The Hazecam Is Back

Just wanted to let everyone know that the Grand Portage Hazecam is back up and running. The picture is looking east from the roof of the Grand Portage Community Center towards Hat Point and Grand Portage Island and out over Lake Superior towards Isle Royale.

The snow is still coming down this morning so not much to see yet, we received about six inches of fresh powder overnight with even more up over the hill. Perfect skiing snow.

Perfect Storm 2?

The meteorological world is buzzing about the confluence of Hurricane Sandy with a strong cold front over the eastern seaboard next week, with headlines screaming "Superstorm" that could affect millions of people with high winds, storm surges, and power outages. There is an eerie similarity to 1991's "perfect storm" of movie fame, although this storm has the potential to cause much more damage because the 1991 storm did not make landfall.

Image from Climate Progress

According to The Weather Channel's Brian Norcross this storm is "unprecedented and bizzare" and has also been compared to the hurricane of 1938 which killed hundreds in New England. People are being warned to prepare for the worst and evacuation routes from the coast are already in place. If you have travel plans for the east coast next week I would suggest changing them since this is a very slow moving storm that has already killed dozens in the Caribbean.

One thing you will not hear mentioned much in the breathless reporting on the storm are the words "climate change". While no single weather event can be directly attributed to climate change, the odds become greater for storms like this as the world warms. Climate scientist James Hansen likens it to "loading the dice" where the likelihood of more powerful storms becomes greater. Another analogy would be to a baseball player taking steroids to increase their home run total. While no single home run could be attributed to steroids, the statistical increase in home runs would lead to the suspicion that something odd is going on. Extreme precipitation events have increased significantly since 1948, and this is in line with what climate scientists have predicted for a warmer world. Storms like this one may become commonplace during the latter half of the 21st century, and people will need to become more aware of potential weather hazards no matter where they live.

I think I had better tune up my chainsaw and generator.

UPDATE: For the third time this year alone floods have crippled a city in the Lake Superior basin

Fire Danger is High

The extremely warm and dry weather we have experienced this month has led to an early snow runoff and a rapid escalation of the fire danger in Minnesota. If the dry weather continues this spring it could be a bad season for wildfires.

Burning permits are currently required in Cook County, and there are already more stringent restrictions in the south-central part of the state.

Please be aware of sparks and fire when working outside this spring, and keep brush and trees trimmed back from your home. Cook County Fire Wise is a good source of information on protecting your property from fire.

Looks Like a Very Early Spring

Well, March has definitely come in like a lamb. The sunshine last week started the melt, and the rain over the past few days has reduced the snow we have left into a a few dirty banks along the roads and slushy remnants in the forest shadows. Although I predicted a milder winter this year due to a moderate El Nino, this level of spring warmth in early March is unlike any I have ever seen.

As it turns out, the mild weather in northern Minnesota is only the tip of the iceberg (so to speak). This winter has been the warmest and driest on record in Canada.

I will let the article speak for itself:

From the balmy Arctic, to the open water of the St. Lawrence and snowless western fields, this winter has been the warmest and driest in Canadian record books.

Environment Canada scientists report that winter 2009/10 was 4 C above normal, making it the warmest since nationwide records were first kept in 1948. It was also the driest winter on the 63-year record, with precipitation 22 per cent below normal nationally, and down 60 per cent in parts of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario.

"It's beyond shocking," David Phillips, a senior climatologist with Environment Canada, told Canwest News Tuesday. Records have been shattered from "coast to coast to coast."

"It is truly a remarkable situation," says Phillips, noting that he's seen nothing like it in his 40 years of weather watching. He also warns that "the winter than wasn't" may have set the stage for potentially "horrific" water shortages, insect infestations and wildfires this summer.

As much of Asia, Europe and the U.S. shivered through and shovelled out of freak winter storms, Phillips says Canada was left on the sidelines.

"It's like winter was cancelled in this country," he says...

It says the long-term record shows Canada's climate has changed, most markedly in the winter, which has warmed 2.5 C over the last 63 years.

"The winter season shows the greatest warming of any season, but all seasons have shown a warming trend since 1948," says the summary. Of the 10 warmest winters, four have occurred within the last decade, and 11 of the last 20 winters are listed among the 20 warmest.

