Climate Change & Feedback Accelerating - Exceeding Original Projections!

Climate Change - The Science
The worst-case scenario is happening now!

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By Bruce Melton - February 16, 2012
AUSTIN, Texas -- If this is not dangerous climate change, then this is
exactly what dangerous climate change will be like in as little as a
decade. What has been happening in Texas, with its unprecedented (in
time frames that matter) droughts and wildfires, is exactly what the
climate scientists have been warning us about for over 20 years. We have
been building up to this point since about the turn of the century, and
now ecosystems have tipped over the edge. Climate feedbacks have kicked
in hard.

The Texas Forest Service tells us
that a half billion trees have died. The first of this series of
droughts in 2005/6 was just classified as extreme. The last two have
been one category worse than extreme -- the exceptional category. The
last 12 months were drier than the worst 12 months of the great drought
of the 1950s. This has been a $10 billion drought, with another $1
billion in damages from the fires.



Worse, it’s hotter now. This past summer was 5.4 degrees warmer than average.
This may not seem like a lot, but think how sick you would be if you had
a 104 degree temperature.

The reason that increased heat makes
such a big difference in a drought is that extra heat greatly increases
evaporation. Four percent more water evaporates for every degree of
temperature increase. With 5.4 degrees of warming above average,
summertime evaporation in Austin was more than 22 percent greater than
normal. In other words, the same drought is much worse if it is only a
little hotter.

In the same breath, even with normal rainfall,
because of warmer temperatures, drought can persist because of much
greater evaporation. The warmer temperatures are easy to see looking at
the average August temperature for the period of record.

It is important to talk about the urban heat island effect here too. The chaos
of information presented by our media today does little to shed light
on the latest climate science. An evaluation of regional temperature
departure from normal for 2011 shows the exceptional nature of this most
recent in a string of droughts.



Urban heat island signatures are easily evaluated and constant correction is
an integral part of climate work on global land/ocean temperatures.
Corrections are made through the comparison of individually impacted
weather stations and their normal neighboring rural weather stations.

Published work on the heat island effect shows that even without correction, the
heat island’s influence on global temperatures is as yet inconsequential
because of the relative size of the heat islands compared to the global
surface.

The evaluations can also be visually confirmed looking
at the temperature departure from normal for the region during the 2011
drought. Where the heat island effect looks to be dramatically visible
in the Austin and San Antonio metropolitan areas, it is dramatically
absent from the Houston and Dallas metro areas.

The total number
of fires in Texas since November 2010 (through September 20, 2011) is
22,790, totaling 3,759,331 acres. This exceeds the previous record of
2.1 million acres, set in just 2005/6, by 80 percent. We almost doubled
the last record, set just five years ago.

Thirty-three percent of
U.S. wildland fires in 2011 were in Texas. This number is 61 percent
greater (as of September 2011) than the 10-year national average for the
entire United States. Six of the 10 largest wildfires in Texas history
occurred in 2011.

Sure, there have been bigger droughts and
bigger fires in the early 1900s or the 1800s or the 1300s, or 3,000 year
BC, but our complicated society did not evolve back then. We do not
have the water to support our region today. This is why we have water
use restriction in effect now, and last summer and every summer since
the turn of the 21st century.



It cannot be emphasized more that this is exactly what our climate
scientists have been warning us would happen for the last 20 or 30
years. Only their warnings were generations distant from actual impacts
happening today. The impacts happening now are far ahead of the
projected schedule. The reason is that the projected future climate
changes have always been based on the middle of the road “Kyoto”
suggested emissions behaviors.

Our society has not limited our
emissions as was suggested by climate scientists to be a prudent way of
avoiding dangerous climate change. What should have been a global
emissions path reduction to a few percentage points less than the
emissions made in 1990 has instead seen emissions grow to 50 percent
greater than they were in 1990.

Climate scientists warned us that
if we did not significantly limit our emissions, our climate would
change much faster, with much greater risks of even larger changes duo
to positive feedbacks that we were just beginning to understand.

Since the IPCCC stopped taking papers for the 2007 report in 2005, we have
learned a lot about these feedbacks. We have also been able to document
changes to our climate happening much faster than previously projected
and these two things are, as suggested by our climate scientists for a
generation or more, intimately related.

In June 2009, the U.S.
Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), founded by Ronald Reagan,
published a report that tells us that by 2080, Austin will see an
average of 90 to 120 days of 100 degree weather every year -- 10 times
more than today’s average of 12 days per year.



Look Closely at Arizona. The area of the map with 100 degree day data from
the 1961-1979 data can be considered to be representative of the average
for the 20th century. What the USGCRP tells us is that enormous areas
of the North American continent will see the same climate that has seen
the evolution of the Saguaro Cactus, in the Sonoran desert of South
Central Arizona or in many cases, a climate that is up to 50 percent
more extreme than that of the Sonoran Desert today.

