Tag Archives: climate change

Washington State drought

Washington State has a snowpack problem.

“Snowpack is down to just 16% of normal,” Inslee said. “This is an unprecedented low. Several mountain areas have already melted out and have little to no measurable snow left…. On the Olympic Peninsula, where there would normally be 80 inches of snow today in the mountains, the glacier lilies are blooming.”

No mandatory rationing has been ordered, but because conditions recently worsened, Inslee took the step to declare the statewide emergency. Fellow Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown of California declared a statewide drought emergency in 2014, and last month ordered municipalities across the state to cut water use by 25%.

In Oregon, Gov. Kate Brown has declared a drought emergency in seven of the largest counties. Seven other counties have requested that an emergency be declared. Combined, that’s about two-thirds of the state.

El Nino

More El Nino coverage from Slate. It’s going to be the strongest since 1998! or 2010! or ever!

First off, it’s rapidly intensifying. El Niño is about self-reinforcing feedbacks between the ocean and the atmosphere, and from all accounts, this one has its foot on the accelerator pedal.

If it continues, the impacts will be felt around the globe—here’s my detailed rundown of what to expect. Among them: drought in Australia, Southeast Asia, and perhaps India, with flooding in Peru and Southern California.

climate change impact reports

Here are a number of reports on climate change impacts on U.S. cities:

The common thread is that extreme weather is going to be more frequent and more damaging, and we need to be ready.

400 ppm

Yes, we’re at 400 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, consistently now, everywhere. As a reminder, the pre-industrial number was something like 280.

For the first time since we began tracking carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere, the monthly global average concentration of this greenhouse gas surpassed 400 parts per million in March 2015,  according to NOAA’s latest results.

“It was only a matter of time that we would average 400 parts per million globally,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. “We first reported 400 ppm when all of our Arctic sites reached that value in the spring of 2012. In 2013 the record at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory first crossed the 400 ppm threshold. Reaching 400 parts per million as a global average is a significant milestone.

From a non-scientific sample of people I know, people who thought they were immune from seasonal allergies seem to be suffering them for the first time, and people who have always suffered them, which includes me, are reduced to slobbering insomniac messes. Could there possibly be a connection?

recycled water

Recycled water, i.e. treating sewage back to drinking water standards, has been around for awhile and doesn’t raise many eyebrows in truly water scarce areas. Which is why it is getting more popular and less controversial in California cities. Here are some fun pictures of politicians drinking it out of beakers with big smiles on their faces.

Which, maybe because we are in mayoral election season here in Philadelphia, reminded me of this great scene from The Wire.

 

April 2015 in Review

Negative stories:

Positive stories:

  • Mr. Money Mustache brought us a nice post on home energy efficiency projects. This was a very popular post.
  • Biotechnology may soon bring us the tools to seriously monkey with photosynthesis. (This is one of those stories where I struggle between the positive and negative columns, but clearly there is a potential upside when we will have so many mouths to feed.)
  • Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, is retiring. That might sound bad, but his ground-breaking ideas are continuing on and actually seem to be going mainstream.
  • Lee Kuan Yew, who took Singapore “from third world to first” in one generation, passed away (in March, but I wrote about it in April. Let me be clear – I am an admirer and it is his life I am putting in the positive column, not his death.)
  • Donella Meadows explained how your bathtub is a dynamic system.
  • Robert Gordon offers a clear policy prescription for the U.S. to support continued economic growth.
  • I explain how a cap-and-trade program for stormwater and pollution producing pavement could work.
  • Joel Mokyr talks about advances in information technology, materials science and biotechnology.
  • Some U.S. cities are fairly serious about planting trees.
  • Edmonton has set a target of zero solid waste.
  • Saving water also saves energy. It’s highly logical, but if you are the skeptical type then here are some numbers. Also, urban agriculture reduces carbon emissions.
  • Peter Thiel thinks we can live forever. (positive, but do see my earlier comment about mouths to feed…)
  • A paper in Ecological Economics tries to unify the ecological footprint and planetary boundary concepts.
  • Philadelphia finally has bike share.

downscaling

Here is a useful (to me, at least) Hydrology and Earth System Sciences open article on spatial and temporal downscaling of climate change model output.

