Underpaid Genius

How high will the ocean’s rise if we continue on toward a few degree temperature change?

Justin Gillis,  Seeking Clues About Sea Level From Fossil Beaches

In previous research, scientists have determined that when the earth warms by only a couple of degrees Fahrenheit, enough polar ice melts, over time, to raise the global sea level by about 25 to 30 feet. But in the coming century, the earth is expected to warm more than that, perhaps four or five degrees, because of human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Experts say the emissions that may make a huge increase of sea level inevitable are expected to occur in just the next few decades. They fear that because the world’s coasts are so densely settled, the rising oceans will lead to a humanitarian crisis lasting many hundreds of years.

Scientists say it has been difficult to get people to understand or focus on the importance, for future generations, of today’s decisions about greenhouse gases. Their evidence that the gases represent a problem is based not just on computerized forecasts of the future, as is commonly believed, but on what they describe as a growing body of evidence about what occurred in the past.

The only thing that is going to actually make the unresponsive and uninterested American population pay attention to climate change is an enormous and growing ecological disaster in their own country. Well, for better or worse, the current drought is going to accomplish that.

Carey Gillam, As drought persists, town dries up and states scramble to save every drop of water

“Everyone is wondering whether this dry weather is the new norm … or an anomaly that will soon pass,” said Barney Austin, director of hydraulic services for INTERA Inc, an Austin, Texas-based geoscience and engineering consulting firm. “We all hope for the latter, but it’s hard to tell.”

The signs of distress and the search for answers are most prevalent in the Plains, where historic drought blankets much of Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and parts of Texas.

This month the small Oklahoma farming town of Wapanucka lost water completely when the spring-fed wells the community relies on ran dry. Officials closed the town’s school and residents had to do without tap water until the town could run a line to a neighboring water district.

In Texas, state lawmakers are pushing for a $2 billion fund to finance water infrastructure projects as numerous communities face their own shortages. But it won’t be soon enough to help rice farmers, who were told this month that there is not likely to be enough water to irrigate their fields this spring.

Meanwhile, in the big wheat-growing state of Kansas, penalties for exceeding water use limits for irrigation were doubled this month and Gov. Sam Brownback has launched a task force to come up with strategies to counter statewide shortages.

“It’s going to be dry again this year,” said Lane Letourneau, water appropriations manager for the Kansas Agriculture Department. “We consider this a really big deal.”

The drought is ongoing and growing. It will reach from the West Coast, across the high prairies, the Southeast, and the prime agricultural heartland of the Midwest. Already, over 60% of the continental US is in moderate to severe drought, and there is every likelihood that we are headed into continued dry times ahead.

Have you heard anything about climate change forming a major aspect of Obama’s second term? This could be that out-of-left-field catastrophe that defines his legacy, like Bush and Katrina.

But the postnormal is here, changing everything, and most people aren’t even aware that we’ve moved into a completely new era, and we can’t go back. The climate will *never* go back to 20th century averages, at least not for hundreds or thousands of years. 

But a story like this one, from Reuters, US News, and NBC, make no mention of that possibility. Not one climate scientist is interviewed, just conversations with Julie Wallis, the city water clerk of Wapanucka OK, where the city lost water service completely this month. She said, 

We are not going to be the only ones who this happens to. It’s coming.

No, Julie, it’s here already.

While the media is entranced with the idiocy of a trillion dollar coin conjured up as an economic trick to sidestep the obduracy of small-minded Republicans who are planning to act like fiscal terrorists again, meanwhile the most critical threat to humanity — climate change — is completely off the radar screen.

At least a few reports are stringing together the extreme weather around the world into a coherent threat assessment, even if our erstwhile leaders aren’t.

Heat, drought, and wildfires in Australia, with heat so high the government has created a new, hotter slice in the heat index chart. Record temperatures in Rio. Torrential rain in the UK, Major snowstorms in Italy, Germany, and across the entire Middle East. The coldest winter ever in China. Temperatures dropped so low in Siberia (50 below zero fahrenheit) that the natural gas in the pipeline froze, and diesel fuel in trucks won’t burn. 

It appears that the Atlantic Ocean has changed:

Sarah Lyall, Heat, Flood or Icy Cold, Extreme Weather Rages Worldwide

Barry Lynn, who runs a forecasting business and is a lecturer at the Hebrew University’s department of earth science, said a striking aspect of the whole thing [snow and flooding in the Middle East and the Mediterranean] was the severe and prolonged cold in the upper atmosphere, a big-picture shift that indicated the Atlantic Ocean was no longer having the moderating effect on weather in the Middle East and Europe that it has historically.

