The NY Times has just given some of its precious real estate to one of the lamest and most irrelevant op-eds ever published on climate change:  ”Ben Franklin on Global Warming.”  The gist of it seems to be that since weather changes over small parts of the Earth’s land were noticed by people in the 18th century and that Franklin himself apparently noticed part of what is now well understood and modeled by scientists as the heat island effect — “cleared land absorbs more heat and melts snow quicker” — that we should somehow think … well, actually, I can’t even figure out what the author is trying to say.

The piece appears to be a novel take on the “teach the controversy” strategy.  The author, Ben Gelber, meteorologist at WCMH-TV in Columbus, Ohio, sort of acknowledges anthropogenic global warming science but mostly makes irrelevant connections between the past and today to imply that what’s happening now is nothing really new.  If Gelber thinks we should do anything about global warming, he keeps it to himself.

Well, anthropogenic global warming is new, and it would be catastrophic or worse to do nothing about it — see, for instance, “Humans boosting CO2 14,000 times faster than nature, overwhelming slow negative feedbacks” and “Imagine a World without Fish” and “Intro to global warming impacts” and UK Met Office: Catastrophic climate change, 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic, could happen in 50 years, but “we do have time to stop it if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon.”

But hey, I’ve written too much already.  You respond, and I’ll lift the best comments up into the main post.

Thom Porter, staff chief at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) talks about the changes he has witnessed in the Californian climate and how it is increasing the risk of forest fires:

A bit strange this comes via a story from the UK’s Telegraph, but an important, science-based message from someone in the front lines nonetheless:

Thom Porter, staff chief at Cal Fire believes climate change is in a large part responsible for the increase in fires. “As a firefighter I’m a student of the weather and I’ve noticed that there is a change that has occurred over the last several years.“These patterns are not what I’ve grown up with. They are also not what I’ve seen in the historical record. We are starting to see more monsoonal style weather which is causing more dry lightening which ignite fires”

For completeness’s sake, I’ll include some key links and studies for those interested in the underlying science of the connection between human-caused global warming and wildfires that CP readers have seen many times:

Back in 2004, researchers at the U.S. Forest Services Pacific Wildland Fire Lab looked at past fires in the West to create a statistical model of how future climate change may affect wildfires.  Their paper, “Climatic Change, Wildfire, and Conservation,” published in Conservation Biology, found that by century’s end, states like Montana, New Mexico, Washington, Utah, and Wyoming could see burn areas increase five times.

In 2006 Science magazine published a major article analyzing whether the recent soaring wildfire trend was due to a change in forest management practices or to climate change. The study, led by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, concluded:

Robust statistical associations between wildfire and hydroclimate in western forests indicate that increased wildfire activity over recent decades reflects sub-regional responses to changes in climate. Historical wildfire observations exhibit an abrupt transition in the mid-1980s from a regime of infrequent large wildfires of short (average of 1 week) duration to one with much more frequent and longer burning (5 weeks) fires. This transition was marked by a shift toward unusually warm springs, longer summer dry seasons, drier vegetation (which provoked more and longer burning large wildfires), and longer fire seasons. Reduced winter precipitation and an early spring snowmelt played a role in this shift.

That 2006 study noted global warming (from human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide) will further accelerate all of these trends during this century. Worse still, the increased wildfires will themselves release huge amounts of carbon dioxide, which will serve as a vicious circle, accelerating the very global warming that is helping to cause more wildfires.

A July 2009 study, “Impacts of climate change from 2000 to 2050 on wildfire activity and carbonaceous aerosol concentrations in the western United States” finds a staggering increase in “wildfire activity and carbonaceous aerosol concentrations in the western United States” by mid-century under a moderate warming scenario:

We show that increases in temperature cause annual mean area burned in the western United States to increase by 54% by the 2050s relative to the present-day … with the forests of the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountains experiencing the greatest increases of 78% and 175% respectively. Increased area burned results in near doubling of wildfire carbonaceous aerosol emissions by mid-century.

