Year End Observations

If you think we had a mostly mild and pleasant November, you'd be right. Last month, record warm temperatures reaching up to 10 degrees C above average, were observed across the northern hemisphere, including Alaska, northern Canada, Siberia, Greenland, the Southeastern US and Western Europe. In mid-December, temperatures are still way above average, as much as 16 degrees above normal for the northeastern US.

Weather forecasting all a matter of probabilities, the further out you go, the worse the probability you will get it right. That being said, forecasts for up to five days in advance are much better than they used to be.

A few months ago, the long range forecast for this winter was for it to be as bad as last winter. Now, not so much, mostly due to the El Nino weather pattern in the pacific.

The Farmer's Almanac forecast for the northeastern US is for below normal temperatures and snow. The Almanac's forecast for last week was "Dec 10-14: Snowstorm, then snow showers, cold". That one did not work out too well (not that I am complaining). The Farmer's Almanac doesn't do El Nino, it does sunspots.

This all does not mean we will get no snow this winter. One forecast I read stated that conditions could be right for nor' easters to develop starting in January. We can have a milder winter and still get snow. Water will freeze just as well at 30 degrees as it can at 10 degrees.

My completely scientific long-range winter forecast is that we will not have as much snow this winter for the simple reason that I plunked down a good chunk of cash at Boston Lawnmower for a kick-butt 20 h.p. snow blower last fall. I think there is a Murphy's Law corollary about an inverse relationship between the amount you spend on a snow blower and the number of winter storms. If that turns out to be correct, you can all thank me next spring.

On to more serious matters.

Last week in Paris, France, the heads of state from almost every major country on the planet were meeting in an attempt to hammer out an agreement on limiting and then reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide, in an attempt to stem and perhaps reverse global warming.

(As an aside, I have to say that if global warming is a hoax, why is this meeting even happening? Man, if this is a hoax, it makes the 1947 Roswell UFO incident look like a toddler's chunky book).

Will anything meaningful come out of this conference? I doubt it.

Even though the US and Europe are no longer the biggest emitters of CO2, the US and Europe, mostly England, are, historically, the two countries who have contributed the most to the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere today.

The countries who have contributed the least are the ones who are 1) the most likely to suffer from global warming and 2) the ones being asked to not use fossil fuels to grow their economies to get to the first world lifestyle you and I enjoy because of those fuels. These underdeveloped or developing countries would want heavy subsidies to develop green energy programs from the rich western countries who caused most of the problem and I don't think that's going to happen.

Regardless of what comes out of Paris, something interesting did happen this year regarding our ever increasing carbon emissions - they slowed and may even have decreased. This is happening despite the fact that 2015 was a year of economic growth of about 3% overall, so one would expect that emissions would increase. Despite record low prices for oil, the growth in petroleum use has also slowed. This kind of result can only happen if people are using less energy.

That is pretty amazing.

In the meantime, 2015 is going to go end up as the warmest year since instrumental records started being kept in the middle 1800s, beating the last 10 warmest years on record, all of which have occurred since 1998 (the year global warming supposedly "stopped"). The previous record was 2014, which beat 2010, which beat 2005. You can get the data here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/

Anyone who tells you that global warming stopped over the last 15 or 17 or 20 years is blowing smoke where the sun don't shine, if you get my drift.

Originally published in the Westborough News on 12/18/2016

Musings on the Price of Oil

I still have a "Bloom County" cartoon from the Sunday Funnies published in the summer of 1986. In it, Opus was watching a man filling his car at the gas station, who was in ecstasy because gasoline was so cheap: "Louise, dump the milk, the cat drinks unleaded for now on!"

Opus opined "Oh, me thinks this doesn't bode well."

He was right of course, if you lived in Houston and worked in the oil industry, or like me, lived in Houston and had just lost your oil industry job along with a whole lot of other people. The running joke then was "What's the difference between a pigeon and a petroleum engineer? A pigeon can still put a deposit on a BMW."

Flash back five years prior. My first job out of school was as a petroleum engineer for Shell Oil. At the height of the 1980 recession, when my classmates were scrambling for a job, oil companies were lined up at the door to the geology department looking for candidates. The price of oil was climbing past $100/barrel in today's dollars, shortages were rampant, and everyone was talking about the "energy crisis."

