Historic Heat In North America Turns Winter To Summer 618
An anonymous reader writes "A huge, lingering ridge of high pressure over the eastern half of the United States brought summer-like temperatures to North America in March 2012. The warm weather shattered records across the central and eastern United States and much of Canada. From the article: 'Records are not only being broken across the country, they're being broken in unusual ways. Chicago, for example, saw temperatures above 26.6Celsius (80Fahrenheit) every day between March 14-18, breaking records on all five days. For context, the National Weather Service noted that Chicago typically averages only one day in the eighties each in April. And only once in 140 years of weather observations has April produced as many 80Fahrenheit days as this March.'"
Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Funny)
If only we had some sort of theory that could explain this inexplicable change in weather patterns.
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Informative)
This warm season actually doesn't have as much to do with Global Warming/Climate Change as it has to do with a double whammy of La Nina and an Arctic Oscillation. The former brought unusually warm weather while the latter kept the colder, arctic air away from us. The combination of the two warming effects gave us a warm, relatively snowless winter.
This isn't to say that GW/CC isn't real. Just that this winter is explained by other forces at play.
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, you! Quit being calm and rational! We're having an ideological screaming match over here, keep it down would ya?
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Informative)
I agree somewhat with this statement. But remember that there's very good evidence that the loss of summer Arctic ice cover has a large effect on the winter Arctic Oscillation. And the loss of summer Arctic ice cover is caused by the current climate change/global warming. So there is some effect there. I don't know if it's very predictable though so what effect climate change/global warming had on the past winter, I don't know. And you're correct about the La Nina - for all I know that's the bigger cause of the past winter's weather.
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:4, Informative)
In the professional atmospheric physics community (say people who are members of the American Geophysical Union, attend the conferences and regularly publish papers), it was sometime in the early 90's that nearly everybody was convinced.
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh come on. Nobody argues with climate change. The debate is over MAN-MADE climate change. The climate has changed dozens of times through heating and cooling periods throughout history. This isn't even questioned.. except by some young-earther's. :\
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Informative)
That's true. HOwever, an appreciable amount of carbon which was out of the climate system for a hundred million years (and made things damn hot when it was in the atmosphere), was never suddenly inserted in the environment in a tiny time scale geologically and substantial magnitude.
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure it would also explain the brutally cold winter that Europe experienced this year. http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/02/03/cold-weather-kills-more-than-220-in-europe-danube-freezes-over-france-set-to-break-power-consumption-records/
What I remember from thermodynamics when I took it with Newton: pumping energy (heat) into system making it go all kaflooey. Hotter and colder and then even colder to outrageously hot.
Nope, obviously a conspiracy on the part on those people who wrote the laws of thermodynamics in order to eventually tax us and hand over our God given sovereignty to the UN!
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Informative)
I live in Europe, and have had a very mild winter. It's true, though, that we had a slight dip below average the first week of February. I think it might have something to do with being just outside the high pressure area that settled over central Europe, bringing winds from Siberia.
Re: (Score:3)
I live in Europe and we had a winter I'll tell my grandkids about when talking about the snow being THIS high and us not having any boots.
Seriously, it's been a while since we had a Winter like this, with downtown temperatures near the -10 Celsius. Which essentially means that we had close to -20 in rural areas, which is really, really cold in Central Europe.
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Informative)
temperatures near the -10 Celsius
Now, as cold as you think that is, it is a warm night for a Chicago winter.
As I posted earlier, in some suburban areas of Chicago, it was 91F today. (that is 42 degrees above average, for nearly 10 days now)
For some perspective, if it was as much above average in Chicago in July as it currently is now, the daily high temperature would be 127F, with an overnight low of 94, for over a week.
Those temperatures are almost above the maximum globally recorded extremes for heat, ever, and certainly would be for Chicago by almost 20F.
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Actually, it isn't. The usual way we project it on our maps only makes it look bigger, the whole friggin' continent is smaller than Brazil and Argentina combined.
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It's small compared to bigger things, true, but big enough to have different weather in different parts.
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's perhaps more to Europe than you think.
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Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh my gosh, this is concrete evidence that man made global warming is real!
Humans don't affect the planet at all, moron, this is the fault of the fish! They fart too much. Every time you see a bubble on the surface of the ocean, the atmosphere dies a little.
And if it isn't the fish's fault, then blame the ants. Those bastards are everywhere, and everyone knows an ant colony that stretches miles pollutes way more than any little coal powerplant.
