SCIENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

 

I can't make up my mind about climate change. Will we adjust our behavior in time, or does the human species lack the intelligence to survive? I hope the answer is yes and no, I worry the answer is no and yes. It seems to come down to how you define “intelligence”, by the smartest of us or the most obstinate and greedy?  There are over 8 billion human brains working at this moment, and too many it seems are convinced that since meteorologists can't get closer than a 50% chance of rain tomorrow, of course scientists can't predict the average temperature a hundred years from now.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration says “The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time”, while the Climate Impacts Group offers a more pragmatic definition; "You pick your vacation destination based on the climate but you pack your suitcase based on the weather." And it all started with a Swedish triple threat – he was an arrogant, racist atheist. But he was a very smart chemist. In fact Svante Arrhenius was so far ahead of his instructors that they gave his PhD dissertation a “C”, and in 1903 that same work won him the Noble Prize in Chemistry.

Growing up with those long cold Swedish winter nights made the racist Svante (above) curious as to why we weren't still having ice ages.  Being a chemist he naturally thought chemistry might provide the answer.  His knew that the sun heated the ground during the day, and  at night reflected most of that stored energy back into the air as infrared radiation, otherwise known as heat.  He suspected that the more carbon dioxide and water vapor there was in the air, the less of that reflected infrared radiation could escape into space. 

What he came up with in 1896 was his greenhouse law; “If the quantity of (carbon dioxide) increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.”   He ran the numbers, and found, as he wrote a decade later, “...any doubling of the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air would raise the temperature of the earth's surface by 4 degrees Celsius; and if the carbon dioxide were increased fourfold, the temperature would rise by 8 degrees C.”  Svante had predicted global warming and climate change, four years before the 20th century had begun.

Poor old Svante. He had to do his calculations the old fashioned way – using unpaid graduate students who labored for hours with pencils and papers and slide rules.  And he made a couple of bad assumptions. He missed how sensitive the climate was to carbon dioxide by half.   In other words he saw that burning coal and oil and wood released carbon into the air, but he didn't realize how really bad that was.  In fact, being Swedish, he was looking forward to more beach weather.

It was the geologists who provided what I think is the most convincing piece of the puzzle, they just did not know it for a long time. You see, they were looking for gold and diamonds and copper and coal and oil and even water, which they did by first drilling a lot of holes all over the place. Now, each hole was an experiment, and these rock farmers recorded everything about the holes as they drilled them, including the temperature at various depths. Most of those numbers were kept secret by the companies that collected them. 

But eventually more and more geologists were able to collect a record of what they called the geothermal gradient world wide. They found that as a general rule at anything less than 200 feet the temperature was about 11 degrees Celsius – or 55 degrees Fahrenheit.  Below that you have to figure in ground water, rock type, how close you are to a volcano - but as a general rule the temperature goes up about 1 degree Celsius for every additional 1,000 feet down the hole you go.  And it wasn't until much later that other graduate students noticed that as a general rule, up close,  the general rules did not add up.

Plotting out the temperatures in great detail and very exactly, and allowing for volcanoes and such, still produced a steady rising temperatures as you went down.  But on the other end, at the top of the holes, things were a little odd.  The line there seemed to be steeper than it ought to - not enough that it kept the rock hounds up at night, but it did nag at them.  And then somebody compared the carbon 14 dating of the rocks. And the closer you got to the surface, and the younger the rocks got, the higher the temperatures were above that general rule, beginning about 500 years ago, about the start of the industrial revolution, when a growing number of smoke stacks started spewing out all that carbon that Svante had measured.  

And in 1998, a century after the chemist Svante started all of this,  three geologists , Henry Pollock, Shapeeng Huang and Po-Yu Shen provided geological confirmation of global warming. “The subsurface temperatures ...indicate that Earth's mean surface temperature has increased by about 1.0° (C) over the past five centuries.”