And not just the Atlantic: expect this year’s weather to be even more extreme than what we are seeing now, or what we have been witnessing for the past decade.

Also remember, 61% of the US is in serious or moderated drought, right now, in the middle of winter, and the hot summer of 2013 — very likely to be one of the hottest and driest on record — is just a few months away.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, the US House of Representatives cannot pass a bill to allocate funds for the Hurricane Sandy recovery.  

The US temperature 2012 was a full degree fahrenheit hotter than the second hottest year, 1998.

2012 Was Hottest Year Ever in U.S. - NYTimes.com

The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but last year’s 55.3 degree average demolished the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit.

If that does not sound sufficiently impressive, consider that 34,008 daily high records were set at weather stations across the country, compared with only 6,664 record lows, according to a count maintained by the Weather Channel meteorologist Guy Walton, using federal temperature records.

That ratio, which was roughly in balance as recently as the 1970s, has been out of whack for decades as the country has warmed, but never by as much as it was last year.

[…]

Scientists said that natural variability almost certainly played a role in last year’s extreme heat and drought. But many of them expressed doubt that such a striking new record would have been set without the backdrop of global warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. And they warned that 2012 was probably a foretaste of things to come, as continuing warming makes heat extremes more likely.

Even so, the last year’s record for the United States is not expected to translate into a global temperature record when figures are released in the coming weeks. The year featured a La Niña weather pattern, which tends to cool the global climate over all, and scientists expect it to be the world’s eighth- or ninth-warmest year on record.

Assuming that prediction holds up, it will mean that the 10 warmest years on record all fell within the past 15 years, a measure of how much the planet has warmed. Nobody who is under 28 has lived through a month of global temperatures that fell below the 20th-century average, because the last such month was February 1985.

Everything sits atop the basics of life, like water, food, air, and climate. But we have catapulted ourselves into a new era — the postnormal — and nothing will ever be the same. 

Those studying these climatic changes have suggested it might take hundreds or even thousands of years for the earth’s weather to return to something like what was the norm in my childhood, even if we immediately and permanently cut back on spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. 

We are stuck in the postnormal for a long time to come, and the climate works at the bottom, with everything else sitting on top.

Oh, and mentioned in the piece is the not surprising fact: 61% of the US is still in moderate to severe drought conditions at the start of January 2013. It’s likely to be a big story in 2013, but the media aren’t applying much ink to it yet. The US populace wants to like the drought is last year’s news, but its going to become a permanent fact of life in the US, with huge repercussions. Consider the difficulties of moving freight on the Mississippi with the water so low, or the ecological refugees we’ll start to see moving out of the southwest when the water is just totally gone. And trust me: people will exhaust all the water before real action is taken to move people to where there is more water. 

It will be good for Detroit and the Rust Belt, and we’ll be seeing a huge surge of farming in New York state.

Here’s the map of NYC with FEMA’s 1983 100 year and 500 year floods:

And here’s Sandy’s flooding:

So, we are having 1000 year storms how often these days? What if we have another storm, even larger than Sandy? One that causes a storm surge up Long Island Sound, which is generally considered the worst case?

Meanwhile, Hizzoner Bloomberg stated — in the same meeting where they showed these maps to the gasps of those that were there — that the city can’t afford to undertake Netherlands-style protection of the city.

What should be done? Retreat from the shore. However, that is still politically impossible. So, they will temporize, weatherize, and harden the coastlines. But this is just a disaster waiting to happen. Again.

This headline demonstrates the schizophrenia that dominates our discussions around growth: Brazil Registers Anemic Growth in 3rd Quarter, Surprising Economists. The entire tone of the article is negative: 

Even economists with favorable views of Ms. Rousseff’s policies of assertively directing large government banks and other state-controlled enterprises to promote growth expressed surprise. The figures reflect a sharp departure from 2010, the last year of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidency, when Brazil’s economy grew 7.5 percent.

Here’s the insane part:

1. We know we can’t tolerate continued ‘growth’ — it’s unsustainable, and the planet is spiraling into a death spiral because of global warming and its direct consequences.
2. We haven’t figured out how to transition to a new sustainable economic footing, one that is not based on growth, but equity and well-being for people and rebalancing our exploitation of natural resources.
3. But we continue to clamor for more growth. Even a liberal paper like the NY Times does so reflexively, without a breath pause to examine the danger of the premises for growth.

It’s truly insane.