Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal

A deadly weekend tornado outbreak is becoming more likely this evening. Conditions are coming together for potentially violent long track tornadoes across much of Mississippi and Alabama on Saturday. Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana are also threatened.

It is quite possible conditions may reach the threshold for a rare High Risk outlook from the Storm Prediction Center (NOAA) in Norman.

Several of the tornado watches tomorrow will be PDS watches. (Particularly Dangerous Situation).

As I mentioned in my previous post last night, the parameters for an outbreak of strong and long track tornadoes are quite high. The numbers have actually increased some. One of these parameters that forecasters look at is the significant tornado algorithm.

This index looks at instability and wind shear along with low level moisture to indicate areas where the highest threat is. Based on this index, a high risk may be needed for NW Alabama and nearby areas on Saturday.

There are already severe thunderstorms with possible tornadoes developing in Mississippi.

The greatest threat for tornadoes will be during the day and early evening tomorrow. It is very possible that more tornadic storms could develop across Arkansas and Louisiana before sunrise.

Don’t get in the “fraidy” hole yet, but you might want to vacuum the carpet in it…

It may sound crass and I do not mean it to be that way, but there are likely to be deaths from tornadoes in the next 48 hours.

If only we could only say exactly where!

What we can say is that conditions are coming together to make the development of a few strong tornadoes and they will likely be in Mississippi and Alabama on Saturday. Here in Alabama there is special concern because nearly 100,000 people will be at a major stock car race in Talladega. Here in Huntsville is a major art festival Panoply.

The odds of a tornado touching down at any one spot are minuscule, but the odds of a tornado in the area are rather high. So all we can do is to warn people to be alert and to have a NOAA Alert Weather Radio.

One other thing. If you live in a mobile home, make arrangements to go somewhere else during a tornado watch on Saturday. Believe me when i say that several will be issued. Your odds of being killed or injured from a tornado are many times higher in a mobile home. Leave the windows closed (Opening them can increase damage) and consider a walk in closet or a bathroom for safety.

You might wonder just how we know tornadoes are possible?

Tornadoes require two basic ingredients. Wind shear and instability.

A tornado can develop with a lot of one parameter and a little of another. The big outbreaks happen when you have a LOT of both.

This weekend looks to have a lot of  both.

Instability can be measured in different ways but one preferred way is to use numerical weather prediction models to estimate the CAPE.

CAPE stand for Convective Available Potential Energy. Remember potential energy from high school physics? Let me just simplify it and say that numbers over 1000 joules/kg are bad.

Wind shear can also be measured (and is) in different ways. The direction of the wind shear that a storm sees as it moves along is most important and meteorologists look at what is called the storm relative helicity as an indicator. This gets even more complicated (can you say calculus?), but the basics are this- over 200 is bad.

Here are some actual NWP charts for those parameters on Saturday. I will let you check out the numbers.

There are a lot of meteorologists at NOAA and at TV stations (like me) who will be working together for very long hours to give as much warning as possible.

Take them seriously this weekend, even if you never have before.

Mother nature may be in a rotten mood.

A lot of TV weather people avoid talking about climate change on air. There are multiple reasons for this. Among them are the fact that the person you see doing the weather on TV in many cases does not know that much about science. (Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to stop some from saying some really silly things.)

The number one reason is the political overtones involved in it. This is actually a good reason not to do it and something I thought long and hard before I said something.

There are two parts to this story and here is why I decided to do it.

What we DO about climate change is a political issue.  The reality of the threat and it’s magnitude is a scientific question.  Especially when you consider that the average person sees only one person with a background in science each day.

Who??

The person giving them the forecast on TV.

I’ve long thought that those of us who are real meteorologists with a background in atmospheric physics have an obligation to provide accurate scientific information. We get plenty of questions about science everyday, from “What’s that bright star in the western sky?” to “How big was that quake??”

So with that justification for doing so, the next question becomes “what do I say??”.

This is where things have gotten really messed up.

