Just Temperature Redux: What about the Cherries and Apples?
Just Temperature Redux: What about the Cherries and Apples?
March and April were very warm in the United States, and especially in March when it was 86 degrees F in Detroit, there was a lot of press attention to the heat (my blog at the time). Following the March heat wave I watched with interest the caster that has weather events and earthquakes on the homepage. There was a period of time when there were record highs and, a couple of hundred miles away, record lows. There were these waves moving (very) warm air north and (very) cool air south (another old Rood blog Warm, Cold, Warm, Cold). This is what weather does, moves heat from the tropics to the poles; it tries to smooth out the distribution of temperature, heat, energy. The climate of the Earth is strongly linked to the Equator to Pole temperature contrast. (I note that, at this writing, a May 20 record high in Holland, MI, of 92 F. In fact, May 20 is pretty much coast-to-coast high.)
So I am watching these highs and lows, expecting someone to write to me and tell me how cold it was in Tennessee, and what do you say to that you alarmist?
The past few months provide us a nice example of climate, and a useful framing for thinking about the future. Scientists are always explaining that just because the globe is, on average, warming, that does not mean that it no longer gets cold. When I have written about this in the past, I always start with the Sun still goes away at the winter pole; it gets cold; the pole is relatively isolated, so there are cold pockets of air up north. (Yes, I am presuming a Northern Hemisphere bias.) So it’s cold up north, and down south it’s hot. If you think about the Earth, the seasons, the distribution of land and ocean, an increase in average global temperature suggests an increase in the average temperature between, say, 30 degrees latitude south and north. Half of the Earth’s area lies in those bounds, and, well, the Sun is always there.
Next if we think about weather and climate, the contrast between the temperature at the equator and the pole is a measure of the amount of mixing that the atmosphere and ocean need to do to work towards a balance. If someplace up north is still getting about as cold as it used to get, because the Sun is down and it is a bit isolated, and there is more and more build up of heat in the tropics, then something has to give. Using climate and weather models as a guide, we see large mixing events in the late winter, perhaps more characteristic of events of, historically, early spring.
Figure 1: From an old, but good, blog: Warm, Cold, Warm, Cold. A schematic picture that represents a wave in temperature. There are hot and cold parts of the wave.
So there are bursts of warm air north in late winter or earlier in the spring. But there are still pockets of cold air and these get pushed south. The variability, hot and cold contrast in this case, actually increases. The bursts of warm air appear as the onset of spring, leaves and flowers come out. And there they sit waiting for the return of the cold air. This year’s warm spring did great damage to the sour cherry crop (Michigan, Wisconsin, New York) and the apple crop all across the upper Midwest. (Iowa, Michigan).
This scenario of a warm period followed by a frost that kills fruit blossoms is not new. I grew up in the South, and just about every year there was some strip of peach-growing land that was damaged by the onset of spring, followed by a frost. What this current case study lets us think about is what does a warming climate bring to table? Earlier warm spells extending farther north. Increased vulnerability as larger areas of land are impacted by the mixing of the increasing temperature contrasts. Increased crop risk as new weather threats encroach on new regions. There are adaptation strategies for these risks, but they come at a cost.
So I want to finish this blog with something of a change of gears. It relies on a paper brought to my attention by Chris Burt. It is a paper in Nature entitled Warming experiments underpredict plant phenological responses to climate change by E. M. Wolkovich (2012) and many others. There are a couple of points I want to make about this paper.
First, the paper is a nice exposition about how biological scientists think about the intersection of their field with climate change. Advancing onset of leafing and flowering is one of the most sensitive indicators of the onset of spring. Though many factors influence when plants start to leaf out and flower, temperature is the predominate factor. The variable that is used as a proxy for climate is mean annual temperature, and variability of the mean annual temperature represents the variability in the onset of spring.
The second point I want to make about the paper is a clarification – perhaps a translation between different scientific fields. As pointed out in Wolkovich et al. (2012), there is substantial observational evidence that spring is coming earlier. This move to earlier times is especially evident in the northern hemisphere and more evident at higher latitudes, say, in Michigan or Canada. When Wolkovich et al. (2012) talk about “warming experiments” they are not talking about experiments with climate models. They are talking about experiments that artificially warm plant communities to investigate their sensitivity to increased temperatures. In this paper, they find that such experiments do not explain the observations of the onset of spring in natural plant communities.