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Interesting)
ah but those on both side of global warming think 100 years of data most of it not very accurate is enough to plot trends.
What i want to know is not what the the records are but how the rest of the year faired. If 1910 and 1945 were close were their summers hotter or colder than normal? dry or wet? past behaviour isn't a prediction of the future but you do need data points to start with.
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure if you're quite aware, but the pro-science side has data much longer than 100 years (actually, both sides have access to all that data, but one side tends to ignore it). Besides, when the physics does a very good job of explaining the current climate change/global warming (and many of the past climate changes), you don't need even 100 years of data. If you turn the oven on and it warms up, do you really need 100 years of data to understand what's happening?
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Statistically speaking it takes 17 years of the temperature record to distinguish a warming or cooling trend from the noise of natural variation. Of course that only says what's happening currently, not what will happen in the future.
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but that doesn't mean that we don't know why many of those earlier events occurred or that we don't know why the current climate change/global warming is occurring. The causes of climate change aren't that varied. The big players are the sun, the earth's orbit around the sun, and the ability of the earth to radiate away the energy it gets from the sun. We know the sun isn't causing the current climate change/global warming because, if anything, the long term output from the sun has decreased slightly. We know the orbit isn't causing the change because it should actually be cooling the earth slightly. We can measure the increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and know that is primarily caused by man. We can also measure the reduction in outgoing IR radiation due to that increase in CO2. Sure, it's possible that climate science is missing something (that's always possible in every field of science), but when the science explains so much of what's currently going on and what went on in the past, and when the current science is able to make very good projections about what will happen, at some point you have to say, "Yeah, that's probably right." Since there are no current alternate hypotheses (or, rather, no good ones) and since the data clearly supports the basic theories that make up climate science, there's no good reason to be doubting the science.
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Informative)
We know the sun isn't causing the current climate change/global warming because, if anything, the long term output from the sun has decreased slightly.
Incorrect. The "long term" here is on the order of hundreds of millions of years. In the short term, the Sun is a variable star and variation in solar output is thought to contribute to climate changes. Typical climatology theory claims here are that we have accounted for variance in solar output and that these variations don't contribute significantly to the global warming that is seen over the past couple of centuries while contributions from human-generated greenhouse gasses does.
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure I've ever read a more disjointed reply.
Doubt science because of economics?
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:4, Informative)
Doubt science because of economics?
Yes. We can form beliefs about things based on our beliefs in the consequences of not doing so. Example: Believing in god because you'll go to hell if you don't.
But a bigger factor is 99% of the population has formed a belief about global warming based on what other people have said. Most of us have not looked at the evidence with the eye of a trained scientist. Most of us have only seen brochure style graphs and news stories and summaries of scientific findings. We're basing our opinions on what others (both credible and not credible) are saying...not what's logical. So if someone who is perceived to be credible by one social group says something is true (regardless of whether or not that person believes it), the social group will believe it.
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> Believing in god because you'll go to hell if you don't.
Atheists don't believe in hell either. What a silly argument.
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, Pascal's wager is tragically flawed. Pascal was creating a justification to pretend to believe in God. The true wager would require much more than 4 squares because you have Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism as major religions. That's before we start dipping into the minors and silly religions. After all, it's technically possible that the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Invisible Pink Unicorn or even Scientology could be true. Thus Pascal's wager only works for people who are already Christian because they will already "know" that all the other possibilities are false. It sort of the defeats the supposed purpose of the wager, though.
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And, yet, I don't recall anyone on the pro-science side saying to cease all carbon emissions. Ok, there are probably some radical people doing so, but there are also radical people saying that climate change/global warming doesn't exist - there are always fringe people spouting off nonsense.
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:5, Informative)
You lack imagination. Energy is energy. More solar energy pours down on the planet in a few hours than humans use in a whole year. We didn't get as far as we have by sticking with the old ways of doing things.
I have some imagination - I need it for work, I'm an engineer working with electronics. Yes, we have lots of energy - and we can't capture it. Without capturing energy efficiently we can't use it. Solar and wind are enormously expensive; solar is also very poisonous, since manufacturing of pure silicon requires lots of nasty chemicals.
You should not discount economics. For example, you are taking a bus to school every day. But starting tomorrow someone way above you and me decided that buses are polluting and you should walk or use your bicycle. The only problem is (for example) that you have only one leg and you can't do any of the above at any reasonable efficiency level. You can't spend a week to crawl to the school. You don't have money to pay someone to carry you there, unless you stop eating. What are your choices? This is the problem that invariably occurs when the cart is placed in front of the horse.
