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.

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

One of the last things I had to do before I finished my Masters in Earth Science was a presentation on James Hutton. Hutton is not one of the famous great scientists like Newton, Darwin or Galileo. He probably deserves to be a name that everyone knows, but such is not the case.

Hutton is known today as the founder of modern Geology. He was a Scottish naturalist who had a medical degree but never practiced. He was also a farmer who gave it up to do chemistry and study rocks and minerals. He had some famous friends, like Joseph Black the person who discovered Carbon Dioxide.

They invited him to join the Royal Society of Scotland. This was (and still is) a prestigious organization of the brightest minds of the time.

Hutton lived in the 18th century and after much prodding he agreed to deliver a paper to the society stating his views on the age of the earth. He created a sensation when his paper to the societywas published. In it he made his famous statement (Well famous to Geologists at least) that in regard to the age of the earth “We see no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end”. In an age where almost everyone believed the Earth was no more than 6,000 years old, this was a phenomenal statement.

The criticism came almost at once. Much of it from the religious leaders of the day who believed it to contradict the bibles version of earth history. Even Isaac Newton ,before his death, had pondered the question. He came up with about 6,000 years. In an age where you could still be put under house arrest for offending the church this was a safe thing to do!

Hutton’s study of rocks and the earth had convinced him that the fossils he saw in rocks were from once living animals and that the only way that fossils on a mountain top could be there, was if that land had once been beneath an ocean. Since he believed that the same processes acting now acted in the past, the only explanation for this was time..DEEP TIME. Time so liong that it was almost impossible to imagine.

Hutton never gave an age for the earth but probably thought it could be millions of years old at least. We know now that it is 4,500 million years old-give or take.

To prove his theroy, he searched for what geologists now call an unconformity. A sequence of rocks with a missing gap of time in them. Imagine if you will a set of rocks from 500 million years ago on top of rocks from 900 million years sgo. What happened to the rocks in the missing 400 million years? That is an unconformity.

Hutton found his unconformity on a sunny June day in the late 1700’s off the coast of Scotland. The location, then and now is called Siccar Point. It is south of Edinburgh and his a place of homage for Geologists the world over. It is called Hutton’s Unconformity. This sequence of rocks went a long way in proving his theories. I hope to visit it the next time I am in beautiful Scotland.

If you want to learn more about James Hutton, I highly recommend the following book:
The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of Earth’s Antiquity

by Jack Repchek

It takes courage to stand up and tell everyone that what they have always thought about something is wrong. Hutton did just that. Perhaps someday he will be given the same recognition of other brilliant scientists like Einstein, Darwin, Newton and Galileo.

Cheers,

Dan

I did a blog awhile back on the 8 planets in the solar system. That’s right 8 planets. Not the 9 that your grammar school and high school text books say. Well today my view of the solar system got another boost.

Seems that astronomers have detected another big object orbiting the sun. It’s official name is UB313. The discoverer wants to name it the planet Xena. Before you think this is just a large asteroid or something, let me explain that it is bigger than Pluto. UB33 is almost as big as Earth’s moon. About 3,000km across.

Many scientist believe that this is not a planet though. Anymore than Pluto is. (see my blog on Pluto)

When Pluto was discovered, our knowledge of the solar system was very poor compared to now. We now have a much better idea of how the planets formed some 5 Billion years ago. In addition we have the ability to see things far away that we could not back in the early part of the 20th century.

Suffice it to say, there will be a bunch more objects like UB313 discovered. There are literally thousands of them in what is called the Kuiper belt (Pronounced KIE-PER). They are really just dirty snowballs of left over material from when the solar system was formed.

This alone makes them of huge interest to many different sciences. NASA recently launched a probe to Pluto and the Kuiper belt that will get there in about 10 years. (I told you it was far out)

So how far away is UB313? A lot farther than Pluto. Astronomers measure distances in different ways but Miles or Kilometers are not usually one of them! A good measurement for space is the Astronomical Unit. 1AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

1 AU = 1 Astronomical Unit = 149,597,871 kilometers

Now Pluto is about 35 AU from the Sun. (by definition the Earth is 1AU)

UB313 is 96 AU away!
(That is over 12 hours at light speed Captain Kirk! I canna handle eet- err I digress- the Geek in me is showing)

The Solar system has 4 rocks close into the Sun.
Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.
It has 4 gas giants farther out.
Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune

It has a bunch of dirty little snowball objects left over that are orbiting in the Kuiper belt. Some of which get pushed out of their orbits and fly past the sun as comets every now and then.

That makes 8 planets.

Disagree?

Well, you are in good company! There are a lot of scientists who argue that they are planets. The problem is this: What IS the definition of a planet?

If you are a science teacher, I would suggest you put this to your class for discussion. Tell them to quit reading for awhile and do some real science! Anyone can do science- you don’t have to be grown up and you don’t have to have a college degree!

Later,
Dan