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New York Times Publishes a Searing Drought Story, But Completely Misses the Climate Change Angle (Climate Central)

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Published: July 12th, 2011, Last Updated: July 13th, 2011
By Andrew Freedman

In Monday’s New York Times, Kim Severson and Kirk Johnson wrote an eloquent story on the intense drought that is maintaining a tight grip on a broad swath of America’s southern tier, from Arizona to Florida. Reporting from Georgia, Severson and Johnson detailed the plight of farmers struggling to make ends meet as the parched soil makes it nearly impossible for them to grow crops and feed livestock.

Monday’s story from the New York Times on drought.

The piece is a great example of how emotionally moving storytelling from a local perspective can convey the consequences of broad issues and trends, in this case, a major drought that has enveloped 14 states. In that sense, it served Times readers extraordinarily well.

However, when it came to providing readers with a thorough understanding of the drought’s causes and aggravating factors, Severson and Johnson left out any mention of the elephant in the room — global climate change, and pinned the entire drought on one factor, La Niña. For this, it was overly simplistic, and even just downright inaccurate.

Here’s how the story framed the drought’s causes:

From a meteorological standpoint, the answer is fairly simple. “A strong La Niña shut off the southern pipeline of moisture,” said David Miskus, who monitors drought for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The La Niña “lone gunman” theory is problematic from a scientific standpoint. Just last week, Marty Hoerling, the federal government’s top researcher tasked with examining how climate change may be influencing extreme weather and climate events, told reporters that “we cannot reconcile it [the drought] with just the La Niña impact alone, at least not at this time.”

Instead, the causal factors are more nuanced than that, and they do include global warming, since it is changing the background conditions in which such extreme events occur.

During a press conference last week from a drought management meeting in the parched city of Austin, Texas, Hoerling made clear that climate change is already increasing average temperatures across the drought region, and is expected to lead to more frequent and intense droughts in the Southwest. Other research indicates the trend towards a drier Southwest is already taking place. “There are recent regional tendencies toward more severe droughts in the southwestern United States, parts of Canada and Alaska, and Mexico,” stated a 2008 report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

As is the case with any extreme weather or climate event now, one cannot truly separate climate change from the mix, considering that droughts, floods, and other extreme events now occur in an environment that has been profoundly altered by human emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. This doesn’t mean that climate change is causing all of these extreme events, but it does mean that climate change may be increasing the likelihood that some types of events will occur, and may be changing the characteristics of some extreme events, such as by making heat waves more intense.

The fact that the Times story detailed both the drought and the record heat accompanying it, yet left out any mention of climate change, was a particularly puzzling error of omission. Hoerling, for one, pointed to the extreme heat seen during this drought as a possible sign of things to come, as climate change helps produce dangerous combinations of heat and drought.

“We haven’t necessarily dealt with drought and heat at the same time in such a persistent way, and that’s a new condition,” Hoerling said, noting that higher temperatures only hasten the drying of soils.

Many ponds in Texas, such as this one in Rusk County, were nearly dry by late June 2011. Credit: agrilifetoday/flickr.

Texas had its warmest June on record, for example, and on June 26th, Amarillo, Texas recorded its warmest temperature on record for any month, at 111°F. According to the Weather Channel, parts of Oklahoma and Texas have already exceeded their yearly average number of days at or above 100 degrees, including Oklahoma City, Dallas, and Austin. The heat is related to the drought, because when soil moisture is so low, more of the sun’s energy goes towards heating the air directly.

It’s unfortunate that the Times story, which was a searing portrayal of how a drought can impact communities that are already down on their luck due to economic troubles, did not include at least some discussion on climate change. As I’ve shown here, and climate blogger Joe Romm has also pointed out, there was sufficient evidence to justify raising the climate change topic in that story, and many others like it. After all, if the media doesn’t make an effort to evaluate the evidence on the links between extreme weather and climate change, then how can we expect the public to understand how global warming may affect their lives?

At Climate Central, our scientists are working to better understand whether and how climate change is increasing the likelihood of certain extreme weather events, such as heat waves, while at the same time, our journalists are covering the Southern drought and wildfire situation with the goal of making sure our readers understand what scientific studies show about global warming and extreme events.

This is not an easy task, but it need not be such a lonely one.

Update, July 13: The Times published an editorial on the drought today, which also blames the drought squarely on La Niña-related weather patterns, and makes no mention of climate change impacts or projections.

* * *

EDITORIAL (New York Times)
Suffering in the Parched South
Published: July 12, 2011

Right now, the official drought map of the United States looks as if it has been set on fire and scorched at the bottom edge. Scorched is how much of the Southeast and Southwest feel, in the midst of a drought that is the most extreme since the 1950s and possibly since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The government has classified much of this drought as D4, which means exceptional. The outlook through late September shows possible improvement in some places, but in most of Texas, Oklahoma, southern Arkansas, and northern Louisiana and Mississippi the drought is expected to worsen.

Dry conditions began last year and have only intensified as temperatures rose above 100 in many areas. Rain gauges have been empty for months, causing a region-wide search for new underground sources of water as streams and lakes dry up. The drought is produced by a pattern of cooling in the Pacific called La Niña. A cooler ocean means less moisture in the atmosphere, which shuts down the storms shuttling east across the region.

Droughts are measured in dollars as well as degrees. The prospects for cattle and wheat, corn and cotton crops across the South are dire. There is no way yet to estimate the ultimate cost of this drought because there is no realistic estimate of when it will end. Farmers have been using crop insurance payments, and federal relief is available in disaster areas, including much of Texas. But the only real relief will be the end of the dry, hot winds and the beginning of long, settled rains.

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Drought Spreads Pain From Florida to Arizona

Grant Blankenship for The New York Times. Buster Haddock, an agricultural scientist at the University of Georgia, in a field where cotton never had the chance to grow.

By KIM SEVERSON and KIRK JOHNSON
Published: July 11, 2011

COLQUITT, Ga. — The heat and the drought are so bad in this southwest corner of Georgia that hogs can barely eat. Corn, a lucrative crop with a notorious thirst, is burning up in fields. Cotton plants are too weak to punch through soil so dry it might as well be pavement.

Waiting for Rain

Dangerously Dry – Nearly a fifth of the contiguous United States has been faced with the worst drought in recent years.

The Dry Season

OKLAHOMA A simple, if plaintive, message from the residents of Hough, in the panhandle, late last month. Shawn Yorks/The Guymon Daily Herald, via Associated Press

Farmers with the money and equipment to irrigate are running wells dry in the unseasonably early and particularly brutal national drought that some say could rival the Dust Bowl days.

“It’s horrible so far,” said Mike Newberry, a Georgia farmer who is trying grow cotton, corn and peanuts on a thousand acres. “There is no description for what we’ve been through since we started planting corn in March.”

The pain has spread across 14 states, from Florida, where severe water restrictions are in place, to Arizona, where ranchers could be forced to sell off entire herds of cattle because they simply cannot feed them.

In Texas, where the drought is the worst, virtually no part of the state has been untouched. City dwellers and ranchers have been tormented by excessive heat and high winds. In the Southwest, wildfires are chewing through millions of acres.

Last month, the United States Department of Agriculture designated all 254 counties in Texas natural disaster areas, qualifying them for varying levels of federal relief. More than 30 percent of the state’s wheat fields might be lost, adding pressure to a crop in short supply globally.

Even if weather patterns shift and relief-giving rain comes, losses will surely head past $3 billion in Texas alone, state agricultural officials said.

Most troubling is that the drought, which could go down as one of the nation’s worst, has come on extra hot and extra early. It has its roots in 2010 and continued through the winter. The five months from this February to June, for example, were so dry that they shattered a Texas record set in 1917, said Don Conlee, the acting state climatologist.

Oklahoma has had only 28 percent of its normal summer rainfall, and the heat has blasted past 90 degrees for a month.

“We’ve had a two- or three-week start on what is likely to be a disastrous summer,” said Kevin Kloesel, director of the Oklahoma Climatological Survey.

The question, of course, becomes why. In a spring and summer in which weather news has been dominated by epic floods and tornadoes, it is hard to imagine that more than a quarter of the country is facing an equally daunting but very different kind of natural disaster.

From a meteorological standpoint, the answer is fairly simple. “A strong La Niña shut off the southern pipeline of moisture,” said David Miskus, who monitors drought for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The weather pattern called La Niña is an abnormal cooling of Pacific waters. It usually follows El Niño, which is an abnormal warming of those same waters.

Although a new forecast from the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center suggests that this dangerous weather pattern could revive in the fall, many in the parched regions find themselves in the unlikely position of hoping for a season of heavy tropical storms in the Southeast and drenching monsoons in the Southwest.

Climatologists say the great drought of 2011 is starting to look a lot like the one that hit the nation in the early to mid-1950s. That, too, dried a broad part of the southern tier of states into leather and remains a record breaker.