Returning to climate change - Wolkovich et al. (2012) estimate that for each degree C that mean annual temperature increases the onset of leafing and flowering will move forward by 5-6 days. Given temperature trends for the past forty years, this translates to 1.1 to 3.3 days per decade. And returning to the cherries and apples, these types of trees are especially vulnerable to bloom followed by a frost, especially in high latitudes. So if you are an orchard fruit grower, how do you use this information? Do you treat this year as a simple fluke of weather, or do you look to start a replacement program with different types of fruit or different hybrids as the orchard is refurbished? Or do you look to ways to manage the temperature in the orchard, and perhaps a market advantage with earlier fruit?
r
Figure 2: Larger image Ripe by Jennifer Bruce from Absolute Michigan
Reader Comments
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 — Blog Index
Well, I can't be everywhere, you know.
If we get any more climate related hockey sticks we'll have to form a team and join the NHL. And I had trouble ice-scating in the 1950s, when the lakes in Minnesota froze over well before Thanksgiving.
The bigger problem is that we will be skating on thinner ice. .... Maybe we can invent similar shaped sticks to use while playing Water-Polo?
I think it is a combination of everything you have mentioned. I believe there is no consensus as to what might happen to currents when the arctic ocean is ice-free for any extended period of time.
Also during the winter months when there is no sunshine to facilitate the oxidation of methane there are more GHGs trapping the heat in the polar regions. I just learned within the past week or two that it is sunlight interacting with water vapor that creates the free radical Hydroxyl (OH) which then mixes with methane (CH4) to create carbon dioxide (CO2).
We are living in the midst of a real-time science project, with more new questions than hypotheses.
When will Polar Polo become an Olympic sport??
My best guess would be when they decide if it is a summer game or a winter game. Maybe, not in the too distant future, it will become an all year round game?
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/prods/MODISCOM-T/20120 521000000_MODISCOM-T_0006457378.jpg
The full article in The Scientific American can be found here:
Link
Now, just so you know: I can't speak for anyone else here, but I plan to continue minusing any and all hyperparanoid Tea Party/NWO conspiracy theory rants posted here. They're laughable, they're silly, they're baseless, they're illogical, they add absolutely nothing to the discussion of climate change science and mitigation, and--IMHO--they have no place here on this scientific forum. (FYI, you'd probably gain greater traction selling such tripe to the small-minded simpletons over on Free Republic...)
I Concur Wholeheartedly
If you walked the walk, you would get some respect. But so far all you do is paste and run. You've never backed up any of your assertions and when people hve tried to take you seriously, you ran away.
So it's not aboupt anyone being collectivists, it is about people judging you based on lack of character and content.
Maybe we are collectivists, but you haven't got anywhere near to the right to claim that.
The best, IMO, is to attend to the data and understand what the data is telling us.
To be a "believer" in anything generally requires that some of the facts staring you in your face have to be denied.
I'll go one step further.
Not only are they laughable, silly, baseless, illogical and add nothing to the discussion, I'm willing to bet that they are posted in an attempt to disrupt and piss people off.
It's right-wing rat-fking.
I'm going to go with a low carbon footprint skeptic who accepts the scientific consensus on AGW.
As most of us here know, most of the global warming occurs or is transferred the the polar regions. The speed of the jet stream varies as the differential of the two temperature regimes. When the differential is great , the stream is faster and the course of the flow is shorter(the weather I grew up with) and polar temps are more confined to the geographic pole area. As the differential decreases, the jet stream slows and begins to meander(like any river) and it's rate of change lessens(hence we get locked-in weather patterns that would have only lasted a week in my childhood now last a season sometimes). Last winter, the cold outbreak started in eastern Europe and slowly wandered over to the date line, giving us the 'great' Bering Sea freeze-up.
I'm just trying to work out the math of this new world and am looking for input on these new more persistent weather patterns, like how hurricanes are just as common but no longer have their Cape Verde origins.
