Bruce Melton : Kick the Climate Deniers off the Island

The Greenwood Acres fishing pier on Lake Buchanan, west of Burnet, Texas. Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.

The climate science is certain:
Time to kick the deniers off the island

In just eight years, permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest (including Austin) will be comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years.

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / August 15, 2013

AUSTIN, Texas -- The science is certain, but the deniers are just as certain that their pseudo science is certain. Getting the last few deniers to agree with 97 percent of climate scientists though -- is that a good use of resources? We have the vast majority of the public on our side -- isn't that enough votes?

We can kick the deniers off the island. This is not a mean-spirited thing -- far from it. It's about the optimal path for resource-deprived situations.

The denier crowd is no longer a viable voting block. We need to be focusing on the rest of us. Very few understand the extreme nature of the most recent findings in climate science and the relative ease with which our climate pollution problem can be solved. Environmentally aware voices today advocate for Kyoto Era policies. But Kyoto Era policies were created in the early 1990s.

The psychology of denial is a tricky thing to overcome. It's not about what we think it is about. It's not about "their science" being as good as ours in their eyes. It’s deeper than that and involves social upbringing, false intuition, authority figures, geography, gender, and religion. Because "believers" control the voting block it no longer matters why deniers disbelieve. We no longer need to change their minds.

Because of the dwindling number of deniers, their opinions are no longer relevant. The only thing that has a chance of changing their minds is time or personal experience -- so says the global warming psychology literature. We can influence neither of those, so why waste valuable time and resources? In just eight years, permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest (including Austin) will be comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years. (1)

This megadrought has now begun. In Austin we are suffering from a devastating long-term drought, but only four of the last eight years in Austin have seen significantly below normal rainfall (less than 0.5 inches below average). In the Highland Lakes watershed at San Angelo, where the water comes from to fill our lakes that are at 36 percent of capacity, only three of the last eight years saw significantly below normal rainfall. Yet inflows to the lakes have fallen below the 1950s Drought of Record levels four times in the last eight years. How can this be?

A longer growing season soaks up more soil moisture and leaves less for the springs to create inflows into the lakes. More numerous bigger rainfall events and fewer smaller rainfall events happening already mean that dry periods are longer. When it does rain, more soaks in and less runs off.

Winters are warm enough now that many species do not go dormant any longer (in Central Texas). They keep using groundwater through the winter and leave less to create inflows into the lakes. Evaporation is disproportional to warmth. A little warmth equals a lot more evaporation; more evaporation creates a drier atmosphere allowing it to get warmer creating a feedback loop.

Inflows to the Highland Lakes during the drought of record were 14 percent more than what we have seen today. They were more during the Drought of Record.

• 1947 to 1956: 10,333,493 acre feet
• 2003 to 2112: 9,070,919 acre feet

(This does not include the drought buster year of 1957 with 4.4 million acre feet of inflow.)

Plus, during the Drought of Record, LCRA was releasing 460,000 acre feet of water annually above what they release today because of hydroelectric generation. If hydroelectric releases similar to LCRA’s hydroelectric generation era were made today, in 2011 lake levels would have been far lower than they were in the 1950s and today the lakes would be completely dry. LCRA quit making hydroelectric releases in the late 1970s and early 80s as coal- and natural gas-fired power plants came on line.

But the biggest surprise is that rainfall in Austin is 7 percent more than it was in 1990. Yet, inflows to the lakes are far, far below the average of the previous 50 years. Drought can be perpetuated even with greater rainfall.

Climate scientists have been telling us these things will happen for decades, and now they are happening. It shouldn't be counterintuitive, but the denier and delayer crowd has effectively killed discussion about anything except whether or not global warming exists from a high school greenhouse effect point of view.

We need to be focusing on the level of "belief" of the "believers." It's a business decision. We can fire the deniers. It might not be the "right" thing to do, but we do not have time to be so kind. As a bonus however, we can preserve our relationships with deniers by ignoring the topic like they do. It's ok, we have enough votes.

The amount of resources needed to convince the denier and delayer gang is disproportionally large compared to the fine-tuning of the message that needs to be delivered to "believers." Time is short. We are likely too far gone to forego major tipping points like the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, desertification of the interior of continents, and a 50 GT methane outburst from clathrates. Now we need to prevent our climate from crossing even more severe thresholds.

Solution requirements are much larger today than in the Kyoto Era. We were supposed to have reduced our emissions to 1987 levels by 2012 to prevent dangerous climate change. Instead we have increased emissions by 57 percent. Since 1987 we have emitted 81 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted from the beginning of mankind's emissions until 1987.

Greater than 100 percent emissions reductions are now needed to prevent "extremely dangerous climate change." (2) Spending all of our time trying to convince a few deniers that climate change is real is not a good use of limited time or resources.

The public needs to know the ease with which we can "treat" climate pollution. The 2 percent global gross domestic product cost of dealing with climate pollution advocated by most economists over the last decade is the same as we spend on advertising every year; or the annual U.S. military budget not counting wars; or the yearly costs of the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act; or the costs of normal weather losses every year in the U.S. alone not counting climate enhanced events. It is one quarter the annual cost of health care in the U.S. averaged from 2000 to 2009 -- before Obamacare went into effect.

But the latest research leaves the science of the mid-2000s in its dust. The Stanford/Cornell Plan for a fossil fuel-free New York State suggests that New York build a new alternative energy infrastructure at a cost of a bit more than $500 billion by 2030. Beginning in 2030, the savings and profits -- above a fossil fuel economy in New York State -- are $114 billion per year. This pays off the investment in less than five years. Savings and profits then only increase with time relative to the ever-increasing costs of a fossil fuel infrastructure.(3)

[Bruce Melton, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, and author in Austin, Texas. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, as well as more climate change writing, climate science outreach, and critical environmental issue documentary films can be found on his website and at climatediscovery.com. Melton’s Climate Change Now Initiative has applied for nonprofit 501(c)(3) status. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.]