I was on an advisory panel for a survey of TV weather people on climate change. It was conducted by Ed Maibach of George Mason University. The results of this survey absolutely floored me. 26% of the respondents believe global warming is a scam.

This is amazing.

I shouldn’t be surprised.  Just this week, I heard one on-air weathercaster blame the sun and another claimed the planet is getting cooler!

Why are so many TV weather people  so skeptical?

I wish I knew. The lack of science training in some may be a factor, but I think it is much deeper than that. I know some really smart forecasters who make a right turn into a brick wall when it comes to climate change.

It is very difficult to forecast the weather for the next 7 days and perhaps the idea of talking about the weather 100 years ahead is the problem. I used to feel exactly the same way. I’ve since learned that climate and weather  are two very different things.

The climate science community needs to work hard on explaining this to TV weather people and the public at large. Weathercasters on the other hand need to take a page from good journalists and learn to set aside political beliefs and really study the science. Especially if they are going to talk about it on air. They have an obligation to do so.

With this in mind, should I not say on air that scientists are divided? That there is deep division and the science is not good?

Let’s look at it from a logical and scientific perspective.

EVERY major scientific organisation on Earth has endorsed the IPCC reports. This includes strongly worded warnings, that we must act, from the American Meteorological Society, the AGU, the AAAS.

The oldest and most distinguished scientific body on Earth, The Royal Society has done likewise. Then there is NASA and NOAA the two major government science bodies in America. They too agree.

On the other side you have a tiny handful of scientists, only a few of which have published anything recently in peer reviewed journals, who disagree. Even more telling is to look online at the number of scientists who are writing blogs about the latest research.

Real Climate is the most popular and is written by several scientists from NASA and Universities. Climate Progress is another one that takes on the political issue and covers the science. Joe Romm the author has a doctorate in physics. Only in it for the Gold is another excellent resource by Dr. Michael Tobis.

The most popular blog on the “other side” is written by a retired TV weatherman who never even finished an undergraduate degree in either Meteorology or climatology. In second place is one written by the former spin master for extreme right wing Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has said that all the scientists in the world are perpetrating the greatest hoax in human history. Yet another is written by someone who has a doctorate in, wait for it…

political science.

This in itself should tell you something, but it still does not cover the science.

Peer review and scientific method have taken us from living in log cabins to exploring the outer planets in two centuries. The great thing about the way science works is that the knowledge is built upon those that have come before.

If you want to make the claim that the sun is responsible for climate change, then you will need to show why the dozens of papers that show it’s not are wrong. You need to show why people like Dr. Judith Lean at the U.S. Naval Observatory is wrong when she puts together a graph of the sun’s output showing it has been remarkably constant in the last 50 years.

You also will need to show why Dr. Ben Santer is wrong. Santer showed conclusively that the pattern of warming is not what we would see from the sun getting brighter, but it IS what we would see if it were increasing greenhouse gases. There are many more too.

If you want to claim the planet is getting cooler then you need to show why Michael Mann’s data showing a stunning warming trend is wrong. A lot of people have tried.  Every single scientific review of the data says he has it right.

You will also need to show why almost every tropical glacier on the planet is melting and the rate of the melting of the Greenland Ice Cap is increasing. While your at it, explain why the ocean temperatures are warming and hundreds of species are migrating northward in the Northern Hemisphere., while the planet cools. There are a dozen other independent climate proxies that all show warming.

Why are all of these wrong???

The world of science is waiting. All you have to do is write it up and submit it to a peer reviewed journal. That’s how science works. Political spin does not, but science does.

What about El Nino??
That’s not responsible either, but it didn’t stop McLean et.al from getting their paper published and turning themselves into the laughing stock of the science world this month. Need a laugh? Read all about it HERE.

Last, but not least, is the myth of bad data. This is a real favorite of the number one denial blogger. He claimed that NOAA’s weather stations were all badly placed and the data could not be trusted! Only a hundred or so out of thousands are any good he claimed, therefore we cannot trust it!

NOAA ran the data with the stations that he found acceptable and guess what? We have warmed more than we thought. Not less. The difference was incredibly minor. You can read more about this comical episode HERE.

