President Obama addresses climate change in acceptance speech

President Obama addresses climate change in acceptance speech

Dorsi Diaz

By Dorsi Diaz

In a move giving hope to environmentalists, climatologists, scientists and humanity, President Obama mentioned climate change in his acceptance speech last night after winning his bid for re-election.

Despite all the threats that America faces, Obama zeroed in on climate change.

“We want our children to live in an America that isn't burdened by debt, that isn't weakened by inequality, that isn't threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.”

Although climate change was not mentioned once in the candidate’s debates between Romney and Obama, clearly our warming climate is on the President’s mind.

After Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast and cost lives and billions of dollars in damage, the subject of climate change has repeatedly been brought up, and the tide of public opinion on global warming has shifted – with over 70% of the U.S. now believing that climate change is real.

Days before the election and in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the subject of climate change also shifted the thoughts of some on who to vote for in the election.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York decided to vote for Obama saying he had decided that Mr. Obama was the “better candidate to tackle the global climate change, which he believes might have contributed to the violent storm.”

“Our climate is changing”, Bloomberg wrote. “And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it may be - given the devastation it is wreaking - should be enough to compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.”

Although the debates featured both candidates speaking of drilling for oil, it looks like the President’s agenda will be to continue focusing on clean energy, sustainability and green issues. Although there were some failed attempts to implement Obama's policies in his first term, we can be sure to expect the continuation of working towards a more sustainable future in the next 4 years.

When elected in 2008, President Obama had high hopes for addressing climate change, but with the focus then on saving the faltering economy, bailing out the banks and a corrupted Wall Street system, attention was diverted away from the subject. Despite the threat of an economic meltdown when Obama first took office, there was still a major push towards creating green companies, researching alternative energy sources and a focus on green energy jobs.

Although the President faced opposition from many Republican leaders who didn't believe in climate change, the tide of public opinion and the necessity to address climate change has many people concerned. With extreme weather on the rise and costing lives and billions of dollars in damage, people are also waking up to the growing threat of a catastrophic release of methane gas from the rapidly thawing Arctic.

Methane gas is many times more powerful than carbon dioxide, and has the ability to send the Earth into runaway and/or abrupt climate change.

In a recent plea to world leaders to address the growing threat of climate change: Why Arctic Sea Ice Matters To You and Me (pdf), John Nissen of AMEG (Arctic Methane Emergency Group) didn't mince words when he put this out on the table for world leaders to ponder:

“We are toppling over the cliff edge. Collapse of sea ice could be even more dramatic next year. We face an almost irreversible transition to an ice-free Arctic. Only immediate and drastic action to cool the Arctic can stop it now. The consequences of further meltdown would be dire for you and all your citizens. The weather extremes we've witnessed this year could get far worse, leading to widespread crop failures and an ever deepening food security crisis affecting every country in the world.”

Written in September of 2012, before Hurricane Sandy hit, Nissen's plea seems to hold many truths as we stand witness to the devastating damage from an unprecedented storm dubbed “Frankenstorm”.

With a need to put more pressure on global leaders to address the growing threat of climate change, more action is needed to act fast and act quickly. Climatologists and scientists say the window of opportunity is rapidly closing.

With Obama's words on climate change during his acceptance speech, a tiny flicker of hope has been stirred that maybe, just maybe, something can be done to avert a climate change mega-disaster.

And with the Pentagon stating that climate change is the number #1 threat to national security, perhaps a global consensus surpassing partisanship can take place – with saving humanity as the ultimate goal.

After all, the economy won’t matter if there are no people left to have jobs.

From an article posted earlier at Examiner.com - posted with the author's permission

Hurricane Sandy intensifies climate change debate

By Dorsi Diaz

Flooded Avenue C at East 6th Street in Manhattan's East Village neighborhood of Loisaida, October 30, 2012, moments before an explosion at the power substation took out power to the neighborhood. Credit: David Shankbone

Although recent polls show that 70% of people now believe in climate change, recent extreme weather events are sure to drive that number even higher. With the East Coast of the U.S. reeling from the extreme devastation of Hurricane Sandy, attention has been brought back to what caused the Superstorm and why.