The future could look like this:

“This graph shows the percentage increase in area burned by wildfires, from the present-day to the 2050s, as calculated by the model of Spracklen et al. [2009] for the May-October fire season. The model follows a scenario of moderately increasing emissions of greenhouse gas emissions and leads to average global warming of 1.6 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2050. Warmer temperatures can dry out underbrush, leading to more serious conflagrations in the future climate.”

It’s most certainly not too late to avoid this hellish future.

Related Posts:

• Global warming and the California wildfires
• Global warming and the California wildfires — Update
• Memo to Baucus: Your state’s trees are being ravaged by warming-driven pests now and Montana faces 175% to 400% increase in wildfire burn area

They are still soaring.  NOAA’s National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center has a good animation of tropical Pacific SST anomalies:

The warming in the Nino 3.4 region of the Pacific is typically used to define an El Niño — sustained postive sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies of greater than 0.5°C across the central tropical Pacific Ocean.

Two weeks ago the anomaly was 1.1°C.  Last week it was 1.5°C.  This week it’s 1.7°C, as seen in this figure from NOAA’s latest weekly update on the El Niño/Southern oscillation, “ENSO Cycle: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions“:

If this value is maintained for any length of time, this would be a pretty strong El Niño, as this historical graph of the 3-month running mean SST departures in Nino 3.4 region show:

Technically, we aren’t in a “full-fledged” El Niño episode yet.  NOAA says, historically, that requires the the 3-month running mean SST departure to exceed 0.5°C “for a period of at least 5 consecutive overlapping 3-month seasons.”  As you can see on page 26 of the weekly report, they can’t make that official until the end of this month.

For the rest of us, it’s increasingly clear that this will be at least a moderate El Niño, and many models are forecasting it will last past the winter and through the spring.

And it bears repeating that back in January, NASA had predicted:  “Given our expectation of the next El Niño beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance.”

It still seems likely.  And that will be on top of the hottest decade in recorded history by far.

Related Post:

• Skeptical Science explains how we know global warming is happening: It’s the oceans, stupid!
• Another major study predicts rapid warming over next few years — nearly 0.3°F by 2014
• Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.” Levitt “said he does not believe there is a cooling trend”!!

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:  [Note: For ease of reading, I'm not indenting this.  Everything below is Ostro.]

That’s what the weather was in the Atlanta metro area early last week, and things were wiggy in the U.S. for much of September. 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.

This “ex-skeptic” hasn’t blogged about climate change in a while. For that matter, I haven’t blogged about anything for a while! Been a bit distracted, but it’s time to jump in the water again. Or maybe I should say, time to dust off my Nomex suit and put it on!

Before you fire up the flamethrower, though, let me say what this long entry is NOT about.

It’s not about H.R. 2454 (more commonly known as the Waxman-Markey bill).

And I’m not telling you that you can’t drive your SUV.

This blog is about the effect of climate change upon day-to-day weather. About physics and thermodynamics not politics.

It was two years ago last week that I first thoroughly laid out the basic premise.

Nothing that’s gone on in the atmosphere since then has convinced me otherwise, and I’ve continued to add gazillions of weather events to this PDF [56MB file, and now up to 529 slides]. My goal has been and continues to be to document and objectively analyze these cases.

There have been anomalies and extremes for as long as there has been weather on the planet; the key is to assess how they are now changing as the climate changes.

To review:

–The global climate is overall warmer than it was in the 1970s. (That shouldn’t be too controversial a statement!)

–Technical talk: The atmospheric warming has resulted in an increase in 1000-500 millibar thicknesses. Those increased thicknesses are manifesting themselves primarily by an increase in 500 mb heights (particularly notable in mid-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere), as there has not been a similar rise in 1000 mb heights. Although there is of course natural year-to-year variability, the overall trend at 500 mb has clearly been upward.

Analogy: It’s like bread baking in the oven. As it warms, the dough expands in depth. Although the details of the science involved are different, the analogy works, which is that the depth (thickness) of a given layer of the atmosphere is increasing on average as that layer warms. Furthermore, in this case, the bottom of that atmospheric layer (1000 millibars) is not significantly changing, just as the bottom of the bread isn’t (in that case, it’s fixed by the bottom of the pan).

