At the ever-entertaining Watts Up With That, well-known global warming skeptic Roger Pielke Sr. links to the following graph: In a challenge to a NASA/GRL study released last week that shows a sharp decline in Arctic sea ice coverage, Pielke Sr. writes: Since 2008, the anomalies have actually decreased.
No, I'm not kidding! That's his analysis of the graph above. (Check out the link if you don't believe me.)
Is there a better example anywhere of a scientist unable to see baselines shifting?
Or, as they used to say, not able to see the forest
for the trees?
The Obama administration is coming back from the G-8 meetings with no agreement from other nations -- both European and developing -- on reducing emissions of heat-trapping gases such as CO2.
This has not been clearly reported; as so often seems to happen these days, the clearest statement on a murky news situation comes not from the news pages, but from the editorial, as in this from the NYTimes:
Before the leaders gathered, their negotiators had already settled
on a draft communiqué, committing to a 50 percent cut in worldwide
greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The industrial countries would cut
theirs by 80 percent, and the developing countries would make
“significant” if unquantified cuts. But on Wednesday, things fell
apart. The developing nations flatly refused to commit to the 50
percent goal by 2050.
It was not immediately clear why they
balked. (My emphasis.) Some repeated an old demand: that the United States and the
other industrialized nations — which bear responsibility for the
buildup of greenhouse gases since the beginning of the industrial
revolution — should do more and do it faster. Otherwise, the developing
nations would be left with an unfair share of the burden while their
economies were expanding rapidly.
What is clear is that Mr. Obama
and the other leaders of the developed world have yet to come up with
the right mixture of pressure and incentives to get the developing
countries to commit.
The administration's cap-and-trade plan can be criticized, but I don't see how anyone who wants to see the world act to reduce the risks of climate change could argue with Obama's closing statement:
Ultimately we have a choice. We can either shape our
future or we can let events shape it for us. We can fall back on the
stale debates and old divisions, or we can move forward and decide to
meet this challenge together. I think it's clear from our progress
today which path is preferable.
Of course, that's not to say that some (such as Ted Rall) won't snipe...and memorably so:
Talk to climate change skeptics, and they will take you into the weeds of global temperature measurement, the supposedly overlooked importance of the sun, and so on. They will invariably cite the obvious fact that global temps have risen and fallen over the eons.
But they will not mention that the glaciers and plants and animals, with whom we share the planet, are responding to the rise in global temps in predictable and difficult to deny ways. In the 19th century, there were 150 glaciers in Glacier National Park; by 2030 they will be gone, according to the crazy wild-haired radicals at the Parks Service. Sheep, which have been weighed for other reasons for decades on a remote Scottish island, are shrinking due to global warming, according to a new study reported in Science. Dozens of other natural examples have been cited and photographed.
Many are in a new presentation for the US Fish and Wildlife Service by Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech (who has also written a book for Christians on the subject). She cites a study of fish habitat off Alaska by F.J. Mueter and M.A. Litzow, from 2007, which includes an excellent graph:
All this raises an inevitable question: When will those of us in Southern California be smart enough to shift
our habitat?
After all if we continue down the path of
uncontrolled emissions, drought in our region will look something like
this:
Anyone else thinking we may have to move north someday before it's too late?
It's frankly shocking to me how many people I encounter who still cling to the idea that the globe is not warming, despite vast scientific libraries of evidence to the contrary.
Here's the latest example, from data compiled by NASA and ICESAT:
Two take-away points from the chart above. One, the red indicates multi-year ice; two, the blue reveals thin seasonal ice, which will return in the winters...but has little of the density or the staying power of what has been lost. In the words of Ron Kwok, writing for the GRL:
The total area covered by the thicker, older "multi-year" ice that has survived one or more summers shrank by 42 percent.
Which raises the question: What will it take to convince doubters? The loss of Miami?
Janisse Ray, a wonderful writer from the South, has a story about an experience she had with climate change in a gorgeous new interactive book just released by the Union of Concerned Scientists, called Thoreau's Legacy: American Stories about Global Warming. Well worth a look...
I never saw a spring so stormy. Spring is supposed to be a time of fragrant wisteria and five blue-green eggs the size of jellybeans in a nest box. Spring is mild, emergent, translucent. It's March. I wake to rain, an army of clouds that darken and lower by the hour. By midmorning the weather radio pops on with an alert: Tornado watch in surrounding counties. Outside there's lightning, long and brilliant and vicious, accompanied by its sidekick, thunder, rolling in great booms—bowling balls across an alley. I call my mother, who tells me that she and Daddy will get under the stairs if there's a tornado. "I have never seen daylight this dark," I say. "This is like night." Rain is falling so hard the ground has long since given up absorbing it. The water is two inches deep in places. The alert radio alarms: a tornado has touched down in Dublin. Prepare to take shelter immediately. I live in a tinderbox. The house, about eighty years old, is made of heart pine, which is very flammable. Some of the windows come out in your hands when you raise them. In the yard, thirty feet from the back door, an old-growth longleaf pine leans toward the house. My dad calls back. He wants me to get into the ditch out by the road. "What if I get sucked up?" "Get in the culvert," he says. "And if it floods?" We hang up because I want to listen for a roar like a train. It's hailing, ice chunks so big you could bag and sell them. The weather radio is calling out all the places where tornadoes have been spotted. Take cover! Should a tornado touch down you will not have time. I put blankets on the floor of the small hallway, next to the freezer. I close all the doors leading to the hall. Growing up in south Georgia, I never heard of tornadoes in spring. They came in summer and fall. Scientists say that warmer temperatures will favor the severe thunderstorms that give birth to tornadoes, and it's possible that the tornado season could shift to what used to be the colder months. This looks like the climate crisis to me. I wait a long time, thinking: We are being taken by storm. But after a while the sky lightens, and finally the weather robot says that the storms are beyond us, farther east and our county is no longer under a warning. I can come out.
