Climate change
Offline Climate change can be very nasty.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100812/ap_on_sc/us_sci_climate_breakdown
Long, hot summer of fire, floods fits predictions
AP
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent Charles J. Hanley, Ap Special Correspondent – 1 hr 40 mins ago
NEW YORK – Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Pakistan and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It's not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.
The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says — although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming.
The experts now see an urgent need for better ways to forecast extreme events like Russia's heat wave and wildfires and the record deluge devastating Pakistan. They'll discuss such tools in meetings this month and next in Europe and America, under United Nations, U.S. and British government sponsorship.
"There is no time to waste," because societies must be equipped to deal with global warming, says British government climatologist Peter Stott.
He said modelers of climate systems are "very keen" to develop supercomputer modeling that would enable more detailed linking of cause and effect as a warming world shifts jet streams and other atmospheric currents. Those changes can wreak weather havoc.
The U.N.'s network of climate scientists — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — has long predicted that rising global temperatures would produce more frequent and intense heat waves, and more intense rainfalls. In its latest assessment, in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning panel went beyond that. It said these trends "have already been observed," in an increase in heat waves since 1950, for example.
Still, climatologists generally refrain from blaming warming for this drought or that flood, since so many other factors also affect the day's weather.
Stott and NASA's Gavin Schmidt at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York, said it's better to think in terms of odds: Warming might double the chances for a heat wave, for example. "That is exactly what's happening," Schmidt said, "a lot more warm extremes and less cold extremes."
The WMO did point out, however, that this summer's events fit the international scientists' projections of "more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming."
In fact, in key cases they're a perfect fit:
RUSSIA
It's been the hottest summer ever recorded in Russia with Moscow temperatures topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees C) for the first time. The drought there has sparked hundreds of wildfires in forests and dried peat bogs, blanketing western Russia with a toxic smog. Moscow's death rate has doubled to 700 people a day. The drought reduced the wheat harvest by more than one-third.
The 2007 IPCC report predicted a doubling of disastrous droughts in Russia this century and cited studies foreseeing catastrophic fires during dry years. It also said Russia would suffer large crop losses.
PAKISTAN
The heaviest monsoon rains on record — 12 inches (300 millimeters) in one 36-hour period — have sent rivers rampaging over huge swaths of countryside. It's left 14 million Pakistanis homeless or otherwise affected, and killed 1,500. The government calls it the worst natural disaster in the nation's history.
A warmer atmosphere can hold — and discharge — more water. The 2007 IPCC report said rains have grown heavier for 40 years over north Pakistan and predicted greater flooding this century in south Asia's monsoon region.
CHINA
China is witnessing its worst floods in decades, the WMO says, particularly in the northwest province of Gansu. There, floods and landslides last weekend killed at least 1,117 people and left more than 600 missing, feared swept away or buried beneath mud and debris.
The IPCC reported in 2007 that rains had increased in northwest China by up to 33 percent since 1961, and floods nationwide had increased sevenfold since the 1950s. It predicted still more frequent flooding this century.
ARCTIC
Researchers last week spotted a 100-square-mile (260-square-kilometer) chunk of ice calved off from the great Petermann Glacier in Greenland's far northwest. It was the most massive ice island to break away in the Arctic in a half-century of observation.
The huge iceberg appeared just five months after an international scientific team published a report saying ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet is expanding up its northwest coast from the south.
Changes in the ice sheet "are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass than we had anticipated," said one of the scientists, NASA's Isabella Velicogna.
In the Arctic Ocean itself, the summer melt of the vast ice cap has reached unprecedented proportions. Satellite data show the ocean area covered by ice last month was the second-lowest ever recorded for July.
The melting of land ice into the oceans is causing about 60 percent of the accelerating rise in sea levels worldwide, with thermal expansion from warming waters causing the rest. The WMO'S World Climate Research Program says seas are rising by 1.34 inches (3.4 millimeters) per decade, about twice the 20th century's average.
Worldwide temperature readings, meanwhile, show that this January-June was the hottest first half of a year in 150 years of global climate record keeping. Meteorologists say 17 nations have recorded all-time-high temperatures in 2010, more than in any other year.
Scientists blame the warming on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases pouring into the atmosphere from power plants, cars and trucks, furnaces and other fossil fuel-burning industrial and residential sources.
Experts are growing ever more vocal in urging sharp cutbacks in emissions, to protect the climate that has nurtured modern civilization.
"Reducing emissions is something everyone is capable of," Nanjing-based climatologist Tao Li told an academic journal in China, now the world's No. 1 emitter, ahead of the U.S.
But not everyone is willing to act.
The U.S. remains the only major industrialized nation not to have legislated caps on carbon emissions, after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week withdrew climate legislation in the face of resistance from Republicans and some Democrats.
