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<font size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b>February</b></i></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b> 7, 2024</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font> <br>
<i>[ Top scientist on deluge ]</i><br>
A primer on atmospheric rivers<br>
<b>Climate change runs through it</b><br>
Andrew Dessler<br>
Feb 5. 2024<br>
Atmospheric rivers are low-level jets of air that flow out of the
tropics to the mid-latitudes. They are associated with extratropical
cyclone systems. For more details, read this.<br>
<br>
Sometimes atmospheric rivers originate in the tropics, near Hawaii,
and those are also called the Pineapple Express. Their origin in the
tropics also explains why they carry enormous amounts of water
vapor.<br>
<br>
When these atmospheric rivers hit California, they can cause
enormous rainfall. The mechanism is straightforward: As an
atmospheric river encounters the land, particularly the Sierra
Nevada mountain range, the moist air is forced upwards — a process
known as orographic lift. As the air rises, it cools and condenses,
and rain falls out.<br>
<br>
Because the ocean never runs out of water, this weather pattern can
bring neverending rain to the State. One storm in the 1860s brought
continuous rain for nearly 43 days, leading to catastrophic flooding
across much of California, particularly in the Central Valley, which
transformed into an inland sea, reportedly up to 30 miles wide and
300 miles long. If such an event occurred today, the damage could
top $1 trillion.<br>
<br>
What about climate change, you ask? A warmer planet has more water
vapor in the atmosphere. And, everything else being the same, an
atmospheric river carrying more water vapor will cause more rainfall
when it hits land and starts rising.<br>
<br>
Because of the simplicity of this physical argument, the IPCC
concluded that global warming will increase the precipitation from
these events:<br>
<br>
<b>Precipitation associated with extratropical storms and
atmospheric rivers will increase in the future in most regions
(high confidence).1</b><br>
<br>
Thus, we can conclude with confidence that climate change is making
the event occurring in California right now worse than it would be
without climate change.<br>
<br>
<br>
But by how much? If we assume a purely thermodynamic response (e.g.,
Clausius-Clayperon scaling), rain would increase by about 7% for
every degree Celsius of warming of the atmosphere. But this neglects
the dynamic response — e.g., impact of climate change on atmospheric
circulations.<br>
<br>
My reading of the literature suggests that we don’t really have a
good handle on this. Thus, a firm quantification of the impact of
climate change on the rain in this event will await formal
attribution analysis.<br>
<br>
In summary, atmospheric rivers are a high-consequence weather
system, with significant implications for water resources and flood
risk. The interaction between atmospheric rivers and climate change
is complex, but the increase in moisture in the atmosphere will
certainly lead to more intense rainfall. Changes in atmospheric
circulation could ameliorate or enhance this, which future research
should clarify<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://open.substack.com/pub/theclimatebrink/p/a-primer-on-atmospheric-rivers?r=e3p5r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email">https://open.substack.com/pub/theclimatebrink/p/a-primer-on-atmospheric-rivers?r=e3p5r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ Hottest year, Lower media attention of rising moisture]</i><br>
<b>"Nearing a tipping point"</b><br>
Monthly Summaries<br>
Issue 85, January 2024<br>
January media coverage of climate change or global warming in
newspapers around the globe plummeted 23% from December 2023. Also,
coverage in January 2024 dipped 20% from January 2023 levels. Figure
1 shows trends in newspaper media coverage at the global scale –
organized into seven geographical regions around the world – from
January 2004 through January 2024.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/icecaps/research/media_coverage/summaries/images/85/figure1.jpg">https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/icecaps/research/media_coverage/summaries/images/85/figure1.jpg</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/icecaps/research/media_coverage/summaries/images/85/figure2.jpg">https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/icecaps/research/media_coverage/summaries/images/85/figure2.jpg</a><br>