But this time, things are different in the drought belt. With states and towns short on cash and unemployment still high, the stress on the land and the people who rely on it for a living is being amplified by political and economic forces, state and local officials say. As a result, this drought is likely to have the cultural impact of the great 1930s drought, which hammered an already weakened nation.

“In the ’30s, you had the Depression and everything that happened with that, and drought on top,” said Donald A. Wilhite, director of the school of natural resources at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and former director of the National Drought Mitigation Center. “The combination of those two things was devastating.”

Although today’s economy is not as bad, many Americans ground down by prolonged economic insecurity have little wiggle room to handle the effects of a prolonged drought. Government agencies are in the same boat.

“Because we overspent, the Legislature overspent, we’ve been cut back and then the drought comes along and we don’t have the resources and federal government doesn’t, and so we just tighten our belt and go on,” said Donald Butler, the director of the Arizona Department of Agriculture.

The drought is having some odd effects, economically and otherwise.

“One of the biggest impacts of the drought is going to be the shrinking of the cattle herd in the United States,” said Bruce A. Babcock, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University in Ames. And that will have a paradoxical but profound impact on the price of a steak.

Ranchers whose grass was killed by drought cannot afford to sustain cattle with hay or other feed, which is also climbing in price. Their response will most likely be to send animals to slaughter early. That glut of beef would lower prices temporarily.

But America’s cattle supply will ultimately be lower at a time when the global supply is already low, potentially resulting in much higher prices in the future.

There are other problems. Fishing tournaments have been canceled in Florida and Mississippi, just two of the states where low water levels have kept recreational users from lakes and rivers. In Texas, some cities are experiencing blackouts because airborne deposits of salt and chemicals are building up on power lines, triggering surges that shut down the system. In times of normal weather, rain usually washes away the environmental buildup. Instead, power company crews in cities like Houston are being dispatched to spray electrical lines.

In this corner of Georgia, where temperatures have been over 100 and rainfall has been off by more than half, fish and wildlife officials are worried over the health of the shinyrayed pocketbook and the oval pigtoe mussels, both freshwater species on the endangered species list.

The mussels live in Spring Creek, which is dangerously low and borders Terry Pickle’s 2,000-acre farm here. He pulls his irrigation from wells that tie into the water system of which Spring Creek is a part.

Whether nature or agriculture is to blame remains a debate in a state that for 20 years has been embroiled in a water war with Alabama and Florida. Meanwhile, Colquitt has allowed the state to drill a special well to pump water back into the creek to save the mussels from extinction.

Most farmers here are much more worried about the crops than the mussels. With cotton and corn prices high, they had high hopes for the season. But many have had to replant fields several times to get even one crop to survive. Others, like Mr. Pickle, have relied on irrigation so expensive that it threatens to eat into any profits.

The water is free, but the system used to get it from the ground runs on diesel fuel. His bill for May and June was an unheard of $88,442.

Thousands of small stories like that will all contribute to the ultimate financial impact of the drought, which will not be known until it is over. And no one knows when that will be.

The United States Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency has already provided over $75 million in assistance to ranchers nationwide, with most of it going to Florida, New Mexico and Texas. An additional $62 million in crop insurance indemnities have already been provided to help other producers.

Economists say that adding up the effects of drought is far more complicated than, say, those of a hurricane or tornado, which destroy structures that have set values. With drought, a shattered wheat or corn crop is a loss to one farmer, and it has a specific price tag. But all those individual losses punch a hole in the food supply and drive prices up. That is good news for a farmer who manages to get a crop in. The final net costs down the line are thus dispersed, and mostly passed along.

That means grocery shoppers will feel the effects of the drought at the dinner table, where the cost of staples like meat and bread will most likely rise, said Michael J. Roberts, an associate professor of agricultural and resource economics at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C. “The biggest losers are consumers,” he said.

Kim Severson reported from Colquitt, Ga., and Kirk Johnson from Denver. Dan Frosch contributed reporting from Denver.

Our Extreme Future: Predicting and Coping with the Effects of a Changing Climate (Scientific American)

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Adapting to extreme weather calls for a combination of restoring wetland and building drains and sewers that can handle the water. But leaders and the public are slow to catch on. Final part of a three-part series

By John Carey | Thursday, June 30, 2011 | 97

Image: Fikret Onal/Flickr

Editor’s note: This article is the last of a three-part series by John Carey. Part 1, “Storm Warning: Extreme Weather Is a Product of Climate Change,” was posted on June 28. Part 2, “Global Warming and the Science of Extreme Weather,” was posted on June 29.

Extreme weather events have become both more common and more intense. And increasingly, scientists have been able to pin at least part of the blame on humankind’s alteration of the climate. What’s more, the growing success of this nascent science of climate attribution (finding the telltale fingerprints of climate change in extreme events) means that researchers have more confidence in their climate models—which predict that the future will be even more extreme.

Are we prepared for this future? Not yet. Indeed, the trend is in the other direction, especially in Washington, D.C., where a number of members of Congress even argue that climate change itself is a hoax.

Scientists hope that rigorously identifying climate change’s contribution to individual extreme events can indeed wake people up to the threat. As the research advances, it should be possible to say that two extra inches (five centimeters) of rain poured down in a Midwestern storm because of greenhouse gases, or that a California heat wave was 10 times more likely to occur thanks to humans’ impacts on climate. So researchers have set up rapid response teams to assess climate change’s contribution to extreme events while the events are still fresh in people’s minds. In addition, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is preparing a special report on extreme events and disasters, due out by the end of 2011. “It is important for us emphasize that climate change and its impacts are not off in the future, but are here and now,” explained Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, during a briefing at United Nations climate talks in Cancún last December.

The message is beginning to sink in. The Russian government, for instance, used to doubt the existence of climate change, or argue that it might be beneficial for Russia. But now, government officials have realized that global warming will not bring a gradual and benign increase in temperatures. Instead, they’re likely to see more crippling heat waves. As Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told the Security Council of the Russian Federation last summer: “Everyone is talking about climate change now. Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions.”

Doubts persist despite evidence

Among the U.S. public, the feeling is different. Opinion pollsand anecdotal reports show that most Americans do not perceive a threat from climate change. And a sizable number of Americans, including many newly elected members of Congress, do not even believe that climate change exists. Extreme weather? Just part of nature, they say. After all, disastrous floods and droughts go back to the days of Noah and Moses. Why should today’s disasters be any different? Was the July 23, 2010, storm that spawned Les Scott’s record hailstone evidence of a changing climate, for instance? “Not really,” Scott says. “It was just another thunderstorm. We get awful bad blizzards that are a lot worse.”

And yes, 22 of Maryland’s 23 counties were declared natural disaster areas after record-setting heat and drought in 2010. “It was the worst corn crop I ever had,” says fourth-generation farmer Earl “Buddy” Hance. But was it a harbinger of a more worrisome future? Probably not, says Hance, the state’s secretary of agriculture. “As farmers we are skeptical, and we need to see a little more. And if it does turn out to be climate change, farmers would adapt.” By then, adaptation could be really difficult, frets Minnesota organic farmer Jack Hedin, whose efforts to raise the alarm are “falling on deaf ears,” he laments.

Many scientists share Hedin’s worry. “The real honest message is that while there is debate about how much extreme weather climate change is inducing now, there is very little debate about its effect in the future,” says Michael Wehner, staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and member of the lead author teams of the interagency U.S. Climate Change Science Program’s Synthesis and Assessment reports on climate extremes. For instance, climate models predict that by 2050 Russia will have warmed up so much that every summer will be as warm as the disastrous heat wave it just experienced, says Richard Seager of Columbia University’s Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory. In other words, many of today’s extremes will become tomorrow’s everyday reality. “Climate change will throw some significant hardballs at us,” says Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. “There will be a lot of surprises that we are not adapted to.”

A dusty future

One of the clearest pictures of this future is emerging for the U.S. Southwest and a similar meteorological zone that stretches across Italy, Greece and Turkey. Work by Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Seager and others predicts that these regions will get hotter and drier—and, perhaps more important, shows that the change has already begun. “The signal of a human influence on climate pops up in 1985, then marches on getting strong and stronger,” Barnett says. By the middle of the 21st century, the models predict, the climate will be as dry as the seven-year long Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s or the damaging 1950s drought centered in California and Mexico, Seager says: “In the future the drought won’t last just seven years. It will be the new norm.”

That spells trouble. In the Southwest the main worry is water—water that makes cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas possible and that irrigates the enormously productive farms of California’s Central Valley. Supplies are already tight. During the current 11-year dry spell, the demand for water from the vast Colorado River system, which provides water to 30 million people and irrigates four million acres (1.6 million hectares) of cropland, has exceeded the supply. The result: water levels in the giant Lake Mead reservoir dropped to a record low in October (before climbing one foot, or 30 centimeters, after torrential winter rains in California reduced the demand for Colorado River water). Climate change will just make the problem worse. “The challenge will be great,” says Terry Fulp, deputy regional director of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado Region. “I rank climate change as probably my largest concern. When I’m out on my boat on Lake Mead, it’s on my mind all the time.”

