By Michael D. Lemonick

On Monday, Harold Shapiro, a former president of and current economics professor at Princeton University, formally presented the United Nations with a report assessing the procedures of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had come under intense criticism for months, beginning with the so-called “climategate” affair late in 2009 and continuing with the discovery of a few errors in the panel’s most recent report, issued in 2007 (most notably the “glaciergate” misstep in reporting how quickly Himalayan glaciers will melt). Critics also accused the IPCC’s Chairman, Rajendra K. Pachauri, of conflicts of interest related to his financial dealings.

To get an independent assessment of the workings of the climate panel, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. vice president Al Gore in 2007, the U.N. turned to the InterAcademy Council (IAC), made up of representatives from 18 national science academies, which in turn recruited Shapiro to head up an investigative committee. The committee’s mandate: address deficiencies, real and perceived, in the IPCC process.

Yesterday, Shapiro spoke with Climate Central about the report and about the reactions it has received. Here is a lightly edited transcript of the interview.

ML: Has the press done a good job of reporting accurately on your report?

HS: Overall I’d say yes, it is a pretty fair treatment, especially if you overlook the headlines and read the actual articles. There are some publications that are pursuing their own objectives and distorting the message. We made some comments to the effect that [the IPCC] ought to be more careful in using non-peer-reviewed literature, and one headline came out in Europe saying we said: “the data is terrible.” Of course, we said nothing of the kind. But I think overall what I’ve seen so far has been reasonable.

ML: What about press reports saying you urged IPCC Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri to resign?

HS: [The report] does not say anything of [the] kind. It says that the whole senior leadership of IPCC – not only the chair but the senior co-chairs, in all, about eight or nine people – should serve for a period of only one assessment [the 2007 report was the fourth such assessment since the IPCC was formed in 1988], simply because we believe this area is so dynamic, and with so many different perspectives, that we all could benefit from some freshness in approach, some freshness in each assessment.

It was beyond our charter to even look at whether the current leadership was adequate or inadequate or super-terrific, and so we did not look. This suggestion [of term limits], from our point of view, does not come from any lack of confidence in the current director. It’s something we simply did not address.

IPCC Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri.
Credit: Wikipedia Commons.

HS: We don’t recommend any change in the director’s position. We do propose a new position called executive director, who would head the secretariat in Geneva. We believe that should be a senior scientist, responsible for day-to-day operations of the secretariat and of the overall assessment. Someone who could really talk on a peer-to-peer basis with the working group co-chairs, and provide a better level of support for the working groups, which consist of hundreds of scientists all around the world.

ML: How do you go about assessing whether the IPCC is doing a good or bad job? Is there some other institution you can measure it against?

HS: The IPCC is a very unique organization. I think of it as an important social innovation to be able to bring together, under a decentralized framework, this vast array of scientists from all around the world. To produce a coherent report on such an important subject is an enormous accomplishment…. Our charge here was not to review the science, but simply to ask, “are their policies and practices set up in such a way as to minimize errors and generally achieve the authoritative nature they seek in the report?”

And so once you ask the question that way, it’s not a unique organization; it’s just a quality control problem. Not that it’s a simple problem, but it’s something you can look at whether you’re a climate scientist or not, and regardless of what background you come from, as long as you have experience in quality control. If you’ve been the editor of Nature or Science or any number of other organizations or had other posts in a research establishment, you know what quality control is, and that’s essentially what we were after.

ML: Did you go back into the history of the IPCC?

HS: We did go back. We didn’t write a history of IPCC; we were focused on its procedures and practices. But we did have to go into its history, inevitably, since it sits at the intersection between policy and science. You had to explore this, and how it was handled, just to see whether procedures were effective or not.

So to give you an example, we looked at how they handle and communicate uncertainty. Uncertainty is a huge problem in this area -- just as in all areas of science, there’s always a marginal uncertainty in what you’re assessing. All science is uncertain. We only believe it until it’s proven wrong.

And so it becomes a matter of risk management. We looked very carefully at the question of how they communicate the level of uncertainty to policy makers. Do they do this effectively or ineffectively? We found out it was a mix. Sometimes they do it well, sometimes not so well. And so we made a series of recommendations about how they might communicate and deal with uncertainty as a general proposition, since all science is faced with that problem.

ML: You found that different sections of the IPCC reports dealt with uncertainty in different ways.

HS: They dealt with it in different ways, which is by itself not inappropriate; these working groups dealt with different areas of scholarship, and there are different amounts of evidence. There’s more contention over the evidence in some areas than in others.

But risk management is a science by itself, and there are ways of dealing with it. And our view is that the IPCC had pretty good guidance in this respect, but didn’t always follow it, especially in the summary for policymakers, which as you know summarizes a very large number of pages down to a small number. There were statements made where they expressed high confidence in a conclusion where there was very little evidence, and sometimes there were statements made which could not be falsified.

So to give you an example, they say it’s going to be cold in Eastern Europe. That’s probably true, but not very interesting -- there’s no date associated with it. There were statements like that type, especially in the summary for policymakers, which I think -- I’m guessing now -- came out as they were trying to agree, governments trying to agree on how to phrase things, and where there were different interests, different values, different concerns of different governments, and they came up with statements that they all agree on. But they agree on essentially nothing.

I should say that even though we found errors of this type -- and I was very surprised, because I thought that by this time every error that could possibly be in there would have been found, but we found some new ones -- they were not major errors. They were not distorting facts in any significant way that we could understand. But they do undermine the credibility and authority of the report as long as they’re there. Now, in a report that’s a couple of thousand pages, you’ll always have some errors -- hopefully minor ones -- so we made a number of recommendations, just to improve things in this area.

ML: Did you speak with people from outside the IPCC as well as inside?

HS: Yes, inside and outside -- supporters of IPCC and climate skeptics. We tried to get as varied a group as we could. We interviewed, and we sent out hundreds of questionnaires to, people who had spoken skeptically about IPCC and who had supported IPCC, and we got an enormous response. Many of them were very thoughtful. We also had public meetings, had both supporters and skeptics there. So we tried to approach this in as neutral a way as we could. I don’t want to claim that one is always perfectly neutral in these matters. But we tried to be very cautious in that respect because we knew it was such a controversial area.

ML: Did you hear from people who were angry?

HS: Oh, we talked to angry people, all right. There are people out there, some thoughtful people, who think the whole process ought to be abandoned. [They thought that] the whole thing was set up to demonstrate that humans were causing global warming, and guess what, they went out and found that humans were causing global warming. I think it’s understandable that some people feel that way, because [IPCC] were charged in the beginning with finding out the human contribution to climate change.

But it was our judgment that that wasn’t the case. We spoke to too many very thoughtful people who weren’t in any way dependent on IPCC or IPCC friends particularly, who really were very convinced by the science -- given always that there is a margin of uncertainty. Everybody recognizes that.

And as I’ve tried to explain to people, all science is tentative, so you’re always engaged in risk management. You’re never engaged in anything other than risk management….It’s like buying insurance -- you’ve heard that analogy many times. But it is like that. Nobody expects their house to go on fire tomorrow, but we all have fire insurance.

This is a different matter, of course, and it’s not so trivial as what I’ve suggested. But that’s what you’re faced with. Is it time to buy insurance? And if so, how much insurance do you want to buy? That’s really the question, and the more we know, the more certain we will be. Given the fact that we have all these enormous climate models with all the uncertainties built into them, these things happen on such extraordinary timescales, you don’t have that much past data -- there’s all sorts of ways to be uncertain. But nevertheless, the committee didn’t try to come to an opinion on this.

My own opinion, having reviewed a lot of this evidence for the first time very carefully, is that I would sure buy insurance. But that’s just my opinion. The committee didn’t focus on that.

ML: If your panel concluded generally that the IPCC’s procedure is reasonable, even if it could use improvement, doesn’t that implicitly suggest that the science is sound?

HS: Yes, I think that’s fair. It suggests that it was convincing enough -- this organization is not a fraud, this organization wasn’t perpetuating some sort of criminal act on us all -- in fact, it’s extraordinary the number of scientists who participated. I know of no other comparable situation.

The ozone situation might be comparable in some ways. It was a big, worldwide problem, not understood very well at the beginning. It took them a decade or two before they could come to the Montreal Protocol and begin to solve the problem. It wasn’t easy. Because even if you convinced every scientist in the U.S. and Great Britain and western Europe that this was a problem, it was a worldwide problem: you had to convince a lot of people and a lot of governments.

ML: You say the press reaction has been generally fair. What about reactions from scientists and policymakers?

HS: I’ve had many letters in the past few days, emails, letters, from scientists, including well-known skeptics, like Roger Pielke, and John Christy at the University of Alabama, who both said this was a very positive step. Christy said, if they do this, if they adapt both the letter and the spirit of what you’ve said, things would be a lot better. So…I’m not sure that everybody feels that way. I don’t scan the blogosphere, so I don’t know what’s going on over there. But many skeptics -- or people who are classified as skeptics, and I don’t mean that in a pejorative way….Christy, I think, is a very thoughtful person and really cares about what he’s doing. He came to our committee at a time when it was extremely difficult for him to do and yet he made an effort to do it, and I have a lot of respect for him.

So a lot of these people say “this doesn’t solve all these problems, this doesn’t do away with a lot of the issues, but it would help strengthen the organization.” And I think it’s fair to say that our committee feels, and even many of the skeptics feel, that if you didn’t have IPCC you’d have to invent something like it. Someone like Nigel Lawson in Great Britain, the former chancellor of the exchequer, who is almost a violent critic of IPCC, he just thinks that we ought to toss it out and forget it and think of something else. I think very few of the skeptics actually believe that. They want major changes, they might want different approaches, different procedures, that’s my sense of it, but I’ve had very positive responses. I’m sure there are negative responses out there, you just have to look a little harder.

ML: Who decides whether to accept your recommendations?

HS: Well that’s up to the panel [the IPCC]. The panel, of course, are the governments that established IPCC in the first place, of course under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization and U.N. Environment Program, and they meet in plenary session in Korea, in the middle of October, which is why they wanted our report by August 30th. They’re the ones that decide.

There are some recommendations which the IPCC director, the working group chairs, could implement on their own -- they may be important, but they don’t involve anything structurally important. We have some recommendations on how you communicate uncertainty, recommendations on the review process, recommendations on conflict of interest policy that would not require the panel to do anything. It’s just the leadership of IPCC that would have to decide to do it.

There are other recommendations, such as reorganizing the secretariat, appointing an executive director and so on, which really can only be done if the panel decides that’s a useful recommendation.

ML: How quickly could such changes reasonably be made?

HS: We think all of our recommendations, if they’re thought to be helpful and useful, could in our view be implemented in the Fifth Assessment [which is currently in progress]. It’ s my own judgment that when people say you have to wait for the Sixth Assessment, it’s just a way of postponing action.

ML: You could even replace the current Chairman?

HS: It’s all a question of what the panel wants to do. The current chair… I want to make clear it’s not a recommendation that he should resign. When I briefed him on the report, that’s the first question he asked me. And I said that was not our intention. He has spoken about this in the press in the last couple of days, saying this was up to the panel to decide, but as far as he was concerned—this was how I interpreted what he said—he’d like to carry through a lot of these changes as the Fifth Assessment goes on. Just how that will happen, what the panel will feel, I really don’t have any idea.

ML: Any other points you’d like to make?

HS: We talked a lot about communications. Since this is a matter of great public interest and public concern, you’ve got to find some way -- it’s not just scientists talking to themselves -- this is something you’ve got to be able to communicate to policy makers and the public at large. Everyone believes that the IPCC’s communications capacity is awful. So we have in the report…a set of recommendations. But it’s not an easy problem. There’s just a small number of people who can really communicate to both sides -- speak to scientists, understand what they do, and speak to the public, which speaks a different language and so on. This is an important issue.

I briefed the State Department on this report yesterday, and we talked about communications, and the guy from the State Department said to me, "you’re not suggesting the IPCC has the capacity to do this, are you?” I don’t know what they’re going to do about this in the end, but my sense is that they’re going to have to rely, if they want to take this on, they’ll have to rely on some external people.

 

By Andrew Freedman

The summer of 2010 was a scorcher in many parts of the world, including the eastern U.S., where Washington, D.C. and New York, N.Y. broke records for their warmest summer since recordkeeping began. According to the Washington Post's "Capital Weather Gang" blog, (full discosure: I write a weekly climate science column for that site) this year marked the first time that city has experienced an average summer high temperature that was greater than 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures in D.C. reached or exceeded the 90 degree threshold on 52 days during June, July, and August, which together comprise the meteorological summer months. The average low temperature this summer was also far above average in D.C., with 71 days having had a low temperature of 70 degrees or higher, the Post reported.

Meanwhile, in New York, the National Weather Service (NWS) said the summer of 2010, with an average temperature of 77.8 degrees, had beaten the previous record of 77.3 degrees, which dates back to 1966. Records have been kept at Central Park since 1869. The high temperature on August 31, for example, was 96 degrees, which was 17 degrees above average, and September 1st was projected to reach the upper 90s once again.

The heat did not grip the entire country, however. The West Coast, for example, was remarkably cool during much of the summer, as detailed here yesterday. So far this year global temperatures have been soaring to record levels, but the global data for August won't be in until later this month.