Our team at the Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO)
continues to provide three international and seven ongoing regional
assessments of trends in coverage, along with 16 country-level
appraisals each month. Visit our website for open-source datasets
and downloadable visuals.<br>
<br>
Scanning content in January 2024 coverage, many scientific themes
continued to emerge in stories during the month. To illustrate,
research findings focused on snow and climate change earned media
attention early in the new calendar year. For example, Washington
Post journalist Maggie Penman reported, “Snow is piling up across
much of the United States this week, but new research shows this is
the exception rather than the rule: Seasonal snow levels in the
Northern Hemisphere have dwindled over the past 40 years due to
climate change. Even so, snow responds to a warming planet in
different ways. “A warmer atmosphere is also an atmosphere that can
hold more water,” said Alex Gottlieb, a graduate student at
Dartmouth College and lead author on the new study in the journal
Nature. That can increase precipitation, spurring snow, or even
extreme storms and blizzards that offset the effect of snowmelt amid
warmer temperatures. That has made it harder for scientists to
calculate how snowpack has changed over time. But the new findings
reveal that areas of the United States and Europe are nearing a
tipping point where they could face a disastrous loss of snow for
decades to come”.<br>
Research examining continued ice loss in Greenland also generated
media attention in January. For example, Guardian environment editor
Damian Carrington reported, “The Greenland ice cap is losing an
average of 30m tonnes of ice an hour due to the climate crisis, a
study has revealed, which is 20% more than was previously thought.
Some scientists are concerned that this additional source of
freshwater pouring into the north Atlantic might mean a collapse of
the ocean currents called the Atlantic meridional overturning
circulation (Amoc) is closer to being triggered, with severe
consequences for humanity. Major ice loss from Greenland as a result
of global heating has been recorded for decades. The techniques
employed to date, such as measuring the height of the ice sheet or
its weight via gravity data, are good at determining the losses that
end up in the ocean and drive up sea level. However, they cannot
account for the retreat of glaciers that already lie mostly below
sea level in the narrow fjords around the island. In the study,
satellite photos were analysed by scientists to determine the end
position of Greenland’s many glaciers every month from 1985 to 2022.
This showed large and widespread shortening and in total amounted to
a trillion tonnes of lost ice”. Meanwhile, Washington Post
journalists Kasha Patel and Chris Mooney wrote, “The Greenland ice
sheet has lost 20 percent more ice than scientists previously
thought, posing potential problems for ocean circulation patterns
and sea level rise, according to a new study. Researchers had
previously estimated that the Greenland ice sheet lost about 5,000
gigatons of ice in recent decades, enough to cover Texas in a sheet
26 feet high. The new estimate adds 1,000 gigatons to that period,
the equivalent of piling about five more feet of ice on top of that
fictitious Texas-sized sheet. The additional loss comes from an area
previously unaccounted for in estimates: ice lost at a glacier’s
edges, where it meets the water. Before this study, estimates
primarily considered mass changes in the interior of the ice sheet,
which are driven by melting on the surface and glaciers thinning
from their base on the ice sheet. The study, released Wednesday in
Nature, provides improved measurements of ice loss and meltwater
discharge in the ocean, which can advance sea level and ocean
models. Loss from the edges of glaciers won’t directly affect sea
level rise because they usually sit within deep fjords below sea
level, but the freshwater melt could affect ocean circulation
patterns in the Atlantic Ocean…The researchers tracked changes in
207 glaciers in Greenland (constituting 90 percent of the ice
sheet’s mass) each month from 1985 to 2022. Analyzing more than
236,000 satellite images, they manually marked differences along the
edges of glaciers and eventually trained algorithms to do the same.
