Tag Archives: severe weather

Water Management

Exoplanets, or extrasolar planets, are simply planets that circle a star other than our own. First detected in the late 1980s, there are now thousands of known exoplanets. Although there is no current interest as a place to flee the ravages of our planet, the exoplanets are none the less of scientific interest.

The biggest problem as an escape route is the fact of distance, the nearest is over four light-years away. A light year is the distance light travels in one year or about six trillion miles. Despite being quite distant, the exoplanets are of interest as possible sources of other life in the universe. To accommodate life as we know it requires one universal – liquid water.

Water has unique chemical properties as a solvent that no other substance really can compare. Chemistry and thermodynamics, anywhere in the universe, combine in a way that makes life inconceivable without it.

With an abundance of water on this planet, one might think it is not an issue but increasingly it is. Specifically the availability of manageable water. Global warming and the climate change that follows therefrom is making the management of water difficult.

Sea levels are rising and rising faster than previously predicted. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has suggested that the sea level rise may be as much as six feet by the end of the century, more than twice the prediction of just a few years ago. And lest you think the end of the century is a long way off, it is within the lifetime of someone who could be reading this column today.

Whole cities will either have to be abandoned or pay incredible costs for infrastructure to hold the seas back. Forty percent of the world’s population is coastal, that is live within fifty miles of a seacoast.

Meanwhile farther inland, managing water is being made more difficult. Billions of people around the world depend on meltwater from the mountain snowpack. The regions which include the western United States, Alpine Europe, Central Asia and downstream of the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau contain nearly half the human population of the planet. Global warming is threatening the timely delivery of freshwater. More cold season runoff can overwhelm reservoir storage of water, making less water available later in the growing season.

We’ve recently had a lesson on water management with the historic flooding of the Arkansas River valley. Serious to catastrophic failure of levees is responsible for disaster declarations in a sixth of Arkansas Counties. Levees and other flood control structures will have to be not just replaced but radically upgraded to accommodate changing rainfall patterns.

At every turn, climatic instabilities force greater expenditures on infrastructure. This is the cost of climate inaction. The sooner we act to reduce the rate of global warming, the less we have to spend on mitigation. We have economically practical technologies to stop driving global warming. Wind and solar electric energy coupled with battery storage can power the world. We must wholeheartedly invest in the future, now. Or do we abandon our children to our unaddressed climate disasters?


Weather Problems, Climate Solutions

May is usually a rainy time of the year but this year is special. As I write the Arkansas River is rising to a historic high level. Some homes in low lying areas of Fort Smith and Van Buren are flooded and the crest is still days away. The Interstate 540 bridge over the Arkansas River is closed and some Highways near the river are closing due to flooding. Pope County Judge Ben Cross has suggested that even sections of Interstate 40 may close.

This flooding presents immediate problems for travelers and homeowners alike but also threatens agriculture, the number one industry in Arkansas. Waterlogged fields can’t be planted and this is the planting season. Couple this the self-inflicted wounds of tariff wars with China and one can see that farming in the Arkansas River Valley is in trouble.

Could this particular flooding event have been predicted? Of course not, but the likelihood of the flooding has been predicted. General Circulation Models (GCM,) the computer systems that estimate the effects of climate change due to global warming, indicate that a warmer climate is a wetter climate for the simple reason that warmer air holds more moisture. The models are doing a good job of predicting a general increase is severe weather including storms and flooding in the midwest and midsouth.

Although most Americans accept the reality of man-made global warming, we have yet to demand action to mitigate or reduce the threat. What will it take? What ever steps we take need to be done immediately and with the understanding that the solution will take a long time. It has taken a couple of centuries to increase the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere by 70% but we are realizing the effects at an increasingly rapid rate.

The solution of course is to decarbonize our energy systems. Simply put we need to stop burning stuff to produce energy for industry, to heat and cool our homes and fuel our vehicles. Tremendous strides have been made to lower the cost of wind and solar energy. The next revolution which will make the transition possible is battery storage of the electrical energy. We need an immediate program, a national agenda, to support sustainable energy and suppress carbon emitting fuels.

Democrats have introduced a bill in the US House of representatives to institute a Carbon Fee and Dividend. This will both favor the transition to sustainable energy, but create millions of high tech jobs – jobs that can’t be outsourced as the work must happen here. Additional benefits include a reduction of hundreds of thousands of premature deaths due to improved air quality.

The biggest fear of this transition to a stable future is economic. The fossil fuel industry has tried to paint a sustainable energy future as more expensive but nothing could be further from the truth. The cost of inaction is increasingly expensive. The avoided cost to taking action now, coupled with the reduced costs of wind and solar versus fossil fuels makes for a bright future.

Lower energy costs, more jobs, a more stable climate, and cleaner air – the time has come.


Climate Change in the Courts










Climate Change, Weather Change

Climatology is meteorology writ large. They are really just different branches of atmospheric science. If you want to know whether it is likely to rain tomorrow talk to the weatherman who is a meteorologist. But if you want to know about what the weather will be like in a number of years, you should consult a climatologist.

