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. 

Climate Discovery Chronicles

New Home for Climate Discovery!

Hola Friends: 

Please visit the new home for Climate Discovery Chronicles Breaking News. It's called Climate Discovery at: www.climatediscovery.com I am in the process of migrating the archives. The new site includes all new posts, beginning November 1 with a piece about how Superstorm Sandy was indeed caused by climate change as per research from last March (InSandyty).

The new site is comment capable so we can discuss, you can leave a comment or my favorite--you can help spread the outreach by relating climate change news to the rest of us. I have also started loading up a ton of images from my climate change exploration expeditions.

Thanks and, watch your carbon footprint (and don't forget to "like" the new site if you are Facebook literate!),

As always--tell your friends,

Bruce Melton PE

Little Ice Age moraines at Kangerlussuaq’s Point 660: Foreman et al., Little Ice Age and neoglacial landforms at the Inland Ice margin, Isunguata Sermia, Kangerlussuaq, west Greenland, Boreas, Volume 36, Issue 4, pages 341–351, November 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00173130601173301

October 1, 2012 SMASHED AGAIN! Arctic Sea Ice Extents AND My First Near-term Climate Change Forecast: Blizztastrophes, Devicestation, Blizery and Snowtality -- Arctic sea ice has smashed its last smashed record by a margin nearly as great as the previous smashing. The minimum Arctic sea ice record set in 2007 was widely believed to be a freak, caused by freak weather conditions. It shattered the previous record by 22 percent.  This year's record shattered the 2007 record by 18 percent. Bigger yet, this years record shattering comes after an "average" summer and the Barents and Kara Seas temps were even cooler than normal. Contrast this with 2007 when temps were much warmer than normal and wind conditions bunched up the ice and pushed it out of the Arctic into the Greenland Sea.

Maslowski's prediction is coming true (see September 10, 2010). Arctic sea ice is in a freefall and we will see ice free conditions in the summertime in the Arctic before 2020 (right click images for larger versions). In reality, summer sea ice in the Arctic is so rotten in mid summer now that it is no impediment to shipping (see also September 10, 2010).

Avery important piece of climate science kicks in now that there is so much more open water in the Arctic. It's the open Arctic ocean feedback. What this does is it supercharges the winter atmosphere with moisture while the Arctic Ocean has yet to freeze over.  And the lower the extents record in the fall, the longer the Arctic Ocean stays open into the following winter. Year before last it set the longest open water record extending into January before ice up--a full month longer than ever before recorded.

All of this energy in the form of heat and water vapor creates berserk weather patterns that shift Arctic weather further south on the jet stream as we saw in 2005/6, 2007/8 and 2009/10 and 2010/11. Even though warm for Arctic standard, theses blizzards are still way cold for us down here in the States. (See February 10, 2010 and December 10, 2010)

So my first prediction for a near-term extreme climate change caused weather event is (are) snowpocalypses and snowmeggedons blizardaroos and what was it it--total devicestation. just wait till we get the big bad-ass ice storm that puts the Canadian ice storm of 1998 when 5 inches accumulated in some places. Expect the berserk winter weather in the U.S Northeast, Northeast Canada and Northern and Central Europe.  Freak winter weather could show up anywhere, but these seem to be the preferred areas.

So we had "normal" to colder than normal weather this summer with no abnormal winds pushing the ice around like crazy and we still smashed the previous record to smash all records. Why is this? It's because of the feedback. Normal winter conditions in the Arctic will grow about 6 feet of ice per winter. As the ice thickens, the relatively warm ocean below keeps it from getting much thicker faster. But every year it can add six feet if it does not melt. Here's the problem: lots of ice is melting every year, far more than normal. 

Since just before the turn of the century we have been melting more ice every summer than can be replaced every winter. It's a chain reaction. Less sea ice in the summer means longer till freezeup in the winter, which allows less time to grow thick winter ice, which melts more rapidly every summer  because it is thinner, which allows more heat to build up in the Arctic Ocean every winter, which further increases the time to freezeup and the dance continues in a replicating spiral that falls faster and faster every year until BOOM! It's all gone.

The results are that not only is Arctic sea ice coverage at an all-time low, but Arctic sea ice volume is at an all time low too. Look at the graphic titled Arctic Sea Ice Age. It's easy to see the domino effect in action here. Every year it get's warmer, or almost every year. The warming feeds back into less ice in winter which dominoes into a longer open water summer season which warms more ocean water pushing freezeup farther and farther into winter.

Looking at how strange these winters have been lately, we had a snowtastic year in 2004 in Texas when we saw a big snowstorm on the Texas coast. Eight inches of snow fell in my favorite place to get into the coastal Texas wilderness by boat: Port O'Connor.  Victoria, about 40 miles north of Port O'Connor, had 18 inches. The year 2004 had the tenth lowest sea ice extents measured in the Arctic since record keeping began in 1979. 2002 was the ninth lowest. Every year since 2004 has seen a lower sea ice coverage than 2002. The year 2003 was only slightly higher than 2002 and 2004.

This storm was a rarity indeed. It was the first time in recorded history for almost every recording station on the Texas coast to have a white Christmas. In Victoria and Corpus, their 13 and 5.2 inch totals respectively were more than all previous snowfalls since the 19th century combined. Brownsville had 1.5 inches, more than any snow event there in 105 years.

If these extreme events were to never happen again the deniers and delayers would be correct: climate change would be a hoax. But the high temperature records continue to recur at a rate that is twice as frequent as low temperature records.  Arctic sea ice continues its fall over the brink. Greenland's 97 percent surface melt may have been similar to events over the last 2,000 years that happen every 80 to 300 years, but now we have been told by some of the smartest people in the world that our climate has changed.

They have been telling us for 20 years that our climate would change if we did not reduce emissions, and the longer we delayed the quicker the changes would come, the more extreme would be those changes and the faster our would climate change in the future.

As just one example, Arctic sea ice is disappearing 70 years ahead of schedule and the list of other climate change impacts already happening far ahead of schedule is long and wearisome. The image below is based on the 2007 record. This years record was 3.61 million square kilometers. On the graph below this is 4.89 million square kilometers below the 0.0 arbitrary baseline.

And as a corollary-Antarctic Sea Ice; this year we again saw a record in Antarctic sea ice only it's another maximum sea ice record. What you say? Shouldn't Antarctic sea ice be shrinking on a warmer planet? I've written about this several times. Because the Antarctic is land surrounded by sea vs. sea surrounded by land at the North Pole, climate change affects the South Pole differently. Temperatures down there are stable to slightly rising, nowhere near approaching melt across such a large area as Greenland saw this year, but other aspects of the climate down there have changed.

The winds have increased and changed in direction somewhat. amoung many other things, this spreads the ice out farther, increasing sea ice coverage--even on a warmer planet. It's just that Antarctica is soooo dang cold, a little warming doesn't mean much.  BUT! The higher winds are is mixing more warmer water with the frigid Southern Ocean water. Ice loss in Antarctica has caught up with that in Greenland simply because the oceans are warmer down there now. Much of the ice loss in the Antarctic is now coming from the bottom of ice shelves that are much more numerous down yonder than at the North Pole. In the 2007 IPCC though, Antarctica was not supposed to start losing ice until beyond the end of the 21st century. Snowfall on the interior of Antarctica (on a warmer planet--remember that warmer air holds more moisture) was supposed to counteract melting around the edges caused by warming. But this has not happened. The melt from below the ice is strong. Antarctica wasn't even supposed to start losing ice until after 2100. Unbelievable!

