Report on global warming predicts dire Illinois consequences

WASHINGTON -- If global warming continues unchecked, Chicago would see a repeat of the killer 1995 heat wave every summer by the middle of the century, an environmental group says in a study released Wednesday.

The report from the Union of Concerned Scientists also predicts that the city's air quality would deteriorate if humans do not scale back greenhouse gas emissions dramatically.

Illinois farmers would suffer from droughts, pests and flooding that would more than outweigh any potential benefits from a longer growing season caused by warmer temperatures. Heat stress in cattle could force the state's dairy industry to migrate north.

"Global warming represents an enormous challenge to Illinois' way of life and its residents' livelihoods," the authors write in conclusion.

More than 50 days a year would top 90 degrees in Chicago by mid-century, the report warns, up from a historical average of 15 per year. The city would average a heat wave per year on par with the city's 1995 scorcher, which authorities blamed for hundreds of deaths. Once every five years, the city would endure a heat wave similar to Europe's in 2003, which the authors project would kill more than 1,000 residents.

By century's end, the report projects, every Chicago summer would be hotter than 1983, the hottest summer on record for the city. Illinois' climate would resemble East Texas today, the report says.

The projections stem from an analysis of climate-modeling projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in a 2007 report.

The report includes two scenarios: one with heat-trapping gas emissions continuing to increase along current trend lines and one where countries take major steps to limit emissions.

Emissions limits would stave off many of the worst effects of warming in the middle and long term, the report concludes. But they would barely affect warming in the next three decades -- including a more than 50 percent increase in summer days topping 90 degrees -- because that warming has been essentially "locked in" by previous emissions.

"What we really have control over," said Melanie Fitzpatrick, a climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, "is our temperatures in the middle and end of the century."

Inauguration day and climate change politics

Inauguration day 2005: 35 °F Mostly cloudy with some sunny breaks.
Northwest wind 14 mph. Around 1″ of snow lay on the ground.
More inauguration day weather history is available here

There is much speculation about the weather on Tuesday, January 20th, which is the inauguration day of president Obama. Particularly it is being conjectured widely on the blogosphere that a colder than normal day might have some chilling effect on climate change thinking in Washington. After all, it is not unlike politicians to grasp onto ancillary topics and use them as the focal point for forming opinions.

For example, as reported here, The last time Dr. Roy Spencer testified before Congress, committee chair Barbara Boxer appeared more interested in discussing Rush Limbaugh than she did in discussing science. That is not necessarily a sensible way to weigh trillion dollar policy decisions.

Here is another example. When Dr. James Hansen testified before Congress in June, 1988, on the topic of global warming, Senator Timothy Wirth took several deliberate steps to make sure that the room was oppressively hot. This excerpt below is from a PBS Frontline interview:

TIMOTHY WIRTH: We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.DEBORAH AMOS: [on camera] Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day? TIMOTHY WIRTH: What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the- when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot.

That is going to be a lot tougher now, after two more decades of unprecedented global warming.

As of Saturday morning, NCEP is forecasting severe cold along the East Coast for the end of the month, and well below normal temperatures for the inauguration of president Obama. Perhaps the chill will freeze out some the early political rhetoric in Washington? Some prominent members of Congress now claim that they can legislate the climate, which requires that they also are able to control volcanoes, ocean circulation patterns, and solar activity.

Here is the NCEP CONUS temperature forecast for now to election day:

Click for a larger image

One wonders though, it the weather patterns were shifted west to east in the anomaly graph below, and we had a warmer than normal inauguration day in Washington, would it provide lawmakers with a personal confirmation bias much like that day in June, 1988?

Thanks to wattsupwiththat

Predicting New Global Temperature Record within Two Years

The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is under the authority of NASA has released their December 2008 temperature data and also the full 2008 annual data.

First, here is their December global anomaly map....

I did not see any of the specific numbers for the month, but I will continue to look..

The year 2008.

The base period from 1951-1980 was used to determine the global temperature anomalies.

--2008 was the coolest year since 2000, which is supported by other methods. (+0.44).

--2008 was the 9th warmest year since records were kept back to 1880. When considering the
margin of uncertainty, GISS is confident that 2008 was somewhere between the 7th and 10th warmest year on record.

