Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

Stu Ostro, Senior Meteorologist at the Weather Channel, has written a must-read post on the recent record Georgia deluges, “Off the chain without a ‘cane” (reprinted below).  He makes a key point that had not occurred to me about the devastating September rainstorms:

Usually during that month when there’s wild weather, including precipitation extremes, it’s as a result of a hurricane or tropical storm. Not in 2009.

The main point of my post, Hell and High Water hits Georgia, was that, as climate scientists have predicted for a long time, wild climate swings are becoming the norm, in this case with once-in-a-century drought followed by once-in-a-century flooding.

Back in 2007, the NYT reported, “For the first time in more than 100 years, much of the Southeast has reached the most severe category of drought….  The situation has gotten so bad that by all of [state climatologist David] Stooksbury’s measures — the percentage of moisture in the soil, the flow rate of rivers, inches of rain — this drought has broken every record in Georgia’s history.“  So it was more than a once-in-a-century event.

As for the flooding, as one CP commenter posted, the USGS quantified that “the rivers and streams had magnitudes so great that the odds of it happening were less than 0.2 percent in any given year. In other words, there was less than a 1 in 500 chance that parts of Cobb and Douglas counties were going to be hit with such an event.”

I have called this type of rapid deluge, “global warming type” record rainfall, since it is one of the most basic predictions of climate science — and its an impact that has already been documented to have started.

But in fact this deluge is even more of a global-warming-type rain event because, as Ostro notes, unlike typical Georgia deluges, this one was not associated with a tropical storm or hurricane.  Ostro is “Senior Director of Weather Communications. Stu leads the team of tornado, hurricane, and climate experts at The Weather Channel.”  Because these extreme rain events becoming more common, and because Ostro’s excellent explanation is really too long and technical to simply excerpt, I’m going to repost the entire thing below:  (more…)

Once-in-a-century drought followed by once-in-a-century flooding — Hell and High Water — that’s something larger and larger swaths of this country will need to get used to, especially if their Congressional reps keep opposing action on climate change.

Douglas county Georgia was “hit by 21 inches of rain in a 24-hour period from Sunday to Monday, knocking out the drinking water supply to most residents, and forcing others to boil their water,” the NYT reports.  “As much as 15 to 20 inches of rain pounded counties around Atlanta for more than 72 hours.”

On Tuesday, Reuters reported “a state climatologist said this was the worst [flooding] in 100 years in some parts of Atlanta.”  Today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution listed the records set.  Here are just a few:

Among the flooding records, a nearly 90-year-old mark was broken Monday when the Chattahoochee River reached 29.61 feet near Whitesburg, west of Palmetto. The old record was 29.11 feet, set on Dec. 11, 1919.

Downstream, the Chattahoochee on Tuesday beat another nine-decade record near Franklin, reaching 29.97 feet. The new record bested a Dec. 15, 1919 mark.

The largest jumps came at Utoy Creek, near Atlanta, where the water level surged to 27.54 feet, nearly 11 feet over the May 2003 record of 16.86 feet, and Sweetwater Creek at Austell, where Tuesday’s crest of 30.17 feet topped the previous record of 21.81 feet set in 2005.

I have called this type of rapid deluge, “global warming type” record rainfall, since it is one of the most basic predictions of climate science — and its an impact that has already been documented to have started (see below).

And on top of the direct storm-related deaths, it is a broad threat to human health.  As the AJC reported yesterday:

The record rains of the past few days flooded out sewage treatment plants in Fulton, Cobb and Gwinnett counties, dumping millions of gallons of untreated sewage into local waterways.

So, water already polluted by oil and gasoline, trash, pesticides and other ground contaminants will also be carrying debris and bacteria from human waste….

The damaged plants around metro Atlanta continue to dump untreated, or not-fully-treated sewage into floodwaters that then end up rising into homes and businesses.