–Technical talk: In turn, one of the ways in which those increased mean 500 mb heights are manifesting themselves is by way of individual (temporally short-term and spatially small-scale) 500 mb positive height anomalies. These positive 500 mb height anomalies are also playing a role in concomitant short-term negative anomalies.

Translation: What we’ve been observing over and over again in recent years is exceptionally strong ridges of high pressure, sometimes accompanied by strong, persistent “cutoff lows” (upper-level lows cut off from the main jet stream) to the south of the ridges.

Over and over and over again, there has been one of those ridges of high pressure bulging northward. One week it might be in Eurasia, the next in North America. Like when you squeeze a kids’ squishy ball in one place and then another, as I’ve done on the air and in talks I’ve given. For an example of a TWC segment (from July 1, 2009), click on the screen capture below.

The upshot: many weather events/patterns in recent years which have been topsy-turvy and/or produced precipitation extremes and temperature anomalies.

The past few months help illustrate all of this.

As I recently reported in a TWC segment, it’s extremely important to look at the context of this year’s cool summer in a portion of North America including the U.S. Midwest! That was a local anomaly of blue dots (below-average temperatures) amidst a sea of red dots (above-average temps). The map is for “climatological summer,” or June, July, and August (JJA). And this was occurring in the context of the global temperature rankings.

The temperature pattern was associated with a negative 500 mb height anomaly (persistent troughs/cutoffs) “trapped” to the south of a strong positive height anomaly (strong ridging in the Arctic). Here are a conventional “cylindrical equidistant” map projection to provide that perspective, and a “polar stereographic” map which doesn’t exaggerate the area around the North Pole. Both maps of 500 mb height departures from average show the very clear and persistent pattern.

Then after JJA came September, and the atmosphere outdid itself.

First, there was the flash flood disaster in Istanbul, produced by what was reportedly the largest amount of rain there in 80 years.

The atmospheric circulation signature aloft at the time?

In the U.S. a couple days later, a non-tropical low pressure system took on some tropical characteristics and became a hybrid as it was forced northwestward (an atypical direction) from out in the Atlantic to Delaware Bay, due to a cutoff low in tandem with a strong bulging ridge aloft to the north of it. The cyclone brought wind damage to southern New Jersey from gusts as high as 61 mph, and also locally heavy rain there and other locations in the Northeast.

The pattern aloft at the time:

Then, in one of the oddest, most deviate meteorological things I’ve ever seen in my career, an upper-level cutoff low at ~45-50N latitude in mid-September not only “retrograded” to the west but it did a complete 360 degree loop over the course of several days (September 10-14), from southwest Saskatchewan to South Dakota to Wyoming and back to southwest Saskatchewan.

This was occurring at a time when there was an extreme spike in the preliminary satellite-derived globally-averaged mid-tropospheric (600 mb, or 14,000 feet) temperatures to a value which was by far the highest in the ~30-year period of record.

Just sayin’.

[Click on image for larger version. Source: UAHuntsville; NASA; DISCOVER Technologies]

Global cooling?

Fortunately that bizarro cutoff low did not have catastrophic consequences, but while that situation was happening another remarkable weather pattern was unfolding. And this system, like the one in Turkey, would ultimately bring disaster.

A persistent mid and upper-level low just sat and meandered and sat and meandered day after day after day over the ArkLaTex and Oklahoma, producing a series of localized deluges from September 9-21 and resulting in record September rainfall in Texarkana and Tuscaloosa.

The pattern during that period:

Starting to look familiar yet?

This all culminated in the flash flood calamity not far from The Weather Channel in the Atlanta suburbs, affecting some TWC employees and causing 10 tragic fatalities in Georgia including one involving a heart-wrenching 911 emergency phone call.

Rainfall quickly went off the chain, unheard of for September in Georgia without a hurricane or tropical storm. [Side note: Is El Nino totally to blame for such an exceptionally quiet Atlantic hurricane season? Hmmm.]

Many locations in the northern part of the state received more rain in one week than previously on record for the entire month of September, those prior records having been set in 2004, when the remnants of Frances, Ivan and Jeanne brought torrential downpours.