See Previous Discussions
October 7, 2011--Unprecedented Arctic Ozone Destruction (bottom of this page)

(In the archives at the bottom of this page)
July 15, 2010 Five Big All-time Global Climate Records Broken in June and

December 2, 2009 Antarctic Melt Increases While the Ozone Hole Keeps it Cool 

National Snow and Ice Data Center: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

September 20, 2012: Expect the Unexpected Say Climate Scientists -- Just a quick note. One of the continuous warnings from climate scientists is not continuous drought, warming that makes Minnesota like Texas, floods that rival Noah's, melting permafrost, loss of Arctic sea ice, global economic crippling sea level rise, ocean acidification or any of dozens more; it's "expect the unexpected." One of the biggest examples so far has been the increase in record snowtatstrophes across the U.S. northeast, northern Europe, the British Isles and China. When these things started in 2005 (ish--I think the big Chinese snowpocalypse was a few years earlier) they were widely regarded by the D&D crowd (deniers and delayers) as "the end of global warming." Climate scientists of course new better. Less sea ice in the Arctic meant warmer Arctic storms early in the winter, transferring more energy to the jet stream, pushing these storms farther south as the jet stream buckles increased in size. It took a few years for the science to be done to confirm, but by about 2008, the outreach had been done, and the extremeness of these snowmeggedons had impressed upon the general public this fundamental thing about climate change; "expect the unexpected."

Do climate scientists have any ideas about more of these unexpected things happening--no. Hence, the reason for the statement "expect the unexpected." But I have had a few ideas. Beyond the climate change impacts already happening generations to a century or more ahead of schedule, the Arctic ozone hole is one of these. We have had two significant Arctic ozone loss events in the last five years--expect more, or at least expect the unexpected.  Other things?  A partial collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet tops the list. It's happened before when the global temp was similar or just a wee bit warmer than today. The consequences of course will be globally crippling economic trouble. 

Others?  Insect infestation and disease: Not in humans, at least not that affect you and me. Maybe in developing nations or or third world countries. But the infestations and diseases I am talking about are already evident in our forests across the planet. The pine beetle pandemic which I report about in my documentary What Have We Done, is a prime example. The previous discussion (September 12, 2012) about forest mortality is another. The evaluations of forest mortality across the Rockies of North America do not include tree death because of the pine beetle. They include everything else though--other insect infestations and tree diseases that are now running rampant on a warmer planet. Why are they running rampant? The pine beetle pandemic tells us again. These bark beetle that are the attacker in this pandemic are killed by extreme cold. One of the casualties of global warming is extreme cold at altitude and in northern latitudes. We no longer have the kind of extreme cold that kills these beetles. Combine this with drought, that can be perpetuated even during periods of normal or above normal rainfall because a warmer climate gives us so much more evaporation, and you get heat stress. Stressed trees, just like stressed humans, are more susceptible to disease and infestation. So another great and unexpected thing that we will almost certainly see happening in the very near future is the migration of the mountain pine beetle into areas of eastern Canada, the northeastern U.S. and even the southeastern U.S. These areas have never before seen this beetle and there are no natural defenses against its attack.

What Have We Done a documentary about the 62 million acre pine beetle pandemic in the Rockies of North America.

September 12, 2012 Canadian Boreal Forest Mortality is Already Ten Times Higher than Normal, In a similar study in the Rockies, Four to Five Times Higher Mortality than Normal: The Canadian boreal forest is that northern area of Canada where almost nobody lives. It extends north through some of the wildest lands ever known to the arctic tundra. Under traditional warming scenarios, the boreal forest, and most forests of the world are "fertilized" by extra carbon dioxide and grow faster. This CO2 fertilization effect was supposed to last far into the 21st century or even beyond before warming creates a hostile environment that overwhelms the CO2 fertilization effect and begins to harm forests. The Canadian boreal forest contains 30 percent of the world's boreal forests and is larger than the remaining Amazon rain forest.

The boreal forest or taiga covers ten percent of Earth's land area and is 29 percent of Earth's total forest cover. It contains almost twice the carbon of tropical forests and almost six times the carbon of temperate forests. It surrounds the north pole across Canada, Russia and Scandinavia in an 800 mile wide band of green. It is clearly, relative to climate change, the most important ecosystem on Earth counter to the popular understanding that that the Amazon, or the rain forests are most important. (Not to dis' tropical forests diversity--we are talking about carbon and climate.)

This study was done by researchers at the University of Quebec, Montreal and published in November 2011. The research looked at 96 long term forest study plots all across Canada. Only undisturbed forest plots were evaluated where no logging or forestry practices had ever been undertaken. The minimum forest age was 80 years. None of the forest plots showed any signs of the unprecedented bark beetle infestations now taking place across Canada nor any other of the dozens of maladies present in Canada's forests that have been enhanced by a warming climate. The scientists tracked 22,425 living trees; and their data included a total of 74,556 observations.

The mortality rate was ten times greater in the west beginning at 0.25% per year in 1960, and doubling in twenty years (1980), then increasing five times more in the next 30 years (2010). In the east the mortality rate only doubled between 1970 and 2010. Counter intuitively, it was the mid elevation forests that are dying the fastest. Logic (and computer modeling) tells us the highest elevation forests, because they warm more than lower elevations, will experience more stress and thus mortality will increase faster.

Somewhat more predictably however, lower latitude forests are dying faster than higher latitude forests. The reason is likely that those trees further north are already existing on the ragged edge where the Arctic rules. As these climates warm it becomes more habitable, which still does not make much sense because there should then be less mortality; until one recognizes that these forests on the ragged edge exist in a very shallow layer of active soil that thaws for a few months every summer. Beneath is permafrost. With warming the permafrost is melting, but much of the melt is trapped on top of more permafrost. This creates a bog, not a forest and the trees stress and die, even as the temperature becomes more hospitable. So mortality, while increasing, is less than further south, confirming the logic.

So now this is happening generations or even a century ahead of schedule. The same thing is going on in the American West. In a study done by the U.S geologic Society, the U.S. Forest Service, the Universities of British Columbia, Washington, Arizona, Oregon State, Colorado at Boulder and Penn State, published in the journal Science in January 2009.

These researchers found an average increase in mortality of fourth to five times from "normal" in the 1960s. They looked at 58,736 living trees over the study period, and 11,095 died. Seventy-six plots of old growth forest were studied with the minimum tree age of 200 years from all across the American West. 

The researchers ruled out beetle infestation and the other maladies enhancing mortality because of warming. They also ruled out fire, successional dynamics where shade tolerant species dominate,  increasing forest density from fire suppression, and something called the "majestic forest syndrome." This is where really ancient trees, possibly allowed to become over ancient because of forest fire suppress, fall on younger trees causing their deaths.

Regrettably, recruitment rate is failing as well. Normally when a tree dies in the forest, dozens of new trees pop up to replace it. This is happening in only half of the forest plots studied today. The researchers conclude that warming stresses are responsible. As our climate changes, forests are simply evolving to something different from the way they originally evolved in our old climate.

This pervasive increase in mortality dramatically reduces stored carbon. In twenty years, standing carbon is reduced by 50 percent. In thirty years it is reduced by 80 percent. this bodes poorly for the carbon sequestration ability of our world's forests in the short-term.

Peng et al., A drought induced pervasive increase in tree mortality across Canada's boreal forests, Nature Climate Change, Dec_2011.pdf

Mantgem et al., Widespread Increase of Tree Mortality Rates in the Western United States Science Jan 2009.pdf

August 18, 2012 Global Warming Caused Landslide in Alaska? If your read my reporting on mega-tsunamis from March 13, 2011, you know that evidence of astronomically landslides has been recorded in Hawaii and evidence exists around the world of similar events. The evidence shows tsunami debris 1,200 feet above sea level from the last interglacial period 120,000 years ago that was as warm or only about a degree or two warmer than it is today. Modeled tsunami heights reach 2,500 feet.

