Snow

It took a while this winter. The first big snow came yesterday. All earlier attempts by our local Winter Fairy to produce the first genuine “must shovel” snow had failed. She had, presumably, become confused by Global Warming talk and trends. The earliest attempts came in November but never even fully covered drives, never mind roofs and roads. “It snowed a little,” was the phrase. And while the white did unevenly mark the grass out back, it was light enough so that even shy autumn leaves could hold up small brown sails; some even moved east in the wind, reminding me that Fall Raking had fallen short of one hundred percent.

So January 19, 2019 (a properly uneven year) came with skies triple-grey and dumped snow any which way. It cumulated to about four inches and piled under wind-pressure to hillocks high enough so that taking the garbage out resembled an Arctic trek. We too got snow, not just the East Coast. But continuing to trouble our local Winter Fairy, in Alabama they had tornadoes.

Very white out there, very bright the sun. Lovely, lovely. A neighboring oak’s still holding on to leaves with the usual oaken tenacity; but that’s just a species. Other trees have all obeyed; the evergreens are decorated with white jewelry.

Question to the Fairy? Will this first 2019 storm be the last as well? Who knows, these days. Everything’s confusing when oceans boil and icebergs melt.

Global Challenge, Local Response

The biggest challenge of global warming is, indeed, that it is global. Its effects are quite easy to document these days with photographs—but locally, in most places in the United States, you can’t see sea level rising. What you can see, and quite easily, is the price of gasoline and changes in the cost of electricity on your monthly Detroit Edison (or equivalent’s) bill. The New York Times this morning speaks of “A Nation slip[ing] into the Relentless Rising Sea.” I wondered: What nation might that be? I learned that it is the Marshall Islands. I didn’t know that the Marshall Islands are a nation; I also only had a very vague feeling that these islands might be in the Pacific somewhere. The nation (Republic of the Marshall Islands) had an estimated population of 71,191 in 2009. You might call that the local population of a scatter of some 1,156 islands and islets—but, to be sure, the Marshall Islands are definitely part a globe with a total population of 7.3 billion. That huge population, to be sure, is made up of more than 100,000 such local clusters as the Marshall Islands. And in most of those local clusters, global warming is not viscerally, actually, obviously challenging.

The weather may be warmer, summers more hot, winters milder—on some small percentage of total days. There may be more flooding, more fires in seasons; more tornadoes and tsunamis. But these are familiar from way, way back and don’t come with such labels attached as: “Brought to you by Global Warming.” My point is that the hard link between the challenge and the local impact is not such as to energize all but those few clusters of humanity that are actually touched by a real impact—causing them to have to raise seawalls by hand.

At the same time, any effective response to Global Warming must begin at the local level—where mostly the challenge isn’t actually felt. And it must be paid for by the local citizenry resulting in such things as rising electric bills or taxes.

Not surprisingly Congress yesterday passed bills undermining the Administration’s attempts to control power plant carbon emissions just as President Obama is overseas at a Global Warming conference. And Jeb Bush, one of many aiming to replace him, opines that he would have avoided going to Paris because any deal struck there might impose costs on the American public. Thus we need only to read a national paper to know the local response to the global challenge. What this shows me is that there is a genuine limit to human abilities to control global change—whether human-caused on not. To some challenges—especially those with serious local impacts projected to 2050 or beyond—there will never be a local response except those what will be too little too late. Sometimes even modern man must experience what used to be called Fate with the sober realization that que sera, sera.

The Minimalists

The German Gustav Spörer (1822-1885), who had studied mathematics and astronomy, began as a school teacher but then, at age 36, turned to astronomical observation. His interest centered on the sun and using sunspots to discover where the sun’s equator lies. His work led him to discover, searching ever older records, that a period from 1645 to 1715 the sun had virtually no sunspots. Nobody paid much attention. The younger Edward Maunder (1851-1928), an English astronomer, later made the same observations and was a much better publicist—perhaps because his second wife, Annie Russell, helped him. As a consequence, that period of minimum sunspots came to be known as the Maunder Minimum. Spörer, however, managed to get his own minimum—posthumously. John A. Eddy (1931-2009), discovered a yet earlier period of solar inactivity dating from 1460 to 1550, and, having a kindly temperament, presumably, he named it after Spörer to make up for that pioneer’s lack of recognition.

Having mentioned these names, we’re far from exhausting discoveries of solar minima, thus periods of unusually low sunspot activity. We also have the Oort Minimum, dated to 1010-1050 and associated with the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort (1900-1992), the Wolf Minimum, dated to 1280-1350, associated with Swiss astronomer Rudolf Wolf (1816-1893), and the Dalton Minimum, 1790-1820, named after the English chemist, physicist and meteorologist John Dalton, but I cannot discover who actually made the observations and named this minimum after him. The period from 1300 to 1850, thus encompassing the Spörer-Maunder minima and what might be called the Dalton Dip are known as the Little Ice Age.

I show above a graphic from Wikipedia (link) charting carbon-14 measurements from about 850 AD to 1950. These are thought to be meaningful because sunspot activity interferes with cosmic-rays. Therefore fewer rays reach the earth in periods of strong sunspot activity—and therefore produce less carbon-14. The more quiet the sun, the more radiocarbon is formed. This gives us a way of measuring, indirectly, sunspot activity down here on earth. The graphic above does not single out the Dalton Minimum, but it is there to the right of the 1800 peak.