Record floods occurred on Suwannee Creek near Suwanee and on the Chattahoochee at Whitesburg.

The two images below are from not quite the end of the event, but most of the rain had fallen by then; the first shows the rainfall accumulation at one location and the second is a mapped radar estimate of the amounts.

Dewpoints, representative of the amount of moisture in the air (and indirectly the warmth) helping to fuel the extreme rainfall rates, were as high as 80 degrees, exceptionally high for late September.

The pattern at the time on September 20-21:

And last but not least, on the 22nd …

While it fortunately did not result in any new flood misery, this was the off-the-chain coup de grace meteorologically: a ridge that bulged so strongly for this time of year that it set the record for the highest 500 millibar height so late in the season so far north in the United States (5950 meters at Spokane, Washington). And for icing on the cake, there was yet another cutoff low stuck to the south.

Was all of this just an “accident”? Let’s look at the bigger picture. This has happened in the context of overwhelmingly positive 500 mb height anomalies (higher-than-average pressure aloft) so far this year, as has also been the case in recent years.

So what does all this mean? Did global warming “cause” the Atlanta flood?

Well, the atmosphere is very complex, and with any weather event there’s a combination of factors rather than a single one for an outright cause. Additionally, there’s no way of knowing what would have happened without the climate having changed. Maybe there would have been an even more extreme and deadly catastrophe by way of a landfalling major hurricane. And large-scale climate drivers didn’t determine the small-scale specifics of, for example, my neighborhood having been spared serious flooding while other Atlanta suburbs got hit hard.

Nevertheless, there’s a straightforward connection in the way the changing climate “set the table” for what happened this September in Atlanta and elsewhere. It behooves us to understand not only theoretical expected increases in heavy precipitation (via relatively slow/linear changes in temperatures, evaporation, and atmospheric moisture) but also how changing circulation patterns are already squeezing out that moisture in extreme doses and affecting weather in other ways.

While it’s important to consider what may happen in 50 or 100 or 200 years, and debate what should be done about that via H.R. 2454 or other measures, we need to get a grip on what’s happening *now*.

Related Posts:

• Why the “never seen before” Fargo flooding is just what you’d expect from global warming, as Obama warns
• Why do the deniers try to shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather?
• Pielke in Nature: “Clearly, since 1970 climate change … has shaped the disaster loss record.”
• Sorry, deniers & delayers, Part 1: Even U.S gov says human emissions are changing the climate
• Sorry, delayers & enablers, Part 2: Climate change means worse droughts for SW and world
• Record Flooding Slams Midwest (2007)
  
• Global warming will spawn severe storms and tornados, reports NASA
• Early 2007 saw record-breaking extreme weather
• A deluge of extreme weather, thanks to climate change
• Après nous le deluge
• UK Prime Minister on “weather extremes” and climate change
• UK: Worst Floods In Modern History
• NBC Reports on Hell and High Water
• ABC Reports on Hell and High Water
• The Weather IS Becoming More Extreme

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:

As the New York Times reported back then:

For the first time in more than 100 years, much of the Southeast has reached the most severe category of drought, climatologists said Monday, creating an emergency so serious that some cities are just months away from running out of water….

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….

And no, far be it from me to say that current flooding is caused directly by global warming.  Wouldn’t want to earn the wrath of the deniers and delayers who rush from house to house removing the batteries from the smoke detectors.

But funny how we are seeing these wild swings from extreme drought to extreme flooding more and more, just like those pesky climate scientists warned — see, for instance, my June post, AP, Washington Times: “Experts suspect global warming may be driving wild climate swings that appear to be punishing the Amazon with increasing frequency”:

Across the Amazon basin, river dwellers are adding new floors to their stilt houses, trying to stay above rising floodwaters that have killed 48 people and left 405,000 homeless.

Flooding is common in the world’s largest remaining tropical wilderness, but this year the waters rose higher and stayed longer than they have in decades, leaving some fruit trees entirely submerged.

The surprise isn’t just the record flooding, it’s that the flooding followed record droughts:

Only four years ago, the same communities suffered an unprecedented drought that ruined crops and left mounds of river fish flapping and rotting in the mud.