Marten Geertsema of the ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources  in Prince George, British Columbia, Canada, submitted a report of the incident to the first meeting of the Cold Regions Landslides Network in Harbin China that met July 23-27.

The cause for this one in Alaska, that did not reach sea level and caused no tsunami, was not changing sea level as is likely from Hawaii. The cause of this one, and another one similar a few weeks prior, was possibly permafrost melt.

It happened about half way down the panhandle in southeast Alaska, about 75 miles west northwest from Juneau, on the eastern flank of Lituya Mountain in the Glacier Bay National Park and Wilderness Area on June 11. The event was identified by seismic signals of up to 3.7 on the Richter scale, but the slide itself, because of the remoteness of the region, was not seen until July 9. This is when the photos in this report were taken.

The slide started at about 10,500 feet, fell  over a mile and ran out five and a half miles on the Hopkins Glacier.  The image on the left shows the slide debris on top of the Hopkins glacier. The image on the right is from the photographers airplane (Drake Olson). The slide travelled a mile and a half down the steep mountainside then ran out along the Hopkins Glacier another four miles before coming to a halt. Debris from the slide was scattered 200 feet above the level of the slide deposition zone and included gravel up to 15 inches in diameter, dust up to 1500 feet above the slide zone and fist sized rocks "peppered" in a wide area even higher than this. The flow had such a high velocity that it super elevated the outside of the curves up to 100 feet above the inside.

In the image on the right, on the right hand side of the valley, several (or more) snow slides were triggered by the landslide. Evidence of these snow slides is obvious from the fresh slide fields of snow and ice deposited on top of the landslide debris zone.

We know that the slide originated in a permafrost zone, and we know that high altitude slides are increasing around the world. We know that permafrost melt can be responsible for slides like this. We also know that heavy snowpacks melting rapidly can cause slides like this. And indeed, this year the Glacier Bay area saw heavy snowfall and a rapid melt.

Report: http://www.nps.gov/glba/parknews/upload/2012-Landslide-Report.pdf

August 1, 2012  Greenland Melts--It's NOT About the Past:  It is time we stopped comparing climate change caused weather events with similar events in the past. Our country is suffering through a second year in a row of drought as bad as or worse than the Dust Bowl. Climate scientists say that Dust Bowl drought and heat will be the average condition while you and I are still alive. This means that weather events like the Dust Bowl will become 50 to 100 times more frequent, while you and I are still alive. Considering that a Dust Bowl drought is about a one in a hundred year occurrence, to go from a once in a hundred year thing to a thing that happens every year or two within the time span of several decades, this means, like I have said before--if this is not climate change happening right now, this is exactly what climate change will be like in the very near future.

The fall season may hold really important problems too. Many creatures (like butterflies) use much more energy in early hibernation in the fall--as much as four times more than in deep winter. This is because they go through different types of dormancy and the early dormancy is more energy intensive. It is so much so that one day of energy use in fall dormancy is equal to four days of dormancy energy use in the winter. A late fall may mean curtains for these creatures. If they are butterflies or moths, if the energy use requirements in the fall exceed the normal amount of energy that those creatures evolved with, then they perish.  The nourishment that these larvae produce feed many other creatures and those too may be in peril if other sources of energy (food ) are not available, say because they migrate by day length and warmer temperatures means spring starts much earlier.

In the Rockies they have been tracking the onset of the spring melt for 70 years. This is very reliable indicator of the very beginning of spring. What has been found, all across the Rockies, is spring is coming up to a month earlier than normal. This leaves a lot more summer out there to evaporate water out of the environment. Becuase the West is mostly an arid region, this is not good news. The warm season, especially the hot summer period, can evaporate ten times more (really a lot more than that) water than evaporates in winter. This means drought can persist even with greater than normal rainfall.

So now that I have rattled off a few; a big question arises. Can we blame the changes in this plant phenology on climate change? The answer is yes. The link between plant flowering and temperature is very strong. So if one "believes" in climate science, the answer is "yes." Likewise, species migrations are linked as well. When the American robin's wintering grounds experience early spring and they fly north and there is still five feet of snow on the ground in their summering grounds in the Rockies, something is amiss. That something is early warming and again, belief in climate science points the finger at climate change.

NOAA Factoids for 2011:

-31degrees F: the record low temperature reported in Nowata, Oklahoma, on February 10, 2011, which is the coldest temperature on record for the state. (All extremes are amplified and even though many more high temperature records are being set than low records, some of the low records still being set are pretty fantastic.)

3 Million+: the number of residents who lost power during an unseasonably early nor’easter storm that spanned West Virginia to Maine (Oct 29-31).
 
343: the largest outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded (April 25-28), which left a deadly path of destruction from Alabama to Virginia.
 
199: the number of confirmed tornadoes across the Southeast on April 27, the most on record for any single day in the United States!
 
1 Million+: the number of acres burned across just Texas, during a record wildfire season for the Southern Plains states.
 
3 Billion: the potential cost (dollars) to rebuild Joplin, Mo., after it endured the single costliest tornado in U.S. history on May 22. It was the 7th deadliest tornado the U.S. has seen, with 158 lives lost.  (The rest of the story here.)
 
-7.97: the value of the Palmer Hydrological Drought Index (PHDI) for Texas in September that indicated the most intense drought to affect the state in 117 year period of record. (See the rest of the story here.)
 
300 percent: three times the amount of average precipitation (mainly rainfall) in the Ohio Valley that caused historic flooding along the Mississippi river.
 
19: the number of tropical storms in the Atlantic this year, the 3rd busiest season since record keeping began in 1851.

From the Guardian in the U.K.:

"Drought zones have been declared across much of England and Wales, yet Scotland has just registered its wettest-ever May. The warmest British spring in 100 years followed one of the coldest UK winters in 300 years. June in London has been colder than March. February was warm enough to strip on Snowdon, but last Saturday it snowed there. Last year, more than 2million sq km of eastern Europe and Russia scorched. An extra 50,000 people died as temperatures stayed more than 6C above normal for many weeks, crops were devastated and hunderds of giant wild fires broke out. The price of wheat and other foods rose as two thirds of the continent experienced its hottest summer in around 500 years. In Queeensland, Australia, an area the size of Germany and France was flooded in December and January in what was called the country's "worst natural disaster". It cost the economy up to A$30bn (£19.5bn) In China, a "once-in-a-100-years" drought in southern and central regions has this year dried up hundreds of reservoirs, rivers and water courses."

Oxfam reported that while the number of "geo-physical" disasters (such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions) has remained more or less constant, those caused by flooding and storms have increased from around 133 a year in 1980s to more than 350 a year now.(10) The Executive summary of this reports states: "There is an upwards trend in the number of reported disasters. This is chiefly driven by a steep rise in reported floods in all regions and, to a lesser extent, storms in Africa and the Americas. When weather-related disasters are analyzed separately, the average rate of increase is 4.1 per cent per year for the sample of countries which have a first disaster reported from 1980 (a rise of 233 per cent over 30 years), and 4.9 per cent per year for countries whose first report was from 1990 or before (159 per cent over 20 years). The rise in the number of reported disasters, and of floods in particular, is broadly supported by independent data."

