Climate tweets for 3 June 2014

Drought Drives Drilling Frenzy in California--for Water: @KQED
http://blogs.kqed.org/science/audio/drought-drives-drilling-frenzy-for-groundwater-in-california/ 
[farming, food, agriculture]

.@IPCC: Millions of words on climate change are not enough: Simple Climate
https://simpleclimate.wordpress.com/2014/05/31/ipcc-millions-of-words-on-climate-change-are-not-enough/
[science]

May Likely to Break Global High Temp Record as El Niño Conditions Strengthen: 
https://robertscribbler.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/may-likely-to-break-global-high-temperature-records-as-el-nino-conditions-strengthen-in-pacific/
[science]

Thanks, Climate Change! Llano River 9.5-inch Rain Exemplifies Extreme Weather: 
http://blog.mysanantonio.com/monikamaeckle/2014/05/thanks-climate-change-llano-river-9-5-inch-rain-exemplifies-extreme-weather/ 
[flooding, Texas]

#climatedeaths MT @billmckibben: 'Freak heat wave' hospitalizes 1600 in Japan 
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/xinhua-news-agency/140603/freak-heatwave-kills-4-hospitalizes-1600-japan-last-week 

Capturing every drop: Kansas city learns to live with drought: @kcstar 
http://www.kansascity.com/2014/06/01/5060818/capturing-every-drop-russell-kan.html
[water]

RT Alexander Verbeek @Alex_Verbeek:
Here’s How Much U.S. Summers Have Warmed Since 1970
http://ow.ly/3lk4an http://pic.twitter.com/fuI96pJU5u

RT ClimateNexusHotNews @ClimateHotNews:
RT @PeterGleick: To those who claim climate rules will destroy economy, here's how that worked out in the past. 
http://pic.twitter.com/X0jjKOn4G0
[denial]

@.CitizensLobbyCa sees support ... but where are media?: 
http://citizensclimatelobby.ca/content/ccl-canada-sees-support 
[Citizens' Climate Lobby Canada]

Major Companies Distance Selves From U.S. Chamber Campaign Against Climate Plan 
http://thkpr.gs/1pDlVeI
[denial, investing, divestment]

Where is signboard to warn of #climate catastrophe?: @guardian
http://gu.com/p/3pm4c/tw 

Climate tweets for 4 February 2014

Time Running Out for California Drought Relief: @ClimateCentral http://www.climatecentral.org/news/time-is-running-out-for-california-drought-relief-17030 

Winter ice season 24 days shorter than in 1950, study finds: @ScienceRecorder http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/winter-ice-season-is-now-24-days-shorter-than-it-was-in-1950-researchers-say/ 

Editorial: Playing politics with California's drought: @LATimes.com http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-drought-california-20140203,0,7714989.story#axzz2sLc4Ua1m 

Sydney in midst of driest summer 4 >70 years: @smh http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/sydney-in-midst-of-driest-summer-for-more-than-70-years-20140203-31w82.html 

RT Climate & Security ‏@CntrClimSec: Deep Dive Into Iran’s Water Woes http://wp.me/p1t6fZ-1fv 

RT CitizensClimateLobby ‏@citizensclimate: Waiting for cavalry to ride to rescue on #climate change? Guess what? We're it. Join the next CCL intro call. http://ow.ly/tguPC 

RT Bill McKibben ‏@billmckibben: The CA drought is tapping its groundwater reserves too--this is really bad news http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2014/world/california-drought-sapping-water-reserves-ground/ 

Like, Um, Tobacco: How U.S. Exports Global Warming: @RollingStone http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-u-s-exports-global-warming-20140203 

Sydney public support drought relief: @abcnews http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-03/sydney-public-support-drought-relief/5234126#.Uu_kUdwCkQw.twitter 

UK floods: 'We can protect towns or country, not both,' says Environment Agency boss: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/10613389/UK-floods-We-can-protect-towns-or-country-not-both-says-Environment-Agency-boss.html 

RT ClimateCentral ‏@ClimateCentral: RT @NASA_EO: Winter Heat Swamps Alaska http://1.usa.gov/MrxmFe  http://pic.twitter.com/aK9iSHlvsc // Amazing satellite image shows spring runoff in Jan.