The U.S. inaction, dating back to the 1990s, is a key reason global talks have bogged down for a pact to succeed the expiring Kyoto Protocol. That is the relatively weak accord on emissions cuts adhered to by all other industrialized states.
Governments around the world, especially in poorer nations that will be hard-hit, are scrambling to find ways and money to adapt to shifts in climate and rising seas.
The meetings of climatologists in the coming weeks in Paris, Britain and Colorado will be one step toward adaptation, seeking ways to identify trends in extreme events and better means of forecasting them.
A U.N. specialist in natural disasters says much more needs to be done.
Salvano Briceno of the U.N.'s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction pointed to aggravating factors in the latest climate catastrophes: China's failure to stem deforestation, contributing to its deadly mudslides; Russia's poor forest management, feeding fires; and the settling of poor Pakistanis on flood plains and dry riverbeds in the densely populated country, squatters' turf that suddenly turned into torrents.
"The IPCC has already identified the influence of climate change in these disasters. That's clear," Briceno said. "But the main trend we need to look at is increasing vulnerability, the fact we have more people living in the wrong places, doing the wrong things."
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
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This is very interesting. The ocean color changes as phytoplankton dies off. It is dying off for many reasons, including the increased acidification of the water as the ocean absorbs more CO2. Sort of like pouring vinegar in your fish aquarium. Science is wonderful, yah? We learn more and we can change our predictions to match our new knowledge.
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1904590/oceans_color_affects_hurricane_paths/index.html
Ocean’s Color Affects Hurricane Paths
Posted on: Sunday, 15 August 2010, 09:51 CDT
A change in the color of ocean waters could have a drastic effect on the prevalence of hurricanes, new research indicates. In a simulation of such a change in one region of the North Pacific, the study finds that hurricane formation decreases by 70 percent. That would be a big drop for a region that accounts for more than half the world’s reported hurricane-force winds.
It turns out that the formation of typhoons — as hurricanes are known in the region — is heavily mediated by the presence of chlorophyll, a green pigment that helps the tiny single-celled organisms known as phytoplankton convert sunlight into food for the rest of the marine ecosystem. Chlorophyll contributes to the ocean’s color.
“We think of the oceans as blue, but the oceans aren’t really blue, they’re actually a sort of greenish color,” said Anand Gnanadesikan, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. “The fact that [the oceans] are not blue has a [direct] impact on the distribution of tropical cyclones.”
In the study, to be published in an upcoming issue of Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, Gnanadesikan’s team describes how a drop in chlorophyll concentration, and the corresponding reduction in ocean color, could cause a decrease in the formation of hurricanes in the color-depleted zone. Although the study looks at the effects of a simulated drop in the phytoplankton population (and therefore in the ocean’s green tint), recently-published research argued that global phytoplankton populations have been steadily declining over the last century.
Gnanadesikan compared hurricane formation rates in a computer model under two scenarios. For the first, he modeled real conditions using chlorophyll concentrations in the North Pacific observed by satellites. He then compared that to a scenario where the chlorophyll concentration in parts of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre — a large, clockwise-circulation pattern encompassing most of the North Pacific — was set to zero.
In the latter scenario, the absence of chlorophyll in the subtropical gyre affected hurricane formation by modifying air circulation and heat distribution patterns both within and beyond the gyre. In fact, along the equator, those new patterns outside the gyre led to an increase in hurricane formation of about 20 percent. Yet, this rise was more than made up for by the 70 percent decrease in storms further north, over and near the gyre. The model showed that more hurricanes would hit the Philippines and Vietnam, but fewer would make landfall in South China and Japan.
In the no-chlorophyll scenario, sunlight is able to penetrate deeper into the ocean, leaving the surface water cooler. The drop in the surface temperature in the model affects hurricane formation in three main ways: cold water provides less energy; air circulation patterns change, leading to more dry air aloft which makes it hard for hurricanes to grow. The changes in air circulation trigger strong winds aloft, which tend to prevent thunderstorms from developing the necessary superstructure that allows them to grow into hurricanes.
A decrease in hurricanes in the North Pacific is just one example of how changing chlorophyll concentrations can have far-reaching, previously unconsidered, effects. The specific outcomes over different patches of the ocean will vary based on local currents and ocean conditions, said Gnanadesikan.
A complete absence of chlorophyll in parts of the ocean would be a drastic change, Gnanadesikan admits. Yet, its potential impact is still important to consider, he maintains. The northern Pacific gyre that he studied is already the “biological desert of the ocean,” he said. So the surprise, then, is that “even in this region that is apparently clear, biologically-mediated heating is important.”
