The great thaw of America’s north is coming
bbc.com
bbc.com
Our area, a temperate rainforest with steep mountains rising almost straight up from the ocean, has always experienced landslides. You can see slide scars throughout the mountains, from a boat or from a plane. But in recent years we've had a few that cause people to be much more concerned about the possibility of being caught in a slide.
Two years ago there was a slide in town (Sitka) that killed three people. Before that there was a slide that took out a remote cabin, and the two people staying at the cabin barely outran the slide. Now every time it rains hard people talk to each other about the risk of slides. Meteorologists' predictions haven't helped much, because most slide forecasts are just general statements about an elevated risk of slides for the entire region. No one can predict a high likelihood of slides in particular locations, so everyone is left to evaluate the risk for themselves in deciding whether to stay at home during heavy rain.
We live in a rainforest, but most of our rain comes from light steady rain most of the year. We have some heavier rainfall events in the spring and fall. It seems the slides have happened during periods of intense heavy rain - 2+ inches over the course of several hours.
What scares me about climate change is what might happen if we end up with significantly heavier amounts of rainfall in short periods of time. What happens if we get 6+ inches in a day like we've seen more recently in other regions?
When I get a lull between my various projects I'm going to do some analysis of our long-term weather data, and try to correlate it with slide events. I'm curious to see if the rainfall patterns are changing over time, beyond just total amounts each year. I'm curious to see if I, as a local, can identify some weather patterns here that outside meteorologists haven't noticed yet.
It's had an interesting effect in that the summer hasn't had many hot days, but the average is higher. This year, I only had a couple of days go above 90 deg f. My winter has fewer longer cold snaps, but some pretty steep cold snaps (-48 deg f this past year was the record). My snow totals have actually increased from area historical norms. I've been able to get the historical data and have a weather station that logs my local conditions.
There's also a bit of microclimate effect going on here. I'm not a climate scientist, so I am really only capable of comparing the results.
If it wasn't so damaging, I'd be all for it. I love snow and hate when it goes above 90. I don't get grumpy until it goes below -20. It's too bad that it's going to cause lots of damage for other people.
Sort of related: You can get the data and run the models yourself. I used to model traffic and there are some similarities. It seemed like a good thing to learn a bit about, so I spent a couple of years poking at it in my free time.
Apart from lake effect on the west side of the state, we hardly get snow anymore, because it's barely dropped below freezing. The last few winters have been incredibly mild apart from the "polar vortex" events where dry cold air blows down from the north. Since it's so dry, these don't really generate a lot of snowfall, it just snaps cold. These polar vortexes are a new weather pattern for us.
This fall we've been getting literal monsoon weather from the remains of hurricanes coming up the east coast. Each storm turns into days of warm drizzling and fog, which is much more typical weather for the spring, not October. Another atypical weather pattern.
That's just on a local scale. Then you look at how we're now getting multiple extreme hurricanes per year, one after another, multiple 100-year floods, and it's just insane that people could possibly deny the reality of climate change when it's literally happening over a span of just a few years, right before their very eyes. The weather we had ten years ago is not the weather we have today.
Trump has taken office at a very unfortunate time, because we urgently need to mitigate both carbon emissions and the direct impacts of the weather right now. But instead we're going to spend the next 3-7 years going backwards during one of the most critical junctures. At least he's so utterly incompetent that he's mostly just stalling out his agenda - going nowhere does beat going backwards at least. Just kinda sucks for the people most directly in the line of fire for climate change, because it's very obvious that no relief is going to be forthcoming for the parts of America that have been devastated over the last few months.
I was first here in the 1970s and the records confirm my recollection of cold snaps where it would go below 0 deg f and not come back above 0 for 5 to 7 days.
I've not had any stretch longer than 72 hours where the temperature didn't go above 0, in the past nine years.
At the same time, there have been some very, very cold days. My car wasn't in the garage the night we hit -48 and rear view mirror cracked. I can only guess that it was due to the cold.