UK Heat-related deaths will rise 257% by 2050 because of climate change: @guardian http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/04/heat-related-deaths-climate-change

Short course in climate at An Open Mind

Tamino, who runs an excellent blog on climate and weather statistical analysis (most of it over my head mathematically :)) at An Open Mind (listed on the right of this page in the blog roll), has a lengthy response today to a lengthy comment on a post concerning the recent U.S. heat wave.  While his response is, as usual, very good, several of the comments are also very educational and provide a good short course on key indicators of climate change.  Recommended.

Hottest 12 months on record, again

Andrew Freedman at Climate Central and Jeff Masters at Weather Underground are both up today with breakdowns and graphics from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) monthly State of the Climate summary for June, which has just been released.

The big news is that for the second month in a row, the U.S. has racked up its warmest 12-month period on record (that is, July 2011 through June 2012 topped June 2011 through May 2012, the previous record holder).  June 2012 also marked the close of the warmest January-June period on record.

Two of the most notable graphics:

This shows the degree to which 2012--so far--is departing from the four warmest years in the temperature record.

And this shows how far the two 12-month periods ending in May 2012 and June 2012 exceed other 12-month periods in the historical record.

By the numbers: U.S. warming

OK, I admit it--I'm a numbers geek, er, guy.

Graphics are good, but numbers are better.  It's fun to poke around them and try to understand the story they are telling.

A while ago, inspired by the Great March 2012 Heat Wave, I expressed concern about the ratio of new high daily temperatures across the U.S. to new low daily temperatures.  I reposted a graphic from the blog Capital Climate that seemed to me to suggest that the high ratios of months like March 2012 (35:1, here after just "35") and January 2012 (22) indicated that wild swings in temperature are growing greater--that the weather system was looking more and more unstable due to global warming.

The Capital Climate graphic, however, didn't show everything I needed to confirm that hypothesis. In this particular iteration (the blog has published others previously, covering different time periods), only ratios from 2011 and 2012 were shown--not enough to get a feel for just how unusual the March and January ratios were.  So I decided to go digging.

A week later (this is tedious and time-consuming work), I've created an Excel spreadsheet that shows new daily highs, new daily lows, and their ratio for months in the years 1993-2012.  I also flipped ahead and took a peek at 1988 and 1936, two previous years with remarkable heat waves.  All data is from the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which maintains an online database of temperature extremes at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/records/.

There's still quite a bit of work to do (the database covers years back to 1850!), but even with the limited portion I've completed, there are some interesting results:

First, ratios of new highs to lows in recent years are not toooo extreme.  While March 2012 (35) and January 2012 (22) are definitely unusual, there are other wilder outliers in the historical record.  January 2006 (58:1) is the biggest I've found so far, and November 1999 (53) and February 2000 (50) also achieved ratios of 50 or better.

Second, there is a clear warming trend.  That trend is, I think, best illustrated by looking at some yearly records:

Most recent year in which new daily lows exceeded new daily highs: 1997, with 16,469 new lows versus 15,964 new highs.  That's a stopper right there, since if the climate were stable, it would be unusual for there to be 14 straight years (1998 through 2011) in which new highs exceeded new lows.

Most recent year with 20,000 or more new daily lows: 1996 (23,160).
Most recent year with 20,000 or more new daily highs: 2007 (26,067).
One might speculate that the number of new records is decreasing over time as the temperature data set gets longer/larger, but there's no reason for highs to exceed lows unless the average temperature is increasing.

Most recent year with 15,000 or more new daily lows: 2002 (18,166).
Most recent year with 15,000 or more new daily highs: 2012 (18,164 and counting, through July 7).
Pretty hard to refute this very impressive data.  2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2011 also had more than 15,000 new daily highs.

Most recent year with 10,000 or more new daily lows: 2007 (10,355).
2010, 2011, 2012 all surpassed 10,000 new daily highs.

Number of months since January 1, 1993, with a ratio of new lows to new highs exceeding 10:1: 1 (March 1997, with a ratio of 12.7:1).
The following months since that date have had ratios of new highs to new lows exceeding 10:1: January 1995 (17), February 1997 (16), January 1998 (12), July 1998 (16), September 1998 (17), November 1998 (21), December 1998 (14), November 1999 (53), January 2000 (12), February 2000 (53), March 2000 (40), November 2001 (14), December 2001 (12), January 2002 (15), August 2003 (12), October 2003 (11), March 2004 (21), February 2005 (18), January 2006 (58), August 2007 (13), June 2011 (10), August 2011 (22), January 2012 (22) and March 2012 (35)--a total of 24 months in all.

