Climate and Weather
gregladen | November 22, 2013There is a storm (this one) moving across the southern part of the United States that forecasters predict will turn north over the Atlantic and menace the east coast somewhere between Northern New England and Washington DC or Virginia, possibly much of that area. The storm may develop, forecasters say, into a Nor'easter. I looked at the predicted Jet Stream configuration for next Wednesday and I noticed that is will be all curvy-durvy like it has been so often lately. This curvy jet stream is so much more common these days because, climate scientists think, of the phenomenon of Arctic…
gregladen | November 13, 2013If I want to measure how much business a shopping mall gets, I can stand by an entrance way and count the number of people who go into the mall. If I stop every tenth person on the way out and frisk them for their receipts, I can estimate the per-person amount of money spent, and multiply that by ten to get an idea of how much business is represented by the particular entrance way I am sampling. This would work. I wouldn't know how much money was spent in the mall because I have no information about other entrance ways, but I could track changes over time in business, and I'd probably be…
gregladen | November 11, 2013Trigger warning: Truth and pain.
Published on Nov 11, 2013
Philippines delegate Naderev (Yeb) Saño, announces his decision to go on hunger strike on the first day of the COP19 Climate Change Summit in Poland, 11 November 2013.
Making an impassioned plea for action by the conference, he said that he would be fasting in solidarity with his country-folk until action to prevent climate change is forthcoming.
Saño received a standing ovation after describing the hardship suffered by Filipino's, including members of his own family, due to the "colossal" typhoon Haiyan which recently hit his…
gregladen | November 10, 2013Should there be a Category 6, or even a Category 7, to classify extra bit tropical cyclones like Haiyan?
Some tropical cyclones labeled Category 5 are much stronger than others. It has been suggested that we would be smart to extend the system to have a Category 6 and maybe even a Category 7 to allow the additional severity of these storms to be indicated when they are being spoken of in the news or by officials in charge of scaring people into doing the right thing, like running away or staying indoors.
There is resistance to this proposal that comes from two mostly distinct places. One is…
gregladen | November 9, 2013At this moment, there is a guest post over at WUWT blog downplaying the size, strength, wind speeds, overall effects, and even the death toll of Super Typhoon Haiyan. Even as the monster storm steams across the sea to it's next landfall (probably as a huge wet tropical storm, in northern Vietnam and southern China), Anthony Watts and his crew are trying to pretend this monster storm didn't happen, and instead, that it was a run of the mill typhoon.
At the moment, nobody is really saying that Haiyan's strength, size, power, or even existence is specifically the direct result of global warming…
gregladen | September 30, 2013Paul Douglas from Weather Nation (and elsewhere):
For the 5th time in 23 years, the world's leading climate scientists have released an update on the state of the climate. WeatherNation Chief Meteorologist reviews the highlights plus shares the panel's predictions for the rest of the century.
gregladen | August 14, 2013There are at present two systems in the Atlantic that have a good chance of producing tropical storms and possibly, eventually, hurricanes. One is east of the Yucatan, the other is very near the coast of West Africa.
Here's the report from the National Weather Service. I've used a rough routine to convert case so it is not screaming at you (the NWS has not yet implemented the rumored policy of not using ALL CAPS FOR EVERYTHING.
1. The broad area of low pressure in the northwestern caribbean sea is moving toward the west-northwest at 10 to 15 mph. Cloudiness and showers associated with…
gregladen | August 5, 2013Originally posted on Mar 18, 2012
Communications expert George Marshall offers six strategies for talking to people who don't accept that climate change is happening Drawing on his workshops in climate communications and the latest social research he proposes a respectful approach that responds to their interests and values. He says that you should keep away from an argument about the science and concentrate on the personal journey that led you to accept the problem. Try it and you'll find it works.
More here.
gregladen | August 3, 2013This is early in the year for Atlantic hurricanes, though we are already up to "D" in named storms. The current mane floating around in the Atlantic is "Dorian" which the National Weather Service is shortly going to rename "Dorian The Zombie." Dorian was a named tropical storm several days ago, disappeared into a system not worth of a name, then re-organized a bit so they are using the name again, and is expected to spit lightly on Florida and then wander off to the Hurricane Graveyard in the mid Atlantic.
From NOAA: The average cumulative number of Atlantic storm systems per year.
In…
gregladen | July 30, 2013WeatherNationTV Chief Meteorologist Paul Douglas looks at how climate change leads to rising sea levels and what coastal cities can expect to see by 2040. Also, more on torrential downpours and record setting rainfalls.
gregladen | July 23, 2013James Hansen, the famous climate scientist and author of Storms of my Grandchildren, talks about the possible role of nuclear power in addressing climate change, and in particular, reducing the release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere.