The same problem exists everywhere else. Imagine that starting tomorrow coal and gas plants stop making energy. Cost of energy goes through the roof. As result you can't cook food at home! What are your options? Making a fire on the kitchen floor with your philosophy books?
I'm glad that you know of a coal power plant that is more expensive - for whatever reason - than solar. (I have 6 kW of solar panels at my house, by the way.) However failures of solar power are far more common, even despite huge injections of public money into those projects (see Solyndra.) The reason for that is simply that solar panels today are not very efficient. Will they become better? Probably, over time. Maybe even soon. But today we can capture very little of the energy that is coming down.
You need to consider also the weather. Not every region is suitable for solar power. Not every region is suitable for wind either. The energy is out there, but it's very costly to mine it. I have sun here, but wind is either 0 (for most of the year) or 60 mph for a few days in winter; in both cases the windmill would have to be shut down; it would be completely useless to me.
In the end, a hungry man needs his daily food. You cannot tell him that he should eat only every other day - even though food is available - because food on odd days is "unclean." But that's what green advocates are doing. The goal is good since I can't imagine an advanced society of Star Trek type that burns coal to power its spaceships. But we cannot implement the program until the program becomes viable. We cannot destroy the world in order to save it.
I'm not against nuclear power but it's an awful expensive way to produce electricity and the lead times are so long. I'm not sure it will be able to compete with solar and wind in another decade.
Nuclear power is very competitive with these sources right now. We do not need to guess what will be 10 or 20 years in the future. Today's nuclear reactors by that time will be ready for decommissioning, and then we can decide what to do, and we will have all the up to date information. Guessing today is pointless. What is not pointless is running all the reactors that you got. Each operating reactor prevents burning of a mountain of coal!
I would understand if UN, for example, or some other worldwide organization, set up a research institute that would focus on the new energy sources, collection and storage methods. But that's not what happened. Instead we have con men like Al Gore that are cutting coupons from useless "carbon credit" trade. Essentially, rich countries are supposed to pay money to poor countries because those poor countries don't pollute that much. Please tell me how this helps develop new technologies? All that we have here is producers being given another haircut, and the proceeds are given to tinpot dictators in banana
Re:Completely inexplicable... (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagining that tomorrow that coal and gas plants stop making energy is a straw man. They will be phased out as alternative energy sources come on line. As I said it will take time to transform our energy systems.
Your bus scenario is an example of your lack of imagination. How about if instead of stopping the bus service you replace it with a hybrid bus that gets 20% better fuel mileage? Then in 15 years when it wears out you replace it with a bus that only needs batteries to run its route. The longest journey begins with the first step.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't mind waiting another 140 years for another data point.
I fear NOT having to wait that long.
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That may be so (I don't know) but is human activity not responsible for so much farty livestock?
Finally... (Score:5, Funny)
Finally all of those CFC's I've been spraying have paid off. Its too bitter cold in Chicago anyway.
And some of us are Cold when it's meant to be hot (Score:5, Informative)
And in the southern Hemisphere, We've had one of the coldest and wettest summers on record in New Zealand.
But you only hear about climate change when people are hot.....
Re:And some of us are Cold when it's meant to be h (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry. Hot chicks trump cold Kiwis any day of the year.
Re:And some of us are Cold when it's meant to be h (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And some of us are Cold when it's meant to be h (Score:5, Funny)
Most Slashdotters know very little about moisture down under.
groundhog meteorologists (Score:4, Funny)
Not everywhere (Score:5, Informative)
It's effing cold in Seattle. Snowing every other day it seems. I want to be warm and dry.
Re:Not everywhere (Score:4, Funny)
...and you live in Seattle?
A few years ago, I spent a week in Seattle in July. The weather was great--sunny and warm. Everyone was talking about how I picked a great week to visit. I told them I didn't notice it because we'd had the same kind of weather for the last 4 months in Southern California.
They seemed to get upset by that. I don't know why...
Yea, it's "just a few hot days"... (Score:5, Informative)
Back in October, I was writing 'HAPPY HALLOWEEN!' in the snow, having a chuckle. I stopped laughing when a storm blew in so fierce, so heavy, that it took out the entire Western MA. area's electricity. We were without power for a week, almost exactly. The snow was already heavy, but the fact that trees still had leaves on their branches added to the weight. Entire limbs--or just entire trees were everywhere. It was a spooky time, and it's only getting spookier. I should NOT be sweltering at work while wearing shorts, which is how it went yesterday. Anyone saying "so what, it's a heatwave" doesn't come from New England. We're used to crazy-assed weather, but this has got us all stumped.
