How Global Warming Makes it Snow in Boston

                                            The warmest ocean temperature anomaly on earth is found
                                                            in the Atlantic ocean east of Boston


The winter of 2014-15 has been a rough one in Boston.  Snowstorm after snowstorm have hit Boston and the rest of New England, taking the city to the edge of an all-time record for total winter snowfall.  

Why oh why is this happening?  Wasn't global warming supposed to result in warmer winters?

Well, the Boston area IS having a warmer winter.  Or at least the Atlantic Ocean east of Boston and New England is having a very very warm winter. On the Feb. 16, 2015 sea surface anomaly map based on the latest NOAA data (above), the largest temperature anomaly on the entire planet occurs in the north western Atlantic Ocean just east of New England, with ocean surface temperates reaching more than 4° C (7.2° F) above normal over an area reaching from the Virginia coast all the way north to Greenland.

When warm wet air meets cold dry air, you get snow.  When record warm air with record amounts of moisture from the record warm Atlantic Ocean encounters cold air over New Engalnd, you get a record snow year in Boston.  And yet another snow storm is scheduled for Boston later in the week.   

Look out Beantown ---- more  global warming is coming your way.  

The Federal Reserve Bank endorses Geoengineering

The Federal Reserve Bank, best known for its Quantitative Easing programs (QE I, QE 2, and QE III), has come out in favor  of Planetary Geoengineering.  And the bankers in Washington DC have even decided precisely which Geoengineering plan they will back---- the bankers are in favor of shooting many tons of sulfuric acid into the upper atmosphere in hopes it will reflect enough sunlight back into outer space to cool the planet and counteract the warming effects of the many tons of CO2 humans have put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.

The Federal Rrserve Bsnk's approach to fixing global climate change bears a curious resemblance to their approach to fixing the U.S. Economy after the 2009 financial crisis.  Rather than identifying and correcting the problems in the U.S. Economy the Fed instead has injected hundreds of billions of dollars into banks in the U.S. and around the world every month to mask underlying structural economic problems.  

Similarly, rather removing CO2 from the atmosphere and solving the climate change problem as the CO2 Antarctic Pumpdown concept would do, the bankers of the Federal Reserve Bank have chosen to endorse a plan that would require dousing earth's upper with tons of sulfuric acid every month to mask the global warming problem.

The acid treatments would have to be continued for a thousand years because this scheme leaves ALL the extra CO2 in the atmosphere  where it's residence time is about a thousand years.  Other problems caused by excess CO2, like ocean acidification, wouldn't be helped at all because all the CO2 would remain in the atmosphere.   In fact there's a good chance  some of the sulfuric acid the bankers want to put into the atmosphere would eventually find its way down back down as acid rain

I urge the Federal Reserve Bank to reconsider their support for a plan that calls for loading the atmosphere with sulfuric acid to go along with the CO2 that's already there.  Please consider the possibility of REMOVING the CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it in a secure geologic repository like, maybe, ummmm.....well, how about Antarctica?

Dr. Research discusses Global Warming in 1958

                             Dr. Research explains global warming to the American people in 1958

In 1958 the Bell Telephone Science Hour was the biggest thing on American TV, featuring films made by the talented movie director, Frank Capra.  TV viewers saw an avuncular scientist named "Dr. Research" answering questions from a character named "Mr. Fiction Writer."  Mr. Fiction Writer was played by an actor named Eddie Albert, while Dr. Research was a Professor at USC named Frank Baxter.  

On one show Mr. Fiction Writer asked Dr. Research about climate change.   And Dr. Research knew all about it----60 years ago.

The Beaches are Moving

                                                                       The beaches are moving

In 1979 a famous popular science book entitled "The Beaches are Moving" was published.   This book was the first attempt to explain to the general public the science behind coastal erosion, and to educate the public about the dangers of building in coastal sites.  Curiously, there is not a word in this well-known science book about climate change or about global sea level rise.  Today it is generally accepted that sea level is rising,  but as the 1979 edition of this book shows, the scientific concepts of global warming and global sea level rise were mostly unknown just 36 years ago, even within the scientific community.

Just six years after "The Beaches are Moving" was published, an international scientific Conference on the "Assessment of the Role of Carbon Dioxide and Other Greenhouse Gases in Climate Variations and Associated Impacts" reviewed the available science and predicted  that greenhouse gases would cause significant warming in the future.  A few years later in 1988, Prof. James E. Hansen reported that global climate change had already started.  Later in 1988, scientists met at the "World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security" and released a report that said  the buildup of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases "represent a major threat to international security and are already having harmful consequences over many parts of the globe."  The year 1988 also saw the establishment of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with a mission to document global climate change and to predict the effects of future global warming.  

In the years from 1979 to 1988 a revolution began in the scientific community.  The concept of global climate change began to be accepted, first among scientists and then within the general public.  The idea that human-caused global climate change is underway is still not universally accepted, but then its only been 27 years since scientists themselves starting to publicize the concept.    By comparison, it took until 1765--- 150 years after Galileo started advocating the idea that the earth rotates around the sun in 1615 --for the ban on his writings instituted by the Holy Inquisition to be lifted.