The Southwest is just a snapshot of the challenges ahead. Imagine the potential peril to regions around the world, scientists say. “Our civilization is based on a stable base climate—it doesn’t take very much change to raise hell,” Scripps’s Barnett says. And given the lag in the planet’s response to the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, many of these changes are coming whether we like them or not. “It’s sort of like that Kung Fu guy who said, ‘I’m going to kick your head off now, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it,'” Barnett says.

Grassroots action

Although efforts to fight climate change are now stalled in Washington, many regions do see the threat and are taking action both to adapt to the future changes and to try to limit the amount of global warming itself. The Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado Region office, for instance, has developed a plan to make “manageable” cuts in the amounts of water that the river system supplies, which Fulp hopes will be enough to get the region through the next 15 years. In Canada, after experiencing eight extreme storms (of more than one-in-25-year intensity) between 1986 and 2006, Toronto has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade its sewer and storm water system for handling deluges. “Improved storm drains are the cornerstone of our climate adaptation policy,” explains Michael D’Andrea, Toronto’s director of water infrastructure management.

In Iowa, even without admitting that climate change is real, farmers are acting as if it is, spending millions of dollars to alter their practices. They are adding tile drainage to their fields to cope with increased floods, buying bigger machinery to move more quickly because their planting window has become shorter, planting a month earlier than they did 50 years ago, and sowing twice as many corn plants per acre to exploit the additional moisture, says Gene Takle, professor of meteorology at Iowa State University in Ames. “Iowa’s floods are in your face—and in your basement—evidence that the climate has changed, and the farmers are adapting,” he says.

Local officials have seen the connection, too. After the huge floods of 2008, the Iowa town of Cedar Falls passed an ordinance requiring that anyone who lives in the 500-year flood plain must have flood insurance—up from the previous 200-year flood requirement. State Sen. Robert Hogg wants to make the policy statewide. He also is pushing to restore wetlands that can help soak up floodwaters before they devastate cities. “Wetland restoration costs money, but it’s cheaper than rebuilding Cedar Rapids,” he says. “I like to say that dealing with climate change is not going to require the greatest sacrifices, but it is going to require the greatest foresight Americans have ever had.”

Right now, that foresight is more myopia, many scientists worry. So when and how will people finally understand that far more is needed? It may require more flooded basements, more searing heat waves, more water shortages or crop failures, more devastating hurricanes or other examples of the increases in extreme weather that climate change will bring. “I don’t want to root for bad things to happen, but that’s what it will take,” says one government scientist who asked not to be identified. Or as Nashville resident Rich Hays says about his own experience with the May 2010 deluge: “The flood was definitely a wake-up call. The question is: How many wake-up calls do we need?”

Reporting for this story was funded by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

Global Warming and the Science of Extreme Weather (Scientific American)

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How rising temperatures change weather and produce fiercer, more frequent storms. Second of a three-part series

By John Carey | Wednesday, June 29, 2011 | 46

HURRICANE KATRINA battered New Orleans in 2005. Image: NOAA

Editor’s note: This article is the second of a three-part series by John Carey. Part 1, posted on June 28, is “Storm Warning: Extreme Weather Is a Product of Climate Change”.

Extreme floods, prolonged droughts, searing heat waves, massive rainstorms and the like don’t just seem like they’ve become the new normal in the last few years—they have become more common, according to data collected by reinsurance company Munich Re (see Part 1 of this series). But has this increase resulted from human-caused climate change or just from natural climatic variations? After all, recorded floods and droughts go back to the earliest days of mankind, before coal, oil and natural gas made the modern industrial world possible.

Until recently scientists had only been able to say that more extreme weather is “consistent” with climate change caused by greenhouse gases that humans are emitting into the atmosphere. Now, however, they can begin to say that the odds of having extreme weather have increased because of human-caused atmospheric changes—and that many individual events would not have happened in the same way without global warming. The reason: The signal of climate change is finally emerging from the “noise”—the huge amount of natural variability in weather.

Scientists compare the normal variation in weather with rolls of the dice. Adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere loads the dice, increasing odds of such extreme weather events. It’s not just that the weather dice are altered, however. As Steve Sherwood, co-director of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Australia, puts it, “it is more like painting an extra spot on each face of one of the dice, so that it goes from 2 to 7 instead of 1 to 6. This increases the odds of rolling 11 or 12, but also makes it possible to roll 13.”

Why? Basic physics is at work: The planet has already warmed roughly 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial times, thanks to CO2and other greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere. And for every 1-degree C (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in temperature, the amount of moisture that the atmosphere can contain rises by 7 percent, explains Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the U.K. Met Office’s Hadley Center for Climate Change. “That’s quite dramatic,” he says. In some places, the increase has been much larger. Data gathered by Gene Takle, professor of meteorology at Iowa State University in Ames, show a 13 percent rise in summer moisture over the past 50 years in the state capital, Des Moines.

The physics of too much rain

The increased moisture in the atmosphere inevitably means more rain. That’s obvious. But not just any kind of rain, the climate models predict. Because of the large-scale energy balance of the planet, “the upshot is that overall rainfall increases only 2 to 3 percent per degree of warming, whereas extreme rainfall increases 6 to 7 percent,” Stott says. The reason again comes from physics. Rain happens when the atmosphere cools enough for water vapor to condense into liquid. “However, because of the increasing amount of greenhouse gases in the troposphere, the radiative cooling is less efficient, as less radiation can escape to space,” Stott explains. “Therefore the global precipitation increases less, at about 2 to 3 percent per degree of warming.” But because of the extra moisture, when precipitation does occur (in both rain and snow), it’s more likely to be in bigger events.

Iowa is one of many places that fits the pattern. Takle documented a three- to seven-fold increase in high rainfall events in the state, including the 500-year Mississippi River flood in 1993, the 2008 Cedar Rapids flood as well as the 500-year event in 2010 in Ames, which inundated the Hilton Coliseum basketball court in eight feet (2.5 meters) of water . “We can’t say with confidence that the 2010 Ames flood was caused by climate change, but we can say that the dice are loaded to bring more of these events,” Takle says.

And more events seem to be in the news every month, from unprecedented floods in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to massive snowstorms that crippled the U.S. Northeast in early 2011, to the November 2010 to January 2011 torrents in Australia that flooded an area the size of Germany and France . This “disaster of biblical proportions,” as local Australian officials called it, even caused global economic shock waves: The flooding of the country’s enormously productive coal mines sent world coal prices soaring.

More stormy weather

More moisture and energy in the atmosphere, along with warmer ocean temperatures also mean more intense hurricanes, many scientists say. In fact, 2010 was the first year in decades in which two simultaneous category 4 hurricanes, Igor and Julia, formed in the Atlantic Ocean. In addition, the changed conditions bring an increased likelihood of more powerful thunderstorms with violent updrafts, like a July 23, 2010, tempest in Vivian, S.D., that produced hailstones that punched softball-size holes through roofs—and created a behemoth ball of ice measured at a U.S. record 8 inches (20 centimeters) in diameter even after it had partially melted. “I’ve never seen a storm like that before—and hope I’ll never go through anything like it,” says Les Scott, the Vivian farmer and rancher who found the hailstone .

Warming the planet alters large-scale circulation patterns as well. Scientists know that the sun heats moist air at the equator, causing the air to rise. As it rises, the air cools and sheds most of its moisture as tropical rain. Once six to 10 miles (9.5 to 16 kilometers) aloft, the now dry air travels toward the poles, descending when it reaches the subtropics, normally at the latitude of the Baja California peninsula. This circulation pattern, known as a Hadley cell, contributes to desertification, trade winds and the jet stream.

On a warmer planet, however, the dry air will travel farther north and south from the equator before it descends, climate models predict, making areas like the U.S. Southwest and the Mediterranean even drier. Such an expanded Hadley cell would also divert storms farther north. Are the models right? Richard Seager of Columbia University’s Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory has been looking for a climate change–induced drying trend in the Southwest, “and there seems to be some tentative evidence that it is beginning to happen,” he says. “It gives us confidence in the models.” In fact, other studies show that the Hadley cells have not only expanded, they’ve expanded more than the models predicted.

Such a change in atmospheric circulation could explain both the current 11-year drought in the Southwest and Minnesota’s status as the number one U.S. state for tornadoes last year. On October 26, 2010, the Minneapolis area even experienced record low pressure in what Paul Douglas, founder and CEO of WeatherNation in Minnesota, dubbed a “landicane”—a hurricanelike storm that swept across the country. “I thought the windows of my home would blow in,” Douglas recalls. “I’ve chased tornados and flown into hurricanes but never experienced anything like this before.” Yet it makes sense in the context of climate change, he adds. “Every day, every week, another piece of the puzzle falls into place,” he says. “More extreme weather seems to have become the rule, not just in the U.S. but in Europe and Asia.”

