{"id":56,"date":"2011-06-01T07:16:39","date_gmt":"2011-06-01T14:16:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thebigweasel.wordpress.com\/?p=56"},"modified":"2011-06-01T07:16:39","modified_gmt":"2011-06-01T14:16:39","slug":"weather-or-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zeppscommentaries.online\/?p=56","title":{"rendered":"Weather or Not"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/strong>With global warming, the weather is just the same, only more so<\/strong><\/p>\n

May 31st 2011<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 I was pleased when I found a plug-in for my blog that gave the average levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.\u00a0 I regard climate change to be the greatest threat humanity faces over the next century, and the levels attained, according to the display, were terrifying.\u00a0 393.18 parts per million.
\nThere was just one problem: it was wrong.\u00a0 It was out of date, and badly so.
\nThe\u00a0 US government’s Earth Systems Research Laboratory<\/a> at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, came out with a report this week that CO2 peaked last week at 394.97ppm<\/a>. That set a new record for greatest concentrations of CO2.
\nTo give the numbers some perspective, the ice core samples show that for most of the last millennium, CO2 levels stayed within a couple of points of 282ppm.\u00a0 That was high by Holocene standards.\u00a0 Over the previous 450,000 years, it usually ranged between 290ppm and 190ppm, in a cycle running between 100,000 and 125,000 years.\u00a0 Big, dramatic falls were known to occur over the period of 10,000 years, usually triggering an ice age.\u00a0 Over the past 450,000 years, the highest level recorded prior to the past hundred years was 314ppm, some 4,700 years ago. That may have played a significant role in humanity migrating out beyond the tropics. \u00a0
\nLate in the 16th century, it took a sudden and dramatic dip, down to 276ppm.\u00a0 It recovered, staying around 277ppm until 1800, when it suddenly jumped to 283ppm.\u00a0 It leveled out for a couple of decades, and then began the climb that is affecting our daily lives today.\u00a0 It hit 300ppm around 1925, and 350ppm around 1989.
\nWe’re now on pace to break 400ppm by late 2015.\u00a0 Remember, this is a shifting reading where a \u201csignificant\u201d change prior to 1800 was seen as swings of 5ppm in the space of a couple of centuries.
\nIn the past century, it has swung upward and upward only, by over 100ppm.
\nThat’s pretty significant.
\nCarbon Dioxide is the main player in global warming.\u00a0 At 388ppm, it increased radiative forcing (heating) by 1.66 Watts per square meter of earth.\u00a0 That’s a lot of energy.\u00a0 Methane, which is presently two and a half times historic levels, contributes an additional .48 Watts\/square meter.
\nMuch of the increase in methane levels is, like carbon dioxide, anthropogenic in origin.\u00a0 The earth, minus humanity, produces about 225 megatons of methane a year.\u00a0 With human sources (including landfills, ruminants, waste treatment and biomass burning, that number jumps to 600 megatons a year.\u00a0 This is unfortunate, since the earth can only reabsorb 580 megatons a year.\u00a0 That’s why it’s two and a half times its historic level.
\nCarbon Dioxide has a similar story.\u00a0 Natural emissions far exceed human emissions, but the relatively tiny human emissions tipped the scale.\u00a0 If you have a super accurate scale, and put weights weighing precisely one ton on each side, the scale stays in balance.\u00a0 However, if you put a feather on one of the ton weights, the scale shifts to the heavier side.
\nThe growth in atmospheric concentrations of CO2 almost exactly match the emissions caused by human sources.
\nIt’s all known beyond a shadow of a doubt, and nobody except American right wingers and a scattering of crackpots in the rest of the world think otherwise.
\nOne problem in the US is that even if you can get people to admit that climate change is real, they see it as a problem 50 or 100 years down the road, and limited to shoreline areas.\u00a0 Even if all those dumb climatologists and other commie scientists are somehow right, despite towering geniuses like Senator Inhofe and Exxon who say they are wrong, it’s no big deal.\u00a0 A mild inconvenience for great grandkids you’ll never meet anyway who were silly enough to live and work near the beach.
\nBut the problem we face here and now isn’t some esoteric numbers that have no direct effect on human health, or ocean rises measured in centimeters per century; it’s the weather.
\nWith global warming, the weather is still the weather, only more so.