Experts suspect global warming may be driving wild climate swings that appear to be punishing the Amazon with increasing frequency.

The BBC also got the story right in May, “Experts say global warming may be behind the wild climate swings that have brought periods of unprecedented droughts and flooding to the Amazon in recent years.”

Interestingly, the same exact swings in extreme weather hit Louisiana in 2005, as I wrote in my book Hell and High Water:

While the U.S. suffered a record-smashing hurricane season that deluged southern Louisiana with rain in the summer of 2005, “the eight months since October 1, 2005 have been the driest in 111 years of record-keeping” in southern Louisiana, the U.S. National Climatic Data Center reported in July 2006.

What makes the AP and the Washington Times story on Brazil so unusual is not only that the Times is a right-wing newspaper, but that the story continues with an extended discussion of the climate issue:

… climatologists say the world should expect more extreme weather in the years ahead. Already, what happens in the Amazon could be affecting rainfall elsewhere, from Brazil’s agricultural heartland to the U.S. grain belt, as rising ocean temperatures and rainforest destruction cause shifts in global climate patterns.

“It’s important to note that it’s likely that these types of record-breaking climate events will become more and more frequent in the near future,” Mr. Nobre [a climatologist with Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research] said. “So we all have to brace for more extreme climate in the near future: It’s not for the next generation”…

“Something is telling us to be more careful with the planet. Changes are happening around the world, and we’re seeing them as well in Brazil,” President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said this month on his radio program….

Duh?

And for completeness’ sake on the subject of “global warming type” record rainfall, let’s run through some of the literature one more time.  Regular readers can skip the rest of this post.

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.”

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):

Even the Bush Administration in its must-read U.S. Climate Change Science Program report, Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate, acknowledged:

Many extremes and their associated impacts are now changing…. Heavy downpours have become more frequent and intense….

It is well established through formal attribution studies that the global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases.… The increase in heavy precipitation events is associated with an increase in water vapor, and the latter has been attributed to human-induced warming.

In the future, with continued global warming, heat waves and heavy downpours are very likely to further increase in frequency and intensity. Substantial areas of North America are likely to have more frequent droughts of greater severity.

In short, get used to it.

If you are a journalist wondering what is a reasonable way to talk about this, one of the best recent examples comes from a New York Times story on Australia made possible by our friend Andrew Revkin:

The firestorms and heat in the south revived discussions in Australia of whether human-caused global warming was contributing to the continent’s climate woes of late — including recent prolonged drought in some places and severe flooding last week in Queensland, in the northeast.

Climate scientists say that no single rare event like the deadly heat wave or fires can be attributed to global warming, but the chances of experiencing such conditions are rising along with the temperature. In 2007, Australia’s national science agency published a 147-page report on projected climate changes, concluding, among other things, that “high-fire-danger weather is likely to increase in the southeast.”

The flooding in the northeast and the combustible conditions in the south were consistent with what is forecast as a result of recent shifts in climate patterns linked to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases, said Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the United States National Center for Atmospheric Research.

That’s how it is done.

And no, I’m not say that the media should link every extreme weather event the way Revkin did. But when we have “worst on record” type events, or 100-year floods — and especially ones that last more than a day and hit a broad area — then I think the reporter has an obligation to include the issue.

Related Posts:

• Why do the deniers try to shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather?
• Sorry, deniers: Even U.S gov says human emissions are changing the climate
• Sorry, deniers & enablers, Part 2: Climate change means worse droughts for SW and world

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.

On September 14, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced a comprehensive framework for his department’s response to climate change impacts, including the establishment of eight Regional Climate Change Response Centers under the U.S. Geological Survey. The USGS has already begun the development of these regional science centers, which will “synthesize and integrate climate change climate change impact data and tools that the Department’s managers and partners can use when managing the Department’s land, water, fish and wildlife, and cultural heritage resources.”