This winter was a standout, with records being shattered from B.C. to Baffin Island to the Great lakes. The North saw extraordinary temperatures, with three regions setting "a new high mark" — the Arctic tundra 5.4 C above normal, Arctic mountains and fiords 5.3 C above normal, and northwestern forest 4.2 C above normal.

Spring has now arrived in many parts of Canada with cherry trees in full bloom on the West Coast, and Phillips says, "crocuses already blossoming in Labrador."

The warm, dry winter could spell big trouble this summer. "One of the greatest things about our winter is it kills bugs and diseases and resets the clock for us," says Phillips. Or, it used to. He says many pests are sure to be thriving after this year's warm winter.

"Everything weird, wild and wacky that happens this summer people will trace back to the year without winter," says Phillips, noting that soil moisture in the western Prairies is very low.

Snowmageddon! Who Could Have Predicted? Climate Scientists, That's Who!

Apocalyptic headlines about the record snowfalls in Washington, D.C. and the surrounding states have saturated the media the last few days as a series of major storms has inundated the region under a two foot blanket of heavy, wet snow. As thousands struggle to dig out the chorus of climate change denial is braying how the existence of winter disproves any warming trend. Who could have predicted record snowfall events for the eastern seaboard? As it turns out, climate scientists have already predicted a greater frequency of more extreme precipitation events for that region as our climate continues to warm.

Although individual weather events can not be directly attributed to climate change, the overall trend has been for more frequent incidents of extreme precipitation in the U.S. over the last hundred years. Physics has shown that warmer air can hold more water vapor. When you realize that overall global temperatures have only warmed by just over 1 degree C, the fact that it falls as snow in the middle of winter should not come as a surprise.

Climate realists have begun pushing back against the anti-science spin, with some help from Stephen Colbert.


Update: tried to embed the Colbert video - HTML fail - so click the link if you want a laugh. To the New York Times: this is not a deep freeze, precipitation is not the same as temperature.

Update 2: Want to vacation in a place with record-breaking warmth? Try Greenland!

MPCA Issues Air Quality Alert For Duluth, St. Cloud, Rochester, and the Twin Cities

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has issued an air quality alert for four Minnesota cities today, citing high levels of fine particulates. Particulate levels are high throughout the state, but have reached levels that are unhealthy for sensitive groups such as asthma patients, young children and the elderly. Sensitive people are encouraged to avoid strenuous exercise and should stay indoors as much as possible. Increasing westerly winds this afternoon should dissipate the temperature inversion that has caused the particulate buildup, and the alert should be lifted then.

I am monitoring particulate levels here in Grand Portage, and while they have reached the moderate level they are beginning to trend down as of 9:30 am. I will alert the local health service if particulate levels rise above the unhealthy for sensitive groups threshold. If you have any questions on the Air Quality Index and what it means please call my office at 475-2415 ext. 35.

Here is a graphic from the MPCA link showing the Grand Portage AQI at 8:00 am this morning.

Weather and Climate

There has been a lot of commentary on TV and the blogosphere lately about the recent cold snap in certain regions of the northern hemisphere, particularly in the southeastern United States. While this cold snap is very bad for some citrus and produce growers, events like this are not unusual during the winter and are not an indication of any global cooling trend. I have written before on the difference between weather and climate, and how you need to look at weather records of at least thirty years to see any kind of overall climate trend.

This does nothing to stop the defenders of the status quo from getting all worked up about how wrong all those climate scientists are. Meanwhile in the southern hemisphere Australia is suffering from heat waves and massive crop losses.

The changes that are happening to the global climate system will cause more extremes of both hot and cold, because adding more energy to the system will cause more disruptions in the normal jet stream patterns. This will allow cold air to flow down from the poles as well as warm air to move north. While the freeze in the southeast is grabbing all the headlines the west coast has been warming, and the Vancouver Olympic organizers may be starting to get nervous.

I will close this post with a graphic representation of record heat versus record cold since the 1950's from Dr. Joseph Romm's excellent blog Climate Progress: This is only for the U.S., but the change in ratio is striking.