All total, 133 disasters were reported in 1980, whereas in recent years it has become the norm for over 350 disasters to be reported annually. Yet not all types of disaster are increasingly reported: the number of geophysical events and droughts has remained more or less stable over time, while there has been a sharp increase in the number of reported floods and storms and, to a lesser extent, in the number of other weather-related events such as wildfires and extreme temperatures."

Swiss Re, which last month estimated losses from natural disasters have risen from about $25billion a year in the 1980s to $130 billion a year today

Munich Re also shows undeniable increase in the trend of losses. One note about these insurer statistics too. This is the most rock solid of conservative economic evaluations that you will find. When the insurance companies are telling us that natural disasters are increasing and it's not the population, it's a sure thing. (11)

1) Hansen, et al., Global climate changes as forecast by GISS three dimensional model, Journal of Geophysical Research, August 1988. http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1988/1988_Hansen_etal.pdf

2) Min S., X. Zhang, F. Zwiers, and G. Hegerl, 2011: Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes. Nature 2011 Volume: 470, Pages: 378–381. doi:10.1038/nature09763

3) Trenberth, The Russian Heat Wave and Other Climate Extremes of 2010, 2011 GSA Annual Meeting in Minneapolis (9–12 October 2011)  http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2011AM/finalprogram/abstract_190757.htm

4) Hansen communication: Oct. 1, 2010: How Warm Was This Summer? Discussion of recent global temperatures and near-term projections. http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/

5) Broeker, Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?, Science, 1975.

6) Stott et al., Human contribution to the European heatwave of 2003, Nature, August 2005.

7) Rahmstorf, S. and D. Coumou, 2011, Increase in extreme events in a warming world. Proceeding of the National Academy of Science, 108 (44) 17905-17909, doi 10.1073/pnas.1101766108.

8) Christidis et al., The role of human activity in the recent warming of extremely warm daytime temperatures. Journal of Climate, 2011. http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2011JCLI4150.1

9) Meehl, et al., Relative increase of record high maximum temperatures compared to record low minimum temperatures in the U. S., Geophysical Research Letters, December 2009.

10) Jennings,Times Bitter Flood, Trends in natural disasters, Oxfam, May 2011. http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/policy/conflict_disasters/downloads/rr-times-bitter-floods-270511-en.pdf

11) Munich Re http://www.munichre.com/app_pages/www/@res/pdf/media_relations/press_dossiers/hurricane/2011-half-year-natural-catastrophe-review-usa_en.pdf

March 25, 2012 Early Spring Drives Butterfly Decline -- From NSF "Early snowmelt caused by climate change in the Colorado Rocky Mountains snowballs into two chains of events: a decrease in the number of flowers, which, in turn, decreases available nectar. The result is decline in a population of the Mormon Fritillary butterfly, Speyeria mormonia. Using long-term data on date of snowmelt, butterfly population sizes and flower numbers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Carol Boggs, a biologist at Stanford University, and colleagues uncovered multiple effects of early snowmelt on the growth rate of an insect population. "Predicting effects of climate change on organisms' population sizes will be difficult in some cases due to lack of knowledge of the species' biology," said Boggs, lead author of a paper reporting the results online in this week's journal Ecology Letters. Taking into account the butterfly's life cycle and the factors determining egg production was important to the research. Butterflies lay eggs (then die) in their first summer; the caterpillars from those eggs over-winter without eating and develop into adults in the second summer. In laboratory experiments, the amount of nectar a female butterfly ate determined the number of eggs she laid. This suggested that flower availability might be important to changes in population size. Early snowmelt in the first year leads to lower availability of the butterfly's preferred flower species, a result of newly developing plants being exposed to early-season frosts that kill flower buds. The ecologists showed that reduced flower--and therefore nectar--availability per butterfly adversely affected butterfly population growth rate. Early snowmelt in the second year of the butterfly life cycle worsened the effect, probably through direct killing of caterpillars during early-season frosts. The combined effects of snowmelt in the two consecutive years explained more than four-fifths of the variation in population growth rate. "Because species in natural communities are interconnected, the effects of climate change on any single species can easily be underestimated," said Saran Twombly, program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research. "This study combines long-term, data models, and an understanding of species interactions to underscore the complex effects climate change has on natural populations." "It's very unusual for research to uncover a simple mechanism that can explain almost all the variation in growth rate of an insect population," said David Inouye, a biologist at the University of Maryland and co-author of the paper. Indeed, "one climate parameter can have multiple effects on an organism's population growth," Boggs said. "This was previously not recognized for species such as butterflies that live for only one year. "We can already predict that this coming summer will be a difficult one for the butterflies," she said, "because the very low snowpack in the mountains this winter makes it likely that there will be significant frost damage." "Long-term studies such as ours are important to understanding the 'ecology of place,' and the effects of weather and possible climate change on population numbers," said Inouye. "This research is critical to assessing the broader effects of weather on an ever-changing Earth," he said. "By facilitating long-term studies, field stations such as the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory are an invaluable asset." Stanford University's Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education also funded the work."

Article: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=123520&org=NSF&from=home

Images: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_images.jsp?cntn_id=123520&org=NSF

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=123520

March 21, 2012: Thoreau's Woodland is no More -- Henry David Thoreau, Concord Massechusetts, Walden Pond. Among temperature and non temperature dependent flowering species, climate change has affected and will likely continue to shape the pattern of species loss in Thoreau's woods. Species that have decreased greatly in abundance include anemones, buttercups, asters, campanulas, bluets, bladderworts, dogwoods, lilies, mints, orchids, roses, saxifrages, and violets. (1)

All total, Thoreau documented 473 species between 1852–1858. reliable temperature records did not exists in the mid 19th century at Walden pond, but over the past 100 years the temperature there has risen by 4.3 degrees. Flowering plants are blooming on average 7 days later than in Thoreau's time. (2) 

Twenty seven percent of the plants studied by Thoreau have become extinct and 36 percent are now so rare that they may soon become extinct. More northerly species have decreased in abundance in relation to southerly species.  (3)

The work by Willis et al., from Harvard, Boston University and Yale, is the first to report that extinction risk due to climate change is directly influenced by climate change. Plants whose flowering times are not based on temperature (i.e. daylight length flowering species) are also decreasing in abundance.

The authors go on to relate their findings to global patterns of species extinction due to climate change. "These results represent a link between the impacts of climate change on local community composition and broader patterns of taxonomic selectivity observed in the fossil record during past mass extinction events." (4, 5)

1. Willis et al., Phylogenetic patterns of species loss in Thoreau's woods are driven by climate change, PNAS, July 2008.

2. Miller-Rushing and Primack,  Global warming and flowering times in Thoreau's concord: A community perspective, Ecology, 2008.

3. Willis et al., Phylogenetic patterns of species loss in Thoreau's woods are driven by climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A., 2008. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/10/24/0806446105.abstract?sid=d1511438-5704-4d47-9188-bae1000a8d80

4. McElwain and Punyasena, Mass extinction events and the plant fossil record, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 2007.
5. Tannner et al., Assessing the record and causes of LateTriassic extinctions, Earth Science Reviews, 2004.

March 17, 2012 Impacts of a Little More Than Three Feet of Sea Level Rise This Century: New Maps – Pick an amount of sea level increase, any old amount will do. The minimum is the IPCC estimate of about 15 inches (a half meter). This of course does not include any increase in discharge from Greenland and Antarctica above turn of the century levels. It also does not include ocean warming above the middle of the road A1B scenario. Because we are on a much warmer track, ocean expansion will be a lot more, totaling more than 15 inches alone . Current sea level rise estimates this century range from just under a meter to nearly two meters. This amount of rise does not include significant rise from what the ice scientists call “dynamical ice sheet disintegration.”