\nWhile the long-range worries are about climate shifts, with wet areas becoming dry and vice versa, humans are scurrying to adapt even as much of the flora and fauna that make up the food chain are dying out. We’re in one of the biggest extinction-level events in earth’s history right now, and it’s happening much faster and more dramatically than most, some of which are measured over millions of years.\u00a0 Even if we can adapt agriculture fast enough to keep our billions alive, the rest of nature, which is a vast support system we utterly depend upon, is crumbling.\u00a0 But even that is still decades off, we think.\u00a0 We hope, anyway.\u00a0 Nobody’s quite sure what the tipping point is for changes in the climate patterns.\u00a0 We just know we can expect them.\u00a0 And when they come, they will be very expensive, and cost mass migrations and probably billions of deaths.
\nBut here and now, the weather is getting wilder.
\nNow, the deniers love to say that you can’t point to any particular weather event and say it is a result of global warming.\u00a0 And that’s perfectly true.\u00a0 You can’t.
\nI once rolled three yahtzees (five die, all of the same value) in a row.\u00a0 The odds of that happening are 2,171,747,375 to 1.\u00a0 Forgive the sudden change in subject, but I just wanted to point out that even though you can never predict how the dice will roll, there are very specific odds on what sorts of results you might get.\u00a0 The odds of rolling a yahtzee are 1,295 to 1. I rolled three in a row, which only happens once in every couple of billion throws, and my odds of rolling a fourth yahtzee were…1,295 to 1 against.
\nYou can’t predict any given roll of the dice.\u00a0 But you can predict the frequency in which they will fall a particular way, reliably.\u00a0 It’s why casinos invariably make money on the crap tables.\u00a0 The odds are stacked just slightly in their favor.
\nYou can’t say any one weather event stems from global warming, but when you get a series of weather events, you begin to get a pattern.\u00a0 (Climate is just a whole bunch of weather over a period of time, and it’s amazing how many people don’t get that climate change, of necessity, entails weather change.)
\nDeniers can’t think that way.\u00a0 I remember back when the tobacco industry was spending millions of dollars to debunk the science that smoking was bad for you (and featured some of the same players who argue that climate change is a fraud), I had one fellow tell me that you can’t prove that cigarettes cause cancer unless you can show that one specific cigarette is what triggered the cancer.
\n\u201cMr. Jones, we’ve narrowed it down.\u00a0 Your stage four lung cancer was caused by a Pall Mall that you smoked on July 23rd, 1976.\u00a0 If you had not smoked that particular cigarette, you would be fine now.\u201c
\nThis is what passes for thinking in the right wing.
\nWe’re seeing changes in the weather all over the world.\u00a0 I just watched a video today of two immense waterspouts sighted just off-shore near Sydney, Australia.\u00a0 It’s almost winter-time.\u00a0 Waterspouts?\u00a0 Really?
\nTornadoes have been making the news lately in the United States.\u00a0 And tornado season, which is longer and more widespread than it used to be, is going to keep on ramping up.\u00a0 Not just over the next 30 or 50 or 100 years, but next week.\u00a0 I’m in far Northern California, and we’ve had several days of rain, heavy at times, with snow mixed in.\u00a0 That’s pretty unusual, even for us.\u00a0 But that cold wet air is moving due east, and there is a big glob of very warm moist air that has pushed up from the Gulf, which is already at record surface temperatures.\u00a0 Guess what’s going to happen when those air masses meet\u00a0 in the upper midwest?\u00a0 That’s right: housing prices in Muncie, Indiana might fall.\u00a0 As might some of the houses themselves.\u00a0 The upper northwest might see tornadic events to rival those in Alabama and Joplin, Missouri.
\nAnd the US, which hasn’t had a major hurricane in a few years, is likely to get hammered this year.\u00a0 Normally, the statistics about hurricane behavior are a bit like those of rolling the dice, but Mother Nature likes to load the dice.\u00a0 The long range says a very warm wet Gulf zone, with a jet stream moving up from about New Mexico to Ohio and into Ontario, so no sheer to break hurricanes up, and a persistent tropical low over the Caribbean. This means that the US might be hurricane alley this year.\u00a0 And thanks to global warming, we’re seeing bigger hurricanes then we used to get.
\nIt’s the same all over the world.\u00a0 The weather is MAGNIFIED.\u00a0 Bigger droughts.\u00a0 Bigger snowstorms.\u00a0 Bigger floods.\u00a0 The weather is just the same, only more so.
\nAnd it’s not going away.\u00a0 It’s just going to keep getting worse.
\nNo matter what we do.
\nBut what we can do is try to make sure the place is still inhabitable for those great grandkids we’ll never meet.
\nIf we can manage it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With global warming, the weather is just the same, only more so May 31st 2011 \u00a0\u00a0 I was pleased when I found a plug-in for my blog that gave the average levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.\u00a0 I regard climate change to be the greatest threat humanity faces over the next century, and the levels … <\/p>\n

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