In Hawaii, yesterday was the day after tomorrow

Remember the opening of The Day After Tomorrow, the documentary feature film highlighting what could happen if the Earth warmed enough to suddenly shut off the Gulf Stream that's part of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation that keeps the northern latitudes from Ice Age temperatures? Los Angeles was plagued by a sudden outburst of tornadoes, something that is unheard of in the Golden State.

Not what you usually imagine
when you think of Hawaii+ice.

Well, we in Hawaii have been having some wicked winter weather. It's been chilly and we've had some nasty thunderstorms, the cool kind that shake the ground for quite a few seconds (setting off car alarms) after lightning has struck very close to where you live. Meanwhile, the lack of sun and the excess of wind have made daytime conditions quite a bit chillier than usual.

Temperature drops into the low sixties are not that uncommon in January or February (or even March), but we've been getting three-inch hailstones and an actual tornado hitting the northeastern side of Oahu (my island). It started as a water spout (a rarity here) and went inland.

It struck Lanikai, a place where I occasionally go kayaking and biking and not far from where Hawaii-born Barack Hussein Obama often vacations. It was nothing like the horrific and deadly rash of unseasonal tornadoes that recently struck the Midwest, but it did do some damage.

If I start to see a nerdy Jake Gyllenhaal chatting up Emmy Rossum, I'm gonna be real worried.

Still, as far as Hollywood messing with Hawaii goes, I'd rather go with the Day After Tomorrow scenario than that of 2012.

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Critics of Climate Change "consensus" find... consensus

Interesting. Actually I share the concerns of critics such as GI Korea of ROK Drop, who feel that data should be open and subject to scrutiny. I expected that this effort by doubters of the consensus at UC Berkeley might lead to some questions that need some 'splainin, so it was a (pleasant) surprise to see this:

A team of UC Berkeley physicists and statisticians that set out to challenge the scientific consensus on global warming is finding that its data-crunching effort is producing results nearly identical to those underlying the prevailing view.

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project was launched by physics professor Richard Muller, a longtime critic of government-led climate studies, to address what he called "the legitimate concerns" of skeptics who believe that global warming is exaggerated.

But Muller unexpectedly told a congressional hearing last week that the work of the three principal groups that have analyzed the temperature trends underlying climate science is "excellent.... We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups."

The hearing was called by GOP leaders of the House Science & Technology committee, who have expressed doubts about the integrity of climate science. It was one of several inquiries in recent weeks as the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to curb planet-heating emissions from industrial plants and motor vehicles have come under strenuous attack in Congress.

Muller said his group was surprised by its findings, but he cautioned that the initial assessment is based on only 2% of the 1.6 billion measurements that will eventually be examined.

As Paul Krugman writes, that was certainly going off script. The study had been gaining attention, especially on the right where it some assumed the Koch Brothers-funded group would skewer the "consensus" in the scientific community about global warming:

On the project's website, in a public lecture and in statements to the media, Muller had portrayed the Berkeley effort as rectifying the "biases" of previous studies, a task he compared with "Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables." He said his study would be "more precise," analyzing data from 39,000 stations — more than any other study — and offering "transparent," rather than "homogenized" data.

[source]

Though two percent of 1.6 billion is a very good sampling from which to draw a very precise sampling, I'm sure some deniers will latch on to that to say that the skeptics newly lost skepticism is unwarranted. They may also note that global warming theorists preemptively criticized the UC Berkeley group as unqualified for the task at hand, which could call into question their surprise seal of approval.

Such critics are people who, for whatever reason, are convinced of or vested in the idea that climate change due to warming is (a) not manmade, (b) too costly or inconvenient to do anything about, (c) impossible to reverse, and/or (d) against their own personal interests to resolve.

In other words, it's against their best interests to accept the theory and they will fight tooth and nail to undermine confidence in the evidence and to block any legislation that would come from it.

