The Ozone levels soared Friday. We hit 127 on the air quality index in Huntsville. We always get calls and emails from people on days like this who are confused. Didn’t they hear that the ozone was disappearing? Wasn’t that a bad thing? Now we are saying there is too much of it! What gives??
Actually they are right, ozone is a good thing. It is also a bad thing. Here is the scoop!
Ozone is Ozone, but we have two areas of Ozone on Earth. Tropospheric Ozone and Stratospheric Ozone.
Ozone is oxygen by the way. The oxygen we breathe is two oxygen atoms bonded together. Ozone is formed when three atoms of oxygen bond.
The stratospheric ozone is good. It blocks harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun from making it to the surface. Tropospheric Ozone is bad. It causes allergy like symptoms and is bad for your health.
The bad ozone (near the ground) is formed from exhaust gases from burning coal and oil. sunlight interacts with these pollutants and through a photochemical reaction, Ozone is produced. Some of this ozone will make it to the stratosphere eventually, and become good Ozone.
One of the greatest success stories of international cooperation is the Montreal Protocol. Scientists discovered in the 1970’s that chemicals used in air conditioners, and in aerosol cans were reaching the stratosphere and reacting chemically with the Ozone to destroy it. These CFC’s (Chlorofluorocarbons) were essentially phased out and replaced with more safe alternatives. This agreement is why you will have a tough time buying Freon these days! The Montreal Protocol has been amended a few times since 1985 to phase out other Ozone destroying chemicals as well.
Now the famous Ozone hole that develops in the Austral Spring each year over Antarctica is still there and bigger than ever, but atmospheric models now show that the Ozone hole will be mostly gone by 2065.
This is a good thing, in more ways than one! We did not appreciate it at the time, but it turns out that Ozone is a potent Greenhouse gas!
There is some significant new research coming out in August from NASA Scientist James Hansen. He apparently has evidence that Ozone, and some other pollutants have been responsible for more of the planet’s warming in the past few decades than thought.
Tropospheric Ozone is the reason we have an Air Quality Alert this weekend (July 2008) here in Huntsville.
The clean air act specifies that cities should try to keep Ozone levels below a certain standard. The current standard is 76 ppb (Parts per billion). It was just lowered from 80 ppb this year. When the air quality index is at 100, that indicates that the 8 hour average of Ozone was at 76 ppb. Friday’s number was 127, so we were well above the standard.
One last thing and perhaps most important. Politics is involved in this standard. The EPA has a Science Advisory Committee that advises the EPA on what level of Ozone is dangerous to health. The panel last year Unanimously recommended that the standard be lowered to somewhere between 60-70 ppb. The EPA lowered it 4 ppb from 80 to 76.
The EPA says an AQI number of 90 is moderate air quality. The top scientific experts say it is unhealthful. So what do I tell my viewers?? I am doing both.
The EPA is now proposing doing away with this science advisory committee. This proposal has met with some fierce criticism from the scientific community.
You may have heard me mention CoCoRahs on a weather cast a couple of times, and did not pay much attention. Well you should have! If you are the type of person who is interested in science (Why are you reading this if you’re not? You certainly cannot be expecting news about that Brittany person) then you really should check it out.
CoCo Rahs stands for community Collaborative Rain and Hail Study. What it boils down to is this. With the Internet, we can now collect very valuable rain, hail, snow data from across the nation in real time!
This is not only valuable to synoptic forecasters like myself, but to climatologists and hydrologists as well. Both now, and in the future!
It takes 5 minutes a day at most. Less if there has been no rain or snow. Best of all, you will have the good feeling of knowing that your making a valuable contribution to science!
You will have to fork out $28 for a rain gauge but that is the only cost. Just go online and type in your precip..hit submit and you’re done! The reason for the special rain gauge is simple. Your gauge is not accurate! Hold on you say. You have a $500 tipping bucket gauge running on solar power! Nope, the plastic CoCoRahs gauge is better. It is even better than the VERY expensive gauges that NOAA puts in at airports!
Have I talked you into it?? Check out cocorahs.org and look at the power point below!
Here is a link to a power point with tons more info:
The UK took a big step back from Biofuels this week. It seems the science has finally caught up with the rhetoric. Are biofuels all they are cracked up to be?
Maybe, but science tells us not the way we are headed now.
First of all let’s start with the basics.
The idea behind biofuels is a good one. The thought process works this way..
We grow corn which takes carbon out of the air and ground. We turn that corn into ethanol to burn in our gas tank. Yes, this will release Carbon back into the atmosphere, but we are just recycling it. The next crop of corn will suck the carbon right back out again.
Another benefit is that countries that use a LOT of oil are not as dependent on Middle Eastern suppliers. If we make enough perhaps we will not have to drill up the ANWAR and a thousand other places to supply our fix.
