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Weather related post.
I spoke previously of 'spiky' weather and my views were that GW or CC(climate change) were not about averages but about abnormal changes or extreme changes. The averages may still compute the same but the 'variations' are what is important.
Given that we may only go up a slight percentage of a degree in say 5 years but what is really happening is very big changes that still average out with just a slight uptrend.
For instance this last spring. A very very warm March then followed by the extremely hard killing frosts of April. This
had huge effects on my part of the country and we are still dealing with that. Right now soybeans are the focus where corn and wheat was before.
By my observations in my region we have not really had any rainfall in over 1 and 1/2 months. About the middle of Apr was our best rainfall. However over the whole year we might
obtain the same 'average annual rainfall' .....but there is the kicker. Just how and when that rain occurs.
What has happened recently? Wheat had to be chopped down due to dead growing points. Then had to be mowed and then baled up,another large cost. It had abnormal amounts of nitrate and thus not really suited to being fed to animals and much of it caught on fire,...burned barns in the midwest.
Then after dealing with insurance farmers had to go prep the fields again and now sow soybeans on what was previously wheat. The beans are in the ground. The ground is extremely dry and dusty so no germination. Its just lying there.
Previous , I forgot, a rouge shower crusted over the corn fields preventing much corn from breaking thru so special measures had to be taken(rotary hoes) to break the crust in many areas.
Now the lack of moisture hits.
Spiky weather. If weather is NOT climate change then something is sure as hell playing havoc with weather. El Nino, La Nina, whatever. I think its climate change yet the averages might say no but I believe different.
Sitting in an ivory academia tower dealing with slowly maturing data and writing lengthy reports might be well and good yet is NOT REALITY short term and not where the seed hits the ground.
People are also starting to really bitch here (farmers) about the cost of fuel. The cost of 'inputs' is skyrocketing.
The eventual price of foodstuffs is going to on a huge increase IMO due to much of this. The droughts still continue elsewhere.
We are looking at some bad bad moons on the rise. Sooner or later the cat will escape the bag(or Schrodingers box) and we will then see whether its dead or alive(QM non-locality).
I believe it will be sick and dying. This country has a very , very few, good times(hedonists times that is) ahead of it before the fat lady sings. She is waiting in the wings right now. Then we will see the centre start to fly apart as that rough rude beast slogs(slouches) onward towards Bethlehem.
Airdale-not a cloud in sight,its a doomish sorta day
Yeah it is one of those days when we can look out into the yard and know that there will be no Pecans, No pears, Not many other fruits, cause the hard freeze took them at the prime. I have a dozen species of trees in my yard that have suffered from that spring weather then sudden hard freeze, Next year I'll be triming the dead wood at around 25 to 50 precent off some trees.
Spikes is all that you need to harm you. Look at the Gasoline spikes that way too. But farming and Gardening rely on things that keep steady and Global Climate Change is not one of those things. I don't think we will see a normal year ever again. We really might not have seen one for 20 years either, but my records only go back for 25 years on this land.
Happy food storage.
My old next door neighbor was a retired cotton farmer and I always liked his old saying about rain.
"It only rains twice in West Texas, when it can do the most damage or the least good."
On the flip side we went up to Wyoming this weekend to look at a seismic shoot and it appears Wyoming and West Texas are on the verge of breaking a near 20 year drought. This is the coolest and wettest spring in recent memory. Best hopes for those in need.
Mose in Midland
Or as Elmer Kelton put it, "West Texas is a stage of permanent drought, broken occasionally by rain." I would apply that observation to the entire US Southwest.
I've been following the Gulf Stream Current flow since the theory first appeared 20 or so odd years ago. Something doesn't seem right with it right now, I mean much worse than before. They point out when looking at maps of the current now, that they have changed the way they "compute" it. Off the top of my head its called from "relative" to "absolute" or perhaps the other way around.
The way they used to compute it (don't have the exact date of the change over at hand, but it is fairly recent) showed the GS broken and very sluggish. Then they changed the way they compute it and it looks nothing like the old version. The current seems OK compared to the old views, but a current map shows it begins its turn a tad bit farther south before its northern turn.
A group of amateurs has been following it for the last couple of years and right now they are concerned. They seem to think it has stopped or is very close to it. The change over in computation of the current makes them wonder about what is going on. The water temps along the coasts (they claim) are below normal in the Gulf and along the Atlantic coast.