The rise of climate attribution

Is humankind really responsible? That’s where the burgeoning field of climate attribution, pioneered by Hadley’s Peter Stott and other scientists, comes in. The idea is to look for trends in the temperature or precipitation data that provide evidence of overall changes in climate. When those trends exist, it then becomes possible to calculate how much climate change has contributed to extreme events. Or in more technical terms, the probability of a particular temperature or rainfall amount is shaped roughly like a bell curve. A change in climate shifts the whole curve. That, in turn, increases the likelihood of experiencing the more extreme weather at the tail end of the bell curve. Whereas day-to-day weather remains enormously variable, the underlying human-caused shift in climate increases the power and number of the events at the extreme. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Deke Arndt puts it more colorfully: “Weather throws the punches, but climate trains the boxer,” he says. By charting the overall shift, then, it’s possible to calculate the increased chances of extreme events due to global warming.

This idea was already in the air in 2003 when Stott traveled though the worst heat wave in recorded European history on a wedding anniversary trip to Italy and Switzerland. One of the striking consequences he noticed was that the Swiss mountains were missing their usual melodious tinkling of cowbells. “There was no water in the mountains, and the farmers had to take all their cows down in the valley,” he says. He decided to see if he could pin part of the blame on climate change after he returned to his office in Exeter, England. “I didn’t expect to get a positive result,” he says

But he did. In fact, the signal of a warming climate was quite clear in Europe, even using data up to only 2000. In a landmark paper in Nature Stott and colleagues concluded that the chances of a heat wave like the 2003 event have more than doubled because of climate change. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Data collected since then show that the odds are at least four times higher compared with pre-industrial days. “We are very aware of the risks of misattribution,” Stott says. “We don’t want to point to specific events and say that they are part of climate change when they really are due to natural variability. But for some events, like the 2003 heat wave, we have the robust evidence to back it up.”

Case in point: Hurricane Katrina

Another event with a clear global warming component, says Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., was Hurricane Katrina. Trenberth calculated that the combination of overall planetary warming, elevated moisture in the atmosphere, and higher sea-surface temperatures meant that “4 to 6 percent of the precipitation—an extra inch [2.5 centimeters] of rain—in Katrina was due to global warming,” he says. “That may not sound like much, but it could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back or causes a levee to fail.” It was also a very conservative estimate. “The extra heat produced as moisture condenses can invigorate a storm, and at a certain point, the storm just takes off,” he says. “That would certainly apply to Nashville.” So climate change’s contribution to Katrina could have been twice as high as his calculations show, he says. Add in higher winds to the extra energy, and it is easy to see how storms can become more damaging.

This science of attribution is not without controversies. Another case in point: the 2010 Russian heat wave, which wiped out one quarter of the nation’s wheat crop and darkened the skies of Moscow with smoke from fires. The actual meteorological cause is not in doubt. “There was a blocking of the atmospheric circulation,” explains Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, also in Boulder. “The jet stream shifted north, bringing a longer period of high pressure and stagnant weather conditions.” But what caused the blocking? Hoerling looked for an underlying long-term temperature trend in western Russia that might have increased the odds of a heat wave, as Stott had done for the 2003 European event. He found nothing. “The best explanation is a rogue black swan—something that came out of the blue,” he says.

Wrong, retorts NCAR’s Trenberth. He sees a clear expansion of the hot, dry Mediterranean climate into western Russia that is consistent with climate change predictions—and that also intensified the Pakistan monsoon. “I completely repudiate Marty—and it doesn’t help to have him saying you can’t attribute the heat wave to climate change,” he says. “What we can say is that, as with Katrina, this would not have happened the same way without global warming.”

Yet even this dispute is smaller than it first appears. What is not in doubt is that the Russian heat wave is a portent—a glimpse of the future predicted by climate models. Even Hoerling sees it as a preview of coming natural disasters. By 2080, such events are expected to happen, on average, once every five years, he says: “It’s a good wake-up call. This type of phenomenon will become radically more common.”

Storm Warnings: Extreme Weather Is a Product of Climate Change (Scientific American)

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More violent and frequent storms, once merely a prediction of climate models, are now a matter of observation. Part 1 of a three-part series

By John Carey | Tuesday, June 28, 2011 | 130

DROWNING: The Souris River overflowed levees in Minot, N.D., as seen here on June 23. Image: Patrick Moes/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

In North Dakota the waters kept rising. Swollen by more than a month of record rains in Saskatchewan, the Souris River topped its all time record high, set back in 1881. The floodwaters poured into Minot, North Dakota’s fourth-largest city, and spread across thousands of acres of farms and forests. More than 12,000 people were forced to evacuate. Many lost their homes to the floodwaters.

Yet the disaster unfolding in North Dakota might be bringing even bigger headlines if such extreme events hadn’t suddenly seemed more common. In this year alone massive blizzards have struck the U.S. Northeast, tornadoes have ripped through the nation, mighty rivers like the Mississippi and Missouri have flowed over their banks, and floodwaters have covered huge swaths of Australia as well as displaced more than five million people in China and devastated Colombia. And this year’s natural disasters follow on the heels of a staggering litany of extreme weather in 2010, from record floods in Nashville, Tenn., and Pakistan, to Russia’s crippling heat wave.

These patterns have caught the attention of scientists at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). They’ve been following the recent deluges’ stunning radar pictures and growing rainfall totals with concern and intense interest. Normally, floods of the magnitude now being seen in North Dakota and elsewhere around the world are expected to happen only once in 100 years. But one of the predictions of climate change models is that extreme weather—floods, heat waves, droughts, even blizzards—will become far more common. “Big rain events and higher overnight lows are two things we would expect with [a] warming world,” says Deke Arndt, chief of the center’s Climate Monitoring Branch. Arndt’s group had already documented a stunning rise in overnight low temperatures across the U.S. So are the floods and spate of other recent extreme events also examples of predictions turned into cold, hard reality?

Increasingly, the answer is yes. Scientists used to say, cautiously, that extreme weather events were “consistent” with the predictions of climate change. No more. “Now we can make the statement that particular events would not have happened the same way without global warming,” says Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.

That’s a profound change—the difference between predicting something and actually seeing it happen. The reason is simple: The signal of climate change is emerging from the “noise”—the huge amount of natural variability in weather.

Extreme signals

There are two key lines of evidence. First, it’s not just that we’ve become more aware of disasters like North Dakota or last year’s Nashville flood, which caused $13 billion in damage, or the massive 2010 summer monsoon in Pakistan that killed 1,500 people and left 20 million more homeless. The data show that the number of such events is rising. Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies, has compiled the world’s most comprehensive database of natural disasters, reaching all the way back to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Researchers at the company, which obviously has a keen financial interest in trends that increase insurance risks, add 700 to 1,000 natural catastrophes to the database each year, explains Mark Bove, senior research meteorologist in Munich Re’s catastrophe risk management office in Princeton, N.J. The data indicate a small increase in geologic events like earthquakes since 1980 because of better reporting. But the increase in the number of climate disasters is far larger. “Our figures indicate a trend towards an increase in extreme weather events that can only be fully explained by climate change,” says Peter Höppe, head of Munich Re’s Geo Risks Research/Corporate Climate Center: “It’s as if the weather machine had changed up a gear.

The second line of evidence comes from a nascent branch of science called climate attribution. The idea is to examine individual events like a detective investigating a crime, searching for telltale fingerprints of climate change. Those fingerprints are showing up—in the autumn floods of 2000 in England and Wales that were the worst on record, in the 2003 European heat wave that caused 14,000 deaths in France, in Hurricane Katrina—and, yes, probably even in Nashville. This doesn’t mean that the storms or hot spells wouldn’t have happened at all without climate change, but as scientists like Trenberth say, they wouldn’t have been as severe if humankind hadn’t already altered the planet’s climate.This new science is still controversial. There’s an active debate among researchers about whether the Russian heat wave bears the characteristic signature of climate change or whether it was just natural variability, for instance. Some scientists worry that trying to attribute individual events to climate change is counterproductive in the larger political debate, because it’s so easy to dismiss the claim by saying that the planet has always experienced extreme weather. And some researchers who privately are convinced of the link are reluctant to say so publicly, because global warming has become such a target of many in Congress.

But the evidence is growing for a link between the emissions of modern civilization and extreme weather events. And that has the potential to profoundly alter the perception of the threats posed by climate change. No longer is global warming an abstract concept, affecting faraway species, distant lands or generations far in the future. Instead, climate change becomes personal. Its hand can be seen in the corn crop of a Maryland farmer ruined when soaring temperatures shut down pollination or the $13 billion in damage in Nashville, with the Grand Ole Opry flooded and sodden homes reeking of rot. “All of a sudden we’re not talking about polar bears or the Maldives any more,” says Nashville-based author and environmental journalist Amanda Little. “Climate change translates into mold on my baby’s crib. We’re talking about homes and schools and churches and all the places that got hit.”

