Plant Hardiness Zones On The Move

The Plant Hardiness Zone Map is used by gardeners to determine which plants are best to grow in a particular area.  The map is based on the average annual minimum winter temperature, divided into 10-degree F zones.  I mentioned in a recent post that this year might be a good time to think about starting a backyard garden and this information would be helpful.  The warming climate across the U.S. is causing the range of plants to move poleward.

Average low temperatures for the U.S. (1895-2010).  Image Credit: Climate Central.

Note that the long-term trend has been moving up, however the 25-year moving average has shown mild periods and cooler periods.  However, there has been a significant increase in the moving average since the late 1970s.  As a result the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had to update its zone map due to the warming of recent decades.

Climate Change & Ethics

I have been thinking about this post since Donald Brown, Associate Professor of Environmental Ethics, Science, and Law at Penn State University, wrote a blogpost entitled "An Ethical Analysis of the Climate Change Disinformation Campaign: Is This A New Kind of Assault on Humanity?"  He outlined the campaign against climate science and went on to write "We are not trying to limit free speech but encourage people to see that lying or misinformation is deeply ethically problematic particularly in cases when deception can lead to immense harm."

I will be the first to admit that I have not consider the ethical implications of man-made climate change or the tactics used to attack the science.   I have been more concerned about the science and challenging those spreading science myths and disinformation.  Considering ethics seemed more of an academic exercise and one that most would find hard to understand.

Granted, I am taking a risk in exploring this issue.  Therefore, I started with an easy question; what is ethics?  I looked at several dictionary responses, but I didn't get much information from them on ethics.  Turned out that the answer was not easy or succinct.

Snow Drought: A Major Concern

In the previous post Andrew Friedman of Climate Central mentioned the warm winter and snow drought that is occurring in the U.S.  Information from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reveals just how warm it has been for the winter months of December and January.

This winter has been influenced by La Nina and the Arctic Oscillation which have combined to produce the warmer than normal temperatures.  The precipitation picture has been mixed with wet conditions from parts of Texas northeastward to New York.  This has eased the extreme drought in some areas of Texas, but has not ended it for much of the state.  Meanwhile, southern Georgia is the center of an expanding drought in the Southeast.  Much of the West is experiencing drought particularly in the Southwest.

What’s Causing the Deadly Cold in Europe?

The weather pattern responsible for bringing frigid air to Europe, like this heavy snow fall on the Colosseum in Rome, is driven in part by a naturally-occurring pattern known as the Arctic Oscillation. 

This is a repost from Climate Central 

By Andrew Friedman 

While the U.S. cruises through winter with a snow drought and above-average temperatures, much of Europe and Eurasia are locked in the grips of a deadly cold air outbreak, with more than 300 people reported dead so far. According to news reports, entire communities in Italy, Bosnia, and Romania have become inaccessible due to heavy snowfall and power outages. According to Sky News, a dam in Bulgaria burst due to the combination of snowmelt and heavy rains, killing four people in a village downstream, and other dams in Southeastern Europe are also being threatened. Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia and Turkey are at risk for heavy snows during the next few days.

According to U.S. News and World Report, the wintry blitz presents a poorly-timed challenge to European economies, which already are struggling to contain a debt crisis:

"In more robust economic times, the economic effects of bad weather might be nothing more than bump in the road, but in a place already teetering on the brink of recession, the stakes are higher."

"[E]ven relatively limited disruption from snow and freezing conditions could very well be enough to tip the balance towards the economy suffering further contraction in the first quarter of this year, which would put it officially back into recession," writes Howard Archer, chief European and UK economist of IHS Global Insight, in a commentary on the cold snap.

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According to Bloomberg News, 93 stations from the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute reported the lowest-ever temperatures for February 5, with one station bottoming out near -38°F. In Ukraine, the cold has killed at least 131 people, and nearly 2,000 were hospitalized due to hypothermia.

Ice has forced Austria to close the Danube river to navigation, shutting down access to part of the second-longest river in Europe. In addition, the iconic canals of Venice were reported to be frozen as well.

What's Going On?

Suomi NPP Producing Stunning Views

NASA has renamed its newest Earth-observing satellite in honor of the late Verner E. Suomi, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin who is recognized widely as "the father of satellite meteorology."

Verner Suomi pioneered remote sensing of Earth from satellites in polar orbits a few hundred miles above the surface with Explorer 7 in 1959 and geostationary orbits thousands of miles high with ATS-1 in 1966. He was best known for his invention of the "spin-scan" camera which enabled geostationary weather satellites to continuously image Earth, yielding the satellite pictures commonly used on television weather broadcasts. He also was involved in planning interplanetary spacecraft missions to Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Suomi spent nearly his entire career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where in 1965 he founded the university's Space Science and Engineering Center with funding from NASA. The center is known for Earth-observing satellite research and development. In 1964, Suomi served as chief scientist of the U.S. Weather Bureau for one year. He received the National Medal of Science in 1977. He died in 1995 at the age of 79.

The National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project, or NPP, was renamed Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership, or Suomi NPP. The satellite is the first designed to collect critical data to improve short-term weather forecasts and increase understanding of long-term climate change.

The Little Ice Age Was More Than A Solar Experience

The term Little Ice Age (LIA) was coined by François E. Matthes in 1939 in a paper published by the American Geophysical Union.  It described a period of unusually cool temperatures roughly from the 16th to the 19th century.

