storms

Earliest Tornado in Minnesota

gregladen — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 08:55:49 +0000

Earliest Tornado in Minnesota

It is now verified that the earliest 2017 tornados -- first tornados of the season -- struck several communities in east-central Minnesota (a few miles north and south of me). So what you say? Especially because it was a mere F1 and didn't hurt anyone!

This is an important event because the earliest recorded tornado of the year in Minnesota was previously March 18th, and that was in 1968. This tornado, striking on March 6th (confirmed yesterday by the NWS) is way earlier than that!

One tornado, near Zimmerman went for nine miles.

A second tornado appears to have passed through the community of Clark's Grove as well. That one may have been on the ground for over 12 miles.

Neither tornado was large, but there was a lot of damage to property and trees.

Needless to say, the frequency of storms in general, and their severity, are expected to rise with climate change. Part of that seems to be the lengthening of the storm seasons. More time, more storms.

The local reports:

gregladen Wed, 03/08/2017 - 03:55

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Severe weather

Tornado

climate change

global warming

storms

My reading of this issue, at least historically, has been that while tornadoes may be increasing in intensity and the season may be spreading, the relative frequency of tornadoes may or may not increase - that this last statistic is so far indeterminate. The last discussion I saw of this, perhaps two years ago, suggested that sheer numbers of tornadoes in the Midwest appear to be *very slowly* decreasing over time despite better detection and observation (elsewhere, such as in my own state of CA, the numbers of known tornadoes are rising slightly owing to these same factors).

Regardless - tornadoes are such a fascinating phenomenon that we should continue to get good data of them and good analysis for a long time to come. Stay safe!

This analysis contains some graphics that might be useful.

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/climate-information/extreme-events/us-tornado…

Weather, Climate Change, and Related Matters in 2015

gregladen — Mon, 28 Dec 2015 11:29:55 +0000

Weather, Climate Change, and Related Matters in 2015

I had considered writing an accounting of all the outlandish weather events of 2015, but that project quickly became a tl:dr list of untoward happenings which is both alarming and a bit boring, since it is so long. So, I decided to generate something less comprehensive, focusing more on the context and meaning of the diverse and impressive set of outcomes of anthropogenic global warming, an historically strong El Niño, and, well, weather which is already a pretty whacky thing.

See: Highlights of Climate Change Research in 2015

It should be noted right away that 2015 is the last year in which any human alive will see CO2 levels dip below 400 parts per million.

What is the biggest single weather related news of 2015?

Floods, probably. Around the world, there were a lot of floods, and a lot of them were very damaging and deadly. Also, many of these floods appeared with little warning, even in places like Texas, where the meteorology is pretty good. Those Texas floods were of special note, as were the floods in the Carolinas. But outside the US there were major floods in Asia, especially Vietnam and Myanmar, as well as Yemen. Alaska, Oklahoma, Atacama in South America, also saw severe floods.

Why were there so many floods?

I’m pretty sure it is accurate to say that there was more flooding, and more severe flooding, than typical for, say, 20th century climatology. We had many 1,000 year flood events, too many to assume that these events remain as 1,000 year events.

See: Global Warming Changing Weather in the US Northeast

There are probably two or three reasons for increased flooding, which of course is caused by increased and concentrated rainfall along with other factors such as land use changes that cause rainfall to result in more flooding. One is the simple fact that a warmer atmosphere, due to global warming, contains more water, and thus, we get more rain. How much more? Not a lot, but enough to make a difference. If you put together a bunch of weather data and plot the annual precipitation rate over the last century or so, and fit a line to the data, the line will look flat. It isn’t really flat, and in fact, a properly fitted line on good data will show a statistically significant upslope. But still, the total amount of extra precipitation is a small percentage of the usual amount of precipitation, so the slope is not impressive unless you draw it out using heavy-handed graphing methods.

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A few other places are doing end of year reviews. Inside Climate is doing a series of 2015 retrospectives. Skeptical Science has an overview of the year. Environmental health news has a wish list pivoting on 2015 and a year in review. And Then There's Physics summarizes 2015. Critical Angle takes a critical look at 2015 here. If you see any more out there in the wild, let me know. Media Matters has "The 15 Most Ridiculous Things Conservative Media Said About Climate Change In 2015." Media Matters also has 5 New Year's Resolutions For Reporting On Climate Change. HotWhopper has The Fake Sceptic Awards for 2015 here.
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A second factor is a set of changes in how, when, and where the rain falls. Normally, in the temperate regions, rain storms move along with trade winds, guided or influenced by jet streams, fairly quickly. But if the jet streams slow down, the storms slow down, so we may see 4 inches of rain fall in one place that normally would have been spread out over a larger area, never exceeding half (or less) of that amount in any given area. The jet streams have slowed down and also become curvier, which both increases the amount of rain that falls in a give area but also may transfer moisture from and to places that are normally not involved as much in such a process. For example, the storm we are expecting today in the upper Midwest and Plains is not a typical Canadian Clipper, but rather a Gulf Coast storm related to the deadly blizzards and tornado swarms we’ve seen over the last few days to the south.

See: Does global warming destroy your house in a flood?

This clumping of rain in smaller areas also means that other areas that would normally have received some rain don’t, causing what my colleague Paul Douglas refers to as “flash droughts.” These are dry periods that don’t last long enough, and are not severe enough, to register on any official drought-o-meter, but nonetheless stress local water systems (such as farming) enough to be a nuisance.

A third factor is sea surface temperature. This really relates to, and is probably one of the main causes, of the first factor (increased precip overall), and feeds into the second factor (clumping of rain) but deserves its own consideration. Elevated sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic off the US coast last winter caused a lot more moisture than normal to feed into nor’easter storms, which in turn have become more common (because of increased sea surface temperatures and other factors), thus dumping large quantities of snow in the US Northeast. The same thing dumped lots of extra snow in a region that normally gets very little snow, the US Southeast, the winter before.

See: A selection of books on climate change

These changes have been happening for decades, and are due to global warming. The warming caused by the human release of extra greenhouse gasses, and other human effects, increase the warmth, thus the evaporation, thus the precipitation. Part of this warming trend involved increasing the warmth of the Arctic at a much higher rate than most of the rest of the planet. This, in turn, seems to have caused the jet stream to become wavy and slow down. The jet streams and trade winds are ultimately caused and controlled by the Earth spinning, which has not changed, and the temperature differential between the warm equator and the cold poles, which has changed quite a bit.

See: Weather Whiplash Is Like My Old Broken Sprinkler

But what about El Niño?

Didn’t El Niño cause these changes, and thus, aren’t these weather events unrelated to global warming?

No, and for two reasons.

First, many of these events happened during the first half of the year, before the start of the current El Niño, which is in fact the strongest El Niño so far observed directly, and possibly the strongest El Niño in millennia.

The second reason is that the heat released by the El Niño (the release of heat stored in the Pacific Ocean is what an El Niño is, in functional terms) is added to an already warmed world. It may even be that the extra severity of this year’s El Niño is upscaled by anthropogenic global warming. In any event, any records we set during the current El Niño exceed earlier El Niño years because the El Niños we experience are shorter term warming events on top of a steadily increasing global warming phenomenon.

We had a lot of fires

Last year and this year, or really, the last few years, have seen excessive, above normal rates of forest and brush fires in various regions. We have seen major fires in Australia, North America, and Southeast Asia during this period, with North America breaking several recent records this year.

See: Forest fires in Indonesia choke much of south-east Asia

These fires are caused by a combination of factors, but ultimately heat increasing evaporation, prior rainy years increasing available fuel, and warm winters increasing tree death to parasites (thus increasing fuel), all have contributed.

North America, in the old days, had much more fire-heavy years than anything recent because we were busy cutting down the forest, piling up “slash” (left over tree parts) and running sparky old fashioned coal-driven railroad engines up and down between the slash piles, catching them on fire. In addition, just burning the slash on purpose contributed to the overall amount of fire, especially when the slash fires got out of control.

We also saw some pretty impressive fires a couple of decades ago because of what we now know were bad fire management practices, which had actually grown out of those earlier decades of logging related fires. In other words, the frequency and distribution of forest and brush fires is complex. During aridification, probably global warming related, in Africa during the 70s and 80s, vast areas started to burn more regularly than usual. In those days, I would fly at night over Libya, Chad and the Sudan a couple of times a year, and could observe the entire region was burning all the time, easily visible from 26,000 feet.

The bottom line: The frequency and extent of fires is variable and chaotic, but anthropogenic global warming seems to have contributed significantly to us having more of them.

Were there more storms in 2015?

Record breaking tropical storms occurred in 2015. All of the tropical cyclone/hurricane basins saw interesting activity, with the Atlantic being the most quiet, and the Eastern Pacific, possibly, being the strangest.

There were 22 Category 4 or 5 storms this year in the Northern Hemisphere, a record number. The last record year was recent, 2004. Studies have shown overall that the total energy that forms up in tropical cyclones has increased with global warming, though the actual total number of storms is highly variable.

It is reasonable to expect an increase in the frequency and severity of tropical storms with global warming, while at the same time, in some areas, smaller storms may become less common. This is partly because smaller storms are more readily abated by some of the global-warming related changes in weather systems such as increased wind shear and increased dust in the tropical atmosphere. At the same time, extremely high sea surface temperatures, and also, high water temperatures as depth (100–200 meters) increase the potential strength of storms that do get past that initial formation.

Hurricane Patricia, in the Eastern Pacific (landfall in Mexico) was an especially important storm. It was a physically small storm, but had more powerful winds than ever seen in a tropical storm. The storm went from nothing to a full hurricane in several hours (instead of several days).