The main reason I am writing about Georgia’s once-in-a-century flooding, though, is that just a short while ago, the region was hit by a once-in-a-century drought (see “And the drought goes on“).  This is the climatic whipsawing of Hell and High Water.  Here is how things looked in October 2007:

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A key lesson of Katrina is that global warming “adaptation” is a cruel euphemism — and prevention is far, far cheaper. But we certainly need to prepare for the catastrophes we know are inevitable — all the more so if the global warming deniers and delayers succeed in blocking U.S. climate action.  The scientific literature, such as the journal Nature, makes clear that hurricanes ARE getting fiercer — and it’s going to get much worse.  In particular, land-falling Gulf Coast hurricanes will likely grow more and more destructive (see Why global warming means killer storms worse than Katrina and Gustav, Part 1 and Part 2).  So it is particularly self-destructive for Senators from Gulf Coast states to offer knee-jerk opposition to even the mildest of planning efforts, as guest blogger Brad Johnson makes clear in this repost.

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) is trying to prevent the United States from being ready for the next Hurricane Katrina. Vitter, who denies the human influence on global warming, has submitted an amendment (S. Amdt. 2450) to the Interior appropriations bill (H.R. 2996) to block funding for centers that study and prepare for the impacts of climate change:

SEC. 423. PROHIBITION ON USE OF FUNDS TO DEVELOP REGIONAL CLIMATE CHANGE OFFICES.

No funds made available by this Act may be used to develop Regional Climate Change offices within the Department of the Interior.

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Polar bears are the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of climate-change-endangered Arctic species.  They get all the press (see Will polar bears go extinct by 2030? and Bush launches Unendangered Species List, phones “Rename the Polar Bear” winner“).  But not-so-photogenic animals will suffer at the hands of human-caused global warming, too.  World Wildlife Fund’s Nick Sundt looks at impacts on walruses in a post first published on WWF’s climate blog.  And yes, I’m much more concerned about impacts on humans (see “An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water” and Let’s Dump “Earth Day”). Click to enlarge the above AP photo of a congregation of walruses.

Just days after Arctic sea ice receded to the third lowest extent on record, forcing thousands of walruses ashore, researchers flying along the Alaska coast stumbled upon a grisly scene: 100 to 200 walrus carcasses along the shoreline of Icy Cape, southwest of Barrow.  The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner carried an editorial (likely written before the dead walruses were reported) saying:

Reports of thousands of walrus forming unusual congregations on Alaska’s North Slope appear to confirm again the environmental challenges posed by relatively low fall ice coverage within arctic water….  Alaskans should be watching these barometers of climate change carefully as the debate rages about what can or should be done.

The scientific literature paints a hellish future if we don’t quickly reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends (see “Climate change expected to sharply increase Western wildfire burn area — as much as 175% by the 2050s“).  Even the watered down, consensus-based 2007 IPCC report acknowledged the danger:

A warming climate encourages wildfires through a longer summer period that dries fuels, promoting easier ignition and faster spread. Westerling et al. (2006 — see here) found that, in the last three decades, the wildfire season in the western U.S. has increased by 78 days, and burn durations of fires >1000 ha have increased from 7.5 to 37.1 days, in response to a spring-summer warming of 0.87°C. Earlier spring snowmelt has led to longer growing seasons and drought, especially at higher elevations, where the increase in wildfire activity has been greatest. In the south-western U.S., fire activity is correlated with ENSO positive phases, and higher Palmer Drought Severity Indices….

Insects and diseases are a natural part of ecosystems. In forests, periodic insect epidemics kill trees over large regions, providing dead, desiccated fuels for large wildfires. These epidemics are related to aspects of insect life cycles that are climate sensitive.

