The Growth in Ocean Dead Zones

Ocean dead zones -- warmer regions that hold less oxygen -- are increasing worldwide. This summer the Gulf of Mexico dead zone was 5,000 square miles along the Louisiana coast, and it's estimated to cost $82 million in lost tourism and lost fish catch. The second largest US dead zone is off the coast of Oregon -- low-oxygen water that's been appearing every summer since 2002, perhaps tied to global warming.

There are 166 dead zones in US waters alone.The number is rising worldwide, according to a great article about them, "Devil in the Deep Blue Sea" by Brian Palmer:

[Those are decades along the horizontal axis, and "cumulative number of systems" along the vertical axis. Lots more interesting information in the article.]

Dead zones are caused by runoff of agricultural fertilizers, sewage around Africa and South America, and airborne nitrogen, the latter coming from cars, trucks, and coal-burning power plants in the Midwest. These particularly affect Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound. Chesapeake Bay has several dead zones, each where a river drains into the Bay.

Don't miss reading about London's Great Stink of 1858, which brought the city to a standstill.

More from the article:

A Blog Post of Mine as an Essay Suggestion at Univ of Hawaii

Hey, someone is using a blog post of mine as essay material for their university class on Global Environmental Change.

I've had professors use (with pay) some articles I've written for magazines -- mostly from Scientific American. But never a blog post (that I know about). That makes my day (except for the not getting paid part; not that I'm expecting that here).

It's Never Been About the Science....

Rarely do you see the opposition to climate science expressed as openly and succinctly as in this comment on Keith Kloor's blog:

In other words, it's not about the science at all -- and never has been. A spot-on reply came later in the comments:

Court Filing: Tim Ball Not an "Authority on Global Warming"

Tim Ball's now infamous rant at WUWT seems to me to be pure desperation. Like he's so frustrated that he's nothing more than a mosquito in the scientific world, that no one who matters takes him seriously, that he's on the verge of giving up, so he finally went full Nazi and pulled the ultimate pin.

Well, penultimate. The only comparison left is to Satan.

By the way, Tim Ball is hardly a climate science expert, and this has been stated in a court of law.

After the Calgary Herald published an op-ed by Ball on April 19, 2006, whom the newspaper identified as the first climatology PhD in Canada and a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years, they published a letter on April 23, 2006 from Dr. Dan Johnson, a professor at the University of Lethbridge, who pointed out that neither of those descriptions is true; that Dr. Ball's credentials were being seriously overstated. Ball later threatened Johnson and the Herald and ultimately sued for defamation.

In their Statement of Defense filed in Court, the Calgary Herald submitted the following:

"...that the Plaintiff (Ball) never held a reputation in the scientific community as a noted climatologist and authority on global warming....

"The Plaintiff has never published any research in any peer-reviewed scientific journal which addressed the topic of human contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming;

"The Plaintiff has published no papers on climatology in academically recognized peer-reviewed scientific journals since his retirement as a Professor in 1996;

"The Plaintiff's credentials and credibility as an expert on the issue of global warming have been repeatedly disparaged in the media; and

"The Plaintiff is viewed as a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than as a practicing scientist."

Ball dropped his lawsuit.

Source: The Calgary Herald, Statement of Defense – paragraph 50, Dr Tim Ball v The Calgary Herald, In the Court of the Queen’s Bench of Alberta Judicial District of Calgary, Dec 7, 2006 (http://is.gd/brO4uO).

More at:
http://www.desmogblog.com/tim-ball-vs-dan-johnson-update-0
http://www.desmogblog.com/tim-ball-vs-dan-johnson-lawsuit-documents
http://www.desmogblog.com/ball-bails-on-johnson-lawsuit

Where's the Economic Damage From Environmental Regulations?

Pasting this here because it will come in handy. It's from Peter Gleick on Twitter.

Third Quarter Ocean Warming is 200% above Trendline

The ocean heat content numbers are in for the third quarter -- and they again show big increases.

For the 0-700 meter region, the change from a year ago is 0.59 W/m² (the area being the total Earth's surface).

That's over twice as large as its trend over the last 15 years, which is 0.28 W/m².

For the 0-2000 m region, the change from a year ago is 1.73 W/m², whereas its trend since its data started in 2005 is 0.58 W/m².

The top half of the ocean gained 200% more heat than it has on average.

For the top 2000 meters, a quadratic fit is again better than a linear fit, with the acceleration being 0.07 W/m² per year.

