A potpourri of articles on climate change and environmental issues written by scientists, science writers and journalists who are associated with Climate Central.
Fans of electric automobiles love the fact that they’re quiet, zippy and take far less maintenance than gasoline-powered cars (no oil changes, no ignition system, no radiator fluid…). In principle, electrics are also more climate-friendly — although until coal-fired power plants start capturing and storing CO2 to keep it out of the air, the climate advantage is still just a principle in lots of places.
But now, GE has come up with another plus—albeit a small one — for electric vehicles: they can power up your house during a blackout, like the one that disrupted the Northeast during last fall’s unprecedented Snowtober storm, or during the winds and rain from Hurricane Irene a few weeks earlier.
“No more debating,” wrote a publicist touting the technology, “whether getting your child a glass of milk will ruin your refrigerator’s store of coolant and your foodstuffs.” (Note to publicists: The sad and thirsty child angle gets me every time.)
Seriously, though, while this milk-saving technology isn’t quite ready for widespread distribution, it’s something I would look into once it reaches that point. My own house in New Jersey was dark for three days after Tropical Storm Irene, and two days after Snowtowber. I flirted briefly, twice, with the idea of getting a backup generator — noisy, possibly dangerous, but maybe worth it to keep a few lights on and the food from spoiling.
But the idea of a backup power supply that could also take me on errands around town, without requiring an oil change every 3,000 miles is a whole lot more appealing.
We’re suckers for humor. And Heaven knows, there’s very little about climate change that is funny. But if you’re trying to make a case for people to take advantage of solar power, a little humor might just go a long way.
That’s what a company called SunRun is hoping for in unveiling a hilarious new ad campaign. The message behind it is that solar power is cheaper than any other form of energy. And in making that point, why not poke fun at the tree-hugging, organic-buying stereotype of environmentalists? In one spot, a SunRun customer is arguing that he’s going solar for the cost savings, not because he’s a weird “pickling guy” and turns out to be just that guy anyway.
Solar companies know they have a tough chore ahead, convincing people raised on oil- and coal-based energy and reluctant to embrace something new — especially something that sounds as new-agey as solar panels. But what they have on their side is that people also want to save money, so advertising that solar is the cheapest form of energy (in many places, anyway) is a smart strategy. SunRun offers free installation of solar panels and even maintains them, using a system called a solar lease.
Of course, you wish saving the planet and combating climate change was enough motivation for people, but since that hasn’t proved to be true yet, the economic angle is a wise one.
Communicating climate science information is no easy task — take it from me, I’ve been working at it for at least a decade now. The science is complicated, and it’s all too easy to present it in boring formats, with the message of why climate change matters getting lost somewhere between the terms “anthropogenic warming” and “solar irradiance.” Add in the extremely polarizing political environment surrounding this issue, and you have a major challenge.
As part of a Google.org climate communications initiative, a group of scientists and policy researchers are seeking to ascertain what video format appeals most to people when digesting their climate science news. Google.org’s philanthropic arm (which has helped fund Climate Central), has chosen to devote some money, effort, and technical wizardry to helping climate scientists and science policy specialists better communicate with the public. Google.org’s efforts include workshops that bring together groups of interdisciplinary specialists to explore innovative approaches to climate science communication.
As part of this venture, the World Resources Institute helped put together three videos each by three different researchers: Texas A&M climate scientist Andy Dessler, Brian Helmuth, a biology professor at the University of South Carolina, and Paul Higgins, associate director of the American Meteorological Society’s policy program. Each of the videos addressed a study that was either in progress or had recently been published.
The first video from each of them is simple, consisting of a webcam talk (these proved too stiff and visually uninteresting for my taste). The other two videos consist of a more conversational style video, with “B-roll” images rotating through, and a whiteboard talk in which the scientist spells out why their study is important.
Strangely enough, I found the whiteboard talks to be the most engaging, which surprised me, since such talks put the viewer in a classroom-like setting. Yet it’s in this setting that the scientists seemed to be most energetic or enthusiastic about their work, and that translates into better viewing.