Many in the scientific community point to climate change as being a major contributing factor in the unprecedented storm.

Paul Beckwith, climate scientist at The University of Ottawa and member of the Sierra Club Canada, goes into detail in explaining how Hurricane Sandy was fueled by climate change:

“Rising greenhouse gases are rapidly warming our climate with Arctic amplification by 5x due to darkening from sea ice and snow cover collapse. The resulting decrease in temperature gradient between the equator and Arctic slows the jet stream winds which increases their waviness in the north/south direction. Combined with 4% higher water vapor in warmer atmosphere, this waviness makes storms more intense and frequent and larger in size and occur in different places. It made Sandy enormous in size and made her turn left onto the U.S. coast instead of turn right like every other hurricane in history.”

In a comment to Dorsi Diaz, reporter for the Examiner, Beckwith goes on to explain what would have happened had Sandy not been influenced by the climate anomalies that fed into the storm:

“Without the blocking high pressure northward and low pressure trough pulling her to the coastline (from the jet stream waviness) she would have headed harmlessly out to sea. Without the huge waviness of the jets the massive and ongoing drought in the U.S. would not be occurring. As sea ice further declines these storms and drought and all extreme weather events are certain to explode in magnitude, size, and frequency.”

According to Sam Carana, AMEG member (Arctic Methane Emergency Group) and editor of the Arctic-News blog:

“Warming in the Arctic is accelerating at a pace several times that of the rest of the world. This is changing the jet stream, which is what forced Sandy to move inland, to spread out and to hang around for such a long time. Without more effective action on climate change, weather events like this can be expected to hit the U.S. more often and with increasing force in future.”

Although some die-hard climate skeptics say that Hurricane Sandy was not caused or fueled by climate change, that minority seems to be losing ground as evidence piles up in favor of those that believe that extreme weather events are being caused by a warming climate.

Nathan Currier, senior climate advisor for Public Policy Virginia, who also writes about climate change, had this to say about it in a recent article:

“All major components of this super storm show the signature of human-induced climate change to varying degrees, and without global warming the chance of the three occurring together like this would have a probability of about zero. So, let's make it simple, and just say climate change caused this storm.”

In a sampling of Americans, there are some interesting views and comments being made about climate change and its effects on the globe.

Writer Julia Hanna was amazed at Hurricane Sandy’s strength and ferocity,

“I heard about the hurricane from people posting about how the replica ship Bounty went down, and it seemed surreal to hear about a hurricane taking down a ship. I am not a climatologist, but I have never heard of a hurricane of such severity.”

Although losing ships in a hurricane is not a new phenomena, evidence is piling up that devastating hurricanes are on the rise due to global warming. In a report by the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), hurricanes are expected to become more frequent in the coming decades:

“Anthropogenic warming by the end of the 21st century will likely cause hurricanes globally to be more intense on average (by 2 to 11% according to model projections for an IPCC A1B scenario). This change would imply an even larger percentage increase in the destructive potential per storm, assuming no reduction in storm size.”

As the clean-up from Hurricane Sandy continues, more people are starting to wonder why we are having such extreme weather events around the globe. Doug Harry, West Coast resident, comments:

“Too many people dismiss climate change. You don’t make mother nature angry.”

Many that Diaz interviewed agree with Doug, that the Earth is now showing us the consequences of not tackling climate change earlier on.

Patrick McNulty, another AMEG member, has some ideas for tackling the problem that climate change is bringing us.

“Not allowing solar radiation to re-radiate back out to space because of fossil fuel GHG's trapping that energy in the atmosphere/oceans raises Earths total energy budget closer to the surface. You can now expect once in a lifetime storms to occur every decade. BTW, my tunnel idea reverses this trend.”

