect infestation or disease does the same thing. the trees that survive get a growth spurt very rapidly after their neighbors die.  This growth covers up

Press Release: http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2011/nov/climate-change-causing-movement-tree-species-across-west

Nicholas C. Coops, Richard H. Waring. Estimating the vulnerability of fifteen tree species under changing climate in Northwest North America. Ecological Modeling, 2011; 222 (13): 2119 DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2011.03.033 Richard H. Waring, Nicholas C. Coops, Steven W. Running. Predicting satellite-derived patterns of large-scale disturbances in forests of the Pacific Northwest Region in response to recent climatic variation. Remote Sensing of Environment, 2011; DOI: 10.1016/j.rse.2011.08.017

November 12, 2011 Sea Level Rise - the Biggest Long Range Climate Threat  
Over the years I have been watching the reports reporting how sea level rise slowly increasing. Slowly however is a misnomer. Sea level rise has rapidly increased since about 1990. The papers tell the story.

Throughout most of the 20th century, sea level rise was between 1.2 and 1.5 mm per year. About 1990, it was found to be 2.0 mm per year. By the late 90s it was 2.1 mm per year, then 3.0 then 3.4, now I've seen 3.7 mm per year. All the while the reports of increasing melt from mountain glaciers, Greenland and Antarctica continued.

Over the past four or five years the reports from Greenland and Antarctica have shown melt and iceberg discharge increasing rapidly. Antarctica was not even supposed to be losing ice until the 22nd century according to the IPCC, but now it has caught up with ice loss from Greenland.

All the while, our beaches and coastal wetlands are sweating bullets. the US Global Change Research Program's report in 2008 telling us that our barrier islands and wetlands will begin to disintegrate and disappear when sea level rise reaches 7 mm per year has been looming precariously in the near future.

New findings about the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet the last time Earth was within about 1 degree C of being as warm as it is today, about 120,000 years ago, saw sea level rise 30 mm per year for centuries on end.

Seven mm per year is about 2.4 feet per century. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse at 30 mm per year saw sea level rise 10 feet per century.

Assessments of the impacts of climate change tell us that our society can adapt to sea level rise of no more than about one foot per century. The reason is the vast infrastructure lying within feet of sea level that has been constructed over generations.

Today the most detailed evaluations of sea level rise yet are being published. Church and White's latest contribution however has a twist. it appears to be a linear trend in sea level rise beginning about 1990. the rate is 3.1 mm per year, but this rate is not averaged. It fits a straight line trend. this is very odd considering the increase in melt from mountain glaciers, Greenland and Antarctica.

Why is sea level rise not following an exponential trend like temperature and ice discharge? The most likely answer is "I have no idea." thinking about the water cycle though, the amount of water remains constant. as temperature rises though, more water can be held in the air. Too, as our society grows, more water is taken out of the ground. this water ends up in our rivers or the sky and becomes a part of the water cycle, it should increase sea level rise.

But we have to subtract the amount of water impounded from new reservoirs. Our society has yet to stop building dams. these dams are a significant amount of capture, equal to a share of "negative" sea level rise. Altogether however these pluses and minuses, intuitively, should still be causing an exponential rise, not a linear rise.

The contribution from mountain glaciers is supposed to be diminishing, is this happening and is it happening in a strong enough way to offset the increase in rise from Greenland and Antarctica?

Is our society at a peculiar crossroads where environmentally increasing variables are nearly exactly matched by society's increasing population and manipulation of resources? Our aerosol emissions are increasing so rapidly that they are masking more than half of our current warming. It could certainly be possible that we have temporarily locked up the missing sea level rise in new reservoirs, or increased storage in the atmosphere because of the capacity of warmer air to hold more water.

Climate change deniers would say it is because climate change is not real. Sea level rise is not increasing. But Church and White's tide gauge data from 2005 (top graph) shows distinctly that sea level rise in the early 20th century was less than 1.0 mm per year. Numerous studies of sea level rise over the last several thousand years, from fossil corals and stranded beaches, shows that sea level rise through this period has been near zero. (The climate change deniers are good at ignoring lots of data.)

So what is the answer? No-one knows as of yet, but I bet it will not be long until we find out.

Church and White CSIRO: http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_last_15.html

November 9, 2011 The Point of No Return is in 2017; Just Five Years the International Energy Agency
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has returned a valuable yet frightening assessment of our current and future energy use and climate change. We have just five years to bring our energy sources into line with climate change mitigation scenarios or we default on our planet. Says the IEA: "On planned policies, rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change."

The IEA was created in 1973 after the world oil crisis. Their mission was meet world energy knowledge and policy needs in the future so as to manage for things like the 1973 oil crisis. The Agency broadened its mandate to focus on the 3Es of sound energy policy: energy security, economic development, and environmental protection.

IEA Ministers say "Current energy trends are not sustainable and a better balance must be found between the three Es. Energy is part of many environmental problems, including climate change, and must be part of the solution. The IEA has been engaged for more than a decade on designing cost-effective approaches to reduce CO2 emissions, from the international policy architecture (including trading mechanisms) to energy efficiency policy and the promotion of clean technologies."

The IEA says reveals a more aware evaluation of global energy issues than is customary for this organization: "The window of opportunity is closing ... Governments need to introduce stronger measures to drive investment in efficient and low-carbon technologies. [Remember, this is the IEA, famous for fossil fuels.] Faith Birol, IEA Chief Economist is quoted in the press release: "As each year passes without clear signals to drive investment in clean energy, the „lock-in of high-carbon infrastructure is making it harder and more expensive to meet our energy security and climate goals."

The 660 page World Energy Outlook 2011 is the flagship publication of the IEA.