What this crazy dynamical ice sheet disintegration term means is that sometimes, ice sheets collapse. The ice scientists know it has happened before. They know that it happened last when Earth’s temperature was about what it is now, and they know that sea level jumped ten feet in ten years or less. But the one to two meter sea level rise scenario simply comes from increased melt and increased iceberg discharge.

Without this “dynamical ice sheet disintegration,” the loss of property will be immense. A total of 2150 towns in the U.S. have at least one person living below one meter in elevation. If sea level rises just three feet, 1.5 million housing units will be flooded and 3.7 million people displaced.

The image showing the rise though varies greatly in the amount from place to place. The study looked at 1 meter of sea level rise on average across the U.S.

Our seas do not rise the same everywhere because of ocean currents, land subsidence, crustal rebound and changes in Earth's gravitational field. What you say? As an example, the Pacific Ocean is up to several feet higher than the Atlantic Ocean on average. Ocean currents play a tremendous role in controlling sea level, this is a fairly easy thing to visualize. Point an ocean current at a shoreline and the water piles up. The stronger that current is, the more the water piles up. But gravity plays a role too. The higher the water piles up, the more gravity pulls it back down and the less influence increasing volume of water in the oceans has.

Land subsidence and crustal rebound play a role to. Many places across Earth are subsiding because of various things caused by man and not. Many places on earth are still changing from when the ice age ended. Masses of ice as large as ice sheets depress Earth's surface hundreds of feet. When the Earth's crust goes down in one place, it generally goes up in others. The little squeeze dolls with the pop-out eyes are a good example of this efect. Because the mantle is made of different material that behaves differently under stress, some areas pop-out more than others. 

The great depression in Earth's surface from the northern ice sheet is rebounding too. And it's not just the land under where the ice sheet once was. For hundreds of miles away from the edge of the ice sheet the land was pushed down by the ice and is still rebounding after the melt.

Beyond those hundreds of miles, land is falling because of the land under where the ice sheet was is rising. Think of a gravy ladle and a serving of mashed potatoes. Push the gravy ladle down into the mashed potatoes and the serving of potatoes gets bigger around. But if the mashed potatoes were the Earth's crust, and there was no place for the mashed potatoes to go when the ice sheet gravy ladle pushed down, the mashed potatoes around the edge of the ice sheet would rise--that is, beyond that several hundred mile area away from the edge of the ice sheet that would be dragged down because of the weight of the ice. A good example is the central eastern U.S. coastline. It is still falling quite a bit from the end of the ice age 10,000 years ago.

Even more, all of that ice melting has mass. Mass creates gravity. More mass near the giant ice sheets that can pile up over two miles high creates more gravity in those areas. Gravity affects sea level. So as the ice melts, mass is shifted from the ice sheet and redistributed in much smaller amounts all around the globe as water. This means that the gravity from that mass of ice, once concentrated at the poles, is redistributed around the earth. 

All of these things affect sea level rise. This is really quite an astounding body of work from the last several decades that has looked at how sea level changes. Now we have this current work by Strause and his team that has put all of these things together and modeled the outcome.

Straus et al., Tidally adjusted estimates of topographic vulnerability to sea level rise and flooding for the contiguous United States, Environmental Research Letters, March 2012.

March 15, 2012: Politics and Economics are Public’s Primary Climate Change Cue’s -- In a paper in Climatic Change, Researchers from Drexler University, the University of Montreal and Ohio State have found that politics and economics (unemployment) are the most important things that shape our thoughts about climate change. 

When the economy is tight and or when our politicians are actively advocating for or against climate change science, public opinion shifts the most. The authors looked at science knowledge, extreme weather and even media coverage and these things in general, had little statistical influence on the public’s belief one way or another about climate change.

But when the economy is bad, we are too concerned about where the money is going to come from to worry about the “perceived” threat from climate change. Likewise, when we see our leaders working hard to advance or defeat action on climate change, we change our views to match these actions.  But hurricanes, tornadoes and floods make little difference. It doesn’t seem to matter a great deal how much these extreme weather events are in the media. The number of scientific papers published on climate change doesn’t seem to matter much either.

These two things, politics and the economy though, make the case. Since 1986, nearly 300 public opinion polls have been taken dealing with climate change. The data from this large body of work was evaluated and correlated to things like Copenhagen, the movie The Day After Tomorrow, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, extreme weather outbreaks, media coverage of congressional actions about climate and other similar events.

The authors do admit that even this large amount of data has its flaws. Until recently, thorough, unbiased polls have not been repeated over long enough time frames to come to valid statistical conclusions about the trend of public opinion. They also tell us that in a few more years current work will remedy this situation. Until then, the modeling compiled from this work does have some decent statistical validity.

The authors have developed a Climate Change Threat Index (CCTI) that shows the general sentiment of the public at any given time. From this CCTI, they can map out the different influences in our society and draw conclusions. Those influencing factors have been well identified in previous literature and in addition to the above include: publicly made positions of industry and religious leaders (what they call “elite cues”), climate denier and climate skeptic tactics, increasing drought and temperatures, information deficit—when politics make it “inconvenient” to discuss climate change issues, the inherent difficulty of understanding climate change, limitations of personal experience, and inappropriate mental models (understanding that weather and climate are the same thing), wars and energy prices.

One of the flaws that I see in this work is the lack of any relationship with media coverage, one way or the other. Events like the great tornado outbreaks, floods, snowpocalypses and hurricanes, and climategates of all sorts, failed to move the CCTI in a statistically significant way. But the facts are that these things made no difference. Maybe it is those “inappropriate mental models.” Incomplete knowledge about the difference between weather and climate is a good example.  The inherent difficulty of understanding climate science is another.  Public knowledge simply may not exist in a great enough quantity to evaluate the extreme weather events as being a part of climate change. Especially when so many television weather personalities refuse to become a part of the perceived controversy. Weather extremes today have actually crossed the line into climate change territory, but the same old line about “any one individual weather event not being attributable to climate change” is ever present in the media, even when the extremes have been shown to be significantly caused by climate change.

Some of the tools that the authors used to help compare the data are NOAA’s extreme climate index, the Palmer Drought Severity Index, the number of articles about climate change in the scientific journal Science, the number of articles in 15 major popular scientific magazines, the number of climate change stories on the nightly news and on all of the major networks, the number of climate change stories in the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, U.S. News and World Report … You get the picture.

Amazingly, only a few things other than politics (elite cues) and economics (recession and unemployment) made any difference. One was An Inconvenient Truth and its subsequent Academy Award. The release of major climate assessments and individual articles in popular science magazines had slightly significant impacts. Democrats releasing public statements had about a 30 percent greater impact than did Republican releases.

Of most importance in this study was the finding concerning voting habits of Republicans in the House and Senate. When Republicans made a big deal about climate legislation, public support of climate science fell whereas Democratic voting had no discernible effect.

A personal opinion: The basis of this work looks back decades, but great changes in our climate have come around only in the last several years. It's quite possible that new work on the subject will show an increasing relationship between the overall public perception of climate change as it is related to weather extremes. There has been work done that does look at individual persons impacted by climate extremes and their own individual beliefs about climate change. This work does show a significant relationship that the understanding of climate science does increase with personal impacts of climate extremes, but the number of individuals impacted is small relative to the overall population. As the number of extremes increase and the number of individuals impacted by these extremes increases, it will likely change the general opinions of the overall population.

Brulle et al., Shifting public opinion on climate change: An empirical assessment of factors influencing concern over climate change in the US 2002 to 2010, Climatic Change, Feb 2012.