This research was primarily supported by NOAA, with additional support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
OK, go where the data goes.
There is way less arctic ice now than there used to be. Something must be up with that.
Do not go where the politicians go. They want to spend your money and if they think that whipping you into a frenzy over global warming will produce more cash for them to spend on shit. They don't give a fuck about the planet, they want your money.
Case in point would be the budget of the great state of Connecticut. We get three billion dollars a year from the tobacco settlement. It is supposed to go for cancer treatments for medicaid recipients. The logic is that because big tobacco caused them to get cancer, they ought to pay for it.
So if you are poor and have cancer, then you should get automatic free health care. That is what the tobacco companies are paying for.
Does it suck slightly less to have cancer today? Not really. You still have to deal with the fact that not one single medicaid rule was changed after that. Pretty much, you are just as fucked as you were twenty years ago.
All of that cash gets deposited into the “general fund” account, along with the massive payments from our two Indian casinos.
Does it suck any less to be a taxpayer in CT? Well, with half of the government's cash coming from deep pocket defendants, one might expect so. The reality is that there has never been a year when I owed less taxes than the year before.
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I got that. But I don't see a huge amount of money in the US being set aside for climate change. And damn little is going to Moscow, Pakistan, or India or any of the Pacific Islands that are becoming uninhabitable because of just a small rise in sea levels.
The latest ice chunk was from Greenland. No US money is going to Greenland or Canada or for general shipping. When ice melts in the arctic, it is like the ice melting in your tea. No rise. When ice slides off of land into the ocean it is as if you added ice cubes to your glass of tea. Why is this so hard for some people to get? As the ice melts off of land, it accelerates more ice melt. Melt water under the ice facilitates flow - you remember, like the hockey puck experiments in physics. Or for that matter, like hockey pucks in general. No, not the infamous "hockey stick" chart - real hockey pucks on real ice only go fast if there is a skim of water on top.
Health care in CT is not climate change. Duh.
You don't like government "interference" in your life. You and a lot of other people. I know that.
The US government is NOT doing doodly squat at the moment. So damn little of your taxes are being spent on climate change. There are lots of things the government could do, but they aren't.
Let's follow the data. Let's look at the changes in Moscow this summer. Are they normal? It has never gone over 100 degrees F in Moscow before in recorded history. It has now been over 100 every day for over a month. 700 people a day are dying. The news would be reported a lot differently if that happened in any city in the US. Doesn't matter who is dying or if they have air conditioning or not - if that many people were dying every day in your city? Wooka-wooka would hardly cover the response.
We may not be able to stop climate change let alone reverse it. But we could do a lot to mitigate the effects. Moratoriums on building in low lying coastal areas - planting more trees and stop cutting them down - harvest the algae blooms instead of letting them just eutrify (decay) producing more greenhouse gasses - encourage more alternative energy including nuclear but not just nuclear - planning for record heat and cold and ensuring dwellings can withstand extreme storms. Lots of stuff.
Instead, we just argue. And nothing gets done.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
OK, so now we need to pay Greenland for not having enough ice?
Seriously, the fucking northern ice cap is half as big as it was half a century ago. What matters is that we pay people money for things that they did not do, have no effect over and cannot reverse?
How about if we pay Africa for the fact that they have malaria as well? Not pay to eradicate it, just pay them because it exists.
Global warming is an issue that needs to be dealt with in the manner that makes it not so big of an issue. Sucking cash out of the world's largest economy so that we can put nations that fail to make enough stuff toe feed their own people on international welfare checks is not going to help.
How about if we tell people that rubbers make kids not happen? Kids that you cannot afford to feed and who just make all problems worse. Try not having seven kids because you don't like how rubbers feel.
Do it my way and in 50 years, there will be like three billion people on the planet.
Global warming=problem solved,
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AHHHHHHHH, WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!! QUICK GIVE ME ALL YOUR MONEY BEFORE WE DO!!!!!!!
edit: Oh and eat insects because that is the UN's solution. And they have a great record of success at everything they do.
If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X
My point was that we aren't paying them money and from the looks of things, we aren't going to pay them money. Which is fine with me. Let the Red Cross and other relief organizations assist them. You can contribute to one of the charities if you want or not. I don't care.
I think we are past the tipping point. If humans were wiped out tomorrow, climate changes would still happen.
I think the science is interesting. Chaotic systems like weather are difficult to model. Learning new information to make the models predict better is interesting. Finding out the models have correctly predicted the changes happening in the Russian-Pakistan area is interesting to me. If it ain't to you, don't read the damn thread.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
You are paying very little in taxes towards mitigating the effects of climate change - which was my point - you have damn little to gripe about. If you want to save big bucks, push for getting the US the hell out of the Middle East militarily. And then fire the contractors and go back to having the military supply its own services.