Here's a TV graphic of a tornado that hit Georgia this year. According to the info posted with the picture, an F2 tornado hit Atlanta for the first time this year.
In the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society last September, scientists William Connolley and Thomas Peterson and journalist/equaintance John Fleck routed a favorite line of climate change deniers, to wit:
An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science
community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an
observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate
scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of
the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even
then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important
forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales.
But not only were scientists concerned about global warming in the l970's, they were talking about in the l950's. Physicist Spencer Weart lays this out in his History of Global Warming (available on-line).
In the 1930s, people realized that the United States and North Atlantic
region had warmed significantly during the previous half-century. Scientists
supposed this was just a phase of some mild natural cycle, with unknown
causes. Only one lone voice, the amateur G.S. Callendar, insisted that
greenhouse warming was on the way. Whatever the cause of warming, everyone
thought that if it happened to continue for the next few centuries, so
much the better.
In the 1950s, Callendar's claims provoked a few scientists to look into
the question with improved techniques and calculations. What made that
possible was a sharp increase of government funding, especially from military
agencies with Cold War concerns about the weather and the seas. The new
studies showed that, contrary to earlier crude estimates, carbon dioxide
could indeed build up in the atmosphere and should bring warming. Painstaking
measurements drove home the point in 1961 by showing that the level of
the gas was in fact rising, year by year.
Hollywood got involved. A Bell Labs short for television, circa 1958, directed by no less than Frank Capra, of "It's a Wonderful Life" fame, featuring Frank C. Baxter, aka "Dr. Research," laid out the essential facts of global warming quite succinctly. Six billion tons of CO2 added to the atmosphere a year, a change in atmospheric chemistry, a few degrees of temperature rise, ice sheets begin to melt.
Sound familiar?
Remarkable how much we knew, and how little we cared...
Apparently. It's just one of four environmental disasters seen in Chile in recent months:
Over the course of approximately three months, thousands of [rare Andean flamingos] abandoned their nests on a salt lake in the Atacama Desert in the far
north of Chile. Their eggs failed to hatch, and all 2,000 chicks died
in their shells.
Of the six species of flamingo in the world, the Andean is the
rarest. There are just 40,000 of them, and about half live in Chile,
where they nest on the barren salt flats of the Atacama Desert. They
share this harsh desert habitat with Chile's big copper mining
companies. Some ecologists say the mining is destroying the area's
fragile ecosystem and threatening its wildlife.
But another, perhaps more likely, explanation for the death of the
chicks is that this was a hot, dry summer in the southern hemisphere,
even by the standards of the Atacama. That caused the lakes to shrink
and become more saline than usual. Eduardo Rodriguez, the regional head
of the government's environmental protection agency CONAF, says the
high temperatures might have killed the micro-algae on which the
flamingos feed, forcing the birds to abandon their eggs and migrate in
search of food.
The Atacama's hotter summer is seen by some as a symptom of global
warming, which may force the flamingos to flee to higher, cooler and
damper nesting grounds. That theory was supported by an unprecedented
discovery in the northern Chilean Andes this summer — a flamingo nest
at more than 4,000 meters above
sea level. Usually the birds nest at around 2,000 meters and seldom
settle in the very high mountains. "This is the first time we've seen
anything like that," says Rodriguez, who fears this could be the start
of a pattern in which flamingos try to adjust to unfamiliar nesting
grounds, with all the risks that entails. "In the next 10 years, we
were hoping for the birth of around 20,000 chicks to replenish the
population," he says. "But if the breeding season is a failure again
next year and if we don't have chicks in the third, fourth or fifth
years, then I think we'll have to sound the alarm bells."
"Sound the alarm bells?" And then what? (Sorry.)
From Nicky Iew, here's a picture of a flock of the Andean Flamingos, taken in Uyuni, Bolivia.
A stupendous climate change report, complete with extensive interactive graphics on emissions, now can be found on the European Environment Agency site.
Part of the story is about how climate change is making life drier and more difficult in Southern Europe. Story includes a great graph on "water stress" in a country, called the Water Exploitation Index.
Already southern Europe is drier and hotter than in the past, and many nations -- including Cyprus, Spain, and Turkey -- are struggling with drought and water stress.
Sounds callous to say so, but for Americans, checking to see a graph on how water-stressed a nation is before your next vacation to Europe might not be a bad idea...below is the comparison of current consumption against available long-term renewable water capacity.
Anything over 20% is considered stressed. [As to why the designers of this index couldn't choose the easily understood word "use" instead of "abstraction" -- well, you'll have to ask them.]
Next question: How does California and the Southwest compare?
The news is not good, unsurprisingly, but what's interesting is that to his fellow scientists, Washington stressed the alarming fact that emissions currently are outpacing even the business-as-usual model, which is already on a course that appears disastrous to climate scientists. Here's the crucial graph:
In ultra-dry scientific speak, here's how this crucial fact -- which is barely visible above -- is expressed:
Note the small dots in Figure 1a above the red curve after the year 2000 show, the 2005 – 2007 actual CO2 emissions [Raupach et al., 2007]. The non-mitigation scenario data is less than actual emissions.
To his fellow scientists, as I recall, Washington not only highlighted this fact, but said it more plainly. Here's my paraphrase:
Our models are underestimating emissions, and already, given a conventional climate sensitive about 2.7C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2, we face a perilously hot future.
"This research indicates that we can no longer avoid significant
warming during this century. But if the world were to implement this level of
emission cuts [70%], we could stabilize the threat of climate change and
avoid catastrophe."
Or if we don't reduce emissions dramatically and soon, we can have a catastrophe.
