Thin Ice film screening

Posted on 2013-04-16 by Brian Magi

I watched the soon-to-be-officially-released new film about climate science and climate scientists called Thin Ice today. I read about Thin Ice on the RealClimate blog, where the blog author (an Atmospheric Scientist who is interviewed in the film itself) posted that screenings of Thin Ice were being planned for Earth Day 2013 (22 April). Great idea! The film makers say

Join us on Earth Day, April 22nd, 2013 for the global launch of Thin Ice: The inside story of climate science. The film will be available for free online here or can be seen in person at various screenings around the world from April 22nd-23rd.

Since I teach a course about global warming in the Spring and Fall semester here at UNC Charlotte, I immediately thought that this would be a valuable multimedia way to incorporate more than just me talking about the world of climate science with my 12 students. Turns out the documentary-style film is really accessible. A geologist named Simon Lamb starts the movie by talking about his motivation – kind of like you would if you were writing a scientific paper intended for publication. Namely, Lamb poses the hypothesis that climate scientists are “peddling a lie” – a hypothesis that any person in the world could arrive at fairly easily given the way that climate science is discussed outside the scientific world at times. Lamb tests his hypothesis by talking with climate scientists and learning about what they do and, more importantly in my opinion, WHY. The answer to why isn’t stated explicitly, but I think it is the common thread linking the scientists working on understanding the amazing climate system. Certainly, the movie and the conclusions resonate with me. The Earth is an amazing place, and humans working for the greater good truly raise the collective level of optimism about the future.

If you want to sit in on the UNC Charlotte screening, I will show the movie from 11:00-12:15 on Monday April 22 (Earth Day). No admission. Send me an email if you plan to be there. I signed up for the screening via the Thin Ice website, so you can see the official screening annoucement here if you search Charlotte.

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Resources for learning about the state of the climate

Posted on 2013-04-11 by Brian Magi

An atmospheric scientist likes to talk about the “state” of the atmosphere. A “meteorological state” usually means knowing the temperature, pressure, dewpoint temperature (moisture), and maybe the wind speed and whether there is precipitation. Climate state is similar but usually presented as a comparitive. I’ve talked about this before, but the essential calculation to understand in climate is the idea of a “departure” or an “anomaly”.*

Climate departures from, say, a climate normal examine the change with respect to what we might expect given past knowledge. A great online resource with very up-to-date climate state is the daily-updated graphs of monthly temperature departure at the High Plains Regional Climate Center (HPRCC). You can easily create presentation-ready figures (properly citing HPRCC) such as temperature departure since first of the month, percent of normal precipitation since first of month, and the analogous figures for temperature departure and percent of normal precip since the first of the year. Here are examples of T and precip in 2013 (so far).

YearTDeptUS-2013-04

YearPNormUS-2013-04

By pressing a few buttons on the internet, you have access to a powerful and constantly evolving data set for the USA. You can evaluate where the USA is in terms of “Is the USA headed to another record warm year like 2012?”, “Has the drought subsided to any degree in the new calendar year?”. With some digging, you can get the numbers in the figures and embark on a more detailed analysis of trends and spatial patterns, but first-order analysis via the HPRCC figures is the natural place to start. For example, studying the figures above, we can quickly deduce that the temperatures in 2013 have been unremarkable compared to the climate normal period (1981-2010). In fact, I think we can safely conclude that through 10 April 2013, the temperature has been cooler than the climate normal period, or in terms of the colors on the graph, most of the figure is light green (a slight negative departure). This is a big shift from 2012, where March shattered records across much of the country and started off a long anomalously warm year in the USA. Precipitation trends for 2013 (so far) seem to suggest that the mountain west remains at less than 50% (red to dark red) of the climate normal period precipitation. The spatial map figures give you the additional power to watch not only the country, but parts of the country that might be more directly relevant to you.

Global warming introduces the increased probability of more warm years – this is very clear from data which I’ll post about soon. In the meantime, when you ask a question about the climate state, you can rest assured that they can be answered. What will 2013 bring us when the fire season starts in earnest? Or as the temperature time series evolves? Keep clicking on HPRCC to find out. Unlike sports seasons, the season for climate-relevant stats never ends.