Drenched in Nashville

Indeed, the record floods in Nashville in May 2010 shows how quickly extreme weather can turn ordinary life into a nightmare. The weekend began innocuously. The forecast was a 50 percent chance of rain. Musician Eric Normand and his wife Kelly were grateful that the weather event they feared, a tornado, wasn’t anticipated. Eric’s Saturday concert in a town south of Nashville should go off without a hitch, he figured.

He was wrong. On Saturday, it rained—and rained. “It was a different kind of rain than any I had experienced in my whole life,” says Nashville resident Rich Hays. Imagine the torrent from an intense summer thunderstorm, the sort of deluge that prompts you to duck under an underpass for a few minutes until the rain stops and it’s safe to go on, Little says. It was like that, she recalls—except that on this weekend in May 2010 it didn’t stop. Riding in the bus with his fellow musicians, Normand “looked through a window at a rain-soaked canopy of green and gray,” he wrote later. Scores of cars were underwater on the roads they had just traveled. A short 14-hour bus gig turned out to be “one of the most stressful and terrifying we had ever experienced,” Normand says.

And still it rained—more than 13 inches (33 centimeters) that weekend. The water rose in Little’s basement—one foot, two feet, three feet (one meter) deep. “You get this panicky feeling that things are out of control,” she says. Over at Hays’s home, fissures appeared in the basement floor, and streams of water turned into a “full-on river,” Hays recalls. Then in the middle of night, “I heard this massive crack, almost like an explosion,” he says. The force of the water had fractured the house’s concrete foundation. He and his wife spent the rest of the night in fear that the house might collapse.

Sunday morning, Normand went out in the deluge to ask his neighbor if he knew when the power might go back on—it was then he realized that his normal world had vanished. A small creek at the bottom of the hill was now a lake one-half mile (0.8 kilometer) wide, submerging homes almost up to their second stories. “My first reaction was disbelief,” Normand says. He and his family were trapped, without power and surrounded by flooded roads. “We were just freaked out,” he recalls.

And all across the flooded city the scenes were surreal, almost hallucinatory, Little says. “There were absurdities heaped upon absurdities. Churches lifted off foundations and floating down streets. Cars floating in a herd down highways.” In her own basement her family’s belongings bobbed like debris in a pond.

By time the deluge ended, more than 13 inches (33 centimeters) of rain had fallen, as recorded at Nashville’s airport. The toll: 31 people dead, more than $3 billion in damage—and an end to the cherished perception that Nashville was safe from major weather disasters. “A community that had never been vulnerable to this incredible force of nature was literally taken by storm,” Little says.

But can the Nashville deluge, the North Dakota floods and the many other extreme weather events around the world be connected with the greenhouse gases that humans have spewed into the atmosphere? Increasingly the answer seems to be yes. Whereas it will never be possible to say that any particular event was caused by climate change, new science is teasing out both the contributions that it makes to individual events—and the increase in the odds of extreme weather occurring as a result of climate change.

Reviewing the Nisbet ‘Climate Shift’ Report and Controversial Claims of Media Progress (Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media)

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by John Wihbey | July 11, 2011

Matt Nisbet’s ‘Climate Shift’ research report raised headline-grabbing points on fundraising successes by those advocating action on climate change. But it’s what lies behind those headlines — and relating specifically to media coverage — that also warrants further review and analysis.

Few pieces of recent academic research on climate change have stirred up as much controversy as American University professor Matthew Nisbet’s April 2011 report “Climate Shift: Clear Vision for the Next Decade of Public Debate.”

The report’s biggest headline-grabbing finding — that the environmental lobby is now holding its own in the money race with industry groups opposing carbon regulations — doubtless will generate further analysis, and one can imagine more such annual scorecards assessing this power struggle. And the questions “Climate Shift” raises about the relative political wisdom — or lack of same — in pushing the failed cap-and-trade bill in Congress may well be debated by historians for years to come.

Perhaps the most underappreciated facet of the scholarship that Nisbet put forth, however, involves his analysis of media coverage in the years 2009-2010, contained in his provocatively titled chapter 3, “The Death of a Norm: Evaluating False Balance in News Coverage.”

According to Nisbet’s story-by-story analysis that covers the vertiginous period involving Copenhagen, the so-called “climategate” hacked e-mails, and federal cap-and-trade, the mainstream media — represented in his analysis by The New York Times, CNN.com, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and The Washington Post — basically moved past the oft-criticized journalistic mode of “he said, she said,” or “false balance.” In its place, those media generally reflected the “consensus science” as backed by organizations such as the U.N.’s IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences and most of its international counterparts. (The opinion pages of the Journal are bracketed as an exception, and Nisbet’s analysis shows that its editorials do indeed continue to cast doubt on climate science.)

Nisbet’s assertion is a profound one, with significant implications. His stated goal with “Climate Shift” is to help reorient the priorities of groups trying to combat global change through the promotion of science and smart messaging to the public. (See companion posting based on author’s extensive e-mail interview with Nisbet.)
“[I]f trend-setting national media have overwhelmingly portrayed the consensus views on the fundamentals of climate science (as the report’s findings indicate),” Nisbet wrote in a recent e-mail interview with The Yale Forum, “then we should be turning to other types of media organizations in our engagement efforts and focusing on other dimensions of coverage, including … subsidizing the ability of local and regional media to cover climate change and energy insecurity as these challenges relate to their region and communities.” These are ideas Nisbet has raised also in previous reports.

Lines of Criticism

Bloggers at Media Matters do criticize how Nisbet interprets his data around the “climategate” period — one of the few on-the-numbers critiques. Nisbet responds that changes in coverage since then are either not “statistically significant” or “not meaningful.”

Other than that, few have questioned the particulars of Nisbet’s labor-intensive analysis of how those five outlets performed. Their selection — and the exclusion of others — though, is the subject of debate.

Nisbet says he chose those specific news outlets because they set the news agenda and have high-volume traffic, as reflected in Nielsen-tabulated figures. CNN.com, the Post and the Times ranked numbers 4, 5 and 9, respectively, in terms of web traffic in 2009. But given that news aggregators such as Yahoo, AOL, and Google ranked 1, 3, and 6, respectively, one might think that Nisbet’s universe of analysis did not capture the true flow of public news information.

The combined traffic of the aggregators is nearly twice that of the news sites Nisbet focused on. Admittedly, though, these aggregators would be a moving target — and an empirical analysis of the quality of news linked to would be difficult — but that’s where some huge portion of the public gets its news and information, and therefore its impressions and opinions.

(One other quibble, about the selection of Politico: Nisbet calls it “the paper ‘the White House wakes up to,’ as memorably headlined in a profile at The New York Times.” In fact, the article he cites is really just a profile of Politico reporter Mike Allen and his important day calendar “Playbook” blog. Though Politico is powerful and prolific, what constitutes “the paper of record for members of Congress,” as Nisbet puts it, may be an issue of reasonable disagreement among media watchers.)

Climate communications expert and University of Colorado-Boulder professor Max Boykoff was one of the formal reviewers for the “Climate Shift” report. He told The Yale Forum in an e-mail interview, “Overall, I found [Nisbet’s] work in Chapter 3 to be good. As he assembled it I spoke with Matt multiple times. (Chapter 3 was the part of the report I most focused on). We discussed how to replicate the methods and approaches that I undertook in my work on empirically testing the accuracy of coverage about human contributions to climate change (aka, the ‘balance as bias’ thesis). His methods and findings (re: WSJ op-ed divergence etc.) appeared valid and reliable.”

Still, Boykoff stated a potentially striking limitation of this type of analysis in his reviewer comments submitted back to Nisbet: Such analysis “still isn’t equipped to gauge how one particular carefully/prominently/well- or ill-timed article or commentary could have a much greater influence on public perceptions and views than consistently inaccurate treatment. In other words, the sometimes haphazard nature of media consumption — from skimming articles to just hearing/watching portions of a segment — isn’t accounted for through this approach. At the end of the day, these studies … struggle to account for ‘selective listening’ or ‘selective reading’ that we actually engage in during our daily lives.”

Boykoff also said he told Nisbet that his (Nisbet’s) research had not provided sufficient support for the “Climate Shift” report’s contention that “even in a world of blogs and fragmented audiences, the coverage appearing at these outlets strongly shapes the news decisions made at the broadcast and cable networks and informs the decisions of policymakers.”

The Fox News Question

Other notable criticisms of Nisbet’s approach in Chapter 3 of his report have focused on his exclusion of television sources, particularly Fox News. Prolific blogger and energy/climate expert Joseph Romm, who leveled ferocious criticism of Nisbet on his “Climate Progress” blog, makes much of this point. This dispute is a tricky one, resting on a difficult-to-resolve social science debate about how “persuade-able” the Fox News audience is, and just how best to measure the impacts of its huge ratings and online readership as part of American political consciousness.