Faith Birol, IEA Chief Economist says: “As each year passes without clear signals to drive investment in clean energy, the lock-in of high-carbon infrastructure is making it harder and more expensive to meet our energy security and climate goals.”  What Ms. Birol is telling us is that if we continue with business as usual energy usage, when 2017 rolls around CO2 levels in our atmosphere will rise to 450 ppm regardless of other actions we take and 2 degrees of warming will be guaranteed.

There is good news and bad with this evaluation. There is time to act. Some international commitments do allow for reductions in our emissions but as of now, agreement and ratification by many of the most important countries is unlikely to happen in the next several years.

More good news: The technologies to reduce emissions exist now. New technologies have been proven in the lab and rapid implementation is completely economical relative to the cost of inaction. But the motivation of our leaders is lacking.

The IEA relies on a 450 ppm scenario. This path calls for allowable emissions demonstrated to meet the globally agreed upon goal of limiting the temperature rise to 2°C. Four-fifths of the total energy-related CO2 emissions allowed by 2035  are already locked-in by existing investments including power stations, transportation, buildings and factories. Continuing with business as usual means that by 2017, the energy-related infrastructure then in place would generate all the CO2 emissions allowed in the 450 Scenario up to 2035.

The big problem here is that much of the latest science now tells us that 350 ppm is the maximum CO2 concentration we can reach before experiencing 2 degrees C. of warming. We have already experienced 1.4 degrees and between and 0.8 degrees (depending on the study) of warming will occur because of emissions already made. Our CO2 concentration when these reports were made was a little over 380 pm. You do the math.

More concerning, there is a growing position that 1 degree C represents the threshold to "dangerous climate change." This represents 300 ppm CO2 or 350 ppm CO2"e", which takes into account warming from non-CO2 greenhouse gases.

More good news (even though at first glance this appears to be anything but good news.) The report tells us: "Delaying action is a false economy: For every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions." In other words, from the 2009 IEA report: "The world will have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions for each year it delays implementing a major assault on global warming." So where is the good news here? Start now. These costs figures represent about 1 percent of global annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In 2010 Global GDP was $63 trillion. One percent of this amount is $630 billion, a little more than the IEA estimate it will cost to mitigate for the delayed costs per year.

The really good news here, did you catch my math error? The IEA says that it will cost $500 billion per year after 2020. Up until then, $1 dollar spent avoids $4.30 cents after 2020. In other words, what we spend in the next nine years is discounted by over 75 percent! Lets get busy!

Report: http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/

Press Release: http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/docs/weo2011/pressrelease.pdf

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/11/09/364895/iea-global-warming-delaying-action-is-a-false-economy/

November 3, 2011 The US Government Says 2010 was Worse than the Worse Case Scenario - CO2 Emissions Rise a Whopping 6 Percent! Emissions in the U.S. rose 3.2 percent from 2009 to 2010, but they were still 3.7 percent below 2008 levels. This was not the case across large parts of the developing world.  While many areas in Europe were mirroring U.S. emissions, many developing nations saw emissions skyrocket. When I first saw the Associated Press (AP) article describing the new U.S. Energy Administration's greenhouse gas emissions data for 2010, I was in disbelief. It was not that I did not believe the Energy Departments numbers, I couldn't find them! All I could find was link after link to the AP article on this whopping 6 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions in 2010. I simply did not think the world economy had recovered enough to double the previous growth rate of greenhouse gases.

I thought the numbers might be right, but I thought I new that the source of gases was not what the AP article said. The AP said it was human emissions. I simply did not realize how robust developing nations across the world are.  This recession thing is something manufactured in the developed world by out of control moneyed interest. It simply has no effect on the developing world.

What I assumed when I first read this piece was that that the real source of this increase was feedback from global forest die-off, methane clathrate venting in the Arctic Ocean and greenhouse gas release from permafrost melt. I did not have the source document from AP. Their link did connect to the home page for the U.S. Energy Administration, but there were no press releases and no indication of the source document from AP used in their story. The Associate Press, in my experience, rarely gives decent references. Fortunately, my mind only ran wild for about 24 hours and I did not publish anything with my assumptions. It is the rest of the story that is important her and it has to do with those feedbacks I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph.

I am slowly coming to realize the scope of climate changes happening right now across the globe. The two droughts in the Amazon, responsible for emitting 75 percent of the total greenhouse gases emitted by the USA every year, was a jolt of reality. The author of the paper that does the math on those emissions estimates that over 2 billion trees were killed. The flip of the Amazon ecosystem from carbon sink to carbon source was not supposed to happen unless we did  nothing to limit our greenhouse gas emissions and then it was a consideration for the distant future with significant uncertainty. But It has now happened. The Amazon has flipped from one of the most important carbon sinks on the planet to a carbon source nearly the size of the United States.

My work with forest issues and climate change has reveled an enormous amount of information that is virtually unknown by everyone except a very few specialists. A great example of this is the relative size of the Amazon's actual carbon sink. Most believe it is the most important forest of its kind and that tropical forests are the single most important carbon sink on land. The Amazon specifically and tropical forests in general  are the most important forests on Earth relative to diversity. The ability of a tropical forest to absorb and store carbon however pales in comparison to that of the great northern forest.

A report by the Canadian Boreal Initiative in 2009 tells us that the great northern forests of our world contain almost twice the carbon as do tropical forests. Even though tropical forests cover about the same the land area of boreal forests (15 million sq km each,),  the carbon content of the boreal is nearly twice that of the tropical forests. How can this be? It's the northern soils. It is fairly well known that most tropical forests exists on very poor soils. Nutrient cycling in the tropics is really fast. Forest debris decompose very rapidly and are constantly cycled from tree to dead wood and forest litter and back again.