I don't have very accurate wind speeds. However, I have near constant wind and the windy storms seem more frequent. Mother Nature has a fondness for taking my weather stations away from me. (Mt. Washington holds the land wind speed record of 231 MPH, I get some serious wind here but not that bad.) Even when hooked to a pole embedded in concrete, Mother Nature loves taking my stuff.
As for the politics, I do what I can as an individual. I offer no opinion on Trump.
The US has just exited a period of a record setting "hurricane drought," so maybe the hurricane remnant weather seems unusual because no such storms have made landfall in the US for the past decade plus.
That this year had a cluster of large storms isn't really indicative of anything in and of itself. Most things appear to happen in clusters. Things aren't perfectly evenly distributed.
https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/major-hurricane-us...!
Scientific American has a good overview of this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/yes-some-extreme-...
You can also do a google search for graphs on the frequency of extreme climate events.
I'm not a climate scientist and only got into it to win an Internet Argument. It was very important, at the time. ;-)
Basically, I'd worked with modeling large data sets in a chaotic system (traffic) and knew that 'adjusting the data' was legitimate. This was when people were complaining about the scientists changing the data they used in their models.
So, I started poking. I spent about two years poking at it. I also learned that the rumors seemed to be untrue. I was able to email and get unadjusted data - even without credentials. I say 'seemed' because this was after the email disclosures.
If you just want a copy of a paper and you don't feel like paying for it or hitting up your local university library, you can even just email one of the authors. I did that a couple of times and have had nothing but cooperation.
If you search the title or visit the author's homepage you can sometimes find a copy hosted, and these days there is of course sci-hub.
I do still pay passing attention but my quasi-scholastic approach has settled down.
One benefit of contacting them directly is you can often get copies of more than just the paper. I've had them send me zipped copies of their research and, in one case, even sent me a couple of DVDs full of stuff.
On a whole, the community was very approachable and I simply explained what I was doing and why. There weren't any negative responses and I was clear that I'm a mathematician and not a climate scientist. It was very unlike how I'd been led to believe, as far as uncooperative responses.
It's almost inevitable that some local would be able to identify extreme local patterns.
To generalise the result though, a problem you'd have, if you turn out to be one such local, is figuring out the extent to which your experience is common, or just down to unfortunate local factors.
When it's raining hard and I want to assess slide risk for my own sake, I look at a few factors: total rainfall over a short time period; average wind speeds and gusts; and how quickly the rivers are rising. I think I might have a sense of a signature of these three factors that predict a higher chance of slide activity.
I want to run a more careful analysis of those factors, and see if I can come up with an actionable signature for slide risk. Even if it works for just this town, it will be really helpful. But I know enough not to say much about that locally unless I have a concrete proposal.
I am not at all informed on the subject, but hours-since-last-slide(s), their proximity and magnitude would be some additional factors you might consider using.
If historical weather and geo-tagged slide data is available for the whole region, you could use it to train and test models.
How is it living out there?
There's an interesting project going on outside of Valdez. A couple people are setting up to do their tech work up here. They call themselves Geeks in the Woods [0]; I haven't followed their work other than keeping an eye on their instagram account [1].
I've often thought of trying to host a tech gathering up here at some point in the future. It's a great location for doing good tech focused work, and then disconnecting fully to regain perspective, then going back to your tech work. It's a great place for remote work, there's just very little networking with others in tech here.
As for a really specific answer to your question, Alaska is so varied that you have to ask about a specific part of the state. Any particular area you're interested in?
[0] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/drop-tune-seattle-mobile-analy...
I'm not sure I get the core concept there. Full disclosure: I was born and raised in Valdez.
Interesting idea, have you though about how you plan on making the correlation?
Two thoughts I just wanted to throw out there:
-As slopes fail, I think they tend to stabilize themselves, so it might be that only increasingly intense periods of rainfall would cause further slides.
-Slope stability depends on pore water pressure, which is more akin to ground water saturation, rather than rainfall. The two can probably be related, but its going to depend on the rainfall intensity minus the losses from permeability of the soil (together, they introduce time into the equation)
I think there's a signature in here, where if all these factors are above critical values then a slide is much more likely to occur. I need to test this by identifying how often this set of critical values have been reached over the last xx years, and then see if that correlates to known slide activity.
