The Unknown Climate

In the Spring of 2010, the East Coast of the United States was nearly drowned in an extreme precipitation event. Ditto parts of Australia, and Rio in Brazil. This is the other half of "global warming" - global wetting. Scientists have been warning about it for years - now it's happening. Can anyone say "Extreme Rainfall Events?"

Right afterwards, Eastern Canada went way above any temperature records, hitting summer beach weather, the eighties - 25 degrees C - in the first week of April. Still, hardly a single Network weather person mentioned "climate change". That's because a George Mason study shows that 67% of "weathercasters" believe that global warming is a natural event, and 27% think it's just a scam that isn't happening at all.

About half of those authoritative (but good looking!) faces on TV, telling us about the weather, have a degree in Meteorology. The other half just have the pretty or handsome face. Practically none have any scientific training in climate - but they talk like experts anyway. It's very damaging.

Our first guest says humans are very close to climate collapse. David W. Orr is a Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics, at Oberlin College, in Ohio. He's been a pioneer in greening higher education. He advises many leaders and foundations. His latest book is "Down to the Wire: confronting climate collapse."

Gaia theorist James Lovelock has just given another disturbing interview to the BBC in London. Lovelock claims it's too late, we shouldn't waste our money on things like wind energy, but spend it all on adapting to the inevitable climate shift. How do you answer that?

Another worry proposed by Lovelock, is that climate change may not develop as a steady rise in either temperature or sea levels. It might happen as sudden jumps and reversals. He says previous climate records show a long-term heating can include intervals - perhaps decades or more - of cooling as well. Given all the global cooling nonsense from last winter's snowfall in the U.S., can any climate action plans can survive unsteady weather?

But Lovelock is making increasingly bizarre statements as well. Like this one: China is planning on moving it's population to Africa. Really? In this show I look into "Twelve Batty Things About James Lovelock".

I raised Lovelock's worries about irregular progression of climate change, partly because of another paper almost unknown to the general public. A theoretical ecologist at University of California Davis, Alan Hastings, says that climate tipping points may not be predictable at all. According to his work, there may be no signals or warnings, before a radical shift. For example, temperatures could go up rather suddenly, and stay there.

Hastings' paper didn't get much press, but it's quite important. As far as I can tell, Radio Ecoshock has the only original interview on the new paper from this distinguished scientist.

I'll send out a second blog entry, with more links for you to follow.

Enjoy,

Alex

GLOBAL DRYING - Super Drought?

Click the title above to hear my 12 minute summary on global drying news.

Don't get me wrong. The science says that a warmer world will hold more water vapor in the atmosphere. And water vapor is also a potent greenhouse gas itself! You can see the positive feedback loop there.

All that water has to come down somewhere, and tons have dropped on the Pacific Northwest lately. I feel like an amphibian here. But that's an exception. A whole belt around the tropics, and extending up into the U.S. Southwest, and the Australian South, are set to dry out into recurring droughts.

That's in the news all over. CNN reports that a leak of the upcoming IPCC report in April (to AP Press) - predicts billions of people - that BILLIONS - could face water shortages by the end of this century.

We're already seeing a super drought in southern Australia. The bush keeps burning up, and former farming land turns into dust. The rainfall there has shifted Southward toward Antarctica, as warming climate disturbs the weather system.

You don't need to be told about the Sahel of Africa. There are already millions of environmental refugees from spreading deserts and drought-lands caused by first-world carbon spewing uncontrolled into the atmosphere. Tim Flannery blames the Darfur tragedy on Europe's smokestacks and tailpipes.

Even the Amazon rainforest has begun to dry out, with reports of rivers shrinking to a fraction of their normal size. The great rainforests may become grass lands - and all their carbon will be released, to our peril.

Then Joseph Romm, author of the blog Climate Progress, writes an article on "the interglacial super drought" in the U.S. Southwest. Agriculture, and eventually who cities of people in Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico will be hit by drought.

Even Los Angelese residents know what I am talking about. So do people near the mountains in China. A new article in the journal "Nature" explains that a type of rainfall formerly caused as hot air cools around the mountains, is greatly reduced. That's because the type of smog particles coming from diesel motors, burning bio-mass, and agricultural fertilizers - is inhibiting the formation of raindrops.

Weather experts suspected that smog was reducing rainfall. The mountain-type rain in California has been reduced between 10 to 25 percent in the last 30 years or so. Now there is scientific evidence to prove it.

The study was done in China, where air pollution is so severe. On a particular mountain, blessed to receive the smog of a great city, raindrops were unable to form. The mountian ecosystem, and all the residents of the valley below, lose the rain they need.

Perversely, when human-made dust in the air ("aerosols") travels over the Pacific, picking up larger particles of salt as well - they drop sheets of heavy rain on the Pacific NorthWest. What fails to fall in one area, is moved elsewhere, to provoke heavy flooding.

Heavy rainfall events will increase in some parts of the world, while droughts strike others.

We're just beginning to understand all this. A lot of science is hot of the press, as they say.

James Lovelock has a map of what an over-heated world would look like. Sure enough, the tropics are mostly deserts - both on land, and under the sea! The green habitable areas are much closer to the poles, especially around the Arctic Sea.

The planet has been in that kind of a state before, in cycles that seem to take many millions of years to develop - except we're pushing it that way in just one or two human lifetimes. Apparently, Nature never expected one of its creatures to drag out hundreds of millions of years of carbon, and burn it all!

Dig into this. Global drying will hit in a wide belt, even while other areas experience Biblical floods.

Alex.
www.ecoshock.org