The significance of this can not be underestimated. We have a situation where the conditions that might cause a hurricane to form are extreme, because of global warming (and this year, more so because of El Niño). So, when when these conditions are in place, a hurricane can form faster, and get more powerful, than normal. Consider the prospect of a land falling Category 5+ storm forming offshore from an area with low lying terrain (not like where Patricia struck land) with a high population density (not like where Patricia struck land) and moving on shore immediately. Like for instance, an Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico version of Patricia making landfall near Miami or NOLA.

Most of the really large hurricanes of this year were in the Pacific basin, distributed across the entire region, but Hurricane Joaquin, which was a very large and powerful storm in the Atlantic, did have us on the edge of our seats for a while when some of the better weather predicting models suggested it might make landfall. Also, nearly unprecedented tropical storms formed near the Arabian Pennensula.

This was a hot year

Other than February, which was merely hot rather than really hot, globally, every month so far this year has broken or nearly broken one or more records, depending on which database one uses. The running 12-month average of surface temperatures started to break records before El Niño kicked in, and continued to do so since. This will continue for several more months, even if the El Niño phenomenon itself stops soon, because it takes several months for surface temperatures to show the El Niño effect.

More specifically, there were killer heat waves in the Western Cape of South Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Australia recorded its hottest day ever. North America experienced numerous record breaking days, in the US and Canada. Cherry trees thought it was spring and bloomed last week in Washington. I saw birds building a nest outside my house in Minnesota two weeks ago, and our lawn was green(ish) through last weekend.

Ocean Oddness and Other Events

Let us not forget the Great Blob of Hot Water in the northern Pacific. This non El Niño phenomenon, which has been going for a couple of years no, has had El Niño like effects in the region, and probably relates to the non normal weather in along the western coast of North America, including record breaking heat in Alaska, major storms in or near Alaska, and of course, the California Drought.

A Haboob-Nado in China involved some of the strongest winds ever seen in the region, and may have, very unusually, contained an embedded tornado. We had a mild tornado season in the US, in Tornado Alley, until a few days ago when a not-very-seasonal tornado season sprung up and killed close to 50 people in just a few days. The American southeast does get winter tornadoes, but Michigan does not. But this year, there was a first ever recorded December tornado in that state.

The Arctic Sea ice has been diminishing in its minimum extent for a few decades now, and this year we saw the third lowest amount. The volume of Arctic sea ice continues to shrink.

You all know about the Syrian Refugee crisis. This is the latest chapter in the collapse of the Syrian state, which in turn happened because of long term drought in that country killing off the agricultural system and forcing farmers into the cities, where many became involved in the Syrian Civil War, which opened up the opportunity for the Islamic State to take a large amount of territory in the region. And so on. The Syrian refugee crisis is likely to be an early version of more of the same to come over future decades. And, I quickly point out, this is not likely to have been the first climate refugee situation, just much worse than prior events related to the spread of deserts in North Africa and drying out in West Asia.

Research on Climate Change

This year saw some interesting research in climate change.

One team studies major oscillations in climate that relate to oceans (of which El Niño is a shorter-term smaller part). This research suggests that the last couple of decades have seen less warming than we might expect over the long term, and further suggests that an uptick in the rate of warming is in our medium term future.

Related research also shows that accelerated melting of northern glaciers, especially Greenland, could alter Atlantic currents, so while the Earth generally warms due to increased greenhouse gasses, weather may change to a colder regime in Europe, some time over the next few dedades.

We are seeing an increased rate at which climate and weather experts are attributing bad weather to global warming. This is partly a shift in thinking and methods among the experts, and partly because of an actual increase in such events.

There has been interesting research in the Antarctic. We are seeing increased concern about, and evidence for, destabilization of huge inland glaciers that could start to fall apart and contribute to sea level rise at any time in the next several years. At the same time we saw one study that seemed to suggest that Antarctic is gaining ice, rather than losing it. If that is true, than recent decades of sea level rise are partly unexplained. Alternatively, the research, which has some known flaws, may simply be wrong. Look for some interesting results related to Antarctic glacier during 2016.

The famous #FauxPause in global warming, claimed by many climate change deniers to be a real thing (no warming in X years, etc.) was already known to be Faux, but this year saw several independent nails being driven into that coffin. Rather than a pause that disproves global warming, we have a better understood series of changed in the long term warming in the planet’s surface temperature.

See: In a blind test, economists reject the notion of a global warming pause

Sea floor biotic diversity was shown to be threatened by warming, coral bleaching is more likely and in fact happening at a higher rate, and probably mostly due to El Niño, there has been some odd ocean animal migrations.

The planting zones, the gardening and agricultural zones we use to decide which crops to plant and when, have over the last several years shifted in most places in North America by one or two zones. This year, the people who make the zone maps came out with a new one.

Sea levels continue to rise, and the rate of rise is rising. Rare nuisance flooding in coastal areas, most famously but not only Miami, have become regular events. Sales in waterproof shoes are expected to increase.

Communication and Politics

Across meteorology we see the graph and chart makers scrambling to find new colors for their maps showing heat. Y-axes are being stretched everywhere. We seem to be stuck with a five level category system for tropical cyclones/hurricanes, but we are seeing so many storms that are way stronger, bigger, more destructive than earlier Category 5 storms that talk of adding a category is no longer being responded to with angry mobs of pitchfork wielding weather forecasters who came of age with the older system.

See: How to not look like an idiot

There has been a great deal of significant climate change related activism, and COP happened, with a strong message to address the human causes of climate change sooner than later. Climate change has actually become an issue in US elections. For the first time a major world leader, President Obama, has faced off with the deniers and told them to STFU. Major news outlets such as the Washington Post and the Guardian have started to take climate change seriously. The idea that reporters must give equal weight to the “two sides of the story” (science is real, vs. science is not real) is disappearing.

Denial of climate change and climate change science reached its high water mark over the last 12 months. It will now fade away.

And that is a short and incomplete summary of weather and climate in 2015.

______________
A note for my regular readers: Yes, I chose the burning Earth graphic to annoy the denialist. Check the comments below to see if that annoyed anyone.

gregladen Mon, 12/28/2015 - 06:29

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Hi Greg.

It would be really useful for the casual lay person if you could link your references to particular papers to the DOIs/abstracts, for those who might want to follow up. Some of us have the exposure and/or institutional access to find them easily, but Joe and Jane Public might have a little more trouble.

Just a thought. :-)

Bernard, I usually do. This was not that kind of post, partly because of scheduling constraints and partly because to give even treatment to all that I refer to would require hundreds of references.

My point here is to provide perspective and context on a series of widely talked about ongoing or recent events or development.

This year, almost every week saw a temp related, a precip related, a separate storm related, a research related, and a political/activism related story. I probably wrote 200+ posts addressing a fraction of those issues this year (see the subject indes on the side bar).

Maybe I should implement a system of tracking.

The Global Warming Fact Of The day site is an archive of many climate stories.

If there is a particular issue or event you would like to know more about, post it and someone will likely have more info.

Oops... GWFOTD is no longer updated. But the Facebook page for that group has a link for everything.

“Denial of climate change and climate change science reached its high water mark over the last 12 months. It will now fade away.”

I tend to think that you are correct. But how fast will the rate of fade be? Since we are dealing with human nature here, and with weather nature, I'm expecting that this is going to be a long slow slog. One good polar blast and Inhofe and the other idiots will be out throwing snow balls again.

Well, here's to planning ahead for the time when the population of denialist whack-a-moles finally does collapse,

#2 Bernard J

This has the makings of a good game ;-) Crowd-source those references, kids!

Here's my best guess for the Research on Climate Change section. GL quite possibly thinking of more recent research than the last two studies listed:

England et al. (2015) Robust warming projections despite the recent hiatus.
Nature Climate Change 5, 394–396 (2015) doi:10.1038/nclimate2575

Hansen et al. (2015) Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms
Atmos. Chem. Phys., submitted, doi:10.5194/acpd-15-20059-2015

Zwally et al. (2015) Mass gains of the Antarctic ice sheet exceed losses
Journal of Glaciology, doi:10.3189/2015JoG15J071

Rignot et al. (2014) Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica, from 1992 to 2011
Geophys. Res. Lett., 41, 3502–3509, doi:10.1002/2014GL060140

Joughin et al. (2014) Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Under Way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica
Science Vol. 344 no. 6185 pp. 735-738 doi: 10.1126/science.1249055

Harmless fun that keeps us off the streets...

Thanks for the detailed reply Greg.

There's nothing that I was particularly thinking about personally, as I am familiar with most of it and could find anything I hadn't come across, but I read the piece just after a(nother) discussion with a colleague about the frustration of media news items that mention a new paper or finding but don't give the primary reference, and which in follow-up entails some searching for scientific folk such as us, and probably a much more arduous search for lay people.

I once discussed this matter with an (Australian) ABC journalist, whose response was that they don't usually get a DOI or URL or journal metadata and so they have no concrete policy for including them. I guess that it's just a thing that I raise when I come across similar issues, but in this case I take your point!

BBD, you are taking to the game with gusto!

Unfortuantely it's 3:30 am here, and so I will have to enter the fray at a later time...

:-)

#3
Although I appreciate your financial advice:
"Sales in waterproof shoes are expected to increase,"
and certainly intend to act on it, I agree with #2 concerning links. More work, yes, but they would have been very helpful here. I hope you'll consider adding them later.

I did just post a list of selected posts on research this year (back through last December) and added a link to that at the beginning of this post.

The reason why current news on research often does not link is partly what your friend said, but not exactly. Here's how it works:

You get a press release with no link, so there is no link. OR,..

You get a press release with an embargoed copy of the paper that does not have a link but you could find it later, but by then you have moved on to other things and don't want to spend the time. OR...

You get a link that is not live yet. But you don't use it because, since it is not live, your web people or editors don't want to use an incorrect link and you don't add it later because you have moved on to other things. OR..

You are simply afraid of accidentally breaking an embargo and losing privileges so you don't provide the link.

Personally I like to ad the links to the research (the posts I link to in that summary I just mentioned generally do). But I also often don't write something up before it comes out. I get embargoed material all the time, but I often wait to see what more colleagues, etc., say about the research. I don't feel my role is usually to report the research first or exclusively, but rather, to say more about it. Also, I don't like simply repeating what press releases say. (I do break all of these guidelines arbitrarily as I feel a need to, of course!)

It is very annoying when a specific piece of research is talked about without even a mention of the journal. In fact, I often get press releases where that happens and if I dig in farther I find out there is no journal article, just a moment when a university press office decides to blurt.

SteveP: "I tend to think that you are correct. But how fast will the rate of fade be? Since we are dealing with human nature here, and with weather nature, I’m expecting that this is going to be a long slow slog. One good polar blast and Inhofe and the other idiots will be out throwing snow balls again."

Social change like this seems to take forever then suddenly happens all at once.

What I think is really going to happen is this: Denialists will not diminish in number, but what they say will be increasingly ignored. When? If the US elects a Dem president and at least one house in Congress goes DEM, then by mid-november 2016. A bold prediction but I really think that is likely. Otherwise, we wait longer.

Anyway, after they become irrelevant (meaning the mainstream press stops taking them seriously) then the next phase is for it to become normal for deniers to keep their mouths shut. Like racists after various civil rights advances. They are still there but their comments are no longer appropriate at the Thanksgiving dinner. Usually.

That may happen very quickly, but in a heterogeneous manner, depending, frankly, on the weather. After it becomes normal to associate weather disasters with AGW, it will then become more common for people to find themselves denying AGW in the company of people who have lost relatives, homes, pets, jobs, etc. because of weather disasters. That will put a kibash on the conversation.

Global Warming: Earth, Wind, Fire, and Ice

gregladen — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 09:58:18 +0000

Global Warming: Earth, Wind, Fire, and Ice

Focusing on Earth, but also a few tidbits on wind, fire, and ice, some current news and observations about global warming.

Earth

As humans release greenhouse gas pollutants (mainly CO2) into the atmosphere, the surface of the Earth, and the top 2000 meters of the ocean, heat up. But some of the CO2 is absorbed into plant tissues and soil, as well as in the ocean or other standing water. Historically, about 30% of the extra CO2 is absorbed into the ocean, and another 30% converted into (mainly) plant tissue. We hope that enough CO2 is absorbed that the effects of greenhouse gas pollution is attenuated, at least a little. Unfortunately, there are two things that can go wrong. First, these "Carbon sinks" -- places where the CO2 is either stored or converted into Carbon-based tissue, could stop working. Second, some of these Carbon sinks could reverse course and start releasing, rather than absorbing, Carbon.

The CO2 released in the atmosphere during any given time period starts a process of warming that takes years to finish. We know how much CO2 we have added to the atmosphere (we went from the mid 200's ppm, parts per million, before this all started to 400ppm). We know how much we are currently releasing and we can estimate how much we will be releasing in coming years. Putting this all together with some very fancy physics and math, we can estimate the amount of surface warming over coming years. This calculation includes the Carbon sinks. If the Carbon sinks stop sinking Carbon, or worse, start releasing previously trapped Carbon, then future warming (next year, next decade, over the next century) will be greater than previously expected.

And there is now evidence that this is happening.

Andy Skuce has written up two pieces, here and here, that explain this. It is also written up here, and the original research is here.

This research suggests that some natural Carbon sinks are slowing down in the amount of Carbon they take in, or perhaps switching to releasing Carbon.

The problem is actually very simple to understand. In order for CO2 to be converted to O2 (free oxygen) and some combination of C and other elements (to make plant tissue), the other elements have to be available in sufficient quantity. For many terrestrial ecosystems, CO2 was a limiting factor (keeping water and sunlight out of the picture or constant). So, adding CO2 means more plant growth. But at some point, the other elements that are required to make plant tissue, such as Nitrogen and Phosphorous (otherwise known as fertilizer) are insufficient in abundance to allow plants to use that CO2. This would reduce or flatten out the amount of extra CO2 that can be trapped in solid form. At this point, the terrestrial biomass starts to release, rather than absorb, CO2.

Why would the terrestrial Carbon sink not simply stop absorbing Carbon, and start to release it? Well, because I as fibbing a little when I said this is simple. The more realistic version of the system has Carbon going in and out of the different parts of the system (atmosphere, ocean water, plant tissue, etc.). With warming temperatures, we expect the release of Carbon from terrestrial systems to increase in rate. So, before nutrient limitation is released, there is Carbon going in and Carbon going out, but on average, mostly going in. With Nutrient limitation on the system, when there isn't enough Nitrogen or Phosphorus to match up with the CO2, the release continues while the absorption stops. But because of warming, the release not only continues, but increases. So, in coming decades, the net effect is that parts of the terrestrial ecosystem contributes to atmospheric CO2.

At present, climate scientists (mainly in the context of the IPCC) have estimates of future warming that involve estimates of how much CO2 we add to the atmosphere. All the known factors have been taken into account, including the Carbon cycle (which includes Carbon moving between the atmosphere, the ocean, and the plant and soil system at the surface. This research indicates that the numbers have to be changed to account for nutrient saturation.

This graph shows how it works. The black line is the increase in plant growth as originally modeled under a "high-emissions" scenario. This shows a 63% increase in plant growth by the end of the century owing to CO2 fertilization. The red line indicates the amount of extra plant growth that would actually happen due to limitations of Nitrogen. The blue lie indicates the amount of plant growth due to the limitation of Phosphorus. These are 29% and 20%, respectively.

If we include the increase in release of Carbon due to warming conditions (basically, more and faster rotting of dead plant tissue), the existing models produce the black line in the graph below. There is still an increase in plant growth, and the plant-based Carbon sink is still working. If limitations on nitrogen and phosphorus are considered, we get the red and blue lines.

This amounts, approximately, to adding about 14 years of human greenhouse gas pollution (at the current rate) to the time period under consideration (from now to 2100).

So that's the news when it comes to climate change and the Earth. But what about the wind?

Wind

No new research here, just an observation. Where does wind really matter? Where do you really feel the wind? Wind is the expression of the large scale climate system (modified by local conditions) which is in turn the result of the spinning of the Earth and the heating of the planet unevenly by the sun, like it does. A valid rule of thumb is more heat, more wind, but that is a gross oversimplification. At a more complex level, more heat equals more wind doing different things in different places than usual, and also more water vapor in the air, and all this has to do with those times and places where we really feel the wind the most: Storms.

Tenney Naumer (of Climate Change: The Next Generation fame) came across an amazing graphic of the Earth, looking mainly at the Pacific, showing some wind.

The graphic is from here, and I added the "Storm World" just for fun. Except it isn't really fun. The date of this graphic is, I think, July 5th or 6th.

Your homework assignment is to identify the named tropical storms shown in the graphic.

Fire

A few years ago there were some big fires. Australia burned, there were fires in California, Texas, Arizona, various parts of Canada, etc. Climate change and fire experts noted that there is an increase in fires because of global warming, but others argued that there was no significant increase, and we had had periods of abundant fires in the past. In truth, there was evidence of an increase, though maybe not very convincing to some. Also, past inclement conditions are a thing ... recent global warming did not invent bad weather or extensive wildfires. But some of those past periods, like the 1930s in the US, are not evidence against current climate change, but rather, evidence of what to expect with climate change. Those periods are only barely as severe as the present state, are usually regional and not global, happened after greenhouse gas pollution was very much a thing and between periods of suppression of warming by aerosols (from volcanoes or industrial pollution). So they matter, but not because they disprove climate change (they don't) but rather because these past events are windows into the future. But I digress.

The point is, a few years ago, those who are rightfully alarmed about climate change were pointing out the problem of increased wild fires referring mainly to research indicating a dramatic increase in wildfire potential, along with some evidence of actual increased wildfires. And others argued that until there were a lot more flames, there was not a problem.

Well, now we have the flames.

Yesterday (anecdote warning, this is not data) I went outside to check the mail and was assailed by a bank of smoke moving through my neighborhood. It smelled really bad. Assuming there was a house on fire, I dashed back into the house to grab my cell phone, in case I had to dial 911. Returning outside, I walked around and did not see anything obvious burning, but the smoke was coming in from the north. That ruled out a burning oil tank train (the tracks are from the south) and the local munitions dump on fire (that is to the west). But I still couldn't see where the smoke was coming from. So, I hopped in the car and drove north a couple of blocks, and by the time I got to the nearby Interstate, it became clear that the smoke was simply everywhere, pretty uniformly.

I then guessed at the cause, and returned to my computer where I checked the Wundermap and some other sources. Yup: it was Canada and Alaska, thousands of miles away, pretty much on fire. Here are two graphics to illustrate this.

From the Wundermap:

And from here:

Ice

Glacial ice is melting, and it is melting faster every year. Earlier in the year we learned that Alaska (on fire, see above) has been losing mountain glacier and ice sheet water at an alarming rate. Now, we are seeing an amazing spike in melting on the surface of Greenland. From here:

The graph is of ice melt extent so far this year. The blue dotted line is the average over recent decades as in dicated. The grey area is 2 standard deviations around that average. The vast majority of observations (nearly 100%) would be in that grey area. The red line is this year. This is what you call unprecedented melting.

Why is this melting happening? Because Greenland is unusually warm, but as expected under global warming. Some of this melted ice will refreeze in the winter. Much of it, however, is going into the sea.

gregladen Tue, 07/07/2015 - 05:58

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I have come to the realization that the human race is the tipping point in all the equations. My hope is that we can tip the the equation the other way.

Shocking stuff. Also well covered here with a terrific analogy with Van Gogh's Starry Night:

http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2015/07/van-gogh-weather-pa…

The rising sea that is going to engulf us all is going to be effluent from this Camp of The Saints.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-27775327

What of it if Bangladesh floods? Or the Niger delta or the Mississippi delta? Wouldn't that solve many of the population pressures.

In reply to Director. One of the few good things about climate change is that smug people in the west who look calmly at the prospect of poor people drowning, will also be finally be caught up in the convulsions as Earth spews humanity out of its system

AGW Class Cyclone Pam Nearing Vanuatu

gregladen — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 20:35:12 +0000

AGW Class Cyclone Pam Nearing Vanuatu

Pam is a tropical cyclone of category 5 strength, but is churning over waters that have high temperatures at depth, a phenomenon we seem to be seeing more often lately, as a result of anthropogenic global warming. That is why I call it "AGW Class." Strong Category 5, deep heat enhanced. It is said that this is one of only 10 Category 5 storms recorded in the basin since good data are available. The Weather Underground has the story.

In addition, there are three other tropical cyclones extant in the Pacific.

Nathan is just on the Tropical Storm-Hurricane boundary and is heading for Cape York, Australia. Olwyn is a fully formed tropical cyclone (hurricane) with sustained winds at 85mph, and is busy menacing the west coast of Australia, which it will scrape over the next several hours, reaching Sharks Bay very soon and passing off the southwest corner of OZ over the weekend. But since that is so many time zones away we really have no idea when any of this will happen. Bavi is a tropical storm out in the Pacific heading roughly west by northwest. This storm may reach hurricane strength in a few day, but the forecast I saw is very uncertain.

And yes, there are views of the Earth that allow you to see all four storms at once. Here is one from the Climate Reanalyzer. The storms are marked but you should be able to spot them:

This one, that I got of Twitter, has the storms marked:

You don't see this every day.

gregladen Thu, 03/12/2015 - 16:35

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There is a small cyclone here off N/E Australia, but is only small one, brings the necessary rain only - that cannot bring any happiness and excitement to the Warmist... The one off Vanuatu is much more promising - lets finger cross and hope that will kill and destroy a lot - to bring happiness to the people with prevalent psychopathic genes... So that they don't have to keep misleading that the polar caps are melting...

P.s. cyclones, hurricanes and tornadoes are made from O2&N2+H2O, wind and rain; nothing to do with CO2!!! If you don't want cyclones and tornadoes - all you need is: get read of the O&N and H2O. Make it same as on the moon - no cyclones and tornadoes there, very peaceful. cheers!!!

Greg, if you are a Warmist, why don't you blacklist me? In my book says: 'on Warmist blogs, no Glasnost allowed'' are you trying to prove me wrong? I'm never wrong, and would like to keep clean record...

Stefanthedenier, we are all hoping no one is killed in Vanuatu.

Also, you are getting pretty creepy.

Cyclone Pam is slated to just skip past the Gisborne area (NE cnr) of New Zealand. Could be our worst storm in 30 years if it hits.

@2. stefanthedenier : So for the record you are actually trying to get yourself banned from here and then intend to boast about it later?

@ ibid :

.. lets finger cross and hope that will kill and destroy a lot – to bring happiness to the people with prevalent psychopathic genes…

Speak for yourself fool. Nobody here wants that and some of us are trying to do what we can to make such storms fewer and less intense rather than the reverse. Project much? Strawmonster much?

"So that they don’t have to keep misleading that the polar caps are melting…

You really haven't dared or bothered to do your research here have you? But then you're no rocket scientist or indeed any sort of scientist are you Stefan? Please check this link out :

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

and see what an actual scientific organisation has observed for multiple years and multiple places. Hint : It kinda, well totally disproves your line there. (Oh & before you mention Antarctica, do check the difference between sea ice and land ice.)

P.s. cyclones, hurricanes and tornadoes are made from O2&N2+H2O, wind and rain;

You forgot particles of dust, ash and sometimes other substances specially introduced to serve as condensation nuclei. Also forgot lightning, thunder and the sharp gradient in atmospheric pressures. Meteorology fail. As for nothing to do with Co2, just go ask James Hansen among other climatologists, unlike you they do have some real idea of what they are talking about.

I'll give ya a generous 1 / 10 in trolling for drawing this response and being mildly irritating. (I sometimes choose to feed the trolls - they do tend to burst, melt down or turn to stone when handled right and can provide some low grade amusement in themselves.)

Wow! Tornadoes, hurricanes and cyclones don't contain any CO2, so CO2 has nothing to do with their creation? Where did you get that science Stefan, on the back of a matchbook cover? Keep writing Stefan, it's always good to see the climate change deniers discredit themselves.

Why argue with a denier who uses the word warmist? Warmist, alarmist, liberal, socialist, communist, are all buzzwords used by paid deniers (I call it Koch Speak) which I suspect but cannot prove that Stephan is. Climate blogs are full of these guys.

Stefanthedenier, it's all in the advertising.

We want GL's soul:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WTBkj8gFfI

It is evident that global warming plays a role in the formation of new tropical cyclones, especially around the Pacific ocean areas. Satellite imaging of the past gives a clear view on how tropical storms have been increasing over the past decade. 15010709

During the past decade cyclones have becoming more and more frequent and with more devastating effects. The strength of a cyclone is directly proportional to the temperature of the water over which it is formed. According to Robert Mendelsohn, Kerry Emanuel, Shun Chonabayashi & Laura Bakkensen a potential impact due to an increase in greenhouse-gas emission is the increase in the damage that cyclones can cause. Will the increased emission of greenhouse-gasses lead to an increase of total storms?

Minnesota's Current Weather Disaster -- Don't worry we'll be fine.

gregladen — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 07:51:46 +0000

Minnesota's Current Weather Disaster -- Don't worry we'll be fine.

I woke up this morning to find about a dozen reports on my iPad Damage app indicating trees down and hail damage in many communities from Mankato to Edina, south of the Twin Cities. More of the same. We have been having severe weather for about a month now, or a bit less. One day in late May, Julia and I were taking pictures of people driving too fast through the lake that formed in front of our house form a major downpour. Early in that storm we witnessed a ground strike not too far away. A short while after that an ambulance came screaming by our house, coming from the direction of the ground strike to the hospital just south of us. Later we heard on the news that a woman at a little league game (which, frankly, should have been cancelled) was struck and transported to the hospital … that was certainly her. This morning, Mankato was flooded, a day or two ago a woman was rescued from her car that was eventually swept away by a river that does not normally exist. Flooding up on the Canadian Border has been epic. The entire state is under a Meteorological Siege.

Not exactly a Turn Round Don't Drown situation, but perhaps a Slow Down So As To Not Crack Your Engine Block situation .

Yet, somehow, CNN has not taken notice.

I believe that what is happening here is an expanded, intensified version of what we usually get around this time of year. The Norther Plains has storms in the late Spring and early Summer for various meteorological reasons. But this Spring, the jet stream continues to experience it’s kinkyness, not the good kind of kinkyness, and we are having stalled weather systems. So, instead of having a storm front move through the area every few days, we have a big huge stormy thing hanging over us for weeks on end.

This is a similar phenomenon, most likely, to what brought epic floods to Central Europe, the UK, Calgary, and Colorado over the last two years. But, since we have no mountains to speak of and the state is full of more swamp and pond than arroyo and river, we don’t have the same kind of result. The rain that fell over the last 24 hours in southern Minnesota, falling in Colorado’s front range would have wiped out towns and people would be missing for days. Here, we have different results. Same weather phenomenon (more or less) likely caused by the same changes to the environment resulting form global warming (most likely) but spread out a bit in time and space so it becomes, rather than a single big huge national news story, this string of little local news stories (listed by day of month for June):

The interaction between the nature of events and the nature of news journalism certainly is interesting. We couldn’t stay out of the news when the Polar Vortex was visiting. Now, we are being ignored in all our glorious wetness. That is reasonable … so far this weather has not caused the death and destruction of epic flooding in mountain areas, and we are lucky that we’ve not had significant tornadoes here – the twisters are staying to the south of us, just. But it is interesting that we suffer the weather of countless tiny drops Minnesota style. In silence. With the occasional stern look. We will be making some hot dish now, out of season, but it is our comfort food. Don’t worry, we’ll be fine.

ADDED:

Here's a few tweeted pics from the NWS Twin Cities:

gregladen Wed, 06/18/2014 - 03:51

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This morning I saw a Weather Underground post about the flooding rains Sioux Falls, SD, has been experiencing. Apparently, month-to-date rainfall at KFSD is (or was at the time the blog post was written) 138% of the previous record rainfall for the entire month of June, and that station has a 121-year period of record. A section of I-29 south of Sioux Falls has been closed due to flooding.

The weather system currently afflicting you is presumably the same one that produced a double tornado in Nebraska yesterday. But apart from this blog post and the aforementioned Weather Underground post, I haven't heard anything about the flooding up your way.

Yes, it is the same system.

And just a few days ago, I was asking my wife, wish we were back in the Twin Cities (we lived there once, and have family there), they are supposed to get five inches of rain. We are in California, and I have to confess I can barely remember what rain feels like.

On Monday, the National Weather Service's map for MPX had so many different types of watches, warnings, and advisories that the legend overflowed! http://imgur.com/9wrTpBK

Climate Change Impacts in the United States: A Summary of the New National Climate Assessment

pgleick — Tue, 20 May 2014 06:24:47 +0000

Climate Change Impacts in the United States: A Summary of the New National Climate Assessment

I previously posted a summary of the water-related conclusions from the new National Climate Assessment, recently released after three years of writing, review, and analysis. The following “findings” are a broader summary of the results from the newly released National Climate Assessment (NCA). They are by no means a full summary: far more detail can be found in the chapters and the regional syntheses, but these are noteworthy conclusions. (Note, thanks to Tim Smith – Sustainable Water Resources Coordinator – for highlighting these. The page numbers refer to the NCA Summary)

1. Global climate is changing and this is apparent across the United States in a wide range of observations. The global warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human activities, predominantly the burning of fossil fuels.

Many independent lines of evidence confirm that human activities are affecting climate in unprecedented ways. U.S. average temperature has increased by 1.3°F to 1.9°F since record keeping began in 1895; most of this increase has occurred since about 1970. The most recent decade was the warmest on record. Because human-induced warming is superimposed on a naturally varying climate, rising temperatures are not evenly distributed across the country or over time. See page 18. (And see the Figure below.)

Figure 2.3 from the NCA: Observed global average temperature changes (black line), model simulations using only changes in natural factors (solar and volcanic) in light gray/blue, and model simulations with the addition of human-induced emissions (darker blue). Climate changes since 1950 cannot be explained by natural factors or variability, and can only be explained by human factors. (Figure source: adapted from Huber and Knutti, 2012).

2. Some extreme weather and climate events have increased in recent decades, and new and stronger evidence confirms that some of these increases are related to human activities.

Changes in extreme weather events are the primary way that most people experience climate change. Human-induced climate change has already increased the number and strength of some of these extreme events. Over the last 50 years, much of the United States has seen an increase in prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, more heavy downpours, and in some regions, more severe droughts. See page 24.

3. Human-induced climate change is projected to continue, and it will accelerate significantly if global emissions of heat-trapping gases continue to increase.

Heat-trapping gases already in the atmosphere have committed us to a hotter future with more climate-related impacts over the next few decades. The magnitude of climate change beyond the next few decades depends primarily on the amount of heat-trapping gases that human activities emit globally, now and in the future. See page 28.

4. Impacts related to climate change are already evident in many sectors and are expected to become increasingly disruptive across the nation throughout this century and beyond.

Climate change is already affecting societies and the natural world. Climate change interacts with other environmental and societal factors in ways that can either moderate or intensify these impacts. The types and magnitudes of impacts vary across the nation and through time. Children, the elderly, the sick, and the poor are especially vulnerable. There is mounting evidence that harm to the nation will increase substantially in the future unless global emissions of heat-trapping gases are greatly reduced. See page 32.

5. Climate change threatens human health and well-being in many ways, including through more extreme weather events and wildfire, decreased air quality, and diseases transmitted by insects, food, and water.

Climate change is increasing the risks of heat stress, respiratory stress from poor air quality, and the spread of waterborne diseases. Extreme weather events often lead to fatalities and a variety of health impacts on vulnerable populations, including impacts on mental health, such as anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. Large-scale changes in the environment due to climate change and extreme weather events are increasing the risk of the emergence or reemergence of health threats that are currently uncommon in the United States, such as dengue fever. See page 34.

6. Infrastructure is being damaged by sea level rise, heavy downpours, and extreme heat; damages are projected to increase with continued climate change.

Sea level rise, storm surge, and heavy downpours, in combination with the pattern of continued development in coastal areas, are increasing damage to U.S. infrastructure including roads, buildings, and industrial facilities, and are also increasing risks to ports and coastal military installations. Flooding along rivers, lakes, and in cities following heavy downpours, prolonged rains, and rapid melting of snowpack is exceeding the limits of flood protection infrastructure designed for historical conditions. Extreme heat is damaging transportation infrastructure such as roads, rail lines, and airport runways. See page 38.

7. Water quality and water supply reliability are jeopardized by climate change in a variety of ways that affect ecosystems and livelihoods.

Surface and groundwater supplies in some regions are already stressed by increasing demand for water as well as declining runoff and groundwater recharge. In some regions, particularly the southern part of the country and the Caribbean and Pacific Islands, climate change is increasing the likelihood of water shortages and competition for water among its many uses. Water quality is diminishing in many areas, particularly due to increasing sediment and contaminant concentrations after heavy downpours. See page 42

8. Climate disruptions to agriculture have been increasing and are projected to become more severe over this century.

Some areas are already experiencing climate-related disruptions, particularly due to extreme weather events. While some U.S. regions and some types of agricultural production will be relatively resilient to climate change over the next 25 years or so, others will increasingly suffer from stresses due to extreme heat, drought, disease, and heavy downpours. From mid-century on, climate change is projected to have more negative impacts on crops and livestock across the country – a trennd that could diminish the security of our food supply. See page 46.

9. Climate change poses particular threats to Indigenous Peoples’ health, well-being, and ways of life.

Chronic stresses such as extreme poverty are being exacerbated by climate change impacts such as reduced access to traditional foods, decreased water quality, and increasing exposure to health and safety hazards. In parts of Alaska, Louisiana, the Pacific Islands, and other coastal locations, climate change impacts (through erosion and inundation) are so severe that some communities are already relocating from historical homelands to which their traditions and cultural identities are tied. Particularly in Alaska, the rapid pace of temperature rise, ice and snow melt, and permafrost thaw are significantly affecting critical infrastructure and traditional livelihoods. See page 48.

10. Ecosystems and the benefits they provide to society are being affected by climate change. The capacity of ecosystems to buffer the impacts of extreme events like fires, floods, and severe storms is being overwhelmed.

Climate change impacts on biodiversity are already being observed in alteration of the timing of critical biological events such as spring bud burst and substantial range shifts of many species. In the longer term, there is an increased risk of species extinction. These changes have social, cultural, and economic effects. Events such as droughts, floods, wildfires, and pest outbreaks associated with climate change (for example, bark beetles in the West) are already disrupting ecosystems. These changes limit the capacity of ecosystems, such as forests, barrier beaches, and wetlands, to continue to play important roles in reducing the impacts of these extreme events on infrastructure, human communities, and other valued resources. See page 50.

11. Ocean waters are becoming warmer and more acidic, broadly affecting ocean circulation, chemistry, ecosystems, and marine life.

More acidic waters inhibit the formation of shells, skeletons, and coral reefs. Warmer waters harm coral reefs and alter the distribution, abundance, and productivity of many marine species. The rising temperature and changing chemistry of ocean water combine with other stresses, such as overfishing and coastal and marine pollution, to alter marine-based food production and harm fishing communities. See page 58.

12. Planning for adaptation (to address and prepare for impacts) and mitigation (to reduce future climate change, for example by cutting emissions) is becoming more widespread, but current implementation efforts are insufficient to avoid increasingly negative social, environmental, and economic consequences.

Actions to reduce emissions, increase carbon uptake, adapt to a changing climate, and increase resilience to impacts that are unavoidable can improve public health, economic development, ecosystem protection, and quality of life. See page 62.

Full Reference to the NCA

Melillo, Jerry M., Terese (T.C.) Richmond, and Gary W. Yohe, Eds., 2014: Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment. U.S. Global Change Research Program, 841 pp. doi:10.7930/J0Z31WJ2.

http://www.globalchange.gov/

pgleick Tue, 05/20/2014 - 02:24

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Social Sciences

Thanks for the summary. As a High School teacher this is very valuable and usable. I went to a talk you gave years ago (maybe 6?) at the University of Minnesota. It was a great talk so thanks for that too!

Why Global Warming's Effects Will Be Worse Than You Were Thinking

gregladen — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:24:42 +0000

Why Global Warming's Effects Will Be Worse Than You Were Thinking

The story of climate change has always been more of worst-case, or at least, worser-case scenarios developing and less about good news showing up out of nowhere and making us unexpectedly happy.

A few decades ago, it became clear that the release of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere primarily as CO2 was going to cause a greenhouse effect (yes, dear reader, we've known this for looooong time ... the idea that this is a recent and still untested idea is a lie you've been fed so many times some of you may have begun to believe it). At that time climate scientists thought, reasonably, that there would be a diverse set of responses to the increase in CO2 and/or the increase in heat, some of which would accentuate the effects (positive feedback) and others would reduce the effects (negative feedback). Over time, the list of possible ameliorating effects became shorter and shorter and eventually pretty much disappeared. There is no double secret save-our-butts-at-the-last-minute Carbon "sink" nor is there any natural response that would cause cooling to somehow be caused by warming. Meanwhile, the list of accentuating effects has grown. Melting permafrost releases copious green house gasses. Melting sea ice in the Arctic allows the Arctic Sea to warm even more. Global warming-caused aridity causes numerous fires which coat the Greenland ice with soot, causing it to melt faster and do less of the work of reflecting sunlight back into space. And so on and so forth.

For these reasons, several years go you'd have climate scientists saying "well, this is important, and change is coming, but there's good news and bad news" and then the good news all went away and the bad news all stuck around, and every now and then, a new bad news item not previously thought of came along and lengthened that list. So already, climate change is worse than we thought.

Then we have the problem of scary empirical reality.

The Ghost of the Eemian

One of the most significant negative effects of global warming is likely to be sea level rise. Sea level rise so far has been significant, measurable, and important, but not large. As the earth warms because of increased levels of greenhouse gasses, the temperature of the ocean has increased, and this has caused the water in the ocean to expand, raising the level of the sea. At the same time, glaciers have been melting all across the planet, adding additional water to the sea, causing additional sea level rise.

So you can see that there is a link between temperature and sea level rise. More heat, more sea level rise. But there's a problem with this model. Based on prior experience, it seems that our planet normally responds to heat like we are experiencing now with a much higher sea level. During the Eemian period, the last time conditions were similar to the present, sea level was about 5 to 7 meters higher than now. In other words, given an admittedly small sample of 2 instances, when global temperatures are roughly like they are now, sea level can be anywhere between their current levels and 7 meters higher than current levels.

This is not the kind of relationship between important variables that allows us to say that sea levels are going to go down, or stay at their current level, or rise very slowly. These are the kinds of numbers that tell us that we really don't know what is going to happen over the next few decades, but that the chance that sea level will drop is zero, and the chance that sea level will rise only a little is slim, and the chance that sea level will rise quickly and a great deal at some point in time, or in a few spurts, is pretty good.

Predicting genocide using information about voting patterns

Which brings us to more details about the problem of sea level. Sea levels will rise the most not because of warming oceans but because of glaciers ... whopping big continental glaciers ... falling apart and slipping into the sea, or melting very rapidly and sending copious meltwater into the sea. Everything we know about the Greenland and Antarctic glaciers seems to indicate that at least some of this is going to involve large events, where big parts of big glaciers slide into the sea, rather than melting slowly like an ice cube in your sink. Also, the rates of melting during a handful of events observed over the last couple of years were entirely unpredicted and shocked scientists watching the process. Also, previously unknown causes of rapid melting are as we speak being discovered and measured.

Putting this another way, it would be a reasonable guess that the rate of continental glacial melting will be much higher than previously estimated, but also, the timing and speed of this ice wastage is pretty much unknown, and quite possibly unknowable except in very broad terms.

We have some very fancy models based on physics of ice melting and a few other variables that can be used to estimate ice melt and sea level rise. The problem is, these unpredictable and large scale catastrophic events have never been observed to happen. Yet, we think that they can happen in part because the rate of sea level rise thousands of years ago at the end of the last glacial maximum was so fast at times that it must have involved some pretty rapid events, more rapid than our models are able to predict. Our models can't predict these events not because the events can not happen but because the models have no way of dealing with them.

This problem reminds me of my days living in the Eastern Congo. Things were mostly peaceful. But, there were some tensions among various social factions, including different ethnic groups, different classes, and so on. There was tension along the borders between Zaire, Rwanda, and Uganda. But there was nothing whatsoever going on during my time there that would have predicted the Rwandan Genocide, the Congo War I or the Congo War II, or any of the troubles that I now realize were just starting then. This would be especially true if we were making careful sociological observations, measuring variables, taking polls, counting things, and so on and so forth. Major social upheaval comes when it comes, and is rarely accurately predicted by those carefully measured and modeled variables, and the timing and magnitude of those upheavals is never known in advance. And as human society so often goes, so may well go the glaciers of Greenland and the Antarctic. Our physics based models are going to look rather silly, predicting a melting rate of several centimeters a year, when three or four big-gigantic glacial monster fragments fall into the ocean within a year or two of each other along with a steady stream of slush causing ten years worth of sea level rise faster than you can say "property values in New York City may be slightly depressed" three times.

The Good News

There is no good news. But what often happens is that a bit of research comes along and looks like good news. This research is then identified, pointed to, repeated again and again, over-interpreted, used to argue that global warming is not real, and even used to argue that those who have been saying all along that global warming is real are making it up, on someone's payroll, are part of some huge conspiracy, etc. etc.

In other words, the progress of understanding of the potential future effects of climate change is set back significantly every time a research project with slightly good news, or even just less bad news than usual, is reported. This is ironic, because so many of those research projects have flaws in them that if taken account of suggest that the good news is not really there to begin with.

For example, a recent study seemed to show that the response of the planet to increased Carbon Dioxide is less than we expected it to be, but only over the short term. The difference between long term "climate sensitivity" (the amount of warming you get from a certain amount of greenhouse gas) and short term is probably where the heat goes not how much is added. Over the last few years, the ocean has been taking on a larger share of the heat from global warming, so the atmosphere has not warmed up as much (though it has warmed). But, the partial story ... that "sensitivity" is less for the present decade has been translated by various re-tellers of the science to suggest that we'll be fine. In fact, the slowdown in rate of atmospheric warming, which is still warming (like I just said) is called a "stall" in warming. But it is not a stall. It is a slow down in rate in atmospheric warming and a speed up in rate of oceanic warming. That is not really good news though it is reported as good news. But there isn't good news, just slightly more complicated news. (See this for a summary of that particular story.)

Not long ago another set of nuanced scientific observations were converted by the once reputable Matt Ridley in a piece in the Wall Street Journal, an outlet guilty of publishing this sort of misleading commentary on a regular basis, into "good news." In ...

“Cooling Down the Fears of Climate Change,” [Ridley] (falsely) asserts observations suggest global warming will be so low as to “be benificial.” This risible piece by Matt Ridley is so riddled with basic math and science errors it raises the question of how the Journal can possibly maintain its reputation as a credible source of news and financial analysis.

Ambiguous News

Of particular poignancy at the moment, since as I'm writing this the bodies of third graders are being pulled from a tornado-ravaged elementary school in Oklahoma, is discussion of the relationship between global warming and storminess. Storms are complicated. They vary in number from year to year, they vary in where they strike, and they vary in intensity per storm. Nonetheless there are patterns. There has been exactly one Atlantic hurricane in the south Atlantic ever, as far as we know. They only occur in the north. Tornadoes don't occur randomly; they are clustered mostly in certain regions of the world and mostly occur during certain months, though there is a lot of variation. (I discuss this at length here and here.)

Hurricanes are fueled by warm seas, and ripped apart by high level winds. Global warming causes sea surfaces to warm, and may also strengthen tropical and subtropical high level winds. So, does global warming mean more hurricanes or fewer? Or fewer but when they happen, stronger ones? Or what?

In the US, severe thunderstorms, bad straight line winds, and swarms of tornadoes typically arise from moist and warm unstable air masses organized along west to east and south to north moving fronts, with the heat and moisture starting out in the Gulf of Mexico, which is a big warm wet place during the summer. It stands to reason that if you heat up the Gulf, you'll get more of this, and global warming is heating up the Gulf. But the actual distribution and behavior of these fronts will also depend on the distribution of the famous "Jet Streams" and that is potentially altered by climate change. So, will global warming involve more tornadoes, stronger ones, or will they simply occur somewhere else? Or what?

There is one thing we know about storms. They are ultimately manifestations of heat, and more specifically, they result from the uneven redistribution of heat originally from the sun concentrated in tropical regions and moving towards polar regions by currents of water and air. In a heated up world there is more energy to feed storms. It is impossible to imagine a significantly warmed ocean and a significantly warmed atmosphere without significantly more storm activity and/or stronger storms, and maybe even some new kinds of storms. The problem is that it is hard to say what kinds of storms will increase, if there will be more of some kind of storm or more severe instances. For that matter, maybe all storm types will "increase" at one time or another, taking turns being the big storm problem for a few years, and sometimes that increase will be in numbers, sometimes in strength, sometimes manifest as a change in location of the patterned storm activity. That would be a statistical nightmare. It would be a lot of "moreness" of various phenomena but distributed across a range of different manifestations so that counting storms or measuring storms of specific types will show a pattern only after decades. This is why we sometimes look at overall damage to property from meteorological events over time, and there we do see a steady increase. It is also why the insurance companies, who are not stupid about these things, are so worried.

"Global warming appeasers" (people who pretend to understand the science but who are really trying to make climate change sound like it is not a big deal, like Ridley) and denialists alike are taking advantage of the statistical difficulty of measuring changes in patterns of storms to assert that "we can't link storms, or storminess, to climate change." But we can. We know there will be a link between a heated up earth and storm patterns, we are just more than a little uncertain as to what kind of change that will ultimately consist of.

Again, there will be no good news about storminess. Just more detailed news, and possibly a more nuanced understanding, which unfortunately will require more nuanced reporting and commentary.

Good luck with that.

__________________
Photo Credit: DVIDSHUB via Compfight cc

gregladen Mon, 05/20/2013 - 14:24

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Thanks, Greg, for putting this into perspective. I noticed that while Ridley is arguing "do nothing" at the same time he is saying he expects renewables to dominate in a few decades. Why he thinks that when he wants to do nothing now is anyone's guess. A fairy waving a magic wand perhaps?

This seems to be a common theme among the delayers. They assume that future generations will be much wiser than us, much more willing to take action in response to rising sea levels, much more willing to invest in adaptation than are the delayers of today.

From a sociological/psychological persepective this doesn't make a lot of sense. "Human nature" isn't going to change. If we cannot show that we are willing and able to invest in mitigation as well as adaptation today, why would we expect any different from future generations?

As for hanging all one's hope on only those 'predictions' that are supremely conservative without considering the whole, particularly the evidence from past climates - you've summed it up very well. It's called cherry-picking I believe.

Another possibility is that there will be fewer and weaker tornadoes, but in approximately the same location. We don't really know. Tornadoes are dependent upon large vertical wind shear in terms of occurrence and intensity. Wind shear is related strongly to horizontal temperature gradients. If the poles warm more than the equator, we'd expect wind shear to decrease.

It's more likely that we'll see an increase in the number, but not necessarily the intensity, of non-tornadic thunderstorm wind events.

Harold: We currently have one of the flattest gradients ever seen between equator and pole, so even though what you say here makes sense and in some way must be true, we are having some pretty bad tornadoes anyway. Perhaps these giant 1+ mile wide beasts that stay on the ground for tens of miles are a different thing. For that matter, the major known types of tornadoes may be different from each other in enough ways that we should be counting them differently.

Sou, I agree, and I would think he would be the kind of guy that would NOT expect a sudden change in human nature, given what he's written about human nature. In any event, we can all agree that could use more fairies, but that seems unlikely.

Even with the poles warming faster than the equator, horizontal temperature gradients aren't going away. As anybody who has ever lived near the ocean knows, the higher heat capacity of water means that inland areas warm faster during the day than areas along the immediate coast. The resulting sea breezes lead to thunderstorms in certain areas, such as Florida, although usually not tornadoes.

The key thing will be what happens to the jet stream. If it simply moves poleward, then Tornado Alley will probably shift poleward as well. But if we see more meandering, as has been the case the last few years, the likely result will be more tornadoes over a wider area than previously. That would be bad news for places like the Canadian prairie and New England, where tornadoes have been rare (although the Canadian prairie is the only place outside the US that has ever seen an F5/EF5 tornado).

Amongst those who recognize a problem, there is this sense that once we wise up and stop treating the atmosphere as a dump thing will magically get better. Unfortunately this is not true.

Mainly because of the large amount of heat the oceans hold and therefore the time they take to heat up, there are some huge lags in the system.

We have yet to see the extra heating from the Arctic Sea Ice that has already disappeared. No sea ice, less albedo, more heat stays in.

As well as all the CO2 we emit, we are also emitting aerosols. These aerosols are masking about half of the impact of the CO2 we have put up there. If we stopped polluting today they would wash out in twelve months or so.

So when we stop polluting, it will get worse and get worse very quickly. The longer we leave, it the higher the price of our Faustian bargain.

Forget the Eemian, we are headed to the Pliocene at a rate a biosphere will not be able to keep up with.

"...there is no good news..."

We have recently hosted a debate about global warming and I was surprised how personal and aggressive it could get. I can not see how this can resolve in the upcoming years.

The problem is the research itself. There are many theoretical flaws and biased researches nowadays.

My own goal is to promote veganism - it is probably the first reasonable step to reducing CO2 after the heavy industry and many coal plants that are still in work.

Changing our lifestyle can have a serious impact on how global warming proceeds. And I don't even mention the problem with droughts and the shrinkage of the drinking water in many regions of the world.

why does no-one mention the latent heat required to melt all this ice, this is ameliorating the temperature rise (I got this from James Lovelock) but I have yet to see it come up in an article

Yes, melting ice lowers the temperature of the atmosphere and/or ocean water nearby, which slows down the rate of global warming somewhat.

But, when the ice cubes in a drink melt, the drink will continue to get warmer because the room air is warmer still. So with the globe.

For the globe, this does give us some extra time. How much is impossible to say at present. But this would only matter if the heat imbalance were somehow corrected soon. Prospects for that appear dim.

By the way, this is not "amelioration." That word implies a permanent fix for some problem.

Good news, revised data, I guess you didn't get the memo..;
"... sea level was about 5 to 7 meters higher than now."
Was based on wrong data.
New data is here;
"...new research suggests this shoreline is actually about 30 feet (10 meters) lower than previously thought, meaning less ice melted than suspected."
http://news.yahoo.com/earths-mantle-affects-sea-level-rise-estimates-19…

Yeah, that would be nice. The situation is indeed complicated, but the high strandline is not confined to that coast, it is found around the world. Each case has to be examined on its own merits. The land moves up and down, and the shape of the surface of the sea varies. You can't just look at a single shoreline and make an estimate of earlier sea level. However, nor can you look at a single interplay between sea level surface and tectonics and rule out a particular strand line.

I've not looked at this specific research project, so I can't comment on it specifically yet but I'd be surprised if a single attempt at revision of a single area obviates all the research around the world that seems to come to the same conclusion.

Also, this is not the shoreline we are looking at to predict sea level rise. The relevant shoreline is the Eemian shoreline, not this one. So, this is only very marginally relevant.

Extreme Weather in the US Northeast and Climate Change

gregladen — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 18:45:56 +0000

Extreme Weather in the US Northeast and Climate Change

This graph shows the extremes in one-day precipitation in a given month relative to the amount of precip in that month for the Northeastern US. So, if the green bar is at 30%, that means that that 30% of month's precip fell in one event. The way this is computed is a little complicated because it is hard to define an "event" in time and space in relation to the time and space coordinates (as it were) we normally use. Check the source of the graph for a more detailed explanation. The point of this graph is that the opposite is true from what many expect: It isn't the case that the snow was deeper back when you were a kid. It's deeper now! (Check out this blog post for an explanation for why you may have misremembered your childhood.) There are a number of contributing factors to a pattern like this, with increasing extreme events, but the best way to think of this may be as an increase in the bimodality of the water cycle. Dry events are dryer (you may have noticed widespread drought) and wet events are wetter (as shown in this graph).

From NOAA National Climatic Data Center.

gregladen Fri, 02/08/2013 - 13:45

Tags

Climate Change

climate change graphics

Global Warming

extreme weather

storms

climate change graphics

Thank you for your expertise.

Can you give your brainstorming for me?

I would like to speculate on why extreme temperature changes over the course of 1-2 days -

How is it that temperature difference can be followed by rushes of wind in the same location within a 24-36 hour period following?

I am very serious and honor your opinion. I am a Liberal Studies graduate from Charter Oak State College and an Associates General Studies graduate from Gateway Community College, particularly:

I speak of the engineering term - Optimization and the electrical term V=IR, Voltage = Amperage (times) Resistance.

I am a Christian:

Bless you,

Richard B. Robinson, Jr

My reference is President Dorsey Kendrick of Gateway Community College in New Haven Connecticut.

Thank you for giving your reply.
I have just sent a message and would like a reply.

Blessing,

Richard Blackstone Robinson, Jr.

The Biggest Storm Ever on a Small, Small World

esiegel — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 15:28:48 +0000

The Biggest Storm Ever on a Small, Small World

"For most of the history of our species we were helpless to understand how nature works. We took every storm, drought, illness and comet personally. We created myths and spirits in an attempt to explain the patterns of nature." -Ann Druyan

Here on Earth, we are well aware of how devastating storms can be. From hurricanes to flash floods, an unpredictable change in weather can turn a serene setting into a catastrophe in no time at all. The clouds that fill the skies can often portend what type of weather is coming, and to me, the most impressive and fearsome of all is the rare and remarkable supercell.

Image credit: Sean Heavey / Barcroft Media, from Glasgow, Montana.

The least common and most severe type of thunderstorm, supercells form when a warm, moist layer of air (typically found above a cold layer, since heat rises) slides below an even higher-elevation cold layer. The wind shear from this motion causes vorticity, or a spinning motion, of the air in the warm layer. As the warm air tries to rise through the cold layer, the rotating vortex becomes vertical, and creates a mesocyclone, which can lead to tornadoes in the most catastrophic of cases.

Image credits: Vanessa Ezekowitz, retrieved from the wikipedia page for supercell.

Even in cases where tornadoes do not form, the supercell storm provides a spectacular deluge and incredible wind speeds.

Image credit: Martin Kucera of http://www.floridalightning.com/.

Under the most extreme circumstances, many tornadoes erupt and the storm -- although usually brief -- can literally destroy an entire town, as was the case a year ago in Joplin, MO. As seen from space, only the flat top of the supercell was visible, blinding us to the destruction that was occurring underneath.

Image credit: NASA / GOES-13 satellite, of the 2011 Joplin, MO supercell.

It will come as no surprise that raging storms like this are not unique to Earth. In fact, they are common and can last for extremely long durations on gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute, by Cassini/CICLOPS.

But what may be surprising is that on a relatively small world in our Solar System -- on Saturn's largest moon, Titan -- what appears to be a long-lived supercell storm may, in fact, be raging over its polar region. In the image above, you can see what looks like a cloudy hood over Titan's north pole; this was taken in 2004, when Titan's northern hemisphere was experiencing winter. The atmosphere of Titan extends so high, however -- it's 10 times as thick as Earth's atmosphere -- that sunlight was able to hit the upper atmosphere above the pole, creating that cold-warm-cold layer necessary to produce a giant supercell!

Well, Saturn experienced its equinox back in 2009, and so now we have the onset of winter in the southern hemisphere. And guess what Cassini saw as it flew over Titan's south pole?

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute, from Cassini/CICLOPS.

Does this swirling, gaseous formation look like anything you've seen before? Titan's south pole is in the process of forming a vortex that will very likely give rise to a southern polar hood as winter arrives! As the amazing Carolyn Porco states:

We suspect that this maelstrom, clearly forming now over the south pole and spinning more than forty times faster than the moon’s solid body, may be a harbinger of what will ultimately become a south polar hood as autumn there turns to winter. Of course, only time will tell.

Don't believe it? View Cassini's video of the storm yourself!

I can't help but marvel at this storm, rotating at 40 times the speed of Titan itself, and wonder at the titanic catastophes occurring on the world below. With more than 100 miles of atmosphere to see through, we are ill-equipped to find out how this cyclonic polar storm is affecting the terrain below, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if we found out (with the next Saturn mission, nudge-nudge) that there wasn't a torrential methane rain with cyclonic winds reaching down miles upon miles.

Can a storm on a world like this reach the surface? I don't know, but I sure hope we get to find out!

esiegel Fri, 07/13/2012 - 11:28

Tags

Are those transient white flecks in the last image lighting? (Or just noise?)

Because it looks so much like a cell I was wondering if this couldn't be a gas outburst, or a volcano cloud. You can see something similar halfway this page in the case of the Mount Pinatubo super eruption:
http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/education/page3042.html

You'd need to find evidence that supports that, chelle, since a storm cell already describes the measured phenomena.

Otherwise, not much point entertaining the notion. It -could- be something else, but no reason to consider it.

Rather like Ethan's take on string theory at the moment.

Isn't it great how we learn about climate by studying *other* planets and moons as well?

@ Dale:

Noise by cosmic radiation et cetera is a common phenomena in images from spacecrafts, affects solid state pixels, memories; plus you have sundry transmission dropouts. If it is black, it is often a damaged pixel in solid state camera I think. If it is white, I would guess CR hit the pixel.

I'm sure they are on the lookout for sprites et cetera discharges.

@Dale

Those specks are almost certainly cosmic rays hitting the sensor. Some of them are even in neat little lines that show the path of the ray as it passes through the sensor array.

"You’d need to find evidence that supports that, chelle, since a storm cell already describes the measured phenomena."

Most likely yes. I had a vortex ring in mind that is often created by volcano's and this 'storm' with its clear edges made me think of that. Storms on our planet seem to have a more dense core, a bit the opposite of this one that seems to be fluffy on the inside.

Although I checked and there are cryovolcano's on Titan:
A cryovolcano (colloquially known as an ice volcano) is a volcano that erupts volatiles such as water, ammonia or methane, instead of molten rock. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryovolcano

... on Titan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)#Cryovolcanism_and_mountains

Anyway that moon seems to be one of the most exciting places in our solar system to go and have a look at, Richard Brandon if you're hearing me ...

Cheers!

Vortex rings don't last long, though..

The Grind

sastyk — Mon, 21 May 2012 07:02:41 +0000

The Grind

These fragments I have shored against my ruins. - T. S. Eliot

The national news trucks hit my neighborhood last fall, as some of you will remember. When Tropical Storm Irene caused severe flooding and destruction in surrounding communities, and particularly to many of my neighbor's farms, we were briefly in the news. Then, as is normal for any community that has experienced disaster, came waves of volunteerism and assistance, and then a gradual diminishing of attention and interest, and the slow, long process of reclamation and rebuilding. As spring came around, the houses in the village of Schoharie that listed, the stories of friends with severe depression and anxiety, people moving out of the neighborhood, farmers thinking about leasing their land for hydrofracking to make back their losses...those were the background of a disaster that most people don't remember happened.

The FEMA trailers that got people through the winter are being auctioned off, some of the renovations are done, the houses that weren't too bad are back and occupied and people are hoping the mold problems won't be too serious as the weather warms. We're back to a new normal - mostly. And the help and donations and volunteerism is winding down too. And now come the long term expenses - more folks on food stamps and unemployed, more depression, anxiety and stress-related illnesses, no tax revenues from homes rendered unlivable. Our area will come back - but it won't come back the same, and it will be less able to bear the next disaster, whether local or collective.

There's nothing atypical about this - all over the country, in the last decade, there have been disasters - and their grinding aftermath in which the losses are not fully made good, where people fall through the cracks and find themselves a little bit behind...and a little more. Most of us remember the big disasters of this century so far - and there have been a lot of them. 9/11. Katrina. Most of us don't remember all the other places there were hurricanes and ice storms, floods and fires, tornadoes - we hear and are appalled for a bit, we send a check and good wishes, and then we don't think much about what happened.

For example, final estimates of the cost of the Joplin tornado are coming in at close to 3 billion dollars. I think, hearing those numbers, the implicit assumption is that the money will come from somewhere to rebuild - and a lot of the money does show up...eventually. Insurers will pay a lot of it - although if our local experience is any example, a lot of insurers will balk and look hard for loopholes, and lawsuits will be required to get some of it out. Half a billion will come from taxpayers. And some of the costs just won't get covered - things that slip through the cracks, and leave people trying to cover too many bases at once. It is the grind again, where everyone involved who survived gets a little poorer - or a lot poorer.

And this is a real piece of our future. It is hard to associate any given natural disaster with climate change, but we know that the aggregate experience of climate change is that the grind falls on all of us - falls on more and more of us as we wait for our storm or heatwave, drought or floods. It falls on more and more of us as it gets harder to get insurance, and the costs go up. It falls on more and more of us as the resources to cover the costs of each disaster get scarcer. The price tag for 2011 world natural disasters was greater than ever before in history.

That this is part of an emergent pattern was the judgement of the Stern Report, the clearest full analysis of the economic impact of climate change - that over the next century, unchecked climate change will take a bigger and bigger part of our budget for remediation and response, until it is consuming up to 20% of World GDP - a hit no economy can bear. The Stern Report considered ONLY climate change, however, not stagnant growth and rising energy costs.

The Grind affects all of us, whether the next storm hits you, your neighbor or far away. It affects us in complicated ways as patterns of relocation and refugeeism change, in our insurance premiums and our neighborhoods as houses sell or don't sell, in our families as we suddenly take in relatives escaping the latest disaster. Right now we can mostly absorb the costs, with only the expected pain - the little things that don't get fixed, the people who can't quite make it out of the quagmire. As we go along into a warming world with energy supply constraints, however, the grind keeps coming back, and its drag upon us gets heavier.

We were lucky - we lost a lot of plants, some fencing, a vehicle. Not our home, our animals or our farm. Most of the consequences for us have been in watching our friends and neighbors rebuild and helping where we can - we are caught only in the gentlest outer waves of the grind, not at the center. And yet, there's a drag, a pull, an effect that makes it hard to go forward. It seems every week we find that someone we depended on is selling up, no longer in business, thinking of moving on, struggling with things. You can feel it even out here on the periphery.

Our future is as much about rebuilding as it is about building, and about coming to terms (because we have functionally elected to do nothing about climate change) with The Grind, with the process of loss and imperfect reconstitution. We imagine that disaster comes and takes all away, and we must rebuild. But the reconstruction is never what was lost - and the resources for rebuilding become more tenuous, fragmentary and uncertain - are we rebuilding, or simply shoring fragments against the next ruin?

Sharon

sastyk Mon, 05/21/2012 - 03:02

Tags

climate change

costs of climate change

My aren't we just the picture of optimism this morning -- is the heat wave getting to you already (at 10am it's already 26C here, 45km northwest of Toronto).

Here in Minnesota the newspapers are reporting the anniversary of the tornado in North Minneapolis last year. Again, not enough $$ to deal with all the problems, trouble with insurance claims, and of course many folks forced to move on. This particular storm hit in one of our poorest neighborhoods. I think since the Katrina disaster, people no longer expect full government help in rebuilding. So sad. Last year there were mentions of this catastrophe on the news, but they quickly moved on to other disasters around the globe.

Even here in Texas, Katrina was a huge disater. We weren't ready for such a large amount of devastation. It gave us a wake up call. With hurricane season fast approaching and our rapidly changing climate, who knows what's coming at us next. I can only hope we're not hit in the face with something we're not ready for.

You left out the burden on our health; physical and mental. We've been buried with work this spring; had to do both April and May chores- in April. Bloody exhausting; can't do them well, not enough time, and it's depressing.

That's not going away.

Lost about half the apple crop; maybe more. Haven't gotten our own food garden in yet; too many other emergencies. Not one potato planted. Missed the good window of dry April weather, then it rained for 2 weeks. Going to be 86Â° tomorrow, they say. Still can't use our access road to the root cellar- it's still blocked by oaks downed by the tornado a year ago.

Yeah, it won't have to get too much worse, and it will be serious.

Not to undercut the seriousness of the weather disasters, but how much of our suffering is simply because our modern expectations are too big and great?

It was easier to rebuild a house years ago when it was a 1000 sq ft house for 5 people, with simple electrical and plumbing systems, if the latter systems even existed, less expensive and complicated furnishings, appliances, etc.

Nowadays rebuilding anything is horrendously expensive, time consuming, and complicated, what with all the expectations, government and insurance rules, and so on.

Years ago one wouldn't have had as much chance of the weather wiping out a family car or two if there wasn't one in the driveway to begin with, or if there was only one versus two, and so on.

The more we build up and reorganize our lives against Nature, the more there is outstanding for Nature to try to undo when She gets the chance.

Notified by our independent insurance co. that our house insurance will go up $40 this year d/t costs of Joplin tornado. We are considering it another donation. A local family was there on that tragic day and lost their son.

I have seen Minot, and I have seen southern Nebraska along the river. I know someone who's still eating out of a microwave balanced on the toilet tank, due Katrina's visit to Miami Better known for what it did elsewhere). It's mind-boggling what people are dealing with, yet when you meet them at the store or post-office, it's "nice day, huh?"

Another thing you didn't mention (only so many things fit in a blog post!) is that if another disaster happens shortly after yours, FEMA, the news trucks, the charities and everyone else packs up and goes to the new disaster. There are so many resources to go around -- except for news networks, which have an unlimited supply of hot air. While it makes sense to apply to resources at the spot of greatest need, it doesn't help much if you are still in dire need when they roll out of town.

For that matter, the construction teams that go from disaster to disaster leave, too.

I'm inclined to agree with Stephen B., in that I think part of the pain people feel is modern expectations, and so is part of the cost. It's a professional roofer and a fancy SUV now, and that drives up the "cost" of a disaster.

This may seem perverse - and it may be, although I don't mean it to be - but, in a way, people who have been hit by one or more of these disasters are 'lucky' in that they have had that experience and know, therefore, that it can happen; often quite unexpectedly, and that it is possible to survive and perhaps become better prepared.

Where I live we're not particularly prone to impacts from tornadoes, hurricanes, floods or even earthquakes (albeit wildfires are a definite concern) so most folks go about their day-to-day stuff pretty much unconcerned about the effects from those things - except to note how lucky they are to live in such a place - and so they are generally unaware and unprepared.

However, since the area is drought-prone already and also will likely get a pretty strong jolt when the 'Big One' along the Pacific/Continental subduction joint lets go (as it will - someday), I think folks hereabouts are in for a real shock as climate change creeps up on us and the water goes away and are certainly in for a shock (no pun) when the 'Big One' hits.

The âgrinding aftermathâ is a phrase that describes our situation in New Zealand so well. 20 months on and thousands of earthquakes later, this disaster keeps on taking a toll, in mental illness, homelessness, and the constant frustrations experienced living in a broken city, fighting government bureaucracy and insurance companies. And yet any time it seems too much, we only have to look at the footage of that terrible black wave that bore down on the shores of Japan to realise we are the lucky ones.

One of the ways to mitigate the effects of the grind is to build resilience into our lives. That could mean getting rid of all automobiles and relying instead on public transit, walking, and cycling for our transportation needs. This drastically reduces our transportation expenses, and also probably enables us to improve our overall health by getting around under our own steam.

Just one example of many of ways we can face the grind head-on with some chances of meeting success.

To clarify:

I didn't mean getting rid of all automobiles in society-although that could be a great thing. I had more in mind single family solutions and single family resilience building.