Dr. James Hansen Credit: Arnold Adler, courtesy of James Hansen/Goddard Space Flight Center
After Al Gore, James Hansen is probably the man climate skeptics most love to hate. Unlike Gore, Hansen is an actual scientist, at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York (it’s located above the restaurant that used to be featured in Seinfeld). It was Hansen who single-handedly put climate change on the national radar when he testified before Gore’s committee in 1988 during a killer heat wave, saying “. . . the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”
Nearly a quarter of a century later, Hansen is more deeply immersed in the issue of climate change than ever. He’s still writing scientific papers — a new one, titled “Public Perception of Climate Change and the New Climate Dice,” which argues that the notable recent increase in climate extremes is no accident, has been submitted to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
He’s also come out of the ivory tower to join protests against coal-fired power plants (he was arrested outside the White House) and the Keystone XL pipeline (another arrest, same place). And he’s speaking out wherever and whenever he can about the dangers of climate change, along with our responsibility to do something about it — in a recent TED talk, for example, and in an even more recent interview with The Guardian, in which he declared that human climate change is a “great moral issue” on a par with slavery — an “injustice of one generation to others.”
It was Hansen’s 2008 paper suggesting 350 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the air as the level we should aim for that launched the activist organization 350.org. (We’re already approaching 400 ppm, with no appreciable emissions slowdown.)
No wonder skeptics dislike the guy, and go out of their way to try and shoot down his scientific work. So far, it hasn’t worked out so well. At around the same time Hansen gave his 1988 Congressional testimony, he put together a projection of future temperature rise — a projection skeptics have jumped on as being an “astounding failure.” Not really, though.
Recently, the bloggers at RealClimate.org have unearthed an even earlier Hansen projection, from a paper (pdf) published in Science all the way back in 1981. At the time, the authors of a recent post on the paper point out, global temperatures were actually cooler than they’d been since the early 1940′s, thanks to the shadow cast by clouds of pollution — and yet, write the authors, “[Hansen and his co-authors] confidently predicted a rise in temperature due to increasing CO2 emissions.” In fact, they underestimated the temperature increase we’d see in 2010 by about 30 percent, so Hansen was indeed wrong. He was too conservative. But the authors continue
“. . . a projection from 1981 for rising temperatures in a major science journal, at a time that the temperature rise was not yet obvious in the observations, has been found to agree well with the observations since then, underestimating the observed trend by about 30 percent, and easily beating naive predictions of no-change or a linear continuation of trends. It is also a nice example of a statement based on theory that could be falsified and up to now has withstood the test. The ‘global warming hypothesis’ has been developed according to the principles of sound science.”
Some of his colleagues in the mainstream climate-science community are reluctant to go as far out on a limb as Hansen. They aren’t comfortable crossing the line that separates science from activism, although everyone agrees that Hansen keeps his activist views out of his scientific work, which is why his science is still taken very seriously. They sometimes challenge his scientific work as well — not everyone agrees with the interpretation of evidence that led Hansen to declare 350 ppm as the proper target for atmospheric CO2 — but every top scientist, including Einstein, has had his or her work challenged. It’s how science works.
At age 70, James Hansen shows no evidence of slowing down. As the RealClimate post makes clear, he’s been doing impressive science since 1981, at least, and he’s still a prolific, highly respected climate scientist. He’s also a vigorous spokesman for humanity’s obligation to do something about our greenhouse gas emissions, and soon. Skeptics might hate him, but he’s not going away.
With below average snowfall across much of the U.S. this winter, it’s tough to find good skiing conditions. But who says there has to be fresh powder in the mountains in order to ski? This video, shot last year in British Columbia, proves that it’s possible to ski in an urban area — even on pavement (although that can’t be good for your skis). The skier in this video risks life and limb as he heads down flights of stairs, up and over dirty snowbanks, and performs risky aerial maneuvers. Making the video especially awesome is the soundtrack, by the now defunct LCD Soundsystem.
“It’s so cold outside!” a woman in the elevator said to me the other day. But it really wasn’t. It was in the 20s, and in Princeton, N.J., that may be below average for February, but it isn’t at all unusual. We often have stretches of a week or more when the temperature never gets above the low 20s, and it’s not rare to see a reading in the teens for a few days in a row. So that particular day wasn’t terribly cold, and the cold snap, such as it was, had lasted 48 hours at most.
The rest of the winter, aside from a few short blips of not-so-frigid weather, has been ridiculously warm, with daytime highs usually in the 40s, 50s and even occasionally in the low 60s. And as I left the office yesterday, with the temperature hovering just below 50, I said to myself, “This is great! I wouldn’t mind if winters stayed like this from now on!”