Computer model simulations that take into account increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, show that the summer of 2010 may be a harbinger of what's to come for many areas by the middle of the century. Climate Central's "Postcards From the Future" illustrate how a warming climate may increase the number of days that reach 90 degrees or greater during the summer months.

Tiny Sea Creatures Shed Light on West Antartic Melting

During the last warm interval between the ice ages -- a time, about 130,000-114,000 years ago, known as the Eemian period -- the Earth got warmer than it is today, and sea level rose higher. And since we’re currently heading for warmer temperatures again, thanks in large part to human generated greenhouse gases, scientists are looking back at the Eemian for clues about what our own future might look like.

One more clue has just been published, in the journal Global Change Biology. Much of the rise in Eemian sea level -- about five meters, or 16 1/2 feet higher than it is today -- presumably came from ice melting off Greenland. But some probably came from Antarctica as well, and sea creatures known as bryozoans seem to confirm that idea.

Field researchers from the British Antarctic Survey have shown that colonies of bryozoans on opposite sides of the West Antarctic Sheet are more similar to each other than they are to bryozoans along the nearby coast. This suggests that they were in direct biological communication sometime in the past -- suggesting in turn that a seaway once existed in a region that’s now buried under thousands of feet of ice. As the paper’s lead author David Barnes says in a press release on the British Antarctic Survey website: 

“The West Antarctic Ice Sheet can be considered the Achilles heel of Antarctica and because any collapse will have implications for future sea level rise it’s important that scientists get a better understanding of big deglaciation events. This biological evidence is one of the novel ways that we look for clues that help us reconstruct Antarctica’s ice sheet history. Our new research provides compelling evidence that a seaway stretching across West Antarctica could have opened up only if the ice sheet had collapsed in the past.”

Flying Over Earl; No Pilot Required

As Hurricane Earl bears down for its closest encounter with the U.S. mainland, which could happen as early as Thursday night, scientists are preparing for a first-ever hurricane flyover with unpiloted drones. The aircraft, known as the Global Hawk, which was originally developed by the U.S. military, could give researchers an unprecedented look at how such a storm behaves and evolves. The storm-chasing version of the Global Hawk has been fitted with radar and other equipment that will let it peer down and into tropical storms for hours on end.

That’s key to seeing the rapid changes that can characterize these giant storms. Geosynchronous satellites can watch from afar without blinking, but they can only see what’s going on at the very top of a hurricane; and the piloted aircraft that fly directly into hurricanes or fly along their periphery can stay inside for only a few hours at a time before they have to go home and refuel. The Global Hawk, by contrast, can in principle stay aloft for 30 hours at a stretch. 

Such a feat of endurance won’t happen this time, though, since the drone is based at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in southern California, and it has to fly across the entire U.S. before it reaches the Atlantic. “It could have nine hours or so above Earl,” says University of Utah atmospheric scientist Ed Zipser, one of the program scientists with NASA’s Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP) experiment -- for which the Global Hawk is one element. “If we get a Gulf hurricane later in the season,” he says, “we might get 16-18 hours.” In the future, the scientists hope to base the Global Hawk at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to save all that extra flight time.

This won’t be the maiden flight of NASA's Global Hawk; it just came back from a test run in the Pacific to watch Hurricane Frank as it weakened into a tropical depression a few days ago. But this will be its first flight over a full-fledged Atlantic Hurricane -- and if it works out as planned, the drone could fly eight more missions this season, and even more next year. 

As for Zipser himself, he  might be flying into Earl on a NASA DC-8, taking complementary readings while the Hawk flies above -- or he may be on the ground, helping coordinate the flow of information. “I’ll see what my colleagues want me to do,” he says.

People along the West Coast from Seattle to San Diego, who have shivered through an unusually cool summer, can be forgiven for being just a little bit jealous of residents of the East Coast, where warm temperature records have repeatedly been smashed this summer. During June, July and part of August as well, it seemed that many coastal areas of the West were missing out on summer entirely.  

For example, whereas Washington, D.C. tied its record for the warmest month on record, with an average temperature of 83.1 degrees F in July, San Francisco, Calif. recorded its coolest average July maximum temperature since 1971. Only one day reached the 70 degree mark in San Francisco during July. The Climate Central infographic above shows some of the contrasting statistics from early to mid-summer. The data goes through the end of July, but in general the pattern of warmer weather in the East and cooler conditions along the West Coast has continued through much of August, with a few exceptions. For example, a heat wave briefly brought record warmth to the West Coast in mid-to-late August, but such heat was the exception there this summer. 

The cool temperatures along parts of the West Coast may be related to the emergence of a La Nina event in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, which is characterized by cooler-than-average water temperatures. In addition, an area of cool waters persisted offshore of California, Oregon and Washington, and this may have contributed to the below average conditions as well. Persistent onshore winds blew cooler air into coastal California during July, according to the National Climatic Data Center. The cool water temperatures off the California coast, extending northward into the Gulf of Alaska, can be seen in the image below, along with the La Nina conditions along the equator. 

Review of Climate Panel Recommends Organizational Changes, But Reaffirms Scientific Findings

Back in March, United Nations officials decided they had to respond to a series of attacks on the credibility of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was founded by the U.N. and World Meteorological Organization in 1988. Among other things, critics asserted that the most recent IPCC assessment report, which was published in 2007, contained errors, and that its authors failed to properly assess uncertainties in projections of future climate. Critics also said the IPCC Chairman, Rajendra K. Pachauri, might be guilty of conflicts of interest (an accusation that evidently didn’t have much substance) and more.

So the U.N. went to a body called the InterAcademy Council, made up of representatives from 18 national science academies in major countries including the U.S., France, the U.K., Germany and China. The Council in turn recruited Harold Shapiro, a Princeton economist and the university’s president emeritus, to run an independent investigation.

That investigation is now complete, the report written and the verdict in. “The Committee found that the IPCC assessment process has been successful overall,” says the Executive Summary. "However the world has changed considerably since the creation of the IPCC, with major advances in climate science, heated controversy on some climate-related issues, and an increased focus of governments on the impacts and potential responses to changing climate… The IPCC must continue to adapt to these changing conditions in order to continue serving society well in the future,” the report states.

In other words, just as human society must adapt to a changing climate, so must the IPCC adapt to a new environment, with greater demands for information on climate impacts, and a need to establish a more transparent and nimble structure to respond to any controversies that may arise.

We’ll be posting an interview with Dr. Shapiro later in the week, but the specific recommendations—condensed and translated from report-ese into English are, more or less:

• The IPCC should create an Executive Committee to run the organization in between major conferences.
   
• Rather than have the IPCC director serve for two six-year terms, a new director should be appointed for each major assessment report (there have been four so far). Since the IPCC is well into the fifth assessment, it isn’t clear whether Dr. Pachauri will step down (he’s evidently said that any decision will have to wait for the next IPCC meeting, in Korea in October).
   
• The reviewers who decide what makes it into the final report and what doesn’t should work harder to address comments from authors, and to let dissenting views be reflected more fully in the finished product.
   
• Statements about certainties and uncertainties about climate science need to be more explicit, need to be based on a more uniform set of criteria, and need to be clearer about how they were calculated.
   
• The IPCC in general needs to be more open and transparent about how it goes about its business.
   
• The IPCC needs to improve the way it deals with so-called “grey literature” -- that is, non-peer-reviewed reports that contain valuable information, but which haven’t already been subjected to strict scientific scrutiny.

This last point is key, since at least one of the so-called “scandals” that raised eyebrows last winter -- the so-called “glaciergate” affair (scroll down to the entry titled “Himalayan Glaciers”), in which the IPCC’s Nobel-winning Fourth Assessment Report suggested that the Himalayas could be 80 percent glacier-free by 2035 -- was based on largely unsubstantiated information from a report that had not been peer-reviewed.

Here’s what the InterAcademy Committee said, in part, on that topic:

"Although some respondents to the Committee’s questionnaire have recommended that only peer-reviewed literature be used in IPCC assessments, this would require the IPCC to ignore some valuable information…" The report added: "The current IPCC procedure requires authors to critically assess unpublished or non-peer-reviewed sources, reviewing their quality and validity before incorporating them (Appendix D)…"

The report also stated: "Although the Committee finds that IPCC’s procedures in this respect are adequate, it is clear that these procedures are not always followed. Some of the errors discovered in the Fourth Assessment Report had been attributed to poor handling of unpublished or non-peer-reviewed sources. Moreover, a search through the Working Group reports of the  fourth assessment found few instances of information flagged as unpublished or non-peer- reviewed."

The committee also issued this recommendation, which if followed could help ordinary citizens understand what the IPCC actually is and what it does, and could greatly improve the organization's ability to respond to questions that arise regarding its work. This could go a long way toward keeping public misinformation to a minimum. As the report stated:

"The IPCC should complete and implement a communications strategy that emphasizes transparency, rapid and thoughtful responses, and relevance to stakeholders, and which includes guidelines about who can speak on behalf of IPCC and how to represent the organization appropriately."

The bottom line message, as I see it is: the IPCC boat is a bit leaky. Let’s tighten things up.

The blogosphere, meanwhile, where much of the original criticism was reported and amplified, is beginning to react -- but surprisingly slowly. Roger Pielke, Jr. characterized the report this way:

"It is an excellent, thoughtful report. While the report focuses on procedural questions and does not address any questions of scientific content, its recommendations have far-reaching substantive implications, such as for how to deal with uncertainty. The report also directly addresses difficult subjects such as conflict of interest, policy advocacy and tenure of the IPCC chairman."

If you look at the climate skeptic blog Watts Up With That?, however, you’ll get the false impression that the report is some sort of scathing indictment; the headline reads:

"IAC slams IPCC process, suggests removal of top officials."

Hurricane Earl Intensifies, Set to Give Eastern Seaboard at Least a Glancing Blow

After lashing the Netherlands Antilles Sunday night into Monday, Hurricane Earl has undergone a period of rapid intensification and was packing maximum sustained winds of 135 miles per hour as of 5 p.m. on Monday afternoon. The storm is expected to batter Puerto Rico with wind and rain, although the island should be spared a direct hit. Earl will be steered around an area of high pressure over the Western Atlantic, and be pulled to the north/northeast by an approaching front over the eastern United States late in the week.

The key question for forecasters right now is: how far west does Earl get before it makes that turn. Right now, it looks like Earl may come close enough to impact parts of the coastline, such as the Outer Banks of North Carolina and Cape Cod, Massachusetts, by the end of the week. A landfall is not the most likely scenario, but it is within the realm of possibility. Stay tuned to our twitter feed @climatecentral and check out our hurricane feature page to find out the latest on Earl, as well as background videos and news stories detailing how forecasters track these storms, and what the the relationship is between climate change and hurricanes.

By Michael D. Lemonick

Back in the 1920’s, the cartoonist Rube Goldberg became a household name by drawing a seemingly endless series of fanciful and absurd contraptions in which a simple action, such as pushing a lever, would lead to an unfolding mechanical drama. The lever might drop a ball into a chute, where it would roll to the bottom and knock a wheel into motion, which in turn would activate a scissors that would cut a rope... You get the idea.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that when scientists began to wrestle with the potential impact of human-generated greenhouse gases, they often used Goldberg’s machines as an analogy. Earth’s climate is a complex, interrelated system involving the land, atmosphere, biosphere, and oceans. If you push on a lever by pumping extra CO2 into the air, it sets off a cascade of events — warming air; warming oceans; melting ice; changes in evaporation, vegetation, ocean currents, wind patterns and more — which themselves push on the system in various ways, leading to more changes, which further alter the system, and so on.

Over decades, improvements in observations of the present climate, reconstructions of ancient climate, and computer models that simulate past, current, and future climate have reduced some of the uncertainty in forecasting how rising temperatures will ripple through the climate system. Except, that is, when it comes to clouds. No variable has more confounded climate scientists than how clouds will react to — and influence — a warming world.

NASA Satellite technology allows
scientists to localize clouds in
3-D and associate different cloud
types with their amount of
solar reflection.

And although researchers are still far from certain whether an anticipated increase in cloudiness will further heat up the planet or offset the warming a bit, a growing consensus among climate modelers is that clouds will increase, rather than hold back, the warming triggered by greenhouse gases. That’s largely because water vapor itself is a powerful greenhouse gas, which means that clouds should trap more heat than they are likely to reflect back into space.

Still, at this point, few climate scientists would be willing to stake their reputations on a definitive forecast of how clouds will impact the climate system in coming decades and centuries. Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider, in an e-mail written just a week or so before his untimely death on July 19, said, “Cloud feedback has been uncertain by a factor of 3 since I did the first paper with that title nearly 40 years ago — we are still no closer to an answer.”

Many of Schneider’s colleagues would argue that they are farther along in understanding cloud “feedbacks” than that. But the uncertainty is understandable, given the many variables at play in studying the effect of clouds on a warmer planet: What types of clouds will form and at what altitude, what particles will the clouds form around, and how can modelers go from predicting the ways any given bank of clouds might behave as opposed to forecasting how the effects on systems of clouds on a regional or global scale? Then there is the problem that, unlike temperature readings — which have been taken in many parts of the globe for more than a century — cloud observations have been far less complete.