When Just a Littllllllllle More Heat Goes Into the Ocean (Re: Hiatus)

There's an nice article in NCSE Reports by John Abraham, John Fasullo and Greg Laden, titled "Continued Global Warming in the Midst of Natural Climate Fluctuations," about the hiatus and all that. It's not very technical and would be a good thing for those who think the hiatus means no more global warming to read.

The first figure in the article (right) reminded me of something I've been wondering -- how sensitive are atmospheric trends to changes in the 93.4% number for the percentage of heat that goes into the ocean?

I think I can estimate it with some simplications. The answer is, if I'm right: surface and tropospheric temperature trends are very sensitive to changes in ocean heating. Answer below (in red), using some very basic physics that is a bit pedantic.

Let Q_in be the amount of heat coming into the Earth over some period of time. (So the units of Q_in are energy per unit time, whereas the symbol Q is usually used for just energy.) Let's assume in all goes either into the ocean or into the troposphere, so Q_in = Q_O + Q_t, where Q_O is the amount of the heat that goes into the ocean, and Q_t the amount into the troposphere.

Now consider two scenarios. In the first, the one we're living in, a fraction f1 (= 0.934) of the heat goes into the ocean, and in the second, a fraction f2 goes into the ocean.

So

Q_O,1 = f1Q_in and Q_O,2 = f2Q_in.

By assumption, the total amount of heat going into the Earth is the same, so

Q_in = Q_O,1+ Q_t,1 = Q_O,2 + Q_t,2

where "t" stands for troposphere. A dash of rearranging and a smidgen of algebra gives

(f1-f2)Q_in = Q_t,2 - Q_t,1

What is Q_in? It's Q_O,1/f1. We know what f1 is: 0.934, from the figure. If we assume all the heat coming into the ocean goes into the 0-2000 m region (that's the top half of the ocean -- and not a bad assumption), then Q_O,1 can be estimated from 10-years worth of Argo data for that region. When I do that I get 0.93e22 J/yr.

That finishes the ocean part. For the troposphere

Q₁ = m_tc_tΔT₁ and Q₂ = m_tc_t ΔT₂,

where ΔT is the amount of temperature change from whatever the baseline is:  ΔT₁ = T₁ - T_base and likewise for scenario 2. (Strictly speaking it's the change of temperature with time, viz. a trend, but as with Q above I'll just call it T.) Then


Q_t,2 - Q_t,1 =  m_tc_t (T₂ - T₁)
where we want to calculate the temperature difference as a function of f2. 

Putting this all together then gives

T₂-T₁ = (1-f₂/f₁)Q_O,1/m_tc_t

All this would surely look better if (1) I knew more HTML, and (2) I was using Wordpress, which has an equation-maker plug-in, but I don't and I'm not.

Now, what's the mass of the troposphere? About 80% of the total atmospheric mass, or 4.1e18 kg. 

(Interestingly, you can calculate the atmosphere's mass without leaving your chair: m = P_sA/g, where P_s is the surface pressure, A is the Earth's area, and g the acceleration due to gravity at the surface. Of course, g varies with altitude, but that's a small effect.)

Here c_t is the troposphere's specific heat. I'll assume the troposphere is homogeneous throughout, and approximate its specific heat by the specific heat of air at typical room conditions and 40% humidity, which is 1,012 J/kgK.

Now we just calculate. If f2 = 0.935 -- that is, it's just 0.1 percentage points above f1 -- I find the difference in trends is

T₂-T₁ = -0.024°C/decade

which seems like it could be in the ball park. At least, it doesn't seem ridiculous. And the sign is right: more heat into the ocean means heat taken out of the troposphere, which lowers its temperature.

So a very small change in how much heat goes into the ocean can lead to noticeable changes in the temperature trends. If f2 is 0.5 percentage points above f1, then 

T₂-T₁ = -0.12°C/decade

which could well put a damper on the greenhouse warming of a decade or two. So just a little more heat going into the ocean (relatively little -- it's still a huge number of Joules) can noticeably cool the troposphere. Or even more noticeably for the surface, which holds even less heat then the troposphere (for, say, the top 2 meters of air above the surface).

That's what I suspected, and the rough numbers seem to support that.

When U Thant Was Overly Dramatic

"I do not wish to seem overdramatic, but I can only conclude from the information that is available to me, that the Members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years left in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion, and to supply the required momentum to development efforts. If such a global partnership is not forged within the next decade, then I very much fear that the problems I have mentioned will have reached such staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control."

-- U Thant, Secretary General of the United Nations, 1969, from the Introduction to The Limits to Growth (pg 14).