By 1986, oil was down to $10/barrel and things that were rampant included idled drilling rigs, unemployed petroleum geologists, engineers, drillers, and empty office towers in cities like Houston and Dallas.

What the heck happened? Basically, Saudi Arabia turned on the spigot. They decided that market share was more important in the long run. Make oil cheap enough and people would stop looking for it or stop extracting it from marginal fields. Eventually, demand would exceed supply and the prices would go back up, which of course, is exactly what happened over several years.

Flash ahead to this year. The oil industry is in a major recession, drill rigs are idle, and layoffs are everywhere. One recently unemployed engineer lamented on a news segment how this was the first time in 30 years he'd been laid off. I sniggered because 30 years ago was the last time I'd been laid off.

Current estimates are that supply exceeds demand by about 2 million barrels a day.

What the heck is happening? Basically, Saudi Arabia has again turned on the spigot. Remind me again why they are supposed to be our allies?

Also in the mix are slowing economies in the developed and developing world.

In a lot of ways, what is happening now is far more dramatic than what happened 30 years ago, because the difference in extraction technology between then and now is like comparing a pocket calculator with an iPhone. Ultra-deep sea drilling, directional drilling, hydraulic fracturing (aka "fracking"), and tar sands extraction allow the exploitation of petroleum plays otherwise uneconomic with older methods.

Conversely, these technologies are only cost-effective when the price of oil is high.

Right now, the price is not high. As a result, the last lease offerings in the Gulf of Mexico had no takers. BP would never have drilled the ill-fated Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 if crude oil prices were as cheap as they are now. Shell just abandoned its efforts to drill in the offshore Arctic. New tar sands development in Canada is slowing considerably. The list goes on.

In a way, cheap oil is a good thing for the planet. Many of the most environmentally sensitive areas are also the most remote and difficult to develop.

Will the price of oil go back up? Most assuredly. The European economies won't be stagnant forever. The slowdown in China's economy is a reduction in the rate of growth, not a recession.

Political instability in the Middle East is a given. If the Straits of Hormuz were blocked tomorrow, prices would skyrocket on commodities exchanges throughout the world the next day, not because there would suddenly be less oil available, but because of the fear that it soon would be.

So, enjoy cheap gas while it lasts, because it won't.

Oh, and most cats turn their noses up unless it's premium.

Originally published 10/18/2015 in the Westborough News

How to be a Climate Skeptic

The fact that I earned two degrees in geology and worked in that field for many years does not make me an expert on global warming; however, I have studied the relevant literature on this subject for the last 15 years, so I think I can discuss this topic intelligently.

Don't take my word for it, though. Be skeptical, but practice skepticism in the modern sense, which, according to Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine, "is the rigorous application of science and reason to test the validity of any and all claims."

Not all of us have the wherewithal to do that, but if a person tells you they don't "believe" in global warming or think it's a hoax, feel free to question their thinking, sources of data and qualifications of people they quote. These are the sorts of questions I'd ask:

- Why have Arctic average temperatures increased at least 4 degrees since the mid-20th century?

- Why have global average temperatures increased by 1.5 degrees since the 1960s?

- Why has the Arctic ice pack volume decreased 40 percent since 1979?

- Why are almost all major mountain glaciers receding at a rapid rate?

- Why is Greenland's ice cap shrinking?

- Why has the frequency of extreme weather events (floods, droughts, wildfires, major storms) been increasing since the mid-20th century?

- Why is sea life in the Atlantic Ocean migrating to higher latitudes?

- Why are global temperatures increasing while the energy output from the sun is actually decreasing?

The list could go on and on (I'd be happy to provide literature citations for all the above assertions, by the way).

There are still a small number of climatologists who are not convinced that global warming is a problem. They mostly question the validity of climate models, but not, to my knowledge, the observed data.

There are many websites and organizations with information about climate change and global warming. Many of them represent legitimate research, government, or academic institutions. Others are nothing of the sort.

For example, both the "National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies" and the "Space and Science Research Corporation (SSRC)" have equally impressive names, and both claim expertise on climate change.

NASA Goddard has studied climate change (natural and man-made) since 1961. All their research and data are publically available for download.