--The ten warmest years all occurred from 1997-2008.

GISS states that comparing the 2008 chart below left with the mean 2001-2007 anomalies clearly shows why 2008 was the coolest since 2000. The main differences between the two charts is in the Pacific. Note: the cooling in the Pacific during 2008 and also over North America.

GISS also responds to questions about their prediction from last year which stated that a new global temperature record was likely within the next 2-3 years (now, the next 1-2 years).

According to GISS, there are several factors to consider when making this prediction......

1. El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). History says that a prolonged La Nina is unlikely for 2009/2010 despite the trends over the past few months. The subsurface of the Pacific in their opinion appears recharged for the next El Nino and there is a good chance for an El Nino in 2009 or 2010. Note; There is usually a 3-6 month lag in global temperature response to a change in ENSo conditions.

2. Solar Irradiance. Most solar physicists expect the irradiance to begin to pick up in the next several months after a longer than normal period of low solar output. Even if the irradiance does pick up, the 1-2 year lag in any surface temperature response to the cycle means that solar irradiance will continue to provide a negative anomaly for the next 2-3 years.

3. Volcanic aerosols.

4. Greenhouse gases (GHG's). The latest GHG forcing trend translates into a mean warming rate of ~0.15 Celsius per decade.

Updated prediction from GISS.......It still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance.

Thanks to global-warming.accuweather

Global warming will be a killer for agriculture, UW scientists say

Forget ice melting and sea-level rise. Global warming's most pressing threat may be heat that wilts crops across much of the globe, says a UW scientist.

When searing heat waves blasted Western Europe in 2003, more than 50,000 people perished and harvests of corn, wheat and fruit fell by up to a third.

Imagine those temperatures being the norm over much of the world, and you'll have an idea of what the future is likely to hold for agriculture — and humanity, says a new report from scientists at the University of Washington and Stanford University.

"I'm not worried about Greenland sliding into the sea. I'm not worried about sea levels going up," said UW atmospheric-sciences professor David Battisti. Those changes will take several hundred years to unfold, he said, but the effects on agriculture will begin showing up within the next several decades.

"This is probably the most compelling reason why we need to deal with global warming."

If the buildup of greenhouse-gas emissions isn't halted or slowed, the odds are higher than 90 percent that average growing-season temperatures will be higher than in recorded history across a big swath of the planet by the end of the century, says the analysis published today in the journal Science. The hardest-hit areas will be the tropics and subtropics, which encompass about half the world's population and include Africa, the southern United States, and much of India, China and South America.

"We are headed for a completely out-of-bounds situation for growing food crops in the future," said report co-author Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment.

There is time to adapt to the rising temperatures through development of heat-resistant crops, the scientists say.

High temperatures cause plants like rice, corn and wheat to grow faster but reduce plant fertility and grain production. With average growing-season temperatures expected to rise more than 6 degrees F in many places, crop yields will fall 20 to 40 percent, the report estimates. The effects will be aggravated by increased evaporation and loss of soil moisture.

Even in the United States, where warming caused by greenhouse-gas emissions is projected to increase some crop yields through the middle of this century, harvests will most likely fall by 2100 as the heat intensifies.

But worldwide, the impacts will be felt most keenly by subsistence farmers and the poor, Battisti pointed out.

"You're talking about hundreds of millions of additional people looking for food because they won't be able to find it where they find it now."

France and Italy were able to turn to other nations to fill their food gaps in 2003, but a 1972 drought in the former Soviet Union showed how easily worldwide grain supplies can be disrupted, the report says. After the Soviets secretly began buying vast amounts of wheat, global prices more than tripled.

In a warmer future, there will be fewer places to turn for help when the cupboards are bare, Battisti said. "In a sense, there will be no place to hide from this."

The scientists reached their conclusions by combining climate data with projections from 23 global climate models used by the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Michael Glantz, a political scientist who studies the social impacts of climate and climate change, said the study raises some good points, but that the developing world faces so many immediate problems it's difficult to worry about what will happen in five decades or more.

"When I think about 2100 and climate-change impact on food security, I just glaze over," said Glantz, who directs the Consortium for Capacity Building at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

But Cary Fowler, director of the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Trust, says the report is a wake-up call for the need to develop new heat-resistant crop strains.

