In the wake of Harvey and Irma, it’s time to take a look at climate change. The usual bad actors are out there, trying to downplay the damages the storms did. Ann Coulter was so egregiously nasty in her approach that she actually drew a reprimand from White House Chief of Staff Kelly.

Since the storms did do enormous damage, the carbon apologists have gone to their first fall-back position—don’t talk about it. They’ve tried telling us that now is not the time to discuss climate change, and that by doing so “liberals” are engaging in the most shameless of political opportunism.

The problem with that is there is no better time than now. So let’s talk about it.

Harvey and Irma were both extraordinary storms, created by unusual meteorological and temperature related situations. They wound up as unique, with Harvey stalling and dumping up to 55” of rain on south Texas and Louisiana. Irma became a cat 5 where no storm had become a cat 5 before, and raked nearly all of the northern coast of Cuba—several hundred miles—before finally turning north as a Cat 3 and hitting Florida as “only” a Cat 4.

These are unique storms. However, they are also harbinger storms.

Because the climate and the oceans are warming, we will see more and more “unique” situations like this. I will guarantee it.

There’s two changing factors critical to the formation of tropical storms (there are others, such as the Coriolis Force, but they are constants).

First is the temperature of the water. For a tropical system to form, a sea surface temperature of 26.5°C (79.7°F) is required. Further, that temperature has to reach a depth of about 50 meters (164 feet) because these storms churn the water up to that depth. If a storm is on disturbed water that is now only 25°C at the surface, the storm will peter out and die.

This is a constant, world wide. Since the overall average temperature of the oceans is 16°C, there’s only limited areas where such storms can form.

However, the warmer the sea surface temperature, the more energy the storm can take from that warm water (and warm water has far more energy than warm dry air—about 10,000 times as much), and the more powerful a storm can become.

The oceans are warming: Between .2°C and .4°C, depending on location. The warming is most intense in shallow waters, such as the Gulf of Mexico and there’s actually been some cooling in the polar regions with cold fresh water spilling from Antarctica and Greenland. Areas of water about 26.5°C are spreading, and those areas subject to seasonal variation are staying warmer longer. Vast tropical regions such as the West Pacific and the Gulf often average well above 30°C, sometimes all the way up to 35°C, or 95°F.

So, more energy for tropical storms to spawn in, lasting longer, and over a wider area. What do you suppose happens next?

Then there is air temperature. It’s not a significant factor as a source of energy, since the energy required to warm air is, as noted, only about 1/10,000th that of water. But it does have one very significant contributing factor: water vapor. There’s a formula called the Clausius-Clapeyron equation that tells us that when air is in the range of -50°C to 100°C (which pretty much covers all of Earth’s climate except for extremely cold regions), the capacity of the air to hold water vapor increases by about 7% for every degree Celsius. The warmer the air, the more vapor it can hold.

And the air is overall getting warmer. We know that, too. There is no doubt.

One last factor: moist air is lighter and less dense than dry air. Thus it takes less energy to get it up to a given speed like, oh, say, 200 kilometers an hour. 125 miles an hour. That’s a Cat 3.

Now, climatologists don’t like to say global warming will cause more hurricanes, and that they will be stronger. Part of the reluctance stems for not being able to point to a time frame, and because climate is a massively complicated science, they are aware that feedback mechanisms can and almost certainly will affect any predictions they make—in either direction. So they don’t.

But I’m not a climatologist. And I’m not going to make a specific prediction.

But the science is clear: as global warming continues, the area that can support tropical storm formation will increase. With greater area to form, that means more storms. And because the water and the air are warmer, they will flourish. Tropical depressions will be more likely to become tropical storms, and tropical storms will be more likely to become hurricanes. And because they have more energy and more moisture, more monsters like Harvey and Irma will develop.

Scientists have to qualify their projections because some feedback mechanism they don’t know about might affect the climate. But without such an unknown mechanism, this is what will happen. No ifs, ands, or buts.