References:

(1) In just eight years, permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest will be comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years -- Evaluation of work from NOAA and Columbia Earth Institute (Seager 2012) for Truthout.org. Melton, Worst Drought in 1,000 Years Could Begin in Eight Years, Truthout.org, Feb. 21, 2013.
 http://truth-out.org/news/item/14655-worse-drought-in-1000-years-could-begin-in-eight-years
Seager et al., Projections of declining surface water availability for the southwestern United States, Nature Climate Change, December 2012, page 5, last paragraph.
Abstract: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1787.html
NOAA: 
 http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/glodech/research11%20SW%20water%20surface.html
Earth Institute press release: http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/12/23/smaller-colorado-river-projected-for-coming-decades-study-says/
 
(2) Extremely dangerous climate change, two degrees C: 550, 450, 350 and 300 ppm CO2 -- Morrigan, Target Atmospheric GHG Concentrations Why Humanity Should Aim for 350 ppm CO2e, University of California Santa Barbara, 2010.
http://www.global.ucsb.edu/climateproject/papers/
Ramanthan, On avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system: Formidable challenges ahead, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America, 2008.
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14245.full.pdf+html
Hansen et al., Target Atmospheric CO2, Where Should Humanity Aim, Open Atmospheric Science Journal, NASA, November 2008.  
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Hansen_etal.html
IPCC 2007, Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,, B. Metz, O.R. Davidson, P.R. Bosch, R. Dave, L.A. Meyer (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, Chapter 13, Policies, Instruments and Co-operative Arrangements.
IPCC 2001, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Third Assessment Report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, Technical Summary.  
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/
 
(3)A Fossil Fuel Free New York State -- Melton, A Fossil Fuel Free New York State by 2050: An in-depth look at Stanford and Cornell's 100 percent alternative energy road map for New York state, Truthout.org, May 26, 2013.  
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/16540-a-fossil-fuel-free-new-york-state-by-2050
Jacobson et al., Examining the feasibility of converting New York State's all-purpose energy infrastructure to one using wind, water, and sunlight, Energy Policy 57 (2013) 585-601.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/NewYorkWWSEnPolicy.pdf

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Restoration Ecologist Bill Neiman on Saving our Texas Environment

Environmentalist Bill Neiman at the KOOP studios in Austin, Friday, April 13, 2012. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio.
Rag Radio:
Restoration ecologist Bil Neiman
says we need a paradigm shift

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / April 18, 2012

Restoration ecologist Bill Neiman, a leader in the movement to conserve natural resources and to restore and maintain the health of the environment in Texas, was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, April 13, 2012, on Austin community radio station KOOP 91-7-FM, and streamed live on the Internet.

You can listen to the show here.


Bill Neiman is an environmental landscaper and his Native American Seed is the principal supplier of native wildflower and grass seeds in Texas, much of it used in the highway-beautification programs of the Texas Department of Transportation. The company also provides consulting services for prairie-restoration projects.

An advocate of the use of native species of vegetation, Neiman speaks regularly to school classes and adult groups in his ongoing effort to educate the public about ecologically-sensitive land management.

Neiman -- who believes we are at a serious environmental and land use crossroads -- points out that we "consume and convert rural land at the rate of 1,000 football fields per day... to sprawling new suburban homes and big box shopping malls." He says we are at a point were we must "make paradigm shifts in how we connect to outdoor living spaces."

On the show we discuss the nature of native or indigenous species and the value of using them in landscaping, and Neiman suggests adding "pocket prairie" ecosystems to urban landscapes to serve as wildlife refuges and seed banks. And he talks about the current epidemic invasion of the vegetation known as "bastard cabbage" which is actually native to the Mediterrean, and how to address the continuing problem of invasive species in Texas.

Neiman discusses the recent Texas drought and wildfires, and how we must seriously address water usage, the most critical resource in our lives. He suggests landscaping with native turf instead of St. Augustine and other non-indigenous grasses, and creating sustainable rainwater gardens and water harvesting sites.

And he tells the Rag Radio audience about community efforts in the Texas Hill Country to preserve the "night skies" by addressing light pollution with simple techniques to shield outdoor lighting.


Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history.

Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP and streamed live on the web. Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.

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Bruce Melton : Climate Change Texas: The Worst-Case Scenario is Happening

Austin, Texas, Late Summer 2011: This is not autumn in Central Texas. These are cedar trees (juniperus Asheii). The fall leaf drop does not begin here until about mid-October and extends through the first of the year. These cedar trees are dead as are countless others in the region. This photo was taken in the Barton Creek Greenbelt in South Austin. Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE

Climate change Texas:
The worst-case scenario is happening now

An evaluation of recent academic work on ongoing and regional climate change impacts and the latest future projections.

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / February 16, 2012

(This article is an expansion of and provides technical backup for Bruce Melton's three-part series, “Welcome to Climate Change in Texas,” published in December 2011 and January 2012 on The Rag Blog.)

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. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.]

• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's December 30, 2011, Rag Radio interview with Bruce Melton.

References

A half billion trees:
Preliminary estimates show hundreds of millions of trees killed by 2011 drought, Texas Forest Service, December 19, 2011.
http://txforestservice.tamu.edu/main/default.aspx?dept=news
Urban Heat Island:
Hansen et al., Global Surface Temperature Change (heat island), Reviews of Geophysics, December 2010.
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2010/2010_Hansen_etal.pdf
Jones and Wigley, Estimation of global temperature trends, whats imnportant and what isn't, Climatic Change, May 2010.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/74731m62483l72m7/
Menne et al., Homogenization of Temperature Series bia pairwise comparison, Journal of Climate, 2011.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/2008JCLI2263.1
Menne at.a l., The US Historical Climatology Network Monthly Temperature Data version 2, Bias Adjustment, 2011.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ushcn/
Deceitful propaganda campaigns similar to acid rain, smoking, pesticides and ozone depleting chemicals…
Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt, Bloomsbury 2010.
Billion dollar U.S. weather disasters 2011, National Climatic Data Center:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/reports/billionz.html
The Texas drought and future of drought in Texas:
Snapshot of the Texas Drought: Near-term and long-term, projections include more dry conditions in Texas, Texas Climate News, Houston Advanced Research Center, November 2011.
http://texasclimatenews.org/wp/?p=3548
Drought in Texas: Status, Future, Reinsurance, Willis Re, 2011.
http://www.willisre.com/documents/publications/Risk_Financing_Structuring/Resource/Property/TexasDrought_2011.pdf
August 2011 Weather Summary: National Climatic Data Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2011/8
Worst-case scenario:
Synthesis Report, Climate Change, Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions, Climate Change Congress, International Alliance of Research Universities, University of Copenhagen, March 2009. http://climatecongress.ku.dk/pdf/synthesisreport
Raupach, et. al., Global and regional drivers of accelrating CO2 emissions, PNAS, April 2007.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/24/10288.full.pdf+html
IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/emission/index.htm
100 degree days:
USGCRP, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, Thomas R. Karl, Jerry M. Melillo, and Thomas C. Peterson,
(eds.). Cambridge University Press, 2009.Complete report available online:
http://downloads.globalchange.gov/usimpacts/pdfs/climate-impacts-report.pdf
2020 to 2029 will include three to five droughts as bad as or worse than the worst drought that we have seen since 1951:
Diffenbaugh and Ashfaq, Intensification of hot extremes in the United States, Geophysical Research Letters, August 2010. http://www.stanford.edu/~omramom/Diffenbaugh_GRL_10.pdf
Sixty-one examples of climate changes already happening:
Trenberth et al., Current Extreme Weather and Climate Change, Climate Communication.org, Science and Outreach, September 2011. http://climatecommunication.org/new/articles/extreme-weather/overview/
Hansen, Ruet and Sato, Perceptions of Climate Change: The New Climate Dice, in-press Jan 2012.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2012/20120105_PerceptionsAndDice.pdf
Dust Bowl conditions will be the average condition beginning in 2020:
Dai, Drought under global warming - a review, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews - Climate Change, p 45-65, January-February 2011.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.81/pdf
Megadroughts of the last 10,000 years:
Cleveland, Extended Chronology of Drought in the San Antonio Area, 2006. Tree-Ring Laboratory, Geosciences Department, University of Arkansas.
http://www.gbra.org/documents/studies/treering/TreeRingStudy.pdf
Cook, et. al., Long Term Aridity Changes in the Western United States, Science 306, 1015, 2004.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5698/1015.short
deMenocal, et. al., Coherent high and low latitude variability during the Holocene warm period, Science, June 2000.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/demenocal2000/demenocal2000.html
Miao, et. al., High resolution proxy record of Holocene climate from a loess section in Southwest Nebraska, Paleoclimatology, September 2006.
http://snr.unl.edu/sandhills-biocomplexity/download/miaopalaeo2007.pdf
USGCRP History of drought variability in the central United States - implications for the future, 1999.
http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/seminars/990120FO.html