Given the uncertainties, it’s no surprise that climate skeptics, including prominent ones like Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, have argued that vagaries in the response of clouds undercut the reliability of climate projections.

Despite the many unknowns, however, Dave Randall, a cloud modeler at Colorado State University, insists that “we do know a lot about clouds. We just don’t know enough. We’re not in the infant stages of understanding any more; we’re in first or second grade, and on the way to adolescence.”

A Challenge for Climate Modelers

Generally, in a warming world, scientists expect more evaporation of the oceans, leading to more water vapor in the atmosphere and more cloudiness. That would probably increase surface temperatures, but clouds block the sun, keeping some of its energy from heating the Earth’s surface, which should hold the warming back. That’s the case, at least, if they’re low-level clouds; high-altitude cirrus clouds are much less reflective, so they tend to enhance warming. And more water in the atmosphere might not lead to more cloudiness anyway: A warmer atmosphere needs more H2O to become saturated — the fundamental requirement for cloud formation.

A major problem facing climate modelers is extrapolating the behavior and impacts of clouds from an individual level to a regional scale. The resolution of climate models — the grid boxes researchers divide the atmosphere into for the purposes of simulations, analogous to the pixels that make up a digital image — is much bigger than any individual cloud. And, says Randall, what goes on inside those grid boxes in the real world varies widely depending on local conditions, including the type of particles around which water vapor condenses to form clouds.

If you pour lots of sunshine into, say, the Amazon basin, you’ll evaporate a lot of water from the surface, which favors cloud formation. But once the clouds form, they cast shadows, which cuts off evaporation. If you get a big plume of dust blowing off the Sahara, that dust absorbs solar radiation, creating a warm layer of air a kilometer or two above the ocean, which inhibits cloud formation. If ice particles in the upper atmosphere are a certain size, they’ll seed the formation of cirrus clouds — but if they’re a little too big, they can’t stay aloft, so clouds don’t form.

Randall cited one example of a huge regional cloud phenomenon in the tropics whose behavior in a warming world is uncertain. Known as the Madden-Julian Oscillation, the phenomenon involves the formation of enormous systems of thunderstorms over the oceans, driving weather patterns affecting millions of people. “Most models do not even produce this phenomenon, even though it’s the largest feature in tropical atmosphere,” said Randall. “If you’re missing that, you’re missing an important thing. We’d like to be able to predict whether it will get stronger and more common, or less.”

Climate scientists would obviously be far more confident in the models if the simulations of cloud behavior matched the real world. But just as with the computer models, observations of clouds have been too spotty to get an accurate picture of what’s going on. Meteorologists have been taking reasonably consistent readings of temperatures around the world for more than a century, which is why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can talk so confidently about the fact of global warming. But there’s no comparable data set on clouds, which means that “there’s really nothing we can say about how clouds have changed globally over the 20th century,” says Amy Clement, a climatologist at the University of Miami.

But that began to change about a decade ago with a set of satellite-borne NASA experiments known as “Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System,” or CERES. “What we measure,” says CERES principal investigator Norman Loeb, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, “is how much radiation is being reflected from the Earth and how much is being emitted, all the way from the top of the atmosphere down to the surface.”

When you combine that with data from other instruments that look at the physical properties of what’s going on down below — whether those emissions and reflections are coming from clouds, aerosols, or the surface itself — you can see where the clouds are and where they aren’t, how they ebb and flow, and, crucially, how their presence or absence correlates with changes in temperature. You can, in Loeb’s words, “unscramble the egg.” The bad news is that it will take several decades to unscramble it fully.

Over the past decade when scientists have finally begun to get high-quality, uninterrupted data on clouds, there have also been strong El Nino and La Nina events — the sort of short-term natural variations that can temporarily mask the underlying signal of climate change. “As you collect more data,” says Loeb, “the signal will emerge from that natural variability. In 15 or 20 years, it will start getting interesting.” Nevertheless, he says, the measurements so far suggest that there’s no strong negative climate feedback from clouds, and some indication of a positive feedback — just as the models have been forecasting.

Given the preliminary nature of these results, it’s too soon to rule out a negative cloud feedback. MIT’s Richard Lindzen, for example, has proposed a mechanism called the Iris Hypothesis that could in principle produce a cooling effect. The idea is that as the Earth warms, the increase in humidity leads to a change in the balance between heat-reflecting cumulus clouds and heat-trapping cirrus in the tropics, with the former increasing and the latter diminishing. The result would be a strong counterweight to greenhouse warming — not enough, perhaps, to overcome it, but enough to make the warming minimal.

The problem, says Clement, is that “there’s no empirical evidence for it.” Atmospheric scientist Bing Lin has used CERES data to test Lindzen’s hypothesis, finding that instead of a strong negative feedback, there’s actually a weak positive one.

Another set of real-world experiments is known collectively as the GEWEX Cloud System Study. (GEWEX stands for Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment). Scientists from different government agencies go out for several weeks at a time, using some combination of aircraft, ships, and remote sensing instruments to observe clouds in great detail on small scale. Then they compare the observations, not against global climate models, but against models that simulate clouds on those same scales. It’s a sort of bottom-up approach that’s helping inform the top-down models climate modelers use, says Anthony Del Genio, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

All of the evidence so far is only suggestive, not definitive, that clouds will accelerate warming. Yet most climate scientists say that the case is getting stronger. And researchers who remain uncertain about the impact of clouds on the climate say that even if clouds have a slight cooling effect, it will not be sufficient to put the brakes on human-caused warming.

“I’m as skeptical as any other scientist,” says Clement. “I still ask myself, ‘Do I really believe this global warming thing?’ I can’t just give students the party line. But the conclusion I come to is that it’s really hard to see anything in the data or models that suggest clouds can overwhelm the effects of CO2 on temperature.”

Del Genio comes to pretty much the same conclusion. “The only possible way to explain the warming we’ve experienced from 1970 onward,” he says, “is if the climate has a significant sensitivity to greenhouse gases. We’ve monitored volcanoes, the sun, pollution aerosols, and despite all of these things [which would tend to slow temperature increases], we’ve seen systematic warming. That’s telling us that even if clouds end up being a negative feedback, it couldn’t be large enough to offset the warming significantly.”

And cloud feedbacks could equally well end up being a more strongly positive feedback than the models are suggesting.

“In most things where uncertainty goes both ways, we tend to plan against the worst-case scenario,” says Del Genio. If you have high cholesterol, for example, you try to reduce it — even though high cholesterol doesn’t necessarily guarantee a heart attack. With climate change, he says, “We freely admit that we don’t understand everything. But if we’re anywhere close to being right, there’s significant warming in our future.”

(Reprinted, with permission, from Yale Environment 360)

More on the Sun-Climate Connnection

Graphic of a satellite observing a distant star.
Credit: UCAR/Institute of Astrophysics of the
Canaries.

A brightening Sun has largely been debunked as the reason for rising global temperatures over the past half-century or so. But that doesn’t mean solar changes can’t influence climate. In the first half of the 20th century, in fact, solar brightening may indeed have been a major factor in global warming. Changes in Earth’s orientation to the Sun, meanwhile, are believed to have triggered the start and end of ice ages over the past many hundreds of thousands of years.

More recently, solar physicists have been watching the Sun go through a period of unusual inactivity, with fewer sunspots than normal —which usually goes with an overall Solar dimming. They even thought the Sun might be entering a new version of the Maunder Minimum, when sunspots were depressed for decades, and the world went though an especially cold period that included the Little Ice Age.

It’s not entirely clear what triggered the recent drop in sunspot activity, although solar physicists have some ideas. It’s also unclear whether the even more recent recovery means things are back to normal—but either way, a complete understanding of climate isn’t possible without a good understanding of how the Sun waxes and wanes.

Which is why a new study out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research is potentially so important. A team of scientists observed, not the Sun, but a Sun-like star about 100 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. What they were looking for was not sunspots—far too small to be seen at that distance—but vibrations in the body of the star. Stars, it turns out, vibrate like gigantic, very hot blobs of jello, and using a technique known as astroseismology, astronomers can map those vibrations with great precision (when it’s used on the Sun, it’s called heleoseismology.

What they found, in short, was that this star vibrates much as our Sun does, and in a way that proves it too, goes through regular sunspot cycles. It’s far too early to draw any conclusions about how a changing Sun might or might not accelerate or hold back global warming over the next few centuries. But by understanding how stars behave in general, it could ultimately be easier to predict what our own particular and very important star is likely to do.

Antarctica from the Warmth of Your Own Home

As you head into one of your last full weekends of the summer, we thought we would leave you with some Antarctic eye-candy.  Recently posted on TED.com is a presentation made by Wall Street Journal science journalist Lee Hotz. The video is less than 10 minutes long but is brimming with stunning visuals of an exploration site from Antarctica known as WAIS Divide, where researchers are drilling Antarctic ice cores to learn more about the history of earth’s climate.



The comments stream at the bottom of the video indicates that viewers were none too pleased that Hotz didn’t present more data. The truth of the matter is that – in addition to the fact that Hotz isn’t a scientist with the project – the data just doesn’t exist yet. As he emphasizes at the 1:48 min. mark, “what we don’t know is the exact, precise, immediate impact of these changes on natural climate patterns.” The entire focus of the project, which is still ongoing, is to find answers to how the climate has changed in the past, when such changes took place, and maybe even answers into the all important question of why?

Yes, it is unusual to tell people that scientists are seeking out information, rather than waiting to tell them once the scientists have figured it all out. But here Hotz so clearly explains why we need to study ice core data and how scientists actually conduct such work that the presentation is still meaningful.

"The ice of Antarctica is a calendar of climate change. It records the annual rise and fall of greenhouse gases and temperatures going back before the onset of the last ice ages" -- Lee Hotz

The project Hotz talks about in Antarctica also reminds us of the NEEM Project in Greenland that we’ve previously reported on in both blog and video formats. Though they are on opposite ends of the planet, the two ice core projects are expected to yield equally rich climate history data in the years to come.

Satellite image of Hurricane Katrina making landfall in
southeastern Louisiana on August 29, 2005.
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

When geoscientist Torbjörn Törnqvist decided to relocate his research group from the University of Illinois to Tulane University in New Orleans, he knew full well there might be some bumps along the way. In addition to setting up a new lab and learning the ropes at a new university, he was leaving a city he had called home for six years. 

But while he was prepared for these setbacks when he moved in the summer of 2005, he didn’t anticipate that his welcoming committee would include Hurricane Katrina – one of the worst hurricanes the United States has ever experienced. 

Törnqvist took up refuge from the storm with a friend in Texas, but when, six weeks later, he made his way back to “The Big Easy,” he discovered that his new Earth and Environmental Sciences department was not the same one he had signed on to join just a few months earlier. 

“There were a lot of changes,” he recalls. “We ended up losing half of our faculty members.” Throughout the rest of 2005 and much of 2006, five researchers left the department. Some, whose houses or research projects were destroyed by the floods, never came back to New Orleans after the evacuation. Others found that living in the post-Katrina landscape was simply too complicated and depressing. It was early evidence of a kind of post-Katrina “brain drain” of scientists from research institutions across the city, including Tulane, Xavier University and Louisiana State University’s Health Sciences Center, that otherwise could have helped New Orleans rebuild and prepare for future storms.

Though many academic groups at Tulane and around New Orleans lost talented scientists, the exodus from Törnqvist’s department was one of the worst immediately following the hurricane. It foreshadowed the difficult times ahead for the entire research community left behind in New Orleans. And for the city itself, which in the years after Katrina was in dire need of experts that could help evaluate why the city’s flood defenses failed, and plan how to reduce the risks of damages from future storms, the loss of some of New Orleans’ top scientists threatened to slow the city’s recovery. 

Katrina Aftermath at Tulane

Tulane University’s campus, situated in a historic area of downtown New Orleans, suffered $500 million in damage as a result of the storm, included flooding in the library and the computing facilities, which left the entire campus community without email access for months. In the weeks immediately following the hurricane, the university’s priority was to locate its employees and students, a tough task when those thousands of people had no internet or phone connections. 

Stephen Nelson, the chair of earth and environmental studies at Tulane, recalls the struggle to contact everyone. “It took me two months just to locate faculty, staff and graduate students and to make sure they were all still being paid,” he says.

And then, for the first time since the Civil War, Tulane actually closed its doors and suspended classes indefinitely. As was widely publicized in 2005, the undergraduate class from Tulane was welcomed warmly by hundreds of colleges around the country. Fewer people have heard, however, that many of Tulane’s faculty also took refuge at other institutions, in hopes of continuing their research. By the time classes in New Orleans started again in January 2006, a number of faculty members had already decided not to return. 

Adding to the turnover was a restructuring plan Tulane announced in December 2005, which was designed to transition Tulane into a post-Katrina era and offset the soaring costs the university faced after the storm.

“As appropriate, Tulane’s programs will be shaped by the university’s direct experience with the unprecedented natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina,” read the university’s press release for their renewal plan. “This experience will provide faculty, staff and students with equally unprecedented research, learning and community service opportunities that will have a lasting and profound impact on them, the city of New Orleans, the Gulf Coast region, and other communities around the world.”