When we use gasoline (Petrol for you Aussies and UK folks) we are taking Carbon that was long ago taken out of the carbon cycle, and putting it back into the atmosphere.
This is not good because the more Carbon we put into the air, the warmer our planet gets.
It all looks good on paper but the devil is in the details.
When we calculate how much carbon we are saving with biofuels, we have to consider the energy needed to plant the crop. Fertilize the crop. Harvest it and convert it to ethanol. All that takes fuel! Burning that fuel releases carbon, and other pollutants into the atmosphere.
So what happens when you do the math?
The answer is you save about 10-15% of the carbon that would be released from just using oil like we do now. Congress loved the math so much, that last year they passed new requirements that increase dramatically the amount of ethanol we use over the next 15 years. The farmers love it because the price of corn has tripled in 3 years! How much of this rise is due to demand for biofuels is debatable, but a World Bank report released recently says a large amount of the price rise is due to biofuel demand.
While high food prices are a pain in the pocket book to most Americans, and Europeans, they are a pain in the stomach to many people in the third world. If you cannot afford to heat, you go hungry. This is a science blog, so I will leave the important moral issues for someone else. Let’s just follow the carbon.
THE SHOE DROPS HERE
It turns out that a lot of the corn now being grown around the world is being grown on land that was not cropland a few years ago. Therein lies the problem. When you turn an hectare of Prairie grass into a corn crop you release the carbon in that prairie grass, and some of the carbon in the soil into the atmosphere.
With high food prices around the world, there are millions of hectares of rain forest, grass land, and any other vegetation you can think of being plowed under to grow biofuel crops. Not just corn either, Palm oil is the reason that the topical rain forest in Indonesia is under attack.
When we redo the math, and add in the amount of carbon released by turning land already covered by vegeation into biofuel crops, a much different picture emerges.
It turns out that biofuels grown on converted land actually cause MORE carbon to go into the atmosphere. In some cases many times more Carbon! In some cases it will take hundreds of years to save any carbon from the atmosphere. A rain forest stores a LOT of carbon. Cutting it down to grow corn for biofuels will do much more harm than good.
In other words, if biofuels put more carbon into the atmosphere than oil- Better to use the oil!
The American Meteorology Society brought together some scientific experts on Biofuels recently in Washington. You can see their presentatons here:
AMS ENVIRONEMENTAL SCIENCE SERIES
(Scroll down until you see the biofuels image)
Right now every gallon of ethanol costs the taxpayer 50 cents in farm subsidies. So keep in mind that it is not as cheap as you might think.
So do we dump the idea?
No.
There is VERY promising research that will likely show us how to make biofuels in a sustainable way that does not increase the carbon in our atmosphere. Unfortunately, they may not prove very popular with the National Corn Growers Association.
The evidence is growing that we do not have a lot of time to figure this out. One of the top climate scientists in the world believes we are already out of time. NASA’s James Hansen believes we might have already passed the tipping point, and we can no longer avoid significant changes to our climate.
The river of science supporting climate change has turned into an avalanche. I work hard to keep up with the peer reviewed science, and I have to tell you the news is not good.
Later,
Dan
Update Sunday 13-07-08:
CBS London correspondent Mark Phillips has done a very good piece on Bio fuels. He actually puts it much more succinctly than I do!
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/12/eveningnews/main4255982.shtml
I spent last week in Denver at the American Meteorological Society conference
on Broadcast Meteorology.
You should know that of all the Meteorologist who belong to the AMS in this
country, very few work on TV! There are many many more who work for NOAA, NASA,
and private firms. Researchers, climate scientists, university professors etc.
Having the conference in Denver gave us the ability to visit two key research
facilities. The first was NCAR- The National Centers For Atmospheric Research.
NCAR is funded by Universities, NOAA and the National Science Foundation. Almost every person working in the field of Atmospheric Science knows someone who worked at or works now at NCAR. I have two friends who work there. Some of the first research into dual polarimetric radar was initiated there.
NCAR has a nice audio tour with exhibitions, so if you find yourself in Boulder, bring the kids up and take the tour. They even have stromatolites..the very oldest fossils of life on earth. They are thought to have developed very early on the evolutionary time line.
After NCAR I went down the road a bit to ESRL. The NOAA facility at the Earth Systems Research laboratory. We had a nice briefing on the latest Climate Change research and I saw the fabulous Science on A Sphere invented by Dr. Sandy McDonald the director of ESRL. We must get one of these in Huntsville!!! I hope to talk some big local high tech company into donating the $161,000 to get one at Sci Quest. NOAA will provide it at cost.
Imagine walking into a dark room and in front of you hanging in space is the Earth is all it’s colour! The sphere makes it possible to show everything from real time images from the GOES satellites to plate tectonics and climate models. I think it is one of the best educational tools I have ever seen. Imagine following Alabama’s place on the earth through 550 million years of earth history. Radically cool dude!
