A Favour please?

I have been helping a graduate student from London this week. He is working on a Masters degree and is doing a thesis on severe weather hazards and how people prepare for the severe weather we have around here.
It would be very helpful if those of you here locally in the Huntsville area could fill out an on line questionaire for him. We do not need your address or even a name but a street or zip code is helpful.

QUESTIONAIRE

Many thanks in advance, doing this will save him a ton of time!

Dan S

Final Thoughts on Climate Change

In my last few blogs I've tried to put forth some good information on climate change with some links to great sites on the web. If you read these I think you will have a pretty good understanding of where we are in climate research.

One more link that will require about 15-20 minutes to listen to. It is a 3 part report that National Public Radio did last year. One of the people interviewed is John Christy from right here in Huntsville. Dr. Christy is one of the lead authors on the latest IPCC assessment. He is well known for research that shows the overall warming of the atmosphere as a whole is much less than some other methods of shown.

While some other researchers have disagreed with portions of his findings, Dr. Christy makes a point that I think is very important. We need to be very careful that regulations to inhibit global warming do not harm the poor of the world.

It is perhaps easy to forget that we live in wealthy world. Most of the world's population is dreadfully poor.

Take a listen to the NPR report.

You might find it interesting to know how some of these climate models work.

We know fairly well what the climate has been like for the last several thousand years. So, if you want to make a prediction of future climate, You test it in the past.

Start it say 1,000 years ago and slowly add in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases , with a huge increase as we reach the industrial revolution. Does the model accurately predict the climate we experienced. If so, then it might do a good job forecasting the next 100 or 200 years.

There are now several models that do a good job. Recent models have tried to predict the warming seen in the last century and it's been found that the model will only project an accurate representation if increased CO² levels are included. This is some powerful evidence of man's influence on the earth's climate.

We do know the earth is warming. The rate is debatable.
We do know that for much of earth history this planet has been much warmer than it is now.
We do know that the last 100,000 years have been much cooler.
We do know that the climate we have now will not last.

We do not know how fast the change will be. (Evidence exists for super fast and super slow change)
We do not know what earth processes may kick in to counter the warming from CO²
We do not know if the ice ages of the past 100,000 years are ending or if we are just in another short interglacial period.

Lots to think about,
When new climate news comes out I will link to it. Hopefully I've managed to make this subject a little less political and much more interesting!

Later,
Dan

Ten and Twenty-Five

It was 10 years ago Wednesday that the Anderson Hills tornado hit Madison county. I can still recall vividly watching the radar and a live feed from one of our reporters in Athens as the storm approached. Suddenly, a large hook echo appeared on radar and at the same time I saw a curtain of rain wrap rapidly around the south side of the storm.

A tornado warning was already in effect but I knew then that we likely had a damaging tornado on the ground and that it would do a lot of damage. One of our reporters out in the field had asked me earlier that day what to do if, while covering a storm, a tornado developed.

I told him that he probably wouldn't see it. Most tornadoes in this part of the world are shrouded in rain. "I will yell at you to get in a ditch though if it looks real bad" I told him.

We had 2 reporters in the area as the rain wrapped around the intensifying mesocyclone. I yelled for both of them to take cover.
I'll never forget walking through the News Room later that evening and seeing him covered in mud. "What happened to you?" I asked. (he had gotten in the ditch!)


On Sunday, May 18, 1980 I was in Oklahoma City. I had only been working on air a few months and would not finish my degree for another year. Driving back to Norman the radio news on KTOK-AM announced that Mount St. Helens had exploded.

I immediately thought of the man that owned a little lodge on the mountain. His name was Harry S. Truman. (Named after the President). Many a reporter had done stories with him and he was a great character. He had steadfastly refused to leave his lodge and move to a safe distance away.

He and his lodge on the slopes of that once beautiful mountain have never been found.

Most of those who died that day were outside the restricted zone. Few expected the catastrophic type of explosion that happened. Three days later, the dense ash cloud was steered by the jet stream into Oklahoma. I mentioned on air that the edge of the ash cloud would pass over Oklahoma City about 4 pm. Sure enough at that hour a gray hazy line moved across the sky.

The next morning as I unlocked my bicycle to ride to class, there was a thin layer of ash on my bike seat. I put volcanic ash in my on-air forecast that day. Haven't done that since.

I flew over St. Helens coming back from a weather conference in Seattle a couple of years back. Got a nice picture of it at sunrise. Mount Ranier doesn't get near the attention of St. Helens, but it is probably one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. It, too, will erupt again, and many more people live near it than St. Helens. Still, new housing developments are going in almost non-stop in the shadow of Ranier.

That makes most Geologists very nervous.

The Big Frosty

It might surprise you to know that we are in an ice age.

Have been for the last 3 million years or so. Currently we are in a short warm period between ice advances. The last advance of the ice ended about 10,000 years ago. At that time the ice sheets were near the Ohio river and our part of the world was much cooler than now. The BIG question is when will the next ice advance start? Most recent interglacial periods have lasted around 10,000 years..So this one may be getting long in the tooth.

Visible life appeared on Earth about 600 million years ago in a period of Geological time called the Cambrian.. For most of that time, the earth has been a very warm place. Sea levels were much higher than they are now and Alabama and much of North America was under water much of the time.

For some reason earth started cooling about 50 million years ago. This almost certainly had to do with Antarctica drifting over the South pole. Ice ages do not spontaneously develop when a continent is over a pole, but it is thought that they DO NOT happen when there is not one there.
So!
When there is a continent over the pole we have a series of glacial advances and retreats.
There are some good theories about why this is happening, but there is no consensus. (See my blog on Milutin Milankovitch).

The PBS program NOVA has a great Ice age fact sheet online.

It's called:

The Big Chill

(Here's to NOVA, one of the best science programs in North America)

Here is another link to
Continents adrift


Many global warming doubters use these facts to say that global warming is a fallacy. That we should be more concerned about keeping warm!
This is almost certainly bad logic and in the next blog I will tell you why.

More later,
Dan

Ice Ages and A Good Read

My last blog was the beginning of several I plan writing about climate and climate change. Many thanks to those of you who emailed. Nice to know I am not the only one interested in this stuff!

Have you ever driven through a highway cut and noticed the interesting layers of rocks. Not only are there different colors but you can sometimes see faults and the rocks are tilted at incredible angles. There is an excellent book that will explain what your seeing. It was written by a Geology professor at the Univ. of North Alabama. (I have an autographed copy!)

Even if your reading this in another part of the world..This book is just excellent. You will never look at rocks the same way again, I promise!
The book is
LOST WORLDS IN ALABAMA ROCKS
by Jim Lacefield
ISBN: 0970308000

There is an historical marker near my house that talks about an event of 150 years ago. Nearby is a bed of limestone that was laid down 350 million years ago when Alabama was under a warm tropical ocean. (In that layer are fossils of shark teeth from giant prehistoric sharks) No historical marker for that!

More on climate change tomorrow...

Later,
Dan