Patrick McNulty proposes tunnels

Patrick’s tunnel idea for dealing with the effects of Arctic ice melting are one of the many “solutions” that are being examined in the response to battling the effects of climate change.

Changing the way we consume fossil fuels is being tackled by other inventive people including an idea that includes the use of “bio-fuel”. One manufacturer of this bio-fuel cites that there would be less impact on our environment, one way to slow down human’s contribution to the problem of our warming climate.

In a opening statement on their website, the makers of the new bio-fuel Envirolene say it's:

“the world’s strongest, cleanest alcohol fuel. It’s a new, more powerful class of ”oxygenate” fuel. It’s stronger and cleaner than ethanol, more profitable to produce, and this new clean fuel powers any gas or diesel engine from a ship to a small engine with no modifications.”

Jay Toups, CEO and managing partner of BioRoot Energy, the makers of Envirolene, comments,

“There are 1 billion plus tailpipes and smokestacks spewing emissions every day. That's the real threat because it never stops.”

Mead Rose, who has also been following the climate change debate for several years, closely follows the melting of the Arctic ice and it’s ramifications.

In one of the articles that Mead submitted, the evidence of climate suppression is exposed. In an 2009 article named, “Group Promoting Climate Skepticism has Extensive Ties to Exxon-Mobil”, evidence makes it clear that there has been an ongoing battle by Big Oil companies to discredit scientific evidence about climate change.

In his blunt statement in the article, Joseph Romm, lauded climate expert and author of the blog Climate Progress, said:

“Exxon-Mobil essentially funds people to lie. It’s important for people to understand that they pay off the overwhelming majority of groups in the area of junk science.”

Joe Romm also makes the connection between Superstorm Sandy and climate change when he stated today at Climate Progress:

“Scientists worst-case scenarios are already happening - latest findings deserve attention so that Sandy doesn't become just another Cassandra whose warnings are ignored. Now climate scientists project that we risk up to 10 times as much warming this century as in the last 50 years — with many devastating consequences from dramatic sea level rise to Dust-Bowlification.”

With the battle over climate change continuing, climate skeptics and disinformation concerns climate scientists who have been trying to warn of catastrophic consequences if we don’t address it now.

One well know climate scientist, Michael Mann, a Penn State University scientist who has been studying the climate for decades, said that ocean waters were about 1 degree warmer thanks to man-made climate change, one factor that clearly caused Sandy to swell. Mann, author of “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars”, has been an outspoken critic on the debate over climate change.

Politicians, who used to shy away from the discussion of climate change, are even starting to “come clean” about what’s happening to our climate. With an estimated 3 foot rise in California’s sea level expected by 2100, California Governor Jerry Brown is pulling no punches in dealing with climate change deniers.

In a dire warning the California governor recently said:

“Humanity is getting close to the point of no return.”

EQECAT, a consultancy based in Oakland, California, estimates the economic losses from Hurricane Sandy at between $30 billion and $50 billion in economic losses, including property damage, lost business and extra living expenses.

The question is now, how much longer can we afford to debate about climate change?

From an article posted earlier at Examiner.com - posted with the author's permission

Related

Read other eye-opening reports by Dorsi Diaz on what happens next if unchecked climate change continues:
Climate Change: Extreme Weather, Storms and Hurricane Sandy
The Tipping Point - a Global Climate Change Warming Point of No Return
The Arctic Sea Ice is Melting: What Does This Mean For Us?

Hold on folks… the times they are a-changin’

Melting Arctic sea ice aims Frankenstorm Sandy directly at the Big Apple

Paul Beckwith,
B.Eng, M.Sc. (Physics),
Ph.D. student (Climatology)
and Part-time Professor,
University of Ottawa 

by Paul Beckwith

Frankenstorm Sandy is a scary beast. A hybridization between a tropical hurricane and a mid-latitude cyclone, her behavior is not natural at all. Moving northward off the east coast, Sandy is turning left toward land instead of right toward the sea. Sandy’s being blocked from moving north by a high pressure area of enormous magnitude, and being sucked west by a low pressure region of very exceptional (and highly unusual) strength.