*This is true in weather studies as well, but the motivation is different. Weather departures look at the magnitude of a departure to help evaluate the strength of the weather especially with regards to the pressure and temperature. Think of a hurricane. Most discussions of a hurricane talk about the central pressure – the air pressure in the eye of the storm. A low number usually indicates a more dramatic (negative) departure from “normal” pressure at sea level. This leads to a higher force moving the air from outside the hurricane towards the eye – air moves from high to low pressure. If you’re wondering, the spinning of a hurricane happens because the moving air is also affected by the coriolis effect from the rotating Earth.

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Margaret Thatcher and global warming

Posted on 2013-04-09 by Brian Magi

Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of Great Britain from 1979-1990, passed away on 8 April 2013. These are her introductory words in a speech to the United Nations about the threat that global warming poses to world order, and that I talk about in more detail below

During his historic voyage through the south seas on the Beagle, Charles Darwin landed one November morning in 1835 on the shore of Western Tahiti. After breakfast he climbed a nearby hill to find advantage point to survey the surrounding Pacific. The sight seemed to him like “a framed engraving”, with blue sky, blue lagoon, and white breakers crashing against the encircling Coral Reef. As he looked out from that hillside, he began to form his theory of the evolution of coral; 154 years after Darwin’s visit to Tahiti we have added little to what he discovered then.

What if Charles Darwin had been able, not just to climb a foothill, but to soar through the heavens in one of the orbiting space shuttles? What would he have learned as he surveyed our planet from that altitude? From a moon’s eye view of that strange and beautiful anomaly in our solar system that is the earth? Of course, we have learned much detail about our environment as we have looked back at it from space, but nothing has made a more profound impact on us than these two facts.

First, as the British scientist Fred Hoyle wrote long before space travel was a reality, he said “once a photograph of the earth, taken from the outside is available … a new idea as powerful as any other in history will be let loose”. That powerful idea is the recognition of our shared inheritance on this planet. We know more clearly than ever[fo 1] before that we carry common burdens, face common problems, and must respond with common action.

And second, as we travel through space, as we pass one dead planet after another, we look back on our earth, a speck of life in an infinite void. It is life itself, incomparably precious, that distinguishes us from the other planets. It is life itself—human life, the innumerable species of our planet—that we wantonly destroy. It is life itself that we must battle to preserve.

In a previous posts about Barack Obama and Martin Luther King Jr, I highlighted some timely quotes related to the eventual costs of rapid technological development. Namely, global warming. This is a global, multi-faceted issue with no clear pathway even though essentially the problem has been understood for almost 200 years. Margaret Thatcher addressed the United Nations and although the transcript of her speech is available, the video I originally came across on Youtube is no longer available. I downloaded the video so I could show it in one of my classes, but I hesitate to re-distribute it since I don’t know the rules. It wasn’t exactly high-quality either. Anyway, here’s the link to the transcript of a beautiful speech by a powerful world figure. And here’s the punchline. She gave this speech in 1989. 1989. Clearly, the world is not responding to the science.

A framework [for addressing global warming and the impacts] is not enough. It will need to be filled out with specific undertakings, or protocols in diplomatic language, on the different aspects of climate change. These protocols must be binding and there must be effective regimes to supervise and monitor their application. Otherwise those nations which accept and abide by environmental agreements, thus adding to their industrial costs, will lose out competitively to those who do not. The negotiation of some of these protocols will undoubtedly be difficult. And no issue will be more contentious than the need to control emissions of carbon dioxide, the major contributor—apart from water vapour—to the greenhouse effect. We can’t just do nothing.

This speech by Margaret Thatcher was the precursor to the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The scientists and policy makers who led the writing of that report in 2005-2006 won the Nobel Peach Prize in 2007 along with Al Gore. PM Thatcher should feel quite a bit of pride in her country’s efforts to initiate the IPCC. The group of scientists who contribute changes with every report that is written and now the IPCC is collectively finishing their 5th Assessment Report. Since I am a proud US citizen, I will say that the US should be (really, should have been) the first to respond. We have consumed the biggest piece of the cheap carbon energy cake and are angrily hoarding as much of the rest as we can. I hope leadership from our President continues and that the efforts of so many in the USA and all around the world is not squandered. As Margaret Thatcher said, “We can’t just do nothing.”