Now brutal heat and drought are fueling massive California wildfires once again (see, for instance, the BBC piece “Heat fuelling California wildfire“).  We can’t expect much from the status quo media (see “CNN, ABC, WashPost, AP, blow Australian wildfire, drought, heatwave “Hell (and High Water) on Earth” story — never mention climate change“).  So here is CAP’s Tom Kenworthy explaining “What a 1-Degree Temperature Increase Means for Wildfires” — and I’ll end with some comments on this positive or amplifying carbon-cycle feedback:

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On August 23, 2005, a tropical depression formed 175 miles southeast of Nassau. By the next day, it had grown into tropical storm Katrina and was intensifying rapidly. Early in the evening on August 25, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near North Miami Beach. Even though it was only a Category 1 storm, with sustained wind speeds of about 80 miles per hour, it caused significant damage and flooding, and took 14 lives.

The hurricane’s quick nighttime trip across Florida barely fazed the storm. Entering the Gulf of Mexico’s warm waters quickly kicked Katrina into overdrive, like a supercharged engine on high-octane fuel. Hurricanes fuel themselves by continually sucking in and spinning up warm, moist air.

On August 28, Katrina reached Category 5 status, with sustained wind speeds of 160 mph and a pressure of 908 millibars. A few hours later, wind speeds hit 175 mph, which they maintained until the afternoon.

At 4:00 pm, the National Hurricane Center warned that local storm surges could hit 28 feet, and “Some levees in the Greater New Orleans Area could be overtopped,” a warning that was tragically ignored by federal, state, and local emergency officials. Over the next 14 hours, Katrina’s strength dropped steadily. When the hurricane’s center made landfall Monday morning, it was a strong Category 3, battering coastal Louisiana with wind speeds of about 127 mph. The central pressure of 920 millibars was the third lowest pressure every recorded for a storm hitting the U.S. mainland.

The devastation to the Gulf region was biblical. The death toll exceeded 1300. The damage exceeded $100 billion. [Combined with the effects of Hurricane Rita] two million people were forced to leave their homes, more than were displaced during the 1930’s Dust Bowl. One of the nation’s great cities was devastated.

About 20 miles to the west of the second Gulf landfall was the small town named Pass Christian, Mississippi, where my brother lived with his wife and son.

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I’m reposting this piece by Ryan Grim, which was on the front page of Huffington Post yesterday.  This is a new analysis from The Nature Conservancy of the temperature and precipitation impact on the country of staying on our current emissions path.  The darkest red on the map is where average annual warming greater than 10°F.  The results are very similar to “Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year.“  I changed the HuffPost headline since this is really just a map of where warming will be the greatest.  Where “climate change” (including all the impacts) will hit the hardest is a tougher to say, but Florida and Louisiana probably top that list.  To bad three of the four senators from those states are also likely to vote for inaction and hence inundation.

Note:  If you want to see how the deniers mock one more warning of what’s to come, read “Exclusive Weekly Standard Climate Change Projection.”

The politics of climate change are difficult in the Senate, it’s often said, because it’s a regional issue: coal state senators are afraid their economies will be driven under if the price of dirty energy rises too quickly.

Climate change is, in fact, a regional issue, but not in the short-term way that the coal senators think, according to new analysis from The Nature Conservancy. The environmental group finds that rural Midwestern states will face the greatest consequences of climate change. The three that will face the steepest rise in temperature — Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa — are farm states whose soil will be significantly less productive as temperatures rise more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit there by 2100.

The rise by by 2050 — only 41 years from now — is also projected to be substantial. (Click here for an interactive map of the analysis.)

The two Republican senators from Kansas, which will be most ravaged by climate change, are unlikely to support legislation addressing it.

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One of the most tragic reasons global warming legislation doesn’t have more public support is the (mis)perception that it will primarily affect the poor and disadvantaged around the globe.  In fact, Hell and High Water will devastate poor and rich alike — it’s just that the poor have fewer resources available for coping with the impending catastrophe, and they often to live in areas most vulnerable to extreme weather.