I think the river gauge is an indirect measure of ground water saturation. If the river gauge is rising at maximum steepness, that's an indication that the ground is fully saturated. If it's raining hard and the river gauge is not rising at maximum steepness, then the ground isn't fully saturated. That's why the river gauge is a key part of this slide risk signature. Fortunately we've had a river gauge in place since before the recent spate of slides.
These discussions are motivating me to take the next steps on this analysis. I think I'll do some analysis tonight, and see how far I can get.
> As slopes fail, I think they tend to stabilize themselves, so it might be that only increasingly intense periods of rainfall would cause further slides.
That's an interesting thought. There's lots of steep land, so there's plenty of land that hasn't slid for a long time but could slide under the right conditions. Repeated slides probably won't release as much material, but then again slides remove what vegetation was holding a slope together. So if a slide doesn't fully unload a slope, I wonder how stable the remaining debris might be.
If you start a blog or spread sheet or other means to track local slides events, you may be able to develop some data of your own. This could give you an advantage.
IIRC, the best info we have on Krakatoa is from the journal of a woman who was fascinated by the lead up events without realizing what it portended.
I would recommend starting with a literature search first. It's likely that people have already studied this. There is already a well understood relationship between rainfall and landslides, so I'm curious as to what you're looking for exactly. Remember, you're unlikely to stumble upon something in a few hours that people spend their entire lives looking at.
stable western country with huge amounts of empty land and too much sun makes it fantastic for solar.
but
an entire economy built on mines and the chinese have reduced their buying of iron so coal it is. and those mines have a lot of voting power.
But how to ship it to China and India? Set up some high voltage lines? Convert the locally generated electricity to some form of transportable, easily re-convertible embodied energy?
Climate change has now become a religion though, so I'm not surprised that the faithful are having the equivalent of apparitions. (This doesn't mean it's not real, just that it's a point of political dogma for some, which I think is unfortunate because it only makes doubters more skeptical by foreclosing opportunities for persuasion.)
For me, it's the fact that the young children in my neighborhood have given up on hockey and now play pickup games of lacrosse on their driveways. See, older generations in Boston used to play on the ponds every winter. Today's kids cannot (ice thickness on the ponds is another low pass filter), and with only so much rink time to go around, they've largely switched sports. THey don't know the signal they're giving me, because they weren't around when hockey was the main game to play. But to me, they are the low-passed signal.
It's certainly true that people can mistake a mere swing for a long run change. But, that doesn't mean changes are invisible!
Here in Quebec and New Brunswick the leaves have been turning later, and there have been warm days later into autumn. When it feels warm, we can check historic temperature records to confirm whether it's abnormal or not.
There are already noted effects on fall leaves: https://www.wsj.com/articles/leave-it-to-the-heat-to-dull-au...
In Canada's north, the coast is eroding, and building foundations are shifting: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/thawing-permafrost-sinks...
We also have ticks moving up from the south, and other invasive species that used to be unable to live up north.
What latitude do you live in?
When people use scientific data to argue it is getting warmer, the deniers often pull out personal anecdotes to the the contrary. And then when there are personal anecdotes supporting warming, the deniers often claim the statistics are not there.
So let me ask you, what sort of evidence would persuade you that the world is getting warmer? Or is it your view that it is simply impossible, so no evidence could persuade you?
In any case, the risks of climate change are high enough to warrant action. I tend to disagree with the commonly proposed solutions, which tend to involve global redistribution of wealth and loss of advantage for the United States and other Western powers. From what I know, renewed investment in nuclear energy is a required part of a solution that doesn't squander America's lead over our competitors. A shift to electric cars also seems essential.
I also think you could persuade climate change skeptics (or deniers or whatever you want to call them) of the utility of these policies in terms of things other than climate change, such as energy sovereignty[1], environmental cleanliness, and the potential for breakthroughs like fusion energy or extremely efficient fission reactors. This would probably be more effective than demonizing them.