WaPo's Michael Gerson on "Climate-Gate"

This op-ed in the Washington Post dovetails nicely with my own views on what the hacked emails (gotta love how so many are so willing to trust the veracity and conclusions of people who would do something like that) from East Anglia University mean — and what they don't mean — and how that fits into the big picture:

Even if every question raised in these e-mails were conceded, the cumulative case for global climate disruption would be strong. The evidence is found not only in East Anglian computers but also in changing crop zones, declining species, melting ice sheets and glaciers, thinning sea ice and rising sea levels. No other scientific theory explains these changes as well as global warming related to the rise in greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Over millennia, the climate shifts in natural cycles. But we seem to be increasing the pace of change so rapidly that plants, animals and humans may not be able to adequately adjust.

The claim of recent global cooling is deceptive. It is true that 2008 was cooler than 1998. But 1998 was the hottest year recorded since the advent of reliable records in the 1800s, while 2008 was the ninth-hottest. Despite yearly variations, the overall trend goes in one direction. All 10 of the hottest years on record have come since 1997.

But the hacked e-mails are not irrelevant. They reveal another sort of warming -- an overheated academic world in which hard science melts into politics.

Some prominent climate scientists involved in these e-mail exchanges have clearly abandoned a profession for a cause. They appear to exaggerate their public certainty on disputed issues, shade the presentation of information for political effect, tamper with the peer-review process, resist reasonable requests for supporting data and urge the destruction of e-mails to avoid embarrassment. Other scientists in these e-mail chains resist these abuses. But the dominant voices are ideological. The attitude seems to be: Insiders can question, if they don't go too far. Outsiders who threaten the movement are "idiots."

In some ways, the overzealousness of the East Anglia scientists reminds me a lot of the enthusiasm and adulation with which Dr Hwang Woosuk, he of Snuppy fame, was greeted. But just as Hwang's fall from grace did not disprove the viability of cloning nor derail the effort to clone human embryos, I don't think that Climate-Gate — which is not at all the slam dunk its praisers seem to think it is — negates human-induced climate change. But like Hwang's case, I hope it will lead to a harsher eye of scrutiny being cast on the scientists behind this.

Did scientists really predict an ice age in the 1970s?

Time Magazine reported in 2006 that the the Upsala Glacier (above), part of the South American Andes in Argentina, has dramatically retreated. The upper picture is how it looked in 1928, and the lower picture is how it looked in 2004. It reportedly has been retreating at least 180 feet (54 meters) per year.

Did scientists in the 1970s really predict an ice age, and if so, what's up with that?

Well, yes, they did. That meme is a favorite counterpoint by those who think that global warming is all a fantasy by Former Vice President Al "Chicken Little" Gore. The thinking apparently goes, "How can we trust scientists who tell us today that the Earth is warming up when those same scientists warned us in the 1970s that we were headed for an ice age?"

Good question. For answers, let's go back to what the scientists were saying four decades ago.

Indeed, in the 1970s scientists were reporting that the Earth had cooled by 0.2 degrees Celsius since 1945. The result was, scientists explained at the time, due to particulate matter, which is sometimes a human creation (but certainly not always, witness volcanic eruptions and naturally occurring forest fires and brushfires). This in turn led to greater cloud cover and more cooling. Nuclear winter lite, one could call it.

But since the 1970s, the United States and the rest of the industrialized world have been working to reduce pollution from particulate matter. I know that California, where I grew up, has much cleaner air than back when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. Without the yŏntan coal bricks burning in every home and far fewer dirty Diesel vehicles, South Korea's air quality has also improved considerably. In other words, reduction of manmade particulate pollution may have reversed that trend.

The other point to be made is that in the 1970s, people were in fact predicting global warming for the very same reasons as now, and those factors have not changed much.

So that's the skinny behind the oft-cited "prediction" of 1970s scientists that we'd be in an ice age by now. Here's a snippet from Time Magazine, dated February 2, 1970 (cover shown above):

Some environment experts visualize future dramas of disaster that seem to border on science fiction. A few scientists feel that the outpouring of carbon dioxide, mainly from industry, is forming an invisible global filter in the atmosphere. This filter may act like a greenhouse: transparent to sunlight but opaque to heat radiation bouncing off the earth. In theory, the planet will warm up. The icecaps will melt; the oceans will rise by 60 ft., drowning the world's coastal cities.