If any proof were needed how hard extreme weather hits the disadvantaged, including poor African-Americans, one need look no further than Hurricane Katrina.  While no individual storm can be directly linked to global warming, energy and moisture picked up from warmer Gulf waters produce more intense winds and rain.  And in the case of Katrina, that extra punch may be what destroyed the levees protecting New Orleans–the “straw that breaks the camel’s back,” in the words of Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of Climate Analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The deadly combination of sea level rise and warming Gulf waters mean that — unless we quickly get off our current emissions path — we’ll be seeing many more Katrinas (see “Why future Katrinas and Gustavs will be MUCH worse at landfall, Part 2” and “Nature: Hurricanes ARE getting fiercer — and it’s going to get much worse“).

Those who want to take the strongest possible action on climate, like Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), are doing so in part because they recognize a moral responsibility we all have to both future generations and to the poor and disadvantaged.  It takes a great deal of chutzpah for anyone to accuse her climate leadership of have racist elements — especially someone who strongly opposes even the moderate climate action currently being considered by Congress, someone such as National Black Chamber of Commerce CEO Harry Alford, whose “group has received $350,000 from ExxonMobil since 2003 and [who] has a history of offering up climate skeptic talking points,” as Grist notes.

And yet Alford did just that in a Senate hearing yesterday. The National Republican Senatorial committee is already pushing this incident hard as if it reflects badly on Boxer, rather than Alford.  But that’s what we’re up against.

Below is the video of the exchange plus a description of this travesty by Brad Johnson, first published in Wonk Room.

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‘Once-in-a-century’ drought sending campers indoors and stunting crops

North Texas has had average rainfall this year, and three “cool” days this week felt like Christmas in July. But don’t tell your friends in Central and South Texas, because they are feeling hot, parched and bothered. A “once-in-a-century” drought is baking a big swath of Texas, says John Nielsen-Gammon, state climatologist and a professor at Texas A&M University. The drought is “zeroing out” crops and forcing ranchers to liquidate their herds….

The river is flowing at 10 cubic feet per second, Lyons said Wednesday. “Normal for this time of the year is 100 to 200 cfs,” he said. “We used to think 100 was low, but the last two years have changed our perspective.”

People are comparing the conditions to the epic drought of the 1950s, he said. “It’s been so dry it’s even killing cedar trees, so you know it’s dry.”

Drought twice as likely to lead to mental health problems
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They called this year’s U.S. Open “Bathpage.”

And yes, Tiger Woods lost, even though I called him an “all-climate player” after he won “the brown British Open” at drought-stricken Royal Liverpool in 2006 and the “Hottest Major of All Time.” In fact, I had predicted “No doubt he’ll some day win the ‘wettest major of all time,’ too” — but a bad draw and bad putting thwarted him, as I’ll discuss at the end.

And this was a bath.  As Newsday reported Thursday evening about the rainsoaked first day,

The golf-hating storm system that soaked the U.S. Open tournament in Farmingdale Thursday broke records for the date in Long Island and New York City, continuing a streak that may make this one of the wettest Junes on record, according to the National Weather Service….

“If this keeps up, New York City could see its rainiest June”….

A weather station at Long Island MacArthur Airport recorded 1.53 inches by 8 p.m., beating its previous record of 1.44 inches.

The 2.26 inches that fell at Kennedy Airport shattered the record of 1.49 inches set in 1972.

I’m going to borrow and modify a term from the scientific literature and call this a “global-warming-type” deluge — see Must-have PPT: The “global-change-type drought” and the future of extreme weather.  After all, this type of extreme downpour is precisely what climate science projects would happen when you put more water vapor into the air.  And it is precisely what major peer-reviewed studies have shown the United States has been experiencing in the past few decades (see Why the “never seen before” Fargo flooding is just what you’d expect from global warming, as Obama warns):

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Would the New York Times have Bernard Madoff as a business columnist?  Only if they hated business.

