WP: Warming to Cause Harsher Weather in U.S., Study Says

[DeepModem Mom]

Warming to Cause Harsher Weather, Study Says
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 18, 2005; Page A02


Extreme weather events -- including heat waves, floods and drought -- are likely to become more common over the next century in the United States because of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study by Purdue University researchers.

The analysis, which is being published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, examines how heat-trapping gases linked to climate change may intensify precipitation, drought and other weather conditions. Instances of extreme heat will probably increase throughout the country, the scientists concluded, and many areas will experience heavier downpours even if rain becomes less frequent.

"I would be thrilled to be wrong," said Noah S. Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at the Purdue Climate Change Research Center and the university's department of earth and atmospheric sciences. "It's definitely going to be more extreme hot temperatures."

The four-person research team, which included two scientists from the Earth Systems Physics Group at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, compared U.S. weather patterns from 1961 to 1985 to models of future weather patterns from 2071 to 2095.

Under this scenario, which assumes the amount of carbon dioxide in the air will roughly double over the next 100 years, the coldest days of the year in the Northeast will be as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, and the temperatures currently experienced on the 18 hottest days of year in the Washington area will prevail for two months....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/17/AR2005101701324.html

[cliss]

1. I would say that at this juncture -

Mother Nature is giving us a little heads-up on what's to come. Since we refuse to change our destructive ways, neither is She.

It might be a good idea to think about selling if you are in any areas that are currently getting hit with bad weather - Florida, the gulf states, probably also the hotter states like New Mexico because they will be FRYING a few years from now.

Anyone with beachfront property might consider getting out while they can. I think we'll have a few more years to take action, but I wouldn't wait that long.

[noahmijo]

2. This is simple we just tell Mother Nature "You're either

with us or against us"

Then if she refuses to bow down to us, we launch a premptive strike against the bitch pure and simple we'll bomb her back into the stoneage and then we'll install Karen Hughes to be the "puppet" mother nature
and she will vow to never hit the blue states with hurricanes so long as they know their place when the next Bush spawn is running for office.

[buddysmellgood]

3. It's the new mother nature taking over...dot dotta da daaaaah

[spindrifter]

4. Any chance someone

in the WH will read the WP article? Or do they think that intelligent designers will take care of reconfiguring the world?

[amandabeech]

5. In predicting the CO2 concentration in the relatively distanct future,

do scientists take into account the probablility that not only oil supplies, but also natural gas and coal supplies, will decrease because of depletion and the difficulty of increased difficulty of extracting remaining supplies?

Every study I recall reading seemed to assumed that fossil fuel supplies remained constant. In my opionion they won't, which does not affect my belief that we should begin lowering our fossil fuel consumption immediately.

[existentialist]

6. silver lining time

"For every silver lining there's a cloud."

Still, your thought is a minor point of hope. My own with regard to these scenarios is "garbage in--garbage out". That is that the computer models, although they are almost certainly right that the world in general will warm, do not yet account well for how the earth will respond to the warming. In particular if its warmer there will be more water evaporating, but if the is more evaporating there must also be more coming down, but where? (And I think that the computer models do not yet answer this question well, and therefore hope that perhaps the drought part of the models might be wrong.)

[amandabeech]

7. Let's all hope that we can at least direct all that comes down to

land suitable for agriculture or rivers and lakes from which we can pump and treat drinking water.

I think that land use and landscaping must change to emphasize retaining water in the soil or returning it to lakes, rivers and aquifers.

[existentialist]

12. Yes, you have expressed my concerns

almost as if you were reading my mind.

Maybe even a step ahead of where I was trying to go.

[Hardrada]

9. This is what I posted a week or so ago:

Will we wreck the environment first or will we run out of oil first? As a thread it quickly vanished but the question is still a good one.

[WindRavenX]

10. The problem is that even if those fuels decrease....

...there will still be an increase of CO2 from developing countries, especially China and India.

