Winter Storm kicks midwest ass and moves on

And Dan, at Wild Wild Weather, discusses this relative to the massive Typhoon currently traveling over the top of Queensland after ripping off a few roofs along the way.

Much of Queensland's doom this summer (as it's still summer there) has been related to La Nina/ENSO, but how much worse is it because of climate change? We can't know exactly with regard to any storm or even series of storms, but globally, the weather is extreme this year, and that matches climate change predictions very well. Dan's got more information on that throughout his blog, one of my favorites in the field.

Spring came in like a big red lion

After several years of Australian drought, Broken Hill, on the west side of New South Wales, goes black in a dust storm:



But that's not all. Sydney is hundreds of kilometers to the east, and is getting whacked with it too, as is Queensland farther north. This is pretty much kicking ass in the western third and northern two thirds of the whole huge country.

It brings to mind images I've seen of the storms heralding North America's dust bowl of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Reuters covers some of the reasons for the dust storm. A friend of mine was reporting rain where I used to live, in Australia, with some of the creeks flowing across roads. (This is normal, it's rural, and the bridges are concreted smooth spots across the creeks.) The front that caused those storms stirred up the dust:

During winter in Australia low pressure storms are generated in the Indian and Southern Oceans, whipping up huge seas and creating severe cold fronts which sweep across southern and eastern Australia.

This caused a thunderstorm with winds of 100+km/hr in South Australia. Those winds lifted the dust from dessicated outback and marginal lands. Just as happened in the thirties in North America (and Australia too, for that matter), the soil was loosened and blew east into Queensland and New South Wales.

And addressing the question of whether climate change caused the dust storm:

....dust storms are usually restricted to the inland of Australia. Occasionally, during widespread drought they can affect coastal areas. Australia is battling one of its worst droughts and weather officials say an El Nino is slowly developing in the Pacific which will mean drier conditions for Australia's eastern states.

We also, for what it's worth, can't say whether climate change caused Hurricane Katrina. (Al Gore was wrong to imply that it did, and it affected his credibility for me, when I saw An Inconvenient Truth.) We can only look at patterns, not isolated events. But we do know that this dust storm was caused by changes in Australia that have come about as a part of a pattern of change in their part of the world. Did climate change cause the dust storm? No way to say. Did climate change cause the conditions that led to it? So far, probably. We shall see.

Dramatic pics in this story
Quite a lot of pictures here
My friend David Morgan-Mar has a dramatic set of photos, and his reaction, here.
@paddyplasterer pointed me at a live stream of photos posted on twitter.

Sierra Nevada watershed

Three years ago, I took this video at the Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model visitor's center in Sausalito, California.



It illustrates with LEDs the storage of fresh water in snow and ice in the Sierra Nevada, and its flow down the slopes, through the valley, and out to sea through the Delta and San Francisco Bay.

If climate change warms up and dries out California in the summer, as models currently predict, less water will be stored as snow over the winter, leaving less fresh water to flow out to sea and through the Delta in the summer. Not only will this mean less fresh water for immediate human use, but less for agriculture, wildlife, and fresh/salt balance in the Delta.

The more you know

The question asked was
"Are humans causing the climate to change/warm because of greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic activities?"



That's from @danwhnt, one of my favorite Twitter geonerds. (And it's much easier to read if you click through to the big one.)

I'm curious if so many non-experts believe climate change isn't largely anthropogenic because various media sources think they have to be balanced, and provide the viewpoint of one denier for every scientist who explains why humans provide a huge chunk of the fuel to drive climate change.

from the most trusted man in America

Walter Cronkite Bust 5.22.2008
Originally uploaded by Notley.

via stopglobalwarming.org:

I am joining the hundreds of thousands who shall be marching in this virtual march to demonstrate the concern that we all hold for the future of our planet and all the living things -- flora, fauna, human and animal -- that exist upon it. The governments of the world have tarried long enough, and the United States is scarcely without doubt the greatest culprit among them.

We the people have the strength to bring our country from our weak-kneed stumbling gait in the last ranks of reason to the leadership of the great march to environmental victory.

I want to be in that parade and if there is a place up front I'd wish to lead the band or at least be assigned a big bass drum to help pound out the rhythm of glorious success.
- Walter Cronkite

I will miss him.

40%

"A group of high profile New Zealanders talk about climate change and why they Signed On at http://www.signon.org.nz to ask NZ Prime Minister John Key to go to Copenhagen to Sign NZ On to 40 per cent emissions reduction by 2020."

FORTY PERCENT

It's so necessary.

Population control has to be part of it.

Clean energy has to be part of it.

Personal sacrifice must be part of it.

But 40% still seems like so very much.



How can we do it, really?

"Sign on" -- Okay. Now what?

Behold: The Ice Worm

As glaciers on the west coast of North America melt, we will lose countless millions, or even billions of representatives of a creature that lives only in those west coast glaciers.



Mind you, these are just the ice worm. We'll also lose alpine plants and animals that have migrated to as high and cool as they can go or as dry as they can go, water storage in snowpack and glaciers, riverflow, and some existing air circulation patterns. More will be revealed. We shall see, we shall see.

Springtime for Greenland

Scientists measure fresh water loss down a moulin on the Greenland ice cap:



First thoughts:
1. Do we have data on melt from a decade ago? from the early 70s? How much has it changed? There had to be some surface melt back then, or the winter snow would be thickening the ice cap every year. I'm sure they know how and why it's worse and scarier now.
2. I'm not fond of heights to begin with, and of abysses in general. I couldn't have hung from those ropes.
3. I was a bit annoyed by Dr. Box saying, "It's just bottomless. No light escapes." Was there some sort of light source at the bottom of the hole that light should be escaping from? But I sort of get what he means, his choice of words just didn't work for me. It's so deep and narrow that it goes black immediately, and once you're down there, you're down in a deep black pit, ice water all around you, battered by ice on all sides, and you're going to die.

I'm one of those people who believe our climate is changing, and that most, but not all of that change, is human-caused. Humans can adapt, but I think we'll lose a lot of biodiversity, like emperor penguins, polar bears (do I really need to link those stories?), and any plants and animals that already live at extremes of height or heat, whose habitats will change beyond their ability to adapt. In addition, animals that could move to adapt will be blocked by human change -- long, narrow reservoirs in Canada, cities and highways and farmland elsewhere in the world.

We can't stop it. We can slow it if everyone works together, but everyone isn't -- and not everyone can. But I think the winds are changing, and we'll get there. There will be certain losses, and certain sacrifices, but we're finally hitting the brakes a bit, and we'll get there.

I'm a little glad for Greenland in the short term. They had some decades of being green a millennium ago, with dairies and farms. I hope they can make use of climate change to help themselves, for the time being.