The boreal forest has a much slower carbon cycle. As a consequence, forest litter does not decompose nearly as fast. Slowing things further, northern forests are frozen for some to eight months or more of every year. In addition, much of northern forests are underlain by permafrost. Permafrost contains an enormous amount of dead, partially decomposed organic material that is a semi-permanent state of storage.

So when the analyses and the math is completed, 703 gigatons of carbon is contained in the boreal forests while only 375 gigatons of carbon is contained in tropical forests.

My estimates of tree mortality from the little drought here in Texas are at a half billion. Estimates of tree mortality from the 64 million acres of beetle kill in the Rockies range from 2 to 8 billion. Scientists in Alaska tell us that the forest death there from fire that has increase four times above the 20th century average is greater than all of the fires in Canada for the last 40 years. The Weather Underground tells us that the great drought in Central Russia last year was possibly a once in 15,000 year event.

Forest die-offs in the tens of millions of acres are happening across the globe. It's highly possible that 8 to12 billion trees have died across the planet in the last decade, because of climate change, most of them in the last five years.  These trees were now emitting greenhouse gases instead of absorbing them. If we look at these 8 to 12 billion dead trees in a similar way as we look at the emissions from the dead trees in the Amazon, we are talking about emissions roughly equal to the total annual global man caused greenhouse gas emissions.  Exactly enough to double the greenhouse gas emissions rate over the trend of the last decade or tow, like what the AP reported.

Very few numbers exist for exactly how much these emissions amount to, except for one evaluation of the Amazon. So my guess could be off by a lot.  But even if it off by a lot, the Amazon is still emitting nearly as many greenhouse gases as the United States.  The rest of the forest death across the planet is real. it is likely that new emissions -- feedback -- from dead forests are already the biggest emissions source on the planet.  I don't make predictions often, and I really don't like to draw my own conclusions. My work is about reporting the breaking climate science discoveries, not creating them. but this case is different. I have don't a lot of work with forest across north and Central America.

Because it takes a while for the data to be collected and deciphered and written up and peer reviewed and rewritten and re reviewed - then queued up to be published, I think the findings will follow, but it may still be some months or longer before the publishing actually happens.

Caron Dioxide Analysis and Information Center: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/perlim_2009_2010_estimates.html

Convention on biodiversity: http://www.cbd.int/gbo1/chap-01-05.shtml

http://news.yahoo.com/biggest-jump-eve r-seen-global-warming-gases-183955211.html

November 2, 2011 The Berkeley Earth Project: Turning Point or Business As Usual? Professor Rich Mueller's The Current Status of Climate Change - A Non-Partisan Analysis, has done what hundreds of others have in the last several decades -- confirmed the facts of climate science. Will it make a difference? Personally, I don't believe so. The greed and selfishness portrayed by those who have created the propaganda is not something that can be fixed by a mere couple of hundred global scientific assessments.  The authority figures are hooked -- they are addicted to money. This addiction is as strong or stronger than heroine, tobacco and alcohol combined. The followers of the anti-science campaign? Ever heard of the Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana?  Deceit of this kind happens. It happens to good people, lots of them. The reverend Jones took over 900 innocent souls with him to the ever after, based on his word that Nirvana awaited. Am I comparing the non climate science propagandists to the Reverend Jim Jones? Damn straight I am.

The misinformation that has been distributed, by what is basically the elite of conservative politics, is nothing new. People have been protesting the improprieties of the moneyed elite for centuries. In the last few decades however, and especially since about the turn of the century, the means  that these authority figures have used to perpetuate their propaganda have grown ever more inappropriate. And I am not just talking about climate change.

Occupy Wall Street is society's backlash, at least against the moneyed elite's excesses of this generation. But the same disease, or dysfunction, or addiction, or what ever it is that motivates these people's greed, is at work all across America.

Now look, this is not about making a profit. What Wall Street has done, what the pharmaceutical industry has done, the insurance industry, the energy industry . . . what is going on here is far more than mere profits. If my small business made the profits that these industries make, I could support the entire town that I grew up in. The greed is out of control. Their supposition that near truths are ethical is now valid.

The Top 1% income graph sort-of looks like the hockey stick doesn't it.  How did this happen? Why did the top 1 percent's income grow ten times more than mine? Looking back to the roaring 1920s, why were rich people's incomes so much of the total back then - surprisingly similar to today?  Could it have something to do with the Great Depression and the banking rules our government created to keep us from ever having another massive stock market crash resulting in a decade long economic depression with nearly 30 percent unemployment?  You bet it did.

Conservatives say that millionaires need tax cuts to create jobs when the top 500 businesses in America are paying less than 15 percent taxes on average. Tell me how, during Clinton's administration, when the top income bracket was 39%, we created ten times more jobs than George "Dubya" did with his tax cuts? Tell me how, during the first three quarters of this year, that energy made 54 billion and

A new report on 280 Fortune 500 companies from 2008 to 2010 shows that their supposed 35 percent tax rate is on average only 18.5 percent. Seventy-eight of the study group of Fortune 500 companies paid no taxes at all.  They earned a collective $78.6 billion yet paid not taxes at all -- AND, they received $10,.8 billion in tax rebates!

Despite $160 billion in profits, these 280 companies received $223 billion in tax subsidies. Thirty of the companies enjoyed a negative tax burden of over the three year study period while at the same time earning $160 billion in profits. Finally, another of the big lies of the right has to do with the competitiveness of US Companies compared to international companies because "U.S. tax rates are higher than the rest of the world's."  The study finds this is just a myth. Two-thirds of the study group who had profits overseas and in the U.S. paid more taxes overseas than they did in the U.S.