POSTSCRIPT:  

My copy of "The Beaches are Moving" is 35 years old.  It looks good on my library shelf, but I rarely refer to it.  Almost nobody actually reads old science books.  Literature is timeless, and people will read and reread the novels of Dickens, Proust, Homer, Dumas, Chaucer, Ovid and other long dead authors forever.  The stories are still powerful, the writing is still great, and the books contain eternal truths.  Old science books are different because eventually they are superseded by newer, more modern, and more accurate books, and what were though to be eternal truths in the old science books are replaced with somewhat different eternal truths in newer science books.

When Glaciers Speed Up

                                                    The Austfonna Ice Cap flows into the Barents Sea


To move at a "glacial pace" means to move slowly.  But glaciers themselves are mysteriously starting to speed up.  

The northernmost glacier in Europe is the  Austfonna Ice Cap on Svalbard.  Recent satellite photos show that part of the Austfonna Glacier is flowing 25 times faster then it did 20 years ago.  Glaciers often speed up for a year or so in an event called a "surge", but the Austfonna Ice Cap has been flowing at an unusually rapid speed for over a decade.  So much ice is travelling down the glacier and dumping into the Barents Sea that the ice cap itself is shrinking.  Parts of the glacier are now 50 meters (165 feet) lower then they were before glacier flow accelerated.

Many glaciologists think glaciers like the Austfonna Ice Cap are speeding up because of global warming.  Several factors control ice flow velocities.  The rate at which ice deforms increases with temperature.  And where glaciers slide along their beds, increased temperatures can produce more meltwater, which allows even faster sliding.  And for tidewater glaciers like the Austfonna, warmer ocean temperatures may also be triggering faster flow by melting the glacier from underneath.

The Austfonna Ice cap holds about 2500 cubic km of ice, or less than 0.01% of the estimated ~29,960,000 cubic kms of ice currently frozen in the earth's glaciers.  If the entire Austfonna Ice Cap flows into the sea and disappears, global sea level will go up about about 5 cm, roughly equivalent to about 16 months of current sea level rise.    

Lets rename "Global Warming" something like "Pollution Death"

                                                      Oh NO!  Its the Dreaded Pollution Death!

In places like Alaska, when temperatures drop to -40° in the winter, its hard to get too upset about "global warming."  In fact global warming starts to sound pretty good.  Alaskans often joke about it in the winter saying things like "Where's that global warming?"   And "Sure could use some of that global warming"

The same thing happens in Chicago and the Midwest, or Scandinavia, or New England, or Canada, or just about anywhere that gets cold in the winter.  When you are out in some cold winter weather, global warming sounds about as scary as a warm fireplace and a hot chocolate drink.

Maybe its time to change the name of global warming to something .... scarier.  Something that will get people's attention.

The first person to complain about the term "global warming" was James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis.  Lovelock hated the term global warming because  “Warming is something that’s kind of cozy and comfortable. You think of a nice duvet on a cold winter’s day.   Lovelock, after considerable thought, argued that it would be better to call it "global heating" because "Heating is something you want to get away from.”   

Well, pardon me, but the term "global heating" really isn't any scarier then "global warming."  When its -40° outside I'll take either global warming or global heating......or both at once.   No----if we want to scare people about global warming we've got to do better than "global heating."

 Harvard Professor John Holden gave a speech a few years ago at the American Association for the Advance of Science and suggested changing global warming to "global climate disruption".  Then a few months later he changed his mind and said global climate disruption isn't scary enough and suggested using "global climate instability" instead.    Uhh......what was that scary term again? Global climate ...indecision???

Maybe re-naming global warming actually isn't a job for a scientist.  Maybe we need a political spinmeister or an advertising guru like Seth Godin.  Well, Mr. Godin has already offered his suggestions---he says scientists need to stop talking about global warming and start talking about either "atmospheric cancer" or "pollution death."

OK.....that works.  No way people are going to joke about wanting more "pollution death" no matter how cold it gets in the winter.  

Stop the Hiatus!

     There have been several hiatuses in global warming since 1880

One of the main points of evidence cited by climate change skeptics has been the hiatus in global warming observed since  1998.  For fifteen years mean annual temperatures stayed at very high levels but never exceeded the mean annual temperature the earth reached in 1998.  Climate change skeptics said that this hiatus in warming debunked the idea that the earth was warming in response to the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Finally, in 2014, global annual temperatures reached a new record high.  

Looking at the instrumental record of global temperatures since 1880, its apparent that there have been several hiatuses (hiati?) during the last 130 years.  A very long hiatus in the rise of global temperatures occurred from the 1940s into the late 1970s, a period of almost 40 years when global temperatures never exceeded record high temperatures set in the early 1940s, and another hiatus occurred at the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th century.

There are several reasons why temperatures on a warming earth should rise and then intermittently pause, rather then warming by steady increments each year.  Perhaps the most important reason is that global warming is affecting both the atmosphere and the oceans, and the oceans can absorb huge amounts of thermal energy without greatly warming.  By some measures about 90% of the global warming that has occurred over the last century has occurred in the oceans.  The huge amounts of ocean warming have so far acted to mitigate warming in the atmosphere.

Another possible reason for the observed hiatuses in global warming may have to do with the inherent randomness of year to year weather variations.  A new climate modeling study shows that natural weather variability will tend to produce periods of hiatus in global warming even as the Greenhouse forcing increases each year due to CO2 buildup in the atmosphere.

Either way, global warming eventually will kick in again and terminate the hiatus.  The new record global temperature set in 2014 suggests the hiatus in global warming seen since the start of the new millennium is over.  If so, the Earth will start warming again, and will return to setting ever higher temperature records in the coming years.