[1] So that our economic security is not tied to the stability and friendliness of Middle East regimes. So that Russia cannot extort Europe with its natural gas supply.
Doesn't that cut both ways?
It can and there is quite a bit of politics involved, unfortunately. Your best bet is to take the time and do some learning in your own, at least that is what I did.
I'd suggest not paying much attention to the extremists on either side. Chances are really good that AGW isn't going to result in human extinction. Chances are really good that AGW is real.
The journalism is generally terrible and I do have a negative opinion about some of the more vocal scientists. However, I have a stronger opinion about the people who refuse to acknowledge the results.
The planet is absolutely warming and we are almost certainly adding to that warming. Our contribution to this warming is due to our adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The greenhouse effect is well studied and can be replicated.
Models aren't certainties and can only make broad predictions. Anyone citing them as absolute fact is poorly representing the science. There are multiple models, many data sets, and variable results.
More greenhouse gases will increase the rate of warming. Global warming is only one part of global climate change. The exact results aren't entirely known and the models attempt to predict this.
The system is very large and very complicated. We don't even know the initial starting state. So, they make approximations, which is what these kind of models do.
When I modeled traffic, I couldn't tell you when you'd get to your destination. I could accurately predict the results, however. They would be largely true for everyone. On an individual scale, they could be wrong but they were much more likely to be true. We had a high confidence in the results.
Modeling the climate is a bit like that, only bigger and more complicated. It is also politically charged - another similarity with traffic modeling. But, the end result is we are, almost certainly, going to get to our destination unless we change our route.
I am not a climate scientist and was a bit skeptical of the claims of accuracy and certainty. I have since put in a lot of effort to learn. I am really, really certain that the climate is changing, we are speeding that up, and that the models are accurate enough to where we should reduce our output of unconstrained greenhouse gases.
Make of this what you will. I've tried to be as clear as I can. I'm not suggesting you trust me. I'm suggesting that you'll reach the same results if you put the effort into learning.
Really now? All this polar ice melting before our eyes is just a coincidental year-to-year fluctuation? You'd have expected this 200 years ago?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_pala...
But any time you bring something like this up, you're slandered as a denier because of the taboo.
Edit: predictable down votes, illustrating my point. How do you expect to solve problems if you deliberately avoid certain questions?
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us
The mental stories & symbolism and related emotions around this subject are really interesting. For the record, I am aware climate change is real -- just wary of anecdotes and things like "man it was warm/cold until November last year, so it must mean X..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/All_pala...
The data is not fake. ps: weather is not political.
EDIT: If you find this post to be of interest to you, please upvote. There are many people which disagree with the information I posted without posting a retort. How can we function as a healthy society without the willingness to question what we are told. Must we have sacred cows?
> There is absolutely no evidence that humans are having any impact on the climate whatsoever.
Starting off real strong. Maybe climate scientists themselves don't exist either.
> In order to establish an actual human impact in a statistically significant way, you must show a modern trend that deviates from a baseline of appropriate duration.
Pick a site, any site. This one's good:
> As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/pag...
> Not only are we not in a period of "record high temperatures", we are in one of the coldest periods in the past 65 million years.
Which means... what, exactly? We are experiencing record high temperatures within recent history, and that's what matters to our survival. We are not equipped to deal with the speed of the change that is happening.
> The earth had had ice caps for maybe about half of the time over the past 500 million years.
Again, so what? We have ice caps now and them melting quickly is problematic for us.
I don't have enough time to address all the nonsense 4chan can come up with. The rest of it is left as an exercise for the reader.
That being said, there are no sacred cows in science. Questioning conclusions is important; however, when the science has been settled by mountains of evidence and there is scientific consensus, continually questioning those conclusions in the absence of new and contradictory data is a waste of time.
You could likewise argue that the earth is flat for all eternity, and "round earthers" wouldn't be holding their conclusions as a sacred cow just because they dismiss your arguments.
Like the earth being round or gravity being real, man-made climate change isn't really a debate.