I think he is far to pessimistic on the use of solar and wind energy than he needs to be and notice that he, and no one else ever, seems to mention geothermal, which could reduce our release of carbon by double digit percentages using existing technology in a few years. Having said that, there is probably no way to solve our energy problem without…
gregladen | July 21, 2013From Paul Douglas:
Just like we read left to right, most weather systems move left to right (West to East). Right now however, the weather pattern is out of whack, moving East to West, creating a monster tropical heatwave for a big chunk of the U.S. WeatherNation Chief Meteorologist Paul Douglas has more on the rare retrograde weather pattern and why it's important to take the heat seriously, but not lose your sense of humor.
gregladen | July 20, 2013Climate Scientist John Abraham and I just finished a session of FtBConscience on Climate Change and during that session we promised to provide some useful links. We also used some graphics during the session. Below are the links and the graphics!
First, here is the video of the session:
Climate Change Science Twitter List
I created a twitter list of people (or organizations) that tweet about current climate change science. If you check this list at any given moment you’ll know the latest climate science news. If you have a suggestion as to who should be added to this list, send me a tweet!…
gregladen | June 25, 2013The video below has meteorologist Paul Douglas talking about the big storm we had in the Twin Cities a few days ago (from his excellent series of climate change and weather related videos). The storm actually followed on a number of days with a fair amount of rain, and up here in the northern part of the Twin Cities, we had a pretty bad blow with high wind gusts and lots of rain the day before. But on the 21st, a storm swept mainly through the Western Suburbs and Minneapolis, but actually a much wider area than that. I drove down to pick up Julia near Roseville yesterday, a couple of days…
gregladen | June 23, 2013On Tuesday, President Obama will make a speech outlining his administration’s plans to address climate change. The Right Wing has already responded by calling those concerned with climate change “Terrorists.” How have the progressive and left wings responded? Badly. Very badly. Here is a selection, some paraphrased to ensure anonymity (though these are all public), of comments by people that I know are well meaning climate change activists or otherwise concerned about global warming and such.
Obama’s speeches and verbal plans make no difference. It’s what he DOES that counts.
He’ll say: “…
gregladen | June 6, 2013A paper came out in today’s Nature about glacial melting and its contribution to sea level rise. This paper does not present new research, but rather summarizes and evaluates the last several years of research on modeling and measuring contiental glaciers and their dynamics.
From the Abstract:
Since the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, new observations of ice-sheet mass balance and improved computer simulations of ice-sheet response to continuing climate change have been published. Whereas Greenland is losing ice mass at an increasing pace, current…
gregladen | June 3, 2013I think most people will agree that in North America (and other places) we've been having some bad weather. Some of the weather is not necessarily intrinsically bad ... so what if it is a little cooler or a little warmer than you expect. Aridity? Deserts are nice! Extra rainfall? Great for the plants. But actually that sort of thing has its down side since important systems like agriculture, the water supply, and Spring Break work reasonably well because of expectations that might not be met if the weather is different.
Other weather is intrinsically bad. I'd mention tornadoes but at the…
gregladen | May 18, 2013Several environmental advocacy groups are asking the US State Department to launch an investigation over the State Department's handling of the Keystone XL review.
This is a bit nuanced but important, and I want to make clear what is going on here.
Normally, environmental impact assessments are done by private contractors ultimately hired by the entity that is building the project that could have the impacts. I often hear people complain that Trans Canada, the group that wants to build the Keystone XL pipeline across the United States to allow the export of it's bitumen (a kind of soft coal…
gregladen | May 15, 2013You've gotta love South Minneapolis.
My friend Sharon Sund passed me an email this morning about an Organizing for Action meeting in South Minneapolis to discuss climate change activism. Sharon and I had been talking about local climate change activism earlier in the week so she thought I'd liked to go to this meeting and see what they are up to.
Organizing for Action(OFA) is an offshoot of the Obama campaign, a grassroots non profit that is separate from any campaign committee (so they don't support or run candidates) that organizes in favor of Obama's issues like getting some sensible gun…
gregladen | April 10, 2013Probably.
The Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University makes annual predictions of hurricane season activity, and they released one of these predictions today. This particular group has a good track record, although I would worry that they tenaciously hold to the idea that global warming is not a factor in hurricane development despite the fact that some of the factors (a disrupted ENSO and high SST) that are most affected in the Atlantic by global warming actually drive their predictions. Still, their predictions seem to be based on good empirical data and are probably…