While the university claimed the reorganization was driven by a motivation to help the university connect with the city and the region, it involved the closure of nearly all of the engineering departments on campus, including mechanical, civil and environmental engineering – expertise New Orleans would need to rebuild itself. For Nicole Gasparini, an earth scientist who joined Tulane in 2008, the university’s decision to eliminate the engineering department was surprising. 

“I’m sure there were politics that went into it, but coming in with my background, I can’t understand why you would get rid of something like that in a place like this,” she says. Gasparini, who trained as an engineer before taking up her current research position, questions the decision to do away with a training program for engineers in a city that depends on that kind of knowledge base for its complicated infrastructure. “It just seems strange.” 

The university defended its decision to close most of the engineering departments, even during a time when engineers could help rebuild New Orleans. According to Nicholas Altiero, dean of Tulane’s Science and Engineering School, the decision was difficult but was made because those departments were particularly costly. In addition, the university wanted to shift its resources into the academic areas that it was better known for. “Not everyone agrees with all the decisions that were made by the president and the board (and I expressed my disagreement when that announcement was made), but there is no doubt in my mind that their quick and decisive action saved our university,” Altiero said in an interview with IEEE Spectrum in 2007. In addition to training and educating local students, Tulane and other universities in New Orleans attract thousands of students from other parts of the country, and provide the city with a steady stream of revenue. Tulane is the city’s largest employer, with more than 4,500 employees. With these institutions comprising an essential component of the New Orleans community – both scientifically and culturally – their post-Katrina development path had an unavoidable impact on the entire region. 

Plugging the Brain Drain

If the news of Tulane’s renewal plan, announced before the school had even reopened, was intended to boost the morale of those that remained at the university, the effect did not immediately take hold. Surrounded by a city that was still awash in hurricane damage, the university fought to repair itself while many departments struggled to keep operating. 

“The first few years after the storm were incredibly stressful,” says Törnqvist, who was the only new professor hired in the summer of 2005 that returned to Tulane. “We were down to a small number of faculty but we just had to keep things going.”

But as departments began recruiting for new faculty members, the university had to contend with the city’s tarnished reputation. Even more difficult was the recruitment of graduate students, which is the foundation of most strong research programs. 

"The [2006] year was not a good recruiting year," says Nelson, of his department. "We had no new graduate students join."

But in the next year, Nelson says his department may have been saved by the fact that following the storm, many earth scientists from outside of Louisiana suddenly became interested in the research prospects in the Gulf Coast region. “Louisiana is a kind of natural laboratory for climate change [research],” he says. “New Orleans itself has become a good recruiting tool.”

The opportunity to closely monitor rapid changes in the area’s landscape is a natural draw for geologists, hydrologists and sediment specialists. Törnqvist himself studies the impact of sea level rise on coastal wetlands, and he says there is no better place to study this than in Louisiana. Even in the midst of the storm, he says he always knew he would stay at Tulane.

“I actually never considered leaving. I knew it was very bad [in New Orleans] but I also felt that this whole new situation that developed had so many connections with what I work on that this was where I had to be,” he explained.

Regaining a Research Community

It has been five years since Hurricane Katrina blew into New Orleans. In many ways the city is still recovering. But as the city works to revive itself, much of the research community has already blossomed again. 

Nelson says that for him, the New Orleans area has “become a very interesting place to do research” since 2005. After walking around the city in the storm’s wake, he even changed his area of research in order to study why the levees failed during the hurricane. 

And while nearly all of the engineering departments at Tulane had dissolved by the summer of 2007, with some professors moving to other universities and others opening private engineering firms in the area, the university has not eradicated engineering experts from its faculty entirely. Instead, the university is incorporating engineers into other foundational science departments, including chemistry, physics, and environmental science. Gasparini, one of four new professors hired by Nelson’s department since 2007, is an example of this effort to maintain engineering collaborations throughout the campus. 

With so many new – and many younger – researchers at the university, attitudes of the research status quo are also changing. In Nelson’s department, almost half of the professors have joined the faculty in the past three years, and they have been eager to update the department’s curriculum. 

“I think there are more new ideas of how to do things differently than there was before,” says Gasparini, who is grateful that the professors who were on staff before 2005 have been so open to making changes. Having joined Tulane after Katrina, however, she says she is surprised that the city and regional authorities are not making more use of the network of experts that are still in New Orleans, as they plan and execute their rebuilding efforts. She criticized local authorities for not taking advantage of the current expertise at Tulane in an attempt to restore wetlands or find creative approaches to the recovery mission.

Törnqvist, on the eve of his 5th anniversary at Tulane, attributes the research recovery to the bold measures taken by the university after Katrina. He says he knows it was tough to watch researchers walk away, and tougher still to terminate other positions, but that, in the end, the difficult choices the university made have helped it rebound after the storm.

New Study Says Geoengineering Schemes Will Struggle to Reduce Sea-Level Rise

As we’ve detailed, geoengineering is increasingly being viewed by some scientists, ethicists, and policymakers as an option to seriously consider in order to prevent the most severe consequences of climate change. Various proposals have been put forward, including injecting sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the stratosphere to reflect incoming solar radiation, or launching large space mirrors that would also redirect incoming heat from the sun. Such measures could theoretically cut down on the temperature increase that would otherwise occur due to human emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide.

But could they be effective in preventing sea level rise, one of the most far-reaching and worrisome consequences of climate change?

Not unless you are willing to go all in on geoengineering – while also significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions – says a new study published by an international team of researchers. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzes the effects that five different geoengineering approaches would have on sea level rise, and finds that all but the most aggressive geoengineering proposals would still allow sea level to increase substantially during this century. A key reason for this is that while geoengineering may be able to rapidly cool global temperatures, sea level responds much more slowly and is expected to react to the warming of recent decades for many years to come.

“… we find that sea-level rise by 2100 will be 30 centimeters higher than 2000 levels despite all but the most aggressive geoengineering under all except the most stringent greenhouse gas emissions scenarios,” the authors write.

In an article in Nature News, Alan Robock, a geophysicist from Rutgers University in New Jersey who was not involved in the new study, was quoted as saying that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will give more bang for the buck as far as sea level rise is concerned. "Reducing emissions of greenhouse gases will have a much larger impact," he said.

Lead author John Moore of Beijing Normal University in China said in the same article: "Anything that isn't reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is like putting [on] a bandage rather than actually solving the problem.”

Shameless Plug: Climate Central CEO Heidi Cullen on "The Colbert Report" Tonight!

Check out Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” tonight at 11:30 Eastern, as our CEO and Director of Communications Heidi Cullen shows off her improvisational skills as tonight’s guest. She will discuss climate change as well as her new book “The Weather of the Future.”

A Skeptical Take on Russian Heat Wave/Climate Change Link

Veteran environmental journalist Tom Yulsman posted snippets from an interview with Martin Hoerling, who runs a unique research group at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that aims to sort out the causes of extreme weather events. Needless to say, Hoerling has been rather busy this summer, with the historic heat wave in Russia and the deadly flooding in Pakistan making international headlines. In the interview, Hoerling expresses doubts that climate change is connected to the Russian heat event, based on an analysis of “atmospheric blocking” patterns and other data.

“In other words, the 2010 situation isn’t following on the heels of a progression of more and more of these things happening ether over Russia, or frankly over any other place that we can see over the Northern Hemisphere. So it stands out as a . . . black swan. It comes out of the blue in terms of its severity. It does not follow on the heels of a progressive increased frequency,” Hoerling said.

However, other scientists have come to different conclusions, such as Stu Ostro at The Weather Channel, and Peter Stott of the UK Met Office. Climate Central Senior Research Scientist Claudia Tebaldi weighed in on the difficult task of attributing causes of extreme events last week.

By Martin Chavez, Executive Director, ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability USA and former Mayor of Albuquerque, New Mexico

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Of all the lessons and reminders that have followed Hurricane Katrina, the need for better natural disaster preparation is the most obvious. Katrina has even redefined what we mean by preparation: not just organizing better emergency response or building taller levees, but developing long-term holistic strategies to increase resilience to a range of threats and natural disasters – many of which may be exacerbated by climate change.

Katrina is a wake-up call for cities, towns, and counties across the country: You may not be within striking distance of a Category 5 hurricane, but you will be impacted by climate change, and you must begin to prepare. Climate adaptation must address the changes that are already being documented by scientists around the country and are predicted to worsen in coming decades: more heat waves in the Midwest, drought in the Southeast, wildfires and water shortages in the Southwest, and rising sea levels on the East Coast, to name a few. (For further details by region, see the 2009 Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States report.)

Climate scientists tell us that in a warming world, disasters will happen both quickly and in slow motion. For example, Miami, just like New Orleans, faces the threat of more powerful hurricanes generated by warmer oceans. But the entire South Florida region must also deal with slowly rising sea levels, which threaten to swallow coastal property, accelerate beach erosion, and contaminate underground aquifers – which supply drinking water to millions – with saltwater. These threats cannot be ignored: Proactive planning is critical, not to mention incredibly cost-effective (another obvious Katrina take-home); today’s choices will shape tomorrow’s vulnerabilities.

Defining Climate Adaptation

Most local governments that are addressing climate change have focused on climate mitigation, or reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). But even if all emissions could be halted tomorrow, we’d still face rising temperatures in the coming decades due to the GHGs we’ve already emitted. In other words, climate adaptation efforts must become as important as mitigation at all levels of government, but especially local governments, which are on the front lines of responding to any disaster or threat.

Climate adaptation is centered on initiatives that reduce a community’s vulnerability to actual or expected climate change impacts. The initiatives chosen depend on local and regional circumstances. Some communities may focus on building sea walls to protect coastal assets; others may prepare their infrastructure for more severe floods or their community members for droughts and heat waves.

How Can Communities Prepare?

Strong climate adaptation efforts are already taking shape in a handful of leading cities and counties, such as Miami Dade County, Fla., Chicago, Ill., New York, NY, Keene, NH, Homer, Alaska, and others. My organization, ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability USA – the leading membership organization of cities and counties committed to climate protection and sustainability – is working to share their lessons learned and to develop a national program called Climate Resilient Communities (CRC) that establishes the best practices for local climate adaptation. The CRC Program will launch in fall 2010, but some of the basic principles of the program are already in place.

Proactive planning can be undertaken with a five-step process:
•    Conduct a climate resiliency study
•    Set preparedness goals
•    Develop a preparedness plan
•    Implement a preparedness plan
•    Measure progress, evaluate, and repeat the cycle

Most local governments are still navigating the first milestone in this process, working to identify their risks and vulnerabilities. But others, such as Chicago, have already integrated adaptation strategies into their climate action plans. Planners have discovered that mitigation and adaptation are not mutually exclusive: Some of the same measures to lower greenhouse gas emissions also enhance community resiliency. For example, increasing local renewable energy from various sources – solar, wind, geothermal, biogas – reduces the vulnerability from widespread power grid outages. Planting more trees on city streets helps cool buildings, which require less electricity; urban forestry also lessens the urban heat island effect and reduces storm water runoff during major rainstorms.

Leading Adaptation Efforts

Around the country, adaptation progress is happening at the local, regional, state, and federal levels. For example, Miami Dade County is integrating adaptation measures into its forthcoming community sustainability plan. In the San Diego Bay region, coastal cities and the Port of San Diego are developing a sea level rise adaptation strategy. The entire state of California released a draft adaptation strategy in 2009, and in October 2010, the White House Council on Environmental Quality is expected to release an update on progress to create a national adaptation strategy.

These efforts are encouraging, but far more work remains, and countless communities have not even considered the climate impacts they face. As we look back on the tragedy of Katrina and its aftermath, we must use it as an opportunity and a motivator to begin serious dialogues on climate adaptation.

To learn more about the innovations of sustainable cities and counties, read ICLEI USA’s Planet Earth magazine.

About ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability USA
With over 600 members nationwide,  ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability USA  is the leading local government association addressing climate protection, clean energy and sustainability.  As a non-profit membership organization, ICLEI USA provides the expertise, technical support, training and innovative tools to help local governments achieve their sustainability goals. More information at www.icleiusa.org.

By Eric Larson

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The U.S. House of Representatives passed climate legislation last year that called for an 83 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Scientists agree that industrialized countries as a whole need to reduce emissions by about this much in order to limit warming of the earth to within a “safe” level. One way such a large reduction could be achieved is by phasing out fossil fuel use to zero by 2050. The daunting nature of this task is a key reason why scientists and engineers are working hard to find ways to enable continued burning of some fossil fuels while still reducing emissions. 

One approach is to capture the carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuel combustion and bury it permanently deep underground. If CO2 capture and storage (CCS) technology works, it will buy valuable time for the transition to a non-fossil fuel world. 

Commercial-scale demonstrations of CCS are now ongoing in a few places worldwide, including one project that has been in operation since 1996. Encouragingly, none of the projects have shown any leakage of CO2, but many more such facilities are needed to provide confidence that CCS can work in a wide range of underground geologies. Leaders of the Group of Eight industrialized nations have called for 20 large-scale CCS projects to be deployed during the next decade, and the U.S. intends to launch five to ten such projects by 2016.  

A research paper I co-authored with Chinese and American colleagues, which was recently published online by the journal Energy and Environmental Science, suggests that there would be mutual benefits for the U.S. to cosponsor large-scale CCS demonstration projects in China.