I'm writing here to a community of fellow enthusiasts. I'd never heard of 'agenda 21', but I did not come here to talk theology.
Bah, bah, don't verify the facts for yourself. Bah, bah don't learn the science. Bah, bah only let other people tell you who is lying or not. Bah, bah keep close minded and only listen to what the conspiracy theorists tell you.
I think the CO2 numbers that I track at Mauna Loa have been worked into them methane on a CO2 equivalency basis, which I don't like. I'd like to track the methane numbers but don't have the wherewithal to do so. If you want to know how old I am you could know that CO2 has nearly doubled in my life-time. But I digress, methane is supposed to be twice the greenhouse gas of CO2 and the Arctic ocean is surrounded by permafrost that's rapidly melting and dumping incredible amounts of methane. Welcome to the tipping point. My gov't has shut down the science centres there. Disclosure, I've no income or support for my point of view, I don't even know anybody that makes money on this disaster.
Your question does not make sense! What the heck do you mean? Low carbon sceptic means what? High carbon sceptic's position is what? Are you throwing linguistic nonsense to disrupt? It could be a simple question or it could be a dog's leavings. What kind of false choice is that when neither is explicable? I call 'foul troll'. You want me to argue your side by slices when you are a dung fly? Read Socrates and know your question it's self is specious.
Your question does not make sense! What the heck do you mean? Low carbon sceptic means what? High carbon sceptic's position is what? Are you throwing linguistic nonsense to disrupt? It could be a simple question or it could be a dog's leavings. What kind of false choice is that when neither is explicable? I call 'foul troll'. You want me to argue your side by slices?
Your question is totally specious and is an attempt to subvert.
A report issued last week "Methane from the Sea"
The above link was a little poky but did come through eventually.
More reports about methane than you ever expected in your wildest dreams.
The home site for the ESRL. Use the search function on upper right to find more and also explore the site in general.
Methane gets some discussion on Nevin's site.
Here, I think, is the latest blog entry.
Link
And here's something worth a read.
Link
I'd also suggest doing a search on Skeptical Science. There's a lot of good stuff there.
Link
I would like to make a weather forecast here now though. Our supply of trolls will dry up as they regroup for the next election and as their funding dries up due to disclosure laws.
"Speaking of Walking the walk, I have a simple question for you.
Is it better in your view for one to be a relatively low-carbon skeptic or a high-carbon footprint AGW believer?"
Sorry, you have a long list of questions to answer that people have asked you directly before you earn the respect needed for me to attempt answering a leading question.
If most of the other bloggers on this page asked me that question, I would respond. Why them not you? Because they have demonstrated some sort of integrity, or at least haven't demonstrated a lack of it.
So go back and earn your right to be answered, or remain a hypocritical cut-and-paste piece of emotional fluff.
Joe Bast Announces the Death of Denial-a-Palooza at Final Heartland ICCC Conference
During his closing remarks at the Heartland Institute's Seventh "International Conference on Climate Change," Heartland President Joseph Bast revealed that the group has no plans to hold another conference and is struggling to pay its staff following the defections of corporate sponsors in the wake of the disastrous Unabomber billboard campaign and Deniergate document dump.
"I'm not a good fundraiser," Bast admitted to the crowd today in Chicago as the gathering wound down.
Bast appealed directly to the crowd for donations, saying that "if you've got a rich uncle" [ask him to donate to Heartland].
"At this point we have no plans to do another ICCC," Bast said, referring to the somewhat-annual gatherings which DeSmogBlog dubbed Denial-a-Palooza years ago.
Read the whole thing here
There's a very interesting--and disturbing--article over on ABC (and referenced by Climate Progress) detailing the reasons we humans so often fail to see the quicksand until we're in it, and then refuse to believe we're in trouble until we're swallowing the wet grains:
'The Great Big Book of Horrible Things': WWII and Climate Change
It reminds us that humanity has often and recently failed to prevent collective calamity, even when many people can see it coming and try to warn everyone.
In other words, just because we see an immense and possibly preventable cataclysm approaching, it's important to realize that it doesn't mean we'll prevent it, necessarily -- however unbearable the thought of that possibility may be.