So two independent fields of science, chemistry and geology, had each independently produced a picture of a warming planet for the previous 500 years, and predicted it would continue to warm. Together they produced a coherent, unified story with an explanation. Glaciologist, the only scientists whose field of study melts if they don't work fast enough, had independently stumbled on a third proof. 

Snow falling on glaciers today has more carbon in it than water melted out glacier ice formed five hundred years ago, and far more than the snow that fell a thousand years ago. And the amount of carbon in the snow is increasing. And it wasn't until very recently that meteorologists got into this discussion, which was to be expected, since, their field of study is what every other scientist calls “background noise”.

Let me give you an example of that noise; from December 1^st , 1801 to January 31^st , 1802, only about an inch of snow fell in Albany, New York, a spot which on average gets closer to 32 inches during those two months. The temperature ranged between 4 and 10 degrees Celsius (40 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit), when it is normally around minus 3 Celsius (mid 20's Fahrenheit ). Along the Ohio River, in eastern Ohio, 3 inches of snow fell on November first in 1801, but after that they suffered not even another hard frosts for the rest of the entire winter. In January of 1802 tulips and violets bloomed in New Haven, Connecticut, and on the 28^th of that month Salem, Massachusetts saw the thermometer hit 15.5 degrees Celsius (60 Fahrenheit). No less a numbers freak than Thomas Jefferson became convinced that “The change which has taken place in our climate is one of those facts which all men...are sensible of...”  And this was before the industrial revolution!

Less than 20 years later came the other extreme, the summer of 1816. On June 6^th, snow fell in Albany, New York. Ice was observed on rivers and lakes in July and August as far south as Pennsylvania. Farmers in Massachusetts got a crop in that summer, but so little that oats were selling for 10 times what they had sold for the previous year. World wide probably 40,000 people died of starvation. It was referred to as “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death”, or “The Year Without a Summer”, and it was probably caused by the April 10^th , 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the largest volcanic eruption in the last ten thousand years. To my mind, that is the real difference between weather and climate – weather is a record of extremes, and climate is a record of the average between them.

Yes, the 700 volcanoes that erupt every year throw about half a million tons of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, and a super volcano like Tambora may double that amount once or twice a century. But ever day today, humans spew 88 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Can there really be any doubt about why old extremes are becoming our new normal, or what is responsible for it?

Every scientific method we use to look at the past 500 years, every experiment we come up with to test what has happened over the last five centuries, tells us that the new normal is climate change, and that our industrial revolution is the one new factor over the last five hundred years that is driving our new normal to new climate extremes.  From this point forward there really is only one question we have to ask. Does the human species lack the intelligence to survive? And the answer is up to all those idiots who vote for Donald Trump.

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THE STORM OF 1775

 

I  know three curious things about the Sahara Desert. First, in Arabic, Sahara means desert, so the Sahara Desert translates as the Desert Desert.  Secondly, the 3 1/2 million square mile surface of the Sahara is actually 75% sun baked rock, and only 25% sand dunes, And third, the powerful jet stream that crosses this tan expanse from northeast to southwest, carries on average only 10% humidity, and yet this huge empty dry expanse is the father of hurricanes.  

The womb is the  "The Sahel", where the desert meets the green scrub of the savanna plain. And in most of the last 2,000 years, from April to September, this is where this southwestern course of the "Harmattan" jet stream slams into the northeast bound African Monsoon.

This head on collision of these two air masses sets up a disturbed atmosphere with clouds popping out of a clear blue sky in regular pulses as the  high and low pressure waves conflict and combine. 

As the disturbed air rises over the 6,000 foot Loma Mountains of the Guinea Highlands, moisture is squeezed out of thin air...

  ...and thunderstorms billow and erupt into the troposphere..

In pulses spaced every three to five days apart,  collections of these thunderstorms then pass over the beaches of Africa's Ivory Coast, pulled by the easterly jet stream. Once over the Atlantic these storms will not see see land again for the next 3,700 miles.