Last but not least is the bad news. The updates on our climate are full of bad news. In spite of the junk science on internet sites and blogs, the peer reviewed science is full of data indicating the planet is perhaps approaching a tipping point in our climate. Arctic sea ice is diminishing at a much more rapid pace than the IPCC forecasted. Sea level is also rising at a rate above the IPCC midlines.
The public in general is very confused on climate change issues because they have difficulty in picking out science from opinion. The way to do it is Peer Review, and my next blog entry is going to be on just that topic!
Forecasting is my job..Science is my passion….Email me anytime with a science question..I iwill try and find the answer for you!
Later,
Dan
I am constantly amazed at the amount of bad information about climate change that is available on the web, masquerading as Science. I frequently get questions asking or commenting on some of these ridiculous claims.
To be sure, there are a lot of things about the Earth’s Climate that are understood poorly. One of the biggest debates in literature right now is on the question of hurricanes in a warmer world. Will there be more or fewer. Will there be stronger or weaker storms. The answer to this question is still in the future. The current leading candidate for an answer is fewer storms but stronger ones. It is not settled and there is no consensus. There are tons of other questions from the affect of cloud on the radiation balance to how much CO2 the oceans can absorb. It is a very fascinating field.
There is a consensus on the broad issues. An absolutely overwhelming consensus. In the past 10 years there has been no published paper in a respectable journal concluding that the basic theories on warming are wrong!
(Oreskes:Science 3 December 2004:
Vol. 306. no. 5702, p. 1686
DOI: 10.1126/science.1103618
The planet has warmed about 6/10 of a degree Celsius. Most of that in the last 50 years and the warming rate is increasing. The top 800 Climate scientists in the world have said that there is a greater than 95% confidence that this warming is mainly due to human behavior. (Adding CO2 to the atmosphere)
I was ill and stuck in bed for almost all of last weekend (I will spare you the details, and be thankful!). I did use the time to catch up with some of the latest in Climate Change Science. Want to know what I found out?
It is worse than I expected.
Considerably worse.
Most of the latest published papers are indicating that the IPCC forecasts that were derided as being alarmists by some, are actually turning out to be too conservative. Just one example is Arctic sea ice. It is melting considerably faster than expected.
People tend to gravitate to explanations they understand when researching something. This is where the junk science sites do their best fishing. I think the world’s climate scientists have fallen down on the job a bit. Yes I know they get tired of refuting the same tired old claims over and over, but someone needs to help the public understand the real science. Especially on the web.
The junk science sites on the Internet have done a really decent job of confusing the issue. Much of it is a mix of a little truth, Spin disguised as basic high school Physics, and a whole lot of just plain wrong facts.
There are some shining examples of good science though.
The IPCC summary for policy makers is written in plain language and is very good. A group of very brainy climate scientists at the Goddard Inst. for Space Science (NASA) at Columbia University have been posting to a blog for about 4 years. It is probably the best source of information for someone who turns green when reading a paper published in a front line peer reviewed journal. The blog is called Real Climate. This blog has won awards from scientific organizations for it’s excellence.
So, what follows is Dan’s Junk Science detector. If you see any of the following claims on a web site purporting to give you unbiased climate science, run.
- Volcanoes produce more CO2 than humans.
(This one is quite popular with numbers and percentages from the Carbon cycle to make it’s point.) - Global Warming stopped in 199*
- CO2 does not cause warming
- The Troposphere is getting colder, and this does not match the climate model predictions.
(There was a mis-match in data and this was very concerning for a couple of years, but almost all of it has been explained as errors in adjusting for instrument bias. (This episode is an excellent example of how science works) There is still some discrepancy over the tropics and this is the subject of much research) Real Climate mentioned above has links to some exc. papers on this. - Antarctica is getting colder.
(The climate models predict it should possibly cool some so if it is this means the models are doing well. Researchers do not really have a long enough data set to say for sure yet. The Antarctic Peninsula is warming very rapidly) - Anything to do with water vapor being responsible for all the warming.
(This is even on some of the sites that say we are not warming. Which is it??) - Back in the 70’s they said it was going to get colder….
(Actually the overwhelming opinion in the late 70’s was warming but no one then knew how much)
If you see any of the above, (and those are just a small percentage), then you should realize that you are being given information that is not based on peer reviewed Science.
No front line Climate Scientist would give them the time of day. Why? They have ALL been refuted (Some many times) in peer reviewed journals.
Even the few scientists who are skeptical of the consensus pay little attention to most of these claims.
I have a list of very good resources for anyone who really wants to learn more about climate change. If you want some pointers on where to go, email me. I will probably put them together in my next blog. The links above are a good start. If you hear some other outlandish claims, email me.
I collect them!
Later,
Dan