Other scientists argue the exact opposite: they point out that the earth's average temperature has dropped by .2° C. since 1945, though the carbon dioxide content of the air keeps increasing every year. To explain this phenomenon, many ecologists think that various particles in the atmosphere are reflecting sunlight away from the earth, thus cooling the planet. Since about 31% of the world's surface is covered by low clouds, increasing this cover to 36% through pollution would drop the temperature about 4° C.—enough to start a return to the ice age.

Make of that what you will. The following Time article from August 9, 1976 (cover below), addresses the same issues—particles causing cooling perhaps offset by a greenhouse effect. Here they report that since 1949 temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were one degree Celsius cooler, which would be disastrous if they occurred globally:

Climatologists admit that they really do not know. A substantial number believe the earth is undergoing a cooling trend and is returning to the conditions of the "Little Ice Age"—the generally cold, damp weather that prevailed from around 1600 to 1850. British Climatologist Hubert Lamb believes the change is cyclical, occurring every 200 years or so. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin and many others blame the earth's cooling on an increase of dust particles in the atmosphere; the particles act like tiny mirrors, reflecting back some of the sunlight sinking the atmosphere and depriving the earth's surface of solar heat.

There is some evidence that the earth had cooled down—at least temporarily—in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1972, according to German Climatologist Horst Dronia, the atmosphere in the Northern Hemisphere was one full degree centigrade colder than in 1949. But there have been indications of a slight warming since then. If the cooling-theory school is correct, however, the prospects for man are chilling. A global average temperature drop of only 1° could shorten the growing seasons in the temperate zones by a critical week or more and reduce food supplies. Increased heating requirements would put a further strain on energy sources.

Other climatologists believe that any long-term cooling trend is being offset by a "greenhouse effect," caused by an increasing atmospheric content of carbon dioxide produced by the burning of fossil fuels. The CO2 prevents some of the heat radiated by the earth's surface from escaping out into space, thus warming the planet's atmosphere. Warming-trend advocates note that winters in such normally chilly regions as Scandinavia and New England have been uncharacteristically mild in recent years, and glaciers in the Alps have actually retreated. Even a modest rise in world temperatures would bring with it other perils. Ocean levels raised by melting polar ice could drastically change global air-circulation and rainfall patterns, as well as cause extensive flooding. The result could be a radical decline in the productivity of many of the world's important agricultural regions.

Climatologists tend to agree that whatever the long-term trend, the earth's climate is entering a period of increased variability that will make prediction and planning ever more difficult. "I do not see glacial melts or an ice age," says Jerome Namias of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. "What I see is fluctuations." Stephen Schneider, deputy head of the climate project at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., says the evidence of the past few years suggests that there is a good possibility the climate is becoming more unpredictable.

To learn more about these fluctuations, an international consortium of scientists is compiling a record of the earth's climate. Climatologist Lamb and his colleagues have assembled an accurate historical record of the seasons going back as far as 1400 A.D.—based on parish registers, government documents, monastery records, and such physical evidence as sediment deposits in lakes and growth rings in trees. Says Lamb: "The more we know about cycles of the past, the better we can work with the highly detailed and sophisticated observations we have of our weather today." Geophysicist Willi Dansgaard of the University of Copenhagen is studying cores taken from the ice in Greenland and Antarctica to learn about temperature and precipitation through the ages. Researchers at Columbia University's Lament-Doherty Geological Observatory are examining sea-floor cores for clues to ocean temperatures and circulation.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, naysayers who like to tell us what scientists in the 1970s said. I think it's interesting to note that now that we have a better record—as they were starting to put together in the 1970s—the consensus on global warming due to manmade causes has become stronger and stronger (though not universal).

Personally, I don't think this is something that can ever convince everybody. I think it's entirely possible we may wake up tomorrow and realize that it was all a great miscalculation. But erring on the side of caution would be to try to clean up the environmental mismanagement we have inflicted on our waters and our atmosphere, and the efforts to curb global warming is a major part of that drive. In other words, even if it turns out we have exaggerated the effect of manmade carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, we still would win if we made strenuous efforts to reduce them.

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