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Bruce Melton : What Can Be Done About Climate Change in Texas?

What a mess. Even without the fires, our natural environment has been devastated by these droughts. This scene was taken in late August just around the corner from my house in southwest Austin. Fortunately I have only lost a handful of immature trees and a few 12-foot shrubs. -- B.M. Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.
What is to be done?
Welcome to climate change in Texas / 3

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / January 11, 2012

[This is the third in a three-part series.]

AUSTIN -- The Texas Forest Service tells us that a half billion trees are dead across Texas. The drought and heat that killed them was similar to the heat wave in Moscow (central western Russia) in 2010 that killed 56,000 and created $15 billion (US dollars) in damages. Academic evaluation of the (Russian) event shows it was 80 percent caused by climate change.

Damage to agriculture and from the drought tops $10 billion here in Texas with another billion and a half in fire damages. Thankfully, the deaths were not nearly as high here because of the predominance of air conditioning in the drought area in Texas and the Southwest.

As I have been saying in the first two installments of this series, climate change is already much more extreme than most scientists have been predicting. This is mainly because the majority of predictions are based on the “most likely” emissions scenario and because we have not reduced our emissions like climate scientists told us to do we are now on the worst-case emissions scenario path.

The bad comes with good though. The solutions to climate change are going to be much less difficult and costly than have been popularized. I will get to the cost and difficulty aspect in a minute but first: one of the biggest reasons that climate change is much more extreme than we thought it would be is that almost all of the predictions have been based on the “most likely scenario." This “most likely scenario” is just one of about 28 computer scenarios that climate scientists use in dozens of different climate models to look into the future.

The “most likely scenario” -- sometimes known as the “middle of the road scenario” -- is roughly based on Kyoto. In other words, if we would have started reducing our greenhouse gas emissions when the consensus of scientific knowledge said we should, these droughts and heat waves would not have happened.

Climate scientists began warning us in the mid-1970s about dangerous climate changes if we don't control our emissions levels. By the time the Rio Earth Summit happened, the modelers knew that the safe zone was likely one with a carbon dioxide concentration similar to that of
the 1980s at the most.

Instead of listening and acting though, our emissions have grown 50 percent greater than 1990 levels. And unexpectedly, in 2011 (climate scientists warn us that these unexpected things will happen more frequently) annual global emissions rose to six percent -- a level not seen since 1970. This is why we are on the worst-case scenario path.

Along this path we should expect weather to be much more extreme. We are nearing the point where our already-changed climate could be considered dangerous; maybe we have passed it.

The links to climate change are being made in the scholarly findings at an increasing rate. A summary of such works prepared by Kevin Trenberth and a roster of distinguished colleagues summarizes 61 scholarly findings since the turn of the 21st century. The conclusion of the paper reads:

Human-induced climate change has contributed to changing patterns of extreme weather across the globe, from longer and hotter heat waves to heavier rains. From a broad perspective, all weather events are now connected to climate change. While natural variability continues to play a key role in extreme weather, climate change has shifted the odds and changed the natural limits, making certain types of extreme weather more frequent and more intense.

It is no longer valid to say that we cannot blame any one individual weather event on climate change. From statistical evaluation of historic weather events to the results projected from computer climate models our scientists can now say that climate change is to blame for the ultra-extreme weather we have been having.

The models show that without our climate having changed already, the costly snowtastrophes in the Northeast and northern Europe would not have happened; billions of trees would not have died in the Rockies because of a native beetle infestation gone berserk; billions of trees would not have died in the Alaskan boreal forest because of extreme fires caused by warming; and billions of trees would not have died in the Amazon because of drought -- the results being annual greenhouse gas emissions from the Amazon alone equal to three-quarters of annual U.S. emissions.

Part of the reason that climate scientists can say this with certainty is that their computer models include these unprecedented events, whereas when they run the models without the extra greenhouse gases emitted by our civilization, these unprecedented events do not appear.

How do the scientists know their models are accurate when weather forecasting models so often fail after only four or five days? Climate models show us that they are much more accurate than weather models because climate scientists can start them up in the ancient past and recreate climate faithfully according to evidence from ocean and lake sediments, ice cores, stalagmites, tree rings, pollen records, fossil shells, soil carbon.

But climate models and weather models are basically the same aren’t they? Yes they are, but climate modelers run dozens of models for hundreds or thousands of years with varying input criteria and average the results all together to get climate. (These are called ensembles.)

The key here is that climate modelers average their results of many different model runs together. Weather forecasting models used by meteorologists in what is in reality a very different field of science than climate, only run one or a few models and then hope that by the fifth day the chaos has not left their seven day forecast in shambles. The two modeling techniques could hardly be more different. For climate, the averaging of so many different model running together makes the chaos (or inaccuracy) of weather models moot.