March 3, 2012: 32 Killed by Tornadoes Yesterday: So Early In the Season -- How many more people will have to die in these unprecedented outbreaks before the delayers get it? It's hard to say. By all (media) accounts, these outbreaks are not as bad as in the past. We have inflation and more people to increase the chance of damage and death. The D&D (delayer and denier) crowd cites these facts religiously. But they don't talk about the earliness of these outbreaks much and they don't talk about the relative number of deaths compared to the pre-early warning system/pre-radar/pre advanced building codes society that has evolved beginning about the time of WWII.

These things are all talked about in depth in the entry for April 29, 2011. Researchers tell us that if today was then, at least for the Oklahoma tornado outbreak in 1999 that killed 36, we can multiply the deaths by about 14 to get a similar amount killed ito back-in-the-day.  So thank goodness 416 people were not killed yesterday as the comparison would tell us.

March 3, 2012  Money, Oil and Money -- British Petroleum supposedly settled their lawsuit with the Gulf Coast yesterday. A paltry $7.8 billion sum was agreed upon, that includes $2.3 billion to continue to help resolve economic issues. Of course, BP reminds us that it has spent more than $22 billion so far, including $8.1 billion in payments to individuals. This is phenomenal amount of Thirty Billion Dollars! And BP says no harm was done to the Gulf.

Jiminy Cricket! I can not even think that high much less understand how much money that is.  We need something to compare it too, and I apologize for veering off into oil and the economy, but there is a madness to my reason. Oil is of course one of the big fossil fuel polluters that we need to target with radical emissions reductions. More importantly, oil is responsible for two and a half times more warming than coal because of the dirty cooling pollutants that coal emits (http://www.meltonengineering.com/It's cars, Not Coal 102610.pdf). So we really need to be leaving the oil in the ground to use another day when we have our atmosphere back under control. But this is not my point.

The issue here is the Grand Deceit being perpetrated on our society by big money. BP denies the problems they caused in the Gulf. What does this mean? It means that the view this $30 billion dollar mountain of money paid, mostly to individuals, as being wrongly done.  They view themselves as the victim of wrongdoing by the public and the U.S. government. That $30 billion is rightly theirs (their shareholders) and they think they should keep it because nothing bad happened in the Gulf because of their unprecedented oil spill disaster.

Then, they post profits for the "disaster year" of 2011.  British petroleum, you know--the guys who tell us the price of oil is so high because of unrest in the Mideast, problems at refineries and shut downs because making gasoline is simply unprofitable anymore with all the government regulations and red tape? These bandits made $40 billion in profits in 2011.

Bandits, liars and thieves. Why is this?  It's because they can.  Greedy corporations and individuals will get away with anything they can get away with including murder (remember the 11 who died that the three parties involved keep blaming each other for?). Our leaders and judges are to blame. Hundreds of millions go to lobbyists to "persuade" lawmakers. Hundreds of millions go to propaganda through Citizens United to fool Americans into believing that BP is not at fault, they are the victim, they are the aggrieved. These efforts have paid off in grand style. The biggest oil spill every recorded was paid off with less than a year's worth of profits.

Please help end corporate influence in lawmaking and advertisement.

February 5, 2012 The Latest Most Accurate Evaluation of Global Temperature -- Here's the latest scientific explanation of global temperature and why there is contention on how much it has warmed. The data below represents the consensus post IPCC 2007. The UAH data is the cherry picked data that folks like Rush Limbaugh and the Cato Institute refer to in their routine attempts at discreditation of climate science. In the raw data it is easy to see that the UAH data represents the least amount of warming and this is because of the way that the data is collected. It does not mean that this data (or any of the other data) is wrong it simply means that it needs more correction than other data. And when I say correction, this is like taking your own body temperature after you have just been out for a brisk walk. Your temperature is elevated for reason after the walk. These reasons are what creates the difference between the UAH data and everybody else. Notice that other sources of data also show differences. The UK Meteorogical Service for example does not consider Arctic temperature change in their work. They do this because there are no temperature reporting stations in the high Arctic. So they ignore this area of the globe and opt to not use other sources besides temperature recording stations to seek out this data. In reality, this area is warming faster than anywhere else as reported in ships records and various other reports of scientific and military efforts, including some satellite data. These sources of data are included in the NCDC and GISS temperature records.

The adjusted data graphic factors out sunspots, El Nino and volcanic aerosols. These are very well known factors that are well accepted in the literature but little known in the public realm.

Now a word about the deniers and delayers telling us this science is bunk because the data only look back to 1979. It is spurious for two reasons. One is that we do not have the robust data to go back further, the analysis could go back much farther but the most accurate and well accepted data begins with the satellite era. The argument that satellite data is wrong has been valid at times but the corrections have been made and those arguments are simply invalid today. From these satellite corrections even the previous satellite data has been corrected, yet the "Voices" don't give a hoot what the subsequent academic evaluation of true skeptical arguments reveals. They just keep trotting out their dated and now invalid talking points. I urge you to read the paper and see for yourself. You are plenty smart enough to evaluate this kind of thing. A concerted effort has been made to communicate these findings in much more palatable language than previously used in academic work. This is quite common across all disciplines of climate science these days.  

One more thing that is not represented here is the Asian Brown Cloud. This massive aerosol temperature mask has a significant cooling effect on Earth that is somewhere around 1.2 degrees F. It can be directly compared to the smog problem in the U.S. that developed after World War II and peaked in the 1970s. The creation of the Clean Air Act by President Nixon helped to vastly reduce the trouble we were having with smog then that had a very measureable impact that caused global temperature to stabilize for thirty years. The Asian Brown Cloud is directly related to the very rapid modernization of Asia in recent years. This modernization is the same kind of thing that happened in the U.S. after WWII, only much bigger. It is still relatively poorly understood, but a much better understanding is available today than just a few years ago. It is quite like that the IPCC will include significant discussion of this mask that approximately equals most of the warming that has happened on Earth since the industrial revolution.

 Paper link: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022/pdf/1748-9326_6_4_044022.pdf

January 29, 2012, The Wall Street Journal “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” Sixteen Deniers Authorities Delegate Delay – These 16 “scientists,” as the Wall Street Journal calls them, have published a letter that has some news for the readers of the WSJ. They tell us that our planet has not warmed  for well over ten years… Which in itself is quite puzzling considering the all-time global high temperature records set in 2005, 2007, 2009 and 2010.

They also tell us that we have seen less warming than the IPCC predicted for the last 22 years. Since 2000 the rate has dropped off a bit, but this has been attributed to many different things including the cool phase of the Pacific Decadel Oscillation, the largest solar spot minimum in 100 years and more La Ninas than El Ninos. In addition, growth in China and India is higher than anticipated. Like the U.S. growth after World War II, when we had very few pollution controls, China and India are producing enormous amounts of aerosols. These aerosols were responsible for about 1.2 degrees of cooling across the planet as of 2008 and China and India barely felt the recession. The unexpected doubling of emissions in 2010 was also the product of this rapid growth along with its disproportionate load of cooling aerosols. Many of our top scientists are quite concerned that the next few years will see a large jump in global temperature. Myself, I am looking for the flip that has been discounted for about two decades now by climate scientists. This is purely a fictional "belief" on my part however as we had 90 days of 100 degree heat here in Austin last year and I may still be somewhat delirious from the heat.

More, the deniers tell us that the observation that the last few years including some of the warmest years on record no more implies future warming than record stock market highs imply a steadily rising future market. True, but when the stock market has been predicted to soar for decades because of rapidly increasing CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere, and when the reasons that the temperature has not soared include the great lag in response time of the equilibrium state of earth, oceans and ice sheets, well, the delayers argument sounds really flat and nasally.