That won’t happen right away. Even with global warming, this unusually warm winter has more to do with short-term fluctuations in local climate. Europe is having an unusually cold winter, and next year both places may return to more familiar conditions. But in the long term, balmy winters are likely to become more common here. The idea of climate change doesn’t seem so bad, suddenly.
But what was I thinking? I’ve been writing about the enormous risks posed by climate change for more than 20 years. I know about the rising seas that threaten hundreds of millions of people, in some of the biggest, most economically vital cities on the planet. I know about the extreme weather — heat waves, droughts, torrential rainstorms — that climate change is likely to bring. I know about threats to agriculture, disrupted ecosystems, the extinction of species, the acidification of the ocean, the melting glaciers, the whole mess. And I know about countries like India and China and Brazil, which are growing so rapidly that their output of heat-trapping greenhouse gases could make the problem much worse before the world can even begin to deal with the emissions we already have.
Yet even with all that knowledge, I jumped right to the thought that climate change — in winters, in New Jersey, anyway — is something I might just welcome. And that gives me a new appreciation for the tough job communicators have in getting people to care about the looming threat.
It’s not nearly as difficult, of course, in the middle of a heat wave like the one that hit Texas and Oklahoma last summer. It’s not so hard when a one-two punch from back-to-back tropical storms triggers deadly floods in the Northeast, or when an out-of-season snowstorm cripples that same region a month later. In Europe, people shivering through the harsh winter are a receptive audience.
But most of the time, in most places, the effects of climate change are subtle and intellectual arguments don’t always convince people to take the coming changes seriously. And even when the climate goes crazy in a bad way, people tend to reassure themselves that it’s a fluke.
But the warmer Februaries here should give people pause, as should the likelihood that Quebec will no longer face competition from Vermont maple syrup as the Green Mountain state heats up, and that America’s grain belt may migrate to Saskatchewan. There will be winners and losers in a changing climate, as scientists have acknowledged all along. The losers are likely to outnumber the winners, though, and the overall disruption in the world’s economy that climate change could bring might not make winning as sweet as some of us might think.
It almost makes me regret that the thermometer is supposed to hit 50 today. Almost, but not quite.
Legend has it that in the final days of the Third Reich, loyalists smuggled Adolf Hitler’s remains out of Berlin along with those of his paramour, Eva Braun. The deceased were later ferried by U-Boat all the way down to a secret Nazi base in Antarctica, where they were, depending on which version you believe, interred or used for cloning experiments. Maybe a thousand identical copies of the mass murderer walk among us!
Or maybe the legends about Nazis in Antarctica are as every bit as ridiculous as they sound (though not as ridiculous as this movie). The New York Times had a nice rundown on the silliness a few days ago, but while Hitler did have a fascination with Antarctica (at one point in the late 1930’s, German planes dropped swastika-bearing stakes from planes in attempt to claim part of the continent as “New Schwabia“, but the rest of the story is more like the plot of a Mel Brooks movie.
There is something hidden in Antarctica, though, and it’s pretty mind-blowing in its own way. Some 12,000 feet below one of the coldest spots on the surface of the frigid continent, trapped between the ice above and bedrock below, lies a system of some 140 freshwater lakes. Last week, after years of inching closer and closer, Russian scientists broke through into one of the biggest: subglacial Lake Vostok is as big as Lake Ontario, but three times as deep, on average — and it could hold a trove of scientific secrets.
That’s appropriate enough: unlike Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union’s intentions in founding Vostok Station, near the Southern Pole of Inaccessibility, were entirely peaceful (by terms of the Antarctic Treaty, they had to be). At first, it was mostly a meteorological station. Then scientists began extracting ice cores, looking for clues to ancient climate and what they might tell us about manmade climate change in the future.
But thanks to observations with ground-penetrating radar, among other things, scientists began to realize that there was water under all that ice, warmed by heat from the underlying bedrock and insulated by the ice blanket above. Not only that: it was clear that the lake had been out of touch with the outside world for at least 15 million years. If there were living organisms trapped there, they might have evolved along all sorts of bizarre and novel paths. The only way to find out was to drill all the way into the lake and dredge up samples — but without letting the kerosene drillers used to keep the shaft unfrozen contaminate the pristine water.