Our climate scientists have known since the beginning that climate change could certainly be as bad as it is now; this was evident from the results of their worst-case scenario model runs as well as the vast amount of evidence of radically abrupt climate changes in ancient history. To prevent these worst-case impacts from happening though, climate scientists expected us to take their sage advice and do something.

Instead we have done almost nothing. But with this realization we must understand that our innocence in this affair is real. The counterintuitiveness of climate change alone is enough to create a great debate, never mind the doubt spread by vested interests in the form of negative false propaganda about climate science, and even personal attacks against individual scientists.

These tactics are virtually identical to past deceitful propaganda campaigns concerning acid rain, ozone-depleting chemicals, pesticide reform, and smoking. In many cases these campaigns were perpetrated by the same institutions and individuals who are attacking climate science today.

So our climate scientists said that if we did nothing, things would be much worse, that our bread basket regions would change to deserts, that wildland fires would increase dramatically, deaths from heat would skyrocket, insect infestations would cripple ecosystems, feedback mechanisms would kick in and there would be war over resources. They told us these things would happen much sooner if we did nothing, whereas if we reduced our emissions we could likely forego these things altogether.

Surprise! All of this has now happened or is in progress. We did nothing and our emissions path is along the worst-case scenario. Civil war in Somalia has been the latest to be added to the lists of things that have been caused by climate change; so said the head of the African Development Bank last August.

Climate scientists have been telling us for a long time, and they continue to warn today, that it will get worse faster. They are now telling us that the threshold to dangerous climate change is no longer 2 degrees C of warming, but 1 degree C. Two degrees should now be considered the threshold to extremely dangerous climate change.

The 2001 IPCC report told us that 550 ppm CO2 was the safe limit in our atmosphere to hold our temperature down to 2 degrees C of warming. The 2007 IPCC report pushed that down to 450 ppm. Since the 2007 IPCC report, some of the most distinguished scientists in the world have been telling us that 350 ppm CO2 is the safe limit and now, the latest papers from the scholarly journals tell us that 300 ppm may be the safe limit. (We are currently at about 392 ppm and in preindustrial times it was about 280 ppm.)

Why? Because we didn’t do what the climate scientists told us we should do. We are on the wrong path.

What we are seeing across the globe today with these unprecedented and extreme weather events is the beginning of dangerous climate change. It is now indisputable and if we do not act fast, impacts will be unimaginable. Which leads me to my second message from the world of academia:


Fixing our climate will be no more difficult than installing toilets across the world like we have done over about the last 100 years. It will cost no more, and in what is becoming an indisputable truth, it will be vastly profitable for our society.

Why is this message so different from the one we have all heard? The answer rolls back to those moneyed interests and their propaganda. A few simple statements explain this conundrum clearly: The same voices that simultaneously bring us the radically different and designed to be confusing talking points -- that climate change is not real, that it is all just a natural cycle, that it is a scientific conspiracy and that it will be good for us -- are the same voices that tell us that the solutions to climate change will ruin our economies.

It is very simple. Not only are these voices telling us all of these vastly conflicting things at the same time, but they were wrong about the causes and effects of climate change. So given the conflict, and the accuracy of these voices and their “beliefs” about the sciences of climate, why would their “beliefs” about the solutions to the climate crisis be any less wrong?

Climate scientists are saying nothing about the solutions ruining our economies. The academic evaluations of the economics of the solutions to climate change do not tell us anything like what is so prevalent in the public’s understanding.

All of this darned propaganda and counterintuitivity is blotting out the truth. The climate scientists do not have the resources to mount an outreach campaign anywhere close to the size and extent needed to counter the efforts by the “voices.”

The most current assessments of the cost and scope of fixing our out-of-control climate tell us that it will take about one percent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per year for a hundred years to create the infrastructure needed to clean up our greenhouse gas pollution. This is very similar to the installed costs of toilets and wastewater collection and treatment systems around the world today.

Now listen up: it took me weeks for the reality of this statement to set in. Climate scientists are telling us that the solutions to the climate crisis are not really so different from the solutions to the toilet crisis.

Another excellent example of the scope of the challenge ahead is the Great Wall of China. Our civilization has built many things of the scope of what needs to be built to remove our greenhouse gas pollutants from our atmosphere. If it is hard to visualize all of the toilets, pipes and treatment plants, it is not too hard to visualize the Great Wall of China.

Willie Nelson’s Biodiesel Plant at Kline’s Corners, 80 miles south of Dallas. Biodiesel will play a role, just as solar concentrators, algae, tidewater generators, wind, hot/dry geothermal, wave power, photovoltaic, fuel cells, and goodness knows what else. -- B.M. Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.
A few simple chemical processes, based on those that are widespread in industry today and simpler than that used to create biodiesel, would be all that is needed. The technology is officially called air capture and mineral sequestration and it is really nothing more than mining carbon from the sky.

Think of thousands and thousands of railroad boxcars lined up end to end, something the size of the Great Wall of China (which was built by hand, over several different periods, totaling much less than a hundred years). Each one of these boxcar-sized processes would capture CO2 directly from the atmosphere.

A couple of scientists from Columbia University, and Gary Comer’s foundation (Gary Comer was the founder of Land’s End), have developed and scale-tested a process to do just this. Another outfit called Carbon Engineering has done the same thing. Another called Global Thermostat has done the same. What’s more, these technologies can very easily be retrofitted onto existing coal-fired power plants or industrial processes creating a sequestration solution much less expensive than what ongoing developments in the energy industry suggest.

Global Thermostat is another start up that uses a proprietary fluid to create a more efficient process than traditionally has been available. The feasibility of these processes is certain. It is the motivation of our leaders that is uncertain. -- B.M.
All of these individual boxcar-sized processes, in another example, are probably no larger than the size of all of the chemical plant installations at the Ship Channel complex in Houston. These facilities could remove half of the total carbon dioxide emissions created by all of us earthlings every year.

(Why half? Efficiency gains and carbon source capture at power plants can be done, but point source capture from all transportation sources, or energy lost due to inefficient buildings, cannot yet be done on this planet. We must use air capture if we are to get our CO2 emissions down anywhere below about 50 percent of what we emit. This is a very simple piece of the puzzle that is taken into consideration almost exclusively by the politics of climate science.)

The final costs would be far, far less than the cost of building all of the coal-fired power plants on Earth alone, much less the vast network of hundreds of thousands of miles of power lines used to distribute the energy that we needed to achieve the greatness of our civilization.

Another comparison would be that the total disposal costs of all of this CO2 pollution would be far, far less than what were required to build all of our roads and gas stations.