They do use charts etc. They noted since the time they thought it had shut down the weather in England turned very cold, as well as in Ireland etc. They also say its too early to make the claim as fact, but if things don't change they are wondering why the media is ignoring this. (welcome to the club guys).
Because of this they are thinking a big Hurricane is going to hit the Atlantic seaboard this summer. If it has shut down, NG is going to be a big topic in the British Isles and in the NE.
I can't say they are correct, I'm giving it a bit more time, but I can say that cold water pools have been making appearances for the last few years. If they are correct, the effects will be felt rather quickly, even the Pentagon report on Climate Change and the GS made this claim.
Looking at the current and temp charts and the buoy readings they have access to, it really seems to fly in the face of the recent claim that the current is stronger than ever I read the other day from a scientific group.
Anyone here follow this and notice this also.
Quid Clarius Astris
Ubi Bene ibi patria
Gulf Stream, PrisonerX could you post a link to the views of the flow and such you follow?
TIA
Here is a link to the fourth page of the current thread on the site.
http://www.climatepatrol.com/forum/10/2484/pg4/index.php
someone for illustration purposes posted an old map and the way the current view looks. Dramatic difference. The first page on this thread goes back to into March April and the last couple of pages are current. The page I am giving you is just a couple of days old.
One of the site admins says he is trying to build a database of the buoys. That will be terrific if he can pull it off.
Quid Clarius Astris
Ubi Bene ibi patria
About the possible shutdown of the Gulf Stream.
There's been lots of talk about that happening, but recall that the Gulf Stream is a wind driven current, the result of wind patterns which force water toward the west in mid-ocean of the Northern Hemisphere. The water piles up against the continents and then flows northwards. As it does so, the Coriolis Effect causes the flow to turn toward the east. The same sort of wind driven current is evident in the Western Pacific, the Kuroshio Current.
That said, the other part of the problem often mentioned is that of the Thermohaline Circulation (THC). The Gulf Stream branches as it crosses the mid-Atlantic, most of it flowing back toward the South. The North Atlantic Drift Current brings some of the Gulf Stream waters toward the north of Europe, thence continues as the Norwegian Current flowing westward toward the Greenland and Labrador Seas, cooling enough along the way to sink to the bottom of the Atlantic.
http://www.meer.org/M10.htm
Were the THC to stop, Europe would be much colder. This is thought to have happened during the Younger Dryas and also during an event about 8200 years ago. Some models used to study climate change have suggested that the THC might slow or shutdown due to increased greenhouse gases. Others model experiments have suggested that warming from increasing greenhouse gases will counteract the cooling which might otherwise result from a shutdown of the THC.
The THC has been seen to vary over time, perhaps as part of a natural internal oscillation of the Earth's oceans. There was a partial shutdown noted in the Greenland Sea during the early 1980's, which MAY have been associated with the colder winters seen in North America and Europe of that period. It's reasonable to expect a return of such conditions, but, whether the result will be a permanent cooling, ie., another Ice Age is subject of considerable question.
E. Swanson, MsME Ret?, AAAS, AGU
You are correct the Gulf Stream and THC are not the same. Nice data site though. Went back to 2003. Most noticable were warm water surface flows that developed throughout the Atlantic Basin in 2006 that had not been there before. Most notable, a sigificant one that developed north south at 51-52 w long. in December 2006:
http://rads.tudelft.nl/gulfstream/gif/gulf_061216_vel.gif
compare with 2005:
http://rads.tudelft.nl/gulfstream/gif/gulf_051214_vel.gif
Most Recent
http://rads.tudelft.nl/gulfstream/gif/gulf_070523_vel.gif
A year ago
http://rads.tudelft.nl/gulfstream/gif/gulf_060523_vel.gif
All Data:
http://rads.tudelft.nl/gulfstream/gif/
THC vs The Gulf Stream
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/carl-wunsch-the-ec...
Is it possible that the unusually warm winter and hot spring have accelerated ice melt in the Arctic thus causing the cooling in the Atlantic?
The spring weather pattern seems to be the same as last year; hot April followed by a cooler wetter May. If the pattern holds then we will see a change to drier hotter (20c+) weather during June, very hot (30c+) in July followed by a wetter cooler August and an Indian summer in the Autumn.