SSRC was apparently started by a former NASA engineer named John L. Casey who has no background in climate science, a blank corporate web page, one self-published book on global cooling, and no peer-reviewed publications.

Rhetorical question: Where would you start your search for accurate and comprehensive information on this subject?

Some final thoughts:

First, a prominent self-described climate science skeptic, physicist Richard Muller, of U. Cal. Berkeley, performed a rigorous statistical analysis of climate data and in 2012 and found "that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause."

Three years earlier, he said he doubted that global warming was even happening. Again, all his research is publically available.

Second, a generation ago, scientists discovered that the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in refrigerants and aerosol sprays were destroying the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, which absorbs ultraviolet light. The loss of this layer would have caused extreme harm to all life on this planet.

Before the problem could fester, even before scientific consensus was reached, the world's governments signed the Montreal Protocol in 1987, which phased out the use of these chemicals. The ozone layer is expected to fully recover by 2070.

We are at a similar cross roads with CO2, yet even though there is great scientific consensus that global warming is very real, we are nowhere near where we are with CFCs and you have to wonder why.

My goal in writing this series of editorials was to explain global warming in an understandable way, because I am pretty sure that most people do not grasp the magnitude of what is going on here or how it is already impacting our world.

I hope I have helped a little on that score.

Originally published in the Westborough News 09/27/2015.

Reducing Carbon Emissions

Reducing emissions is really the only way to keep from further destabilizing the climate in which human civilization developed.

Current estimates are that we need to reduce CO2 emissions by 3 percent per year, starting now, in order to even have a chance of mitigating our current trajectory towards rapid warming.

This is no small task, but consider that even though the U.S. is no longer the top emitter of greenhouse gases, we are still the biggest emitter per capita. We therefore have a lot of room for improvement. All it really takes is the personal and political will to do so. All it takes is leadership, which is sorely lacking.

I know that I have been able to reduce my carbon footprint substantially by being more conservative about my energy use and adopting alternative energy for my own home. I have been able to do this without major impacts to my lifestyle.

I was one of the first in Westborough to put solar panels on my roof back in 2008. My electric bills are down by 70 percent. My system is twice as expensive as one you can buy now and today, you can break even after 6 or 7 years. If you cannot afford it yourself, you can lease a system and get your electric rate fixed for 20 years for little upfront cost. Note that electricity rates have doubled since 2000.

I still drive a car, but because of mandated improvements in fuel efficiency, my 2014 compact SUV gets 20 percent better mileage than my 2007 compact SUV (same make and model). Same was true when I replaced my oil burner, refrigerator, and everything else that uses power.

The cost of alternative energy is now competitive with fossil fuels in many cases. Wind energy from large scale turbines costs as little as 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. Solar panels are 75 cents per watt versus over $4 per watt in 2008.

You hear that shifting to green energy will cost jobs, but there are now more people working in the U.S. solar industry than in the coal industry and the former number is increasing, even as green energy subsidies are disappearing.

Technologies are coming on line to efficiently and economically store energy for use when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. For example, next year, the Tesla Powerwall will be available for installation in any home, which will store excess power from rooftop solar panels.

The trends are there. The question is, will it happen soon enough? The jury is still out on that one and frankly, I am not optimistic, because of the lack of political will.

The price of oil, gas, and coal does not reflect their true costs to us and the planet caused by their pollution, health effects and, as we now know, their impact on climate. If they did, we would be shifting to "green" energy very quickly.

The only way really to force the issue would be to heavily tax fossil fuels, which, of course, is a non-starter in this country. In Europe, where fuels are heavily taxed, it's no surprise to find that they use a lot less of it per capita.

We would also have to make heavy investments in mass transit and other public infrastructure. The mass transit system in this region is woefully underfunded and out of date. It is no faster to take the T into Boston than it is to drive the Pike.

It shouldn't be that way, but there seems to be no stomach for investing in these systems today. I have even heard people say that mass transit is "socialism," as if sitting stalled in traffic for hours on end is a wonderful expression of freedom.

Imagine the cost to Massachusetts when (not if, but when) sea level rises enough to flood downtown Boston on a regular basis, let alone other coastal communities. The money is going to come out of your pocket and mine.