I was surprised for a minute (Score:3, Insightful)
More strange weather events (Score:4, Informative)
If Slashdot covering a weather story isn't a climate-scale outlier, I don't know what is.
Here's another strange fact: on March 18 the low temperature in Rochester MN exceeded [planet3.org] the previous record high for that date.
I'm working on an essay linking this event to anthropogenic climate change ("global warming") which will appear on Planet3.0 [planet3.org].
(For what it's worth I might as well submit a Slashdot story when it's up. Hose my host - see if I care.)
Re: (Score:3)
Global warming means more energy in the atmosphere (Score:5, Insightful)
Means extreme weather patterns become more likely. This includes more extreme temp fluctuations while the global overall mean just inches by a fraction of a degree per year.
All well established and advertised for the last twenty years. People pointing to super cold, wet winter in NZ are just emphasizing this, while kidding themselves into thinking it somehow contradicts the climate change trend.
I'm quite certain that once the future history of global warming will be written it'll emphasize that it shows humanity at it's smartest and most stupid at the same time.
Climate isn't getting warmer. Just more extreme (Score:3)
At least it seems to me that way.
When I was young, we had a mild Spring from about March to about May, a fairly hot and mostly dry summer between June and August, wet, foggy and generally unpleasant Autumn from September to November and fairly cold and snowy winters from December to February. That was pretty reliable and generally quite ok.
Today we have freeze-your-toes-to-the-floor-when-you-dare-to-get-up Winters from about November to March and then it changes within a week or so to sweltering-hot-unbearable-heat from April to September, with October being the joker for really funky, crazy weather where it snows in the morning, the sun frying your brain during noon and hail hitting you on your way home from work.
So yes, I can somehow see a change in the climate. It gets more extreme and crazier. Not necessarily hotter. Just way less pleasant in either way.
Of course it's just weather (Score:5, Informative)
By definition, this is "weather", not "climate", it only lasts a week.
Climate change is defined by decades at a very minimum. Climate change is this:
http://www.ec.gc.ca/adsc-cmda/default.asp?lang=en&n=8C03D32A-1 [ec.gc.ca]
Environment Canada takes readings every day, in hundreds of locations outside urban heat islands, and averages them across a whole season to get an average temperature. And then it graphs that number for every year since 1945. While even that graph swings wildly up and down from year to year and even has warmer and colder decades, the regression across almost 70 years shows a steady upward trend. It's most dramatic for our winter (2.8C) but all the seasons have shown statistically significant increases.
I was a huge skeptic until about 2004, but this and several papers I managed to puzzle my way through, plus the book "The Ice Chronicles", finally brought me around by about 2006.
Yes, there are Snowmaggedons. And there are these. And when you add them all up, the warmer spells are getting a little more frequent and the colder spells a little less so. Over decades. That's climate.
Re:yawn (Score:5, Interesting)
What bothers me is wondering what sort of changes in the weather can be expected during the rest of the year after such an unusually warm winter. As mentioned, there is very little data, perhaps nothing at all, or perhaps even more bizarre weather will follow. As a layman, I have no idea, but I imagine that having strange weather for a full season will have residual effects somewhere.
Re:yawn (Score:5, Funny)
quick, find a butterfly to offset the effect.
Re:yawn (Score:5, Funny)
I found one but accidentally stepped on it. What do I do now? Also, did anyone hear thunder?
Re:yawn (Score:5, Funny)
You Maniac! You stepped on it! Ah, damn you! God damn you to hell!
Re:yawn (Score:5, Funny)
Bursar, stop jumping on those ants this instant!
Re:yawn (Score:5, Funny)
Re:yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
It's only warm in the eastern half. In California it's freakin' cold!
In October we had snow in the east, which was one of he earliest snows ever. And LAST winter we set records for cold & snowfall amounts! So it is not really global warming; it's just month-to-month/year-to-year variation.
Re:yawn (Score:4, Interesting)
It's only warm in the eastern half. In California it's freakin' cold!
Yup, high 50s and rain over here. Freakin' cold.
Re: (Score:3)
It has warmed-up some, but it snowed over the weekend.
Not 200F (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't be silly, it won't be 200F in July.
If it was as much above normal in July, as it is currently in March here in Chicago, the daily high would be 127, with an overnight low of 94.