This hotter then cooler pattern would seem like a natural reaction to a hotter climate; heat melts ice, ice melt cools Atlantic, Europe receives cooler weather, cycle repeats.
A layman's view.
Triumvirate of collapse - Economy, Ecosystem, Energy
Damn it! That is the major flaw in my plan to relocate to mainland Europe from the UK, if the Gulf Stream slows or stops. Not a total NAFU, but a serious one non-the-less.
My rationalisation at the time was that warming would make southern Europe too hot and cooling would make northern Europe too cold, the mixture of the two would make somewhere in the middle more or less unchanged. It seemed sensible to hedge my bets and go for the area in the middle with the possibility of ending up with either a Mediterranean, Nordic or Russian type climate. All obviously survivable, even if some more preferable than others.
It will be both interesting and scary to see where this goes.
Triumvirate of collapse - Economy, Ecosystem, Energy
Five months ago I was towing a vessel from Jacksonville, Florida down to the Caribbean. I crossed the gulf stream at Miami. In forty years of crossing the GS I never saw the current that weak. Three to four knots is normal, and the stream was flowing at approximately one and a half to two knots. Very weird. Also passing through the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti the current was reversed flowing at two knots to the north. I've never seen that before. Something is definitely happening....Bob
Thanks for the link about the difference between THC and GS. I need to reread it and figure out exactly what the difference is, only had time for a quick read. Did this confusion start with the early theory, because from what I recall they were really referring to the THC but also included the GS in the same vein. Confusing terms.
Anyone with any comments on the new maps that show the GS as a stronger unit and the recent change in modeling.
Thanks for the eyewitness account Boatbob. I check back on that site every month or two to see what going on.
Notice the story about the seal hunters. They were complaining that the ice was so thin and vacant that seal hunting was worth squat. Then a month later they get caught in ice because of the ice formation and had to be rescued. Several boats, even a Coast Guard rescue vessel became stuck in what appears by the story's on the news to be some very quick forming ice.
Quid Clarius Astris
Ubi Bene ibi patria
Kata Maran
Over many (hundreds) of gulf stream crossings using 10 to 15 degrees of compensation southwards into the stream it has been evident lately that even 5 degrees is too much.
To quote: "There's something happening here... What it is ain't exactly clear..."
Airdale, the climate change scenarios actually do predict wider variations, more extremes if you will. So your observation is exactly what is predicted - a generally rising temperature system that is wrapped in ever more volatile weather patterns and temperature extremes. A key thing to remember in a global warming situation, whether natural or not, is that total energy available in the storm systems is growing. Stuart demonstrated this when he analyzed the hurricanes a few years ago, showing no change in number but a drastic change in power of each hurricane. See Hurricanes: Trend or Oscillation? in which Stuart assesses that information very clearly.
You are also correct in that this is one of the dangers of climate change - not the temperature rise itself but the volatility of the weather because of the temperature change.
Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett
Here's the local drought report:
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/data/warn_archive/TAE/ESF/0524_094417.txt
Nearing a record for the driest spring.
One thing that it is good to keep in mind is that the Earth
is NOT a static thing. It's a dynamic system. We might
from our short historical perspective be accustomed to thinking of things as being fixed and unchanging. When over time they do change, especially if we have adjusted our own
lives to the way they were, the change is anything from
a worry to a total disaster. However, the natural state of
the world _is_ change. There is no _single_ state which is
the 'natural' state of the world. Most of these things
change over decades, centuries, millenia, and millions of
years- too long for us to notice the process going on.
Even if we academically know that the earth's climate
fluctuates between cold and warm periods and has done so
at least for the past several million years (the longest
ice and sea-floor core samples that I've heard of go back
about 4.5 milion years and show consistent cycles of hot
and cold periods), being in the middle of just a few bumps
along that cycle is quite a major change for us. The
small components of those big slow cycles can be violent
and arbitrary to an observer in the middle with a few
decades or generations of historical data.
In addition, the majority of the human population has
chosen or been forced to choose a lifestyle that is extremely
fragile - founded on agriculture - where a half dozen crops
are the basis of the food and livelihood of virtually the
entire population. In the natural environment, there a millions of species each filling every imaginable niche and
constantly evolving to any new developments. To reject a
million species and keep five to grow in vast monocultures
under conditions of neverending ecological disaster (plowing
a field literally turns it into an expanse of empty dirt)
is to reduce the hardiness of the entire food supply from
a situation where almost any conditions short of the sun
going nova or an enormous meteor smashing into the planet
are survivable to a situation where a few degrees difference
or the rains two weeks earlier or later mean huge food
shortages or enormous expense to scramble to mitigate.