So why does the NYT let John Tierney write a “science” column?  The “founding principles” of his NYT blog are the clearest anti-scientific statement you will ever find by anybody claiming to be covering science (see “here“).

And, of course, Tierney makes up stuff up to smear real scientists (such as John Holdren and Steven Chu), which is only science as practiced by “political” scientists, like, say Roger Pielke, Jr.  And that’s my segue.

Why does anyone who cares about science quote Roger Pielke, Jr. on scientific matters? We’ve already seen one major NYT reporter tarnish his reputation by relying on Roger Pielke Jr.’s anti-scientific –  and anti-scientist — disinformation (see here).

Pielke has launched what is both the lamest and the most intellectually dishonest attack in his career — on a few innocuous sentences in the terrific new NOAA-led report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.  This attack has been pimped by Swift-boat smearer Morano and Tierney.   Pielke has one primary mission in his professional career — other than working with his colleagues at The Breakthrough Institute (TBI) to spread disinformation aimed at stopping any serious climate action, of course — and that is to shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather.

As we’ll see, Pielke’s obsession on this point is so extreme that he trashes the reputation of any scientist who even suggests that there is the tiniest link whatsoever between climate change and extreme weather — even though he himself has stated such a link exists.  Indeed, he has smeared the integrity of many hundreds of the country’s top scientists for merely sitting through a discussion of the issue that doesn’t meet his extreme form of political correctness (see here).

Pielke launches the strongest possible accusation on his blog — “misrepresenting science in a government report” — on the basis of four sentences in this 196-page, 13-agency report:

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The link between global warming and extreme weather events is evident – much as conservatives try to deny this reality (see “Why do the deniers try to shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather?“).  Research predicts that the trend will intensify, most likely causing more crop losses for farmers.  This piece by guess blogger Tom Kenworthy, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, was first published here.  The picture is of a sign outside the Iowa Welcome Center, which was partially submerged by flood water on June 15, 2008.

Farm belt lawmakers are posing a challenge to passage of clean-energy legislation in Congress because of a proposed Environmental Protection Agency ruling that they claim could make it harder for ethanol produced from corn and other U.S. crops to meet the federal renewable fuel standard under a 2007 law. But torpedoing the American Clean Energy and Security Act, H.R. 2454, would actually hurt farmers because harms linked to global warming—including drought, flooding, and other crop damage—would continue unabated.

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[Note: I have tried to link to the relevant literature on extreme precipitation trends. If I've missed any, let me know.]

“I actually think the science around climate change is real. It is potentially devastating,” Obama told reporters Monday. “If you look at the flooding that’s going on right now in North Dakota and you say to yourself, ‘If you see an increase of two degrees, what does that do, in terms of the situation there?’ That indicates the degree to which we have to take this seriously.“

Besides Obama, the British and the Chinese understand global warming has driven their record flooding. The United States media? Not so much.

Certainly North Dakota is experience record-breaking flooding:

Flooding in the Red River Valley is reaching levels never seen before.

So wrote Noreen Schwein, water program director at National Weather Service central region headquarters. Fargo’s mayor calls the flooding “uncharted territory.”

But you’ll have to look very hard to find a single story in the mainstream media that even mentions climate change (other than the few quoting our President) — even though the record “once-in-a-hundred-year flooding” the Midwest now seems to be getting every few years or so is precisely what scientists have been expecting from the warming [see "Global warming causes deluges and flooding, just like the Midwest is seeing (again)."]

In fact, in 2004, the Journal of Hydrometeorology published an analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center that found “Over the contiguous United States, precipitation, temperature, streamflow, and heavy and very heavy precipitation have increased during the twentieth century.” [And yes, this applies to snow, depending on the location, see below.]

They found (here) that over the course of the 20th century, the “Cold season (October through April),” saw a 16% increase in “heavy” precipitation events (roughly greater than 2 inches [when it comes as rain] in one day), and a 25% increase in “very heavy” precipitation events (roughly greater than 4 inches in one day)– and a 36% rise in “extreme” precipitation events (those in the 99.9% percentile — 1 in 1000 events). This rise in extreme precipitation is precisely what is predicted by global warming models in the scientific literature.

