Dan’s Wild Wild Weather Journal

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.

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 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

I have read some great books on science this year and I want to share them with you. If you saw my Quick Science report on Sunday morning, then these are the books I was talking about.

Two of them are by one author: Kerry A. Emanuel, Ph.D.

Doctor Emanuel is a professor of Atmospheric Science at what is arguably the best engineering school in the world. MIT in Boston. In my opinion he is the world’s greatest expert on hurricanes. His book Divine Wind is the best I have read on the subject. He has done the impossible in writing a book that is loved by scientist and non scientist alike. Buy it..you will not regret it.

Here is a link to the book on Amazon: Divine Wind
His newest book is about climate change and it is here: About Climate Change

Last but not least is another book on climate. The Two Mile Time Machine is not about the future climate but instead it covers the climate of the past… deduced from ice cores in Greenland. It is a much better and more interesting read than you think it is!

I link to Amazon for convenience, but you can order them from any book seller!

Here is a press release from NOAA that you may find interesting. Yet another year of unusually warm weather in the USA and worldwide.

NOAA: 2007 a Top Ten Warm Year for U.S. and Globe

The year 2007 is on pace to become one of the 10 warmest years for the contiguous U.S., since national records began in 1895, according to preliminary data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The year was marked by exceptional drought in the U.S. Southeast and the West, which helped fuel another extremely active wildfire season. The year also brought outbreaks of cold air, and killer heat waves and floods. Meanwhile, the global surface temperature for 2007 is expected to be fifth warmest since records began in 1880. Preliminary data will be updated in early January to reflect the final three weeks of December and is not considered final until a full analysis is complete next spring.

U.S. Temperatures

The preliminary annual average temperature for 2007 across the contiguous United States will likely be near 54.3 degrees F- 1.5 degrees F (0.8 degrees C) above the twentieth century average of 52.8 degrees F. This currently establishes 2007 as the eighth warmest on record. Only February and April were cooler-than-average, while March and August were second warmest in the 113-year record.

The warmer-than-average conditions in 2007 influenced residential energy demand in opposing ways, as measured by the nation’s Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index. Using this index, NOAA scientists determined that the U.S. residential energy demand was about three percent less during the winter and eight percent higher during the summer than what would have occurred under average climate conditions.

Exceptional warmth in late March was followed by a record cold outbreak from the central Plains to the Southeast in early April. The combination of premature growth from the March warmth and the record-breaking freeze behind it caused more than an estimated $1 billion in losses to crops (agricultural and horticultural).

A severe heat wave affected large parts of the central and southeastern U.S. in August, setting more than 2,500 new daily record highs.

Global Temperatures

The global annual temperature − for combined land and ocean surfaces – for 2007 is expected to be near 58.0 F – and would be the fifth warmest since records began in 1880. Some of the largest and most widespread warm anomalies occurred from eastern Europe to central Asia.

Including 2007, seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001 and the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1997. The global average surface temperature has risen between 0.6 degrees C and 0.7 degrees C since the start of the twentieth century, and the rate of increase since 1976 has been approximately three times faster than the century-scale trend.

The greatest warming has taken place in high latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Anomalous warmth in 2007 contributed to the lowest Arctic sea ice extent since satellite records began in 1979, surpassing the previous record low set in 2005 by a remarkable 23 percent. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, this is part of a continuing trend in end-of-summer Arctic sea ice extent reductions of about 10 percent per decade since 1979.

U.S. Precipitation and Drought Highlights

Severe to exceptional drought affected the Southeast and western U.S. More than three-quarters of the Southeast was in drought from mid-summer into December. Increased evaporation from usually warm temperatures, combined with a lack of precipitation, worsened drought conditions. Drought conditions also affected large parts of the Upper Midwest and areas of the Northeast.

Water conservation measures and drought disasters, or states of emergency, were declared by governors in at least five southeastern states, along with California, Oregon, Maryland, Connecticut, and Delaware at some point during the year.

A series of storms brought flooding, millions of dollars in damages and loss of life from Texas to Kansas and Missouri in June and July. Making matters worse were the remnants of Tropical Storm Erin, which produced heavy rainfall in the same region in August.

Drought and unusual warmth contributed to another extremely active wildfire season. Approximately nine million acres burned through early December, most of it in the contiguous U.S., according to preliminary estimates by the National Interagency Fire Center.

There were 15 named storms in the Atlantic Basin (Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico) in 2007, four more than the long-term average. Six storms developed into hurricanes, including Hurricanes Dean and Felix, two category 5 storms that struck Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and Nicaragua, respectively (the first two recorded category 5 landfalls in the Atlantic Basin in the same year). No major hurricanes made landfall in the U.S., but three tropical depressions, one tropical storm and one Category 1 Hurricane made landfall along the Southeast and Gulf coasts.

La Niña conditions developed during the latter half of 2007, and by the end of November, sea surface temperatures near the equator of the eastern Pacific were more than 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) below average. This La Niña event is likely to continue into early 2008, according to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

Links to data, graphics and analysis, in addition to further national and global data are available online at: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2007/ann/ann07.html

NOAA is dedicated to enhancing economic security and national safety through the prediction and research of weather and climate-related events and information service delivery for transportation, and by providing environmental stewardship of our nation’s coastal and marine resources. Through the emerging Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), NOAA is working with its federal partners, more than 70 countries and the European Commission to develop a global monitoring network that is as integrated as the planet it observes, predicts and protects.

On the Web:

NOAA: http://www.noaa.gov

NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service: http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov

NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov