by www.Zedge.net

[UPDATED 6/23, 9:30 a.m.] Twenty years ago today, James E. Hansen testified before the Senate Energy Committee — in a room kept intentionally warm by committee staff — that the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and forests was already perceptibly influencing Earth’s climate.

There’s a quote from the New York Times’ Andrew C. Revkin, dated June 23, 2008, memorializing a key 1988 turning point in the history of human-caused climate change. Dr. Hansen, then director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. Revkin added:

The video [shot by Revkin during a 2008 interview that is the subject of the article] begins with [Dr. Hansen's] explanation of a visual aid he created in 1988 with Jose Mendoza, an illustrator at Goddard in the days before PowerPoint: a pair of cardboard dice showing how humans were tipping the odds toward climate troubles. Notably, perhaps because of old glue, the paper black dots were falling off. (emphasis added)

The more I think about Dr. Hansen’s metaphor, the more impressed I am. In 1988, he was able to come up with a very simple explanation of how humans were affecting the climate–so simple that almost anyone could understand it. My profession is communications, and I can tell you from long experience, that’s not easy to do.

In addition to being simple, it’s a very accurate (perfect?) description of a scientific phenomenon that is becoming more and more obvious as time goes on, and the perfect response to those who (1) point to a remarkably cold or snowy day as proof that global warming does not exist or (2) (accurately) state that any short stretch of weather does not prove the climate is changing.  No, a short stretch of record hot weather does not prove anything, but we are loading the climate dice, and it’s exactly the type of weather that we will be seeing more and more of as time passes, because we have changed the odds and the “old normal” no longer applies.

I’d like to encourage everyone who shares my concern about global warming, and about the remarkably poor job most mass media are doing of communicating the issue, to bring up the topic of “loading the dice” as often as possible. It is simple, it is accurate, and there is not, to my knowledge, an easy and simple denier response. Regrettably, after all this time, many newspaper and broadcast journalists still do not get this most basic explanation of the effect of human-caused climate change on weather.

Source

Taken from: http://itsburning.blogspot.com/

West Nile Virus, a known disease threat to humans, was first observed to be carried by mosquitoes in the Midwestern United States in 1999. Since then, state and local governments have enacted mosquito abatement plans that involve large-scale spraying to stem the spread of the disease. While spraying can be lifesaving for humans, birds and animals, it can be fairly expensive. Therefore, in an effort to optimize mosquito spraying schedules, the state of Illinois turned to the Illinois State Water Survey in the 2000’s to develop a method of predicting when the rise of disease-carrying mosquitos might occur each year. A solution to the problem came from a climatologist.

Nancy Westcott and a team of supporting scientists at the Illinois State Water Survey analyzed recent climate datasets side-by-side with incidences of mosquito proliferation in Illinois. From this they developed a model that was able to retroactively pinpoint the “crossover” date of the proliferation of disease-prone mosquitoes to in six out of seven summers from 2002 to 2008 finding a range of July 25 to August 20. Another model’s pinpoint date was within two weeks of the actual date.

An example of Westcott’s mosquito crossover model from the 2005 season using historical climate percentiles and gradually tending toward a single crossover date as the timing of the 81°F+ day threshold becomes more certain. Image reproduced from Westcott, et. al.

One of the main correlations the past data indicated was that mosquito proliferation coincides quite well with the running total of summer days with high temperatures greater than or equal to 81°F. Once a certain number of days with temperatures at this level had been reached, mosquito proliferation usually occurred within a week. The model used guidance from past climate data to hone in on a date when this threshold was historically reached, replacing this data with actual dates from each individual year as 81°F+ days were logged.

By knowing the crossover date with greater and greater accuracy as the season wears on, the state now prepares the resources to spray exactly when the model indicates the crossover will occur. This more accurate method will save time, money and resources.

While there are other factors that Westcott and her team describe to also have some effect on the model-calculated crossover date (including season precipitation and departure from average daily temperature), they assert that these contribute a comparatively small amount of error to the larger high-temperature correlation. The model will continue to improve every year as each successive summer is modeled and retroactively evaluated to see how it performs and to determine what needs to be tweaked.

Sources

Northwest Mosquito Abatement District. Northwest Mosquito Abatement District, 29 Dec. 2011. Web.  Accessed 18 Jan. 2012.

Westcott, N. E. et al. “Predicting the Seasonal Shift in Mosquito Populations Preceding the Onset of the West Nile Virus in Central Illinois.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Sep. 2011: 1173-1180. Print.

An example map of anomalies in global precipitation during the MCA. Red ovals indicate drier conditions; blue ovals indicate wetter conditions; and hatched ovals indicate greater uncertainty in the paleorecords. Image reproduced from Diaz et al.

Since the Industrial Revolution in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels has increased from 280ppm (parts per million) to 390ppm across the globe. This has led to a net warming in the atmosphere to a magnitude that is still being quantified. Complicating the quantification, however is the difficulty of separating natural cycles in the Earth’s orbit (Milankovitch cycles) from human-induced changes in greenhouse gas emissions.

The last time the Earth was entering into a similar warm period due to natural changes in the Earth’s orbit was during medieval times, around 950 AD. This warmer period, dubbed the Medieval Climate Anomaly, or MCA, persisted until approximately 1400 AD. The Earth then slowly started shifting into what is now called the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1400 to 1900 AD. These eras are confirmed by paleoclimatic records, including ice cores, tree rings and sedimentary analysis. Actual data from weather instruments also substantiate the last few centuries of the Little Ice Age.

Since the beginning of the 20^th century, a steady warming has been well-documented by human observational data and ongoing paleoclimatic research. This warming has also been successfully reproduced in retrospective climate models given the known increase in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere.

Thus, as we prepare for the effects of a slightly warmer climate, we look to the past to see how the Earth adapted to the most recent similarly-warmer period, the MCA. Paleorecords from high- and mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere indicate that temperatures were, for several decades, just as warm as during the 20^th century. Ice data show that sea ice recession in many areas was just as intense as it has been recently. However, some geological records show no noticeable signals of a warm phase.

It can, therefore, be hypothesized that the MCA was stronger in some areas than in others; modifying each region’s climate in different ways. One would expect today’s global warming to behave in a similarly non-uniform manner. This non-uniformity includes differences in magnitude of change and differences in geographic location. This latter difference is one that is often forgotten when discussing changes in the Earth’s climate.

Recent global climate change is not to be a question of ‘if’ but rather of ‘how much.’ Ongoing comparative studies between the MCA and today’s climate will further contribute to a definitive answer to our climate change questions that will not end with determining simply ‘how much’ but will go on to include ‘where.’

Reference:

Diaz, Henry, Ricardo Trigo, Malcolm Hughes, Michael Mann, Elena Xoplaki, and David Barriopedro. “Spatial and Temporal Characteristics of Climate in Medieval Times Revisited.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Nov. 2011: 1487-1500. Print.

A study performed by the Game and Wildlife Conservation Society concluded that worms can play a key role to help farmers adapt to extreme weather. Worms improve soil structure, reduce water use in the garden, act as natural fertilizers, reduce greenhouse gases and save on the costs of waste removal.

Dr Chris Stoate, head of research at the society’s Allerton Project farm, said:

When fields are not ploughed, the soil condition is improved ­naturally by the tunneling of ­earthworms, which absorb water at a rate of four to 10 times that of fields which are without worm ­tunnels.

This in turn helps the soil to take up water during storms and to retain it during drought.

The study recommended that farmers cut back on traditional ploughing and harness the power of the army of the eco-friendly microbes and earthworms that live in the soil.

Reference

Winter, S. How Turning Worms Will Save Planet (2011, October 11) Express.co.uk. Retrieved from: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/274941/How-turning-worms-will-save-planet

Savoie, O. Successful Worm Farming. eHow Retrieved from: http://www.ehow.com/about_5476512_successful-worm-farming.html

by web.missouri.edu

The study of past climate, or paleoclimatology, is one of the most important fields of climate science study. The study of the past, using all time scales, is the basis for climate projections. The past is highly relevant for modern climate change, because it helps us to understand the mechanisms regulating climate and, therefore, to correctly attribute the relative importance of the many factors contributing to climate change, including natural and anthropogenic forces.

The methods for studying the paleoclimate are many and their use depends on the time scale in which researchers are examining. Methods are based on investigating changes in the physical and chemical properties of natural archives, which record climatic patterns.

“Proxy data” is the data paleoclimatologists gather from natural recorders of climate variability. Natural archives can include historical records, tree rings, lake and marine sediments, ice cores, pollen, speleothems, loess and geomorphic features. Natural recorders have different resolutions and can cover different time scales, the shortest being historical data (thousands of years) and the longest marine sediments (millions of years). From these natural archives it is possible to derive past temperature, precipitation and humidity; chemical composition of air and water; as well as vegetation patterns, solar activity, volcanic eruptions, geomagnetic field variations and sea level. A scientist will use all these forms of data to reconstruct the climate of a specific period.

From the study of natural archives, scientists discovered that the ultimate source of natural climate change is Earth’s position with respect to the Sun. Periodic changes in the Earth’s orbit over hundreds of thousands of years gave origin to the ice ages as well as to the inter-glacial eras in between. Climate can change as a result of tectonic movements, as well as to changes in the atmospheric composition, including the concentration of greenhouse gases and dust in the air.

From proxy data networks detailed reconstructions of large-scale temperature patterns over the past millennium have been constructed. These estimates indicate relatively modest variations in Northern Hemisphere mean temperature prior to the marked warming of the twentieth century. This is the footprint of human activity, which started influencing global climate beginning in the Industrial Revolution.

Annually and seasonally resolved climate records are critical to describe year-to-year patterns of climate in past centuries. Spatial resolution of climate data helps to derive a detailed description of global climate patterns. It is key now, in order to understand past and present changes in climate, to assemble the most comprehensive possible data record and to make it accessible for analysis to climatologists all over the world.

References and Further Resources

• NOAA Paleoclimatology located at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/paleo.html
• Gornitz, S. (ed) Encyclopedia of Paleoclimatology and Ancient Environments. Springer.
• Solomon, S., D. et. al. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (2007) Chapter 6: Paleoclimate. Retrieved at http://ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch6.html.

In November2011, an international group meeting in Durban, South Africa concluded that farming is the single largest contributor to greenhouse-gas pollution on the planet, through deforestation, rice growing and animal husbandry. Food production is rising sharply, requiring more carbon-based fuels and nitrogen-based fertilizers, both of which exacerbate global warming, river and ocean pollution, and a host of other ills.

Scientific American suggests that energy use can be cut by converting agricultural waste, such as manure, into power; implementing new, pilot-level farming techniques such as drip irrigation, no-till planting, laser-leveling of fields and GPS-driven machinery; and reducing spoiled and wasted food, which amounts to 25 to 30 percent of all food produced.

Scientists recommend that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) form a program to develop a global sustainable agriculture strategy. Scientists argue that the problem deserves a larger share of international climate-change mitigation funding.

The group praised Australia’s Carbon Farming Initiative—the world’s first national legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions from farming and forestry which was enacted last August. The law allows farmers and investors to generate and trade carbon credits from farming and forestry projects. It could serve as a model for similar projects in other countries.

References

Gilbert, N. (2011, November 22) Summit Urged to Clean up Farming. Nature. Retrieved at: http://www.nature.com/news/summit-urged-to-clean-up-farming-1.9376.

Webber, M. (2011, December 29) How to Make the Food System More Energy Efficient. Scientific American. Retrieved at: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=more-food-less-energy.

Melting Permanfrost by BBC News

Scientists in Siberia, Alaska and the Arctic are researching what happens when the tiny microbes, the residue of animals and plants that lived thousands of years ago, become exposed with melting that has been occurring with the warming of the planet. They have found that typically melting permafrost releases carbon dioxide.

In September 2006, a study found that the amount of carbon trapped in the type of permafrost found in Siberia is  released at a rate five times faster than had been anticipated by scientists. Not only that, it was releasing 100 times the amount of carbon released into the air each year than that by the burning of fossil fuels. (Current global emissions of carbon from burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and other human activities total more than 10 billion tons per year.) Additionally, when permafrost at the bottom of Siberian lakes melts, it releases methane! Methane is a greenhouse gas 23 more powerful than carbon dioxide.

Once the permafrost begins to melt, the gases will be trapped in the earth’s atmosphere, thereby heating up the planet and melting more permafrost. Once this cycle begins, even if mankind were to eliminate release of carbon dioxide, the process of global warming would continue nonetheless.

Many studies are being conducted. A group of about 300 scientists is studying permafrost melting in the Arctic in the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment project. Another project, funded by the Department of Energy, the Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments—Arctic, is employing 50 scientists to study the permafrost melting in Alaska. They will add environmental data gained from the study to a planetary model used to forecast how climate evolves under different emissions scenarios.

At the Toolik Field Station in northern Alaska a study is ongoing that is sponsored by the US National Science Foundation. This project will look at the effects of thermokarsts — the scars and pits left behind as melt water from permanently frozen ground leaks away, and soil and rock collapses in its wake. Scientists are also concerned with how release of oxygen, nitrogen and other nutrients will affect vegetation in newly melted regions.

Breck Bowden, scientist at the Toolik Field Station project says streams

are like blood vessels of the human body, and connect land, rivers and lakes, and ultimately the ocean. Streams are also important in their own right. For example, they nourish fish production, providing a key source of food for some communities. Only when we have a full understanding of what goes on in streams and their responses to disturbances will we be able to synthesize what goes on across the entire landscape.

At Hess Creek, Alaska a study conducted on what happens when chunks of Alaskan permafrost thaw for the first time in 1,200 years found there was an initial burst of methane after two days. After seven days, the methane concentration decreased significantly. The cause in the drop in two days was the increase of methane-eating microbes that continued to proliferate up to seven days. However, the samples emitted increasing amounts of carbon dioxide that did not decrease. The study, which continues, found that different microbes behave in unique ways and the release of gases can vary.

Melting Lakes in Siberia by Reuters

In general, when organic material comes out of the deep freeze, it is consumed by bacteria. If the material is well-aerated, bacteria that breathe oxygen will perform the breakdown, and the carbon will enter the air as carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas. But in areas where oxygen is limited, like the bottom of a lake or wetland, a group of bacteria called methanogens will break down the organic material, and the carbon will emerge as methane.

References

Borenstein, S. (2006, September 7) Scientists Find New Global Warming ‘Time Bomb.’ Associated Press. Retrieved from: http://www.thewe.cc/weplanet/news/arctic/permafrost_melting.htm.

Gillis, J. (2011, December 16) As Permafrost Thaws, Scientists Study the Risks. New York Times. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/science/earth/warming-arctic-permafrost-fuels-climate-change-worries.html?pagewanted=all.

Monastersky, R. (2011, December 11) Permafrost Science Heats up in the United States. Nature Magazine. Retrieved from: http://www.nature.com/news/permafrost-science-heats-up-in-the-united-states-1.9681.

Parry, W. (2011, November 6) Frozen Microscopic Worlds Come Alive as Earth Warms. Live Science. Retrieved from: http://www.livescience.com/16898-arctic-microbes-permafrost-climate-change.html

Qui, J. (2009, June 30) Observing the Scars of the Arctic Thaw. Nature Magazine. Retrieved from: http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090630/full/news.2009.609.html.

In these days of budget cuts and economic hardship, it is imperative that we recognize that if we do not understand climate change, we will never have prosperous days. We would very much appreciate your help by:

• Following the International Environmental Data Rescue Organization (IEDRO) on our social media pages (we have loads, so one simply needs to choose a favorite social networking site; no need to follow on all of our accounts).

Here is a link containing all of our social media accounts: https://www.facebook.com/iedro.org?sk=app_2374336051

• Sharing our posts!
• Inviting friends and colleagues to join
• Joining our cause on Causes.com

https://www.causes.com/fb/donations/new?ts=1324215396&campaign_id=70245&source_id=111487675619786&source_type=FbPage

• Using Goodsearch.com  for web search or using their toolbar can help you raise money which you can donate to IEDRO. Type in the full name, International Environmental Data Rescue Organization.

http://www.goodsearch.com/nonprofit/international-environmental-data-rescue-organization-iedro.aspx

• Add IEDRO to your profile job description in either Facebook or Linkedin.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released their annual December report on the past year’s natural disasters in the United States. The sum of the damage in 2011 cost American taxpayers $52 billion. Disasters listed ranged from the Groundhog’s Day blizzard in the Northeast ($1.8 billion; 38 deaths) to Hurricane Irene ($7.3 billion; 45 deaths) to wildfires in the Southeast.

For the US, 2011 was an exceptional tornado year. As of the report’s release, 1,836 tornados were reported, with six being category EF5 tornados. The previous record for tornados in a single year was set in 2004 when 1,717 were confirmed. The 552 fatalities in 2011 are nearly more than the previous ten years combined (564) and only trail 1925 for the most tornado-related fatalities in a single year, when the Tri-State Tornado killed over 700 people across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. Total monetary damages from 2011 tornados were over $20 billion. Nevertheless, while $52 billion in damages from 2011 natural disasters is staggering, it still does not compare to 2005, when Hurricane Katrina alone cost U.S. taxpayers $145 billion.

The United States will undoubtedly need to be prepared for another Category 3, 4, or 5 hurricane to come onshore over a major metropolitan area. With the population along the Eastern seaboard and Gulf of Mexico continuing to build, grow, and expand, it is not a question of if but rather of when.

When preparing for these disasters, infrastructure and construction techniques are of key importance in withstanding such events. Because of what happened in Louisiana and Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, engineers have an idea of what levee heights must be to withstand worst-case-scenario floodwaters. Construction techniques are being developed to make buildings safer and less susceptible to damage during tornados; with great progress being made in framework bracketing and material strength. Better early blizzard communication and snow removal methods are being adopted in large cities also.

But regardless of preparation, these extreme events will continue to occur and the United States will need to be prepared to face the monetary consequences. By understanding our historic susceptibility to short-term natural phenomena such as hurricanes, tornados, and snowstorms as well as long-term phenomena such as droughts, floods, and wildfires, we can estimate how taxed our budget will be from extreme events and perhaps set aside funds in years of good fortune.

In other countries, historic records of natural disasters are not as readily available as in the United States. It is IEDRO’s goal to help find historic paper records, assist each respective country in digitizing them, and help key stakeholders to understand how they too can use this data to be properly prepared for extreme weather events.

Sources:

http://www.christianpost.com/news/2011-natural-disasters-cost-u-s-taxpayers-52-billion-report-says-64452/

http://www.spc.noaa.gov

A group led by PAGES (Past Global Changes) has ranked human weather observations in South America as the second-highest priority climate data that must be collected, collated, and integrated to understand South America’s climate. Their highest-ranked priority is tree-ring records, with ice-core samples, glacial variations, and marine sediment records coming after.

Meteorological observations such as temperature, pressure, and precipitation in South America date back nearly 500 years to 1534 AD, when Spaniards began keeping daily weather logs in present-day Ecuador. Today, as we try to understand how our climate will change in the near future, we look toward records like these to see how our climate has changed in the past. While a great deal of data from South America has already been collected and digitized by IEDRO and other entities, each country still has vast stores containing observations and historic data on old parchments that have not been touched.

It is important to retrieve and represent a majority of the existing data to create a full climate record. Once a full or nearly-full record has been compiled, a crucial second step can then be completed: the calibration and homogenization of the climate dataset.

Instrumentation and observation techniques have evolved over the course of centuries, and thus historical observations must be representatively calibrated, based on their known biases. For example, early mercury thermometers were often produced separately, with little in terms of side-by-side comparisons with similar thermometers for consistency.

Once the climate data is calibrated to remove instrumental biases and human error, it should be spatially weighted. This means that each site of data collection in South America, when considered as a single point, must be appropriately represented based on its proximity to other data collections sites. For example, if there are ten historical data collection sites in Ecuador but only one in Guyana (roughly the same size as Ecuador), the data from Ecuador cannot have ten times more influence on the overall climate records as the data from Guyana simply because Ecuador had more data. This technique for ensuring that the data is properly represented based on geographical proximity is called spatial homogenization, and the final implementation of this technique is what the South America focus group of PAGES hopes to see happen in the near future.

The most important thing that can be done to advance this project at present is the ongoing rescue and digitization of historic climate data from South America. IEDRO hopes to continue playing a front-and-center role in its success.

Article on the millennial climate in South America by the PAGES-LOTRED-SA initiative

LOTRED-SA (Long-Term climate Reconstruction and Dynamics of (southern) South America) initiative’s article “multiproxy summer and winter surface air temperature field reconstructions for southern South America covering the past centuries” has been accepted for publication in Climate Dynamics.

http://www.pages-igbp.org/cgi-bin/WebObjects/products.woa/wa/product?id=428