This NASA/Goddard movie shows the context of where Lake Vostok is located in Antarctica. The camera then flies over the only highway on the lake and comes to rest on a view of the abandoned Russian station.
In fact, the drill reached within a few hundred feet of the lake all the way back in 1998, but it was only recently that the scientists agreed on an anti-contamination strategy: they filled the bottom of the hole with inert, harmless Freon to keep the kerosene at bay, then melted their way through the last few feet with a heated drill bit. When they finally struck Lake Vostok, the water, under enormous pressure from the two miles of ice above, pushed its way into the shaft and froze, creating a plug that will hold until a sampling probe can be brought in next year.
The prospect of finding a lost world of unique bacteria and — maybe — more complex creatures as well is exciting enough for biologists. But astrobiologists, who ponder the possible existence of life on other worlds, may be even more excited. Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, is now known to sport a globe-spanning ocean, covered with a thick layer of ice. And if life is common in the universe, which many astrobiologists suspect, then Europa could be a perfect place to look.
Before NASA drops billions to mount a mission across interplanetary space, though, it will undoubtedly prefer to get its feet wet, so to speak, by finding a mini-Europa somewhere on Earth. And Lake Vostok, as the agency has known for years now, just might be that place.
Admittedly, it’s not quite as funky as secret Nazi bases and cloned Hitlers. But for those with at least one foot in reality, it’s pretty intriguing.
A male polar bear climbs precariously on the face of a cliff above the ocean in northern Novaya Zemlya, Russia, attempting to feed on seabird eggs. This bear was marooned on land and unable to feed on seals — its normal prey — because sea ice had melted throughout the region and receded far to the north as a result of climate change.
Dog bites man: news or not? If you’re a journalist, you don’t even need to think about it. The phrase is our professional shorthand for an idea that hardly qualifies as news, that it’s not out of the ordinary. Man bites dog (goes the second half of the cliché), now that’s news!
It’s not an ironclad rule, though: if the dog bites the man after winning first place at the Westminster Dog Show, or if a marauding dog is biting its way through a terrified neighborhood, or if First Dog Bo bites Sasha or Malia — that’s news, too.
So when January 2012 was officially declared America’s fourth warmest January on record yesterday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was that news or not? Here at Climate Central, we thought it was. But then, we would. Do a Google News search, and you’ll find that a whopping eight news outlets agreed with us, and one of them was the Weather Channel, so it hardly counts. (Extra points to msnbc.com, which came up with a clever angle: it feels like it must be the warmest January ever, but surprise! It’s only fourth!) But for most media, it was kind of ho-hum, because, really, haven’t we heard it all before? It’s always the warmest this, or the second-warmest that.
For scientists who think about climate, though, that’s the point. Especially in the past decade — a time when climate skeptics argue, bizarrely, that global warming has stopped — these records or near-records are being set all the time, and extreme weather events, including droughts, heat waves and torrential storms have been more frequent and more severe.
And that points to a story that doesn’t change much week to week, or even month to month: Earth keeps warming, and result is like climate on steroids. If we keep pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, the climate will keep changing, and it’s likely to be highly disruptive, at best, in all sorts of ways.
In the dog-bites-man sense, it isn’t really news, since it’s pretty much always the same story — a situation that led AP reporter Seth Borenstein to argue last year that a month that for once was colder than average would get his journalistic antennae vibrating. At least it would be different. Just repeating that global warming is still happening, along with the obligatory explanation of how the greenhouse effect works, feels something like Chevy Chase’s old SNL routine from the 1970′s: “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.”
Yet a slow, inexorable slide into a world where the sea level is higher, weather patterns are changed, and trillions of dollars worth of roads, buildings, farms and other infrastructure, along with many hundreds of millions of people, may find themselves stuck in places where conditions are no longer hospitable — surely that’s got to be news.
The question is, how do we present it so that peoples’ eyes don’t glaze over. The “man bites dog” rule isn’t just something we invented to show how clever we are. It’s a reflection of our collective experience of how people respond to news. In this case, it’s news that’s on one hand too scary to think about for long, and on the other depends on a fair amount of scientific explanation to make clear.
Most people have little patience that sort of thinking — not because they’re dumb, but because science isn’t really part of our cultural conversation. It’s no less complicated to figure out who the favorites are likely to be for next fall’s World Series, based on all sorts of interacting factors and statistics and alternative scenarios, but since sports are part of the culture, we have no trouble slogging through those chains of reasoning.