The authors then give this projection, and we're at the apex about now:

On the other hand, they were remarkably accuate with their CO2 projection; the atmospheric CO2 value for January 2000 at Mauna Loa was 369 ppm:

As Wikipedia says, "the book continues to generate fervent debate...," and I'll leave it at that.

Kim Kardashian and the Laws of Physics

#kimkardashian

Excuse me, but this picture of Kim Kardashian, impressive though it may be, violates the laws of physics. (And no, I don't mean her posterior projection, I mean the trajectory of the champagne stream. Though maybe her derriere is photoshopped too.)

GISS Gallop

NASA GISS's global temperature anomaly last month was the highest October in their records, and the 7th-warmest month ever, tied with last month.

That's the third month in a row it's set a record, for that month. (Since they're anomalies, any month can be compared to any other month, regardless of whether it has the same name, but comparing them by month is (1) fun, (2) a reminder that it's still warming.)

Here's how 2014 compares to the commodious capacious big 1997-98 El Nino. The Nino3.4 index is finally increasing, but still way behind the Big One. Yet the surface temperatures for the year-so-far are much higher, an average of 0.24 C higher. (So since it's 17 years later, a crude estimate of the trend from then to now would be 0.24°C/17 years = +0.14°C/decade.)

Here's the warming from any given year to today. The total warming according to GISS is now +0.88°C, which rounds to 0.9°C, instead of the "0.8°C" you usually see quoted. Update your vocabulary.

Veteran's Day

Climate Scientists Get Their Own Lawyer

From the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund:

To all our supporters,

“After years of attacks, I am thrilled that there is a world class litigator whose full time job is to stand up for scientists.” –Dr. Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State

The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund is excited to announce the hiring of Lauren Kurtz as its first Executive Director. Thank you to everyone who donated money to the fund and made this possible. Her first day is today and feel free to reach out to her with thoughts, ideas and words of encouragement as she takes on the important job of defending the scientific community from politically motivated attacks. She can be reached at lkurtz[at]climatesciencedefensefund.org

Lauren is joining CSLDF from Dechert LLP, a top tier law firm after a multi-month hiring process. At Dechert she served as project manager on a high-profile $3 billion litigation initiative and she represented commercial and individual clients on cases involving FOIA requests and litigation over FOIA requests, discovery disputes, and defamation claims. Prior to working at Dechert, she held legal and policy positions at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She has a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a master's in Environmental Policy from the University of Pennsylvania. She will be based in NYC working in an office generously provided by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at the Columbia Law School.

Thank you again for all your support,

The Climate Science Legal
Defense Fund Board of Directors
www.climatesciencedefensefund.org

Here are some profiles of Lauren Kurtz: Linked In, Law360, State Bar of California, I hope she is prepared for an onslaught by the crazies.

Does any other scientific field have its own lawyer(s)?

Stephen Schneider on Uncertainty

"I readily confess a lingering frustration: uncertainties so infuse the issue of climate change that it is still impossible to rule out either mild or catastrophic outcomes, let alone provide confident probabilities for all the claims and counterclaims made about environmental problems."

-- Stephen Schneider, Scientific American (2002)

which is quoted in this paper which is interesting reading: "How science makes environmental controversies worse," Daniel Sarewitz, Environmental Science & Policy 7 (2004) 385-403.

Since Australia Gave AGW the Finger

From @AstroKatie via VariabilityBlog

CE Temperature Highest In 356 Years (YTD)

The Hadley Centre's Central England Temperture (CET), 356 years long, is at a record high for year-to-October:

The Hadley Centre says it is "the longest instrumental record of temperature in the world.... The mean daily data series begins in 1772 and the mean monthly data in 1659.... These daily and monthly temperatures are representative of a roughly triangular area of the United Kingdom enclosed by Lancashire, London and Bristol. The monthly series, which begins in 1659, is the longest available instrumental record of temperature in the world."

Isaac Newton was only 16 years old when CET recordkeeping began (though not by him).

Here's their graph as anomalies; I guess the green bar is 2014 year-to-date:

With a linear fit, CET's total warming is +0.94°C, and +0.91°C since 1975, and +0.95°C since 1900.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that almost all its the warming in the last 356 years has come in the last century, and in fact since 1975.

Beware, though, that the 15-year trend is -0.35°C/decade, which obviously means we're entering an unprecedented global cooling era probably because the Sun has given up on Earth for now and is busy warming Mars, so filthy liberals can blame humans (and their robots) for climate change there, too.

The soon-to-arise environmental group warning about global warming on Mars will be named 953000.org.