In fact, the last few decades have seen rising extreme precipitation over the United States in the historical record, according to NCDC’s Climate Extremes Index (CEI):

An increasing trend in the area experiencing much above-normal proportion of heavy daily precipitation is observed from about 1950 to the present.

Here is a plot of the percentage of this country (times two) with much greater than normal proportion of precipitation derived from extreme 1-day precipitation events (where extreme equals the highest tenth percentile of deluges, click to enlarge):

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In 2006, Nature published (subs. req’d) a news story, “Insurers’ disaster files suggest climate is culprit” (PDF here) that began:

Insurance companies, acutely aware of the dramatic increase in losses caused by natural disasters in recent decades, have been convinced that global warming is partly to blame. Now their data seem to be persuading scientists, too. At a recent meeting of climate and insurance experts, delegates reached a cautious consensus: climate change is helping to drive the upward trend in catastrophes.

The meeting, held near Munich on 25–26 May, was jointly organized by Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance company, and the University of Colorado in Boulder. It brought together climate, atmosphere and weather researchers with economists and insurance experts to discuss what could be behind recent disaster losses, both economic and human….

Delegates seem to have found the record persuasive. Their consensus statement, to be released on 8 June, says there is “evidence that changing patterns of extreme events are drivers for recent increases in global losses”….

“Dissent over the issue is clearly waning,” says Peter Höppe, head of Munich Re’s Geo Risks department, who co-chaired the workshop with Roger Pielke Jr, director of the University of Colorado’s Center of Science and Technology Policy Research. “Climate change may not be the dominant factor, but it has become clear that a relevant portion of damages can be attributed to global warming.”

Previously sceptical, Pielke says that he is now convinced that at least some of the increased losses can be blamed on climate: “Clearly, since 1970 climate change has shaped the disaster loss record.”

I am posting this mainly to show that many serious people have weighed in on this issue and many articles — including peer-reviewed articles (see below) — have made a strong case for a link between the trend in extreme weather disasters and climate change.

Remember, Nobel Prize winner Al Gore has been accused of being “guilty of inaccuracies and overstatements,” in the New York Times for suggesting there is such a link (see “Unstaining Al Gore’s good name, Part 2.” And Roger Pielke, Jr. said that the 3000 scientists listening to Gore at the AAAS meeting were “willing silent collaborators” to “the misrepresentation of climate science” because they did nothing while Al Gore made the link, albeit with very careful wordchoice (see “Unstaining Al Gore’s good name, Part 1“).

Now, in fairness (!) to Pielke, he has an incredibly elaborate explanation of what he was really trying to say (in this 2006 blog post). In my headline, I included an ellipsis because here is Pielke’s full quote:

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I have previously blogged about how Australia has been suffering from Hell and High Water — record-breaking wildfire, drought, and heatwave in one part, flooding and inundation in another. Our guest blogger today Erica Newman, research associate at the College of Natural Resources and Center for Fire Research and Outreach at UC Berkeley, has an update on the hellish side (first published by Wonk Room here).

Even in Australia, where people have learned to live with large wildfires, February’s “Black Saturday” fires in Victoria blew away all expectations. Of the hundreds that died, those who stayed had no time to prepare, and many who fled were overtaken by the fast-spreading flames and died in their cars. Multiple days of above 100-degree Fahrenheit temperatures, extremely low relative humidity and 100 mile per hour winds resulted in an unstoppable spread of the flames, 100-200 foot flame lengths, and fire intensity unlike anything ever before recorded anywhere on the planet.

Wildfire expert Max Moritz, a professor at the College of Natural Resources and Center for Fire Research and Outreach at the University of California, Berkeley, explains these extreme conditions raise new questions:

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