Three reasons:
1) The strength of industrial and energy lobbyists, for whom climate change would mean stronger environmental regulations, which would interfere with their profitability.
2) Environmentalism (and by extension climate change, FKA "global warming") is traditionally seen as "left-wing," associated with effete liberals, tree-hugging hippies and feminism, which automatically causes the right wing to oppose it on principle.
3) Conservative Christians believe that God gave the world to humans to dominate and conquer, and climate change challenges their assumptions about the world and humanity's place in it.
There's the genuine concern that the solutions being proposed will squander our lead over our competitors, by basically redistributing wealth from developed to developing economies[1], and that the people most loudly clamoring for action also tend to be the most opposed to solutions like nuclear power, that would allow us to cut emissions without sacrificing our self-interest as much or at all.
Also, you talk about the profitability of companies as if it is isolated from the prosperity of ordinary people. It's not. And higher energy prices wouldn't just affect a few companies, but just about every single industry.
Environmental activists aren't helping their case when they engage in behavior and lifestyle choices perceived as whacky, and worse, try to impose them on others. People aren't going to abandon the comforts of modernity, so trying to persuade them to isn't a good strategy.
[1] For example, the theory of deals like Kyoto and Paris is that developing economies can keep increasing emissions while developed ones have to immediately cut. Fair, but fairness between countries is naive. The US should do whatever it can to maintain and grow its lead over China.
This whole framing is part of the problem, because it implies things like "if Bangladesh is going to be flooded by climate change, this is actually good for the US garment industry"
> whatever it can
How many deaths?
I dislike broccoli therefore people saying we should eat fruit and veg are liars?
Understanding and engaging with the underlying motivations of the opinion leaders is going to be more effective than just demonizing or ridiculing the people who follow them.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm...
And innumerable scientists who are in the business of documenting the climate change they observe.
This sort of inflammatory, unsubstantiated nonsense doesn't belong here.
I have to be direct to say that your post is a perfect example of this statement. The OP certainly points out an issue and is substantiated with a reasoning that long term change cannot be observed by individual in much smaller time scale, which is totally reasonable and a preferred way of thinking.
Because insufficient methodology produces inaccurate observation, in turn flawed process to address the issues.
Just labeling OP as “inflammatory and unsubstituted nonsense” basically is 1) distorting the fact 2) trying to impose false claim on reasonable ideas, and 3) shuting down non-uniform ideas.
This, in reality, does not belong here, or I believe based on my understanding.
One specific example of this is hurricane season in 2017, which many news sources have frequently linked to global warming.
I'm not saying it's impossible that there's a connection, but based on my understanding (pretty much just this [0]), this is not something anyone should be speaking confidently about.
A lot of people seem to have an "ends justify the means" perspective about this stuff: that being right in general about global warming gives them the right to exaggerate in order to stimulate a public response. I'm not really comfortable with that thinking.
[0] https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
There is huge variability in climate regardless of global warming.
Because at this point, it's largely a game of political motivation, not confirmation of basic facts.
The temperature anomalies are quite high at northern latitudes. Closer to the equator and you wouldn’t see much difference.
If you’re at a more southern latitude, this may be colouring your view of the anecdotes in this thread. Most of them come from winter territory in north america, where temperature anomalies have been large.
I recall seeing on the news an RCMP barracks in the far north had to extend its foundation stilts no concrete foundations in the north. The stilts stick into the permafrost and are cooled by refrigeration during the summer so the building doesn't sink. The stilts used to stick into the permafrost a few metres now they have to put them down 15 metres.
A better measure would be to chart each season as an error-bar range on a graph and visually compare the averages over time to observe trends. I think you might be able to compare that with data at other observation points (airports are usually a good candidate) to show how things likely looked when they weren't under observation.
The current holders of high-dollar waterfront properties would be pushed away. Those holding less expensive properties further inland will be given an unexpected windfall.
Scientists are predicting warmer temperatures will also bring increased crop yields, lessening world hunger.
If climate change does come to pass, it won't all be bad.