Given what the world's climate scientists are now begging us to understand, it seems only logical that before we can begin to glimpse and assess any reasons for realistic hope in the rapidly growing climate crisis, it is important to see the true size of the problem.
And, as these scientists often tell us, the problem's biggest unknown is 'What will the humans do?' Will humanity respond adequately in time to make temperatures level off well within the lifetime of today's teenagers?
Harvard historian and social anthropologist Timothy Weiskel, in his courses on the many aspects of the crisis of manmade global warming, sometimes quotes the insight of 18th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes that 'Hell is truth seen too late.'
The world's climate scientists are in effect telling us that one part of the truth we must now try to see is humanity's ability -- or lack of it -- for collective prevention of enormous manmade disaster, atrocity.
The record is worrisome.
ANother concept that goes with that is the banality of evil. Add to that normal stupidity, laziness, shortsightedness and error and we are in for a rough ride.
: )
Weather predictions are for winds blowing toward the Fram by the first of the week.
If you go to the image site you can zoom in and see the grey/black better.
Link
In a report issued on the penultimate day of new UN talks in Bonn, scientists said Earth's average global temperature rise could exceed the dangerous 3.5 C (6.3 F) warming they had flagged only six months ago.
Marion Vieweg, a policy researcher with German firm Climate Analytics, told AFP the 3.5 C (6.3 F) estimate had been based on the assumption that all countries will meet their pledges, in themselves inadequate, to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
New research has found this is not "a realistic assumption," she said, adding that right now "we can't quantify yet how much above" 3.5 C (6.3 F) Earth will warm.
The monitoring tool is called Climate Action Tracker (CAT), a joint project of Climate Analytics, Ecofys and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
Her colleague, Bill Hare, said the gap between countries' promised interventions and the reality was "getting bigger."
Projections are for greenhouse-gas overshoot of between nine and 11 billion tonnes per year beyond the annual 44-billion-tonne ceiling needed by 2020 to achieve the 2 C (3.6 F) target.
Link
What they are trying to say, without actually saying it, is that our future looks very bleak. Unless we are able to adapt to a far more stressful climate, our future generations may not make it. Should our species survive the greed and self gratification of our generations, then the future generations will not look back on us with any reverence. I view this as a parent that would kill its own offspring so that it would not have to be cared for it and take away from the pleasures the parent desires now. Not out of an inability to care for the offspring, but more out of a desire to not care for the offspring.
This is not good news!!
There are times that I'm glad I'm 65+, however, I feel my generation has failed in so many respects. We're not giving future generations much of an earth to subsist on.
Thanks for that link. I appreciate all of the veterans here who are so open with sharing sources of valuable information.
Anyone care to venture a guess as to how much ice will be left at the end of the melt season this year??
I'm also 65++ (scheduled to add another plus day after tomorrow). I'm worried about climate change, not so much for myself, but for those who follow.
People our age are leaving a much better world than what we inherited in many ways.
Smallpox is gone and polio is about ready to go. Cancer is no longer an automatic death sentence. Many diseases are now quite curable. We can transplant organs, something of science fiction when we were young.
I grew up in the segregated South. Women were very much second class citizens. Gays were firmly in the closet. We've moved society largely past those problems.
We've created computers and the internet making an incredible amount of information available to just about anyone. The technology we're leaving is almost unbelievable.
We've made it past aggressive communism/fascism and to a world in which it seems very unlikely that another individual would emerge who would seek to rule the entire world through force.
What we are leaving those younger than us is a big problem that needs serious attention. The solution is very simple - we need to quit burning fossil fuels.
We're leaving them the means to get off fossil fuels. We could make all the electricity we want with existing technology and we could switch our personal transportation almost totally to electricity.
I'm pretty much past the age when I had the energy to fight segregation and inequality. I'm afraid it's up to those a few years younger to get into the streets, or whatever it takes, to fix this problem.
Over to you, kids. Time to start some serious bailing lest you sink....
I will venture to guess that it will be lower than the 2007 minimum. We are likely to see a new record low in total mass.