Now we have ample, indeed abundant, evidence that solar maxima are warm periods while solar minima, if they last a while, produce a cooler climate; hence we look back on a Little Ice Age. Currently, what with a very wide trough in the last solar cycle, the 23th, and a “weak” 24th underway now, some NASA-ites have speculated that we may be seeing another Dalton. Interesting. We’ll have to wait. It might be ironical that just as the population finally gets with Global Warming, the New York Harbor might freeze over as it did in 1780. (See also my post today on LaMarotte.)

Felt in the Here and Now

Back toward the end of April of this year, I posted the temperature in Detroit on April 29 for a decade (link). My source for these data was the Weather Underground (link); the site offers the same service for any sizeable metro area. Now today, November 11, is the anniversary of “bringing the plants in” last year. This sort of thing looms LARGE in the lives of the old. Our plants came in much earlier this year (the last were in October 28)—but after that the temperature went up again. This morning the thermometer said 55° F as I checked it at 8:30, which led to my making a November 11 chart. And here it is:

Well, well. There is that upward spike. For November 11, the 2012 measurement is the highest in a decade. For April 29, the 2012 measurement was the lowest in a decade. In both cases, however, the trend line of these data slants down. I show it on the graphic. Now, of course, one-year measurements of temperature, a year apart and in one rather small region, are not particularly meaningful in any sense—except for personal amusement. Weather-systems change without much reference to calendars. What such an exercise illustrates, however, is why it is so difficult to find consensus on global warming. People experience the weather here and now and down and under, on the small spot where they live. And if the weather disagrees with our ideological bent, why we need but wait a day or two and it will promptly “get with the program.”

As I pointed out in April, we have two outdoor thermometers, one affixed to the garage, one to a wooden fence near-by. They never show the same temperature. I should mount a third one to make the case even more telling—but what with the fiscal cliff rapidly approaching, we’re saving our money.

Arctic Algal Bloom

Late-night Brigitte left a link that early-riser yours-truly read this morning. That story—and all the others referenced here—are from the Los Angeles Times. They got me thinking about actions and their consequences.

Last Friday the Times brought a story (link) about NASA’s discovery of a massive algae bloom in the Arctic; this was a big surprise for the scientists involved—and what it means is still being debated. Two years ago, for instance, a Canadian team had reported something contrary: the world’s phytoplankton has been disappearing at the rate of 1 percent a year over the last 100 years (link).

Does NASA’s discovery mean that things are suddenly turning around? Or does it mean that melting Arctic ice has caused phytoplankton to wake up and multiply? Or does it mean that increasing carbon dioxide is good for algae? They certainly feed on it.

The rule for scientists and journalists is to report what they find—without fear. Peer review will sort things out, sooner or later. Last Thursday, thus the day before the algal bloom, the Times brought quite another kind of story (link). It concerned the nearness of the “tipping point”: we have too many people, and our actions threaten irreversible planetary consequences.

This got me thinking. The scientists’ gloom in the tipping-point story may certainly be justified, but stories about approaching Armageddon almost always have the same structure. They project change in one part of the environment while holding all other trends steady. Thus it is presumed that burning massive quantities of fuels, paving the arable surface of the planet, mowing down the rain forests, and genetically distorting crops will continue unabated—yet that population will keep on climbing from 7 to 9.3 billion by 2050. Or, conversely, that global warming will increase—but the amount of water vaporized will remain the same and the sky will remain as bright and blue as ever. The story about algae blooms, however, in altogether unanticipated places, suggests a wilder and more interesting future.

Irreversible consequences? I mourn the decline of liberal education. Even a pathetic one like mine exposed me to Horace’s saying; indeed, we all know it. You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she will hurry back. I always frown when I hear the word “fragile” applied to earth or nature—until it occurs to me that the speaker is talking about the short term. We’ve had global warming before—swamps, swamps everywhere. Tyrannosaurus was the bad guy on the block. We’ve had an earth, or so I’m told, without free oxygen in its atmosphere and everything barren.

We’ll pay the price for our abuse, of course. The future won’t be pretty. I frankly can’t imagine maintaining  9 billion humans when fossil fuels run out. No problems in the short run. No doubt I’ll ride to the crematorium in a gasoline powered vehicle after I pass. But Nature will reverse the damage after the Troubles that lie ahead.

It is, however, natural for declining civilizations to engage in End Time projections, whether they’re powered by fossil fuels or not. If the tilting point is not yet near, our extraordinary science has yet something even grander up its sleeve. That brings me to the final LA Times story I want to reference (link). It came a week before the tilting point story, on May 31: “Milky Way, Andromeda galaxies set to crash — in 4 billion years.” Human caused? I wouldn’t be surprised.
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Phytoplankton image from Wikipedia (link).

Take Your Pick: Coffee or Gasoline

ABC news made me choke on my just-taken sip of coffee in a segment they based on a Guardian story. The YouTube version of the ABC’s coverage (short) is here. The Guardian story is here. Global Warming is now threatening future supplies of coffee beans, and the authoritative source of this is Jim Hanna, Starbucks own director of sustainability. Wow! Worse yet, cocoa beans are facing the same dread future. At the same time, the New York Times this morning wonders whatever happened to Global Warming concerns in the United States? It’s become a non-issue with both political parties. That’s going to change now! Time to wake up, folks. When push comes to shove, and a forced choice is presented to us—coffee or gasoline—I rather suspect that gasoline becomes a threatened species of a liquid. Add chocolate to into the mix and gasoline is doomed.