Taxes, the banking mess, financial bailouts and conservative politics. They tell us they can not go on unless they have less taxes yet they had much higher taxes and created ten times more jobs under the Clinton administration.  Their tax/money issues smell very much like their line on climate change.  What is coming out of their mouths in both situations seems to be pretty much opposite from reality.

The following is a list of just a few of the Fortune 500 Companies with negative tax rates - that's right, Uncle Sam paid these folks, they did not pay Uncle Sam taxes: Wells Fargo ($17.9B for billion), GE ($8.3B), IBM ($$8.2B), Goldman Sachs ($3.1B), Verizon ($12.3B), Boeing ($3.5B), Exxon ($4.1B), Coca-Coal ($2.4B), DuPont, Corning, Honeywell, El Paso Natural Gas, Baxter International, Conway, Ryder, Pepco, PG&E, Central Point Energy, Atmos Energy, American Electric Power, Wisconsin energy, Duke Energy, Consolidated Edison, Xcel Energy, CMS Energy -- you should read the report, there is much more there.

The fraud has been widespread since Al Gore was elected by the Supreme Court. The outcome of the Berkeley Earth Project, partly funded by the Koch Brothers?  Business as usual.  The report is now supposedly flawed.

The climate science antagonists are performing amazingly similarly to the bankers and financiers and insurance people. Their latest, led buy Anthony Watts at Watts up with that, tries to demonize  a couple of long standing climate scientists (Trenberth, Abraham and Gleick) who have finally started questioning why Roy Spencer continues to practices climate science. Watts continues to uphold Spencer's allegations -- this time about satellite temperature observations.  This paper was published in the academic Journal Remote Sensing, and it was so bad, that the Chief Editor of the journal has now resigned directly because this paper is so bad that he should have never published it.  Still, just like Big Business as Usual, the climate unscientist supporters bravely slog through their own pits of deceit.

Canadian Boreal Institute Report -- The Carbon the World Forgot: http://www.borealbirds.org/carbonreport.shtml

CBS News Link: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-20129155/study-many-fortune-500-cos-paid-$0-taxes/

Study Press Release:       http://www.ctj.org/corporatetaxdodgers/CorporateTaxDodgersPR.pdf

Full Study: Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodger 2008-10, A Joint Project of Citizens for Tax Justice & the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, November 2011.  http://www.ctj.org/corporatetaxdodgers/CorporateTaxDodgersReport.pdf

October 30, 2011 Snowtober: The First Snowtastrophe of the Year - Possibly Bigger than Hurricane Irene  Widespread one foot totals, even more widespread 2 foot totals, with peaks up to 32 inches fell in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Eleven dead, 3 million without power. Heavy wet snow with leaves still on the trees. NJ Conn and New York - states of Emergency. The storm blanketed states from Virginia to Maine and its only October smashing October snowfall records. More than 800,000 power customers were without electricity in Connecticut alone – shattering the record set just two months ago by Hurricane Irene. 20 October daily records were set from West Virginia through New York. Trains were shut down in Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts and New York and New Jersey. States of emergency were declared in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and 13 counties in New York state. We are still seven weeks away from winter and authorities say it will be a week before all power is back on.

From Capitol Climate: Reference: "Early American Winters", David Ludlum

http://capitalclimate.blogspot.com/2011/10/october-snow-historical-context.html

"The current October snowfall in the northeastern U.S. has certainly been impressive, particularly in the areal extent, but the historical record shows that autumn snowstorms were both earlier and more frequent in the mid-19th century. In his definitive history, "Early American Winters", David Ludlum lists records of early season snowfalls in 21 of the 50 years from 1821 to 1870, including many in September and several in late August. The mid-1830's were particularly prolific, with 3 events before the middle of October in 1836, including at least "some snow" as far south as South Carolina. 1821: Oct. 25-26, Salem MA: "sufficient to cover the ground" 1823: Sept. 29, Worcester County MA: "snow in several parts of the county" 1829: Sept. 3, Sherburne VT: "an inch and a half deep" 1832: Aug. 25-26, New Hampshire: "White Mountains covered by snow apparently several inches deep" 1833: Oct. 30, Somerset PA: "Two inches snow, the fourth fall of the autumn" Oct. 29-30, Philadelphia PA: "Houses whitened by snow" 1835: Sept. 30, northern New England: 6-12" in Franklin County, Vermont; 6" at Kilkenny New Hampshire 1836: Sept. 28: Hamilton NY 4", Bridgewater NY 3", Rochester NY 1" October 5-6: Onondaga County NY 2 feet, Auburn NY 24-26" Cortland NY 18", Hollidaysburg PA 26", Sideling Hills MD 10", Loudoun County VA 5", Yorkville SC "some snow" October 11-12: Hamilton NY 35" "measured as it fell", Madison NY 12", Bridgewater NY 18", Oxford NY 12" "

October 27, 2011 Greenland Melt Equals 2010, Melt Index was 6th Greatest in 2010 -- Our buddy Tedesco at Cryospheric Processes tells us that The Greenland Melt Index ranked 6th in 2011. The melt index anomaly is the number of days with detectable surface melt compared to the baseline period of 1979-2010, and is estimated from satellite microwave observations. But this "melt index" is something like comparing sea ice extents in the Arctic ocean. It is a tool, but by no means definitive. For one thing, the baseline period interferes with the comparison. If every year, a greater amount of surface area is exposed to melt, and every year the baseline changes to include the increasing melt years, the baseline average increase, thus decreasing the relative value of the Melt Index.

Comparing the Melt Index to sea ice extents measurements does not take the other variable into consideration. For sea ice, wind direction and strength and ocean temperature plays a significant role in how much ice volume actually exists. It's the ice volume that must be melted, not the ice area. With Greenland ice melt/loss, a simple area ratio only tells us the change in the amount of are subject to melt compared to the average for the period of record. No consideration is given to how hot it was when the melt area was above freezing, what the cloud cover was, if snow was present or only bare ice, or how fast the wind was blowing; all of which have an impact on ice melt and sublimation.

