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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17736
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sun Jan 26, 2014 12:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

This one is for Bard, and the rest of the ostriches out there that consume oil company propaganda instead of science:

Quote:
By Steve Hockensmith, NewsCenter | January 21, 2014

BERKELEY —
As 2013 came to a close, the media dutifully reported that the year had been the driest in California since records began to be kept in the 1840s. UC Berkeley paleoclimatologist B. Lynn Ingram didn’t think the news stories captured the seriousness of the situation.

“This could potentially be the driest water year in 500 years,” says Ingram, a professor of earth and planetary science and geography.

Ingram has an especially long-term perspective. As a paleoclimatologist — a scientist who studies changes in climate by teasing data out of rocks, sediments, shells, microfossils, trees and other sources — she’s accustomed to looking back over eons. And according to the width of old tree rings (which can record the coming and going of wet or waterless stretches), California hasn’t been so parched since 1580.

“These extremely dry years are very rare,” she says.

But soon, perhaps, they won’t be as rare as they used to be. The state is facing its third drought year in a row, and Ingram wouldn’t be surprised if that dry stretch continues.

UC Berkeley professor B. Lynn Ingram analyzes sediments and archaeological deposits to determine how climates change over the course of millennia.
UC Berkeley professor B. Lynn Ingram analyzes sediments and archaeological deposits to determine how climates change over the course of millennia.
Given that possibility, the title of a recent book by Ingram seems grimly apropos. The West Without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us About Tomorrow, co-written with geographer and environmental biologist (and UC Berkeley visiting scholar) Frances Malamud-Roam, was released by the University of California Press last year. The NewsCenter spoke to Ingram about the lessons to be drawn from her research as California heads into what could be its worst drought in half a millennium.

Q: California is in its third dry year in a row. How long could that continue?

A: If you go back thousands of years, you see that droughts can go on for years if not decades, and there were some dry periods that lasted over a century, like during the Medieval period and the middle Holocene. The 20th century was unusually mild here, in the sense that the droughts weren’t as severe as in the past. It was a wetter century, and a lot of our development has been based on that.

The late 1930s to the early 1950s were when a lot of our dams and aqueducts were built, and those were wetter decades. I think there’s an assumption that we’ll go back to that, and that’s not necessarily the case. We might be heading into a drier period now. It’s hard for us to predict, but that’s a possibility, especially with global warming. When the climate’s warmer, it tends to be drier in the West. The storms tend to hit further into the Pacific Northwest, like they are this year, and we don’t experience as many storms in the winter season. We get only about seven a year, and it can take the deficit of just a few to create a drought.

You mentioned global warming. Is what we’re seeing consistent with the predictions that have been made about how climate change could affect California?

Yes. We’ve already started having a decreased snow pack and increased wild fire frequency. And we’ve been warming, and it’s gotten drier.
With Pacific Decadal Oscillation [the ever-changing temperature of surface water in the North Pacific Ocean], every 20 or 30 years we go in and out of these positive and negative shifts that affect precipitation and temperature. But now we’re entering a period where it looks like we’re getting drier even though it doesn’t necessarily correspond to that cycle. It looks like a trend. It’s warming and drying, and that’s definitely a big concern for Western states.

What originally sparked your interest in all this?

I grew up in Santa Barbara and personally experienced big floods followed by droughts. In 1969, half our backyard was washed away from an atmospheric river during a wet year. Then the ’76-77 drought made a big impression on me because there was almost literally no rain that year. So I was drawn to trying to understand what controls climate and why it’s so variable. It’s definitely very complex. We haven’t explained it completely, but we’re on our way.

What’s an “atmospheric river”?

That’s when corridors of moisture come up from the tropics, traveling across the Pacific Ocean for thousands of miles to the West Coast and bringing the equivalent of, say, 10 Mississippi Rivers of water. There’s a lot of rain within two or three days. Almost all of our major floods in California correspond to these atmospheric river storms. The last one that was really major was the 1861-62 flood. It completely filled the Central Valley with something like 10 feet of water. Sacramento was underwater.

We don’t know why, but we see evidence for these major mega-floods every one to two centuries over the past 2,000 years. It’s been about 150 years now since the last one, and now there are all these major cities in the very places that were submerged. The U.S. Geological Survey created a scenario for this — the ARkStorm, it was called — and it showed that if we repeated the 1861 flood there would be something like $725 billion in damage to the state. It would be a major disaster.

So on the one hand we should be worried about a drought, but on the other hand we should be worried about a flood?

Ingram stands in front of an Arizona sinkhole known as the Montezuma Well. It served as a water source for the Sinagua people until they disappeared from the area around AD 1300.
Ingram stands in front of an Arizona sinkhole known as the Montezuma Well. It served as a water source for the Sinagua people until they disappeared from the area around AD 1300.
Yes. If you look at the past, you realize that our climate is anything but reliable. We’ve seen these big fluctuations. Extreme droughts and extreme floods. My co-author and I wrote a couple review papers about that, but those weren’t going to be seen by the general public. They were for people in our field. And we thought we should try to bring this message out to the broader public. Because if you’re going to buy a house in the Central Valley, I think you should know about these floods. And we have to start assuming that we could go into one of these longer droughts and maybe start doing some serious conservation and rethinking of agriculture here.