But the most mind-boggling part of this future projection is that it is based on the
IPCC A1B scenario. This is one of the middle of the road emissions
scenario families where our society makes a modest effort to reign in
greenhouse gas emissions. It is loosely based on a path that could be
represented by efforts with the Kyoto protocol where new efficient
technologies are rapidly put into use and there is a balanced emphasis
on all energy sources. For decades it has been considered to be the most
likely scenario of actual emissions.

But this thinking is enormously dated. We are currently smack-dab in the middle of the
worst-case scenario considered by climate models. Even with the economic
recession, global carbon emissions in 2010 were double the recent
average and as high as anything seen since the late 1970s/early 1980s.

Let me repeat one more time: The USGCRP projections are based on the middle
of the road scenario. We are currently on the worst-case scenario path.
This means that temperature change will be more to significantly more
than we have been expecting for decades. And this is one of the main
reasons why our climate has already changed so much, so rapidly and why
future change will be even faster than projected.



This middle of the road scenario is also considered in the next two examples
of climate projections as well. It is very clear from discussions of
these results by the principal investigators in their research papers
that these results are conservative and the future is very likely to see
changes that are greater than what are indicated.

A paper in Geophysical Research Letters
in July 2010 by two researchers from Stanford and Purdue (Diffenbaugh
and Ashfaq) tells us that climate conditions will continue to rapidly
worsen in the interior of North America and especially the West. The
worsening will be so rapid that in Central Texas the current decade of
2010 to 2019 will see two to three droughts as bad as or worse than the
drought of the 1950s.

Beginning in just 8 years, in the decade
2020 to 2029, Central Texas will see four to five droughts as bad as or
more extreme than the drought of the 1950s. The implications of these
projections are staggering. And remember, these projections are based on
the middle of the road scenario. It is quite likely that changes will
be even greater than what these Stanford researchers suggest.



A report out of the National Climatic Data Center in February 2011 (Dia)
tells us that beginning in just 19 years (2030) Dust Bowl conditions
will be the average climate condition across much of the interior of the
U.S. By 2060, much of the interior of the nation will be two to three
times as bad as the Dust Bowl with some areas four to five times more
extreme than the Dust Bowl.

The 20-year projection is sobering.
What is depicted here is the average condition. Across much of the
United States, the average drought condition will be similar to that of
the Dust Bowl. It is very important to understand that these findings
indicate the average condition. Some years will be worse, but on
average, it will be as bad as the Dust Bowl -- continually -- and in
some areas four to five times as bad as the Dust Bowl.

What is most important to remember about exceptionally extreme events such as
these is that it is the most extreme events that do the most damage.
Climate change increases the occurrence of these most catastrophic of
events. As the temperature increases, the number of extreme events
disproportionately increases too. What this means is that a little
warming increases the number of extreme events a lot, not a little.



By mid-century however, we reach completely catastrophic levels of
continuous drought several times more extreme than the Dust Bowl.
Implication of this type of non-stop drought and adaptation strategies
for these extreme conditions have simply not been contemplated in the
literature. Significant work is underway to gain insight into these
situations that seemed so improbable just a few years ago.

Again, I must insist on repeating that this research, like that from Stanford
and the USGCRP, looks at the A1B scenario or a middle of the road
climate emissions projection. In reality we are now on the worst-case
path. Climate changes are almost certain to be more extreme than these
studies have shown.

This is no longer business as usual. Water
use restrictions will not meet this challenge alone. We must act now to
convince our leaders that this is not just another in a long string of
extraordinary weather events that we cannot yet blame on climate change.

If we do not immediately change our habits and lifestyles, we will run out
of water. Our forests are already dying because they have run out of
water. The evidence supporting the relationship between this string of
unprecedented droughts and climate change is overwhelming.

A paper by Kevin Trenberth and colleagues from the National Center for
Atmospheric Research, Scripps Institute, and The Weather Underground has
summarized 61 different findings concerning climate changes already
occurring and dating back to 1998. An example of these findings includes
the Moscow Heat Wave of 2010 where over 60,000 died. The findings show
that this heat wave was 80 percent likely to have been caused by climate
change.

A draft paper by James Hansen, Director of the NASA
Goddard Institute for Space Studies (the main U.S. climate modeling
agency) tells us that the Texas drought in 2011 is significantly similar
to the Moscow heat wave (only we have a lot more air conditioning in
Texas, contributing to far fewer deaths). The Hansen paper speaks to the
issue that, because our climate has so significantly changed, all
weather now must be considered to have been caused by climate change.