Well said, old man! Very well said! ..... Don't get upset. I am 60+ and rarely have the opportunity to call someone else, "old man". I am running out of opportunities to do so and I must take advantage where I can. ;-) .... Beside, we still have Grothar.
You're asking for a weather forecast far past the normal "3 day" level of competence.
A few strong storms could flush out massive amounts of older ice and some hot winds off of surrounding land masses could do a lot of melting.
Or the storms and winds might be mild and we'd end up with a bit more ice than what we had at the end of the 2011 season.
Over the last 32 years or so we've seen annual increases in ice volume eight times. Another year of "recovery" is not out of the question.
We've also seen the ice take huge volume hits a couple of times when weather lined up just right.
It's going to be a 'watch and wait'....
<>img src="
Dylan is 71 today.
Now, that's an old fart.... ;o)
Couldn't have said it better myself. That is one reason that I am ungentle with denialists. It is my children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews that will pay for our excesses and irresponsibility.
I doubt that our political/economic purity will be acceptable as a viable excuse for what they will live with.
By Roser Toll (AFP) – 2 days ago
SANTIAGO — In less than 24 hours Lake Cachet II in Chile's southern Patagonia vanished, leaving behind just some large puddles and chunks of ice in the vast lake bed.
The lake's water comes from ice melting from the Colonia Glacier, located in the Northern Patagonian ice field, some 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) south of the capital, Santiago.
The glacier normally acts as a dam containing the water, but rising temperatures have weakened its wall. Twice this year, on January 27 and March 31, water from the lake bore a tunnel between the rocks and the glacier wall.
The result: Lake Cachet II's 200 million cubic liters of water gushed out into the Baker river, tripling its volume in a matter of hours, and emptying the five square kilometer (two square miles) lake bed.
Cachet II has drained 11 times since 2008 -- and with global temperatures climbing, experts believe this will increase in frequency.
"Climate models predict that as temperatures rise, this phenomenon, known as GLOFs (Glacial Lake Outburst Floods), will become more frequent," said glaciologist Gino Casassa from the Center for Scientific Studies (CES).
Casassa, a member of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told AFP there have been 53 similar cases of lakes draining in Chile between 1896 and January 2010, with increased frequency in the later years.
CES research assistant Daniela Carrion was camped out with a small research team taking measurements of the Colonia Glacier when the lake drained in March.
"When we woke up, we saw a change in the valley," Carrion told AFP. "The paths that we walked on had flooded, and the whole area was filled with large chunks of ice."
The lake dropped 31 meters (90 feet) when the water drained out, according to a report from the General Water Directorate, which monitors lake levels in Chile using satellite data.
When the lake starts draining an alarm system is triggered, giving residents in the sparsely-populated area up to eight hours to move animals and flee to higher ground.
The Tempanos Lake, also in far southern Chile, drained in a similar fashion in May 2007. Forest rangers working to save endangered huemuls -- mid-sized deer native to the region -- were surprised when they came across the empty lake. There were ice floes on the floor of the ten square kilometer lake bed, but no water.
Forestry officials had visited Tempanos in April and it was full, and when a team of scientists and naval officials flew over the area in July they found that the lake, which also is fed by waters from a nearby glacier, was starting to re-fill.
The GLOF phenomenon is not exclusive to Patagonia: it has happened in places like the Himalayas, and in Iceland due to volcanic activities, Casassa said.
In a phenomenon also related to rising temperatures, a slab of ice the size of a city block broke off Peru's Hualcan glacier and slid into a high mountain lake with destructive consequences in April 2010.
The crash unleashed a giant wave that breached the lake's levees, causing a tsunami of mud on a village in the northern province of Carhuaz that destroyed more than 20 homes and leaving some 50 people homeless, regional Civil Defense chief Cesar Velasco told the state Andina news agency.
A 2009 World Bank report said that in the last 35 years, Peru's glaciers have shrunk by 22 percent, leading to a 12 percent loss in the amount of fresh water reaching the coast, home to most of the country's citizens.
Copyright © 2012 AFP. All rights reserved.
Viewing: 51 - 101
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 — Blog Index