I will bet that there are more record highs set in the U.S. in 2010 than record lows - anyone want to take me up on it?

Happy Solstice!

Happy solstice everyone! Today is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, so from now on we will be getting a few more minutes of daylight each day as we begin the long, slow climb towards summer. There was a nice light snowfall last night, enough to make the forest here look like a Christmas card. Many species of plants and animals that call Grand Portage home depend on having enough snow during the winter, so I welcome it. It also adds some insulation for the ground against the cold yet to come, so it will help keep wells and septic systems from freezing.

There has been a lot of news and analysis about the climate change summit last week in Copenhagen, and if President Obama has done enough to push deeper cuts in carbon emissions. I think it is a major step to get China and India and the other major emitters on board with a framework to cut emissions, but there needs to be a strong and binding agreement ready for next years summit in Mexico City. Sorry deniers but the existence of snow does not disprove global warming any more than night disproves the existence of the sun. In fact we can expect even heavier snow events in the future because warmer air can hold more water vapor. The desperation of the defenders of business as usual is clearly shown by the hacking of the CRU e-mails. There is nothing in those e-mails that undercuts the science of climate change, because it is a robust theory with thousands of scientific papers as a foundation. Scientists take great care to get the science right, since they know that a sloppy paper will get eviscerated by other scientists. I am sure most of them would love to be proved wrong about climate change since the consequences are so dire. Science is a powerful tool that can show us how our planetary systems operate, and while it is not perfect, it is still the best method our civilization has devised to understand our world.

Can Extreme Weather Events be Blamed on Climate Change?

This claim is often made, but it is very difficult to blame specific weather incidents to larger shifts in climate.

But I have just read a very convincing article from a Weather Channel meteorologist that makes exactly that argument about the recent floods in the American southeast. It is a bit technical, but if you know a little weather science you should be able to follow the argument.

One of the key points to remember about climate is that heat=energy, and the more energy we put into a chaotic system like our climate, the more extreme fluctuations we are going to get. This is similar to how adding a certain amount of energy to a wave tank can cause an even greater increase in wave height than you would expect if the system was linear.

See here for a global view of climate anomalies 2008-2009.

Humans are conducting a huge experiment on the only planet we have, and we are recklessly adding more and more energy to our climate system. Hang on for the ride, it's only going to get bumpier.

NOAA Global Climate Analysis For July: Fifth Warmest On Record

While much of central North America has been cooler than average this summer, NOAA keeps track of the world climate as a whole and guess what - cool weather in Minnesota is not indicative of global climate. Here are some of the highlights in case anyone claims that the global climate has stopped warming:

Global Highlights

• The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for July 2009 was the fifth warmest on record, at 0.57°C (1.03°F) above the 20^th century average of 15.8°C (60.4°F).
• July 2009 was the 33^rd consecutive July with an average global land and ocean surface temperature above the 20^th century average. The last July with global temperatures below the 20^th century average occurred in 1976.
• The global ocean surface temperature for July 2009 was the warmest on record, 0.59°C (1.06°F) above the 20^th century average of 16.4°C (61.5°F). This broke the previous July record set in 1998. The July ocean surface temperature departure from the long-term average equals June 2009 value, which was also a record.
• The global land surface temperature for July 2009 was 0.51°C (0.92°F) above the 20^th century average of 14.3°C (57.8°F), and tied with 2003 as the ninth-warmest July on record.
• For the year to date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 14.3°C (57.9°F) tied with 2004 for the sixth-warmest January-through-July period on record.
• El Niño persisted across the equatorial Pacific Ocean during July 2009. Related sea-surface temperature (SST) anomalies increased for the sixth consecutive month in this ENSO domain, where July SSTs were more than 0.5°C (0.9°F) above average. If El Niño conditions continue to mature, as now projected by NOAA, global temperatures are likely to exceed previous record highs.

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The data presented in this report are preliminary. Ranks and anomalies may change as more complete data are received and processed. The most current data may be accessed via the Global Surface Temperature Anomalies page.