Highest ratio of new highs to new lows for a year: 1998 (4.04).
At the moment, 2012 is on track to easily surpass 1998 (currently, its ratio is a remarkable 11.7), but the record makes it clear that significant changes can take place in a few months.

More generally, this work is inspired not only by the Great June-July 2012 Heat Wave, which we have just finished, but by a study of the ratio of new highs to new lows completed in 2009 by authors from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Climate Central, The Weather Channel, and NOAA. That study found the following ratios by decade:

1950s: 1.09 (to 1)
1960s: 0.77
1970s: 0.78
1980s: 1.14
1990s: 1.36
2000s: 2.04

The decadal record has the effect of smoothing variations and making it clear that since the 1990s, the ratio has taken a jump, with a larger increase from the 1990s to 2000s than any previous change.  (I hope to extend this back to at least the 1930s and 1940s, since the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s had multiple very hot summers.)

I'll be continuing to build out my spreadsheet in the coming weeks, and will keep you posted on what I find.

More eye-popping Greenland data

Over at Weather Underground, meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters has a new post on Greenland, including some recent temperature records and a look at the melting of the giant island's ice cap during 2011:

"The record books for Greenland's climate were re-written on Tuesday, when the mercury hit 24.8°C (76.6°F) at Narsarsuaq, Greenland, on the southern coast. According to weather records researcher Maximiliano Herrera, this is the hottest temperature on record in Greenland for May, and is just 0.7°C (1.3°F) below the hottest temperature ever measured in Greenland. The previous May record was 22.4°C (72.3°F) at Kangerlussuaq (called Sondre Stormfjord in Danish) on May 31, 1991. ...

"Between 2003 - 2009, Greenland lost an average of 250 gigatons [billion tons] of ice per year. In 2011, the loss was 70% greater than that." (This is accompanied by a seriously scary graph showing ice loss from 2003 to 2011.)

To briefly recap the nature of the problem:

- The Greenland ice cap is one of the world's two major land-based ice accumulations along with Antarctica.  "Land-based" is key because when land-based ice melts, it adds to sea level rise. (The Arctic ice cap floats on the ocean, so while it is melting too, that doesn't change sea level.)

- There is enough ice in Greenland's mile-high ice cap to raise global sea levels by 7 meters (23 feet) if it all melts (although that's expected to take hundreds of years to happen).

- Many millions of people live in low-lying coastal areas around the world that will have to be abandoned if sea level continues to rise.

Dr. Masters cites studies that estimate Greenland's current contribution to sea level rise at just 0.7 mm (.03 inches) per year, and expect that rate to double over the next decade.

So, nothing urgent here, just another trend that is headed in the wrong direction and accelerating.  On the other hand, it's also a process that may not be entirely predictable.  See Science News, April 16, 2012, "Greenland may be slip-sliding away due to surface lake melting."

Take the blinders off!

In the wake of the astonishing record heat wave of recent days (see U.S. heat 'unprecedented,' 7,000 records set or tied, Reuters, March 23), the flow of what-me-worry reporting from the New York Times continued, with a lengthy article by Clifford Krauss and Eric Lipton on the new U.S. oil and natural gas drilling boom.

Krauss and Lipton tell the story of how increased oil & gas production from fracking and better auto efficiency due to rising fleet economy standards have combined to put U.S. oil imports on a downward trajectory after a long climb.  "[T]he domestic trends are unmistakable," they write. "Not only has the United States reduced oil imports from members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries by more than 20 percent in the last three years, it has become a net exporter of refined petroleum products like gasoline for the first time since the Truman presidency. The natural gas industry, which less than a decade ago feared running out of domestic gas, is suddenly dealing with a glut so vast that import facilities are applying for licenses to export gas to Europe and Asia."