Information on extreme precipitation for future climate is needed to assess the changes in the frequency and intensity of flooding. The primary source of information in climate change impact studies is climate model projections. However, due to the coarse resolution and biases of these models, they cannot be directly used in hydrological models. Hence, statistical downscaling is necessary to address climate change impacts at the catchment scale.

This study compares eight statistical downscaling methods (SDMs) often used in climate change impact studies. Four methods are based on change factors (CFs), three are bias correction (BC) methods, and one is a perfect prognosis method. The eight methods are used to downscale precipitation output from 15 regional climate models (RCMs) from the ENSEMBLES project for 11 catchments in Europe. The overall results point to an increase in extreme precipitation in most catchments in both winter and summer. For individual catchments, the downscaled time series tend to agree on the direction of the change but differ in the magnitude. Differences between the SDMs vary between the catchments and depend on the season analysed. Similarly, general conclusions cannot be drawn regarding the differences between CFs and BC methods. The performance of the BC methods during the control period also depends on the catchment, but in most cases they represent an improvement compared to RCM outputs. Analysis of the variance in the ensemble of RCMs and SDMs indicates that at least 30% and up to approximately half of the total variance is derived from the SDMs. This study illustrates the large variability in the expected changes in extreme precipitation and highlights the need for considering an ensemble of both SDMs and climate models. Recommendations are provided for the selection of the most suitable SDMs to include in the analysis.

What is potentially useful to me is that they went to a one day time scale, and they defined an “extreme precipitation index” for storms expected to happen once a year or less on average. I am interested in how or whether these concepts can be applied to “typical” hydrologic conditions that happen at the more-than-once-a-year level. Drought and flooding are probably the two most concerning conditions impacted by climate change, but there are also questions being asked about water quality, and it is the “typical” conditions that most come into play.

drought, drought, and more drought

NPR has yet another story on how bad the drought is getting in the western U.S.

The historic four-year drought in California has been grabbing the headlines lately, but there’s a much bigger problem facing the West: the now 14-year drought gripping the Colorado River basin…

The snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, where the Colorado and much of the Southwest gets most of its water, is again at less than half of normal this year…

Some of the West’s biggest metropolises — Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, San Diego — all grew up during what scientists now believe was a wet period, a relative anomaly in the West.

 

Slate’s top-notch oceanography coverage

Slate manages to make oceanography and climate change interesting. I think they sensationalize a bit, which is unnecessary because the story is compelling on its own merits. But I don’t see this kind of coverage anywhere else and I enjoy it. You could spend a month drilling down to all the links they provide. An excerpt:

The news comes amid increasingly confident forecasts that there will be a strengthening El Niño for the remainder of 2015, which could spark a litany of impacts worldwide, not the least of which is the more efficient transport of heat from the oceans to the atmosphere. That liberated heat from the Pacific Ocean should boost global temperatures to never-before-recorded levels, making 2015 the warmest year ever measured…

Besides El Niño, a more worrying, longer-term trend is also taking shape. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is a decades-long periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean that tends to favor bursts of accelerated global warming. As I wrote last October, the Pacific appears to be in the midst of a shift into a new warm phase that could last 20 years or so.

The PDO—or, “the blob” as it’s been referred to recently—is starting to freak out some scientists. There are emerging signs of a major shift in the Pacific Ocean’s food chain, including a dearth of plankton, tropical fish sightings near Alaska, and thousands of starving sea lion pups stranded on the California coast. As Earth’s largest ocean, what happens in the Pacific affects the weather virtually planet-wide, and that means an “imminent” jump in global warming may have already begun—spurred on by the PDO.