One of the interesting facts that will affect us here in northern Minnesota this winter is the return of El Nino conditions in the Pacific after two consecutive winters in a La Nina state. This should be good news for our heating bills but can also lead to erratic swings in temperatures bringing the possibility of mid-winter thaws and ice storms.

NOAA Paper Demolishes Argument Over U.S. Temperature Trends

One of the most stubborn arguments from the people who deny the reality of climate change is that the sharp upward trend in U.S. temperatures over the last fifty years is due to poor siting of the surface stations that gather the data and the urban heat island effect. This argument is particularly stupid since the trend over time would not be affected even if a station was located in a place where it might read a little high. Imagine two identical urban weather stations; one in an asphalt parking lot and one in a grassy field - the asphalt one would read a few degrees higher, but the temperature trends over time would be identical. It's like saying that if your home scale weighs you three pounds heavier than your doctors scale it is useless to show if you are gaining or losing weight - as long as the bias is consistent then the trend is not affected.

A new paper from NOAA neatly skewers these arguments, complete with a graph showing the lack of difference between the so-called "best sites" and the rest of the weather stations in the network. As you can see both the annual readings and the smoothed trend line match nearly perfectly.

The NOAA paper also points out that there are many ecological indicators that show temperatures are rising rapidly, so dwelling on the minutiae of individual stations while ignoring the preponderance of evidence for rising temperatures is intellectual dishonesty at its worst.

(thanks again to Climate Progress)

Climate Science And Honest Debate

The late spring we are having here in northern Minnesota is giving some of the local climate change skeptics more hope than ever that global warming is just some socialist plot to try and take away their pickup trucks and SUVs. Unfortunately for them local weather is not the same as global climate (as I tried to point out in this post). The skeptics are becoming more and more shrill in their arguments as the science that refutes them becomes more solid every day, and most of the arguments they make are full of holes and cherry-picked data that makes attempting to engage them in honest debate an exercise in futility. Coby Beck has gathered together a very nice page of links called "How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic" which has categorized the most commonly encountered denialist arguments.

What is interesting is that many of the same debate techniques used to deny climate change are the same as those used by those who denied a link between smoking and cancer, or used by creationists to discredit evolution. One of the things they all have in common is the attempt to put "reasonable doubt" in the mind of the public that there is scientific agreement on these subjects. Mainstream journalists follow along by framing the subject as a two-sided debate with merit on both sides. The problem with this is that the general public does not see the peer-reviewed scientific journals where actual scientific debate takes place, and they don't realize that it is a small but vocal minority creating most of the controversey.

Please click on the links provided and the links under Climate Change in my list on the left. Often Google Scholar can provide abstracts to peer-reviewed science on climate change that you can find at a university library. Reading science is not easy, but it is nessecary if you want to know the real data and not just spin driven by ideology.

Fairbanks, AK and New Orleans, LA are currently the same temperature

And they are both warmer than us - I had -19F this morning.

Check it out: Fairbanks 5:48 AM AKST +32.5F

New Orleans 9:02 AM CST +33.4F

Less than a degree different and separated by almost 35 degrees of latitude on the same continent. This is why you can't judge climate by local weather, you have to look at long term trends.

The Difference Between Weather and Climate

I am looking out my office window at a foot of fresh snow, and temperatures tonight are supposed to get down to fifteen below (F) - so do I still believe all the talk about climate change?

Short answer: yes

Why? Because it doesn't matter what I believe, or what the current weather is on my little corner of the globe, climate change is happening and science is showing this every day.

I keep seeing arguments saying "global warming stopped in 1998" - well that is nonsense. 1998 was an extremely strong El Nino year that was very warm worldwide, but to base a trend starting from that date to extrapolate climate is dishonest. In order to have a valid climate period you need to use at least thirty years, and going by that the clear trend is upward. Even the temperature in Lake Superior has increased dramatically in the last 30 years. Just because the Earth is heating up it doesn't mean everyplace on the planet is going to turn into Miami Beach. Increased heat in the atmosphere will increase the energy available for storms, as well as increase the amount of water vapor the air can hold, so more intense snow and rain events are one of the predicted outcomes of climate change.

The science is solid, and a little Minnesota cold snap will not invalidate it.