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Your climate change

Posted on 2013-03-14 by Brian Magi

Advocacy in science seems to be on the rise. Maybe it’s that the USA administration is citing greater concern about the future state of our planet. Maybe scientists are just fed up that essentially the same message has been reiterated since the 1980s, and arguably even earlier than that. This is a great looking and simple petition by one of the IPCC chapter authors named Ranga Myneni. Dr. Myneni, who I’ve never met, is a professor at Boston University and has a fine set of credentials in peer-reviewed publications to go along with lead author status on the IPCC AR5 that will be released in 2014. There is no doubt he is an expert in the field. In fact, I use datasets related to vegetation land cover on that BU website. Sign his petition if you agree with the following statement which I received in a mass email from Professor Myneni that read as follows

There is now sufficient evidence that our way of living is causing unnatural changes in climate. Collectively, we own this damage and therefore we need to solve it together. Twenty five years have passed since the IPCC has been advising the policy makers regarding the hazards of climate change. Yet, there has been little meaningful action to solve this global problem affecting all life on Earth.

The solution lies in convincing policy makers that this is a priority for all citizens of the World – It is YOUR CLIMATE CHANGE also. Therefore, I started an online project to collect one billion signatures by Earth Day 2014 for a petition addressed to the Secretary-General of the United Nations to act judiciously and expeditiously on anthropogenic climate change.

Professor Myneni created a website called Your Climate Change. I signed the petition on that site. You can sign it too. Decide for yourself.

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Land use in action

Posted on 2013-03-11 by Brian Magi

Externalities are the costs that are not incurred by coal mining operations, hydraulic fracturing (fracking), and oil sands extraction. Aside from the fossil fuel emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas for power generation, the extraction process bears huge costs that most of us are willing to overlook for the short-term economic benefits. If you happen to be in the vicinity of a mine, however, you probably are paying close attention to everything the company in charge is doing. One impact is land-use, and unfortunately for companies tearing into relatively remote regions of the Earth to feed our massive hunger to consume, NASA has some excellent Earth observing satellites. Satellites have been high above Earth since the 1970s and this is one image of a region in West Virginia, USA in 1984 hobet_19840917 with another image of the same region in 2012 hobet_20120920What do scientists do with this kind of imagery? Well, here is a the link to an amazingly clear image-animation of the process of removing a mountaintop in Appalachia (West Virginia, in this case) to uncover the coal. Related to the documentation of the mountaintop removal, is an image-animation of the land-use associated with the tar sands/oil sands extraction from Alberta’s boreal forest. Fracking doesn’t have as long a record, so NASA imagery doesn’t capture the results of this form of land-use. But states in the USA (including North Carolina) are lining up legislation to begin issuing permits for fracking. Proponents cite job creation and reduced greenhouse gas emissions (noting an important caveat to the 2nd point). Critics cite major concerns about just how long those economic gains will keep rolling in before locals are left with an environmental mess to clean up without help from the deep industrial pockets that created the mess.

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Resources to understand sea level rise

Posted on 2013-02-15 by Brian Magi

Whereas the global warming app I mentioned is based on analysis of data we already have, the future projections of the impacts of global warmings are ridiculously interesting, speculative, and terrifying at the same time. Hurricane Sandy and some of the stories that emerged from the storm surge – including the story of a building in Brooklyn that happened to be building where a storm surge swept through but was undamaged because the the contractors were building with the knowledge that sea level rise will dramatically affect even NYC (building for the future added $550k to the $100 million budget, says the article) and including a very informative interview with a well-known and respected NASA scientist at NOAA’s relatively new Climate Service website – showed that sea level rise is very much on the mind of many. Yet another great webapp published by the New Scientist shows two examples of SLR and how the non-uniform the impacts are expected to be. This is a projection into the future, but many recent studies, like this one based on tide gauge data, agree with non-uniformity in SLR. A great snippet from that Nature Climate Change publication (which was subject to peer-review before publication) is this one nclimate1597-f2, which shows clearly that the West Coast and East Coast of the USA have already experienced much different responses to SLR. The data seems to be in line with the models, where a model projection is what is shown in the webapp. Another great visualization!