Why China? For two reasons. First, China is the world’s largest emitter of CO2, due largely to its high dependence on carbon-intensive coal. Coal meets about 70 percent of China’s energy demands, and coal use is currently growing at nearly ten percent per year, corresponding to a doubling in use every seven years. In 2009, China used more than three times as much coal as the U.S. did. 

Second, China is unique in the world in having a large industry converting coal into chemicals like ammonia and methanol. There are hundreds of these facilities, as identified by pins on the map below. What makes such facilities of special interest for CCS is that they produce a nearly pure stream of CO2 as an intrinsic byproduct, so that capturing it for underground storage is relatively inexpensive.

Why U.S.-China collaboration on CCS in China? The U.S. is a close second to China in CO2 emissions, with more than 400 coal power plants accounting for nearly half of our electricity. CCS is thus a key technology if the U.S. hopes to continue relying on coal power in a carbon-constrained world. But the pace of CCS development in the U.S. is lethargic in large part because the costs of carrying out large-scale CCS demonstration projects there is high: it is costly to capture and concentrate the CO2 from coal-fired power plants in order to inject it underground. This is in contrast to capturing CO2 from coal-to-chemicals plants, but there are less than a handful of these in the U.S. 

With its roughly 400 coal-to-chemicals facilities, China has much more “cheap” CO2 that can be used in CO2 demonstration projects. By sharing the costs and the learning from such projects, America and China could each spend less money developing CCS technology while also speeding up the date by which each of them will be able to deploy it commercially.

Our paper identifies 27 large coal-to-chemicals/fuels facilities in China (big pins on the map) that are also near prospective underground CO2 storage sites (light green shading on the map). We estimate costs for CCS projects that might involve these facilities and conclude that the costs are modest, leading to our suggestion that there would be mutual value for the U.S. (and other countries) to help support CCS demonstration projects in China.

Get Used to La Nina

Following on the heels of the 2009/10 El Nino event, a moderate La Nina is underway in the Pacific Ocean, and is likely to continue through early 2011, according to an outlook released by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) on August 19. La Nina is characterized by unusually cool water temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, and warmer-than-average water temperatures in the western Pacific, with associated changes in air and water circulation. (This is in contrast to El Nino, which features warmer-than-average water in the central and eastern tropical Pacific).

La Nina conditions first emerged in mid-June and have strengthened since that time. Such conditions are evident in the map of sea surface temperature anomalies, or departures from average, below.

The unusually warm water near Indonesia is harming coral reefs, according to a report detailed in the New York Times last week. "A striking rise in sea temperatures in waters off Indonesia may be responsible for one of the most rapid and destructive coral bleaching events on record, a marine conservation group reported this week. Large swaths of coral reef in the Andaman Sea off the north coast of Sumatra are now up to 80 percent bleached, with more colonies expected to die off in the coming months, according to marine biologists who conducted extensive surveys of the area," the Times reported.

You can find more information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which monitors coral bleaching episodes worldwide via their "Coral Reef Watch" website.

According to IRI, computer models project that La Nina conditions will continue through the remainder of 2010 and into the first few months of 2011, although there is some disagreement about its maximum strength. Most computer models project the La Nina to continue at a moderate intensity, while a few models strengthen it further. In order to determine the strength of a La Nina event, scientists measure by how much water temperatures in a portion of the equatorial Pacific Ocean deviate from average conditions. 

Both El Nino and La Nina events tend to reach their maximum intensity during winter, and can significantly influence temperature and precipitation patterns across North America and worldwide. As the map below shows, La Nina events are associated with stronger than average South Asian Monsoons, and the ongoing La Nina may be contributing to the deadly flooding in Pakistan.

El Nino events can also warm global average temperatures, and so far 2010 is the warmest year on record, partly related to the El Nino that ended in June. La Nina could knock 2010 out of the top spot in the record books, especially if it intensifies further.

It may also help foster an active Atlantic hurricane season, since cooler waters in the eastern Pacific and warmer than average waters in the tropical Atlantic are favorable conditions for hurricanes to form. Partly for this reason, NOAA is projecting an above average hurricane season this year.

Study Finds No Clear Links Between Disaster Losses, Climate Change

Have disaster losses increased due to man made climate change? That’s the title of a forthcoming paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS). The answer, according to author Laurens M. Bouwer of Vrije University, in Amsterdam, is: not that you can reliably measure. It’s true that disaster losses have increased over recent decades, and the author does not deny that human-caused climate change is happening. But once you correct for inflation and population growth, he claims, the increase goes away. 

On his DotEarth blog, Andy Revkin cites the new study, acknowledging the temptation to make the link between climate change and increasing disaster-related losses, then says…

"But finding a statistically robust link between such disasters and the building human climate influence remains a daunting task."

On his own blog, Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado at Boulder trumpets the study, which meshes with his own views, as well.

So could it be true? After a summer of withering heat and wildfires in Russia, and deadly floods in Pakistan and China, which are at the very least consistent with man made climate change, the study’s results sound somewhat hard to believe. 

But it’s not crazy: as the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches this week, it’s important to remember that the devastation wreaked by that iconic hurricane was magnified dramatically by the city’s abysmal infrastructure, including levees that were in disrepair long before the storm hit. 

Beyond that, the population and infrastructure in areas threatened by pretty much any weather-related disaster is much bigger than it was 50 years ago – cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, which are booming in the drought-prone U.S. Southwest, coastal Florida where hurricanes are common, and greater Los Angeles where wildfires strike every year. The more valuable stuff you put in harm’s way, the more damage you’re going to sustain, climate change or not.

But this study only looks backward; it doesn’t include this summer’s events. If you look forward, population is still going to increase – but some of these events are likely to happen more often, too, and with greater severity. Take hurricanes: most models now show fewer North Atlantic storms overall during the next century, but an increase in the number of Category 4’s and 5’s, the most powerful storms – and even if there were no increase, higher sea levels would make storm surges more damaging. 

Back in 1988, James Hansen made headlines by telling Congress that the temperature signal of man made global warming could now be detected against the noise of natural fluctuations. Many climate scientists thought he was premature – but whether or not it was true in 1988, it had become very clear just a few years later.

So even if this new study is correct about the recent past, the author also suggests that the human influence is likely to increase in the future. "Studies that project future losses," Bouwer writes, "may give a better indication of the potential impact of climate change on disaster losses and needs for adaptation, than the analysis of historical losses." 

Past performance, in short, is no guarantee of future results.

Hurricane Season Heats Up

As Hurricane Danielle churns in the open Atlantic, destined to curve out to sea without making landfall in the United States (or anywhere else, for that matter), forecasters are turning their attention to another developing tropical cyclone off the African coast. For updates, background info on the hurricane season and more, go to our hurricane feature page. To mark the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which sparked high profile discussions about the potential consequences of climate change, we will be adding print and video content throughout this week.

The latest episode of the Climopedia podcast is up, and this time we’re talking about the National Academy of Science’s recommendation that the U.S. institute a greenhouse gas emissions budget to help minimize the impact of climate change in the coming years.

The recent America’s Climate Choices report, Limiting the Magnitude of Climate Change, recommends that between 2012 and 2050, this country should emit no more than between 170 and 200 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalents.

But what does that even mean? And most importantly: can we meet this goal?

As you’ll hear, it’s hard to get a clear idea of either of those things.

On this episode, you’ll hear from both Robert Fri, the chair of the second America’s Climate Choices report, and Robert Socolow, a Princeton University researcher who helped review the report and also contributed to the fourth report, Informing an Effective Response to Climate Change.

Joining me from Climate Central are senior science writer Michael D. Lemonick and Eric Larson, a scientist who closely studies energy issues.

To subscribe to the Climopedia podcast for free, check out our iTunes page.

By Andrew Freedman
(Originally published on Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang blog)

Earlier this month we helped break news of a huge new ice island that calved off Greenland's Petermann Glacier. (That followed the story from earlier this summer that a major chunk of Greenland's Jakobshavn Glacier broke off as well). So, if you're like me, you may have a few nagging questions in the back of your mind right now:

Where did that ice island – which is about 40 percent larger than the District of Columbia – go? Did it break up altogether? Is it roaming the North Atlantic, awaiting collision with a ship, Titanic style? Or is it floating up the Potomac, ready to wreak havoc on the Lincoln Memorial?

Ok, so that last question is ridiculous. Nevertheless, the fact that a massive ice island broke off Greenland, only to disappear from the news cycle, is rather unsettling...

Read more at Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang blog.

Extra CO2 may not be such a boon for plants after all

Back in 2003, Steve Running, an ecologist and climate modeler at the University of Montana, co-authored a paper that analyzed changes in the uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2) by plants around the world (the technical term for this uptake is “primary production”). The paper showed that it had been increasing through the 1980s and 1990s. The reason, he says: “Warming global temperatures were leading to longer growing seasons” – which gave plants more time, on average, to suck in CO2.
Running and his Montana colleague Maosheng Zhao returned to the question recently, and since temperatures have continued to rise, says Running, “our hypothesis was that was that if you’re following the same logic, you should [see] a further enhancement in primary production.”

Instead, according to a new paper the pair authored in this week’s Science, there's been a trend reversal. Specifically, they found that while carbon uptake rose about six percent from 1982 to 1999, it’s since pulled back by about one percent.

“In higher latitudes,” Running says, “we’re still seeing lengthening of growing seasons.” Closer to the equator, though, and especially in the southern hemisphere, the warming has lead to major droughts – not exactly a recipe for healthy plants. What makes this study so compelling is that it was based on global satellite observations, not scattered local measurements. Running says it’s not clear, though, whether the declining trend in plant carbon uptake will continue.

“If the average precipitation stays the same and temperatures continue to rise,” he says, “the soil will get drier.” But while rising temperatures in most areas of the world are highly likely, changes in precipitation are more uncertain.

The study also weakens the argument that extra CO2 will invariably be beneficial to plants. Plants do need CO2 to grow, but if they don’t get other nutrients and adequate water, more CO2 won’t necessarily help.

Here’s a video from NASA that lays out the new results (click on this NASA graphic and scroll down the page):

A step forward for solar energy conversion

One of the hottest areas of chemical research these days is the search for cheaper and more efficient materials to convert the sun’s energy into a form that humans can use. In addition to a the Powering the Planet consortium, funded by the National Science Foundation, there are a number of international research groups that are on the hunt for ways to harness the sun’s power to make carbon-free fuels.

A new paper published last week in Nature Chemistry gets one step closer to using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Breaking up molecules of water requires an incredible amount of energy (if you just want to do it with heat alone, you would have to get it to about 3,000 degrees Celsius), but with the help of the right catalyst, researchers hope to make the process a bit easier. In this new study, researchers took two different types of known material, a metal catalyst and carbon nanotubes, and put them together to accomplish some of the best water-splitting activity ever observed. Turning this science into technology that can be scaled up to churn out lots of hydrogen fuel is still a number of years away, however.

If you want to get a better idea of why some chemists think solar power is best paired with water, take a look at this video of MIT chemist Dan Nocera from a 2009 PopTech conference.

By Claudia Tebaldi

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On August 17^th and 18^th, in the midst of a series of extreme summer weather events around the world, a meeting took place in Broomfield, Colorado, convening atmospheric scientists interested in the problem of event attribution, along with potential users of the attribution research information and experts in the communication of science to the larger public. I was fortunate to be among them.

Event attribution seeks to explain the complex causes behind a given weather event, be it an especially cold winter, an intense heat wave or a devastating flood, with the particular aim of detecting a possible departure from “normal” conditions, and the role – if any – that human activities played.  

The timing of the meeting, which was planned several months ago, could not have been better. In fact, I wondered if its main organizers, Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Peter Stott, a researcher at the U.K. Met Office, had secretly discovered a new weather forecast method that enabled them to anticipate the climatic mayhem that supplied us with our compelling background.

The ability to confidently attribute specific extreme weather events to manmade or natural causes would constitute a major step forward in our ability to understand the effects of human-caused climatic changes, particularly in their regional manifestations, and would supply us with the knowledge that so many in the media world wish we had (and I use “we” here as in “we climate scientists”) when they ask us those dreaded questions, along the lines of “Is the Russian heat wave due to climate change?” or “Are the Pakistan floods due to our flooding the atmosphere with greenhouse gases?” You may want to read our recent post on this topic.

Image from the Landsat 5 satellite of flooding along the Indus River in Pakistan, near the town of Kashmor on August 12. Credit: NASA

So far, attribution research has resulted in studies of the causes of observed trends in global temperatures over recent decades, such as continental scale temperatures, large area-averaged precipitation trends, ocean temperature trends, long-term changes in atmospheric humidity and more. Using sophisticated computer modeling and high quality observations, we are able to say with great confidence that in these  changing aspects of our climate system, the fingerprint of human causes is already evident, as stated in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report.

You’ll notice, though, that I’m talking about broad trends, large area averages, and long-term changes. Such studies are very different from trying to attribute a measure of human causes to a one-off weather event, like the heat wave in Russia. The presence of high natural variability in the day-to-day weather makes it difficult to isolate a signal of systematic change, especially when we target extreme events with our forensic studies. Plus, the behavior of local climate is influenced by many causes that are difficult to measure, take apart, and simulate.