The other problem with reporting on climate change is that because most people don’t have a good grasp on the science, pundits and politicians have no trouble distorting matters — again, suggesting that global warming has stopped, which is pretty much nonsense, or that the science is far more uncertain that it is, or that climate scientists are a bunch of conspirators chortling into their handlebar moustache as they make fools of the public (the “climategate” affair). That’s why the question of whether the science is even valid keeps coming up. This wasn’t an issue a decade ago, when the science was actually less solid than it is now.
Given all these hurdles, it’s a real challenge to keep this slowly evolving story fresh and urgent. But given its overwhelming importance, we need to keep trying. This is the point where I’m supposed to offer a bold new vision. Instead, I’m asking for suggestions. How would you approach it? What are your best ideas for making our changing climate an ongoing source of compelling news? The fourth warmest January on record isn’t going to cut it.
What stories should we be telling to hold your interest?
The groundhog Punxsutawney Phil may have seen his shadow today, but the prospect of six more weeks of the mild winter of 2011/12 doesn’t seem so terrible. In fact, now that we’re past the typical coldest period of the year, the days are already getting longer, and the typical average temperatures are warming up day by day across the country.
In many areas, this tame winter has been unusual but not unheard of. For example, in the Northeast, the winter has been one of the warmest and least snowy on record, but it has been warmer during past winters. (The Weather Channel has a nice comparison between snow cover charts from February 2011 vs. 2012.)
While winter temperatures have been increasing, on average, due to global warming, the mild winter this year is likely mainly due to natural climate variability, including a La Niña event in the Pacific Ocean and the orientation of the upper air jet stream.
Temperatures in the Northeast have averaged at least 5 degrees F above average since December, with very little snow cover, according to Art DeGaetano, a Cornell University climatologist and the director of the Northeast Regional Climate Center.
“Although December 2011 and January 2012 have been warm, you do not have to go back too far to find a warmer period. The early winter of 2001-02 was the warmest at many Northeast U.S. stations. Over a longer time frame, the early winter of 1931-32 stands out as the warmest at the majority of Northeast U.S. sites,” DeGaetano said in a press release.
The same is true in other parts of the country, although in select locations this winter may rank among the top 10 warmest on record, depending on how mild February turns out to be. In normally frigid Minneapolis-St. Paul, for example, January featured temperatures that were 8 degrees F above average. And across the U.S., January snow cover was the 3rd lowest on average, according to NOAA (H/T Paul Douglas).
Northeast temperature departures from average from Dec. 1 through Jan. 29. Credit: NERCC
Scientists say the mild winter will reverberate throughout ecosystems during Spring, with bigger deer populations, thanks to more accessible vegetation for them to feed on throughout the winter. David W. Wolfe, a Cornell professor of plant and soil ecology, said the lack of severe cold “will benefit some insect pests and invasive weeds like kudzu.”
“On the positive side, if you are a farmer or gardener experimenting with crops or ornamentals that sometimes can’t survive a severe winter, this will be a good year for you,” he said. Last week the U.S. Department of Agriculture released new maps of plant hardiness zones, indicating a northward shift has taken place, which reflects a warmer climate. Although the Agriculture Department did not characterize the shift as being due to climate change, the movement of the hardiness zones is consistent with climate change projections for the U.S..
The mild winter may also benefit insects such as mosquitos and ticks. Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, is a professor of entomology and a specialist with the New York State Integrated Pest Management Program, “This year, lots and lots of hungry ticks will emerge even on warm winter days. I anticipate the mosquito problems we normally see to be much more intense and begin earlier than usual if the weather continues to be mild. Even the fleas have had a boost so far this winter and many people are complaining about flea problems right now, in the middle of winter.”
Mild temperatures during the past week have set records from the Central Plains to the East Coast. New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, for example, reached 64 degrees F on Feb. 1, breaking the old record of 62 degrees F set in 1989.
So far this winter, Alaska has been the only U.S. state that has seen consistently severe cold weather.
Loading ...
Dog bites man: news or not? If you’re a journalist, you don’t even need to think about it. The phrase is our professional shorthand for an idea that hardly qualifies as news, that it’s not out of the ordinary. Man bites dog (goes the second half of the cliché), now that’s news!
Recent Comments