I understand why they take that approach, but in terms of day-to-day reality, they are, like the rest of us, in the position of a man standing in a pool of gasoline, tossing lit matches and hoping there is something overlooked in the chemical nature of gasoline that will prevent it from catching fire.

Solstice 2016

Hope in a hopeless year

December 21^st, 2016

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

 

Every year, I write a piece to coincide with the winter solstice. The theme, always, is that of hope. It’s always darkest before the cliché, the sun will return, so quit shivering and throw granny on the fire.

But this was 2016.

Big Deaths are supposed to come in threes, not thirties. In just this one year, we lost a sizable chunk of the people we admired, enjoyed, who enriched our lives with courage, or talent, or drive. They shaped us, perhaps made us a little bit better than we might have been. I could fill out the rest of the piece just naming the people who died we all wish were still with us. Mohammed Ali and Gordie Howe are dead, and Tucker Carlson is alive. Yes, Virginia, the Universe is fucking random.

They could have saved time and trouble by just lowering the flag to half-staff on January 1^st (death of Dale Bumpers) and leaving it there until at least this week (John Glenn).

In America, the country has, in its past, seen fit to elect illiterates, morons, cutthoats, goosesteppers, egomaniacs, sex fiends and fascists. But until now, we’ve managed to avoid electing someone who combined all those features into one gruesome package.

Oh, wait. Americans did avoid electing him. But rigged elections in two or three states, plus the Electoral College, defeated the popular will. It’s a sign of things to come that in the month following the election, there were 1,200 hate crimes committed in Trump’s name—against transgendered, women, blacks, Moslems, and Jews. It didn’t matter who you are: if you aren’t white and male and Protestant, you are now at risk.

Then there’s the matter of Russian involvement in the election. A lot of people look at endless American efforts to stymie popular will in elections around the world and argue that turnabout is fair play, and perhaps it is. But this particular one has made the world a far more dangerous place for everyone.

Trump, or as I call him, President-Select Putnik the Putznik, was the cherry on a poisonberry pie.

Aleppo. Milan. Paris. Nice. Orlando. The Mexican Drug War. Yemen. The Kurds. Sinai. South Sudan. The Ukraine. Somalia. The Philippines (blessed with a vicious madman of their own). Boko Haram. And of course, George W. Bush’s ongoing legacies, Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans don’t like to discuss Iraq, hopefully out of a sense of shame. So most people don’t know there was a terror attack in Baghdad in the same month as the slaughter in Nice, but which killed four times as many people and injured three times as many. I’m sure the victims of such attacks in Iraq scream just as loudly, bleed just as profusely, and die just as horribly as the victims in France did. But Americans don’t count them, because they were the result of an American oopsie called Bush.

This was the year we realized that any hope of avoiding major damage from climate change was gone, and the best we could manage now was to try to avoid utter catastrophe. Naturally, our captains of industry spent billions trying to dissuade us from such precipitous action.

Northern California saw a crippling drought washed away by copious soaking rains as Southern California struggled with the Big Dry like a bug on a pin. But that was nothing compared to the climatic horrors visited on north Africa, large parts of Asia, and even the Arctic, which saw ice melting in November as the ice cap continued a death spiral. As vast as the damage humans have done to the environment is, climate change is on the verge of doing more damage than all the rest combined.

Things have gotten so bad that Putnik has upped his daily presidential briefings from one per week to three. He may even pay attention to some of them.

So no doubt about it, 2016 was an absolute shit year. It was a leap year which only prolonged the misery.

So how does all this tie in with a Solstice message? Is the message changing? Will I suggest you all run out and top yourselves because there’s nothing to be done for it?

Well, no.

The fact is, I lived through a year that was even shittier, and chances are quite a few of you did, too.

Remember? It was a year we elected a man that many believed was temperamentally and morally unqualified to be President. It was the year we learned the American military wasn’t invincible, but could get its collective ass kicked by a small country armed with fifty-year-old technology and lots of resolve. It was the year a major river caught fire, and the space program appeared dead in the water – or dead in the vacuum, if you will – following a catastrophe the year before. People were just beginning to wonder if it was really a good idea to burn leaded gasoline in cars. Two of the most important men in American history were assassinated.

