Climate Change

[kladner]

I know that individual weather events do not relate directly to climate change. However, we should keep track of violent manifestations.

I picked this story up mainly to inquire after Brian and Nick. Hope you guys are OK.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...m-chaos-europe

[xilman]

Originally Posted by kladner

I know that individual weather events do not relate directly to climate change. However, we should keep track of violent manifestations.

It was a bit draughty around here. Gusts of over 100km/hour were enough knock things over on my property, including a potted monkey puzzle tree.

[Brian-E]

Originally Posted by kladner

[...]I picked this story up mainly to inquire after Brian and Nick. Hope you guys are OK.[...]

Thanks for your concern Kieren.
It was a violent storm by the standards we're used to in this temperate part of the world (you and Dan will be used to far more extremes than we are, I think, in your middle-of-a continent position), but neither of us had to go out to work at that moment so we could observe it from the safety of indoors. Some of our roof tiles came crashing down, but these were put back within a couple of hours by a builder-friend of the house owner after Nick let her know at once. If I'd been that builder I certainly wouldn't have climbed onto the roof before the storm had completely passed, which is what he did!

[kladner]

I am glad to hear that roof tiles were the greatest impact.

[ewmayer]

A Weaker Gulf Stream Means Trouble for Coastal New England | Weather Underground

Problems not confined to New England ... article fails to mention the dire effects on obscure out-of-the-way-locales like, say, "Europe", of certain no-longer-deemed-wildly-improbable scenarios:

What’s concerning is that any major slowdown in the Gulf Stream would also tend to lessen the contrast in sea level from one side to the other—and this would act to push up sea levels along the Northeast U.S. coast, on top of the global rise produced by warmer seas and melting ice. The most likely mechanism for slowing the Gulf Stream and the broader Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) would be an intrusion of fresh water into the North Atlantic from melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and/or Arctic sea ice.

Most research has found that such an AMOC slowdown is likely but would unfold gradually, with some decade-to-decade variability. The 2013 IPCC assessment showed a model consensus for the slowdown of between 11% and 34% this century, depending on how quickly we cut back on greenhouse gas emissions. However, recent studies from Yale University in 2017 suggest that an all-out collapse of the AMOC within 300 years might be more plausible than earlier thought.

Return to Younger Dryas conditions, 10C or more colder across Europe ... good times. "AMOC" is a fitting-sounding acronym here!

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

A Weaker Gulf Stream Means Trouble for Coastal New England | Weather Underground

The page is gone! I got as far as Category 6, but the Gulf Stream article isn't there any more. Nothing more recent than March 1, either, it appears. Guess I can put of worrying about it until The Day After Tomorrow, har de har har...

I found parts of the article, including some discussion, like here and here, but that's about it. Also, this Earth Institute article.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

The page is gone! I got as far as Category 6, but the Gulf Stream article isn't there any more. Nothing more recent than March 1, either, it appears. Guess I can put of worrying about it until The Day After Tomorrow, har de har har...

I found parts of the article, including some discussion, like here and here, but that's about it. Also, this Earth Institute article.

I should've noted the bizarreness of said page's construction - I had no trouble loading it initially using my super-old FF v22, but that was sans image rendering. Later I decided to enable images to look at some of the Gulf Stream pics, got error. Annoyingly, once I get the error I can’t get back to the article, no matter what combination of settings (images on/off, working online or offline) I try. Thanks, Weather Underground page designers!

I was, however, again able to recover the sans-images page by opening it in Palemoon. (Which, like all post-v22 FF versions lacks the image-render toggle checkbox in user prefs, meaning said toggle must be accessed via about:config -> permissions.default.image [change from default 1 (display all) to 2 (block all) or 3 (block only 3rd-party)].)

[Dr Sardonicus]

Leaked Memo: EPA Shows Workers How To Downplay Climate Change

• Human activity impacts our changing climate in some manner. The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue.
  
• While there has been extensive research and a host of published reports on climate change, clear gaps remain including our understanding of the role of human activity and what we can do about it.

In what, I am sure, is news completely unrelated to climate change,

Southwest U.S. Producers Facing an Expanding Drought

The NOAA page on the expanding drought has a sentence which, I confess, I am having trouble understanding:

While a lack of precipitation is not the sole reason droughts exist or worsen, it does tend to coincide with drought.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

I should've noted the bizarreness of said page's construction - I had no trouble loading it initially using my super-old FF v22, but that was sans image rendering. Later I decided to enable images to look at some of the Gulf Stream pics, got error. Annoyingly, once I get the error I can’t get back to the article, no matter what combination of settings (images on/off, working online or offline) I try. Thanks, Weather Underground page designers!

I was, however, again able to recover the sans-images page by opening it in Palemoon. (Which, like all post-v22 FF versions lacks the image-render toggle checkbox in user prefs, meaning said toggle must be accessed via about:config -> permissions.default.image [change from default 1 (display all) to 2 (block all) or 3 (block only 3rd-party)].)

It's baaaaaack! The original link, A Weaker Gulf Stream Means Trouble for Coastal New England goes right to the article now. Musta been a temporary oopsadaisy. Interesting, though, the article disappearing once images were enabled.

[chris2be8]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

The NOAA page on the expanding drought has a sentence which, I confess, I am having trouble understanding:

While a lack of precipitation is not the sole reason droughts exist or worsen, it does tend to coincide with drought.

The rate at which water evaporates or runs off into the sea can also influence droughts. Rain/snow over winter will mostly soak into the ground and refill underground aquifers, in summer a lot of it evaporates first (aided by plant transpiration).

And short bursts of heavy rain will mostly run off into rivers before it soaks into the ground.

So it's theoretically possible to have a drought without a lack of precipitation if it nearly all falls as short bursts of heavy rain, mostly in the summer.

But I doubt whoever wrote that sentence understood any of that.

Chris

[xilman]

Originally Posted by chris2be8

So it's theoretically possible to have a drought without a lack of precipitation if it nearly all falls as short bursts of heavy rain, mostly in the summer.

The Brits have an idiosyncratic view of what constitutes a drought.

Some years ago SWMBO and I were in a Cambridge restaurant chatting to a guy who was visiting from Phoenix, Arizona. We mentioned that a state of drought was in place throughout southern England. Outside a rainstorm of tropical intensity was flooding the street.

A couple of years ago we had what was probably the wettest drought on record. Rain fell at least three days a week for a month or more. However, because underground aquifers were depleted and would take months of above average rainfall to refill, the Met. Office declared we were suffering from a drought.