Like the publicly perceived controversy over Arctic sea ice decline, the rest of the story of Greenland 's ice shows things a little different than the more simplistic tools. For example, other evaluations of the melt in Greenland this year showed runoff, surface mass balance, albedo and bare ice exposure were approximately equal to last year's record levels.

Tedesco et al., Year 2011 Greenland melting remains well above the (1979-2010) average, close to record mass loss, Cryosphere Today online publication, http://greenland2011.cryocity.org/

Box, Arctic Report Card: Update 2010, NSIDC, http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/greenland.html

October 26, 2011 Greenland Melt 2010 New Record  

Tedesco et al., The role of albedo and accumulation in the 2010 melt record in Greenland, Environmental Research Letters, January 21, 2011

October 23, 2011 "Humankind May Not Survive" says Novel Laureate Yuan Tseh Lee  GLOBAL warming poses the greatest threat today, and unless changes happen in about a decade, humankind may not survive, a Nobel laureate said during a conference in Manila on Monday. “The thing I worry about the most is the global-warming trend,” said Dr. Yuan Tseh Lee, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986 and is now president of the International Council of Scientific Unions. The Taiwanese professor was the keynote speaker at the opening ceremony of the international conference “Ethics in Science and Technology” at the University of Santo Tomas.

http://manilatimes.net/index.php/opinion/editorials/9725-mankind-running-out-of-time-nobel-laureate

October 18, 2011 High Arctic Lakes Disappearing  Sixteen thousand lakes in the far northern Arctic have disappeared between 2000 and 2009. Considering there are 1.2 to 1.3  million lakes in this region, the number is not extreme, but the trend is very important. Even more important is the rest of the story.  The paper's abstract states: "Previous local to regional scale studies have shown a considerable reduction in the size of lakes in this region. (in North America between 50 and 70 degrees north.) The subsequent exposure of carbon- and methane-rich sediments and the direct changes in surface albedo feed back into the drivers of regional and global climate change. Understanding and quantifying changes in the Arctic is a critical component of climate modeling due to the cooling effect of the Arctic on the global climate."

We know that the Arctic has warmed three times more than the rest of the world, and that lake sediments contain comparable amounts of carbon to forests.  In the south, slight increases in lakes size are overwhelmed by the larger losses in the north. In the south the growing lakes are caused by permafrost melt, but permafrost melt is not yet widespread in the far north. Growing lakes are caused by permafrost melt, but the authors say that permafrost melt in the far northern region is not a big deal yet. The overall amount of change between 2000 and 2009 is 22,010 km2 surface area gain and 28,697 km2 loss.

Also, during this study period, the area of this study generally received higher than average rainfall. So what in the world is going on? It's all about warming. Two things happen with warming. One is that warmer temperatures increase evaporation. one degree of warming increases atmospheric moisture content by 4 percent. This may not sound like much, but some areas in the Arctic have warmed 7 to 10 degrees. Considering the relationship between temperature and evaporation to be linear (close enough at these levels) this is a 30 or 40 percent increase in atmospheric moisture.

The other thing that happens is a warmer climate results in fewer days of snow or ice cover. When lakes are frozen, their evaporation is reduced almost to zero, so an increase in ice free days yields a tremendous amount of additional evaporation potential.  These things are both feedbacks.  Climate change has a lot of feedbacks and feedbacks often are non-linear. this means that the rate of change gets larger as the change progresses farther.

The paper concludes: "The current results suggest there may be far more change occurring in the tundra farther north that is not currently accounted for. It is likely that this decrease in surface area of inland water is already impacting ecosystem functioning in high northern latitudes of North America and creates multiple feedbacks into the climatic system through modification of surface albedo, evapotranspiration, and carbon cycling."

Abstract: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/pip/2011GL049427.shtml

Article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228345.000-strange-case-of-the-vanishing-arctic-lakes.html

October 20, 2011 Climate change will alter forests in the U.S. Southeast, ecologist says  But she can't really tell because drought killed half of her study trees.

http://onlineathens.com/local-news/2011-10-20/climate-change-will-alter-forests-ecologist-says

October 15, 2011  Governor Perry's State Environmental Commission Appointees Censor Climate Science. A 2010 report on the Environmental health and future of Galveston Bay, has been further delayed because the authors refuse to have their names associated with the report after it was censored of climate change related information by the Governor Perry appointed Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The Governor appoints the three person commission who then selects upper level management. The report, a ten year review of Galveston Bay research, had been approved by staff. Upper level management censored the report.

The scientists who wrote the report new that highly volatile topics such as climate change should be avoided or minimized with this commission, so they automatically wrote around things like IPCC and human-caused warming.  This was a bit difficult when the main tenet of the report is that sea level in Galveston Bay is rising at 3 mm per year, or 6 times greater than the long term average. All of the information in the report was taken from previously published peer reviewed work.  Very few of the important details though, appeared in the final version.

Perry's people made 72 deletions in all, some of them were not climate related but related to subsidence caused by oil and gas extraction around Galveston Bay. I wonder what that was all about (protecting the oil industry of course.) Several were related to dam building and sediment starvation. This is well established science -- like fifty years or more, truthfully, what were they trying to accomplish with this censor move?

All three scientists associated with the report have refused to have their names associated with the censored report. The Houston Chronicle said that TCEQ spokeswoman Andrea Morrow gave no reason for the deletions in an e-mail response, saying only that the agency disagreed with information in the article.

