Tag Archives: Climate Change

NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory

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I happened across NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory: Physical Science Division’s web site today.  Looks to have quite a bit of interesting content.   Among other things, their Research Highlights section includes pages on Interpreting Climate Conditions, Atmospheric Rivers [1], Improving Hurricane Intensity Forecasts, and Twentieth Century Reanalysis [2].

Notes:

  1. Atmospheric rivers (AR) are “relatively narrow regions in the atmosphere that are responsible for most of the horizontal transport of water vapor outside of the tropics… On average, about 30-50% of annual precipitation in the west coast states occurs in just a few AR events, thus contributing to water supply… A strong AR transports an amount of water vapor roughly equivalent to 7.5–15 times the average flow of liquid water at the mouth of the Mississippi River.”
  2. “Using a state-of-the-art data assimilation system and surface pressure observations, the Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is generating a six-hourly, four-dimensional global atmospheric dataset spanning 1871 to 2012 to place current atmospheric circulation patterns into a historical perspective.”

Weekly Digest – September 21, 2014

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Must Read

Should Read

Environment and Climate Change

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Wrong.

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duty_calls

(The original working title for this post was “Supposed Seasoned Veteran Makes Rookie Mistake”.)

I needed educate myself on how people retrieve water vapor column from satellite-based spectral measurements.   I found what I was looking for – see, e.g., The MODIS Near-IR Water Vapor Algorithm and more recent versions of that document.   I also encountered this, IR Expert Speaks Out After 40 Years Of Silence : “IT’S THE WATER VAPOR STUPID and not the CO2″.  If you’re not intimately familiar with the details of the science being discussed the “It’s the water vapor, stupid!”  argument sounds very informed, very sensible.  But if you do understand the science… not so much.

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MIT Tech Day 2014: The Future of Planet Earth

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Videos of this year’s speakers here.

The talks:

  • “Earth Under Stress: Thinking differently about climate research” — Kerry Emanuel ’76, PhD ’78, Cecil & Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science:

For the past half century, scientists have been at work on amassing an impressive array of data and models to understand the stresses placed on the planet by an accelerated rate of climate change. This talk will assess the current understanding of the major climate processes and propose new directions for climate research.

  • “Lessons from the Landscapes of Earth and Other Planets” — Taylor Perron, Cecil and Ida Green Assistant Professor of Geology:

Landscapes are open archives of planetary history. Looking elsewhere in the solar system and into Earth’s past shows that some landscape features are surprisingly robust. But the specific forms they take on appear to depend on life and, more recently, on human impacts. This talk will explore clues left in planetary landscapes and the light they shed on the state of the planet.

Climate Change Digest – June 7, 2014

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Background

Assessment of and Reactions to President Obama’s Climate Plan

Pessimism and Perseverance

 

Dougald Hine, What do you do, after you stop pretending?

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From Dougald Hine, What do you do, after you stop pretending?:

‘Changing the world’ has become an anachronism: the world is changing so fast, the best we can do is to become a little more observant, more agile, better able to move with it or to spot the places where a subtle shift may set something on a less-worse course than it was on. And you know, that’s OK – because what makes life worth living was never striving for, let alone reaching, utopias.

There’s a big difference between the task of trying to sustain “civilisation” in its current form … which is what “sustainability” has largely come to mean, and the task of holding open a space for the things which make life worth living. I’d suggest that it’s this second task, in its many forms, which remains, after we’ve given up on false hopes.

 

Zadie Smith, Elegy for a Country’s Seasons

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The other day I was given a copy of Zadie Smith’s recent essay in the New York Review of Books.   Reading it, it felt complementary to the story in the NY Times Magazine last weekend on Paul Kingsnorth and The Dark Mountain Project.  I initially thought I’d just post a link in next week’s Weekly Digest or perhaps quote few paragraphs in a dedicated post.   On further thought neither seemed right though.  Links without context are easy to ignore and I wouldn’t to justice to Smith by excerpting her work.   Here’s the full essay.   (The following link takes you to the original on the NYRB website.)

Elegy for a Country’s Seasons:

There is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words. Is that surprising? People in mourning tend to use euphemism; likewise the guilty and ashamed. The most melancholy of all the euphemisms: “The new normal.” “It’s the new normal,” I think, as a beloved pear tree, half-drowned, loses its grip on the earth and falls over. The train line to Cornwall washes away—the new normal. We can’t even say the word “abnormal” to each other out loud: it reminds us of what came before. Better to forget what once was normal, the way season followed season, with a temperate charm only the poets appreciated.

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