The costs to deal with sea level rise alone will be mind-boggling. Although Hurricane Katrina was not the result of climate change per se, the $100 plus billion cost to rebuild and protect New Orleans after its flooding are instructive. Over $70 billion of that came from the federal government.

At some point, even the federal government will no longer be able to afford to be the insurer of last resort in areas prone to flooding (which, ironically, will include Washington, D.C., large portions of which are within 10 feet of sea level). Actually, it can't afford it now, in my opinion.

I have talked mostly about sea level rise, but we are seeing economic impacts due to drought, floods, and other extreme weather events, which are increasing in frequency and magnitude.

These extreme events include winter storms, which have are following the same trends since the 1950s because warmer air holds more moisture, even in winter. Yes, I am saying that you can blame our last horrible winter on global warming, as counter-intuitive as that sounds.

The coming winter is currently forecast to be just as much fun.

It comes down to pay it now or pay it later. Actually, it's pay it now AND pay it later.

Originally published in the Westborough News 09/20/2015.

The World is Getting Warmer, Now What?

"If you find yourself in a hole, your first task is to stop digging." - the First Law of Holes

There are many catastrophes which could happen to this planet tomorrow that would ruin everyone's day and we could do nothing to prevent, like a massive volcanic eruption or an large asteroid strike, either of which would wreak havoc with the world's climate and cause untold misery.

It's happened before. In 1815, the Indonesian volcano Tambora erupted and the planet cooled for the next couple of years. In New England, 1816 was the "year without a summer." A major snow storm occurred . . . in June. Crops failed and famine was widespread in Europe.

Global warming though, is slow-motion catastrophe we are living in right now and we can do something about it.

However, no matter what we do, the world is going to get warmer, sea levels are going to rise, and adverse weather events will continue to become more frequent. The chemistry of the oceans is going to continue to change in ways not seen on this planet in millions of years. The CO2 we put into the atmosphere today will be there for many centuries.

But if we do nothing, we are likely to see average global temperatures go up by 5 or 6 degrees by 2100. Remember that when it was 8 degrees cooler 25,000 years ago, large parts of the northern hemisphere looked like Antarctica.

The concern of most scientists who study the climate is something called a "tipping point," which is when the changes we have made to the atmosphere cause a series of events that are irreversible over the next few thousand years.

Such changes include melting of the arctic permafrost, which would release methane (a very potent greenhouse gas) by the billions of tons, or the breakup of offshore glaciers in Antarctica which currently prevent that continent's glaciers from flowing into the oceans.

Will these events kill the planet? No. Will this make life more difficult for the human race, let alone most other lifeforms? Most definitely, yes.

So here is what we can do: stop making it worse.

This might prompt you to ask, "If some of these changes are already baked in, so to speak, why bother?"

The simple answer is, "Your children."

My son is 20 and he already knows that the rest of his life will be spent in a world different than the one I have lived in. Imagine if your child is 2.

There are three ways we can go about addressing this issue:

1. Pretend it isn't happening, which is pretty much what we are doing right now.

2. Use technology on a global scale to either suck the excess CO2 out of the air or block the sun from heating up the earth, also known as "geoengineering".

3. Stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

I will address Option 3 in my next column and spend the rest of this column explaining why Option 2, geoengineering, is a really, really, bad idea.

Back in college, a friend of mine majoring in engineering told me that any engineering problem could be solved with the proper application of money. That's just one problem with geoengineering - the incredible expense.

Geoengineering could include injecting sulfate (sulfur oxide) aerosols into the high atmosphere, just like a major volcanic eruption, which would reflect sunlight. We know this will work, based on observations of volcanos like Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines in the early 1990s. A big drawback to this concept is that it would likely cause regional droughts in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia where people are already having a tough enough time as it is. There's also environmental damage due to acid rain caused by sulfates, which is one of the reasons why we long ago phased out the use of high sulfur coal in the US and Europe.

We could find ways to mechanically suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Hypothetically, we can do this, at very great expense. There is also the problem of what to do with the billions of tons of CO2 once it's extracted from the air.

Another idea is to put giant mirrors into space, or millions of little ones, to reflect sunlight away from the earth. Again, the cost to set up this system and maintain it would dwarf the capacity of every industrial economy on Earth.