The bug thing was sort of - a cultural misstep. A lot of people world wide do eat various bugs - but not where I come from. So most of us who are used to beef steaks and pork ribs and such were grossed out - I don't intend to switch anytime soon, not even to chocolate covered ants. And I don't think it has that much of an impact on CO2 levels. Yeah, cows fart - so do most critters. They don't fart near as much as our fossil fuel vehicles or power plants. We can fix bigger problems and then argue about steaks.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
Because a bunch of guys with towels on their heads do no contribute to global warming. However, dealing with the fact does...
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If we did not rely on them for oil, we wouldn't care if they blew each other up. If we did not rely on them for oil, they wouldn't have as much money to pester the rest of the world.
I know, let's kill multiple avians with a single projectile. Let's get off of oil, period. Fewer Middle East problems, fewer air quality problems (as in respiratory illnesses), less CO2 released in the atmosphere - it's a win all around.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
Yes we should get out of the Mideast. Why is it the only damn thing I supported in Bamas agenda is the only damn thing he doesn't do? I never understood why we feel a need to have active military bases all over. We could close down a lot of our bases. Germany, for example. Make them pay for their own military.
My only point was to point out the incompetence of the people who are demanding our money in the name of climate change. You stated in an earlier post that you believe we are already past the tipping point. I kind of agree with you in that I don't believe there is anything we could do to stop climate change. I see it as more of a natural phenomenon that we may or may not be speeding up but in the end will happen no matter what we do so if we are going to "do" anything about it our efforts would be best put towards looking at ways to prepare to deal with any negative effects.
If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X
I don't see people demanding money in the name of climate change. The US Congress is very carefully avoiding the topic as much as possible. And while we probably can't do much at this point except to make the peak lower, I don't know why that is not something we could strive for. Surely it wouldn't hurt. Most of the stuff I mentioned is not that expensive or costs nothing at all. We can do a lot toward mitigating the effects of climate change. And we should be getting on the stick about that.
Okay, think about this. How much did it cost to put our current fossil fuel infrastructure in place? Could you possibly add it up? Maybe. Gas (petrol) stations, natural gas lines to houses and businesses, rail lines and roads, wells, refineries, pipelines, and on and on. It will cost a lot of money to switch to something other than fossil fuels. But it won't happen tomorrow so the costs to switch to other sources will be spread over a number of years. Many costs you and I will not pay for in taxes, and not even pay for in increased costs for what fuel we do use. (Wind energy in my area cost more right at first, but the utility company is going to phase out the extra costs as wind is saving them a ton of money.) And it won't cost as much because some of the same infrastructure for fossil fuels can be used for alternative fuels.
It isn't all doom and gloom on either side of the argument.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
but I think we need a major event - like sea levels rising a few metres just to get people to wake up to GW. If nothing happens, the naysayers will feel vindicated, the politicians will focus on short term re-election issues.
Humans are smart enough to make the changes but we'll leave it till the last minute. Hopefully we'll get activated before we lose the basis of the ocean's food chain. Most people seem oblivious at this point.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
The reduction in phytoplankton should worry everyone. You are right, the time most people will finally get the program is when GW affects their own personal living space. And not a moment before.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
Kyoto and Cap & Trade. Fortunately Kyoto was shot down. Cap & Trade has been slowed down because of the amount of political capital spent on passing Bamacare, but I will not be surprised to see congress attempt to pass it in a lame duck session. Obama has made it very clear he supports Cap & Trade and would certainly sign the bill. Congress has hardly been avoiding the topic. They just have backed off shoving it through because of the political unpopularity of it, given half a chance the democratic leadership will push it through. During an election year it just isn't practical to push such an unpopular bill especially after so many congressmen took bullets for Bamacare.
If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X
The US has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol. So we are not committed to spending or sending money to other countries for the purpose of assisting said countries.
I haven't heard anyone say anything about the KP in months - so I think we can assume it is dead in the US.
The Cap & Trade is supposed to be a free market solution. Personally, I think it is a dumb idea and will be prone to graft and errors. But, the only role government is supposed to have is setting the cap. No taxes, no real limits and not much in the way of real penalties. It still isn't coming out of your pocket. Or mine. Though I think it is pretty worthless and ineffectual but what do you expect when something is free?
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
I think we need a big event - such as sea level a few meters just to get people to wake up to GW. If nothing happens, pessimists feel vindicated, politicians focus on short term issues re-election.
Carbon credits will save us!
If anyone wants to send me $1000 I will use 80% of it to plant trees on my land and save the planet. Feel better about yourself, save the planet, and improve the hunting habitat on my land. I accept paypal, credit cards or personal check. PM me.
If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X