Global warming: Regional climate change impacts

[jennypenny]

After a pair of mild summers it's pretty miserable in my little corner of the southeast so far in 2016, and very dry.

I don't want to hear about anything except rainbows and sunshine from your little corner of the southeast.

[IlliniDave]

After a pair of mild summers it's pretty miserable in my little corner of the southeast so far in 2016, and very dry.

I don't want to hear about anything except rainbows and sunshine from your little corner of the southeast.

Wilco! Remeber too, everything I say most be put through an iDave-to-Normal/Normal-to-iDave translator. What I find miserable is often what the majority of people find adorable when it comes to weather.

[Dragline]

For those of you living in the arctic:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ene ... &tid=ss_tw

I think the study itself is behind a paywall.

[theanimal]

For those of you living in the arctic:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ene ... &tid=ss_tw

I think the study itself is behind a paywall.

There is more and more vegetation in this area (Arctic AK) every year. There are some fairly interesting comparative studies comparing vegetative cover today to what it was in the 1960s.

[johngalt]

So yes ... there are potentially huge changes under way and lots of things will get broken, e.g. coastal cities, our ability to keep growing food to sustain 7 billion people .

There is such a yield gap between developing and developped countries due to lack of good practice and technologies (sometimes up to 10x, see Mueller 2012) that the future doesn't look so bad for food production as long as good practices and technologies spread... And as explained earlier, yields are increasing.

http://qz.com/674284/incredible-heat-co ... w-decades/
http://link.springer.com/article/10.100 ... 016-1665-6
http://eltahir.mit.edu/wp-content/uploa ... /Paper.pdf

If five million Syrian refugees are hard to absorb, consider the issue of dealing upwards of five hundred million refugees ... They can't all go to Europe?

Well, for now people in the Gulf seem to manage the heat by building ski resorts in their malls and living in buildings with AC.

About refugees, the comparison you make simply has no justification. The differences between a 5-year civil war and climate extremes are quite obvious in terms of impacts on population flows : people don't leave their country without some very good reason, and usually if they just want a better climate, they move somewhere else in their own country just because ... it's their country ! And that's quite different than living 5 full years under a civil war.

With your reasoning Nevada (summer heat), Montreal (winter cold), and Florida (storms extremes) would be deserted and their population refugees. Are they ?

[GandK]

I think this is applicable to a few different threads here, but the author's point is regarding science such as climate change. (Also, his characterization of engineers had me laughing out loud.)

Scientific Education as a Cause of Political Stupidity

[ThisDinosaur]

@GandK
Awesome article. I'm going to have to start reading the Archdruid some more.

I think the issue isn't too much education, though, but blindness to domain dependence. If you are an expert science type, you know that people should ask your opinion about your subject. The missed implication is that you, too, should ask others before speaking publicly outside your depth.

I like NdGT and his buddy Bill Nye (an engineer, btw), but both of them have put their foot in their mouths repeatedly over the past year. That's fine. If you speak publicly often enough, you are bound to say something stupid. But it would have been really extraordinary if they responded by making themselves an example of uninformed opinions. I mean, their whole platform is that we should listen to experts. They should do the same.

I totally agree with the other premise of the article that politics is about interests and values, not facts. I read some Haidt at the suggestion of someone on this board. He argues convincingly that the source of political disagreements is a shared myth that there is one *correct* form of government. There's not. There are predictable and unpredictable outcomes to government policies. Whether those outcomes are good or bad is strictly a matter of unsupportable opinion.

[enigmaT120]

I liked that article too, thanks for sharing the link.

[BRUTE]

good article. brute agrees. scientists have abused the trust put into them too often. now, brute is skeptical about almost all scientists and science. almost ironic.

[cmonkey]

We got a tremendous amount of rain here again overnight. 24 precip map is showing localized amounts of 10-12 inches of rain in Davenport.

Our rain gauge is really crappy and doesn't catch water well, but still 3-4 inches in it from just overnight.

Basement is still dry as a bone.

[enigmaT120]

We got over a half inch on Monday, according to my bucket by the gate. Most of it during my bike ride home from work! At least it wasn't cold.

[jacob]

In case you missed it over the noise of the Trump campaign pivots and the behaviour of Olympic swimmers at gas stations, this has been going on in LA.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/ ... ing-crisis

The area has been hit with several "500-year rainfalls" in short order. It affected the entire flood plain, so several cities. Here "500 year" simply means that the probability distribution which has been calibrated to the historic climate has p=0.002. Obviously this number has now changed. The old 500-year storm has seemingly changed to a new "several times per year" storm. This is what the _change_ in "climate change" means. Because of not recalibrating in time, many of the 40000 impacted houses DID NOT HAVE FLOOD INSURANCE because it wasn't expected.

[jacob]

In related Zika news, the CDC advises pregnant women to stay away from Florida Beach.

Also, Zika has been shown to affect adult brains in mice. Insofar your brain is similar to that of a mouse, you can take this as seriously as you want. It's only the brain. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to- ... tal-cells/

Zika will likely become endemic in the southern parts of the US.

[cmonkey]

I noticed the rainfall totals down in LA when I was looking at rainfall totals for our area last Friday. The color shades were the same as our area, indicating they got 10-12+ inches at a time. It was much more widespread, however.

[BRUTE]

as a weather/climate person, what region does jacob recommend if one would expect to live, say, for 50 more years? or should brute plan a slow migratory path away from climate change?

[jacob]

@brute - The "winners" (or least-losers) 50 years from now will be Canada, Alaska, PNW, Scandinavia, and Russia. Anyone on the southern hemisphere, get on a boat ... there's no land there. Personally, I'm just following a slow path towards increasing latitudes [within the US] every time we move. Might change my mind in case living further south comprise a value investment opportunity.

[IlliniDave]

I noticed the rainfall totals down in LA when I was looking at rainfall totals for our area last Friday. The color shades were the same as our area, indicating they got 10-12+ inches at a time. It was much more widespread, however.

I think some places got over 30 inches of rain over a couple days. I was remarking to a friend a couple weeks ago that this has not been the hottest summer of the 18 I've spent in Alabama, but it's been the most consistently humid (which is saying something). A lot of days it feels similar to the way it does this far from the ocean after a large hurricane makes landfall and disperses. It's hard to describe, but it's a different kind of humid. Apparently I wasn't imagining that as what I'd heard was a large volume of tropical moisture collected in an low pressure hole and set the event up. Here at the far end of the state from the gulf, except for one 2-week stretch, it's been pretty dry since Memorial Day.

[black_son_of_gray]

Re: LA flooding...For those curious: http://water.weather.gov/precip/ under Timeframe, click 'last 7 days' or 'last 14 days'

You can also see river gauge data in that region... crazy.

[cmonkey]

@ID, 30 inches is crazy, wow. It has been very humid in the QC area this year as well. I can't remember the last time it was actually refreshing to go outside in the morning. Many times I am sweating by the time I get to my bus stop at 6 am.

Evidently this is due to corn sweat around these parts, however.

[jacob]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/scien ... begun.html

Coastal impacts. Flooding of houses during high tides and inland winds due to rising sea levels and falling land levels (ground water mining, etc.). Another example of those 500 year things beginning to happen every other year in some places.

Mostly relevant if living next to the sea; if driving on roads next to the sea (ironically, of course); if paying taxes or insurance premiums to battle the sea now or to clean up later after ignoring it now; and if investing in companies/property next to the sea, especially port facilities and utilities.