Hey, this is Texas, I live here and I have been paying attention to this sort of thing for decades. It is ridiculous, it permeates all conservative politics here and it went national in 2000. As Molly Ivins called him "Shrub" made a mess out of this country and it is becoming obvious that because of him, impacts to climate change are far more than messy. To have another Texas Governor as president (tagged Govn'r Goodhair by the late great Ms. Ivins), even worse than Shrub, would lead to climate change mitigation stalling that would push us far out into the risk zone for irreversible tipping points.

Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Professor-says-state-agency-censored-article-2212118.php

Mother Jones: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/perry-officials-censored-climate-report

October 13, 2011 The Time Has Come - All of These Ultra Extreme Weather Events ARE Caused by Climate Change     It is about time that the climate scientists have decided that it is appropriate to start blaming all of these ultra extreme weather events on climate change.  The message is finally beginning to gain broad acceptance in academic circles.  At the Annual American Meteorological Society meeting this year, Kevin Trenberth, one of a handful of the most important climate scientists in the world, has come out publicly advocating that; Yes Indeed, all of this crazy extreme weather we have been seeing around the globe is absolutely caused by climate change.

I have been telling folks for six or seven years now (Remember Katrina?) that on moral grounds, it is a certainty that all of these uber extreme weather events are caused by climate change. The standard line "We can't tell if any one individual weather event is caused by climate change" is receding from use in discussions by climate scientists. The reasoning; the convincingly strong circumstantial evidence of a substantially increasing number of unprecedented weather events. Combine this with consistent projections for over twenty years telling us that the weather would become more extreme with climate warming and one can make the leap and associate these things with climate change.

The reason that climate scientists could not previously say with exact certainty whether or not any one event was caused by climate change was the lack of data. Science is a statistical game. One has to have lots of data to be sure of their findings. This is why, in the 1980s, climate scientists were unsure whether or not climate change was real and or caused by humans. They said that it would be 20 or 30 years before we could collect enough data to know for sure. Now it has been 20 or 30 years and we have that data and we know for sure and climate scientists are saying so.

But we still have this problem with all of the snowpocalypses and snowmegeddons, unprecedented droughts, fires and floods, and uhm, all those hurricanes in 2005. But the tide is turning. There are two things going on here. Enough data is accumulating to give some confidence to the suggestion. But maybe what is more profound, more and more scientists are saying that circumstantial evidence is enough. It's good enough to send a murderer to the death chamber for goodness sakes, shouldn't it be good enough to help us define policy and get something down about the grave risks of uncontrolled climate change?

Kevin Trenberth is head of the Climate Analysis Section at the USA National Center for Atmospheric Research. He was a lead author of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Scientific Assessment of Climate Change (see IPCC Fourth Assessment Report) and serves on the Scientific Steering Group for the Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) program. In addition, he serves on the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Programme, and has made significant contributions to research into El Niño-Southern Oscillation. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2000, awarded the Jule G. Charney Award from the American Meteorological Society and the NCAR Distinguished Achievement Award in 2003. (Wikipedia October 17, 2011)

Trenberth says that our warming atmosphere warms the oceans. Warmer water and a warmer atmosphere contribute to evaporation. With more moisture in the air, storms are bigger. At the same time, the increased intensity of storms influences weather adjacent to the storm. Atmospheric circulations grow stronger. The jet stream is enhanced. All of these things not only increase the amount of extreme weather like storms, tornadoes, hurricanes and floods, but they increases the intensity of snowstorms and droughts and wind storms and floods and all. Think of a warmer planet creating more extreme weather similarly to what happens when you stir up a fire ant bed with a stick. No, really. A little energy added to that ant mound allows an explosive feedback reaction to occur in a very similar way to adding a little energy to our atmosphere.

Specifically, ocean waters are about one degree warmer F than in the 1970s. This means that the air is four percent wetter than before. The extra heat then, like a pot of water on the stove -- the warmer it gets the more convection there is in the pot -- creates more convection in the atmosphere. So we get a double whammy. This is what the models predicted and this is what we got. It's simple physics and finally, climate scientists are backing away form their standard statistical evaluation procedures and recognizing that what they have been predicting for over two decades (actually three now) has finally happened.

The unusually wet monsoon in Pakistan in 2010 that created so much unprecedented flooding blocked moisture from getting to central Russia where we would up having, what a Wunderground meteorologist called a 15,000 year heat wave. The enhanced Beaufort High north of Canada in the Arctic Ocean energized the jet stream and pushed all those snowtastrophes down into the U.S. Northeast and northern Europe for the last several years. The examples are everywhere. The European heat wave that killed 30,000 in 2003. That extraordinary Hurricane year in 2005. The never before seen flooding in the Midwest this year and all the tornadoes. And right here in my backyard, a totally unprecedented heat wave capping a third drought in six years and resulting in the lowest 12-month rainfall ever recorded. These weather extremes in Texas this year contributed to the destruction of thousands of homes from wildfire and $5.2 billion in drought damages all together; so far.

On top of this we have had ten extreme weather disasters in the U.S. that topped a billion dollars each this year. This is three times the average where we have seen 110 billion dollar events (adjusted) in the last 31 years. The old yearly record was nine set in 2008 and 8 in 1998. The next ranked years were six billion dollar events in 2006 and 2009 and five in 2005 and 2007. Over half of the billion dollar weather events of the last 31 years have happened since the turn of the century. The total losses this year are $49 billion (so far.) Here's the list from the National Climatic Data Center (see also August 8, 2011):

1. Upper Midwest flooding, summer: Melting of an above-average snowpack across the northern Rocky Mountains, combined with above-average precipitation, caused the Missouri and Souris rivers to swell beyond their banks across the Upper Midwest. An estimated 11,000 people were forced to evacuate Minot, N.D., due to the record high  level of the Souris River. Numerous levees were breached along the Missouri River, flooding thousands of acres of farmland. The flooding, which is ongoing, has caused more than $2 billion in damages.