While we’re going through the list of myths, let’s not forget that all time favorite the urban heat island effect!

If you want to discredit a hundred years of climate science based on this, then please tell Dr. Tom Karl the head of the National Climate Data Center (and President of the AMS) why he is wrong when he says the cities of the world cause us to be only a few thousandths of a degree warmer.

That’s three orders of magnitude less than the 0.8C warming we have experienced!! Also explain to him why he is wrong when he runs just the rural stations and and gets the same warming??

You also might explain why if it IS the cities, how come the oceans are all warming too??

Karl and other took the time  to do the math and write it up and submit to a peer reviewed journal. If he is wrong, you need to do the same. Neil Degrasse Tyson said “The laws of physics are real, everything else is just politics.

Show us the science. We are all waiting.

So we are left with the giant conspiracy to prevent the truth from being published. The claim is thousands of scientists around the world are all working together to prevent the “truth” from being published.

The great thing about a conspiracy is this. If someone proves it wrong, you can just claim the proof is part of the conspiracy! Every newsroom gets these conspiracy calls every day. Castro shot Kennedy, Area 51, contrails are really chemical mind control, etc. News folks just call them nutters. Twenty people can’t  keep a secret, much less thousands. Get real.

So there we have it.

No serious peer reviewed journal has published anything that put a serious dent in the current understanding of climate in years now. The evidence is not just overwhelming now. It’s a mountain. I couldn’t go through every argument, but John Cook, who studied solar physics at the Univ. of Queensland down in OZ, runs a great web site that explains the real science behind these myths.

Scientists are taught to be skeptics. Show us the data. Being skeptical is good scientific practice but ignoring a mountain of evidence while giving credit to claims in political journals instead is not scientific skepticism.

It’s politics.

This is why I am not afraid to talk about climate change. I think I’m obligated to do so when there is overwhelming evidence we are tampering with the very air conditioner of our planet.

I have all the world’s major scientific organizations backing me up as well.

Richard Feynman was right. “Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves”.

Dan

Dr. Brian Cox.

Rock band musician and physicist. No, really. He played in the rock band DARE with Thin Lizzy’s Darren Wharton.

If you’re in the UK and have not seen Wonders of The Solar System on BBC Two, then fire up the iPlayer and watch it. All four episodes that have aired are just superb.

They are the only TV productions I’ve seen about astronomy that equals or surpasses the great Carl Sagan’s COSMOS. Episode two on Saturn’s rings is in itself equal or better than any COSMOS episode.

The world of science desperately needs a replacement to Carl Sagan these days. There is an open war on science among some political groups. The overwhelming consensus among scientists on such subjects as climate change and the age of the Earth is being ridiculed by those with a political viewpoint to trumpet.  Urged on by only a tiny handful of academics.

Brian Cox is anything but a nerdy science guy. He has a way with words. His on camera presence is comfortable and unique.

Sagan was actually looked down upon in some quarters of the science community for being so famous. It just wasn’t “scientific” some thought.

This mistake should not happen again. The silly claims about climate science recently by those ignorant of how science works should be a potent reminder. Science needs a champion right now. Someone the public can latch onto. Someone who can make the case that knowledge for the sake of knowledge is important.

Hopefully these episodes will be bought by PBS and shown here in America soon. Remember that the next time your local PBS station is having a fund drive!

I am a proud member of the International Association of Broadcast Meteorologists. Many of us who do weather on TV and radio realise that we may very well be the only person of science the average person sees each day. Those of us in the IABM take that responsibility very seriously. We strive to give accurate information on not only weather but on science in general.

Paul Gross of the IABM and the chair of the AMS Station Science Committee has an excellent editorial in the most recent issue of the IABM journal UP FRONT. (Full disclosure- Paul is a friend, and I am a member of the committee)

Here is a well reasoned and fact based look at the issue. I deserved wider dissemination than just us TV science types.

I have my own little mention in the UP FRONT. It is a summary of my trip to Antarctica. You can read it below.