But many scientists believe that we've already gone beyond the point where the Earth's thermostat can reach equilibrium again; we've saturated the atmosphere with CO2 to the point where the carbon cycle is stunted; we grow hotter (which usually helps lower CO2 in the air), but it isn't going to swing the other way. Runaway greenhouse effect may be inevitable.

[amandabeech]

11. Peak oil, gas, coal and subsequent diminution in supply will affect

India, China, and each and every country. While India, China and other rapidly developing countries may obtain a larger piece of a smaller pie, the pie will still be getting smaller.

I have also read stories stating that we have already reached the point of no return and that the greenhouse may be reaching a runaway positive feedback loop, even if we completely stopped emissions now. I guess that we will find out, but I'd still like some of my tax dollars to go to research to find out if there are ways that we don't know about for sequestering the carbon that we already have out there. For example, many soils around the world are carbon deficient thanks to years of abuse by chemical fertilizer and pesticide and failure to plant cover crops, fallow, and apply animal (and human) wastes.

[hatrack]

15. It may be largely out of our hands at this point - see linked articles

A number of news reports and commentary on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have linked the disasters to global warming. Almost nobody noticed a crucial scientific finding, two weeks earlier, that foreshadows disasters on a far greater scale in the decades to come.
According to August 11 articles in the magazine New Scientist and the British newspaper the Guardian, a pair of scientists, one Russian and one British, report that global warming is melting the permafrost in the West Siberian tundra. The news made a little blip in the international media and the blogosphere, and then it disappeared.

Why should anyone care? Because melting of the Siberian permafrost will, over the next few decades, release hundreds of millions of tons of methane from formerly frozen peat bogs into the atmosphere. Methane from those bogs is at least twenty times more potent as a greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide that currently drives global warming. Dumping such a huge quantity of methane on top of already soaring CO2 levels will drive global temperatures to the upper range of increases forecast for the remainder of this century.

According to the most recent forecast by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), compiled in 2001, human industrial emissions are on course to raise global temperatures between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. The IPCC models didn't account for methane releases from the Arctic, nor did they consider other natural sources of greenhouse gases that could be released by human activity. The agency judged Arctic methane releases to be a real but remote possibility, not likely to emerge for decades. Now we find that it could very well be happening today.

The news of melting Siberian permafrost means, in all likelihood, that global warming is accelerating much faster than climatologists had predicted. The finding from Siberia comes amidst evidence, presented at Tony Blair's special climate change conference last February, that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be in danger of disintegrating -- another warming-induced event once thought to be decades or centuries away. Meanwhile, according to a September 29, 2005 report in the Guardian, scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center have measured a drastic shrinking of ice floes in the Arctic Ocean. Arctic waters are now expected to be ice-free well before the end of this century.


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x32788

& acting as major positive feedback speeding up more global warming

In Siberia an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres— the size of France and Germany combined— has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age(108). Siberia’s peat bogs have been producing methane since they formed at the end of the last ice age, but most of the gas had been trapped in the permafrost. The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world’s largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. The thaw has greatly accelerated in the past three or four years. Climate scientists warned that predictions of future global temperatures would have to be revised upwards. Western Siberia is heating up faster than anywhere else in the world, having experienced a rise of some 3C in the past 40 years. Scientists are particularly concerned about the permafrost, because as it thaws, it reveals bare ground which warms up more quickly than ice and snow, and so accelerates the rate at which the permafrost thaws. Projections of the release of methane is to effectively double atmospheric levels of the gas, leading to a 10% to 25% increase in global warming(108).
Katey Walter of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, told a meeting of the Arctic Research Consortium of the US that her team had found methane hotspots in eastern Siberia. At the hotspots, methane was bubbling to the surface of the permafrost so quickly that it was preventing the surface from freezing over. According to Larry Smith, a hydrologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, the west Siberian peat bog could hold some 70bn tonnes of methane, a quarter of all of the methane stored in the ground around the world(108). A widespread decline in lake abundance and area has occurred in Siberia since 1973, despite slight precipitation increases to the region. The spatial pattern of lake disappearance suggests that thaw and "breaching" of permafrost is driving the observed losses, by enabling rapid lake draining into the subsurface(109).