2.  Mississippi River flooding, spring-summer: Persistent rainfall (nearly triple the normal precipitation amounts in the Ohio Valley), combined with melting snowpack, caused historical flooding along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. The region suffered $2 billion to $4 billion in losses. At least two people died.

3. Southern Plains/Southwest drought, heat wave and wildfires, spring-summer: Drought, heat waves, and wildfires scorched through Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, southern Kansas, western Arkansas and Louisiana this year. In Texas and Oklahoma, respectively, 75 percent and 63 percent of range and pasture conditions were classified as "very poor" as of mid-August. Wildfire fighting costs for the region are about $1 million per day. Well over $5 billion in damage has been done so far, with over 2,000 homes and structures lost.

4. Midwest/Southeast tornadoes, May 22-27: Central and southern states saw approximately 180 twisters and 177 deaths within a week . A tornado rated EF-5 on the tornado damage scale struck Joplin, Mo., resulting in at least 141 deaths, making it the deadliest single tornado to strike the United States since modern tornado record keeping began in 1950. The total losses were greater than $7 billion.

5. Southeast/Ohio Valley/Midwest tornadoes, April 25-30: This outbreak of tornadoes over central and southern states led to 327 deaths. Of those fatalities, 240 occurred in Alabama. The deadliest of the estimated 305 tornadoes in the outbreak was an EF-5 that hit northern Alabama, killing 78 people. Several major metropolitan areas were directly affected by strong tornadoes, including Tuscaloosa, Birmingham and Huntsville, Ala., and Chattanooga, Tenn. Total losses exceeded $9 billion.

6. Midwest/Southeast tornadoes, April 14-16: An outbreak over central and southern states produced an estimated 160 tornadoes. Despite the large overall number of tornadoes, few were classified as intense, with just 14 EF-3 --and no EF-4 or EF-5 -- tornadoes identified. Total losses were greater than $2 billion. Thirty-eight people died, 22 of them in North Carolina.

7. Southeast/Midwest tornadoes, April 8-11: An outbreak of tornadoes over central and southern states saw an estimated 59 tornadoes. Total losses were greater than $2.2 billion.

8.` Midwest/Southeast tornadoes, April 4-5: An outbreak of tornadoes over central and southern states saw an estimated 46 tornadoes. Total losses were greater than $2.3 billion. Nine people died.

9. Groundhog Day blizzard, Jan 29-Feb 3: A large winter storm hit many central, eastern and northeastern states. Chicago was brought to a virtual standstill when 1 to 2 feet (0.3 to 0.6 meters) of snow fell across the city. Total losses were greater than $2 billion. The snowstorm killed 36 people.

10. Hurricane Irene, August 20-29, 2011 Minimal Category 1 hurricane makes landfall over coastal NC and moved northward along the Mid-Atlantic Coast (NC, VA, MD, NJ, NY, CT, RI, MA, VT) causing torrential rainfall and flooding across the Northeast. Wind damage in coastal NC, VA, and MD was moderate with considerable damage resulting from falling trees and power lines, while flooding caused extensive flood damage across NJ, NY, and VT. Over seven million homes and businesses lost power during the storm. Numerous tornadoes were also reported in several states further adding to the damage. Over $10.0 billion in damages/costs; at least 45 deaths

Geologic Society of America press release: http://www.geosociety.org/news/pr/11-69.htm

Billion Dollar U.S. Weather/climate Disasters, National Climatic
Data Center, http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/reports/billionz.html

October 9, 2011 RAIN ! ! !  We had 2.5 inches at the airport and an inch an a half in Oak Hill! The last time we had more than a nickel's worth of rain in Oak Hill was the middle of June -- four months ago!

October 8, 2011 Welcome to Climate Change --  This is an article that I wrote for the Sierra Club Central Texas Chapter newsletter; the Austin Sierran.

Welcome to Climate Change
 
If this is not climate change, then this is exactly what climate change will be in as little as a decade. What has been happening in Texas, with these unprecedented (in time frames that matter) droughts and wildfires, is exactly what the climate scientists have been warning us about for over twenty years. We have been building up to this point since about the turn of the century, and now ecosystems have tipped over the edge. Climate feedbacks have kicked in hard.
 
A half billion trees may have died already and that many more may die in the next five years from the damage that has already been done. These are the trees that have died in the drought, not the fires. The first of this series of drought in 2005/6 was just classified as extreme. The last two have been one category worse than extreme - the exceptional category. The last 12 months were drier than the worst 12 months of the great drought of the 1950s.  Worse, it’s hotter now. Heat increases evaporation disproportionately intensifying the effects of drought. In other words, the same drought is much worse if it is only a little hotter.
 
Trees started dying from the drought in 2005/6. The die-off became really bad in 2009 when broad swaths of the countryside west and east of Austin turned brown and failed to turn green again in the spring. Trees damaged from just one of these droughts can remain weak and susceptible to disease or dieback for a decade or more after the drought. The little root hairs on tree roots that soak up water take a long time to grow back. West of Fredericksburg for 100 miles to the edge of the forest the desert has arrived. Fully half of the trees in that region are defoliated from drought (only a small amount is from oak wilt.) The fate of many of these trees is sealed, but there is hope that rain will return fast enough to make a difference for some. 
 
The total number of fires in Texas since November 2010 (through September 20) is 22,790 totaling 3,759,331 acres. This exceeds the previous record of 2.1 million acres, set in just 2005/6, by 80 percent. We almost doubled the last record, set just five years ago. Thirty-three percent of U.S. wildland fires this year have been in Texas. The number of Texas fires this year is 61 percent greater (so far) than the 10-year national average for the entire United States. Six of the ten largest wildfires in Texas history have occurred in 2011.
 