But, what about that two-year study by the American Physical Society (APS) last summer? The press release, not typical of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called our air capture scientists “snake-oil salesman.” The APS’s widely publicized findings appear to show that air capture is actually 20 times more expensive than the air capture “snake-oil salesman” would have us believe (the press release actually said that.)

So the public now understands that air capture snake-oil salesman now have no more credibility than some product on the shopping network that promises to be both a floor polish and desert topping. At least, this is the reporting we get from the conservatively controlled megamedia conglomerates and from the “voices” that would have us believe that climate change is simultaneously “not real," a “conspiracy,” and “good for the planet.”

What "voices” and the media do not tell us however is that the APS study simply did not look at any processes other than traditional ones -- and the authors of the study tell us so. The study also falsely leads us to believe that there are no current pilot processes in existence, an observation easily countered with a quick Googling of the subject.

What the study should possibly have said is that there are no pilot study processes in existence that use the traditional costly process that they evaluated. The traditional processes use giant fans to move air, highly caustic lye or expensive synthetic chemicals to capture CO2 and 350 to 800 degrees of heat to regenerate the capture chemicals.

The alternatives used in the actual pilot processes already constructed and proven in the field often use the wind for moving air, require chemicals that are much less caustic and use room temperature reactions, or temperatures less than the boiling point of water to regenerate the absorbing materials.

The Lackner model, being developed by Kilimanjaro Energy, uses a simple everyday plastic material to absorb carbon dioxide and water to release the carbon dioxide from the plastic. These are all very simple ideas and they have been proven with scale tests to be affordable. The Lackner model for example costs about $30 to remove a ton of CO2 and this cost will likely fall drastically with massive industrialization.

So, just to be clear, why does this big two-year study tell us that the costs are $600 a ton? It is because the new air capture technologies have not been published in the peer review literature. The developers of these technologies are concerned that this would compromise their secret processes. The APS study simply looked at using the old highly caustic lye process, using big fans and 800 degree regeneration temperatures. But did the media tell us this? No. Did the “voices” tell us this? Certainly not!

There will be billions of dollars to be made from these processes in the very near future. Statoil in the North Sea has spent $80 million to build a plant to capture and inject supercooled quasi-liquid CO2 deep beneath the sediments of the North Sea to avoid a $50-a-ton carbon tax in Norway.

The CO2 is coming from natural gas Statoil is producing. The process sequesters a million tons of CO2 per year and its development and installation cost was paid back in less than two years. Another very important thing to remember is that Statoil uses the traditional expensive air capture process and 800 degree regeneration temperatures.

Once the CO2 is captured from the air it must be disposed of. How does one dispose of 10 gigatons of carbon every year? One of the best ways takes the solid carbonates collected with the new air capture techniques and piles them up in mountains at the collection site. This is an immense job, but one that is done every year at a coal mine near you.

In a little more detail, 10 gigatons of carbon turns into 30 gigatons of calcium carbonate or limestone. Changing carbon dioxide into limestone is also a much more permanent way to solve the problem than disposing of (or storing) the gas underground.

We mine seven gigatons of coal to feed our power plants every year. Much of this mining is from pits or mountaintops. The amount of rock and soil that must be removed to get to the coal is usually much more than the amount of coal mined itself, so the total amount of material moved is far larger than the seven gigatons that we mine. We would be coal unmining on a scale that at the most, is as large as the coal mining industry today.

A big job this certainly is, but comparing it to something known really gives us a sense that somewhere, somebody has been getting their facts confused. Another comparison is even simpler: Why don’t we visualize all of the CO2 pollution emitted by humans every year and compare it to all of the human waste pollution created every year? I am talking about those wastes from human bodily functions that go into our sinks and toilets and then miraculously and thankfully vanish from our lives.

The amount of carbon dioxide, converted to liquid that we emit globally every year would cover the island of Manhattan to the 85th floor of the Empire State Building. If we collected all of the toilet and other wastes that flow into our wastewater collection systems every year, just in the United States, the amount would be far above the top of the antenna on the Empire State building (eeeewe).

Real costs are hard to determine, sort-of like predicting the cost of wastewater treatment today as we sat in our outhouses a hundred years ago (eeeewe). The best knowledge we have though tells us that 25 to 50 cents per gallon of gas would do the trick. This would be $20 to $30 per ton of carbon. In the North Sea, Statoil has proven the feasibility and profitability of disposing of a million tons of CO2 a year to avoid Norway’s $50 a ton carbon tax which is equal to about 50 cents per gallon of gasoline.

Yet another example comes from one of the most important climate scientists of our times: Wallace Broecker at Columbia University. Broecker has been instrumental in explaining ocean current processes and their relationships to past abrupt climate changes.

Broecker is a great proponent of this process of mountaintop reinstallation called atmospheric capture and mineral sequestration. He says that if we used wind energy to substitute for coal, it would take an area of wind the size of a barn to provide enough electricity for the average family for a year.

Compare this to the cost of burning coal and then removing the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The amount of energy needed could be thought of as being the same as the wind can generate through a barn window! The cost is something near 170 times less!

My story has strayed a bit from the current climate change impacts in Texas, but the solutions to the climate change challenge are just as important as understanding that climate change is real, that it is happening now, and that it is happening along the lines of the worst-case scenario. The reason the solutions are so important is the broad assumption that the solutions will ruin our economies.

To understand why the propaganda has been able to so heavily influence society is a topic that I have barely skimmed, but is well documented in many books (see references) and articles (my own and many, many others) citing public tax records from the Internal Revenue Service showing who donated how much to what institutes supporting beliefs contrary to the consensus of climate scientists.

And once again, understand that the vast majority of folks supporting the non-climate change position base their beliefs on the positions of their authority figures. These good folks, including most of their authority figures, are innocent.

Our great innocence in this matter does not change reality though. We are polluting, but we are not paying. One percent of global GDP per year is what the scientists and economists are focusing on as the cost of fixing climate pollution.

Professor Richard Alley of Penn State and one of the coolest ice science geeks on the planet tells us there are about 100 economic assessments of the solutions now. One percent of GDP is about $600 billion a year, or about as much as the annual U.S. military budget -- without wars. We simply need to help our leaders understand that the risks from climate change are at least as high as the risks from war. Having the courage to spend the money is easy once the real risks are known.

So make those calls and write those letters and talk with your friends and neighbors and get downtown and stand with the Occupy Movement. The only way to beat the propaganda, the counterintuitiveness, and the pure innocence of ignorance is through a groundswell of activism and a transfer of knowledge.