(108) Sergei Kirpotin, Tomsk State University in western Siberia, and Judith Marquand at Oxford University, New Scientist, August 11, 2005; & K. Walter, Univ. of Alaska Fairbanks, Arctic Research Consortium, 2005 www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/ sep202005/snt1151422005919.asp
http://forests.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=46372
(109) Science, Vol. 308, Issue 5727, 1429, 3 June 2005, & Disappearing Arctic Lakes L. C. Smith,1* Y. Sheng,2 G. M. MacDonald,1 L. D. Hinzman3

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=32112

FAIRBANKS -- Interior Alaska's permafrost has warmed in some places to the highest level since the ice age ended 10,000 years ago, its temperature now within a degree or two of thawing. Earth frozen since woolly mammoths and bison wandered Interior steppes has been turning to mush. Lakes have been shrinking. Trees are stressed. Prehistoric ice has melted underground, leaving voids that collapse into sinkholes.

Largely concentrated where people have disturbed the surface, such damage can be expensive, even heartbreaking. It's happening now in Fairbanks: Toppled spruce, roller-coaster bike trails, rippled pavement, homes and buildings that sag into ruin. And the meltdown is spreading in wild areas: sinkholes, dying trees, eroding lakes. These collapses bode ill: They are omens of what scientists fear will happen on a large scale across the Arctic if water and air continue to warm as fast as climate models predict.

"So far, we have only some local places where permafrost is thawing naturally," said expert Vladimir Romanovksy, a Russian-born geophysicist at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "But we are very, very close to this point when it (all) starts to thaw." After record high temperatures during the summer of 2004 and last winter's deep insulating snow, Romanovsky said he expects Interior permafrost will again be significantly warmer than normal this year -- still closer to melting.

EDIT

For a glimpse of that future, look no farther than the hills north of Fairbanks, near where Romanovsky lives with his wife and two of his three sons. In a meadow on his mother-in-law's property, weird six-foot-deep channels and holes crisscross the ground, trenches and bomb pits from what amounts to thermal warfare. A small hole opened up in the sod a few years ago, curving down into the earth like some gopher den. This spring, his sons and other children playing near the house discovered the bottom had fallen out. The cavity was now large enough to bury a person. No one has crawled down to see where it ends. Romanovksy discourages his sons playing in the field. "It is not safe," he said.

EDIT


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=28934

[amandabeech]

18. I very frequently read your posts over on the Energy and Environment forum

but I missed these two, or at least I forced myself to forget them because they are just too scarey. As I have written previously, I thank you for your excellent posts.

There is very, very little that we can do to offset this terrible situation, both politically and technically. Even if we could generate the political will to do without fossil fuels, and the technical ability to support 6 billion people without them, as well as employ every carbon sequestration method would could think of, it appears that the feedback loop would not be stopped.

I guess that all we can do is use as little fossil fuel as possible now, and try to enjoy every reasonable weather day and the current state of the outdoors as we can.

[conflictgirl]

8. But how can this possibly be? Bush said global warming wasn't real!

:sarcasm:

[Vinca]

13. As a resident of the northeast, I couldn't be happier.

The -25 days will now be a toasty -7.

[JNelson6563]

14. I predict heavy snows this year in the north

I don't think we will see as many bitter cold days but we will see lots of snow. It'll cost all those elderly folks a lot more to get plowed out this year with the cost of gas so high for the plow trucks.

Julie

[HereSince1628]

16. And global warming will not stop the shoveling in my lifetime...

Personally I'd rather have snow than 36 F and rain, even if I have to shovel it.

[JNelson6563]

17. Many are not healthy/strong enough to shovel

I don't mind the snow at all, it is so beautiful and it's power is awesome....but there are many who heavy snows present a big hardship for. This will be a hard winter for them.

Julie