Vitter’s amendment would be a bizarre attempt to outlaw science for any U.S. senator. However, it is particularly immoral for a senator from Louisiana. The great Mississippi Delta is under extraordinary threat from global warming, as seas rise and storms intensify. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated Vitter’s state, costing this nation $80 billion, killing thousands, and displacing a million people. Most of the devastation could have been avoided with the proper preparation and response. One major gap was a lack of understanding of climate change, which significantly intensified Hurricane Katrina. As hurricane scientist Kerry Emanuel has explained, “Probably if Hurricane Katrina had happened in 1980, the levees would have held.”

Related Post:

• Department of Interior launches Climate Change Response Strategy

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:

To the average person a 1-degree rise in average spring and summer temperatures may not seem like much. But for residents of the western United States—including California, which is fighting at least eight fires right now—it could mean a staggering increase in the extent and cost of fires according to a recent study.

In their report, researchers at Headwaters Economics, an independent nonprofit research group in Bozeman, MT, predict that climate change and the accelerating movement of western residents to areas near or in undeveloped forests will likely prove to be a devastating combination. That 1-degree increase in spring and summer temperatures, they conclude, will increase the area burned by seasonal fires in Montana by more than 300 percent and more than double the cost of protecting homes threatened by fire.

Though the Headwaters paper focuses on Montana, using data from 18 large fires in the state during 2006 and 2007, it has implications for fire-prone areas throughout the Rocky Mountain West. And it builds on a growing body of evidence that inaction on climate change will cost the western United States dearly.

Earlier this summer, for example, Harvard University scientists published a study in the Journal of Geophysical Research predicting that areas burned by wildfires in the West could increase by 50 percent by 2050, with even larger increases of 75 percent to 175 percent in the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain West. Those increases could have “large impacts on human health” because of the added smoke and particulates released into the air, the study said.

Federal and state agencies responsible for fighting western wildfires, particularly the United States Forest Service, are already struggling to cope with the rapidly increasing costs of protecting lives and property. Since 2000, wildland fires in the United States have burned an average of more than 7 million acres a year, about double the average acreage for the previous four decades.

Federal firefighting costs have also risen dramatically, according to the Government Accountability Office, averaging $2.9 billion per year from fiscal 2001-2005 compared to $1.1 billion in the previous five-year period.

The Headwaters study predicts that state wildland firefighting costs in Montana will double to quadruple by 2025.

The increasing popularity of building homes in or near forested areas, known as the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, is a major factor in the escalating costs of fire suppression. A 2006 report by the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General found that “the majority of [Forest Service] large fire suppression costs are directly linked to protecting private property in the WUI,” with Forest Service managers estimating between 50 and 95 percent of large fire costs spent on that purpose alone. Though federal agencies shoulder the major financial burden for protecting those homes, development decisions in wild areas are made by local and state officials.

“While fire-prone lands are being developed, the climate is warming, leading to more large fires,” write the authors of the Headwaters Economics report, which notes that with just 14 percent of the wildland urban interface developed in the West, the cost of protecting those areas will increase significantly. “More development in these sensitive areas would lead to more wildfire suppression costs, even in the absence of climate change. Climate change will only exacerbate this effect.”

Climate change and its impacts on temperature, drought, and snowpack runoff will affect fires as well as many other aspects of life in the West.

Climate models predict that global warming will significantly reduce snow runoff in the West, the region’s major source of water. A study published in April by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography estimated that the Colorado River, the lifeline for 27 million people in the Southwest, will not be able to produce its allocated water supply 60 percent to 90 percent of the time by mid-century. That would have major impacts on food production, recreation, and development in the fastest-growing region in the nation. It will also mean forests will dry out sooner, with a likely increase in fire activity.

And in recent years, a widespread and so far unchecked epidemic of mountain pine beetles that has killed millions of acres of trees from Colorado north into Canada has laid the foundation for a potentially large increase in catastrophic fires. Climate change has played a role in that outbreak, too, as warmer winters spare the beetles from low temperatures that would normally kill them off, and drought stresses trees.

In the western United States, mountain pine beetles have killed some 6.5 million acres of forest, according to the Associated Press. As large as that path of destruction is, it’s dwarfed by the 35 million acres killed in British Columbia, which has experienced a rash of forest fires this summer that as of early this month had burned more than 155,000 acres. In the United States to date about 5.2 million acres—an area larger than Massachusetts—have burned this year.