This is real, we are responsible, we must provide the solutions, the solutions are already devised and waiting for industrialization, and the costs and difficulty will be no greater than many other things our civilization has accomplished.

And always remember that these “easy” solutions to the climate change challenge do not give us the right to emit more pollution, any more than toilets and wastewater treatment systems give us the right to make more of that kind of pollution. One more thing: greenhouse gas pollution is very much like that “other” type of pollution. It is an intimate part of our lives and it will not go away by itself.

[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. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.]

• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's December 30, 2011, Rag Radio interview with Bruce Melton.

Austin drought and fires, 2011:
Bruce's summer vacation with climate change



References:

Moscow and European Heat Wave:
Rhamstorf and Coumou, Increase of extreme events in a warming world, PNAS, October 24, 2011.
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Nature/rahmstorf_coumou_2011.pdf
Worst-case scenario:
Synthesis Report, Climate Change, Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions, Climate Change Congress, International Alliance of Research Universities, University of Copenhagen, March 2009. http://climatecongress.ku.dk/pdf/synthesisreport
Raupach, et. al., Global and regional drivers of accelerating CO2 emissions, PNAS, April 2007.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/24/10288.full.pdf+html
IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/emission/index.htm
Six percent CO2 growth in 2010…
Carbon Dioxide Analysis Center. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp030/global.1751_2008.ems
Sixty-one examples of climate changes already happening…
Trenberth et al., Current Extreme Weather and Climate Change, Climate Communication.org, Science and Outreach, September 2011. http://climatecommunication.org/new/articles/extreme-weather/overview/
Deceitful propaganda campaigns similar to acid rain, smoking, pesticides and ozone depleting chemicals…
Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt, Bloomsbury 2010.
Billion dollar U.S. weather disasters 2011, National Climatic Data Center
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/reports/billionz.html
The cost of burning coal and removing the CO2 is 170 times less than wind energy…
Broecker and Wang, Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat--and How to Counter It, Hill and Wang, 2009.
Snowtastrophes, beetle infestations, Alaskan fires, The Amazon:
References are too numerous to mention here but can be seen in individual discussions of these topics at my Climate Discoveries Chronicles webpage on www.meltonengineering.com
Vested interest propaganda:
Powell, The Inquisition of Climate Science, Columbia University Press, 2011.
Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt, Blomsbury, 2010.
Washington and Cook, Climate Change Denial, Rutledge, 2011.
Bradley, Global Warming and Political Intimidation: How Politicians Cracked Down on Scientists As the Earth Heated Up, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011.
Hoggan and Littlemore, Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, Greystone, 2009.
CO2 emissions are worse than the worst-case scenario developed by the IPCC:
Synthesis Report, Climate Change, Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions, Climate Change Congress, International Alliance of Research Universities, University of Copenhagen, March 2009. http://climatecongress.ku.dk/pdf/synthesisreport
Raupach, et. al., Global and regional drivers of accelrating CO2 emissions, PNAS, April 2007.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/24/10288.full.pdf+html
IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/emission/index.htm
Regions would change to deserts, wildland fires would increase dramatically, deaths from heat skyrocket, insect infestations would cripple ecosystems, feedback mechanisms would kick in and there would be war over resources: References are too numerous to mention here but can be seen in individual discussions of these topics at my Climate Discoveries Chronicles webpage on www.meltonengineering.com
2 Degrees C, 550, 450, 350 and 300 ppm CO2, Extremely dangerous climate change:
IPCC 2007, Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,, B. Metz, O.R. Davidson, P.R. Bosch, R. Dave, L.A. Meyer (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, Chapter 13, Policies, Instruments and Co-operative Arrangements.
Morrigan, Target Atmospheric GHG Concentrations Why Humanity Should Aim for 350 ppm CO2e, University of California Santa Barbara, 2010. http://www.global.ucsb.edu/climateproject/papers/
IPCC 2001, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Third Assessment Report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, Technical Summary. http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/
Ramanthan, On avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system: Formidable challenges ahead, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the Untied States of America, 2008. http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14245.full.pdf+html
Hansen et al., Target Atmospheric CO2 Where Should Humanity Aim, Open Atmospheric Science Journal, NASA, November 2008. http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Hansen_etal.html
The Toilet Crisis:
Alley, Earth: The Operators Manual, WW Norton, 2011.
Broecker and Wang, Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat--and How to Counter It, Hill and Wang, 2009.
The costs of solutions to the climate crisis:
ibid.
American Physical Society Study:
Direct Air Capture of CO2 with Chemicals, The American Physical Society, June 2011.
http://www.aps.org/policy/reports/assessments/upload/dac2011.pdf
Evaluation of APS study by Nature:
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/05/sucking_carbon_dioxide_from_ai.html
Disposal of 10 gigatons of carbon:
Broecker and Wang, Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat--and How to Counter It Hill and Wang, 2009.
Atmospheric capture, mineral sequestration and the barn:
ibid.
Additional research and development costs:
ibid.
About 100 economic assessments of the solutions to climate change:
Alley, Earth: The Operators Manual, WW Norton, 2011.

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Bruce Melton : Has Texas Crossed a Climate Threshold?

Downtown Austin seen from near the intersection of Loop 360 and US 290/71 West. This photo was taken in early September 2011. The brownish yellow- and red-leaved trees in the left and bottom right foreground are elms. They naturally shed their leaves early during our hottest summers and September is still summertime in Central Texas! The fall leaf drop does not start until October. This year is different however. Normal drought stress creates a leaf drop where elms go dormant, their leaves yellow and fall to the ground, very similar to the normal autumn leaf drop. In this year’s unprecedented drought however, many of the elms around Austin turned bright brown or reddish brown. This more than likely means they have died. In the middle ground of the photo you can also see many yellow, brown, and gray trees that have already gone dormant or died. A preliminary report by the Texas Forest Service has looked at forest mortality across Texas and tells us that up to a half billion (with a “B”) trees may have died in this drought. -- B.M.

Have we crossed a threshold?
Welcome to climate change in Texas / 2

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / January 4, 2012

[This is the second in a three-part series.]

AUSTIN -- The driest 12 month period in Austin, since record keeping began in 1854, happened October 2010 to September 2011. The 100 degree day record was more than shattered, it was obliterated. Three times in the last six years Lake Travis inflows have fallen below the minimum levels set in the Drought of the 50s.

The Lower Colorado River Authority Board of Directors has voted to take drastic measures. They have received permission to deviate from the Water Management Plan to significantly cut back or even cut off water to farmers next year.