Fun stuff, isn't it?
Re:Not 200F (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be silly, it won't be 200F in July.
If it was as much above normal in July, as it is currently in March here in Chicago, the daily high would be 127, with an overnight low of 94.
Fun stuff, isn't it?
I know it's kinda an interesting anecdote, but it's not as funny when [guardian.co.uk] heat waves [bloomberg.com] kill tens of thousands. [earth-policy.org]
We would be seeing similar problems in the US if we had a heat wave of 127 with a low of 94 for several days in a row. It's not the average Slashdotter that would have problems, it's the elderly, the already ill, the poor, the young, et cetera. Those who are already vulnerable to severe temperatures. And to say nothing of the brownouts due to a huge city like, say, Chicago all running the AC at full bore 24x7.
Unfortunately, the Corporate Apologists in America would be sure to point out that there is no climate change problem and it's "All Obama's Fault" (tm) in any case, so we'll get nowhere.
It's really starting to look like we won't wise up and do something about our environmental destruction until it's too late.
Re: (Score:3)
The point was to succinctly point out the numbers. When I say 'fun stuff' I dont mean funny stuff. I mean since so many people have not taken this seriously at all, they must think it is a game. And that the last heatwave Chicago saw with temps in the low 100s for days, caused the deaths of hundreds and hundreds of people, barely over 15 years ago.
If temps ever got to 127F for days or weeks on end in Chicago, it would not be a stretch to say that tens of thousands of people would die as a result in one ci
Re:Not 200F (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:yawn (Score:5, Informative)
So it is not really global warming; it's just month-to-month/year-to-year variation.
Not global warming, maybe, but definitely global climate change. Though it is an el nino year, it's much too early in the year for it to be affecting the weather this much. In Ottawa, ON (described as the world capital with the most extreme weather... coldest winters + hottest summers), we got over 85 degrees fahrenheit today, when it should be closer to 40 degrees. Today was June/July weather, not March weather.
Things are changing. And while countries like Canada and Greenland stand to benefit from a longer planting season, it's really hurting countries like Kenya (in the middle of one of the worst droughts ever).
Re:yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
Europe had a record setting winter [irishcentral.com], where they shattered many records for both snow and cold, and 112 people died, but it still rather a rather minor rate of change compared to what the world saw in the 1500's.
I really think that people have begun to freak out lately, just because we keep such careful records today. When they had abnormally warm or cold days in the U.S. in the 1800's, no one knew for sure how abnormal they were. Now we have data to compare, and we've become hypochondriacs.
Re:yawn (Score:5, Interesting)
Either that or people's lives are boring.
Re:yawn (Score:5, Informative)
If you paid attention to the Arctic you'd know that there is lots of open water in the Barents and Kara Sea's [nsidc.org] north of Europe where it's been extraordinarily warm. That open water and the (relative) warmth it releases forces the jet stream to dip south into Europe carrying frigid Arctic air with it.
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Re:yawn (Score:4, Informative)
I stand behind the science of climate change, but everything I've seen has said this is just a natural occurrence, albeit rare.
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Re:yawn (Score:5, Interesting)
What the climate change theories predict is an increase in energy of the whole system, which means more extreme weather events; more hurricanes, greater air pressure gradients and bigger temperature swings, at least until it settles down into a new stable (hotter) state.
Of course, one weather event does not a theory prove, we need as much data as possible, and I'm not enough of a statistician to know if we're seeing climate change. It's all the right symptoms though.
Oh, and climate change has as much to with geological timescales as a mayfly does with the span of human history.
Re:yawn (Score:4, Interesting)
On the contrary; perhaps it is global warming, since adding energy to the system increases its volatility. Think of it this way: global warming creates unusual high temperatures and low temperatures in different areas simultaneously in the same way that shaking a glass of water creates waves.
Re:yawn (Score:4, Interesting)
The oceans are absorbing most of the excess heat, over 90% of it I think. The top 2.5 meters of the oceans hold as much heat as the entire atmosphere above it. The heat it takes to raise a mixing layer of 25 meters in the ocean 1 C would raise the atmospheric temperature by 10 C. [wikipedia.org] Heat gets moved around by ocean currents. Thus Western Europe is much warmer than the same latitudes in North America. It also moves from the equator toward the poles in the atmosphere. Thus the Arctic has warmed more than the areas south of it. Nevertheless there aren't many areas around the world that haven't warmed over the last several decades. One thing to keep in mind, it takes 17 years of temperature records to distinguish the global warming signal from the noise of natural variation.