For any of these "solutions," the question of how such a program could be managed is just as big a problem as the technology itself. Any one country who tried to make their conditions better would most likely make conditions elsewhere worse.

The bottom line though, is that none of these ideas address the root problem - putting CO2 into the atmosphere in the first place. The moment we stopped geoengineering, assuming we could do it at all, global temperatures would soar.

So, that leaves us with Option 3, reducing CO2 emissions.

Originally published in the Westborough News 09/11/2015.

Why is Global Warming Science “Controversial?”

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair

In the industrialized world, the US is the only country where there is any serious movement to deny the science around global warming. It did not used to be that way.

So why is global warming science “controversial”?

Entire books have been written on this subject and I cannot possibly do it justice in this space but, here is the gist of it.

The companies that produce fossil fuels have a fiduciary responsibility to: first, provide a return on investment to their shareholders; and second, maintain the value of their stock.

To do the first, they have to extract those resources from the Earth and sell it to customers in the most cost-efficient manner possible.

To do the second, they have to keep on exploring for new reserves. If the amount of available resources they own decreases, so does the source of their future revenue, thus making their company a less desirable investment. No one wants to buy stock in a company with poor earnings potential.

If you owned a company whose product has been alleged to be damaging in some way or another when used as directed, you would first try to correct the problem. If the problem is not correctable and the alternative is to go out of business, you may then try to disprove the allegations or cast doubt on them, so you can stay in business.

You may fund the campaigns of politicians who represent places where you do business and would be happy to represent your interests. You may do what you can to prevent regulation or taxes which would make your product more expensive.

The “cast-doubt” tactic was used successfully by tobacco companies for decades, even though tobacco was known to be hazardous to human health as far back as the 1940s.

This same tactic has been used by fossil fuel producers for the last couple of decades, as the reality of human-caused global warming became more obvious. They even used the same public relations firms as the tobacco industry, in some cases.

It’s the old story of “follow the money”. The most prominent organizations that are “skeptical” of global warming science received funding from oil and coal companies. The most prominent politicians who state that global warming is “unproven” or even a hoax come from states like Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma and surprise, they get a lot of funding from the fossil fuel industry.

There is also this tendency by today’s journalists and media in the United States to present both sides of an issue, even if one side doesn’t have any factual basis and the tactics of denial fit right in with this tendency.

These tactics served to delay any cogent response in the US to the global warming issue by a couple of decades, during which time, CO2 emissions accelerated.

Regardless, as of now, even major oil companies are no longer denying the scientific reality. For example, if you go to Shell Oil’s web site, you will find this statement:

“. . . [T]he world needs to halve carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of climate change. So not only will the world require more energy but also cleaner, low carbon energy” (shell.us/energy-and-innovation/the-energy-future.html).

Of course, this wonderful sentiment is not preventing Shell from trying to drill offshore exploration wells in the high Arctic, even after several previous attempts just to get the drilling rig up there failed miserably due to the harsh conditions that still prevail in the Chukchi Sea.

Full disclosure – my first job out of college was as a petroleum geologist . . . for Shell Oil. But that was 30 years ago. I like to think I am a wiser person now.

Given what I just said, you may left with the opinion that I think fossil fuels are evil. They are not. They provide the energy which powers modern civilization, but like anything else we consume, there are trade-offs, such as damage to the environment from their extraction and use.

What we now know is that our continued use of fossil fuels is causing the planet to warm up quickly, which is likely to overwhelm nature’s and humanity’s ability to adapt. That goes under the heading of “Really Big Trade-off.”

Large portions of the world’s population lives near sea level and just a couple of feet of sea level rise will cause serious problems throughout the world. Major U.S. cities are very vulnerable, including Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Washington, D.C., New York, and Boston. Boston is already attempting to plan for a sea level rise of 3 to 5 feet over the next century.

The Department of Defense listed climate change as a potential driver of political instability as far back as 2010. Many think that the persistent drought in the Middle East is a principal cause of the political instability which produced the Syrian revolution and now the mass exodus of refugees to Europe. 

Impacts to nature are myriad and substantial. Again, many books have been written on this subject.

So, you need to ask yourself if the continued trade-offs are worth it. My opinion is no, they are not.

The next question is “Now what?”

Originally published in the Westborough News 09/04/2015.