Some 300 miles off Mali, what was at first an easterly wave of separate thunder storms, sails south of the Cape Verde Islands. And like an angry fleet of sailing ships, fed by 80 degree waters the wave of thunder storms deepen into a tropical depression, with sustained surface winds of over 38 miles per hour. 

Friction between the troposphere below and the jet stream above convert the vertical heat engine of the thunderstorms into a horizontal sweep,  gathering together squalls and storms and driving them in a counter-clockwise spin. As the separate storms loose their identities, they are now called a Tropical Storm,   

Sometime in mid-August of 1775, one such nameless tropical depression approached the outer edges of the new world. Over the empty Atlantic, this storm went unnoticed because there was nobody with a barometer close at hand. Fed on a steady diet of warm ocean water the air pressure at the center of the storm dropped even more, causing the circulation to tighten, causing the surface winds to increase until they topped 74 miles per hour. It was now a Category One Hurricane. Ahead, the windward islands of the Caribbean awaited.

S

At the end of the fifteenth century, when Christopher Columbus first invaded the new world,  he found people revered a capricious god of storms known as “Hunrakan”, or “Hurakan”.  Having never heard of Africa, the residents of the islands of Martinique and Dominica, had no concept of the source of the violence that assaulted them almost without warning on Friday, 25 August, 1775. So they ascribed it to the mysterious work of the god Hurricane.  The surface winds in the storm were now a steady 100 miles. It had become a Category Two Hurricane. 

 A report from St. Croix described the damage to piers and unloading equipment (above) and how ships at anchor desperately slipped their cables, seeking the relative safety of the open sea. It was as likely as not that such gambles resulted in an enigmatic death. Fifty years later the British Admiralty would estimate that each year 5% of all ships in the Caribbean were lost to such storms, taking as many as a thousand sailors each year to watery graves.

One such sailor, Captain John Tollemache, was sailing his 10 gun brig-sloop, the HMS Scorpion (above), on the open sea, heading from British occupied Boston to Bermuda. As the Scorpion was only 100 feet long and 30 feet wide, she did not handle the storm well.  Royal Navy historian C.S. Forrester explained, "Few men in the Royal Navy had a good word to say for the gun-brigs, which rolled terribly and were greatly over-crowded..."   But in the open sea, and under skilled eyes and hands, Tollemache managed to bring her to safely port. 

A week later, on Saturday, 2 September, 1775,  The now Category Three hurricane brushed across the outer banks of North Carolina, it's sustained winds at 120 miles per hour causing extensive property damage....

...taking 163 lives in the port of New Bern (above) and destroying the corn crops of Parasquotank County.  Weakened by it's brush against land, the storm turned out to sea again, and regained strength.

The Williamsburg “Virginia Gazette” mourned that, “…most of the mill dams are broke, and corn laid almost level with the ground…many ships…drove ashore and damaged at Norfolk, Hampton and York”.  The British warship H.M.S. Mercury was forced from her blockade of Norfolk, “…and driven aground in shoal water.”  Patriots picked her bones and liberated her cargo, as a gift of the storm.

With its center still off shore this unnamed hurricane swept up the open water of Chesapeake Bay.  At 8 on Sunday morning, 3 September, Philadelphia was being pounded by a constant rain . 

The wind was from the southeast and the barometric pressure dropped to 29.5 inches of mercury.  By 3 that afternoon the wind had shifted to the Southwest, and records speak of the “highest tide ever known” -  what modern weathermen and women would call a storm surge.  

At Newport, Rhode Island, the wind shifted from the northeast to southeast between 10am and 2:30pm.  As that Sunday ended and the 4th of September began, the storm turned northwestward, and headed out to sea. 

There was only one landmass in the new world remained between the hurricane and its ultimate fate over the cold waters of the Labrador Current; Newfoundland.