In his comments to The Yale Forum, Nisbet replied, “As I discuss in the report, the audience for Fox News and political talk radio tend to be strongly self-selecting with consumption of these media tending to reinforce the views of those already doubtful or dismissive of climate change (approximately 25 percent of Americans).” Moreover, he says it “is not clear how these unsurprising findings would help us to move forward since any level of engagement with Fox News producers or talk radio hosts is unlikely to lead to changes in their coverage patterns. We can complain about and criticize these outlets, but much of the criticism and anger, I would argue, often ends up distracting us from initiatives where we can make a difference with journalists, editors, and with different publics.”

This latter point, of course, highlights an important facet of Nisbet’s project, namely that it has a particular goal, an “agenda” even, that puts an emphasis on both utility, or making a “difference,” and on truth as criteria for inquiry. (It’s possible this is where he opens the door for controversy, as it leaves him open to criticisms that he is downplaying conservative media and thereby painting an unduly positive picture of the U.S. media as a whole on climate issues.)

Columbia Journalism Review science editor Curtis Brainard told The Yale Forum recently that he thinks the spirit of Nisbet’s report is basically right in Chapter 3, at least as it relates to “news reporters and news articles.” For Nisbet and Brainard both, broad accusations that public ignorance is the media’s “fault” are no longer well-founded.

“There is this conventional wisdom floating around out there that journalists are inept, rarely able to get their facts straight or explain or deliver an accurate account of events,” Brainard wrote in an e-mail. “They’re not. But it’s much easier for activists and other policy or program stakeholders to blame the media when things don’t go their way than to analyze the much more complicated interplay of multiple factors.”

(As an aside, Brainard notes that he wrote about precisely this dynamic in his recent article, “Tornadoes and Climate Change,” which pushes back against such charges leveled by environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben. Brainard says McKibben is too quick to condemn the media as a whole for not making connections between various extreme weather events.)

We’re past those earlier days, Brainard told The Yale Forum, when the basic questions about climate science are portrayed in most mainstream news media as being unsettled: “The coverage has become so much more sophisticated since then, delving into the specific consequences of climate change, from sea level rise, to changing precipitation and drought patterns, to consequences for flora and fauna. Many reporters struggle to accurately explain the highly uncertain and nuanced science underlying these phenomena, but the flaws in the coverage are quite different from the false balance that was on exhibit before, say, 2006. First of all, there is nowhere near as much scientific consensus about these finer points of climate science as there is about the fundamentals (i.e., the Earth is warming, and humans are most likely to blame), so today’s stories are really apples compared with yesterday’s oranges.”

Work Ahead for Media, Scholars

If Nisbet’s report has an underlying flaw, perhaps, it may be in its packaging, particularly in its “Move On”-style message and ambition to deliver a definitive verdict. Its real virtue is that it has just very effectively — whether or not one buys it all — started a different kind of conversation. And given that just five outlets were analyzed in the report, there is certainly much more conversation to be had.

As mentioned, Nisbet has said he is already carrying out new research and further study on local and regional media. (See his latest thoughts on this issue as they relate to Chicago.) It’s a cause on which all academics and media professionals and critics might agree, as the business model for such outlets continues to erode. Local information ecosystems are changing, shifting, and in many cases decaying. But many observers point out how essential they remain.

“It would also be good to look at the practically countless number of local TV network affiliates across the country since, collectively, they are where most Americans still get their news,” Brainard also noted.

“Local newspapers, as Pew has documented, remain at the center of the local media ecosystem, with the overwhelming number of regional/local issues covered by local TV news and at local blogs originating from local newspaper coverage,” Nisbet said. “In this sense, on climate change and energy, we should think about local and regional newspapers as being part of the central communication infrastructure that regions and communities need to learn, connect, plan and make collective choices on the issue.”

Perhaps, through further studies by Nisbet and others, this important work on local and regional media — their shortcomings and needs — can shed additional light.

John Wihbey is a regular contributor to the Yale Forum. He is a journalist and researcher, and he can be reached at jpwihb@yahoo.com.

Nordeste perde um quinto dos reservatórios de água em 2010 (FSP)

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JC e-mail 4304, de 20 de Julho de 2011.

Relatório aponta bacias da região semiárida como as mais críticas.

A região Nordeste do País perdeu, entre outubro de 2009 e outubro de 2010, 20% dos reservatórios de água que possuía no período anterior, segundo a ANA (Agência Nacional de Águas). O dado está em um relatório sobre os recursos hídricos do País, publicado ontem e disponível em http://bit.ly/pnZBqo. Segundo a agência, a perda de reservatórios na região se deve à menor quantidade de chuvas.

Na região ficam as bacias do Semiárido, um dos pontos críticos quanto aos recursos hídricos, segundo o relatório. Também são classificadas assim as bacias do rio Meia Ponte, no Centro-Oeste, e a do Tietê, no Sudeste.

A definição leva em conta a disponibilidade e o uso de água, além da presença ou não de vegetação nativa e como é feito o tratamento dos resíduos sólidos no local. Segundo a ministra do Meio Ambiente, Izabella Teixeira, a ideia é, a partir dos dados do relatório, “focar os esforços nas áreas críticas”.

A ampliação dos serviços de saneamento foi apontada como prioridade pela ministra, principalmente nas cidades de até 50 mil habitantes. O pior índice de qualidade da água é o das áreas de grande densidade urbana.
(Folha de São Paulo)

ABC e INMET fecham parceria com Organização Meteorológica Mundial (Ascom do INMET)

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Firmado acordo de cooperação internacional para meteorologia

JC e-mail 4300, de 14 de Julho de 2011

O ministro Marco Farani,diretor da Agência Brasileira de Cooperação (ABC), esteve na sede do Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia (INMET), em Brasília, no início do mês, para assinar os termos do Programa Executivo de implementação de um Projeto de Cooperação Técnica com a Organização Meteorológica Mundial (OMM), no valor aproximado de 11 milhões de dólares. O projeto tem a finalidade de promover a consolidação das atividades do INMET relacionadas à previsão numérica de tempo e ao monitoramento e previsão de eventos severos. Será desenvolvido pela OMM, em conjunto com a ABC, e executado pelo INMET, no período de cinco anos.

Segundo o diretor do INMET, Antonio Divino Moura, o novo projeto toma como base e dá seguimento aos excelentes resultados alcançados por meio de um Projeto de Cooperação Técnica anterior (2002-2007) que possibilitou ao Brasil a implantação de uma moderna rede de estações meteorológicas de superfície, com economia de cerca de R$ 40 milhões ao Brasil.

Marco Farani considera que é obrigação da Agência Brasileira de Cooperação apoiar as instituições brasileiras que querem e precisam da cooperação para poder evoluir, adquirir mais conhecimentos e tecnologia. “Esse projeto que nós assinamos com o INMET e com a OMM vai permitir tudo isso. Por outro lado, nós nos preocupamos em levar um pouco do lado brasileiro para o exterior, compartilhar com outros países nossas boas práticas. Nós queremos estimular uma atuação maior do INMET no exterior, de forma a levar boas práticas e tecnologias do Brasil a países em desenvolvimento e agir de forma solidária com eles. Então, nós temos essas duas vias: a via de apoiar a captação de tecnologia, de conhecimento para o Brasil, pela cooperação; e de apoiar o compartilhamento e a prestação de apoio e de ajuda aos países, a partir do conhecimento acumulado no Brasil”, disse Marco Farani.

Em 7 de junho de 2011, aproveitando sua participação no 16º Congresso Meteorológico Mundial, realizado em Genebra, Suíça, Divino Moura obteve a assinatura do Secretário Executivo da OMM, Michel Jarraud, nos termos do Programa Executivo de implementação do Projeto de Cooperação Técnica com aquela Organização.
(Ascom do INMET)

Ninguna consultora pudo pronosticar la diferencia entre Macri y Filmus (Clarin)

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[Eleições municipais em Buenos Aires]
11/07/11
Las encuestadoras oficialistas erraron por 13 puntos la brecha entre los dos primeros

Por MARTÍN BRAVO

Dos consultoras difundieron enc uestas en la semana previa a estas elecciones en la Ciudad con una diferencia de prácticamente 15 puntos en la intención de voto entre Mauricio Macri y Daniel Filmus.

El resto indicaba una brecha menor, y más corta cuanto más cercano al kirchnerismo era el encargado del relevamiento.

Al cierre de esta edición, los datos oficiales marcaban que el actual jefe de Gobierno cosechaba 803.486 votos (un 47,06%) y el senador kirchnerista 475.364 (un 27,84%). Con el 96,31% de las mesas escrutadas, la diferencia a favor de Macri daba casi 19,3%. Management & Fit difundió sus últimos números el 4 de julio, con 42,2% para Macri y 27,4% para Filmus, es decir 14,8% de distancia. La misma brecha proyectó la encuesta de Poliarquía, encargada por el diario La Nación y publicada el viernes: 45,3% a 30,5%.