"This research shows we're about to enter a whole new game," said Fowler, whose group receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and operates the "doomsday" seed vault on the remote Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.

It can take two decades or more to breed a new crop strain, but investments in agricultural research have been stagnant for the past several decades, Naylor pointed out.

The Gates Foundation is helping fund an effort in Africa to develop hardier crop strains. That work hasn't focused specifically on heat tolerance, said Gary Toenniessen, of the Rockefeller Foundation, a partner in the project. But it is helping developing agricultural-research capacity where it will be needed most in the future.

Spurred partly by Battisti's work, the Global Crop Diversity Trust has launched a program to screen existing seed collections for traits like heat and drought resistance, Fowler said. It's also developing a computerized database to share the information.

"Plants can be adapted to a range of temperatures," Fowler said. "This really is a problem that we can solve."

Global Climate Weirdness Matches Predictions

Deadly floods in Asia, a cyclone in the Middle East, tornadoes in Brooklyn, and extreme temperatures around the globe since the start of the year have borne out warnings made by a key climate change report, an expert with the U.N. weather agency said Tuesday.

In May the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its fourth report, warning that global warming would increase the number of extreme weather events and cause more natural disasters, which will hit the poor hardest.

Global surface temperatures in January — when Europe experienced an unusually mild winter — were the highest since records began. According to data compiled by WMO measurements were 1.89 degrees Celsius (3.4 Fahrenheit) above the 127-year average.

WMO, the Geneva-based agency said April temperatures around the world rose 1.37 degrees Celsius (2.46 Fahrenheit) above the historical average since 1880. Record storms, floods and heat waves have since occurred in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America.


Hundreds have died and thousands have lost their livelihoods in floods since the start of the year in China, South Asia, Mozambique, Sudan and Uruguay, while the period from May to July was the wettest in England and Wales since records began in 1766, WMO said.

It said two heat waves in southeastern Europe in June and July broke previous records, with temperatures in Bulgaria hitting 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) on July 23. Other extreme events this year include rare snowfall in South Africa and Argentina, and the first cyclone ever documented in the Arabian Sea.

Climate scientists had reached a consensus that weather extremes have increased over the past 50 years and that this trend would likely continue.

The most accurate measures of European daily temperatures ever indicate that the length of heat waves on the continent has doubled and the frequency of extremely hot days has nearly tripled in the past century. The new data shows that many previous assessments of daily summer temperature change underestimated heat wave events in western Europe by approximately 30 percent.

The study adds evidence that heat waves, such as the devastating 2003 event in western Europe, are a likely sign of global warming; one that perhaps began as early as the 1950s, when their study showed some of the highest trends in summer mean temperature and summer temperature variance.

In the U.S., about twice as many Atlantic hurricanes form each year on average than a century ago, according to a new statistical analysis of hurricanes and tropical storms in the north Atlantic. The study concludes that warmer sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and altered wind patterns associated with global climate change are fueling much of the increase.

The study, by Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Peter Webster of Georgia Institute of Technology, will be published online July 30 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

"These numbers are a strong indication that climate change is a major factor in the increasing number of Atlantic hurricanes," says Holland.

The authors note that other studies indicate that most of the rise in Atlantic SSTs can be attributed to global warming.

The unusually active hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005 have spurred considerable research into the question of whether more intense tropical cyclones are correlated with natural cycles, global warming, or some other cause. The new study indicates that natural cycles are probably not the entire cause because the increase has happened across the last century rather than oscillating in tandem with a natural cycle.

The study also finds that enhanced observations in recent decades cannot account for all of the increase. To observe storms in the Atlantic more systematically, meteorologists began relying on data from aircraft flights in 1944 and satellites about 1970. The distinct transitions in hurricane activity noted by Holland and Webster occurred around both 1930 and 1995.

New research shows that industrial development in North America between 1850 and 1950 greatly increased the amount of black carbon--commonly known as soot-- that fell on Greenland's glaciers and ice sheets. The soot impacted the ability of the snow and ice to reflect sunlight, which contributed to increased melting and higher temperatures in the region during those years. This discovery may help scientists better understand the impact of human activities on polar climates.