Obviously, this string of droughts is as bad as they come, or is it? The news that the drought will be over when La Niña goes away is ever present, but will it really go away when La Niña leaves?

And what about all this heat? What about all of these 100 degree-plus days that we have had recently? How big was this 100 degree day record that we broke and how does all this unprecedented heat influence this string of droughts?

The official record shows that we beat the 100 degree day record by at least 30 percent this year. The previous top two records for Austin were 69 set in 1925 and 66 set in 1923. The state climatologist (John Nielson-Gammon) calls 2011 an outlier because we endured 21 more days of 100 degree temperatures than the previous record of 69 days set in 1925.

So, what is an outlier and what do scientists do with them? Outliers are pieces of data that for some reason do not belong to the sample being analyzed. In this case we are analyzing the number of days every year with high temperatures above 100 degrees.

An example describing outliers could be the normal water level in the closed basin lakes in Nevada and Utah. The Great Salt Lake is a 1,700 square mile remnant of the great 8,500 mile Lake Lahontan from ice age times. Lake Lahontan grew and shrank maybe dozens of times over the last 100,000 or so years. The evidence is clear in the raised beaches hundreds of feet above the existing water level and the submerged forests of preserved stumps hundreds of feet below current water levels.

The Great Basin has no natural discharge in this area so the level of Lake Lohontan is an indicator of how much precipitation falls there. When the climate was really warm (like today) or really cold, like any of the two dozen or more abrupt climate changes over the period, rainfall was low.

Statistically, rainfall data from the wet periods would be deemed outlier if they were mixed in with rainfall data from the dry periods. Different climates create different data. Another example would be a broken thermometer. If it is 165 degrees in February, something is broken.

Our State climatologists calling the 2011 heat wave of 90 days of 100 degree plus temperature an outliers means that this piece of data is suspect and is likely the result of an error or fundamental system change. The years 1923 and 1925 were certainly hot, but surrounding weather stations from Del Rio to Dallas come nowhere near the intensity of heat experienced at the Austin weather station.

Has our regional climate seen a fundamental change? Why did this outlier occur and what does it mean? What’s up with 1923 and 1925? To try and answer these questions we need to first clean up the rest of the data. If we look at 100 degree days before the year 2000, we find that 1923 and 1925 were 65 and 73 percent greater than the third ranked most extreme summer ever recorded in Texas.

So if 2011’s 90 days of 100 degree heat was an outlier, and 2011 was 30 percent greater than the previous record, then 1923 and 1925 are outliers two times over!

Now you are thinking, why did I say before 2000? The weather really started freaking out about the turn of the century. This is when “The Big Melt,” as the climate scientists call it, started in Greenland. It’s when the great pine beetle pandemic in the Rockies really got going. Just a few years later is when we started having snowmaggedons and snowtastrophes in the northeast and northern Europe where Arctic warming has enhanced the jet stream, increasing winter storms across the Northeast and other areas.

The ranking of 100 degree days in Austin prior to 1999 shows the tremendous gap between the 1923 and 1925 records and the rest of the pack. These records stood for 75 years. But if you disregard the 1923 and 1925 outliers, seven of the top 10 100 degree day records have been set since 1998.

Beyond rational association, as well as using statistical data validation tools, it is significantly likely that these two records are in error for some reason and should be ignored. When the true nature of the 1923 and 1925 records is understood, the incredible record smashing that we thought happened with 100 degree days in 2011 more than doubles! What I am getting at here is that we have likely crossed one of those climate thresholds the climate scientists keep talking about.

Does more evidence cast doubt on the 1923 and 1925 records? The years 1922, 1923, 1925, and 1926 are incomplete. They have a lot of missing data. These are the last years in the record to have missing data and there were no years for the previous 18 years that had missing data. Prior to 1903, years with missing data were much more common.

Then there are the rainfall records. Rainfall is an excellent indicator of extreme heat. The hotter it is, the greater is the evaporation and the drier things are. This allows the temperature to become even hotter because moisture in the air prevents the temperature from going even higher. It’s a feedback loop.

Nielson-Gammon says that the extreme heat was responsible for 90% of our unprecedented heat records in Texas in 2011 and that climate change was only responsible for 10% (0.5 degrees.) (Nielson-Gammon’s 90% is 4.9 degrees out of the 5.4 degrees Texas’ temperature was above average in the summer of 2011.)

This visually startling photo was taken in southwest Austin. These trees are young elms and they have very likely been killed by the drought and have not just gone dormant. They are maybe 15 to 20 years old. The photo was taken in mid-September and these trees normally do not ever turn this color, especially at this time of year. When these trees go dormant, their leaves yellow, not redden, before they fall. Young trees are especially susceptible to the effects of drought because of their immature root systems. It is also important to note that the 500 million trees killed by the drought, cited by the Texas Forest Services, are all trees with a trunk diameter greater than five inches. None, or very few of these trees, or countless others across the state, come close to five inches. -- B.M.

Based on numerous evaluations of ongoing climate changes from Stanford, Purdue, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), Nielson-Gammon’s evaluation is dated. According to the IPCC and the Climate Change Congress in Copenhagen, our climate is progressing along the worst-case scenario.

These assessments and evaluations (Diffenbaugh and Ashfaq 2010) show that we can expect the hottest season experienced since 1950 (including the drought of the 1950s) to happen two to three times within the next century, four to five times in the 2020s, and largely become average conditions after 2030.

Aigou Dia (NCAR) tells us that we will see Dust Bowl conditions as the average climate across much of the nation by the decade 2020 to 2030. By 2030 to 2040, Dia says the Palmer Drought Severity Index for most of the country will be worse than during the Dust Bowl, with some parts of the country being unimaginably worse than the Dust Bowl.

The USGCRP, founded by President Reagan, says that Austin will be nearly 50 percent hotter than the Sonoran Desert Researcher Station (the one with the giant saguaro cactus outside of Tuscon) beginning about 2080. We can expect every year to have 90 to 120 days of 100 degree heat. The average number of days of 100 degree-plus at the Research Station is 87. In Austin the average number of days over 100 degrees is 11.

Also remember, the three studies above are an excellent demonstration of the "conservative climate science" reality. All three (as do almost all climate research) show the results of modeling that is based on the A1B scenario. This scenario is what is commonly referred to as the "most likely" scenario. It is one where we follow a path similar to Kyoto. This is the climate path that we were expected to follow.