Thus the designation “Frankenstorm”.

Because the Earth rotates on its axis, circulating air deflects toward the left in the Southern Hemisphere and to the right in the Northern Hemisphere. This deflection is called the Coriolis Effect and explains why storms in the northern hemisphere generally always turn to the right. Sandy should be turning right.

The Coriolis Effect - image credit: NOAA

So why is Sandy turning left towards the U.S. east coast? That’s where meteorology comes in - and the meteorology is now a lot different thanks to climate change. How so?

As I wrote in my last blog, push something and it moves a little … push it a little more and it moves a little more. This is called a “linearity” response. But sometimes a little push can lead to something totally unexpected! This is called “nonlinearity” and, contrary to what one might think, nonlinearities are inherent in most systems - like our atmosphere. Until recently, our atmosphere and oceans behaved like linear systems: incremental dumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere caused incremental changes, like rising temperatures and predictable rates of ice melt. But things are now changing unexpectedly fast – nonlinearity is kicking in! Make no mistake about it, Frankenstorm Sandy IS a nonlinearity event; totally unpredicted and totally unprecedented - the latest example of global weirding.

For the first time in at least 3 million years, the Arctic icecap will soon completely disappear. Without it, sunlight that would normally reflect back out to space will be absorbed by the water - warming it and the air above it. The old climate models predicted the Arctic Ocean wouldn't be ice-free for 30 years or more, but now we know it could be gone in as little as 3 years (and no more than 7). When this happens, the temperature differential (between the Northern and Southern hemispheres) will be reduced even further, and in short time.

NASA image with data from the U.S. Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s Special Sensor Microwave/Imager.
The line on the image shows the average minimum extent from the period covering 1979-2010, as measured by satellites. 

Meteorology 101 shows us this change (reduction) in the temperature differential slows west-to-east winds and jet streams. And as fast jet streams slow, they become much wavier and travel much more north and south (this is contributing to the large high pressure area we are seeing directly north of Hurricane Sandy and large low pressure area over the United States).

If you think this storm is bad, get used to it. Frakenstorms like Sandy will become commonplace, the new norm, as it were.

As I write this blog for Sierra Club Canada, Frankenstorm Sandy maintains (and may even be gaining) strength as she approaches the U.S. coast. She’s expanded in size so much that gale force winds are now covering an area over 1500 km in diameter.

Sandy is now the largest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. Her winds have reached 150 kilometers per hour and her barometric pressure has dropped to 940 millibars (among the lowest pressure ever measured anywhere in the continental United States).

As I’ve been predicting in my blog since August, hold on folks… the times they are a-changin’.

NOAA's GOES-13 satellite captured this image of Hurricane Sandy on Oct. 28 at 1302 UTC (9:02 a.m. EDT).
The line of clouds from the Gulf of Mexico north are associated with the cold front that Sandy is merging with.
Sandy's western cloud edge is already over the mid-Atlantic and northeastern U.S. (Credit: NASA GOES Project)

Originally posted October 29, 2012, at Sierra Club Canada; posted here with author's permission

Forces behind Superstorm Sandy

Superstorm Sandy hit North America's east coast in a devastating way. This justifies an analysis of the forces behind Sandy and the links with global warming and climate change.

Global warming causes temperatures of oceans and the atmosphere to rise. A warming Gulf Stream fuels hurricanes traveling north along North America's east coast.

More heat translates into more wind; specifically, stronger hurricanes are getting stronger over the years, as illustrated by the inmage on the right from James Elsner et al. (2008).

Additionally, sea levels are rising, especially on the Atlantic coast of North America, which is a hotspot of accelerated sea-level rise, as described in a study by Sallenger et al. (2012).