From the area measurements, the team could calculate the volume and
mass of the changes in ice. Glaciers can lose ice in many ways. One
change can happen when large ice chunks break off at the edge, known
as calving. They can also lose ice when it melts faster than it can
form, causing the end of a glacier to retreat and move to higher
elevations. Scientists found that a total of 1,034 gigatons of ice
was lost across all glaciers because of this retreat and calving on
their peripheries. The loss accelerated since January 2000, with the
glaciers losing a total of 42 gigatons each year. It has shown no
signs of slowing down. Most striking, nearly every glacier was
shrinking — and in every corner of the ice sheet”. <br>
In January, there were also many political and economic-themed media
stories about climate change or global warming that dominated
overall coverage this month. For example, Associated Press
correspondent Matthew Daly reported, “Climate-altering pollution
from greenhouse gases declined by nearly 2% in the United States in
2023, even as the economy expanded at a faster clip, a new report
finds. The decline, while “a step in the right direction,’' is far
below the rate needed to meet President Joe Biden’s pledge to cut
U.S. emissions in half by 2030, compared to 2005 levels, said a
report Wednesday from the Rhodium Group, an independent research
firm. “Absent other changes,″ the U.S. is on track to cut
greenhouse gas emissions by about 40% below 2005 levels by the end
of the decade, said Ben King, associate director at Rhodium and lead
author of the study. The report said U.S. carbon emissions declined
by 1.9% last year. Emissions are down 17.2% from 2005. To reach
Biden’s goal, emissions would have to decline at a rate more than
triple the 2023 figure and be sustained at that level every year
until 2030, he said. Increased economic activity, including more
energy production and greater use of cars, trucks and airplanes, can
be associated with higher pollution, although there is not always a
direct correlation. The U.S. economy grew by a projected 2.4% in
2023, according to the Conference Board, a business research group”.<br>
<br>
Also in January, media attention was drawn to renewable energy
installation growth as examples of mode-switching sources to reduce
emissions-related energy generation. For example, Guardian
journalist Jillian Ambrose wrote, “Global renewable energy capacity
grew by the fastest pace recorded in the last 20 years in 2023,
which could put the world within reach of meeting a key climate
target by the end of the decade, according to the International
Energy Agency (IEA). The world’s renewable energy grew by 50% last
year to 510 gigawatts (GW) in 2023, the 22nd year in a row that
renewable capacity additions set a new record, according to figures
from the IEA. The “spectacular” growth offers a “real chance” of
global governments meeting a pledge agreed at the Cop28 climate
talks in November to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 to
significantly reduce consumption of fossil fuels, the IEA added. The
IEA’s latest report found that solar power accounted for
three-quarters of the new renewable energy capacity installed
worldwide last year. Most of the world’s new solar power was built
in China, which installed more solar power last year than the entire
world commissioned the year before, despite cutting subsidies in
2020 and 2021. Record rates of growth across Europe, the US and
Brazil have put renewables on track to overtake coal as the largest
source of global electricity generation by early 2025, the IEA said.
By 2028, it forecasts renewable energy sources will account for more
than 42% of global electricity generation. Tripling global renewable
energy by the end of the decade to help cut carbon emissions is one
of five main climate targets designed to prevent runaway global
heating, alongside doubling energy efficiency, cutting methane
emissions, transitioning away from fossil fuels, and scaling up
financing for emerging and developing economies. Last year’s
relatively mild winter and continued declines in power generation
from coal-fired plants drove down emissions in the U.S. power and
buildings sectors, the report said”. <br>
Several cultural-themed stories relating to climate change or global
warming also ran in January, many were reflections on the previous
calendar year. Among them, writing in The Bangkok Post, Moe Moe Lwin
wrote, “the cultural wisdom of our ancestors in Southeast Asia
contains much knowledge that we urgently need to recollect, or
re-learn, in the 21st century if we are to achieve the goal of
limiting temperature increase to a rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Our
ancestors in Southeast Asia knew how to live in harmony with nature,
exploiting nature’s bounty without destroying nature. Traditional
ways of agriculture, community control of forests and watersheds,
building design and construction practices, urban layout, and belief