But science is always progressing and tackling the next challenge, and there are ideas, methods, models, and approaches out there that we are exploring. Studies are bringing us closer to being able to say something about the human factor in the complex mix of forces affecting weather events. You can read about one of the first studies, which represents just one of several approaches, that tackled the problem of attributing the increasing risk of an event like the 2003 European heat wave to the human-caused long-term warming of European summer temperatures.

The meeting in Broomfield this week was an occasion for scientists to compare notes on this nascent area of research, and allow us to forge alliances among a small community active in this area, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. It also gave us the chance to sit together with potential users of this information, and its mediators, to learn more about how such information can be used and communicated.

Composite image of vegetation stress from August 4-11, taken by the NOAA AVHRR satellite sensor. Note the high drought risk in western Russia, where wildfires were raging at the time. Credit: NOAA Visualization Studio.

Why is the notion of event attribution so compelling? It is not only to appease the media, of course.

We can already talk about how the latest extreme events fall in line with trends all over the world – those long-term trends of increasing temperature and increasing heavy precipitation that have been attributed to our impact on the climate system – and we can of course remind the various audiences that in the future, it is very likely that these events are going to be more frequent and intense.  

These are general statements that talk about the world as a whole, or at best large regions of the world, and do not pretend to say something specific about Moscow’s and Pakistan’s future heatwaves and floods, their intensity or frequency. An analysis that is able to drill into the specific events and their causes could not only make us more aware of the effects that our actions have on our local climate, but be the strong basis for saying something about what people on the scorched ground in Moscow, or feet deep in the water in Pakistan, should be prepared to face in a world where greenhouse gases are not kept in check (or not to face, if the result of event attribution concluded that the component from global warming was not significant).

The results from event attribution could thus speak much more cogently to needs for climate change adaptation and mitigation.

I heard some interesting thoughts at the meeting that I would like to close with. Much talk pertained to the educational value that a sustained activity of event attribution would have, in teaching us about our climate system and the factors affecting its behavior – not only human emissions but urbanization, changes in land use like deforestation and agricultural practices, and natural sources of climate variability like El Nino/La Nina (thanks to Eileen Shea of NOAA for speaking eloquently about this aspect). Related to this educational value was the observation that transforming information into clear and meaningful messages is not a straightforward task, and that is where expert communicators could help (thanks to Ed Maibach for making this point very effectively).

Another interesting thought was about our inclination as scientists to structure our studies so that we minimize the chances of saying that something “unusual” is going on if in fact nothing besides natural variation is going on. (This is known in statistical analysis as controlling the chances of a type 1 error, also known as a false positive). This cautionary choice though does not protect us from the opposite kind of error, and in fact makes its chances higher: we are more prone to conclude that nothing is going on, even when in fact the opposite is true (which is to say, our chances of a type 2 error, or false negative, may be high). But we know, at this point in time, with high confidence, that we are changing the behavior of the climate system. We also know that in many cases the error of not detecting that something has changed could have very dire consequences for populations or systems that would be better off adapting to the changing conditions. When – if ever – should we switch our scientific methods to minimize the false negative rather than the false positive? (Thanks to Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research for his thought-provoking words on this issue)

I don’t see us changing our methodology any time soon, and on the one hand my prudent side as a scientist – and in particular as a statistician-- is comfortable with that thought, but the same thought provokes me to seriously consider the dangers in this attitude, especially when one realizes that as we alter the earth more and more through our collective activities, it becomes more difficult to talk about what is natural climate variability (i.e. if modern human activities were not taking place on this planet) and what is “forced” behavior, in a system where the two are already inextricably mixed.

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And Now: Antarctic Sea Ice Update

Yesterday we told you that the sea ice coverage in the Arctic is currently running well below average, although not quite in record territory. Today, let’s flip the world upside down and look at Antarctica – what’s going on with sea ice down there? (Keep in mind that although it’s summer in the Arctic, it’s winter in the Southern Hemisphere). 

Well, according to a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an increase in Southern Ocean sea ice area that has been going on for three decades might come to an end, soon-ish; computer models project that global climate change could lead to declining sea ice surrounding Antarctic by the end of the century, if not earlier.

That Antarctic sea ice coverage has grown during the last 30 years doesn’t contradict the global trend of rising temperatures. In fact, warmer global temperatures have brought more moisture into the air, which has consequently increased precipitation in some parts of the world. And near the South Pole, of course, the temperatures are still cold enough that the extra precipitation falls as snowfall, which accumulates onto ice cover and helps shield it from solar radiation. Other air and ocean cycles have combined to build up Antarctic sea ice, in stark contrast to conditions in the Arctic.

As global temperatures climb even higher, however, much of that Antarctic precipitation is bound to start coming down as rain, rather than snow, according to the new study conducted by Jipling Liu and Judith Curry, atmospheric scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The combination of rainfall and warmer ocean temperatures could be fatal for Antarctic sea ice by the end of this century, they found.  

Curry discussed her findings with Houston Chronicle reporter Eric Berger at his Sciguy blog, telling him:

"Sea ice can melt from both above and below, either heating from the ocean below or the atmosphere above. In the case of the Arctic most of the melting is driven from the warmer atmosphere above. In the Antarctic most of the melting has been driven from the ocean below. What our study has identified is that there's been increased precipitation over the last few decades that has freshened the upper ocean, which makes it more stable so the heat below doesn't make it up to the sea ice to melt it."

"What happens in the 21st century projections is that the global warming signal begins to dominate. We still have the freshening of the upper ocean, but the upper ocean is getting warmer because of a warmer atmosphere. And the precipitation starts to fall more as rain than snow. Rain falling on ice speeds the melting from above."

Putting the Pakistan Floods in Perspective

It’s a bit too easy to put the Pakistan floods in the back of our minds these days; it’s a country halfway around the world from us, the reports of the death toll (about 1,600 people so far) are relatively low compared to other recent natural disasters like the Haiti earthquake, and we’ve got the Rod Blagojevich trial and Manhattan Mosque controversy to keep cable news networks occupied for the moment. The reports that do trickle through about the overwhelming problems in Pakistan, however, should give us pause.

United Nations officials are calling this the worst natural disaster to date that can be attributed to climate change, according to a ClimateWire story that ran online in the New York Times yesterday. Such framing goes against much of the other coverage we’ve heard in the past few weeks, which, in so many words, says that although climate change may have contributed to the floods, as well as the historic heat wave in Russia, we can’t say for certain that climate change has directly caused this summer’s severe weather. 

Somewhere between 15 and 20 million people have been displaced from their homes in Pakistan since the floods began in late July. This is equivalent to the entire state of New York (or almost the entire country of Australia) having to abandon their homes due to flooding.

According to NASA, the Indus River, which is normally one to two kilometers wide, has swelled to 24 kilometers in places, inundating areas along its banks.

In other words, this is a huge problem, particularly for a country with limited disaster response capabilities.

The Pakistan floods raise the issue of what constitutes a “climate refugee,” which is a term that is frequently bandied about in discussions about the potential national security ramifications of climate change.

There has been debate over who the first climate refugees were. Some of the leading contenders are victims of Hurricane Katrina, residents of Papua New Guinea who have been affected by sea level rise, and more than 500,000 Bangladeshis who were forced to move due to flooding. Now, those in Pakistan have been added to the list, even though it’s still unclear exactly how significant of a role climate change played, as opposed to natural weather variations, in instigating many of these events. In the near term, as foreign aid finds its way to Pakistan, these refugees are probably more concerned with finding food, water and shelter than how they can best be labeled to help raise awareness of climate change.

Today the U.S. announced the creation of a Pakistan Relief Fund. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated in a video message, “the enormity of this crisis is hard to fathom, the rain continues to fall, and the extent of the devastation is still difficult to gauge.”

New Version of Widely Used Computer Model Unveiled

We know the Earth is warming thanks to actual measurements—especially over the past half-century, but with at least vague accuracy (despite what you may have heard) dating back for the last several hundred years at least.

What we can say about future warming is less precise, since the climate system is complex, and you can’t do lab experiments on it (unless you classify our emissions of greenhouse gases an experiment, which many do). Scientists’ best projections, therefore, come from sophisticated simulations that try and capture the climate system inside a supercomputer.

Since computers keep getting more powerful — and since scientists’ understanding of the actual climate keeps getting more detailed — the models are updated every so often to make the projections that much more accurate.

As part of the preparations for the next major report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado has just announced its latest upgrade to a key academic computer model in the United States, called the Community Earth System Model (CESM). According to the NCAR press release, the new version of the model will help climate scientists refine the answers to some key questions, including:

• What impact will warming temperatures have on the massive ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica?
• How will patterns in the ocean and atmosphere affect regional climate in coming decades?
• How will climate change influence the severity and frequency of tropical cyclones, including hurricanes?
• What are the effects of tiny airborne particles, known as aerosols, on clouds and temperatures?

The model won’t be perfect, but even the previous generation of models has done a reasonable job of “predicting” the climate of the past, which gives some confidence about their ability to project (roughly) the future.

NCAR’s new, improved model, whose output, along with that of other models, will end up in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report in 2013, should presumably do even better.

By Michael D. Lemonick

Arctic Ice Update

Every winter, the surface of the Arctic Ocean freezes pretty much solid (or, more precisely, the surface freezes), Every summer, some of that ice melts to expose open water — and for the past several decades, the amount of open water in late summer has gotten gradually, though somewhat erratically, larger. The biggest meltback was in 2007, and since then, the summer ice has rebounded slightly. It hasn’t been much of a rebound, though. During the summers of 2008 and 2009, the area covered by ice in mid-September (the annual low point) was a little more than in 2007, although still significantly less than the 1979-2000 average.

Now the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has come in with its latest report: as of two days ago, the ice at the top of the world covered about 5.95 million square kilometers of sea — about a half-million more than at this point in the summer of 2007, but about one and a half million less than what should be there at this point based on the 1979-2000 average.

On the chart below, the black line shows the long-term average; the dotted line is the record melt year of 2007, and the blue line represents this year so far. You can also see that only 2007 and 2008 had less ice than we’ve got this year. It’s the kind of “rebound” you’d expect if you dropped a half-deflated basketball on the gym floor.

Arctic sea ice extent during the 2007-2010 melt seasons (2010 trend so far is in blue), compared to 1979-2000 average conditions. Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center.

All of this matters — and not just to the polar bears who do most of their hunting out on the sea ice. When the ice disappears, so does its ability to reflect sunlight out into space. The water below starts absorbing the light, heats up, and in turn heats the atmosphere, amplifying global warming (the phenomenon is known as “arctic amplification”). The fact that there’s a little more ice this year than in 2007 doesn’t help counteract that much.

And in fact, it’s not absolutely certain how this year will end up. One factor that affects ice extent is the weather during the short Arctic spring and summer: one reason ice plummeted in 2007 was that prevailing winds blew lots of ice out into the North Atlantic. This month, says the NSIDC, the winds are pushing ice northward, which tends to “reduce the total ice extent, especially since much of the ice pack is spread out.” 

You think this is hot?

World leaders, along with many climate scientists, have agreed that the world should reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and take other actions to limit global average temperatures to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (that’s one of the primary goals of the non-binding Copenhagen Accord that came out of the tumultuous United Nations-sponsored negotiations in Denmark last December). Let the world get any hotter, they say, and the consequences — including sea-level rise, extreme weather events and other disasters — could be devastating.

Whether or not we’ll actually hit that mark is open to some pretty serious debate, since it would require steep emissions cuts beginning in the next few years, but even if we do limit climate change to 2 C or below, the consequences could still be pretty damaging. A new paper scheduled for publication in the American Geophysical Union (AGU) journal Geophysical Research Letters points out that an overall two-degree rise won’t be spread evenly across the planet — and that some areas will feel a lot more heat than that, particularly in the form of extreme events. “…even if climate change is limited to 2 degrees Celsius on average,” says a related blog post on the AGU’s Geospace blog, “some parts of the world will likely be hit with scorching heat waves unlike any they suffer today.” Given that we’ve been experiencing some pretty awful heat waves lately, that’s not an encouraging prediction.

Maybe it's just sunspots after all

A candidate for Wisconsin’s September Republican senatorial primary has made it official: climate change is not due to human activity. "It's far more likely that it's just sunspot activity or just something in the geologic eons of time," said Oshkosh businessman Ron Johnson in a speech on Monday, according to an article in the online edition of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “Johnson, in an interview last month,” the story continues, “described believers in manmade causes of climate change as "crazy" and the theory as "lunacy."

Actual climate scientists disagree, of course. But scientists do have good news for those who more generally reject the notion that we paltry humans can do any serious damage to the environment. A new study out of Durham University, in the U.K., argues that wooly mammoths were not driven to extinction by hunting, as one leading theory has long maintained. Instead, say Brian Huntley and his colleagues, a computer simulation of vegetation across the Northern Hemisphere during the past 42,000 years shows that it was the disappearance of the mammoths’ grassland habitat that caused their decline.

The cause of the decline: climate change at the end of the most recent Ice Age. That wasn’t caused by humans either; we didn’t start burning fossil fuels in quantity until about 250 years ago. But as actual scientists would also point out, the fact that something can be caused by natural forces doesn’t mean it can’t also be triggered by human activity. After all, forest fires were ignited naturally, by lightning, for millions of years before humans invented matches.