Aresco, una encuestadora de consulta habitual del Gobierno nacional, difundió 48 horas antes de la elección -no publicada por la veda- una intención de voto del 43,8% para Macri sobre el 34,3% para Filmus, es decir una ventaja de 9,5%. Ya en el boca de urna dio una distancia bastante mayor: 44% a 31%, aunque también por debajo de la ventaja final. Con el resultado puesto, en ningún caso quedó cerca. OPSM difundió el jueves sus números, a los que accedió este diario, con 38% para Macri y 27,8% para Filmus. Una diferencia del 10,2%, apenas menor a su boca de urna: 44% a 33,7%. Esta consultora se presenta como independiente, aunque el búnker kirchnerista le presta mucha atención.

Rouvier & Asociados, que en esta campaña trabajó para Filmus, daba una diferencia de 6,4 puntos una semana antes de la elección (36,2% a 29,8%) y de 7,4 (42,6% a 35,2%) el último jueves. Analogías, que presentó su trabajo como independiente, asignó ocho días atrás una intención de voto a Macri de 38,2% y a Filmus de 29,7%, una brecha de 8,5%. En sus últimas mediciones, no publicadas por Clarín porque ya regía la veda electoral, la diferencia crecía 1,5 puntos: 42% a 32%.

CEOP, la encuestadora que en 2009 anunció un triunfo de Néstor Kirchner por 8 puntos en la provincia (perdió por 3%) atribuía 36,6% a Macri y 30,5% a Filmus, una distancia de 6,1% . Esta consultora, que también mide habitualmente para el Gobierno nacional, dio con amplia ventaja a Rosana Bertone en el balotaje de Tierra del Fuego, en el que Fabiana Ríos consiguió su reelección.

Fernando Solanas llevaba el 12,82% de los votos, según los datos oficiales al cierre de esta edición, un porcentaje superior al que medía en la mayoría de las encuestas, entre ellas Aresco (8,6%), OPSM (8,9%) y Rouvier & Asociados (10%). Pero peor quedó con el resultado puesto el sondeo encargado por su espacio, Proyecto Sur, a la consultora Panorama: difundió el jueves que el cineasta tenía una inteción de voto del 24,5%, por encima de Filmus, y también lo daba ganador sobre Macri en una eventual segunda vuelta.

Tampoco anticipó el holgado triunfo del actual jefe de Gobierno la encuesta de Nueva Comunicación, encargada por Jorge Telerman: su última medición, el 2 de julio, le asignó a Macri una intención de voto del 39,1% sobre el 31,8% para Filmus, una ventaja de 7,3%. A Telerman le daba el 6,9%, lo que le hubiera permitido asegurarse su banca como legislador. Al cierre de esta edici ón tenía 1,76%.

Is a Human “Here and Now” Bias Clouding Climate Reasoning? (N.Y. Times)

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By ANDREW C. REVKIN
N.Y. Times, Dot Earth – May 8, 2011, 7:36 AM

Here’s a “Your Dot” contribution from Jacob Tanenbaum, a computer technology teacher from Tappan, N.Y., who sent the following thoughts after reading “On Birth Certificates, Climate Risk and an Inconvenient Mind“:

Our lack of ability to perceive and react to climate is not just simply a problem rooted in social norms. It goes far deeper into the evolutionary structure of the human mind. We are an animal that evolved over time somewhere in southern Africa. Our minds are set up to quickly and effectively assess an environment and perceive danger in it. This is what Macolm Gladwell calls “thin slicing” and it is very effective in many situations. What we consider higher thought processes appeared far later in our evolutionary path. When we are facing danger, it makes sense that we rely on those higher processes far less than we rely on our “gut instinct” –- those older processes that kept us safe for so much longer in our species’ history. So how does this help us understand our reactions to something like climate?

Consider this:

1. Once we are accustomed to something, change is very difficult. An animal that understands its environment can pick out subtle changes that indicate danger more effectively. An animal in new environment perceives difference, and so danger, everywhere it looks. Our reaction to climate must involve significant change in how we live our lives. This is difficult for any animal. Even us.

2. Our understanding of danger is event driven. The presence of a predator, or a fire or a storm or flood are all events. Climate is not an event, it is a trend. Weather is an event. To understand climate, you must suspend the belief that what you see outside your window is all that can be a threat to you. To understand climate you must look at the numbers over a long time and a large geographical space. That is how you can “see” a trend. This, unfortunately, may be antithetical to the way that the human animal understands danger since the threat is not immediately in front of us in a way that causes our lower thought processes to perceive a threat, pump us full of adrenalin, and push us to react.

3. Since our understanding of danger is event driven, it makes sense that our understanding of danger is also temporally driven. We are best wired to react to events that are immediate in nature and short in duration. We are wired to react to an event quickly and to make whatever adjustments are needed so that things return to what we perceive as normal. We want a short burst of adrenalin to help us get away from the threat and back to our “comfort zone.” Climate, again, asks us to suspend this part of our understanding of danger and may, again, be antithetical to the way in which we are wired to think about danger. We must react now to avoid a threat that may be several decades away. We must suspend our belief that what we perceive as normal may not be OK. We do, after all, live in an environment that has already undergone change, and our normal way of life is causing that change.

If you couple those facts with a media campaign that encourages denial as well as a media and political structure that largely reflects the way that we are wired and you have a perfect storm. So what we are really being asked to do as a species is evolve. We must evolve the ability to rely on more recent brain constructs, rather than our more primitive ones, to assess and react to danger This means we must evolve in our understanding of danger, of risk, of time, and in our ability control what we have created. But, of course, about half the U.S. does not believe in evolution, so asking us to continue the process may be beyond us. These are the things that keep me up at night.

Tanenbaum’s commentary on climate risk and response, or lack thereof, leads back to the recent Edge.org question: Do we need to bolster our cognitive toolkit?

What’s Missing From Our ‘Cognitive Toolkit’?

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
N.Y. Times, Dot Earth – January 17, 2011, 1:18 PM

This is your brain on words:

It’s clearly a pretty hard-wired system. But can we find ways to use what’s locked in our skulls to better effect? I’ll be writing more soon on that broad question, with a hint of my thoughts provided in a recent Tweet. Some variant on noosphere is clearly nigh.

In the meantime, there’s a rich discussion of aspects of this question on Edge.org, a forum for all manner of minds, curated by the agent and intellectual impressario John Brockman. Once or twice a year since 1998, Edge has tossed provocative questions to variegated batches of scientists, writers, artists and innovators.

Some examples: How is the Internet changing the way you think? What have you changed your mind about? Why? What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

This year’s question, proposed by Steven Pinker and shaped with input from Daniel Kahneman, has been addressed by more than 150 people so far:

What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? (The phrase “scientific concept” has a very broad meaning, explained at the link.)

You can read my Edge contribution, centering on a concept I call anthropophilia, below, with links to relevant context added (the Edge format is straight text).

I’m in the early stages of reading the other contributions. There’s much to chew on and enjoy. Here are a few highlights:

Gerd Gigrenzer, a psychologist and director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, is one of several contributors who focus on the need for broader, and better, appreciation of risk:

[M]any parents are unaware that one million U.S. children have unnecessary CT scans annually and that a full body scan can deliver one thousand times the radiation dose of a mammogram, resulting in an estimated 29,000 cancers per year.

I believe that the answer to modern crises is not simply more laws, more bureaucracy, or more money, but, first and foremost, more citizens who are risk literate. This can be achieved by cultivating statistical thinking. [Read on.]

He seems to be endorsing a notion explored on Dot Earth not long ago — that we find a way to go to “risk school.”

Gary Marcus, an associate professor of psychology at New York University, chooses “cognitive humility,” noting, among other things:

[H]uman beings tend almost invariably to be better at remembering evidence that is consistent with their beliefs than evidence that might disconfirm them. [Read on.]

Helen Fisher, an author and anthropologist at Rutgers University, focuses on the opportunities that would arise from a deeper awareness of the four dimensions that shape a human personality — particularly the “temperament dimension.”

We are capable of acting “out of character,” but doing so is tiring. People are biologically inclined to think and act in specific patterns — temperament dimensions. But why would this concept of temperament dimensions be useful in our human cognitive tool kit? Because we are social creatures, and a deeper understanding of who we (and others) are can provide a valuable tool for understanding, pleasing, cajoling, reprimanding, rewarding and loving others — from friends and relatives to world leaders…. [Read on.]

Maybe there’s a research opportunity in Dot Earth’s comment string — a comparative psychological deconstruction of blog commenters’ character?

Haim Harari, a physicist and former president of the Weizmann Institute of Science, writes of the “edge of the circle” in referring to today’s polarized, and largely nonproductive, policy fights:

Societies, preaching for absolute equality among their citizens, always end up with the largest economic gaps. Fanatic extremist proponents of developing only renewable energy sources, with no nuclear power, delay or prevent acceptable interim solutions to global energy issues, just as much as the oil producers. Misuse of animals in biology research is as damaging as the objections of fanatic animal right groups. One can go on and on with illustrations, which are more visible now than they were a decade or two ago. We live on the verge of an age of extremism… [Read on.]

Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at New York University, provides a nice take on normalizing society’s approach to “wicked” problems. (The climate challenge, as as been discussed here before is “beyond super wicked.) Here’s an excerpt:

If we could designate some problems as wicked we might realize that “normal” approaches to problem-solving don’t work. We can’t define the problem, evaluate possible solutions, pick the best one, hire the experts and implement. No matter how much we may want to follow a routine like that, it won’t succeed. Institutions may require it, habit may favor it, the boss may order it, but wicked problems don’t care.

Presidential debates that divided wicked from tame problems would be very different debates. Better, I think. Journalists who covered wicked problems differently than they covered normal problems would be smarter journalists. Institutions that knew when how to distinguish wicked problems from the other kind would eventually learn the limits of command and control.

Wicked problems demand people who are creative, pragmatic, flexible and collaborative. They never invest too much in their ideas because they know they are going to have to alter them. They know there’s no right place to start so they simply start somewhere and see what happens. They accept the fact that they’re more likely to understand the problem after its “solved” than before. They don’t expect to get a good solution; they keep working until they’ve found something that’s good enough. They’re never convinced that they know enough to solve the problem, so they are constantly testing their ideas on different stakeholders. [Read on.]

Hmm. That last section kind of sounds like Dot Earth, or at least some variant on this process. There’s much, much more to read and discuss.

Edge doesn’t have a comment string, so I encourage you to weigh in here with your own answer to the question and evaluation of others.

As promised, here’s what I wrote for Edge (filed on deadline Friday night):

Anthropophilia

To sustain progress on a finite planet that is increasingly under human sway, but also full of surprises, what is needed is a strong dose of anthropophilia. I propose this word as shorthand for a rigorous and dispassionate kind of self regard, even self appreciation, to be employed when individuals or communities face consequential decisions attended by substantial uncertainty and polarizing disagreement.

The term is an intentional echo of Ed Wilson’s valuable effort to nurture biophilia, the part of humanness that values and cares for the facets of the non-human world we call nature. What’s been missing too long is an effort to fully consider, even embrace, the human role within nature and — perhaps more important still — to consider our own inner nature, as well.

Historically, many efforts to propel a durable human approach to advancement were shaped around two organizing ideas: “woe is me” and “shame on us,” with a good dose of “shame on you” thrown in.

The problem?

Woe is paralytic, while blame is both divisive and often misses the real target. (Who’s the bad guy, BP or those of us who drive and heat with oil?)

Discourse framed around those concepts too often produces policy debates that someone once described to me, in the context of climate, as “blah, blah, blah bang.” The same phenomenon can as easily be seen in the unheeded warnings leading to the most recent financial implosion and the attack on the World Trade Center.

More fully considering our nature — both the “divine and felonious” sides, as Bill Bryson has summed us up — could help identify certain kinds of challenges that we know we’ll tend to get wrong.

The simple act of recognizing such tendencies could help refine how choices are made — at least giving slightly better odds of getting things a little less wrong the next time. At the personal level, I know when I cruise into the kitchen tonight I’ll tend to prefer to reach for a cookie instead of an apple. By pre-considering that trait, I might have a slightly better chance of avoiding a couple of hundred unnecessary calories.

Here are a few instances where this concept is relevant on larger scales.

There’s a persistent human pattern of not taking broad lessons from localized disasters. When China’s Sichuan province was rocked by a severe earthquake, tens of thousands of students (and their teachers) died in collapsed schools. Yet the American state of Oregon, where more than a thousand schools are already known to be similarly vulnerable when the great Cascadia fault off the Northwest Coast next heaves, still lags terribly in speeding investments in retrofitting.

Sociologists understand with quite a bit of empirical backing why this disconnect exists even though the example was horrifying and the risk in Oregon is about as clear as any scientific assessment can be. But does that knowledge of human biases toward the “near and now” get taken seriously in the realms where policies are shaped and the money to carry them out is authorized? Rarely, it seems.

Social scientists also know, with decent rigor, that the fight over human-driven global warming — both over the science and policy choices — is largely cultural. As in many other disputes (consider health care) the battle is between two quite fundamental subsets of human communities — communitarians (aka, liberals) and individualists (aka, libertarians). In such situations, a compelling body of research has emerged showing how information is fairly meaningless. Each group selects information to reinforce a position and there are scant instances where information ends up shifting a position.

That’s why no one should expect the next review of climate science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to suddenly create a harmonious path forward.

The more such realities are recognized, the more likely it is that innovative approaches to negotiation can build from the middle, instead of arguing endlessly from the edge. The same body of research on climate attitudes, for example, shows far less disagreement on the need for advancing the world’s limited menu of affordable energy choices.

Murray Gell-Mann has spoken often of the need, when faced with multi-dimensional problems, to take a “crude look at the whole” — a process he has even given an acronym, CLAW. It’s imperative, where possible, for that look to include an honest analysis of the species doing the looking, as well.

There will never be a way to invent a replacement for, say, the United Nations or the House of Representatives. But there is a ripe opportunity to try new approaches to constructive discourse and problem solving, with the first step being an acceptance of our humanness, for better and worse.

That’s anthropophilia.

Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University has long been fond of saying, “Because the human brain does not change, technology must.”

But many analysts now see the need to consciously intensify efforts to foster innovation — technological, social, and otherwise — to limit regrets in the next few generations.

So far, it’s not clear to me that our existing “cognitive toolkit” has allowed societies to absorb this reality. (A case in point is our “shock to trance” energy policies.)

Whether you embrace Ausubel’s technology imperative or seek ways to shift human values and norms to fit infinite aspirations on a finite planet (or both, as I do), a thorough look in the mirror appears worthwhile.

This leads back the value of the question posed on Edge, and a sustained exploration of the answers.

[Original post here.]

Anthropology and Climate Science Controversies

clima, Incerteza, mídia, meteorologia, mudança climática, poder, previsão, , , , , , , ,

Brad Walters (Mount Allison U.)
Anthropology News (American Association of Anthropology), vol. 51(5):36-37 (May 2010)

Enormous research effort has been invested in the study of climate change. Many scientists reveled in the acclaim that followed last-year’s awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This year, some of these same scientists have faced an onslaught of criticism as a result of a few mistakes found in published reports of the IPCC and leaked emails from an eminent, UK-based science group that revealed an all-too-human side of the scientific endeavor (so-called “climate-gate”).

The editors of the pre-eminent science journal Nature commented that these supposedly explosive revelations would be laughable were it not for their policy consequences. Like many, they recognize that the real scandal has little to do with climate change science, but everything to do with its political ramifications.

The scientific consensus on climate change is rock solid on the most critical issues: greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are now warming the earth’s climate at a rate that is extremely rapid by historical and recent geological standards and this poses increasingly serious risks our well being (Union of Concerned Scientists, March 2010, “U.S. scientists and economists’ call for swift and deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions,” http://www.ucsusa.org). The evidence for this general conclusion is so broad, diverse and compelling that virtually no reputable scientist doubts it.

Yet, large swaths of the American public and many opinion leaders continue to doubt the reality of climate change. A major reason for this is that the controversies over the credibility of climate science are to a large degree intentionally contrived by people and organizations with vested interests in the economic status-quo and fear of government regulation, particularly members of the oil, gas and coal industries. What we are witnessing today, according to authors James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore (Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming) and George Monbiot (Heat), is a similar but much more ambitious replay of the tobacco industries’ campaign in the 1980s and 1990s to sew doubt about the scientific consensus on the health risks of smoking. These climate deniers understand what many social scientists do: where there is uncertainty in the minds of the electorate, the political cost of inaction falls while the cost of decisive action rises.

These climate controversies raise intriguing questions for anthropologists who may have interests in issues of public knowledge formation, risk perception, and the application of expert and non-expert knowledge in policy making. But, what motivated me to write this column is a different question: do many anthropologists also not trust the credibility of the scientific “experts” on the matter of climate change?

I came to this question as a result of recent exchanges on the Environmental Anthropology (E-Anth) List-serve that revealed a far less solid consensus on the matter than is found within the mainstream climate science community, which is dominated by natural scientists. Specifically, postings by some list members revealed a surprising lack of trust in the credibility of scientific bodies like the IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences. Even more troubling was their referencing of scientifically un-credible sources—climate skeptics’ blogs, for example—as the basis for their opinions on the status of climate science.

Anthropologists are not alone in having within their ranks credentialed scientists who espouse views on climate change that are totally unsupportable in any reasonable scientific sense. But is it possible that anthropologists are particularly vulnerable to this kind of anti-scientific way of thinking about the issue? Has the disciplines’ deep emersion in subjects like the social construction of knowledge produced social scientists with so little trust and respect for the work of natural scientists that they won’t (or can’t!) distinguish between peer-reviewed research and politically-motivated blog postings?

There is a point reached—and we are now well passed it in climate science—where theoretical arguments and empirical evidence are so overwhelmingly compelling that positions contrary to the scientific consensus are simply untenable. Perhaps it is time for the AAA to step-up as a body and officially state their position on this most critical of issues.