Many of us have heard by now that it was much drier during the droughts of
the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s before reliable record keeping began in
Texas. These droughts however, do not hold a candle to what scientists
have discovered to be true “megadroughts.” Two of them happened between
the 900s and about 1350. These droughts saw rainfall drop to 25 percent
of normal and they lasted for centuries -- hundreds of years!

Water level changes of hundreds of feet in closed basin lakes of the Great
Basin show that these droughts were widespread. Hundred-year old trees
growing a hundred feet or more below the current water level attest to
that.

The climate also likely changed quite rapidly when rain did
begin to fall again because many of these trees remain intact with
their branches, submerged and semi-preserved in the cold waters. One
tree in Jenny Lake at the foot of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming still has a
raptor nest in it, now about a thousand years old.

There is also evidence that large portions of the Great Plains desertified during
these droughts. This is one of those big things the climate scientists
have been warning us about now for decades. During these desertification
events, much of the Great Plains actually changed to a sea of shifting
sand. This desertification was much larger than that at the turn of the
19th century that fostered the term “Great American Desert.”

Sure, there have been bigger droughts and bigger fires in the past, but our
complicated society did not have 1.7 million people in the Austin/Round
Rock Metropolitan Area then.

Projections of climate changes from a
few decades ago have been shattered. Future projections are exceedingly
stark, and these projections are based on the middle of the road
scenario -- far, far from where our emissions are today. Now the climate
scientists are warning us of upcoming weather far more extreme than our
civilization has ever experienced and to which our society will have
difficulty adapting.

We must prioritize our actions towards
immediate action and adaptation strategies far more rigorous than
anything yet contemplated. Climate scientists continue to warn us, and
their warnings continue to worsen.

Our State Climatologists has
attributed only a small portion of our 2011 event to climate change. I
have amassed a very large amount of data over the years looking at this
issue in Central Texas and specifically the validity of the previous
heat wave of record in the mid 1920s. The culmination of this work can
be seen in a three part series published on an investigative internet journal the Rag Blog.

A summary of my reporting shows that the heat records of the mid 1920s
are likely to be in error. This means that the 2011 heat wave was not an
event that shattered the previous record by more than 30 percent. It
means that the 2011 event likely obliterated the previous record event
by over 100 percent. This of course means that our State Climatologists
opinion of the science is significantly dated.

Even with the
erroneous 1923 and 1925 heat records intact in the data, what we have
just seen in Central Texas -- in combination with the warnings we have
been given for over two decades and the evidence showing the global
trend of climate change is much faster than previously assumed -- tells
us that, scientifically and morally, there is no reason to doubt that
climate change is not the cause.

The solutions however, will be
nowhere near as expensive or “ruinous to our economies” as have been
suggested by many voices reported by the media. The most recent academic
evaluations of the solutions to the cleaning up climate change
pollution have shown that costs will be exceedingly non-ruinous.

Many non-academic sources are also claiming that this “new energy economy”
that we are embarking upon will not only be highly prosperous for
humankind, but it will also be highly profitable for humankind as well.
Historically, this kind of fundamental societal change is very well
correlated with highly prosperous and highly profitable historic changes
to our civilization. Much more on this topic is also included in the
three part series mentioned above.

[Bruce Melton
is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker,
writer, and front man for the band Climate Change. Information on
Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, can be found,
along with more climate change writing and outreach, critical
environmental issue films, and the band’s original blues, rock, and folk
music tuned to climate change lyrics at his website.

Latest articles:
" Welcome to Climate Change Texas" -- New
Three Part Series about Climate Change and
Texas:
Part One:
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/bruce-melton-welcome-to-climate-change.html
Part Two:
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/bruce-melton-has-texas-crossed-climate.html
Part Three:
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/search?q=%22welcome+to+climate+change%22
Short
evaluation of relevant academic articles: "Climate
Change Texas The Worst Case Scenario is Happening
Now" and radio interview:
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/rag-radio-bruce-melton-on-real-world.html

Companion video: "Austin
Drought and Fires 2011 - My Summer Vacation
with Climate Change"
https://youtu.be/8b0IFjKGeXc

Check out my
documentaries:

The Ice and the Sea, about
Greenland and sea level rise.

What Have We Done, about the
great Rocky Mountain Pine beetle
Pandemic.

and all of my other films.

Bruce Melton P.E.
Melton Engineering Services Austin
Casa Grande Films & Press
8103 Kirkham
Austin, Texas 78736
(512) 799-7998
bmelton@earthlink.net
www.meltonengineering.com





www.climatechangenow.tv




The Band "Climate Change"
Link - New Rules for a New
World


MeltOn

www.meltonengineering.com


“The
Biggest
Misunderstanding in Climate Science: Warming
over land will be twice the
global average because of cool ocean water.” (three parts)

http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/bruce-melton-biggest-misunderstanding.html