But in addition to the numerous reasons that that the the temperature has not radically increased above the 1998 Super El Nino, and by the way, the Super El Nino was a huge departure much like the year 1900, 1915, 1926, 1944, 1953, 1981 and 1990.  It took years and years for those trends to recover from those spikes. This is why weather, or decades of weather even, can not be compared to climate. After each of these spike years, eventually, in time frames much shorter than climate scientists use to determine climate trends, the temperature climb continued. It will do so shortly, as it has in each of the above cases. Only this time, because the forcing is so much larger, the changes are likely to be much larger when they resume. At least this is what the climate scientists say could be happening in their crystal balls.

As for the attempt by the nasally-sayers in this WSJ article to convince us that CO2 is not a pollutant? Same thing was tried with sulfur and nitrogen oxides and power plant emissions and tailpipe emissions when acid rain was out of control. Notice how we have regained control of acid rain because of NOx and SOx pollution rules?  How about water pollution?  Pre 1970, especially pre 1960, business and industry routinely dumped totally untreated waste into our waterways. There simply were no rules dedicating these untreated wastes as pollutants. (Geeze, back in the 18th century, everyone thought that "night air" was polluted with miasma. This miasma was blamed for all sorts of diseases like cholera, chlamydia and the Black Death. The word miasma comes from the Greek word for pollution.)

Then all the fish started dying in our rivers because the waters became toxic from the unregulated "pollutants" being discharged. Then the Cayahoga River caught on fire. Then President Nixon (a Republican btw) passed the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts and started the EPA. then a whole lot of things were classified as pollutants that were never classified as pollutants before, like lead and cadmium and benzene, particulates (smoke and soot) and PCBs and nuclear waste and chloroflourocarbons, nitrous oxides sulfur dioxides and MTBE and noise pollution and temperature pollution and light pollution and visual pollution (billboards) and, and, and mercury and DDT and Chlordane. Now we have figured out that CO2 is a pollutant. It has nothing to do with its similarity to other pollutants as their nasally arguments attempt to justify -- how similar is lead to DDT, or MTBE; or to noise pollution or nuclear waste or to smoke and soot?  but I seem to have lost my train of thought. I was supposed to be dissecting this Wall Street Journal article.

Next:  the letter says that the warmists have shifted their ploy to one that promotes weather extremes so that any old extreme weather can be attributed to climate change. There has actually been no shift. The projections of greater extremes in weather have been prominent in climate change projections for over two decades. The physics is simple. Warm the pot on the stove and convection currents increase (you can see it in the moving water, it gets faster and faster until it boils). Our atmosphere is no different than the pot on the stove except the convection current s in our atmosphere cause weather (and it's not quite as warm). The stronger the convection current, the stronger the weather, regardless of it being water in a pot or gases in our atmosphere.

Then they try and proclaim that CO2 is not a pollutant. And they are correct. Chromium is a trace element vital to life in trace amounts, but in excess it causes cancer. The excess CO2 in our atmosphere put there by burning fossil carbon (we know this because it can be dated using carbon 14 dating) is about 100 parts per million. Normally, when earth’s atmosphere is in balance with its ocean temperature, we have about 280 ppm in our atmosphere. 250 ppm of gaseous arsenic inhaled for 30 minutes can kill a human outright. Long term exposure to a half a ppm of arsenic in mice causes anemia. A part per million by the way is equal to one drop in 14 gallons. Many pollutants are not pollutants at all and are vital to life, until a concentration threshold is croseed and those pollutants become toxic.

Next: Plants do better with more CO2 –True!  Except when the CO2 is associate with warming and excess evaporation. The evaporation effect because of warming is so large that rainfall can actually increase while drought persists. This in combination with more extreme weather, which is associated with larger rainfall amounts, but falling at faster rates, meaning more rain runs off and less water soakes into the ground. But mostly, warming will cause less rain to fall. These are the general climatic conditions projected for the future across most of the interior of large land masses, aka the interior of continents.  Scientists at NASA have already seen large parts of the northern hemisphere browning because of adverse climate conditions. Forests across the north are growing slower and they are sicker. Forest across the Rocky Mountain West are dieing twice as fast as they were 50 years ago, and this does not include forest losses due to the great pine beetle pandemic. Now, scientists tell us the Amazon has already flipped from a carbon sink to a carbon source because of two great droughts since 2005. Billions of trees are dead. And right here in my backyard, our unprecedented drought last year is supposed to have killed a half billion trees as per the Texas State Forest Service. Carbon dioxide truly is a fertilizer in many plants under controlled conditions. Ever hear of Mother Nature being controlled?

This is getting tedious. Now they want to drag out the old “CO2 was ten times higher in Earth’s history” argument. Yep, right again. Except there were no green plants on land then. It was four times higher (about 1,000 ppm) at the most in the last 500 million years since plants colonized land and atmospheric oxygen weas 2.5 percent (it is 21 percent now).  Old science said that CO2 was 2,000 to 3,000 ppm back during dinosaur times or before. The latest science however says it was only about 1,000 ppm. But back then, the continents were arranged around Earth's equator. Today most of our land mass is located in the northern hemisphere. This is a big deal when we have an earth that wobbles regularly on its axis. When one part of the earth is pointed more towards the sun, it tends to warm the planet more. This is the basis for the orbital cycles theory of climate change. It means a lot and when the continents were arranged along the equator. Earth’s equilibrium temperature was higher then. That is, we are likely living on a more delicately balanced planet today than in ancient times.  And 1,000 ppm is likely where we are headed given our track record, not 2,000 or 3,000 or even 4,000 ppm CO2. We were supposed to have reduced emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels by this year – 2012, as per Kyoto.  Instead, emissions have risen 50 percent above 1990 levels.

Then there's the big one about climate scientists and their ilk benefitting monetarily from the climate change lie.  They say the alarmism benefits scientists and institutions by providing grant money. True, this money does help support academic institutions and it does help pay the salaries of scientists. But isn't there a big industry revolving around medicine and federal grant money, and physics and high tech, and the really really big one, the military? 

Let me quote from Dr. Nordhaus's book review:

"Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. This argument is inaccurate as scientific history and unsupported by any evidence. There is a suggestion that standard theories about global warming have been put together by the scientific equivalent of Madison Avenue to raise funds from government agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF). The fact is that the first precise calculations about the impact of increased CO2 concentrations on the earth’s surface temperature were made by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, more than five decades before the NSF was founded. The skeptics’ account also misunderstands the incentives in academic research. IPCC authors are not paid. Scientists who serve on panels of the National Academy of Science do so without monetary compensation for their time and are subject to close scrutiny for conflicts of interest. Academic advancement occurs primarily from publication of original research and contributions to the advancement of knowledge, not from supporting “popular” views. Indeed, academics have often been subject to harsh political attacks when their views clashed with current political or religious teachings. This is the case in economics today, where Keynesian economists are attacked for their advocacy of “fiscal stimulus” to promote recovery from a deep recession; and in biology, where evolutionary biologists are attacked as atheists because they are steadfast in their findings that the earth is billions rather than thousands of years old. In fact, the argument about the venality of the academy is largely a diversion. The big money in climate change involves firms, industries, and individuals who worry that their economic interests will be harmed by policies to slow climate change. The attacks on the science of global warming are reminiscent of the well-documented resistance by cigarette companies to scientific findings on the dangers of smoking. Beginning in 1953, the largest tobacco companies launched a public relations campaign to convince the public and the government that there was no sound scientific basis for the claim that cigarette smoking was dangerous. The most devious part of the campaign was the underwriting of researchers who would support the industry’s claim. The approach was aptly described by one tobacco company executive: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy."