Agriculture depends on certain very particular climatic
conditions, and very gentle ones at that. It has never
been very intelligent over the long term to place all your
eggs in such a small and shaky basket. The short-term
competetive advantages have so far outweighed the long term
fragility.
Yes, the climate is changing. It has always been in flux.
Knowing it for a hundred years will not prepare you for
what it does over 500 years. Knowing it for 1000 years won't
prepare you for what it does over ten thousand. Stopping in
at ten in the morning at high tide will not prepare you for
another visit at midnight and low tide. Knowing it for a
single day, though, should teach you that it is always
changing, and thus not to expect it to stay the same.
Nice post, Natural climate variability is the missing link IMHO in the Global Warming debate. I can't deny that we are in a warming cycle on balance across the globe. I just am still not totally convinced that we aren't one large volcanic eruption, or one low sunspot cycle away from global cooling and more climate change. Our particular region appears to have hit peak temps in 2003 as successive years has been cooler. This year is very cool and extremely wet much different from the southeast that appears to be in drought. My own experience lends more credence to El Nino and La Nina for weather impact in our region.
Does the climate change debate mean that we shouldn't try and limit our GHG emissions and other man made pollutants... No. It just means I consider Peak Oil a much greater issue for mankind.
Kansas,
just data, but have you noticed that the sunspot cycle was supposed to start and it hasn't. I haven't noticed a report of a sunspot in quite a few weeks. And what do we have. Lots of cold weather around the globe, huge snowstorms in late May. Record cold at the start of the Southern hemisphere winter. Britain is very cold.
coincidence or not. Sunspot activity seems to effect the weather. The Nile evidence recently compiled from the river heights coincided with Sun activity.
Yet, that and volcanic activity are ignored, because "they" say that there aren't enough volcano's to warm the water.
This comes from people that have NO CLUE as to the activity under the water.
the Sea around Japan has warmed faster than other places. Very warm water. Its blamed on CO2 and volcanic activity is ruled out for the above reasons. Yes, they ignore that volcano's are all around Japan under the sea. That japan is an island formed by a eruptions. That they have discovered new activity and magma activity.
You're called names and more when you try and interject it into the discussion, and the people doing this "yelling at dissenters" claim they are using the scientific method.
BS
Quid Clarius Astris
Ubi Bene ibi patria
LOL, do you have any clue what you are talking about???
It's 25 degrees Celsius here (outer London), that ain't cold!
If you thought our weekend was bad look at the weather across the water...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_ar...
Moscow breaks another heat record
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20070529/66283917.html
Seems to me like we're in some kind of transition stage with the climate oscillating between possible new climate states. A period of chaotic weather as the climate struggles to equalise the opposing forces which are moving it from its current equilibrium. Various extremes being tested until the climate zooms in on the most stable state.
A layman's view :)
i>Triumvirate of collapse - Economy, Ecosystem, Energy
Consider two extreme conditions, a block of ice and a pot of boiling water. Bubbles in ice don't move and bubbles in boiling water move very fast. A warming climate means more volatility which will not find a stable state.
I don't follow that logic Thomas.
What I do notice is that with all the stories of major snowstorms in China, Argentina, and all over the world that show massive inflows of cold air during late May is also a part of the "warming" scenario.
turn turn turn, twist twist twist, this is not science.
Quid Clarius Astris
Ubi Bene ibi patria
Hi,
Not exactly a snowstorm but yesterday was the coldest day in twenty years, here in Argentina. Despite that, we had warmer than usual temperatures until the beginning of May.
Fernando
The volatility causes air masses including cold air masses to be pushed north and south more than the average of previous decades and centuries. It is why Iowa had both below 0F and 70F days last January. The added energy in the atmosphere means winters in particular will no longer have months on end of freezing temps. Not all the extra energy causes temps to rise. Some of it is converted into more kinetic energy and highly convoluted jet streams.
I follow the logic.
It is not easy for many to accept that no new stable point is on the horizon. Ongoing and amplifying chaos is not easy to swallow.