As I write the water has yet to drain out of the east Texas area where Hurricane Harvey caused the greatest rainfall event ever in United states (over 50 inches of rain.) Meanwhile, there are three hurricanes off our shores. These are weather phenomena which are impacted by climate. Climate change of necessity causes weather changes.

Hurricane Irma is the most intense Atlantic hurricane ever. It appears to be on a collision course with Miami Beach. If it veers slightly to the west the Carolinas are threatened. Right behind Irma is Jose streaming in our direction from the east. Hurricane Katia is stewing off the coast of Mexico with little indication of movement.

Meanwhile on our west coast earlier this year we saw record flooding and now a severe heat wave and wildfires from Los Angeles to Vancouver.

Is this normal? Or is the the new normal if climate change is factored in? There is uncertainty in blaming any one event on global warming. Realistically that can’t be done. But let me analogize if I may. Mark McGuire was a major league baseball player. Much of his success at home plate he later admitted was due to his use of performance enhancing steroids. Just one example, from 1996 to 1999 he led the league in home runs.

So here is the question: Can we attribute any one of those home runs to steroid use? Not really. What we can say is the muscle mass developed due to his steroid use greatly contributed to his success.

Adding Carbon Dioxide to the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels is like providing steroids to an athlete. The added CO2 causes heat to be trapped in the atmosphere which which causes warming, but also creates a more dynamic atmosphere. More droughts occur because it’s hotter. More intense rainfall events occur because a warmer atmosphere holds more water.

Hurricanes are driven to large degree by the warmer ocean water, clearly demonstrated by the summer/fall hurricane season when the Atlantic is naturally warmer. Make it warmer still from global warming and you get Irma, the strongest Atlantic hurricane ever.

The concentration of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere is now higher (407 ppm) than it has been for at least 2 to 4 million years. Other heat trapping gasses such as Methane and Nitrous Oxide are also at all time highs. Yet there are those, in fact whole political parties, which deny anthropogenic climate change even in the face of rising seas, melting ice, and intensifying storms.

The United States contributes 20% of the heat trapping gasses to the atmosphere, but only constitute about 5% worlds population. Every scientific body on the planet including all major science organizations in the United states agrees that climate change is a threat and needs to be addressed. Our government is alone among the nations of the world in our refusal to address global warming. ALONE.


Stormy Weather in the Southern Plains

The recent wave of severe storms, tornadoes and flooding plaguing the southern plains, essentially Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas have cost a over 30 lives, countless injuries and billions in property damage. And it isn’t over yet. Some of the rain and flooding from these storms are breaking all records. One Texas official described the recent rain as “of biblical proportions”

One of the effects of global warming is more severe storms of all kinds – tornadoes, floods, heat waves, hurricanes, etc. Over the following decades we will see these increase in both frequency and severity. As we continue to pump ever increasing amounts of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere, more heat will be trapped, and more heat in the atmosphere is a principle cause of severe weather.

There are a couple of factors involved. A warmer atmosphere means warmer seas, which means more evaporation. Additionally the amount of water vapor that the atmosphere will hold is a function of temperature, the warmer it is, the greater the greater the amount of moisture in the atmosphere. Conditions such as wild fires will also increase, due to “dry thunderstorms.” Lightning and high winds accompany these events where the rain evaporates before it gets to the ground.

And it’s not just the current storms in the southern plains nor the blizzards on the east coast last winter, it is global. Although the Atlantic was rather calm during the traditional hurricane season last year, there was an unprecedented number of severe storms in the eastern Pacific and Indian Ocean nations. Again billions upon billions of dollars of damages and hundreds of lives lost.

An important point to make is that all this accelerated activity correlates with a warmer atmosphere. Can any one storm (or it’s intensity) be blamed on global warming? No, of course not. No more than any one home run by Mark McGwire could be attributed to steroid use.

The type of societal damage from severe storms varies. Flooding causes the most economic injury. Damage to infrastructure, homes and vehicles dominate the costs. Most human deaths in the US are caused by heat waves. Tornadoes cause the most human injuries.

So what can be done? In the long term the solution is obvious – quit burning stuff for energy production. Burning coal, oil and natural gas returns Carbon Dioxide to the atmosphere over a few decades that took many millions years to remove from the atmosphere. The problem is one of recognizing the true costs of energy sources. What we see on our electric bill or at the gas pump only includes the direct costs. The costs of externalities due to severe weather is not included.

How about a weather tax assessed to energy sources driven by fossil fuels? The money from this assessment could be used to rebuild and strengthen infrastructure, subsidize construction of more storm resistant residences, improve drainage, and expand reservoir capacity in drought prone areas just to mention a few. Basically we should use the funds to provide for the general welfare as is called for in our constitution.



Whistling Past the Graveyard


a natural whistler

a natural whistler