Ten reconstructions of temperature variations during the last 2000 years. The Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age are shown at the period when they are proposed to have occured.  Image credit:  Robert A. Rohde / Global Warming Art

The start and end of the period has been debated.  Wikipedia has a number of start dates culled from several published papers:

2011 Global Temperatures and A Look Ahead

There are three organizations that regularly analyze the global temperature record on an annual basis.  The three international global temperature data sets are from the Met Office and University of East Anglia (HadCRUT3), NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NOAA NCDC) and NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA GISS).  Final figures from HadCRUT3 will not be available until March, 2012.  While the other two are also preliminary, the additional data yet to come will not likely change the findings.

This is what the three data sets looked like together as of October, 2011:

Image credit: UK Met Office.

NASA GISS recently released its figure for all of 2011.  The year was the ninth warmest on record according to its analysis.  Meanwhile, HadCRUT3 and NOAA NCDC listed this past year as the eleventh warmest on record.

Global temperature anomalies 1880-2011.  Image credit: NASA GISS

Decline in Solar Output Unlikely to Offset Global Warming

This is a repost of a press release from the UK Met Office issued on January 23, 2012.

Image Credit: NASA/SDO.

New research has found that solar output is likely to reduce over the next 90 years but that will not substantially delay expected increases in global temperatures caused by greenhouse gases.
 

Carried out by the Met Office and the University of Reading, the study establishes the most likely changes in the Sun's activity and looks at how this could affect near-surface temperatures on Earth.

It found that the most likely outcome was that the Sun's output would decrease up to 2100, but this would only cause a reduction in global temperatures of 0.08 °C. This compares to an expected warming of about 2.5 °C over the same period due to greenhouse gases (according to the IPCC's B2 scenario for greenhouse gas emissions that does not involve efforts to mitigate emissions).

Gareth Jones, a climate change detection scientist with the Met Office, said: "This research shows that the most likely change in the Sun's output will not have a big impact on global temperatures or do much to slow the warming we expect from greenhouse gases.

2011 Extreme Weather Update

The year 2011 was already a record for the most billion-dollar + disasters.  Now two more disasters have been added to the list.  They include Tropical Storm Lee which made landfall in Louisiana on September 2nd and a Rockies and Midwest severe weather outbreak which occurred July 10-14.

Tropical Storm Lee caused wind and flood damage across the Southeast, but considerably more damage to housing, businesses, and infrastructure from the record flooding across the Northeast states, especially Pennsylvania and New York. The storm occurred in an area that had experienced heavy rainfall from Hurricane Irene barely a week earlier.  Meanwhile, in the Midwest much of the damage was from wind, hail, and flooding impacts to homes, business, and agriculture.

Therefore the total number of billion-dollar disasters is now at 14 and there are a few more that are being analyzed that could increase the number.  This brings the cumulative damage estimate to more than 50 billion dollars.

From extreme drought, heat waves and floods to unprecedented tornado outbreaks, hurricanes, wildfires and winter storms, a record 14 weather and climate disasters in 2011 each caused $1 billion or more in damages — and most regrettably, loss of human lives and property. Image Credit: NOAA

The insurance company Munich Re has been collecting and analyzing natural hazards and losses worldwide for more than 35 years.  It has accumulated a database of over 30,000 events.  At the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, Munich Re made the following statement "The number of major weather-related natural catastrophes has almost tripled since 1980. The number of flood loss events has gone up by a factor of more than three, and the number of windstorm natural catastrophes has more than doubled."

Geomagnetic Storm in Progress

The sun erupted late Sunday night with an M8.7 class flare, an earth-directed coronal mass ejection (CME), and a burst of fast moving, highly energetic protons known as a "solar energetic particle" event.  This is producing the strongest radiation storm since September 2005 according to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.

That news was flashed around the globe yesterday in preparation for the arrival of the CME.  It arrived at earth about 15z (11 a.m. ET) this morning.  It does not pose a threat to anyone on the surface, but some planes flying over the poles have been rerouted.

The event was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.  The video shows the eruption toward the end.

From NASA:

What is a solar flare?

 A solar flare is an intense burst of radiation coming from the release of magnetic energy associated with sunspots. Flares are our solar system’s largest explosive events. They are seen as bright areas on the sun and they can last from minutes to hours. We typically see a solar flare by the photons (or light) it releases, at most every wavelength of the spectrum. The primary ways we monitor flares are in x-rays and optical light. Flares are also sites where particles (electrons, protons, and heavier particles) are accelerated.

What is a coronal mass ejection (CME)?

The outer solar atmosphere, the corona, is structured by strong magnetic fields. Where these fields are closed, often above sunspot groups, the confined solar atmosphere can suddenly and violently release bubbles of gas and magnetic fields called coronal mass ejections. A large CME can contain a billion tons of matter that can be accelerated to several million miles per hour in a spectacular explosion. Solar material streams out through the interplanetary medium, impacting any planet or spacecraft in its path. CMEs are sometimes associated with flares but can occur independently.

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This storm is likely to cause enhanced auroral displays tonight as well as some navigational and electrical grid problems.  The potential problems will exist through tomorrow when the storm is expected to subside.

It is rare to see auroras as far south as South Carolina.  However, the chances increase during such storms.  It may be worth watching the skies tonight since they are expected to be clear.  Just be sure to bundle up, because it will be chilly.