Sure, there have been bigger droughts and bigger fires in the early 1900s or the 1800s or the 1300 hundreds or 3,000 year BC, but our complicated society did not evolve back then.  We do not have the water to support our region today. This is why we have water use restriction in effect now, and last summer and every summer since the turn of the 21st century.
 
Do those bigger droughts in past matter?  Not one bit unless one uses that knowledge to understand the droughts and other really serious impacts allowed by drought that will happen right here, starting now. This is exactly what our climate scientists have been doing for these last twenty or thirty years that they have been warning us that these things would become the normal on a warmer planet.
 
In June 2009, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, founded by Ronald Reagan, published a report that tells us that by 2080, Austin will see an average of 90 to 120 days of 100 degree weather every year -- ten times more than today’s average of 12 days per year. And this evaluation was done based on one of the middle of the road scenarios. We are currently smack-dab in the middle of the worst-case scenario of the climate models. FYI: the Sonoran Desert Research Station in Arizona, the one with the giant Saguaro cactus, has an average of 87 days every year where the temperature tops 100 degrees.
 
A paper in Geophysical Research Letters in July 2010 (Diffenbaugh and Ashfaq) tells us that climate conditions will continue to rapidly worsen in the interior of North America and especially the West. The worsening will be so rapid that the decade 2020 to 2029 will include three to five droughts as bad as or worse than the worst drought that we have seen since 1951 (like what we just had.)
 
A report out of the National Climatic Data Center in February 2011 (Dia) tells us that beginning in just 19 years (2030) Dust Bowl conditions will be the average climate condition across much of the interior of the U.S. By 2060, much of the interior of the nation will be two to three times as bad as the Dust Bowl with some areas four to five times more extreme than the Dust Bowl.
 
If you think I am trying to scare you, you are wrong. Projecting the second year of this current drought similar to or worse than what we have just experienced, with a growing La Nina and Lake Travis at 38 percent of capacity right now -- that’s scary. Lake Travis was 100 percent full just 16 months ago. Travis is at its third lowest level or as low as it has been in 47 years. The only reason that it is not the lowest level ever though, is that prior to 47 years ago Lake Travis was used extensively for hydropower generation. This has not been done since that time.
 
What are we going to do?  Getting through the drought and fires is very important. This situation is extremely dangerous. Trim your trees, police your underbrush, move that firewood pile away from the house, get your valuables together in a “go-bag.” The threat of suburban and even urban firestorms, as demonstrated in Bastrop last month and accidentally predicted, to the weekend -- by our State Climatologist -- is real and it is not likely to get better for another year. The future is here now. We must change the evolution of our society fast, before we ruin completely out of water. Prehistory tells us that these abrupt climate changes can be exceedingly violent.

This is no longer business as usual. Water use restrictions will not meet this challenge alone. We must act now to convince our leaders that this is not just another in a long string of extraordinary weather events that we cannot yet blame on climate change. If we do not immediately change our habits and lifestyles, we will run out of water. Our forests are already dying because they have run out of water.
 
Now: if you have read this far, you deserve a break. The bigger picture is a little more comforting than what is happening in our region today. I just finished another book by Dr. Richard Alley, one of the pivotal climate scientists of our time. Professor Alley tells us in Earth, the Operators Manual, that fixing our climate will be no more difficult or costly than creating our society’s wastewater collection and treatment infrastructure. Cleaning up human waste took about 100 years and so will fixing our climate. It took about 1 percent of global GDP to install our wastewater infrastructure and this is close enough to the latest economic analyses of dealing with climate change to make the comparison valid.
 
But like our climate scientists have been warning us for twenty years or more now, if we do not act now, the costs and impacts will only become greater.
 

October 7, 2011 Unprecedented Arctic Ozone Destruction:  The Antarctic ozone hole was caused by man-made emissions of "ozone depleting chemicals."  When we realized that Earth was in grave danger because of the great threat to our ozone layer that these emissions presented, we the people of this planet agreed to do something about it. A treaty was formed called the Montreal Protocol. It was ratified in 1989.

The media these days say that atmospheric scientists say that we have likely stabilized our ozone troubles and we can expect to see a slow improvements over the next couple of decades. But this is not really what the climate science tells us. Yes, we have stabilized emissions of ozone depleting chemicals, but the simple facts of climate science tell us that fewer ozone depleting chemicals will have greater impacts to the ozone layer as the planet continues to warm.

The ozone depleting chemical reaction happens at the coldest time of the year in the coldest place on the planet. The colder it is the stronger the reaction. The reason that it has only happened in Antarctica, or at least that the ozone depletion at the North Pole has always paled in comparison to the South Pole, is that it simply does not get as cold at the North Pole than it does in the South.

So if Earth is warming, why are we even worried about ozone depletion and why are we having an ozone hole form over the Arctic where it is not as cold as it the Antarctic?

The answer has to do with basic climate science. The way that greenhouse gases warm the planet is they trap heat. They trap heat in the troposphere, where most of the greenhouse gases can be found. The troposphere is the "active" layer of our atmosphere, or the layer where all of our weather can be found. The troposphere is that part of our sky below about 58,000 feet, or 35,000 to 40,000 feet at the poles.  You can actually see the bottom of the stratosphere sometimes when big thunderstorms form. The typical anvil head that forms on top of big storms is where the upward convection of the storm is stopped against the bottom of the stratosphere. The "ozone" layer then is way up there in the stratosphere. Because extra heat is being trapped in the troposphere, that heat does not make it up to the stratosphere and the stratosphere cools. This is normal climate science, it has been in the science discussion for decades and the models predict it famously.  So, hey Republicans, here is another way that global warming actually makes it colder!