We have known for a while that global warming is making our weather more extreme, especially extreme heat, drought, heavy rainfall, and flooding. Now we have more predictions:
NASA scientists have developed a new climate model that indicates that the most violent severe storms and tornadoes may become more common as Earth's climate warms.
Perhaps that is why we have been setting records for tornados lately. This is especially bad news for this country because, as the study notes: "The central/east U.S. experiences the most severe thunderstorms and tornadoes on Earth."
The full study, "Will moist convection be stronger in a warmer climate?" was published in Geophysical Research Letters (subs. req'd) earlier this month (here the abstract). The research has mixed implications for wildfires:
For the western United States, drying in the warmer climate reduces the frequency of lightning-producing storms that initiate forest fires, but the strongest storms occur 26 percent more often.
What does this mean?
"These findings may seem to imply that fewer storms in the future will be good news for disastrous western U.S. wildfires," said Tony Del Genio, lead author of the study and a scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York. "But drier conditions near the ground combined with higher lightning flash rates per storm may end up intensifying wildfire damage instead."
The bottom line: The weather is getting more extreme, human-caused global warming is the main reason, and if we don't act soon to reduce emissions, we ain't seen nothin' yet.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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wildleaf Posted 1:01 pm
31 Aug 2007
The Black Car Project
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Delay And Deny Posted 1:09 pm
31 Aug 2007
On weather.com in the morning they said party sunny.
So I rode my bike to work.
At 1 pm they said 30% chance of rain.
It rained on my bike at 5 pm.
Then I rode home in warm, but clear skies.
I stopped at the used clothing store and bought a waterproof jacket.
I didn't need it...it was dry as I rode up Kent East Hill.
Now it's cooler but cloudy.
Predictions?
Better off consulting the Quatrains of Nostradamus...
John Bailo
Sutext:
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greenthinker Posted 1:36 pm
31 Aug 2007
You are a very prolific contrarian here on Grist. Being charitable, I assume that you are well read with respect to the global climate change literature. Surely internalized the most elementary difference between predictions of weather and climate. Predicting the weather on a given day and predicting a seasonal average are clearly different in their accuracy. Skepticism about the former is completely different from skepticism about the latter. But I am sure you know all of this...right?
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Pangolin Posted 4:26 pm
31 Aug 2007
I would point out that weather prediction depends upon extending forward from a known database of conditions and events. That known database probably includes a heavy moderating fraction of arctic ice cap. Too bad, almost gone.
As we don't really know why it's melting so fast I suspect that weather predictions will soon become about as reliable as oija boards.
As usual science fiction beats the news for figuring out what's going on in the world.
Put the Carbon Back
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GreyFlcn Posted 4:52 pm
31 Aug 2007
But they do have a pretty good idea whats causing it. Smog. Specifically Ozone.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2006/tr ...
And the fun part is that biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel actually increase Ozone emissions.
http://greyfalcon.net/ethanol9
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cce Posted 6:18 pm
31 Aug 2007
"Study concludes that rain occurs 30% of the time after forecasts predicting 30% chance of rain."
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Steve Bloom Posted 7:42 pm
31 Aug 2007
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amazingdrx Posted 11:26 pm
31 Aug 2007
I proprosed the "bush bunker" at the start of the administration of the worst president in the history of the US. I had no idea those bunkers would be needed to protect from GHG caused storms.
But I knew they would be named after the duuh...bya. Like Hoovervilles, groups of tarpaper shacks for victims of the great depression, would be named after Hoover.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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trock Posted 5:25 am
01 Sep 2007
I can reasonably predict which teams will win more often in baseball and which pitchers will get the strikeouts and wins and which hitters will get the hits and homeruns. I just couldn't tell you on which days the teams or pitchers would win or on which day or at bat a hitter will get a hit.
Does that mean I have not idea how many total homeruns there is going to be in baseball season? No. It'll be about the same number of homeruns as the year before if nothing else changed.
Now let's say that the makers of baseballs made all the balls go 5 percent farther. I'd predict that there would be more homeruns hit. Does that make me a genius. Hardly, but somehow, people of reasonable intellegence want to think that it would have no effect.
Adding Carbon Dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere is like using a using ball that goes farther. There are lots of factors causing a baseball to go out of a park, but if you change the ball itself, and everything else stays the same, the ball will go for a homer more often. And thus with climate, more greenhouse gases, warmer climate.