Destruction of trees by the mountain pine beetle, combined with climate change and fire, makes for a dangerous feedback loop. Dead forests sequester less carbon dioxide. Burning forests release lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. More carbon dioxide adds to climate change, which raises temperatures, stresses forests, and makes more and bigger fires more likely.

It’s a frightening prospect, as British Columbia’s Forests Minister Pat Bell told an International Energy Agency conference last week. “I am not a doomsayer,” said Bell. “I am not one who wants to say we are beyond the tipping point. But I am afraid that we are getting close to that.”

The final reason to worry about the climate-wildfire connection is that wildfires are a classic amplifying feedback, since burning forests release carbon dioxide that accelerates global warming. As the 2006 Science article, “Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire Activity” (subs. req’d), concludes soberly:

… virtually all climate-model projections indicate that warmer springs and summers will occur over the region in coming decades. These trends will reinforce the tendency toward early spring snowmelt and longer fire seasons. This will accentuate conditions favorable to the occurrence of large wildfires, amplifying the vulnerability the region has experienced since the mid-1980s. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s consensus range of 1.5° to 5.8°C projected global surface temperature warming by the end of the 21st century is considerably larger than the recent warming of less than 0.9°C observed in spring and summer during recent decades over the western region.

If the average length and intensity of summer drought increases in the Northern Rockies and mountains elsewhere in the western United States, an increased frequency of large wildfires will lead to changes in forest composition and reduced tree densities, thus affecting carbon pools. Current estimates indicate that western U.S. forests are responsible for 20 to 40% of total U.S. carbon sequestration. If wildfire trends continue, at least initially, this biomass burning will result in carbon release, suggesting that the forests of the western United States may become a source of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide rather than a sink, even under a relatively modest temperature-increase scenario. Moreover, a recent study has shown that warmer, longer growing seasons lead to reduced CO2 uptake in high-elevation forests, particularly during droughts. Hence, the projected regional warming and consequent increase in wildfire activity in the western United States is likely to magnify the threats to human communities and ecosystems, and substantially increase the management challenges in restoring forests and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

We are simply running out of time to stop all of the carbon-cycle feedbacks from intensifying and to stop these devastating, record-breaking wildfires from becoming the normal climate.

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.

Tropical cyclones in the northern hemisphere rotate counterclockwise, and so the most intense storm surge is just to the east of the eye, because the surge represents the intense winds pushing the sea against the shore. A 30-foot wall of water with waves up to 55 feet crashed over the town. Although my brother and his family lived one mile inland, their house was ravaged with water up to 22 feet high, leaving the contents of the house looking like they had been churned “inside of a washing machine,” in my brother’s words. While they lost virtually all their possessions, they were safe in a Biloxi shelter.

Thanks to the generosity of many people, my brother’s family was able to find a temporary home in Atlanta. But like many families whose lives were ripped apart by the storm, they had difficult choices in the ensuing months. Perhaps the toughest decision was whether to rebuild their home or to uproot themselves and try to create a new life somewhere else.

I very much wanted to give my brother an expert opinion on what was likely to come in the future. After all, climate change was my field, and while my focus has been on climate solutions, I had done my Ph.D. thesis on physical oceanography.

As I listened and talked to many of the top climate experts, it quickly became clear that the climate situation was far more dire than most people-and even many scientists, myself included-realized. Almost every major climate impact was occurring faster than the computer models had suggested. Arctic sea ice was shrinking far faster than every single model had projected. And the great ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica were shedding ice decades earlier than the models said. Soils appear to be losing their ability to take up carbon dioxide faster than expected. At the same time, global carbon dioxide emissions and concentrations were rising faster than most had expected.

As for hurricanes, global warming had been widely projected to make them more intense and destructive, but again the recent increase in intensity was coming sooner than the computer models had suggested. Why is that a concern? Since 1970, the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean’s hurricane-forming region has risen 0.5°C (0.9°F). Over the path of a typical hurricane, this recent ocean warming added the energy equivalent of a few hundred thousand Hiroshima nuclear bombs. On our current emissions path, the Atlantic will warm twice as much, another 1°C, by mid-century, and perhaps another 2°C beyond that by century’s end. Who can even imagine the hurricane seasons such warming might bring?