Agents of Atmospheric Change

"Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain. . ." - James Taylor

I just got back from a business trip to Spokane, Washington. There was so much smoke from regional forest fires that at times the sun was dark orange in color and the sky was an ugly brown-tinged gray I could only describe as apocalyptic. My sister in New Mexico has seen the same phenomenon this year.

I have talked to many people who think it's arrogant to believe that humans are having any influence on the planet, let alone a profound one.

The facts say otherwise.

In any given year, humans move more dirt and rock than all the natural processes of erosion combined. Heck, human-caused changes to the Earth's surface are easily visible from space.

Humans are a recognized agent of geologic change, so why is it so hard a stretch to believe we can be agents of atmospheric change?

In my last column, I talked about the almost instantaneous increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations over the last two centuries (instantaneous from a geologic time perspective). 

Where did all this additional CO2 come from?

Not from volcanoes. Volcanoes discharge at most, about 300 million tons of CO2 into the air per year but the increase in CO2 in our atmosphere is caused by the annual injection of 30 billion tons of CO2 (billion . . . with a B). A quick aside - volcanic eruptions can cause climate disruption - but the effect would be to cool the climate, not heat it up, and then only for a period of a few years.

Ultimately, the carbon part of the CO2 comes from underground where it has been bound up as coal, oil, or natural gas. Most of the coal comes from deposits that are 300 to 360 million years old, from a time called, appropriately, the Carboniferous, when great swamps covered large parts of the world, dragonflies were as big as eagles, and the ancestors of salamanders were the size of alligators. Through our burning of fossil fuels, we are releasing in a matter of a couple of hundred years, carbon as CO2 that has not seen the light of day for a couple of hundred million years.

There is simply no other source for all this CO2 that can explain the observations.

CO2 is the most common, but not the most powerful, man-made greenhouse gas. Methane (natural gas) and the refrigerants we use in air conditioning are many times more efficient at absorbing heat energy. Even water vapor can be a powerful greenhouse gas; however, methane stays in the atmosphere for a decade or two, water cycles in and out of the air in a day or two, but the CO2 we put into the air today is going to stay there for the better part of a millennium.

We are an agent of atmospheric change.

In previous columns, I have talked about how the climate has been unstable. This instability is caused by "forcings," a term used by climate scientists to describe processes that cause climate shifts. Among the many forcings are changes in ocean circulation, ocean temperature, the amount of sunlight hitting the northern hemisphere in summer, the amount of tree cover, the area and volume of ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, the sulfur compounds spewed by volcanoes, and CO2. Shifts in any of these parameters will cause changes in others, leading to the feedback loops I discussed in this column previously.

Over time, all these forcings equal out and the climate settles into a new period of equilibrium. We already know from geologic history that a new equilibrium could include Westborough being under 10,000 feet of ice for many thousands of years, or a mild temperate climate with four seasons and no extremes.

Climate scientists are very certain that we are forcing the climate to shift. The question is, what is it shifting to? What will be the new equilibrium?

Climate scientists have created massive computer models to simulate our atmosphere and its interactions with the land and oceans. These models do not predict the weather, they predict what the climate will be like in a given region over the next century.

Dozens of models created over the decades by various researchers all say the same thing, adding CO2 to the air at the rates we are doing now warms the atmosphere causing shifts in the climate. These models predict that hot and dry regions will get hotter and drier. Regions that normally get rain will get more of it. The high, northern latitudes will warm faster than the temperate latitudes (like New England).

So what do we see today? Look at the southwestern U.S. or Australia. They are getting hotter and drier. We are getting at least 15 percent more precipitation here in New England than we did 30 years ago. The Arctic ice pack is decreasing, forest fires are raging across Western North America. Europe and South Asia are in the midst of record-breaking summer heatwaves. So far, 2015 is the hottest year in the last 130 years, from a global perspective.

Theories in science are not hazy speculations; they are detailed explanations of facts that describe and predict conditions in nature. Good theories make testable predictions. If these predictions that can be verified, then you know you have a good theory. So far, the predictions of climate scientists have been pretty accurate. Also, remember, the geologic record also backs up what we are seeing now.

The next question is, if climate science is sound, why is it considered so controversial? I will cover that in my next column.

Originally published in the Westborough News 08/28/2015.

