Senior meteorologist with 20 years of experience at AccuWeather. [ Bio ]
March 2010
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I ran across this blog entry from the San Francisco Chronicle that was written by Dr. Peter Gleick, who is the president of the Pacific Institute.
According to their website, the Pacific Institute is a nonpartisan research institute that works to advance environmental protection, economic development, and social equity.
With a strong, almost angry tone, Dr. Gleick argues that those who deny that humans are causing unprecedented climate change have never, ever produced an alternative scientific argument that comes close to explaining the evidence we see around the world that the climate is changing.
Dr. Gleick goes on and tries to explain how science works in the minds of scientists.
Gleick blames the media for confusing the public, which is true at times, but it's not just science either.
Dr Gleick also included a heavily edited email that is an example of the many that his colleagues receive. After reading the comment, it reminded me of some of the comments that we have received on this blog over the past few years.
I like the Simpsons cartoon at the bottom. Pretty funny!
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What do you think of Dr. Gleick's comments?
Gallup just released their annual update on the American public's attitude toward the science of global warming. Gallup has been running this particular poll since 1997.
To no surprise, the American public is less worried about the threat of global warming than at any time in the past 13 years.
According to Gallup's global warming poll, 48% of Americans now believe that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, which is up from 41% in 2009 and 31% back in 1997.
Also, 19% of Americans say that the effects of global warming will never happen, while 16% stated that the effects of global warming will not happen in their lifetime.
Still, 53% of Americans say the effects of the global warming problem have already begun or will do so in a few years.
"In a sharp turnaround from what Gallup found as recently as three years ago, Americans are now almost evenly split in their views of the cause of increases in the Earth's temperature over the last century," according to Gallup.
50% of Americans believe that increases in the earth's temperature over the last century are due more to human activities, while 46% say it is due to natural causes. These numbers were 61% and 35% respectively back in 2007.
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Results are based on telephone interviews with a random sample of 1,014 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted March 4-7, 2010. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points.
Along a long-frozen seabed north of Siberia (Russia), large amounts of methane, which is a very powerful greenhouse gas, are bubbling up to the surface.
Scientists are not sure if these emissions are new or have been going on for centuries, but the amount of methane (8 million tonnes) that is seeping from under the melting permafrost is equivalent to the annual total previously estimated from all of the world's oceans. The gas is released by rotting vegetation.
Previously, the sea floor had been considered an impermeable barrier sealing methane, says Shakhova. Current methane concentrations in the Arctic are the highest in 400,000 years, according to the ABC Science report.
Scientists are not sure if this venting of methane is caused by global warming or natural factors, but they note that the projected rise in global temperatures will quicken the thaw, which will release even more methane.
Study co-author Dr Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, noted that there is an "urgent need" to monitor the region for possible future changes since permafrost traps vast amounts of methane.
Monitoring could resolve if the venting was "a steadily ongoing phenomenon or signals the start of a more massive release period," according to the scientists, based at US, Russian and Swedish research institutions.
The release of just a "small fraction of the methane held in (the) East Siberian Arctic Shelf sediments could trigger abrupt climate warming," the scientists write.
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This study was posted in the journal Science.
The damaging impact of commercial food production has largely slipped under the radar of global environmental policy, although it is one of the biggest reasons the earth is warming, according to Anna Lappe, author of "Diet for a Hot Planet,"
Many Westerners live off a packaged, processed diet, blind to the wasteful and combative nature of their food system, Lappe said, adding that until they change their eating habits, it will be tough to make any meaningful change to the environment, according to the Washington Post story.
Meat production creates more carbon dioxide (CO2) than all of the world's travel combined, through deforestation, waste and methane that livestock emit, and fossil fuel-based pesticides and synthetic fertilizers farmers use, Lappe said.
Many environmentalists tout the benefits of locally grown food because it travels fewer miles, creating fewer carbon emissions. But a bigger impact of growing food locally is the relationship communities build with the earth, Lappe said. Growing your own food means you are less likely to cut down forests, use harmful pesticides or raise methane-producing cows, she said.
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The original story was written by By Amber Parcher of The Gazette.
Dr. Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), who was at the center of the climategate controversy with the stolen e-mails, testified before a British House of Commons panel on Monday.
Critics have alleged that the CRU e-mails posted on the Internet in November suggest Jones and his colleagues sought to inappropriately manipulate and suppress climate data and silence climate skeptics (ClimateWire, Nov. 24, 2009). Jones temporarily stepped down from his post as CRU's head in December, according to the New York Times article.
Jones stated that he had "obviously written some very awful e-mails," but he also told the panel that they had only seen a tenth of 1% of his emails within this group.
"I don't think anything in those e-mails supports any view that I'm trying to, or CRU has been trying to, pervert the peer review process in any way."
The panel tried to determine whether Jones and his colleagues had responded appropriately to requests to disclose their raw data and computer codes that underlie CRU analyses of global temperature trends, according to the Times.
Jones said that CRU withheld raw data in part because "most scientists don't want to deal with raw station data, they want to deal with the derived product."
Some nations are also reluctant to release climate data since they see this data as having commercial "value". So far, meteorological services worldwide have given permission to do so, said Julia Slingo, the Met Office's chief scientist. Seven countries have said "no," including Canada, Russia, Poland and Sweden. (from the NYT).
No doubt, February 2010 will be long remembered for its extreme temperatures across parts of the globe and the snowstorms that pounded the Middle Atlantic region. I probably will not see a pattern set up like this for the rest of my life.
Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) has released their satellite measured lower tropospheric temperature data for the month of February 2010. The records go back to 1979.
Global temperature anomaly +.588 C
Northern Hemisphere anomaly +.595 C
Southern Hemisphere anomaly +.582 C
Continental U.S. anomaly -1.771 C, which makes this the coldest February for the continental U.S. since February of 1979. I suspect Canada could end up the exact opposite (warmest Feb in the satellite record) based on the February temperature anomaly graphic from RSS below, but I do not have any specific data to back that up right now....
The blues and purples indicate colder than normal temperatures, while the reds and yellows show above normal temperatures.
The extreme blocking pattern that existed over Canada during the month is clearly evident with the well above-normal temperatures in Canada, while the relative cold shifted into the southern U.S.
Much of northern Asia was very cold while north Africa saw an unusually warm February.
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Acknowledgement
MSU/AMSU data are produced by Remote Sensing Systems and sponsored by the NOAA Climate and Global Change Program. Data are available at www.remss.com.
An international team of scientists have co-authored a new study that recalculates glacier melt in Alaska.
The retreating terminus of Stephens Glacier in Alaska.
According to Erik Schiefer, a geographer from the Northern Arizona University (NAU), previous studies have largely overestimated mass loss from Alaskan glaciers over the past 40-plus years.
The study also concluded that glacier melt in Alaska between 1962 and 2006 contributed about one-third less to sea-level rise than previously estimated, according to the NAU press release.
The research team calculated that melting glaciers in Alaska contribute about .0047 inches to sea-level rise per year, compared to earlier estimates which put that number at .0067 inches per year.
The numbers sound small, but as Schiefer said, "It adds up over the decades."
The study looked at three-fourths of all ice in Alaska using satellite imagery that spans vast areas of ice cover.
Two factors led to the original overestimation of ice loss with this older method of flying planes that flew along the centerlines of selected glaciers to measure ice surface elevations. One is the impact of thick deposits of rock debris that offer protection from solar radiation and, thus, melting. The other was not accounting for the thinner ice along the edges of glaciers that also resulted in less ice melt, according to Schiefer.
While the team determined a lower rate of glacial melt during a greater than 40-year span, Schiefer said other studies have demonstrated the rate of ice loss has more than doubled in just the last two decades, according to the NAU release.
An iceberg, comparable to the size of Rhode Island recently collided with the tongue of a large glacier down in Antarctica, causing the tongue of the glacier to completely break away, forming another massive iceberg.
Check out the three photos below from NASA, which show the before and after high resolution satellite images of the collision.....
Feb 7th
Feb 20th
Feb 26th
The B-09B iceberg collided with the Mertz glacier tongue on Feb 12th or 13th, breaking it away from the rest of the glacier.
The B9 iceberg broke from the Ross Ice Shelf in West Antarctica some time in 1987. It took the massive iceberg more than two decades to drift slowly out of the Ross Sea and along the coast to the Mertz Glacier in East Antarctica. Along the way, it broke apart, one segment becoming the massive B-09B iceberg that collided with the glacier tongue in February 2010.
Australian and French scientists indicate that the two icebergs could disrupt global ocean circulation currents. Also, this event has not been directly linked to global warming, but the natural processes of the ice sheet.
Circle of Blue Waternews has a nice animation of the collision right here.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore wrote an op-ed for the New York Times this weekend, defending the science of global warming against renewed attacks, which were buoyed by a cold and snowy winter across much of the southern and eastern United States.
You can read the entire op-ed right here.
Gore does acknowledge the flawed overestimate of the Himalayan glaciers and that scientists from the University of East Anglia (climategate e-mails) may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law. But, he states that the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes and that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged.
If you do not have the time to read the op-ed, here are some excerpts from Gore's commentary through the New York Times........
I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
...panel's scientists.......probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.
The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere -- thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States.
Though there have been impressive efforts by many business leaders, hundreds of millions of individuals and families throughout the world and many national, regional and local governments, our civilization is still failing miserably to slow the rate at which these emissions are increasing -- much less reduce them.
This period of market triumphalism (1990's) coincided with confirmation by scientists that earlier fears about global warming had been grossly understated. But by then, the political context in which this debate took form was tilted heavily toward the views of market fundamentalists, who fought to weaken existing constraints and scoffed at the possibility that global constraints would be needed to halt the dangerous dumping of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere.
The pathway to success is still open, though it tracks the outer boundary of what we are capable of doing. It begins with a choice by the United States to pass a law establishing a cost for global warming pollution. The House of Representatives has already passed legislation, with some Republican support, to take the first halting steps for pricing greenhouse gas emissions.
Dr. James Hansen, the Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), recently co-wrote an essay on his website titled 'If It's That Warm, How Come It's So Darned Cold?'
It looks like the main reason for essay was in response to the fact that scientists reporting global warming have come under attack for a supposed conspiracy to manufacture evidence of global warming, according to Hansen.
Hansen also notes that........
--Regional cold snaps are expected even with large global warming. Weather fluctuations can be 10, 20 or 30 degrees, much larger than average global warming.
--The earth has been in a period of rapid global warming for the past three decades, and that the assertion that the earth has been cooling over the past decade is without foundation.
--The perceptive person should be able to notice that the climate is warming on decadal time scales.
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Hansen also includes a rare and interesting photograph of a frozen Niagara Falls from 1911 in the essay.
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