systems can be adapted to modern needs to make present-day living
and working much more climate-friendly”. As a second example, New
York Times journalists David Gelles and Manuela Andreoni observed,
“2023 was a year when climate change felt inescapable. Whether it
was the raging wildfires in Canada, the orange skies in New York,
the flash floods in Libya or the searing heat in China, the effects
of our overheating planet were too severe to ignore. Not
coincidentally, it was also a year when climate change started to
feel ubiquitous in popular culture. Glossy TV shows, best-selling
books, art exhibits and even pop music tackled the subject, often
with the kind of nuance and creativity that can help us make sense
of the world’s thorniest issues”.<br>
<br>
Finally, January 2024 media stories featured several ecological and
meteorological dimensions of climate change or global warming. For
example, Wall Street Journal reporter Eric Niiler noted, “The record
global temperatures that spawned heavy rainfall, disastrous floods
and raging wildfires in 2023 will likely continue in 2024, according
to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The
service is the first analysis to declare—after months of
speculation—that 2023 was the hottest year since record-keeping
began in the mid-1800s. 2023’s global average temperature, the study
found, was 14.98 degrees Celsius, or 58.96 degrees Fahrenheit. That
average was 1.48 degrees C, or 2.66 degrees F, hotter than the
preindustrial baseline, creeping ever closer to the 1.5 degrees C
threshold the world’s nations have agreed to keep warming below to
avoid the worst effects of climate change”. As a second example
(among many), journalist Jonathan Chadwick from The Daily Mail
reported, “Scientists have long suspected it but now it's official –
2023 was the hottest year on record. Last year's global average
temperature was 58.96°F (14.98°C), around 0.3°F (0.17°C) higher than
the result in 2016, the previous hottest year, experts from the EU's
Copernicus climate change programme (CS3) reveal. The scientists
have already revealed that last summer was the hottest season on
record, while July was the hottest month on record. Experts warn
that global temperatures are now close to the 2.7°F (1.5°C) limit –
and they point to greenhouse gas emissions as the cause. 2023 has
already been dubbed the year Earth suffered the costliest climate
disasters like droughts, floods, wildfires and lethal heatwaves,
largely due to these emissions”.<br>
Thanks for your interest in our Media and Climate Change Observatory
(MeCCO) work monitoring media coverage of these intersecting
dimensions and themes associated with climate change and global
warming.<br>
- report prepared by Max Boykoff, Rogelio Fernández-Reyes, Jennifer
Katzung, Ami Nacu-Schmidt and Olivia Pearman<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/icecaps/research/media_coverage/summaries/issue85.html">https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/icecaps/research/media_coverage/summaries/issue85.html</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[The news archive - ]</i><br>
<font size="+2"><i><b>February 7, 2007 and 2013 </b></i></font> <br>
</font>
<p>• The US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and
Transportation holds a hearing on climate change research and
scientific integrity, focusing on the George W. Bush
administration's slicing and dicing of science and data. White
House whistleblower Rick Piltz and Nobel laureate Sherwood Rowland
testify.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9vXi61G0MU">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9vXi61G0MU</a>
CSW Director Rick Piltz Senate Hearing Testimony - February 7,
2007<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYDQD8AeORA">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYDQD8AeORA</a>
Dr. F. Sherwood Rowland Senate Hearing Testimony - February 7,
2007<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/2007/02/07/senate-fireworks-on-climate-an/">http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/2007/02/07/senate-fireworks-on-climate-an/</a><br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://scienceblogs.com/integrityofscience/2007/02/07/administration-testimony-one-o/">http://scienceblogs.com/integrityofscience/2007/02/07/administration-testimony-one-o/</a><br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2013/01/31/recalling-an-exchange-with-sen-john-kerry-about-climate-change-and-the-bush-white-house/">http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2013/01/31/recalling-an-exchange-with-sen-john-kerry-about-climate-change-and-the-bush-white-house/</a><br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2013/06/03/recalling-an-exchange-with-sen-lautenberg/">http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2013/06/03/recalling-an-exchange-with-sen-lautenberg/</a><br>
</p>
<p><font face="Calibri"> <br>
</font><font face="Calibri"><br>
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