Dan’s Wild Wild Weather Journal

When James-Paul Dice left for Birmingham, (Don’t get me crying again) he left a vacancy in a class he had been teaching at Calhourn Community College, here in Huntsville. JP talked me into taking it over for him, and I will start teaching Environmental Science on Monday.

JP swears I will love it, and since I do love everything to do with Earth Science, he may very well be right.

For those of you wondering how JP is doing, the answer is GREAT. We both still work for the same company, he is now the Chief Meteorologist at WBRC in Birmingham. A WAY overdue promotion for him. In case you could not tell, JP and I are not just co workers, but good friends. We LOVED working together during severe storms. We could read each others thoughts!

Back to teaching for a second.

I’ve taught some off, and on but never a class for a whole semester. What kind of teacher will I be?

Hopefully a good one!

I suffer fools poorly. Very poorly in fact, so students who did not find the time to read the assigned pages will find little sympathy from me. Where they will find sympathy is in not understanding something. I have always been thick with new concepts and I will do ANYTHING to make sure they understand it.

The average person really does not grasp how much an impact humans are having on our planet. My research for this class has been a real eye opener. We face some real challenges as global citizens in the very near future. The image below is from SCIENCE in July 2007. It shows the human impact on the Earth’s surface.

Science 29 June 2007:
Vol. 316. no. 5833, pp. 1866 - 1869
DOI: 10.1126/science.1140170
Domesticated Nature: Shaping Landscapes and Ecosystems for Human Welfare
Peter Kareiva,1,2* Sean Watts,2 Robert McDonald,3 Tim Boucher1

There are some fabulous instructors out there, and one internationally renowned biologist is just down the block. I count him as a friend and have listened carefully to his advice on how to pass on my love of science to my students.

There is talk of a war on science in this country. It does indeed seem like it, with teachers still having to be careful about teaching evolution in some cities. Trust me when I tell you that this is looked upon with utter amazement, and disbelief in most countries in Europe.

Then there are the ridiculous attacks on Climate Change Science. Most of these by web sites that are mainly politics in a thin disguise of high school physics. Some of those who do weather around the country, and have an AMS seal are guilty of passing on this kind of junk science.

You would think that sometime during their education, they were taught what Peer Review is.

I know one goup of students who are about to get a very indepth lecture on it!

Back in the late 1990’s i put together a web site on weather for kids. It is currently under a redevelopment, but I have put together a new web site on climate. This site is aimed at an older audience. Generally from High School on up.

The reason for this site is my concern that the public still has a limited understanding on the Science of Climate Change and most importantly, many still believe that the Science community is divided on the issue. THEY ARE NOT. Only a small handful of those working in the field disagree with the basic theory. This is out of thousands. Don’t believe me - watch this.

The web is full of ridiculous claims about climate change. Most on political commentary sites. Many of these political opinions are disguised as basic High School Physics.

Meteorology is a broad field, and I am a Synoptic Forecaster, not a Climate Scientist. Like most Meteorologists (make that all!), I frequently get questions about climate change. In the past, I avoided saying anything definitive for 3 reasons.

1. I was not familiar enough with the science.

2. Very political - why tick off viewers.

3. Too busy with other projects to spend the time needed to bring myself up to speed.

In 2005, I changed my mind.

One set of graphics did that overnight.

After that, I spent hours a week reading everything I could get my hands on. I had to brush back up on my Calculus, and then learn some grad level statistics that almost fried my brain. (I will never be a climate scientist- I shall be happy with my Masters in Earth Science!) I thought I had cracked a book written by Holton for the last time, but I was wrong! (A joke for my fellow Meteorology weasels out there).

What I learned was incredibly fascinating, and very concerning.

Mankind is carrying out the greatest experiment in history on our climate. The research in the last decade has confirmed that our climate does NOT react like the dimmer switch over your dining room table. It more closely resembles the behaviour of the street light in front of your house…. and the sun is setting.

The site includes a power point audio visual presentation for teachers to show to classes. It is based completely on PEER REVIEWED science and the result of 150 hours of work. I hope it will be used widely by teachers looking for some reliable information on Climate Change.

It does NOT cover what we do about climate change. That is for all of us living on the blue, and green Earth to figure out.

http://wildwildclimate.com or click image.

Occasionally a paper is published by a renowned expert or a group of experts in a field that summarizes what we know about a particular topic. These papers are usually destined to be referred to many times and cited by other papers for years to come. Dr. Micheal Mann and Dr. Phil Jones wrote one in 2004 that you should read.

While I realize most readers of this journal may not read papers in the Science journals often, I think this one should be an exception. This is a high tech town, and there are a ton of folks here that DO read things like this. Many others  write papers that are an order of magnitude more complex. Teachers as well around the world should add this to their reading list.

Even if you are not included in the above, this is a great paper to read. Nothing would make me happier than to hear from a young student that read this entire paper.

Michael Mann is one of this country’s top climate scientists, and Phil Jones is head of the famous Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK (Hadley Center).

This paper summarizes what we know about the Earth’s climate over the past 1000 years. It also shows how ridiculous some of the claims in online junk science sites really are. You can read more about climate on my new Wild Wild Climate Page.

The paper can be accessed by clicking on the image below.

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:

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