In climate, inherent complexity is the enemy of understanding

If complexity is the enemy of understanding, then it's no wonder that folks are confused by climate change.

The climate is so complex that nobody's going to make sense of it in an hour or a day or even much longer.

Take some of the human-caused things that can affect global temperatures, either pushing them hotter or dialing them cooler. This is from the 2009 Climate Change Science Compendium, produced by the United Nations Environment Programme. You can find it here.

Airliner contrails and more cirrus clouds make it warmer.

More sulphates and other reflective aerosols from coal burning make it cooler.

More black soot (can also come from coal burning) makes it warmer.

The tendency of particles from fossil fuel burning to support cloud formation makes it cooler.

Mineral dust blowing up off cleared land makes it warmer.

Reduced ozone in the upper atmosphere makes it cooler.

Increased methane, such as from cows and landfills, makes it warmer.

Making the land surface more reflective, by clearing, makes it cooler.

Increased nitrogen gas from feedlots and biomass burning makes it warmer.

Increased carbon-dioxide, of course, is a big warmer.

And so forth.

Some of these things have a bigger impact on temperature; some smaller. Some last for days in the atmosphere, some centuries.

It's really complex.

On balance, the report says, the result of human activity from the year 1750 to now promotes more warming than cooling.

There are lots of natural, non-human factors that impact climate, of course. One is the sun, whose output can be calculated.

The report estimates the sun is responsible for about a quarter of the amount of climate warming that humans are responsible for in the last 250 years.

The combined total climate forcing of all calculated human impacts during the period in question was about 1.2 watts per square meter. Solar radiation, which has recovered since there was a lower than average intensity in 1750, is calculated at .3 watts per square meter.

It is painfully easy, in the face of the immense complexity, to grasp at one or two facts and draw conclusions from them, rather than taking in the whole picture.

Easy, and commonly done by folks on both sides of the climate discussion, but wrong.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2009

Angst and lies over climate predictions

Mojib Latif knew that the climate change skeptics wouldn't understand what he was saying, or would misrepresent it.

Sure enough.

Latif, the German ocean circulation and climate modeling expert, recently famously announced that in the long global warming trend, there might be an upcoming limited cooling period.

Climate is cyclical, after all.

In the immediate future, he said, a powerful cool phase in the North Atlantic Oscillation, could temporarily overwhelm the larger warming trend for a few years. The rest of his commentary is important: it's that while his models suggest a possible short-term cooling trend, he fully endorses the larger view that the globe is in a long-term severe warming trend.

Nobody who hates climate change seems to have bothered to read the rest of what Latif had to say. A confident response of climate skeptics has been: See, it's cooling, so we don't have to do anything about climate.

The Vancouver Sun, citing Latif, wrongly headlined: “Scientists pull an about face on global warming.” A lot of other skeptic commentators in various media have also grabbed on to just the convenient half of Latif's comments, while ignoring the rest.

The truth, again, is that Latif, looking at the wider data, continues to be convinced about the long-term warming trend and has not, as the Sun suggested, “started batting for the other side.”

Latif told the UN World Climate Conference in Geneva: "People will say this is global warming disappearing... I am not one of the sceptics,"

The clear-eyed science writer for the New York Times, Andy Revkin, reported on the issue this past week. Revkin called Latif on the phone and asked him about the issue. He suggested that many people simply can't handle the complexity of the climate story.

“People understand what I’m saying, but then basically wind up saying, ‘We don’t believe anything,’” Latif is quoted as saying.

And this post would not be complete without noting that a number of other climate scientists disagree with Latif's short term conclusion, arguing instead that we're looking at more warming in the short term as well as the longer term.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2009

Changing climate? What's it mean to me?

Climate change, shlimate change—what does it mean to me?

Two Hawaii projects during the next couple of months will look directly at the local impacts of climate change: The Blue Line Project and a conference on Kaua'i keyed to local impacts.

(Image: The blue represents how far water extends inland at Waikiki with a three-foot rise in sea levels. Credit: Blue Planet Foundation.)

The first, backed by the Honolulu-based Blue Planet Foundation, will encourage students from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Oct. 24 to use chalk to draw a blue line at the height of the water around Hawai'i if there's a one-meter rise in sea levels.

Schools have only a week to sign up, so if your school is interested, don't waste time. Find details of the project here at http://www.blueplanetfoundation.org/blueline/.

“We chose to illustrate the extent of flooding from a one meter rise in our sea level because that is one clear effect of climate change that could devastate many of our communities within our lifetime,” the project data sheet says.

Its goal, too, is to send a message to the United Nations climate change conference in December in Denmark.

“By having Hawaii's youth take part in the Blue Line Project, our goal is to have Hawaii's message of hope be heard all the way in Copenhagen. Hawai'i will be doing just that as an island community and in its own unique way contribute to making a difference,” said Blue Planet's Francois Rogers, Blue Line Project coordinator.

The second project , a conference from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Nov. 21, will specifically look at climate impacts on the island of Kauai. “Global Climate Change as it will affect Kauai” is sponsored by the Surfrider Foundation, Kauai, UH Sea Grant Program and Kauai Community College.

“We will attempt to get an understanding of the cumulative effects of various aspects of climate change on the future of Kauai. Immediately after the presentations we will have a forum and speakers will answer questions from the audience and will be able to address 'What can we do about it.' Another workshop, specifically focused on mitigating climate change effects and actually slowing the rate of change, is planned for next year,” said organizer Carl Berg.

Speakers from across Hawai'i will review rainfall and drought, stream flow and groundwater, sea level rise, reef changes, and other issues. There is no fee, but registration is required. For information reach Berg at 639-2968 or cberg@pixi.com.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2009

Mosquitoes, urban man and disease: a new look

Humans are a peripatetic bunch, and that creates real problems for controlling diseases--particularly mosquito-borne diseases like dengue.

When an infected person travels, say, from home to a workplace on the other side of the island, a mosquito feeding at the new location suddenly introduces the disease there.

(Image: The mosquito Aedes aegypti feeding. This mosquito, sometimes called the Yellow Fever Mosquito is implicated in dengue fever as well. It is a day-biting mosquito present in Hawai'i, but other mosquito species can also spread such diseases. Credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

“Even a short visit to an infected patch of mosquitos, say at a lunch venue or open market, may be enough to keep the virus circulating,” said University of Hawai'i researcher Durrell D. Kapan.

And when another worker gets bit, and goes to home to a different part of the island, the disease leapfrogs once more.

Researchers from the University of Hawai'i and elsewhere reviewed these problems in a paper, Man Bites Mosquito: Understanding the Contribution of Human Movement to Vector-Borne Disease Dynamics.

The authors are Kapan, of the Center for Conservation and Research Training, Pacific Biosciences Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, and mathematician Ben Adams, of the Department of Biology, Kyushu University, in Fukuoka, Japan, and the University of Bath in the United Kingdom. The paper is available at http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0006763

Dengue, also known as break-bone fever for the kind of pain it inflicts, has been a problem in Hawai'i, and is even more prevalent elsewhere in the Pacific. Between 50 million and 100 million people are infected each year.

“Even a small number of infected people who remain active can move a virus such as dengue between different parts of the community, where it will be picked up by mosquitos and, after an incubation period, be passed on to another unsuspecting passerby,” Kapan said in a University of Hawai'i news release.

So how do you deal with a leapfrogging virus in a modern commuting population?

“Our research examined whether the standard practice of eliminating mosquito vectors at residences would be sufficient to control dengue if other areas in the community still had several large patches of mosquitos that could become infected by commuters,” Kapan said.

The authors sought out the support of UH Mānoa’s Pacific Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Research Center of Biomedical Research Excellence program (http://www.hawaii.edu/pceidr/), and UH Mānoa’s National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Research Traineeship (IGERT) in Ecology, Conservation and Pathogen Biology (http://www2.jabsom.hawaii.edu/igert/).

Their conclusion was that traditional vector control programs may not be sufficient, and new approaches are needed.

“Our primary objective with this paper is to prompt researchers, public health practitioners and others concerned with vector control to ...consider novel ways to control community transmission of vector-borne diseases that account for great morbidity and mortality worldwide,” says Kapan.

An example of the problem: “Singapore, for example, has for many years implemented a vigorous program of domestic vector source reduction and insecticide spraying in a full GIS-enabled public health protection effort. Nevertheless dengue continues to circulate and, after a brief period of respite, outbreaks are becoming increasingly severe,” their paper says.

In someways, the authors suggest, it is the humans who are the vectors, hauling the disease from one mosquito population to another.

“When someone gets infected we need to look at their recent travel patterns to figure out from which group of mosquitoes they got the disease, and to which groups they may have passed it on,” Adams said.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2009

A hot August, on average, but not everywhere

This summer's global temperatures were warm, in spite of what you may hear on the news.

“The world’s ocean surface temperature was the warmest for any August on record, and the warmest on record averaged for any June-August,” NOAA reported this week.

(Image: Global climate anomalies for August 2009, compared to a baseline average global temperature for August from 1961-1990. Where it's blue, temperatures were cooler than normal; where red, warmer. Source: NOAA)

It's not what you may have heard, because climate isn't consistent around the globe, and in fact, this summer, it was pretty cool in a few places. Notably, central North America, Eastern Europe and the Japan area.

There has been a fair amount of press on the comparatively cool summer in much of the U.S. Mainland.

But trying to assert global conditions from regional patterns is as difficult as a blind man trying to describe an elephant when he can only touch the tail.

Other areas of the world were way hotter than usual. Australia is the prime example. But also west Greenland, Peru, western Europe.

Hawai'i did not appear to have either exceedingly hot nor exceedingly cold temperature anomalies.

But ocean temperatures globally were a full degree Fahrenheit warmer than the 20^th century average for the same time of the year, NOAA said.

And the summer warming is part of a warm trend that appears to be ready to cover the whole year, the NOAA report said: “For the year to date, the combined global land and ocean surface temperature of 58.3 degrees F tied with 2003 for the fifth-warmest January-August period on record. This value is 0.99 degree F above the 20th century average.”

Do these data points prove anything with regard to the larger issue of climate change? No. It's a warm year. Doesn't prove anything by itself, although as part of a larger trend, it can suggest things. But that's another story for another time.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2009