But the United States' refusal to ratify Kyoto, as the only nation on the planet to do so, has almost certainly relegated the A1B scenario to the infeasible category. The path that our actual global emissions are on is the A1FI (Fossil Intensive) scenario, otherwise known as the worst-case scenario. So as outrageous as it sounds, these projections are conservative -- impacts will likely be more extreme.

Back to last summer: Rainfall makes a huge difference with summer temperatures. May, June, and July of 2008 saw 22 inches of rain. That summer we only experienced three days of 100 degree heat in Austin.

The second driest period of the drought of the 50s had just an inch more rain than we had here in 2011 (1956 at 12.2 inches) and they had 34 days of 100 degree heat. We had nearly three times that many days over 100 last summer with virtually the same rainfall. What about the big heat waves in 1923 and 1925?

In 1925 we had almost 13 inches of rain. This was great for the heat wave-inducing temperature feedback that supposedly produced 69 days of 100 degrees-plus temps that year. But what happened in 1923 with 66 days over 100? It rained 51 inches in 1923! Why in the world were there so many 100 degree days in that year? May through August 1923 had six inches including three inches-plus in July. February through April saw 12.5 inches. In 1923 there was no extreme dryness contributing to the 66 days over 100 degrees supposedly recorded.

The years where 100 degree days do not match up with extremely low rainfall in the record are too numerous to print here. The relationship that our State Climatologist talks about simply is not well-supported. So, glaringly, there is a problem with Nielson-Gammon’s hypothesis. Extreme drought may be responsible for the heat wave feedback, but it does not appear to have a definitive relationship with the 14 most extreme 100 degree day years in the record. What about the rest of Texas in 2011?

The only number two-ranked record was San Antonio. They had 57 days of 100-plus this year, second to 59 days they endured in 2009. Prior to 1998, the most San Antonio had seen was 33 days over 100 in 1948. All the rest suffered through the hottest summer ever. A few of them shattered their previous records. The remainder annihilated their records. But most important for this discussion, notice how the 1920’s are completely absent from the previous record list except for Austin.

Even if Austin’s 1923 and 1925 records are absolutely valid, something big has happened across Texas. Have we really crossed a climate threshold? As unambiguous as all of these obliterated 100-degree day records seem to be, it may be decades before we know. Remember when the climate change debate began 30 years ago and the climate scientists said it could be 20 or 30 years before we knew for sure if it was real? Same smell here. A scientific certainty requires lots of data.

Scientific truths and moral truths however, are very different things. A murder suspect sentenced to death based on circumstantial evidence... is sentenced to death by moral truths. But circumstantial evidence -- moral truths -- are almost never allowed in science.

Climate scientists have been telling us for nearly three decades that these kinds of things would happen: that the weather would become more extreme, that droughts would become the norm, that extreme heat waves would surpass all heat waves of the past, that we would see desertification and forest die-off, agricultural failure, and unimaginable water shortages.

They told us that all of these things would be unprecedentedly extreme. They have been telling us that the longer we delayed the greater would be the extremeness of the changes that we would have to endure. They told us that it was not the average temperature increase that would be the problem, it would be the extremes.

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 900's and about 1350. These droughts saw rainfall drop to 25% of normal and they lasted for centuries -- hundreds of years! These periods were when Lake Lahontan dropped so low.

There is also evidence that large portions of the Great Plains desertified, changing 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 early 1900's or the 1800's or the 1300's or 3,000 years BC, but our complicated society did not have 1.7 million people in the Austin-Round Rock Metropolitan Area then. Now the climate scientists are warning us of upcoming weather far more extreme than our civilization has ever experienced.

This is no longer business as usual. We have to do something. The only way that we are going to overcome the momentum of political ignorance though is for each and every one of us to do something.

I’m not talking about fluorescent light bulbs or Priuses. Each and every one of us CAN make a difference. Contact your local, state, and national leaders and tell them to listen to what the people, not corporations, are telling them to do about our climate. Tell them that this is the single most important issue of our time and they need to treat it like it is so.

Tell them what professor Alley says in his book Earth: The Operators Manual. Alley says that fixing our climate will be no more difficult than creating our planetary wastewater collection and treatment infrastructure.

Then tell them that those who say it will ruin our economy are the same ones who tell us that climate change is not real, it is not bad, it is good for us, or it is a world-wide conspiracy by almost all climate scientists.

And ask them why is it that we still believe these climate change deniers when they tell us the solutions to the climate challenge will ruin our economy?

[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. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.]

• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's December 30, 2011, Rag Radio interview with Bruce Melton.

References:

Preliminary estimates show hundreds of millions of trees killed by 2011 drought:
Texas Forest Service, December 19, 2011.
http://txforestservice.tamu.edu/main/default.aspx

2020 to 2029 will include three to five droughts as bad as or worse than the worst drought that we have seen since 1951:
Diffenbaugh and Ashfaq, Intensification of hot extremes in the United States, Geophysical Research Letters, August 2010. http://www.stanford.edu/~omramom/Diffenbaugh_GRL_10.pdf

Dust Bowl conditions will be the average condition beginning in 2020:
Dia, Characteristics and trends in various forms of the Palmer Drought Severity Index 1900 to 2008, Journal of Geophysical Research, March 16, 2011, revised. `
Press Release: http://www2.ucar.edu/news/2904/climate-change-drought-may-threaten-much-globe-within-decades
Article: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/Dai_JGR2011.pdf

100 degree days:
Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, A State of Knowledge Report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2009. http://downloads.globalchange.gov/usimpacts/pdfs/climate-impacts-report.pdf

Weather Data: U.S. Weather Service

Lake Travis Information: Lower Colorado River Authority

Megadroughts of the last 10,000 years:
Cleveland, Extended Chronology of Drought in the San Antonio Area, 2006. Tree-Ring Laboratory, Geosciences Department, University of Arkansas.
http://www.gbra.org/documents/studies/treering/TreeRingStudy.pdf

Cook, et. al., Long Term Aridity Changes in the Western United States, Science 306, 1015, 2004.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5698/1015.short

deMenocal, et. al., Coherent high and low latitude variability during the Holocene warm period, Science, June 2000.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/demenocal2000/demenocal2000.html

Miao, et. al., High resolution proxy record of Holocene climate from a loess section in Southwest Nebraska, Paleoclimatology, September 2006.
http://snr.unl.edu/sandhills-biocomplexity/download/miaopalaeo2007.pdf

USGCRP History of drought variability in the central United States - implications for the future, 1999.
http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/seminars/990120FO.html

Fixing our climate will be no more difficult than creating our planetary wastewater collection and treatment infrastructure:
Alley, Earth: The Operators Manual, W.W. Norton, 2011.

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