Re:yawn (Score:5, Interesting)
What people in my area, Pennsylvania, don't get is we get a lot of our water from melting snow. We had three days of snow, period, all winter. It all melted within a day or so. North America is going to be heading for drastic droughts. We have communities drilling wells for new water sources as is. We also have communities with water supplies either contaminated by Marcellus drilling or natural gas migration. Doesn't matter which at the moment, water is becoming scarce.
This is why I am fuming at Republicans not getting the problem with the Keystone Pipeline. The U.S.'s bread basket is watered through a giant underground aquifer. The bread basket will survive the coming drought. If the K.P. goes through, as planned, and has a B.P. style incident? There goes the country's capability to feed ourselves. We'll be trading exporting food/importing oil for importing oil from Canada/importing food if we have more years like we had this year in our future.
This warm weather is scarring me for the coming year, climate change or fluke event.
Re:yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
If the K.P. goes through, as planned, and has a B.P. style incident?
How on earth could that happen? It's a pipeline, not a well; you just shut the nearest valves and voila, it's done. Not only that, pipelines are buried just below the frost line, which even up there is maybe six feet down. It's not that hard to avoid the areas where the Ogallala runs very close to the surface. It's nothing like a well of oil under pressure that's over 4000 feet below sea level.
Re:yawn (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, all you need to do is turn the oil off, huh?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pipeline_accidents [wikipedia.org]
Re:yawn (Score:5, Informative)
If the K.P. goes through, as planned, and has a B.P. style incident? There goes the country's capability to feed ourselves.
There is an important difference between the BP well and a pipeline: a pipeline can be shut down. Pipelines have multiple pumping stations to keep pushing the oil along, and those pumping stations can be shut down; pipelines have leak detectors. Not only do the oil companies not want to waste valuable oil and incur financial penalties for pollution, but additionally governmental regulations require them to have leak detectors and safety shutdowns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_transport#Leak_detection_systems [wikipedia.org]
Wikipedia says the Keystone XL pipeline has a planned maximum capacity of 510000 barrels of oil per day. If I am not mistaken, that's about 354 barrels of oil per minute. Wikipedia says that one state (Washington) imposes a requirement to be able to detect and pinpoint the location of leakage of 8% of maximum flow within 15 minutes. Using this standard, if we assume the Keystone XL leaks 8% for 15 minutes and is then shut down, that would seem to work out to about 23 barrels of oil leaked before shutdown. I'm not an engineer, but I should think it would be easier to detect more significant flows and shut down.
On the other hand, what if we assume some catastrophic event completely breaks the pipeline at some point? Wikipedia says that industry practice is to place "block valve stations":
If we assume that a catastophe completely breaks the pipeline and all the crude oil in an entire 48 km segment drains out, and use the Wikipedia pipe diameter of 910mm, then if I have done my sums correctly that would be a spill on the order of 25000 tonnes of oil. Checking the Wikpedia List of oil spills page, we find that the Deepwater Horizon leak in the Gulf was at least 492000 tonnes. If we assume that most segments of the pipeline are not completely flat, then it seems likely that less than the maximum oil will leak out.
Also, according to press releases from TransCanada, there is at least one route available that takes the pipeline completely around the aquifers, and other routes were studied that shortened the pipe runs by putting some sections in aquifer areas. One possible solution is to insist that the pipeline simply not go through the aquifer areas. I'm not an expert on pipeline risk assessment so I won't take a position on the tradeoffs involved.
Also, I wonder just how much crude oil will soak through the ground and into an aquifer, and what the consequences would be; whether crude oil ever naturally leaks into aquifers, and if so how serious it is when it happens. I haven't found a sober assessment of the situation; I have mostly found breathless and fact-free assertions that the pipeline would instantly destroy "the heartbeat of America" and such.
While pipeline disasters suck, the level of disaster that worries you should not be possible.
steveha
Re:yawn (Score:4, Interesting)
Watch for a rise in insects and vermin that the winter would normally have killed off. Any wildlife got a pass this winter as well. Where I live the ticks are bad, and this will not have helped. Ticks need a deep freeze for a long time to kill them. They are all over the deer and the deer are now coming into town because idiots feed them. We are going to have a deer tick disease epidemic I'm afraid, as these ticks drop off in yards, get on people and pets and pass along their diseases.