This is what I ultimately told my brother, the same advice I would give anyone contemplating living near the Gulf Coast:

Only a quarter of Atlantic hurricanes make U.S. landfall, and while there is no question that the frequency of intense Atlantic hurricanes is rising, it is somewhat random as to where they will actually go any given year.

That said, the Gulf of Mexico is going to get warmer and warmer, as is the Atlantic Ocean, and so hurricanes that enter the Gulf are likely to start out and end up far more destructive than usual. I would not bet that the Mississippi Gulf Coast will get hit by a super-hurricane in any particular year, but I would certainly plan on it being hit again some time over the next ten years; I wouldn’t be surprised if it were hit by more than one.

Coastal dwellers from Houston to Miami are now playing Russian roulette with maybe two bullets in the gun chamber each year. In a couple of decades, it may be three bullets.

[This is excerpted from my book, Hell and High Water. The description of Katrina is from two terrific sources: Grauman et al., Hurricane Katrina: A Climatological Perspective, Technical Report 2005-01, NCDC, October 2005, update Jan 06, and Richard D. Knabb, Jamie R. Rhome, and Daniel P. Brown, Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Katrina, 23-30 August 2005, National Hurricane Center 20 December 2005.]

Subsequently, the scientific literature has supported the view that human-caused global warming is “more likely than not” partly responsible for the fact that “In the period 1971–2005, since the beginning of a trend towards increased intense cyclone activity, [economic] losses excluding socio-economic effects show an annual increase of 4% per annum” (see here).

I have further elaborated on the growing threat to the Gulf from warming-driven superstorms:

• Why global warming means killer storms worse than Katrina and Gustav, Part 1
• Why future Katrinas and Gustavs will be MUCH worse at landfall, Part 2

And the literature also supports that analysis:

• Nature: Hurricanes ARE getting fiercer — and it’s going to get much worse

Needless to say, sea level rise will turn many other coastal cities into sitting ducks pre-Katrina New-Orleans:

• Startling new sea level rise research: “Most likely” 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100
• Sea levels may rise 5 feet by 2100
• US Geological Survey stunner: Sea-level rise in 2100 will likely “substantially exceed” IPCC projections

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.

Sen. Sam Brownback, who is retiring from the Senate but continues to have statewide ambitions, has said that humanity has a religious imperative to reduce climate emissions, but he has also signed on to the “No Climate Tax Pledge” being pushed by Americans for Prosperity, which opposes climate change legislation. The pledge says that Brownback will “oppose legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue” — which means any of the plans currently being considered.

Sen. Pat Roberts will also be a difficult vote for advocates to score.

In Nebraska, Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson often works to pull legislation in a more conservative direction and Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) isn’t clamoring to support taking action to address climate change. Nelson signed a letter in June, along with nine other Democrats concentrated in the Midwest, saying he couldn’t support the current version of the bill and outlining principles that would need to be met to get his vote.

Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the state that will face the third worst catastrophe, will be a key player on the Finance Committee, which hopes to claim jurisdiction over the distribution of the revenue that will be raised through a cap and trade system. His Democratic counterpart, Sen. Tom Harkin, is a much more likely yes vote.

The consequences to these farm states will be far reaching. As droughts become more common, their soil and climate will begin to look more like their neighbors’ to the south in Texas and Mexico.

The ten-degree rise in temperature in the three states assumes that carbon emissions will continue their rate of increase. If the world’s population somehow manages to reverse greenhouse gas emissions, the temperature is still expected to rise more than three degrees, which would still devastate those states’ economies. A study released Thursday by Columbia University adds further concern about the viability of soybeans, corn and cotton — the expected temperature rise over the next century from even a slow warming scenario could decrease crop yields by 30 to 46 percent.

“To many, climate change doesn’t seem real until it affects them, in their backyards,” said Jonathan Hoekstra, director of climate change for The Nature Conservancy. “In many states across the country, the weather and landscapes could be nearly unrecognizable in 100 years.”

Here is the map from the 13-agency NOAA-led impacts report.