If you look at the archaeological record, you see that the Native American population in the West expanded in the wet years that preceded those long droughts in the Medieval period. Then during the droughts, they were pretty much wiped out. There was the so-called Anasazi collapse in the Southwest about 800 years ago. In some ways, I see that as an analogy to us today. We’ve had this wetter 150 years and we’ve expanded. Now we’re using up all the available water, yet our population is still growing.

We’re vulnerable just like they were, but on an even larger scale.
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MalibuGuru



Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9287

PostPosted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 1:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

And this is for the ultimate ostrich Mac, the global warming alarmist koolaid kid himself...2/3 of the US is under ice. Same with much of the N hemisphere.

This is a satellite view of the great lakes region today. This global warming is killing us.
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nw30



Joined: 21 Dec 2008
Posts: 6485
Location: The eye of the universe, Cen. Cal. coast

PostPosted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 2:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The great lakes currently have a record of frozen surface this year.
It must really be a constant bummer that the weather keeps getting in the way of Global warming.
The funny this is that you'd think that the alarmists would be happy to see all this coldness that we've been having these last 10 to 15'ish years.
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 6:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Oh, but 30 ... the AGW alarmists claim ice as proof of warming, and ignore the fact that cold kills FAR more people than heat does. They even blame France's deadly heat wave a few years ago on AGW rather than on "ANV" ... the "Annual National Vacation" that France's medical professionals always take that month.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17736
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 12:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Who knew that it was cold in winter?

Quote:
And this is for the ultimate ostrich Mac, the global warming alarmist koolaid kid himself...2/3 of the US is under ice. Same with much of the N hemisphere.


I love your scientific perspective, with your peer-reviewed rebuttals, from reputable sources.

So here is why the Koch's are brainwashing you. I'm not sure why you are helping them--that's your problem. The whole article is here:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-u-s-exports-global-warming-20140203


Quote:
With domestic petcoke consumption plummeting – by nearly half since Obama took office – American energy companies have seized on the substance as a coal alternative for export. The market price for petcoke is about one-third that of coal. According to a State Department analysis, that makes American-produced petcoke "less expensive, including the shipping, than China's coal." Petcoke exports have surged by one-third since 2008, to 33.4 million metric tons; China is now the top consumer, and demand is exploding. Through the first nine months of 2013, Chinese imports were running 50 percent higher than in 2012.

No surprise: The Koch brothers are in the middle of this market. Koch Carbon, a subsidiary of Koch Industries, was the owner of the Detroit dune, since sold off to an international buyer. But it's a third Koch brother, Billy, who is the petcoke king. William Koch is the CEO of Oxbow Carbon, which describes itself as "the worldwide leader in fuel-grade petcoke sourcing and sales" – trading 11 million tons per year.



Interesting sidelight for those of you pimping for the Keystone Pipeline. The final EIS did not look at the secondary emissions associated with increased consumption of petcoke. What do you want to bet that there will be litigation on the legal sufficiency of the EIS?

If you two actually knew anything, it might take some work to rebut your silliness.
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pueno



Joined: 03 Mar 2007
Posts: 2807

PostPosted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 12:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

mac wrote:
Who knew that it was cold in winter?

The major misunderstanding in this whole thing -- and an aspect of it exploited by the deniers -- is that global warming (aka "climate change"), according to the prevailing theory, which is substantiated by centuries of measurements, results in a small temperature rise that's averaged around the globe. It's not equally distributed, and it's not everywhere.

So, a thought experiment:

Let's say the average global temperature has increased one degree.

That means what would have been a 15-degree winter day becomes a 16-degree winter day. Still cold. Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Beck, the Fox fools, Mr. Fick-shun, NW, and some of the others scream, "It's 16-degrees outside!! What happened to GLOBAL WARMING? Benghazi, Benghazi!!"

Another overlooked aspect is that the extra thermal energy in the air causes more violent and energetic weather (e.g., storms) and weather perturbations. The arctic jet stream vacillates downward over the US, and Atlanta gets socked with snow.

In addition, that extra thermal energy (warmer atmosphere) means that more moisture is evaporated from land areas, causing (1) localized drought, and (2) more precipitation when/where the temperature drops. Thus, more rain, more snow, more dry spells.

Plenty of unusual weather that the deniers claim as evidence of whatever.

One does not need a PhD in weatherology to understand simple high school physics.
.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17736
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 12:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Great quote:


Quote:
One does not need a PhD in weatherology to understand simple high school physics.


However, one must have learned either critical thinking or physics in high school. Seems to not be happening. But sucking up to the Koch's?
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pueno



Joined: 03 Mar 2007
Posts: 2807

PostPosted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 1:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

mac wrote:

However, one must have learned either critical thinking or physics in high school. Seems to not be happening. But sucking up to the Koch's?

Well........ maybe not really sucking up to the Kochs, per se.

Those who have no critical thinking skills, no analytical skills, no study skills, no real reading comprehension -- and no high school physics -- are reduced to depending on others for their values, focus, direction, and talking points.

Enter the Kochs, Fox, Limbaugh, Rove, and the far right evangelical conservative noise machine with all the values, focus, direction, and talking points ready for spoon feeding to those unable to find knowledge any other way.
.
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MalibuGuru



Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9287

PostPosted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 1:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I don't watch Fox news, and who in the hell are the Koch's? All I do is open the window, watch global weather, and make an observation.

Talk about fools who've been misled for political purposes......
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17736
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 1:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bard, the inadvertent comedian, said:

Quote:
All I do is open the window, watch global weather, and make an observation.


Before you call others fools, perhaps you ought to understand the difference between climate and weather, and just a little of the science. Just a little.
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