Global Warming - The View from Deep Time

Geologists routinely talk about geologic epochs millions of years in the past like everyone else talks about last week's sports scores.

The Earth has been around for 4.55 billion years. If all of Earth's history were compressed into a 24-hour clock, all of recorded history would take place in the last tenth of a second.

In a nutshell, this is the concept of deep time.

The geologic record tells us that the climate has been radically different from what we consider normal today. Based on fossils found in Alaska, if you lived in Anchorage, Alaska just 3 million years ago, you would have been walking under palm trees and dodging alligators.

But since then the climate has undergone a lot of instability, shifting quickly between brutal cold and climate similar to, or somewhat warmer than today's climate in the space of just a few thousand years, a long time relative to a human life, but a few tenths of a second on the 24-hour geologic clock.

We see evidence of these shifts from a variety of sources including deep sea cores, layers extracted from stalagmites in limestone caverns, cross sections through corals and ice cores drilled through the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps.

These data, gleaned from many different sources, tell the same story. Not only that climate has shifted, but the reason why.

The first part of the reason is how currents flow in the ocean. Three million years ago, the connection between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans was blocked by geologic uplift and volcanic activity that created Panama in Central America.

This change in ocean circulation amplified the second part: the effects of small changes in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth due to variations in Earth's orbit around the sun, as well as the Earth's tilt, relative to the sun.

In case you didn't know, Earth wobbles a bit while it spins, and its orbit is not a perfect circle (it's an ellipse), so sometimes the northern hemisphere is closer to the sun in summer and sometimes in winter.

When everything lines up, the Earth plunges into one of several ice ages which have periodically buried the northern hemisphere under miles of ice.

The very last piece of this puzzle is carbon dioxide (C02).

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is very small, about 400 parts per million (ppm) or 0.04% of all gases in the air, as of today. Incidentally, the last time CO2 was at 400 ppm was 3 million years ago . . . when you could find alligators in Alaska.

So why is CO2 so important? CO2 absorbs infrared (heat) radiation. The sun bombards the earth with a lot of light, which is absorbed by the earth's surface and re-radiated as heat. CO2 acts like a filter, trapping some of that heat. A French scientist by the name of Joseph Fourier discovered this property of CO2 in the 1820s. Scientists also figured out that a little CO2 goes a very long way.

If we had no CO2 in the atmosphere, Earth would be mostly covered in ice. At least twice in Earth's history, it DID practically freeze solid in a phenomenon called "Snowball Earth."

The freeze was most likely due to the first photosynthesizing bacteria consuming most of the CO2, plunging the Earth into a deep freeze that was eventually replenished by long-term volcanic activity.

The last "snowball" occurred about 700 million years ago.

You may or may not know that the colder water gets, the more gas it can absorb. As the Earth started to cool during one of those times when it was getting less sunshine, the oceans absorbed more CO2, which in turn made the air grow colder, then made the oceans grow colder, then the oceans could absorb more CO2 and so on, until at the depths of an ice age, there was only about 180 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.

This process is called a feedback loop. In this case, a negative feedback loop.

During the start of an ice age, declining CO2 did not trigger cooling, but the decline accelerated the cooling and vice versa. Once more sunlight started to hit the Earth during periodic shifts in Earth's orbit and rotation, CO2 outgassing from the oceans accelerated the warming - a positive feedback loop. The CO2 feedback loop is one among many in nature.

At the depths of the last ice age, about 25,000 years ago, CO2 concentration was at about 180 ppm. As the ice age ended, it took about 15,000 years to get to 270 ppm, the concentration at the beginning of the industrial revolution in 1800.

Since 1800, the concentration of CO2 has gone from 270 to 400 ppm, an increase of over 40 percent, in just two centuries, and a good chunk of that has occurred in just the last 50 years.

Scientists have been able to make good estimates on the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere based on deep sea sediment and ice cores. In the last 65 million years, there is nothing close to this rate of change in the geologic record.

Nothing.

CO2 has increased so quickly that the rest of the Earth's systems have not yet caught up, which is why alligators have not yet taken up residence in Anchorage.

The view from deep time shows us that CO2 plays a very big role in our climate, either by causing change (Snowball Earth) or accelerating change (our current ice age cycle).