Generally, global warming will cause more extreme weather events, says James Hansen (2012). This is especially the case for heavy rainfall events, since global warming causes more evaporation of seawater, while warm air can also carry more water. According to Kevin Trenberth (2011), the water holding capacity of air increases by about 7% per 1°C warming, which leads to increased water vapor in the atmosphere. Hence, storms, whether individual thunderstorms, extratropical rain or snow storms, or tropical cyclones, supplied with increased moisture, produce more intense precipitation events. All this leads to a greater hurricane danger; they can be expected to be stronger and wetter, causing flooding and further devastation along the east coast of North America.

The situation in the Arctic is making things even worse. Several studies, such as by Jennifer Francis (2012), by Greene et al. (2012) and by Liu et al. (2012), show that atmospheric circulation is changing as a result of sea ice loss. This circulation change results in more frequent episodes of blocking patterns that lead to increased cold surges over large parts of northern continents. Moreover, sea ice loss results in an increase in atmospheric water vapor content in the Arctic region during late autumn, and this provides enhanced moisture sources.

More open water in the Arctic Ocean results in more warming of the overlying atmosphere. This warming can be expected to change precipitation. An analysis by Julienne Stroeve (2011) shows an autumn increase in cyclone-associated precipitation over the past decade, linked to a shift in atmospheric circulation towards more frequent and more intense cyclones in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic.

The authors added that more research was needed; indeed, the devastation caused by Sandy calls for further analysis. Warming in the Arctic is accelerating at a pace several times that of the rest of the world, as a result of multiple feedbacks as described in the post Diagram of Doom; changing of the jet stream is only one out of multiple feedbacks.

Changes to the jet stream were behind Sandy's path inland. A strong and prolonged high pressure area over Greenland blocked Sandy from going north or east. This also caused it to spread out and to hang around for such a long time.

Big changes are taking place in the Arctic, in terms of sea ice loss, snow line retreat and albedo change in Greenland. Without more effective action on climate change, weather events like this can therefore be expected to hit the east coast of North America more often and with increasing force in future.


References

- The increasing intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones, James Elsner et al. (2008)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v455/n7209/abs/nature07234.html

- Hotspot of accelerated sea-level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America, Asbury Sallenger et al. (2012)
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1597.html

- Perception of climate change, James Hansen et al. (2012)
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/37/E2415

- Changes in precipitation with climate change, Kevin Trenberth (2011)
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/SSD_Trenberth_2nd_proof.pdf

- Linking Weird Weather to Rapid Warming of the Arctic, Jennifer Francis (March 2012)
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/linking_weird_weather_to_rapid_warming_of_the_arctic/2501/

- An Arctic wild card in the weather, Chuck Greene and Bruce Monger (2012)
http://www.tos.org/oceanography/archive/25-2_greene.html
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/June12/arcticWildcard.html

- Impact of declining Arctic sea ice on winter snowfall, Jiping Liu et al. (2012)
http://www.lasg.ac.cn/UpLoadFiles/File/papers/2012/2012-pnas.jiping_liu.pdf

- Attribution of recent changes in autumn cyclone associated precipitation in the Arctic, Julienne Stroeve et al. (2011)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0870.2011.00515.x/abstract
http://www.tellusa.net/index.php/tellusa/article/view/15846/17736
poster at:
http://soa.arcus.org/sites/soa.arcus.org/files/sessions/2-3-arctic-change-and-natural-variability/pdf/stroeve.pdf

Related

- Warming Gulf Stream causes methane release
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2012/10/warming-gulfstream-causes-methane-release.html

- Diagram of Doom
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2012/08/diagram-of-doom.html

- Opening further Doorways to Doom
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2012/08/opening-further-doorways-to-doom.html

- Climate Change Sandy Says to US: 'Take That, Idiots!'
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2012/10/climate-change-sandy-says-to-us-take-that-idiots.html

- Hurricane Sandy moving inland
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2012/10/hurricane-sandy-moving-inland.html

- Big changes in Arctic within years
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2012/10/big-changes-in-arctic-within-years.html