Editor's Note: This is the first installment of what will become daily, quick-hitting blog posts that will cover climate science and energy developments from our nonpartisan (yet still entertaining) perspective. 

Coal ash ruined my Sunday night

Shouldn’t Sunday night, by default, be relaxing? After all, it’s the best time to recover from a fun-filled weekend and to prepare for the busy workweek ahead. Unfortunately, anyone who caught this Sunday’s repeat episode of “60 Minutes” probably wasn’t left with any calm feelings. In a segment titled "Coal Ash: 130 Millions Tons of Waste", correspondent Lesley Stahl informed viewers that there is virtually no regulation of the staggering amount of toxic waste byproduct known as coal ash that is generated each year in the burning of coal for electricity in the U.S.

After listing off the poisonous metals that are concentrated in coal ash, including arsenic, mercury, cadmium, thallium, selenium and lead, Stahl pointed out the careless ways in which coal companies dispose of it all – none of it made for an easy Sunday night. Scientists still need to figure out exactly how toxic coal ash is, but Stahl says the EPA is lagging behind with instituting regulations based on existing knowledge.

Stahl seems to have missed the mark on one very important point, however. When speaking with Jim Roewer, a coal lobbyist, about how 48 percent of electricity in America comes from coal, Stahl says, “we can’t get rid of coal.” Well, this isn’t entirely true. Technology already exists for replacing coal with natural gas, wind turbines and nuclear power plants. What Stahl probably meant was that to do away with coal would require a costly change in infrastructure. But since scientists say we’ll need to change our electricity sector one way or the other if we expect to dramatically lower carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to avoid the most serious potential consequences of climate change, starting to phase out coal-power sooner rather than later could help kill two birds with one stone. 

Are irrigation canals a cause of regional climate change?

An irrigation canal in California (Credit: Aquafornia/Chris Austin (Flickr) .

Poor carbon dioxide. The tiny molecules take all the blame for the world’s recent climate change. Sure, the man-made emissions of billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year has led to increasing global temperatures, but CO2 is far from the only agent of climate change. For example, methane, along with short-lived emissions such as black carbon, has been shown to affect the climate.

A new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research sheds light on another climate change driver – changes in land use. A research team from Rutgers University in New Jersey (up the road from Climate Central's Princeton office, woot!) has found evidence that the vast network of irrigation canals that run across the Great Plains may have increased the amount of precipitation in the area by as much as 30 percent since the 1940s. The changing precipitation patterns mean that the canals may have altered the weather and longer-term climate in that region, and the irrigation systems are also linked to loss of groundwater reserves across the prairies. (Of course, the irrigation systems also help sustain American agricultural production). While global climate change may also contribute to the increased precipitation, the discovery that irrigation canals may be involved in changing the climate at the regional level reveals yet another way in which human activities control some of the puppet strings.

Severe weather and climate change? Let’s review.

It took more than a month of a ferocious Russian heat wave and weeks of tragic flooding in Pakistan to make it happen, but last week news organizations around the world finally started exploring the links between severe weather and climate change. However, only a handful of news organizations managed to address what a difficult question that actually is to answer. Over the weekend, the New York Times nicely covered why scientists can’t say climate change is causing this severe weather, but that it is expected to make weather extremes worse. And on Monday, the Guardian included an op-ed from climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf that offered evidence for the fact that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are probably to blame for at least some of the current rash of deadly weather events.

(Oh yeah – we did a pretty good job of this too, by the way.)

For now it’s hard for scientists to say what the link is between severe weather and climate change – though most of them say there is, indeed, a link – but a group of them are going to put on their thinking caps this week near Boulder, Colorado to see how they can push the state of knowledge forward. Climate Central’s own senior research scientist Claudia Tebaldi will be there.

Check back here, and follow us on twitter via @climatecentral for more from that conference later this week.

After a scorching summer thus far, this year remains on track to be one of the hottest on record, according to the latest analysis from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center. The global land and ocean surface temperature data show that this July was the second warmest on record, and the period of January–July was the hottest since records began in the 1880s.

The combined global land and surface temperature for July came in at 61.6 degrees Fahrenheit, more than a degree warmer than the 20th century average, and only 0.1 degree F cooler than the warmest July on record, set in 1998. For land surface temperatures alone, it was the warmest July on record. The warmer-than-average global temperatures seen this year to date suggest 2010 could go into the history books as either the warmest, or at least one of the warmest, years on record.

Map of temperature departures from average for the period from January to July 2010. Credit: NOAA.

According to one relevant measure, it already has. According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “The 12-month running mean of global temperature achieved a record high level during the past few months.” NASA’s analysis of global surface temperatures is in close agreement with NOAA’s data, finding that July was the fifth-warmest month on record, with the warmest January to July period. 

The exceptionally warm global temperatures seen through the first part of 2010 were maintained in July in spite of the presence of La Nina. which has brought cooler than average sea surface temperatures to the tropical Pacific. As La Nina continues through the second half of 2010, it could cool global average surface temperatures just enough to prevent this year from eclipsing 1998 as the hottest year since instrumental records began.

A comparison of year-to-date global temperature anomaly (in degrees Celsius) for some of the warmest years on record, including 2010 so far. Credit: NOAA.

So far this year, 17 countries have set new national records for warmest-ever recorded temperatures, including Finland, Belarus, Columbia, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which saw the mercury rise to 128.3 degrees Fahrenheit on May 26. If verified, Pakistan’s record would stand as the warmest temperature on record in the continent of Asia.

NOAA’s report of global July temperatures was released just over a week after a similar report of U.S. national temperatures for July was made public. The U.S. also experienced above average temperatures last month, and it was ranked as the 17^th warmest July on record for the country. The states of Delaware and Rhode Island, as well as a number of cities across the East Coast, experienced their hottest ever month during July, although some western regions of the country experienced below average July temperatures.

The release of the July and year-to-date information also comes in the midst of a number of extreme weather events occurring around the planet. In particular, the ongoing heat wave in Western Russia and the floods in Pakistan brought on by unusually intense monsoonal rainfall. Though these extreme weather events cannot be solely attributed to the climate's long-term warming trend, studies show that the warming climate increases the odds of such extreme events.

“What we can say is that global warming has an effect on the probability and intensity of extreme events,” says the NASA press release. “This is true for precipitation as well as temperature, because the amount of water vapor that the air carries is a strong function of temperature.”

How weather patterns play out through the rest of the year remains to be seen. As evident in the comparison of the planet’s 10 warmest recorded years, however, 2010 is off to a remarkably warm start.

Massive flooding and extreme heat in Pakistan, devastating heat and wildfires raging across Russia, a giant iceberg calving off Greenland, a wicked hot summer on the U.S. East Coast: this is exactly the stuff scientists such as ourselves have been warning would be a likely consequence of climate change. So, it might seem frustrating when you read a news report saying something along the lines of "while these events are consistent with climate change, no single event can be directly linked to or regarded as proof of climate change."

If that is the case, you may be wondering when we are going to get that definitive proof – the smoking gun, if you will – that links today’s weather events to climate change. The thing is that if we continue to look for proof in those terms, it may take a very long time.

The reason is that the extreme weather events we are seeing today are theoretically possible with or without climate change. That’s why these events don’t prove the existence of human-caused climate change any more than last winter’s snowstorms disproved it. While there’s overwhelming observational evidence showing that humans are affecting climate, this evidence comes from long-term trends, rather than individual events.

Extreme events are related to climate change, however: the odds of them happening are much greater with climate change.

Satellite image showing the swollen Indus, Jhelum and Chenab Rivers in Pakistan after unusually heavy rainfall, taken on Aug. 11 from NASA's MODIS instrument aboard the Terra Satellite. Image credit: NASA.

Take the deadly 2003 heat event in Europe that killed an estimated 40,000 people. To explore links between climate change and that heat wave, Dr. Peter Stott of the UK Met Office and colleagues ran two types of climate simulations. One replicated conditions of a natural climate (unmodified by human influences) and the other included both natural influences and the effects of human emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and other activities. The authors estimated the probability of exceeding an extreme temperature threshold, measured as the degrees above the historic summer mean, in both simulated climates. In their paper, published in Nature in 2004, they wrote: “According to our calculation, there is a greater than 90% chance that over half the risk of European summer temperatures exceeding a threshold of 1.6K  (which is the same as 1.6 degrees Celsius, or 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit) is attributable to human influence on climate.”

In other words, Stott and colleagues asserted with very high confidence that the chances of having a heat wave of a magnitude similar to the 2003 event had doubled because of human-induced warming. But notice what their analysis did not find. It did not conclude that the heat wave would not have occurred, absent human influences on climate. That is because that heat event could still have taken place without human-induced climate change, although with relatively lower likelihood.

We can estimate probabilities, but rarely can it be asserted with 100 percent confidence that there is a causal relationship between variables. That might be how some findings by scientists get interpreted, but scientists don’t tend to talk that way. So we could run computer models today and try to determine how likely the extreme weather of this summer was with and without human influences. And we could estimate by how much human-induced climate change has elevated the odds of these events happening. But we cannot say in a scientifically rigorous way that the event was definitely due to climate change. 

The point is that while it is a perfectly reasonable question to ask: “Was this event due to climate change?” it would more useful to ask a related question: “are we putting ourselves at greater risk of experiencing this kind of event?” And to that scientists can answer with high confidence: yes!

Now, you might think this question is less interesting or useful, and perhaps not as worth asking than the first one. But we would argue that, in fact, it is very important to pose this question, and to carefully consider its answers.

Think of smoking, sun bathing without sunscreen, eating lots of junk food and so on. You may not be able – ever – to unequivocally attribute one person’s problem to the effects of these activities: people develop lung cancer without smoking, for example, but as a population we know we are better off wearing sunscreen, watching our cholesterol, and not smoking, since all of these actions have been shown to make the chances of harm to our health lower.

So, although climate scientists cannot give us the comfortable certainty of a yes or no answer to the “who’s to blame question,” that doesn’t mean people should roll their eyes and discard the issue altogether. Rather, we should confront the reality that we are further escalating the risk of these extreme weather events every day that we postpone action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Spc. Rick Canfield, a multi-media illustrator at Headquarters Company in the U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan in Seoul, changes a light bulb to conserve energy as part of a post-wide community effort earlier this summer. Photo courtesy Sgt. Opal Vaughn/U.S. Army

Quick  — what's the most effective way for you to save energy?

If you're like many Americans, you'd say turn out the lights or turn up the AC's thermostat.

And, like many Americans, you'd miss the mark.

Turns out, when figuring what we can do to go green, most of us overstate. We think about curtailment - unplugging appliances, driving less, turning off lights - when improving the efficiency of our cars, appliances and home would take the biggest chunk out of our energy footprint.

When you think about your life, what's really easy to do is turn off the lights when you leave the room.
  —Shahzeen Attari, Columbia University's Earth Institute and Center for Research on Environmental Decisions

That's not a surprise to scientists who surveyed 505 Americans on their perceptions of energy consumption and savings. After all, curtailment is pretty easy: Flip a switch. Improving efficiency, on the other hand, requires research, effort, out-of-pocket expense: Does anybody want to buy a new washing machine when what's downstairs works just fine?

The researchers started their survey with a simple open-ended question: What's the single most-effective thing you can do to conserve energy? Their findings were published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More than 40 percent of the respondents said one of three things: Turn off lights, drive less or change the thermostat.

Less than 10 percent identified what experts generally agree are the most effective measures - insulate the house or use more efficient appliances or cars.

"When you think about your life, what's really easy to do is turn off the lights when you leave the room," said Shahzeen Attari, the study's lead author and a researcher at Columbia University's Earth Institute and Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. 

Researchers note that for many of us, concerns about energy simply are not strong enough, compared to other daily worries, to warrant learning about energy conservation.

But raise fuel prices or impose a tax on carbon that reflects its role in climate change and other environmental harm, and the public would have ample incentive to get educated in a hurry.

After all, it was the spike in gas prices in 2008 that brought the auto industry to its knees and triggered some of the nation's sharpest declines in vehicle-miles traveled since recordkeeping began in the 1940s.

"With a carbon tax we would see changes," Attari noted. "People are pretty elastic when it comes to the consumption of energy."

What you can do

Let's face it: nobody's going to go out and replace a working hot-water heater or washing machine. And few of us have a few grand lying around to replace our drafty old windows. But there are some easy steps you can take that can effectively cut energy consumption.

• Buy your beverages in aluminum cans, not glass bottles. Making a glass bottle requires 1.4 times the energy of an aluminum can when virgin materials are used. Toss recycled materials into the equation and the difference jumps to 20 times as much. In part that's because glass is so heavy.
• Change your washer's settings. Most people assume line-drying clothes — a time-consuming process to be sure — saves more energy than using colder water and optimizing loads. In fact the reverse is true.
• Cool the room, not the house. Many of us think, incorrectly, that central air uses marginally more energy than a room air conditioner. The reality is it uses 3.5 times as much.