I predict lots of violent storms ahead for us, with more F5 tornadoes than we have ever seen. Look for an insanely hot Summer, resulting in massive humidity that will erupt into violent storms when a cold front of any sort approaches. That's if we are lucky. If not, we will just cooking in our juices this summer under broiling heat, and high humidity.
Of course I could be wrong...lol..it's the weather.
Re: (Score:3)
Welcome to global climate change. That billion dollars of infrastructure of reservoirs, pipes, dams, etc, is now a skate park.
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This would be a good time to have the reservoirs deepened to take advantage of future rain fall when it happens.
Re:yawn (Score:5, Informative)
Read carefully, only once in 140 years ( the period such records have been kept in Chicago ), has there been a run of as many days in the 80's in April, as we have had this March. Never, in the records, have we had a run like this before in March.
Re:yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
In the cage match between the laws of physics and money, physics wins.... but money buys itself a huge victory party and claims physics is a fraud. And a large segment of the population who resent the snooty superiority of laws of physics eagerly believe physics has been defeated.
Therefore, you can expect to hear that this same kind of weather anomaly has happened numerous times before, and a lot of people will believe it.
Re: (Score:3)
No. It happened before a month later.
And on geological time scales the human race isn't much, thus we DO have to worry about shorter time scales.
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Not sure if you are serious, but April != March.
And, yeah, it probably has happened before, but the point is, we don't have data on what consequences this will have.
Re:yawn (Score:5, Interesting)
The story is a little out of date. There have been five more record-shattering days in a row of 85 F or greater since this story came out. Records not only broken, but broken by more than 10 degrees.
So the five days in a row, for which there was a least something close happening in recorded history, there's nothing even close to ten days in a row of temperatures more than 25 degrees hotter than normal.
It may still be nothing on a "geological time scale" but it's now worth noting at least, and as a Chicagoan who walked down to the beach on the last day of Winter yesterday, and strolled along with my feet in the water, I can tell you that it's weird as hell.
We also blew away the record for airborne pollen by like 15%, which has caused my poor wife to have really red eyes and sound like the comic book store guy on the Simpsons, except with an Eastern European accent. I actually had to turn on the air conditioner so she could breathe a little bit. And if you know Chicago at all, you'll know that having to turn on the air conditioner on the last day of Winter is fucking strange as hell.
The good news is it looks like super short-shorts are going to be in style again this summer. Yay!
Re:Remember folks weather isn't climate, unless it (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the scientific consensus is that global warming is happening and that man is contributing toward it.
Not all theories and consequent predictions are correct and complete - in most areas of science this is accepted calmly and rationally, but in this one it's suddenly proof that the whole premise is wrong. Kinda like saying evolution is a crock of shit just because one piece of fossil evidence isn't fully explained by a previous assumption. Not that I've ever seen global-warming deniers as any more rational than evolution-deniers, but they tend to find it hard to see themselves that way.
Re: (Score:3)
The idea that humans are going to cause problems by warming the globe is not scientific consensus, either.
There is no 'solution' to global warming that is supported by most scientists.
The only thing that IS scientific consensus is that human effects have some effect on the earth's temperature. How much is a huge question; it could be completely negligible.
Re: (Score:3)
Nature has balance. What is worrying is what will be the consequences of this week-long stint of a heat wave. Likely, we'll see a week-long cold wave sometime in April.
Re:so it was hot for a few days in March? (Score:4, Funny)
Knowing my luck, it will be right before my planned trip out of town and will bring a record 3 foot snowfall that keeps all planes grounded for a week.
Re:so it was hot for a few days in March? (Score:5, Interesting)
We already barely had a winter- there were plenty of days in the 40s and 50s, temperatures never dipped below 0, and then to end it we get weeks of 60s and then 80s, when normally we would be getting highs in the 40s right now. If it was just a heat wave out of nowhere, I would agree with you, but unusual warmth has been the trend for months (while until now we hadn't been setting day-to-day temperature records, we have consistently been well above average). While nominally the explanation is the Arctic Oscillation plus La Nina, this "winter" does seem unprecedented (I have to wonder how much global warming is affecting the strength of these effects).
If you want more information about records set, you can poke around here [chicagoweathercenter.com]. We have been setting a variety of records related to continued high temperatures.
Re:so it was hot for a few days in March? (Score:5, Interesting)
This past winter's average temperature was 32.8 degrees, 6.4 degrees above the current winter average of 26.4. It is unusual for a Chicago winter to average above freezing, occurring in just 13 of 142 Chicago winters dating to 1870-71, less than 10 percent of the time.