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Policy leadership on issues related to global warming

Posted on 2013-02-13 by Brian Magi

President Obama continues to steam ahead in the beginning of his 2nd term. His State of the Union speech was really well-done, and followed on the tone he set in his Inaugural Address. Not all of the speech was about climate (full transcript), but it is clear that even in the face of sequestration, if you are concerned about the impacts of global warming, then now is the time to send a letter to your representative, senator, and even our president to let them know you support the forward-thinking policy. Here is a snippet of the part of the speech most relevant to addressing the impacts of global warming. I added links to points that verify or provide a more complete perspective on statements President Obama made.

Today, no area holds more promise than our investments in American energy. After years of talking about it, we’re finally poised to control our own energy future. We produce more oil at home than we have in 15 years. We have doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas and the amount of renewable energy we generate from sources like wind and solar, with tens of thousands of good, American jobs to show for it. We produce more natural gas than ever before, and nearly everyone’s energy bill is lower because of it. And over the last four years, our emissions of the dangerous carbon pollution that threatens our planet have actually fallen. But for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change.

Now, it’s true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods, all are now more frequent and more intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science and act before it’s too late.

Now, the good news is, we can make meaningful progress on this issue while driving strong economic growth. I urge this Congress to get together, pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago. But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.

Now, four years ago, other countries dominated the clean-energy market and the jobs that came with it. And we’ve begun to change that. Last year, wind energy added nearly half of all new power capacity in America. So let’s generate even more. Solar energy gets cheaper by the year. Let’s drive down costs even further. As long as countries like China keep going all-in on clean energy, so must we.

Now, in the meantime, the natural gas boom has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence. We need to encourage that. That’s why my administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits. That’s got to be part of an all-of-the-above plan. But I also want to work with this Congress to encourage the research and technology that helps natural gas burn even cleaner and protects our air and our water. In fact, much of our newfound energy is drawn from lands and waters that we, the public, own together. So tonight, I propose we use some of our oil and gas revenues to fund an Energy Security Trust that will drive new research and technology to shift our cars and trucks off oil for good. If a nonpartisan coalition of CEOs and retired generals and admirals can get behind this idea, then so can we. Let’s take their advice and free our families and businesses from the painful spikes in gas prices we’ve put up with for far too long. I’m also issuing a new goal for America: Let’s cut in half the energy wasted by our homes and businesses over the next 20 years.

I do feel like this part of his speech does make some concessions and perhaps side steps the simple fact that the USA has to lead a GLOBAL effort to eliminate carbon emissions. This does not mean using natural gas instead of coal in the USA is a good thing because coal is still being mined and sent elsewhere (Europe) and the long-term health/environmental costs on top of the costs of more carbon in the atmosphere (natural gas combustion still releases carbon even if it’s less than coal – good article here) are a powerful part of that equation that essentially are being neglected for the economy. Policy might simply be lagging the science, but the science is becoming more and more stark, while policy suffered from years of delay when action was needed. I know climate is not the only issue on the table, but it is the clearest issue when trying to understand the future. Every year we delay will make any level of action not only more difficult economically, but will also reduce the impact of that action.

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Charlotte Research Scholars 2013

Posted on 2013-02-13 by Brian Magi

Cross-posted from a campus-wide announcement. I participated as a CRS mentor in Summer 2012 and have volunteered to participate again this summer. Please let me know if you’re interested in working on a project – this is a great chance to get paid to do research and learn valuable skills. Apply now – it’s not a committment and it’s certainly NOT a guarantee that you’ll even get the funding. 60 applicants will be selected from a pool that I would guess would be about 200 students. Maybe more. Application is here and is due by 5:00 pm on Feb 25.

……………….START ANNOUNCEMENT……………………….

Attention rising seniors, you can now apply for the 2013 Charlotte Research Scholars summer program.

The Charlotte Research Scholars (CRS) program is sponsored by the Office of Academic Affairs, Graduate School, and Charlotte Research Institute. It will provide 60 UNC Charlotte undergraduate students funding to participate in a 10-week research program. Scholars receive one-on-one, faculty-guided research training, and participate in weekly professional development sessions to better prepare them for graduate school and a future research career. The program culminates in the Summer Research Symposium, held on August 1st in the Student Union. Additional details are below.