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Sam Wells Posted 7:03 am
01 Sep 2007
The climatologists and modelers are very careful to say that global warming MAY cause some outbreaks of more severe droughts and cyclones.
I do not need persuading because I believe global warming IS a clear and present danger to be confronted.
But when you look outside or watch the news and say "Gee, look at that global warming effect" you are exposing yourself as being dumb, asinine, ludicrous, and perhaps some religious shaman that should be run out of town.
Onward through the fog
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trock Posted 9:30 pm
01 Sep 2007
I think an example of this is not alowing oil drilling in ANWAR in Alaska. It's mostly a bunch of ice with some great pictures to be taken, but very few people have been there and if the whole thing just fell into the sea, I don't think it would be that great a loss. (except for anybody living there)
Then we say we should do something about Global Warming because it could give us problems. The reply would be, no, you just want control, you don't really know what you're talking about, you also think that setting aside ANWR from drilling is a good idea.
If it's not a control thing, why is ANWR set aside, who 1000 people a year visit and doesn't really matter to humans (or biomass) if it exists. All industry wants is a small foot print to do drilling. We will someday drill there when we get to cold or our cars need the fuel. We will drill there in our near future.
Some people say control over other people is the real reason that oil drilling is not allowed in ANWR. Can we say it's not? Some of the solutions to Global Warming is to place a huge amount of Wind Turbines and huge Concentrated
Solar Power plants in our human environment and in places alot more noticable than northern Alaska.
That's why I'm an advocate of tax trading to help with Global Warming. We should pay a little less in Income, Property, Sales and Social Security taxes for a little more taxes in Carbon Dioxide release. It would be the simplist method with the most benefit and could be the easiest to explain. Taxes on Carbon Dioxide relaese don't go up until other taxes go down.
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Sam Wells Posted 4:15 am
02 Sep 2007
Sunlight has infrared energy that is in part absorbed by the Earth
CO2 in the atmosphere can store IR energy as heat, although water vapor is the most powerful
The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the warmer it can get. So far so good. Should have stopped right there.
Because heat is not uniformly distributed over the planet, cyclones can occur. Anti-cyclones or high pressure cells are by definition stable air masses but a cyclone is by definition unstable, chaotic, and notoriously difficult to predict. That is why most climatology models looks to key indicators such as latent ocean heat, ocean oscillation (e.g., El Nino), jet stream positioning, Saharan dust, persistent high pressure, and other variables because they simply can't predict individual cyclones. So what the climatologists are saying is that based on such information, things could be relatively warmer or cooler, or wetter or drier.
Some researchers as Dr. Emmanuel have inferred that intensity, duration, and spatial coverage of individual cyclones could be worse in the future than in the past. Climatologists howled in protest, since such a conclusion could not be based on climactic theory. Meteorologist protested because of measurement issues and lack of proof regarding cyclones, especially historical ones.
Was Dr. Emmanuel right?
He has fair chances that he was correct (I am open to that) but the overwhelming consensus is not on his side. Cold core cyclones (cold fronts) and warm core cyclones (hurricanes) follow historical ups and downs as a Circadian Rhythm. For example, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) seems to repeat itself about every 30 years or so, with our present condition being in a peak cycle that started in 1995. It is well known that the AMO can cause droughts in the Southwest and wet conditions along the Gulf and Atlantic. So on that basis, Dr. Emmanuel was right.
But are today's hurricanes worse than in the past years, speaking of intensity, duration, and spatial coverage? That turns out to be a big problem because we didn't have many good measurements back in the old days - no satellites, no computerized weather reporting system, and sparse density of any monitoring stations and weather buoys. Our ability to measure storm energy has vastly improved since the last "cool" AMO periods in 1969-1994 and 1990-1925. Therefore, historical cyclones had to be somehow inferred, which could lead to heavily biased results. Dr. Emmanuel did not do so good on that point.
At the end of the day, one would have to "tease out" the difference between the AMO impacts and the notion that CO2 and ambient temperatures were rising, perhaps producing an increase in planetary water vapor or maybe 8 percent. Many weather gurus agree that storm energy could be enhanced in this manner, but are reluctant to say how, or anything about a single weather event.
Sam Wells
Onward through the fog
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