Whoopee!  The only thing missing from this saga of new hydrocarbon wealth is its impact on global warming.  Climate change is mentioned just three times, briefly, and in a political context rather than a scientific one: while Candidate Obama "promoted policies to help combat global warming" in 2008, President Obama has "de-emphasized the challenges of climate change."

I know, I know, it's an energy story, but the question remains: how much longer before energy stories (not to mention weather stories) are viewed as incomplete unless they incorporate discussion of global warming?  It's been a long wait: in 1990, I wrote a letter to the Times complaining about a similar non-mention of climate in a story about the glowing market prospects for the coal industry.

Not that there aren't encouraging signs. Over at the Washington Post, which has been equally out to lunch on global warming, the editorial staff put together a strong screed on the subject today (Rising concern on climate change, March 24).  Said the Post sternly, "[T]he only energy debate America seems capable of having during this election year revolves around whom to blame for higher gas prices and who can bring them down again. Neither of those is the first, second or even 10th question we’d ask of America’s leaders on energy."

I agree, it's a problem.  But when the most respected news sources publish story after story about high gas prices and energy with barely a mention of the most important problem with which they are inextricably intertwined, what are political candidates supposed to do?

The blinders have to come off.  The tunnel vision has to stop.  And as hard as the media try to pass the buck, it has to start with them finding ways to ask the hard questions and change the national conversation.  (For an entirely different take, see Lessons from Obama's Keystone Cave-In by Jeff Goodell on Rolling Stone's Politics blog, March 23, in which he asks the burning question: Will Barack Obama go down in history as the President who cooked the planet?)

Connecting the dots: The Great March Heat Wave and ... climate

I had a brief conversation recently with a couple of friends, both committed, long-standing environmentalists. Both were hesitant to ascribe the extraordinary heat wave we are currently experiencing here in Vermont (and that is being felt as far west as the Dakotas) to global warming.

I told them there was no doubt in my mind about the connection.  For the record (as it were), here's why:

The temperatures have been extraordinary, far outside the realm of previous temperature ranges in our region.  Sunday's high here was 80 degrees F, breaking the old high record by 16 degrees.  Monday the temperature was 79, breaking the old record by 20 degrees.  Tuesday, 80, 13 degrees above the old record.  Wednesday 81, 10 degrees above the old record.  This is just a remarkable run of extreme temperatures. (Today, 84, 11 degrees above the old record--five straight days in which the previous high has been broken by double digits.)

The new high temperature records here and elsewhere across the U.S. dovetail with a pattern that has developed over the past four decades, in which the ratio of new highs to new lows is steadily increasing.  This pattern is detailed in two graphics, one from the blog Capital Climate and one from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) that have been reproduced in two excellent articles at another blog, Climate Progress (see March Madness: This may be an unprecedented event since modern U.S. weather records began in the late 19th Century, March 22, 2012, and Record highs far outpace record lows across U.S., Feb. 11, 2010).  The articles are well worth reading and highly recommended for the detail they provide, but here is a quick summary:

Article 1, from February 2010, includes the UCAR graphic, which shows the ratio of new high records to new low records across the U.S.  If the climate were not changing, one would expect the ratio to vary around 1:1.  Instead, what is actually happening is that the ratio is increasing, and some really wild excursions are taking place.  According to the UCAR graphic, the ratios (new highs to new lows) for recent decades look like this:

1950s: 1.09 to 1
1960s: 0.77 to 1
1970s: 0.78 to 1
1980s: 1.14 to 1
1990s: 1.36 to 1
2000s: 2.04 to 1

Article 2, the "March Madness" article from today, includes the Capital Climate graphic, with the monthly ratios for 2011 and 2012: 22 to 1 for August 2011, 22 to 1 for January 2012, and 35 to 1 to date for March 2012.  That makes three extraordinary heat waves in the past eight months.




I wish I could say the news is going to get better, but I don't think it is--to me (non-scientist), it looks like we are disturbing a previously stable system and the oscillations will get larger as long as we keep increasing the main input that is the source of the disturbance--the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The "March Madness" article also includes a brief video from The Weather Channel, featuring Senior Meteorologist Stu Ostro.  Ostro, formerly skeptical of the findings of climate science, has become a convert in recent years as the weather has increasingly diverged from what's been normal in the past. In Ostro's words, "Something ain't right--it's not business as usual." Indeed.