Application deadline: 5:00 pm on February 25, 2013
Program length: May 28 to August 3 (10 weeks)
Eligibility: Undergraduates with a minimum GPA of 2.8 and between 50 and 110 credit hours by spring 2013
Compensation: Scholars will receive a $4,000 fellowship
Application: Apply here

Frequently Asked Questions:
How much time are scholars expected to commit to their research project?
Scholars are expected to work full-time for the entire 10-weeks. They will spend approximately 3-4 hrs/week away from the project in order to participate in professional development activities.
How will the scholars be selected?
The CRS steering committee will attempt to match the most qualified students with research projects that are of interest to them. To facilitate this matching, students will include a ranking of their preferred project choices in their application. If a match is identified, the faculty member will be contacted to see if there is interest in the applicant. In addition, feel free to indicate any preferences for particular students that you might have in the text of your email (not the submission form).
Whom do I contact if I have additional questions?
Dennis Livesay, Associate Professor of Bioinformatics and Genomics (drlivesa@uncc.edu).

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Resources to understand global warming

Posted on 2013-02-12 by Brian Magi

There is a treasure trove of information and misinformation about global warming on the mighty internet. I try to sift through these as I prepare for effective ways to empower students or at least generate discussion. Here are a couple of new-ish resources that visualize the NASA GIStemp gridded temperature anomaly data set, which are described in great detail on that website but also in the peer-reviewed science literature. The New Scientist (UK popular science magazine) created this webapp to allow anyone to point and click on a location to see how the temperature has changed since about 1890. Here’s a snippet of the Southeast USA anomaly averaged from 1893-1912 warming-southeast-1890and then from 1993-2012 warming-southeast-2000The global warming trend is presented on the right side, while the temperature trend for the specific location is right above it. What’s really nice is the pop-up window that the app opens when you hover over that location-specific temperature trend. You can see the data that’s plotted! Admittedly, it’s pretty easy to get from NASA GISS as indicated via the links on the webapp itself, but still, it’s a great effort by the New Scientist to make sure any person who wants to can reproduce the analysis. And, most importantly, the app itself is a really accessible way to “see” global warming. Other temperature data sets (HadCRU, NOAA NCDC, and a couple of others) have trends that are very similar to NASA GISS – if I find a link showing this comparison, I will post it.

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Where the US coal is going

Posted on 2013-02-08 by Brian Magi

Many in North Carolina are aware of the move in the energy industry from coal to natural gas (example 1, and others from photos with telling captions at example 2, example 3, example 4, etc.). Fracking has opened up a huge reserve of natural gas, driving down consumer costs and keeping the individual happy while essentially ignoring the larger health and environmental costs to society down the line. Leave that part alone and focus on coal. The US mines coal, but what is the incentive for continued mining? Certainly it is not for the sake of communities and ecosystem as discussed in another sobering study about the true costs of a very dirty form of energy. Glancing at the Washington Post this morning reveals why coal is still being mined in the US, and hints about why there is no monetary incentive to slow frakking in the US. Here’s the article. One part of the article says

Europe’s use of the fossil fuel spiked last year after a long decline, powered by a surge of cheap U.S. coal on global markets and by the unintended consequences of ambitious climate policies that capped emissions and reduced reliance on nuclear energy.

This is a worrying development that is happening in response to two things: 1. US fracking for natural gas driving down US coal prices and 2. A country that shuts down old nuclear plants in response to the disaster in Japan. Neither 1 or 2 by itself is a problem, but the far-reaching impacts of violently tearing into the world are something are completely ignored by industries and by the consumers that demand low-cost energy sources. Economics is trumping common sense. Another quote from the articles is

Demand for coal in Germany has been rising since a May 2011 move to phase out nuclear power by 2022. The shutdown was spurred by the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan as well as long-standing German concerns about safety. But nuclear energy, which is low in greenhouse gas emissions, has been partially replaced by brown coal. Lignite supplied 25.6 percent of Germany’s electricity in 2012, up from 22.7 percent in 2010. Hard black coal supplied an additional 19.1 percent last year, and it was also on the rise.

The economy will likely improve (in the US and Europe in the case of the Washington Post article), and as the article points out, US carbon emissions from electricity generation are down to 1992 levels, but my studies of the climate system as I prepare for teaching reveal that this is likely a short-term benefit with long-term costs. Global warming is still global, and global carbon emissions are what matter. Global carbon emissions continue to increase, as described in this source. Google ‘global carbon emissions’ for many more groups tracking or discussing carbon. The simple evidence suggests that carbon-based energy is nowhere close to leaving the scene.

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