Ah. The nickel just dropped, didn’t it? Yes, I’m talking about 1968. Kennedy and King were assassinated. Nixon was elected. The Tet Offensive made it clear that the war was not going well, and the government was lying—a lot—about what they were doing there.

You say the Chinese just seized an oceanographic drone and took two days to return it? In ’68, the North Koreans seized the USS Pueblo, and held it and its crew for nearly an entire year.

Putin and the Russians may be bad actors now, but 1968 saw brutal repression in Czechoslovakia, Russia sent nearly a quarter-million troops in to crush the “Prague Spring”.

A lot of people think that it wasn’t until after the Nixon resignation that the GOP decided ethics were for losers, but Nixon more than made up for any decency and honesty the GOP once possessed, impeding the Paris Peace Talks and boasting of a “secret plan” to end the war. Five years later and over a million deaths passed, he reached an agreement with Hanoi that was the very same terms he sabotaged in 1968.

Disgusted by the behavior of state police and armed corporate thugs at Standing Rock? You should have seen Mayor Daley’s pigs in action. Journalists called it a police riot. This was back in the days when the talking heads on TV were actual journalists, and not just overpaid fascist clowns.

Somebody even shot Andy Warhol.

There were differences. We didn’t have nearly as many mass shooting back then, but the overall murder rate was far higher. The Black Panthers were a lot angrier and more strident than Black Lives Matter, unfortunately for the same sad reasons that confront BLM today.

We did have several terrifyingly close calls with an intercontinental thermonuclear war, but we didn’t learn about those until much later.

NASA chose to have a capsule with a pure oxygen atmosphere and thousands of yards of electrical wiring. The resultant inferno barbequed three astronauts on the launching pad during a live exercise. A year later, people were still wondering if the space program could recover.

Yeah, 1968 sucked. I posit it was worse than 2016, although I admit our outlook now at year’s end is grimmer than it was in 1968.

In December, two brighter signs appeared that year. Unemployment dropped to 3.3% (as is often the case, the country prospers during Democratic administrations, and this unemployment level was reached after a 10% rise in federal taxes and a boost in the minimum wage.)Finally, on the Solstice of that year, Apollo 8 was launched to orbit the moon and take a picture that forever changed how we saw our world. Two months later Standard Oil would paint the beaches of Santa Barbara black, and this would forever change how we cared for our world.

We survived 1968. We may have been a bit more tired, a bit more cynical, a bit worn around the edges, but we survived. Kids born that year learned to dream just as kids had before. The wounds healed.

We don’t have great economic news or Apollo 8, but there are signs of hope. If Trump doesn’t destroy us, he’ll destroy the plutocracy and the system of lies and corruption that put him in office. Yes, it will boil down to us or him.

There was good news in sports. The Cubs finally made the World Series, and won in an incredibly dramatic world series. The Cleveland Indians were equally deserving. Maybe next year, Cleveland. In the meantime, enjoy your NBA championship. Oh, and next time you get in the World Series, have Charlie Sheen throw out the first pitch. You know what music to play.

In the Premier League, Leicester City won for the first time since…oh, never. Founded in 1884, they had made the finals four times over those 131 years, only to be turned away each time. Meanwhile, just to show some symmetry, in the Canadian Football League (Motto: more yards per down needed) we saw a third year team, the Ottawa Rouge et Noir, win the championship, having appeared in it twice in their three years of existence. That’s a bit like seeing the eight year old who absolutely butchered “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on the triangle in rehearsal get a scholarship to Juilliard because someone else made a typo on their application. For Juilliard, the kid played it in a way that would make Mozart groan in envy.

Lost in the political miasma are the amazing scientific advances and discoveries. If we survive our leadership, people will live longer, healthier, and with an amazing access to all the world’s knowledge—assuming they don’t sewerdip in the slime of fake news instead.

We survived 1968, a year of horrors.

We’ll survive 2016. I believe that.

Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.
1968 chronology available at:

http://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/1968/reference/timeline.html