Dan’s Wild Wild Weather Journal

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.

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

A new article out tonight caught my eye. Researchers inthe Antarctic have now contructed a record of the earth’s Carbon Dioxide levels for the past 800,000 years.

It was thought that our CO2 might be higher right now than it has been in this time and sure enough that is what they found.

This is just another supporting piece of evidence that the industrial revolution is very likely changing our climate. Their is also a way comparing the relative amounts of two types of oxygen in the atmosphere to estimate the global temperature over the least 800,000 years.

See Oxygen comes in two types. O16 is what you and I breathe mostly but every now and then is a molecule of Oxygen with 18 protons instead of 16. It turns out that this ratio is very dependant on temperature.

So all you do is drill down through ice that is a half million years old in Antarctica, and extract some air frozen in ice bubbles. You compare the oxygen ratio with what we have now, and what we have already discovered about the climate in the last few hundred years. You end up with a record of planetary average temperature!.

A record that goes much further back than the invention of thermometers! Or science itself, for that matter!

So what does it show? It shows that when the CO2 levels rise, the earths temp. rises with it. When the CO2 drops, the earth gets cooler.

Since the CO2 levels are likely to keep rising, at an ever increasing rate, for the next century or so. This spells bad news for our climate.
So why care if it is a bit warmer? Just a few degrees of warming will melt the polar ice caps. Melt the ice caps and sea level rises enough to flood a good chunk of Florida, New York City and the home of about one out of every 5 people on the planet. Don’t think for a second that this is far fetched. For much of Earth’s history, there have been no ice caps and this planet was much warmer than now.
In the end though, things will average out. We will be heading into an ice age again in about 10,000 years…as much as I love snow, I wish I had been born about 9,500 years from now-that would be some fun forecasting!

later,
Dan