Adding to that trend of warm temperatures, the average temperature this March through the 18th was 50.4, over a typical average of 34.3, and well exceeding the previous record of 47.5. As the records have continued, we may well set a record for most consecutive record highs, in addition to hitting 85 sooner than ever recorded, and getting more days in the 80s in March than has ever been recorded in April.
Source [chicagoweathercenter.com].
Re: (Score:3)
Re:And yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet last year saw some of the coldest temperatures we've had in a very long time. But I didn't see people screaming OMG GLOBAL FREEZING!!1!!1! back then.
That's because the people who understand global warming are smart enough to know that a single season doesn't mean anything on its own. It's the deniers who, every goddamned winter, come out of the woodwork with their childlike taunts: "If the Earth's getting warmer, then why is it currently cold outside!?"
Isn't it funny that this winter they all seem to understand that one point doesn't make a line? Sadly, I'm sure that by next year they will have forgotten all about this, and will point to the first snowflake as proof that the Earth is unchanged.
Re: (Score:3)
And the warmists, who every time a cyclone hits, come out crying that it wouldn't have happened, if only you'd let them tax you more for your sinful energy consumption.
I'm sorry. Was that parody? My sarcasm meter doesn't work well in the heat.
Re: (Score:3)
Google image search: "global warming cartoon"
1 [google.com]
2 [google.com]
3 [google.com]
4 [google.com]
5 [google.com]
6 [google.com]
7 [google.com]
8 [google.com]
9 [google.com]
10 [google.com]
That took less than a minute of searching. Let's see how long it takes you to find instances of people claiming "cyclone == proof of global warming".
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Note that "sin" is not a scientific concept. The religious stuff is generally on the other side.
We've figured out that our fossil fuel burning is causing an unwanted effect on our environment. We've figured out similar things before and been able to reverse some of the damage (e.g. smog, acid rain). This one's a bigger problem.
Re:And yet... (Score:4, Insightful)
Think
G
Re:And yet... (Score:5, Informative)
And yet last year saw some of the coldest temperatures we've had in a very long time. But I didn't see people screaming OMG GLOBAL FREEZING!!1!!1! back then.
Several years ago, when the changes were starting to get wide attention, people realized that it was extreme weather on both ends and changed the description from "warming" to "climate change". We've had several unusual winters, it's obvious that the phenomenon is not limited to higher temperatures.
And last year I do remember news stories on the unusual winter where people questioned if the global climate change was responsible.
The root of the problem is that global average temperatures are increasing, but since that also contributes to [politicalaffairs.net] unusual [wunderground.com] cold snaps [nytimes.com] then it doesn't help the discussion to call it global warming if every idiot who gets cold uses that as evidence that global warming is not happening. Extreme weather changes on both ends are both symptoms of global warming. You only need to look at a graph of global average temperature over a long period to figure out that it is currently spiking.
Re:And yet... (Score:5, Informative)
Several years ago, when the changes were starting to get wide attention, people realized that it was extreme weather on both ends and changed the description from "warming" to "climate change".
While I agree with most of your points, I thought I'd point out that this is a common misconception. In fact, both terms came into usage at about the same time (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate_by_any_other_name.html ). Climate change refers to all effects of the changing climate (ocean acidification, droughts, floods, changes in short term weather events, long term temperature changes, etc.). Global warming only refers to the general trend in surface temperature. So global warming is, and always has been, just a subset of climate change.
Re:Cue the Warmists... (Score:5, Interesting)
La Nina does not affect the Great Lakes region. It is a west coast phenomenon, and corresponds to a LOWER than usual ocean temperature at a distance pretty far south from the US coast.
During a period of La Niña, the sea surface temperature across the equatorial Eastern Central Pacific Ocean will be lower than normal by 3–5 C. ... In the United States, an episode of La Niña is defined as a period of at least 5 months of La Niña conditions.
As for Global Warming, I think statistics and physics have proven quite nicely much of these climate change theories are on the right track. The planet is getting warmer overall - it's a fact. That's not to say the ice caps will melt and New York will be underwater next week, or the movie 2012 will come to pass. It just means the atmosphere surrounding the planet earth is getting hotter. Make of this what you will.
You can call others deniers, but to deny proven scientific fact and then tell someone else they're denying the truth is just silly.
I don't, however, believe there is anything we can do about it at this point. Might as well hang on and invest in a good air conditioner...and then heater when we inevitably dip back into an ice age.
Re:Wilder, wackier weather to become the norm? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)