Photo of wool home insulation batts courtesy Sustainable Initiatives Fund Trust, via flickr.
This work by The Daily Climate is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

By Michael D. Lemonick

The question of what will happen to hurricanes in a warming world is of obvious interest to people who live in the paths of these powerful storms, and those who insure them. It tends to come to mind most easily during a hurricane season that’s worse than average, like 2005 (the year of Katrina) or one that’s expected to be, like the current one.

All other things being equal, warmer sea-surface temperatures should lead to more powerful hurricanes, and the most current research suggests that’s true — but that changes in upper level wind patterns could lead to fewer hurricanes overall.

But a new study that will be published in a future issue of Geophysical Research Letters points to yet another factor that could influence hurricanes in a warming world, and it’s one that you might not readily think of: the ocean’s color.

It turns out that the tiny marine plants known as phytoplankton, which lie at the bottom of the marine food chain, but at the surface of our oceans, affect the ocean’s color quite significantly thanks to the chlorophyll they use to manufacture food. As the oceans have warmed during the past century, phytoplankton levels have diminished, and the water overall has become a little less green.

A team of climate modelers at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) led by Anand Gnanadesikan took that as a starting point for a simulation that looked at what might happen if phytoplankton levels plummeted. They examined a typhoon-forming region of the Pacific known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, and plugged in both the actual ocean color as seen by satellites today, and the washed-out color you’d see in a phytoplankton-poor sea (assuming, of course, that the trash accumulating in the gyre doesn’t skew the calculations).

Satellite image of a phytoplankton bloom off the coast of Newfoundland on August 9, 2010, taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. According to NASA, "The paisley pattern of peacock blue owes its color to phytoplankton." Credit: NASA.

Here’s the connection between a washed-out ocean and hurricanes: when you lose the phytoplankton, sunlight can penetrate deeper into the water, which means the water near the surface ends up being cooler than it otherwise would be. That should cut down on hurricanes in multiple ways, according to the American Geophysical Union press release:

“Cold water provides less energy; air circulation patterns change, leading to more dry air aloft which makes it hard for hurricanes to grow. The changes in air circulation trigger strong winds aloft, which tend to prevent thunderstorms from developing the necessary superstructure that allows them to grow into hurricanes,” the release states.

Sure enough: hurricane formation dropped by 70 percent in the colorless simulation, dramatically reducing the potential risk to China and Japan. The risk rose for Southeast Asia and the Philippines, though, due to an increase in hurricane formation just outside the gyre, but overall the incidence of hurricanes was still significantly less.

If further research confirms this result, you could think of it as a little bit of good news about global warming — that is, if you consider a major hit to the marine food chain to be good news…

By Andrew Freedman
(Originally published on Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang blog)

Extreme weather has dominated world headlines recently, with a record-smashing heat wave in Russia as well as deadly flooding in Pakistan that may rank as that country's worst natural disaster. Here at home, we've endured a sizzling summer, and NOAA announced last week that 2010 is still on track to be the warmest year on record (although La Nina may knock it back a rank or two).

The relationship between global climate change and these extreme events is complex in that climate change did not specifically cause them to occur, but likely did influence them, perhaps in significant ways. An article in Sunday's New York Times clearly laid that out, and (as I have previously noted), Jeff Masters of Weather Underground has provided uniquely in-depth coverage of possible links between climate change and extreme weather

Stu Ostro, senior meteorologist for The Weather Channel, is a rare breed of meteorologist who is increasingly focused on the intersection between climate and weather. A former climate change skeptic, he has compiled a lengthy presentation showing changes in weather patterns that he believes may be related to climate change.

In an email interview during the weekend, Ostro shared his thoughts on climate change and extreme events, and what has convinced him that climate change is now manifesting itself in daily weather patterns...

Read the full interview at Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang blog.

By Andrew Freedman

Extreme weather events around the world during the summer of 2010, ranging from devastating flooding in Pakistan to a deadly heat wave in Russia, have many people asking if climate change is now influencing daily weather patterns. After all, scientific assessments of climate change, including the 2007 report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have stated that climate change increases the odds of certain extreme weather events, such as heat waves and heavy rainfall. Still, the science of climate change attribution is an emerging field, with research programs just getting underway in the U.S. and other countries.

To find out more about how climate change might be connected to the recent string of extreme weather events, I spoke via Skype with Dr. Peter Stott of the UK Met Office. Stott is one of the leading researchers in this area, having conducted a study that examined the role that climate change may have played in the 2003 European heat wave, which killed an estimated 40,000 people. In the interview, he explains why climate scientists can't say that that climate change caused a particular extreme event, but that global warming is increasing the odds that such events will occur. 

This graphic shows the new record high temperatures for the 17 nations that have broken their national records so far in 2010. Previously, the largest number of countries to break such records in a single year was 14, according to Weather Underground and The Guardian newspaper. If verified, the record set in Pakistan would also stand as the warmest temperature ever recorded in the continent of Asia. Click on the graphic for a larger version. Graphic design by Russell Freedman.

By Andrew Freedman

This year is a little more than half over, and already it is one for the climate record books. 2010 has featured several extreme heat events, as well as record flooding, in many countries worldwide. The number of countries that have set new national records for the warmest temperature recorded — 17 — would beat the old record of 14, provided that all of the new records are verified by meteorological agencies. According to meteorologist Jeff Masters of the private weather forecasting firm Weather Underground, located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the countries that have set new records thus far this year comprise about 19 percent of the earth's surface area.

Masters wrote on his blog: "These nations comprise 19 percent of the total land area of Earth. This is the largest area of Earth's surface to experience all-time record high temperatures in any single year in the historical record. Looking back at the past decade, which was the hottest decade in the historical record, 75 countries set extreme hottest temperature records (33 percent of all countries.) For comparison, fifteen countries set extreme coldest temperature records over the past ten years (six percent of all countries)." According to Masters, Guinea, which is located in northwestern Africa, is the one nation so far this year to break its coldest temperature record, which occurred in early January.

The new record high temperature set in Belarus occurred during the Russian heat wave, which is still gripping portions of that country. Although Russia did not set any all-time record high temperatures, Moscow did, breaking 100 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time.

Temperature departures from average for July 2010, as measured by NASA. Note the warmth (in red) centered over western Russia. Credit: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

For the planet as a whole, 2010 has been extremely warm, with the June to July period ranking as the warmest such period on record. Part of the warmth earlier this year may have been due to an El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean, which tends to warm the planet, but that event is no longer taking place. Manmade global warming is likely also playing a role in the record warmth. Scientists, including Climate Central's Claudia Tebaldi, have published studies showing that as the planet warms due to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, warm temperature extremes become more likely to occur.

By Michael D. Lemonick

The behavior of clouds in a warming climate is something scientists are still struggling to understand. Changes in clouds could either amplify or minimize warming, depending on the precise nature of the response. Clouds tend to cause cooling, by reflecting sunlight back into space, and can also cause warming by preventing heat radiation from escaping into space. The warming effect of high clouds is generally stronger, so increases in high clouds would amplify warming. With low clouds, however, the cooling effect is generally stronger, so increases in low clouds would reduce warming.

But clouds are incredibly complex creatures whose waxing and waning depend on temperature, altitude, humidity, winds and aerosols made of dust and other particles floating in the air — not just their composition, but also their size. Most climate scientists think that on balance, clouds will end up as a net positive feedback, meaning they will accelerate the warming of the planet due to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases.

The case is hardly ironclad, though, so anything that provides even a little bit of insight into cloud behavior is welcome.

A little bit of insight is just what’s on offer in a paper published August 11 in Nature. Graham Feingold of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, along with several colleagues, focused on a type of cloud that’s relatively common over the oceans. Known as “open-cell clouds”, they’re vast sheets of stratocumulus clouds perforated with regular holes, in a sort of irregular honeycomb pattern (if the holes are relatively big compared with the cloudy parts, they’re known as closed-cell clouds).

Image of open and closed-cell clouds taken by NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the agency's Aqua satellite. According to NASA, "Open-cell clouds look like empty compartments, whereas closed cells look like compartments stuffed with cloud." Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

Open-cell clouds are remarkably persistent over the oceans; to figure out why, Feingold and his colleagues created simulations to study their behavior in detail. It turned out that the thickest parts, naturally enough, are the most likely to produce rain. The falling rain cools the surrounding air as it falls, creating a downdraft. When the downdraft hits the surface and spreads out, it eventually runs into the spreading air from the next downdraft over, at which point the colliding streams of air rise up again, freshly charged with evaporated water from the ocean’s surface, to form new clouds. These new clouds form in places where the holes were before, while the places that started out cloudy become clear.

That’s an oversimplification, of course (to avoid this trap, we’d have to simply reprint the original paper, and where’s the fun in that?). But in general, the clouds don’t exactly persist; their configuration oscillates back and forth in such a way that the overall pattern persists. The evidence that what happens in the computer also happens in the real world: satellite movies of real clouds show just this sort of oscillation.

So how does that help with climate projections? Well…it doesn’t really at this point. What it does do is give cloud modelers confidence that they’ve got at least one important cloud-formation process right, and the more of these processes they can model successfully, the better they’ll be able to simulate cloud dynamics on a scale large enough to nail down their role in climate.

By Andrew Freedman

Depending on your news source, the weather around the world has either gone “berserk,” haywire, off its rocker, or plain old extreme.

Take a Sky News headline from August 10, for example: “Berserk Weather Causes Worldwide Chaos.” It’s a quintessential example of how the media sensationalizes unusual weather events. (My compliments go to the author, however, for managing to use the words “berserk” and “chaos” in the same sentence).

Despite the excessively alarming tone of some of the stories, it’s difficult to avoid being at least somewhat concerned by the facts: thus far 2010 ranks as the warmest year in recorded history. Western Russia continues to suffer through its worst heat wave in generations that is killing thousands and brought the first-ever 100-degree plus weather to Moscow – twice – along with rampaging wildfires that are polluting vast areas of the country and halting Russian wheat exports.

The widespread influence of the fires on Russia’s air quality can be seen in this image from NASA, showing atmospheric carbon monoxide levels. The heat and fires have led to elevated levels (in red) of this harmful gas in Western Russia. Credit: NASA.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan an unusual configuration of the Asian Monsoon, which typically douses Bangladesh and India with heavy rain during the summer months, has brought torrential downpours to normally dry areas, affecting millions of people. Meteorologist Jeff Masters has many more details on his blog at Weather Underground.

Oh, and did I mention that as many as 17 countries may have set new all-time high temperature records so far in 2010? Those are not exactly easy records to break, either.

The Economist and Wired Science have published excellent analyses of the immediate causes of the wild weather of late, and the potential role that long-term climate change may be playing in making these events more likely to occur. None of these events has been—or ever could be—definitively attributed to human-caused climate change, but there are intriguing climate change connections.

The Economist sums up the relationship between climate change and the ongoing extreme events succinctly with these two sentences: “The two events [Russian heat wave and flooding in Pakistan] are linked by a large-scale pattern of atmospheric circulation which is producing a particularly persistent area of high pressure over Russia. They are also linked in both being the sort of events climate scientists predict more of in a warming world.”

Unfortunately, there may be another region that will feel the effects of the Russian heat wave, and it’s an area that is already undergoing major changes due to a warming climate.

According to Reuters, scientists are warning that soot from the raging Russian wildfires may have a warming impact in the Arctic, where sea ice is in the midst of another abnormally extensive melt season. As of the beginning of this month, sea ice was on track to, by the end of the melt season, reach the second lowest extent since satellite records began in 1979.

Trend in sea ice extent in 2010, as of August 10, 2010. Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center.

A full 40 percent of soot emissions comes from uncontrolled sources like wildfires, whereas the rest comes from human activities such as burning diesel fuel. Components of soot, such as black carbon, can warm the atmosphere and melt ice and snow by absorbing greater amounts of solar energy. Black carbon in soot darkens bright white snow and ice surfaces, which increases the amount of solar radiation absorbed, and leads to greater melting of snow and ice.

The geographical extent of the wildfire smoke was driven home by this image from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

By Andrew Freedman

Russians suffered through yet another day in the relentless and incredibly intense heat wave of 2010, as wildfires continued to burn uncontained and the government increasingly focused on appearing in command of the situation. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is famous for his public relations stunts, even took control of a firefighting aircraft, and went online to rebut criticism from the blogosphere of the government's emergency response services. The wildfire smoke has led to dangerously poor air quality across many sections of Western Russia, with many scenes of Muscovites wearing masks in order to safely venture outside.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), using data from NASA's MODIS satellite, just put out this fascinating image of smoke from the wildfires. The image shows readings of "aerosol optical depth," which is a measurement of the particles lofted into the air by the fires. Satellites can detect the smoke because particles alter how the atmosphere absorbs and reflects light. A low optical thickness means the sky is quite clear, whereas a high reading indicates hazy conditions.

Excessive heat waves combined with intense smoke plumes have created very dangerous air quality conditions over much of Western Russia. As seen in this aerosol optical depth data from the NASA MODIS satellite, areas of deep orange (false colored) indicated very hazy conditions and poor air quality. Credit: NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory

Russian authorities estimate that at least 700 people per day have been dying due to the heat and poor air quality. This event may eventually rival the 2003 European heat wave, which contributed to the deaths of an estimated 40,000 people. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, heat and poor air quality pose significant health risks to the elderly, persons with respiratory ailments, and other segments of the population.