And that is why every major scientific organization on the planet is very, very, concerned about what is happening right now.

Originally published in the Westborough News 08/15/2015.

We had an Awful Winter – and now the Good News

“It’s been a long cold lonely winter . . .” -  George Harrison, “Here Comes the Sun”, Abbey Road Album.

Anyone who lives in New England (me included) will tell you that last winter sucked. Heck, anyone north of Florida and East of the Mississippi River will tell you that.

It’s also been, so far, a very pleasant summer. No brutal heatwaves or sustained, soul- sucking humidity.

We are all familiar with the acronym “NIMBY”, for Not in My Backyard, but I read a new term the other day “Not out my window”. Doesn’t lend itself to a catch phrase. NomWin? Nah.

“Not out my window” means, “We had a record breaking winter, what’s all this talk about global warming”. It’s easy to confuse weather with climate. It lets presidential candidates dismiss the idea of climate change and makes it easy for senators to throw snowballs on the senate floor.

Weather is what we see when we look out the window. Climate is the weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period. My cousin lives in Tucson, Arizona, which has a desert climate. We live in Massachusetts, which has a temperate climate, with no extremes in temperature, and four definite seasons.

But what we see out the window does not represent what is going on in the world at large and it doesn’t even represent what we would have seen had we looked out the window 50 years ago.

The last couple of years notwithstanding, average yearly temperature in Eastern Massachusetts have increased almost 2 degrees centigrade since the beginning of the 20^th century, based on records from the Blue Hills Observatory. Average annual precipitation has increased from 43 inches per year to over 50 inches per year during the same period.

These two numbers represent long term trends. These two numbers represent changes to the prevailing weather conditions. These two numbers tell us the climate is changing where we live, right now. Not in the future, not down the road. NOW.

Two degrees temperature change does not seem like much when the temperature can change 30 degrees in one day. But we are not talking about daily temperature, we are talking about average annual temperatures. To give you some perspective, 25,000 years ago, the average annual temperature here in New England was 8 degrees lower than it was at the beginning of the 20^th Century. At that time, Westborough was sitting under a continental glacier two miles thick. Please take some time to wrap your head around that. Go ahead, I will wait.

So, think about what the world would look like if the opposite occurred – average global temperatures 8 degrees higher than they were 150 years ago. Again, take some time to think about what that means. If you cannot think of what that means, I will tell you. Sea levels will be much higher because the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will have substantially melted. The climate here in New England will be more like it currently is in the tropics. You don’t want to consider what the conditions in the tropics would be like.

The interesting thing is that when you look at trends globally, the Eastern United States has been an outlier relative to the rest of the planet. The weather has been cooler than normal for the last couple of years. Where has it been warmer than normal? Everywhere else. In fact, so far, 2015 is the warmest year on record, from a global perspective. Temperatures in the Arctic are almost 5 degrees above normal. We had something like four times as much snow as Anchorage, Alaska last winter.

The American West, that is, everywhere west of the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, is seeing record drought and high temperatures. Forests are drying out, dying, and now burning from Alaska to Arizona. What we are seeing now is unprecedented in the instrumental record. Lake Mead is at something like 50 percent capacity and reservoirs are emptying out all over the Western US.

What is occurring now is in fact a predictable outcome and has in fact, been a predicted outcome of the increasing carbon dioxide (CO₂) in our atmosphere to our industrial activities and our energy-intensive way of life. These predictions are nothing new. Scientists studying and modeling Earth’s atmosphere started making these predictions at the end of the 19^th century. Warnings about what the burning of fossil fuels could do to Earth’s climate can be found in government reports as far back as the 1950’s. 

These warnings were always put on the back burner because the effects would be felt in the future, down the road, in another few generations.

Well folks, I got news for you. We are at the end of the road, the future is now the present and this is the generation.

What’s the good news? New England is perhaps not a bad place to be as the climate warms, at least if you live away from the coast. We are not likely to see the kind of droughts afflicting the western US.  We will see more rainfall, which may be a mixed blessing as a good chunk of it will come as large storm events, but I’d rather be here than in Southern California right now.

In future columns I will discuss why the climate is changing, how we know it is caused by us, what the geologic record says, and perhaps what we can do about it.

Originally published 08/15/2016 Westborough News.