The cast of the WSJ letter:

Claude Allegre: French politician and geochemist published “the Climate Lie” with at least 100 errors. He believes the causes of climate change are unknown. More than 500 French researchers have asked the French Science Minister to “dismiss” Allegre’s book.  He describes asbestos as harmless. The others include a professor of marketing, a pediatric physician, a former president of research and engineering for Exxon, a board member at the Geroge Marshall Institute, an electrical engineer, William Kininmonth; meteorologist science adviser to the Exxon-funded Science and Public Policy Institute, a member of the Exxon funded Heartland Institute Richard Linzen, a polymer chemist, former director of the Heartland Institute Rodney Nichols, former U.S. Senator Harrison Schmidt, a professor of astrophysics and featured speaker at the Heartland Institute, Henk Tennekes, former director of the Dutch Meteorological Service and featured writer for the Exxon funded Science and Policy Institute, and a nuclear physicist.

Meet the Wall Street Journal 16: http://drich13.newsvine.com/_news/2012/01/29/10263079-meet-the-wall-street-journals-16-climate-scientists

Norhaus, Why the Global Wrming Skeptics are Wrong http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/why-global-warming-skeptics-are-wrong/?pagination=false

January 1, 2012 How Many Climate Scientists Does it take to . . . 

How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  None - There is no known evidence that light bulbs burn out. Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  None - The human species is too inconsequential to change a light bulb.  Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  None - It is too early to say if the light bulb needs changing.  Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  None - The light bulb will eventually begin working again.  Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  None - The light bulb is not really burned out, it is a scientific conspiracy.  Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  None - They will never agree on exactly how to change the light bulb.  Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  None - It is more cost effective to live in the dark.  Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  None - We only know how to screw the planet.  Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  None - The Internet has proven that the light bulb is not actually burned out but is burning even brighter than before.  Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  None - There were far more burned out light bulbs in the ancient past, why should we change them today? Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  None - Climate scientists don’t change light bulbs. But! They tell us how light bulbs have changed in the past and how they are going to change in the future. Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  None - Do you see the Chinese changing their light bulbs? Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  I don't know but you better hurry, they are being banned because of climate change. Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  None - Changing light bulbs is for engineers. Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  Duh! It's not the light bulb; IT'S THE SUN, STUPID!!!   Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  The luminosity of the sun is of the order of 10^26 watts, so clearly the effect of any single light bulb is so small as to be negligible. Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  None - The climate skeptic believes it will clearly be more cost effective to adapt to the darkness. Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  It is far too expensive to change the light blub. Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many climate scientists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  None - Light bulbs have been burning out since the days of the dinosaurs, why should be change them now?  Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many surrealist painters does it take to change a light bulb? Fish.

What happens when you rub two climate scientists together? Global warming. Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
Why did the climate change denier cross the road? It was just a natural cycle. Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
Why are blondes our best chance for solving climate change? Blondes know the meaning of 'hot'! Ha-Ha-ha-ha!

You know Global Warming is real when:
Hot water comes out of both taps.
You go outside and your shadow stays inside.
The chickens are laying hard boiled eggs.
The trees are whistling for dogs.
You no longer associate bridges or rivers with water.
Morning dew is an oddity.

Why are blondes our best chance for solving climate change? Blondes know the meaning of 'hot'! Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
Why are surfers our best chance for solving climate change? Tall buildings sticking out of the surf get in the way of a good wave. Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
How many politicians does it take to solve climate change? The theory that politicians solve anything at all is yet to be proven. Ha-Ha-ha-ha!
What did one climate change denier say to the other? "I'm not hot, and this ain't Hell" Ha-Ha-ha-ha!

December 19, 2011 A Half Billion Trees Have Been Killed by Drought in Texas  -- 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 brown and dad looking (they could be just dormant), not ten percent. However, windshield surveys might be deceiving. In Rocky Mountain National park I did a grid count and found that what looked like more 80 or 90 percent kill from the road was actually about on half to 2/3rds kill. All that red in the canopy, seen from the road, seems to overwhelm the remaining live trees, or in the case of Texas--brown.

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 from drought 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 mid 1990s.

The pine forest and park entrance monument are in the Davy Crocket National Forest northeast of Houston. Ratcliff Lake Recreation Area is closed for logging of hazard trees. This is all too familiar to me from the Rockies where the pine beetle has ravaged somewhere near 70 million acres by now. The beetle pandemic there, like here, is because of warming. There, the beetles numbers have skyrocketed because of stressed trees and low temperatures that have risen above levels that kill beetles in a meaningful way. In Texas, it's a different species of pine beetle that appears to have caused much of the havoc in the area I surveyed at Ratcliff Lake.

The beetle outbreak at Ratcliff is likely enhancd because of drought stress. The trees cannot defend themselves in times of drought because there is not enough moisture to make sap to push the little boring beetles out of their boreholes. Consequently, the beetle is running rampant. In the recreation area itself, about half of the trees have been cut, and a significant number of the remaining trees are red. Remember, pines generally don't turn red until the season after they are attacked and have died. I also identified a number of green trees that were actively being attacked with live beetles. If this area is like others I've seen, most of the trees will have to be cut to keep them from falling on visitors.

 On the other side of the state, from the edge of the oak/juniper woodlands in the Hill Country forest west of Junction all the way to Austin and Bastrop and on to Houston, the trees that browned off last summer still have their brown leaves. In Texas, about two-thirds of the trees lose their leaves naturally in the fall leaf turn and the brown trees just look like more autumn leaf turn.

The image with the prickly pear cactus is from south Austin in September; a good 6 to 8 weeks before these winged elms normally lose their leaves in the fall.

I lost several large shrubs and a number of smaller perennials at my house in southwest Austin. All of them were natives, but even being a native doesn't help if it doesn't rain. In the twelve months from September 2010 to August 2011, we had 11.2 inches of rain.

About a third of my Saint Augustine grass bit the dust and my summer veggie garden was abysmal. I just gave up on my tomatoes. They quit setting fruit in April this year. Tomatoes do that when the afternoon and or overnight temperatures go above 90 degrees or 70 degrees respectively. We had 90 days of 100 degree or hotter temperatures this summer, 29 days more than the previous record set in 2009.

The final image is from the Fredricksburg area about 90 minutes west of Austin. Out there the drought has been so bad for the last 6 years that in places, half of the live oaks have dropped their leaves completely. Many of these trees are dead as they have not leafed out in several years. It will be a few year yet before we know if this latest crop of leaf drop will result in dead trees or not in these areas. But even if the drought does not kill the trees directly, disease can set in because the trees are so, so weak.

One fungus in particular is wreaking havoc in these parts because of the drought. A particular fungus called hypoxylon canker simple loves trees with low moisture content in their live wood. Stress and particularly drought stress result in this condition and the hypoxylon canker has become widespread. Trees attacked by hypoxylon general show rutpures in the bark and weeping ooze coming from the wounds.

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

December 10, 2011 Scientific American Says (Eroneously) Atmospheric Capture Infeasible: Handing a Huge Piece of Pie to the Denying Delayers -- I am talking about climate science business as usual.  As in: classic conservative science. The 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 a ridiculous debate where the "air capture" of CO2, in the world of industrial scale processes is compared 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. And to think that these folks are on our side. I suppose this goes to show the competitiveness of some scientists.

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.  Those processes being 1100 pounds per square inch of pressure and 2400 degrees F temperature.

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.