Late September was the peak fishing season for the long finned squid (Logilo pealiei), used as bait for Cod fishing.  Every year there were thousands of fishermen in their dories, from Ireland, England, France, Portugal and Spain, in the bays and inlets of Newfoundland, to take their share of the bounty.

This season the squid had made no appearance until late in the afternoon of Saturday, 9 September  when they suddenly ascended on the jigging hooks in an ominous blizzard. The squid were even attacking each other while writhing on the hooks.  What was driving these cephalopods to such as frenzy? As the storm approached Newfoundland, it's winds climbed again to 157 miles per hour. It was a once rare Category Five Hurricane.

As the fishermen happily pulled in their abundance that evening of 9 September, 1775, they noticed that the dying sun was blazing in an odd orange tint, and that the wind was freshening and gathering. As darkness enveloped the fishing fleets the more cautious captains made for Salvage Point or Ochre Pit Cove.  But in the darkest of nights none of these anchorages would be protection enough

That night the sea and the air conspired to murder men and their works. Ships which had thought they were safe, were battered onto rocky shores. By dawn of the next day  in Northern Bay (above) three hundred fishermen would be drowned,...

...their white and bloated bodies strewn across the sands like beached dolphins. They now lie in a forgotten mass grave somewhere in the Provincial Park. Human bones would continue to wash ashore on this beach (above) for years to come. It was the revenge of the squid, which now feasted on the dead fishermen.

In the narrow harbor of St. Johns (above),  there arose a tempest of a most particular kind — "the sea rose on a sudden 30 feet; 700 boats, with all the people belonging thereto, were lost, as also 11 ships with most of their crews,...“Even on shore they severely felt its effect, by the destruction of numbers of people and, for some days after, in drawing the nets ashore, they often found 20 or 30 dead bodies in them; a most shocking spectacle!"

At Harbor Grace (above) on Conception Bay, 30 miles to the south, there was released "a most terrible gale of wind" which destroyed another 300 vessels in this harbor and  "... all their crews were lost... while at anchors, and causing inhabitants of the north shore to suffer still greater severity. At Anspach upwards of 200 fishing boats and their crews were lost

In Placentia (above), dawn found the 2,000 residents of the narrow village - most substantial community in Newfoundland -  awash in a six foot storm surge. Those who survived did so by climbing into the rafters of their attics. A fishing schooner was thrown up on the beach overnight. The only surviving crew member was a boy, lashed to the wheel. Off the Avalon Peninsula two navy schooners were sunk and dozens of fishing ships were dismasted and left adrift.

After it was all over a review of the losses listed by the marine insurance company of Lloyds of London would produce the startling figure of 4,000 dead, mostly Irish and English, in the fishing fleets off Newfoundland. 

Rear Admiral Robert Duff (above), Governor of Newfoundland, attempted to detail the disaster for his superiors back in London. 

"I am sorry to inform your Lordship that…the fishing works in those places…were in a great measure defaced…(you) should image…that the amount...in shipping, boats, fishing works etc. cannot be less than thirty thousand pounds…” (about $40 million today). There was barely a house left on Newfoundland with an intact roof or chimney, even if they had not been flooded out. 

The hurricane of September 1775 remains, more than two hundred years later, Canada’s deadliest natural disaster. For decades afterward the survivors on Conception Bay claimed to still hear the desperate cries of the lost souls in the cold surf.

As for the storm itself, conceived over the hot dry Sahara and born of the warm equatorial waters, it could not simply die. Once over the colder currents of the North Atlantic the storm converted from a warm core to a cold one, drawing a diminished power not merely from air pressure variations but also from temperature divisions, becoming just another in the unending string of common “baroclinic” cyclones which march across Europe. 

But I like to think that this was the particular storm which passed over Carrickfergus castle (above), outside of Belfast, Ireland in 1775, and which brought with it such violent and continuous lightening and thunder that it was said the Scotch and Irish fairies were doing battle in the heavens above.

That would be a significant enough ending for such a significant storm in such a significant year.

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