It's Official: New Record for Winter Sea Ice

I posted about this earlier, but it's now official. The wintertime maximum of north polar sea ice extent is the lowest on record, according to an article posted by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at http://tinyurl.com/kcydsrh. This graph tells the tale:

The solid blue line is this year's day-by-day sea ice extent as measured by satellite observations. The grey swath shows the 95% prediction interval (under the assumption that the ice extent is normally distributed -- not a bad assumption, but it is an assumption). This year's trace drops almost to the level of being a full three standard deviations below the long-term mean. Even for a small sample, that's remarkable.

Ted Cruz: Candidate of the KnowNothing Party

They say that, if you keep your mouth shut, people might wonder whether you're an idiot, but, if you open you mouth, you dismiss all doubt. Apparently, Senator Ted Cruz proved the truth of this sentiment, earlier this week. The video clip from "Late Night with Seth Myers" is all over the web. One place you can see it is in a Mother Jones article at http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2015/03/ted-cruz-seth-myers-climate-change.

Cruz actually said this about global warming: "Debates on this should follow science and should follow data. And many of the alarmists on global warming, they've got a problem because the science doesn't back them up." 

In fact, it isn't only a lunatic fringe of "alarmists" who are distressed by the prospect of global warming. It's 97% of all practicing climate scientists, the people who make it their business to know about this. 97% of climate scientists know that the science does back them up. They know because they understand the science and the data. Ted Cruz does not.

The article quotes one of the more prominent of those scientists, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, as saying that everything Cruz believes about climate change is "a load of claptrap…absolute bunk". Trenberth is right: The "science" and "data" that Cruz refers to are very clear about this. Climate change is occurring, including warming of the globally averaged surface temperature, and it's caused by human activities that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. I can't illustrate what's wrong with Cruz's thinking any better than Mother Jones does, so I won't try. Do please go read their article.

What I will do is wonder how Cruz thinks that his stance makes any kind of sense. Recent public opinion polls increasingly show that Americans are overwhelmingly on the side of science. A poll taken last December found that 83% of Americans believe that climate change is occurring. A poll taken in January showed that even 48% of Republicans would vote for candidates who want the government to do something to fight global warming.

It's pretty clear that Ted Cruz wants to be President. If polls are to be believed, a minority of Americans are going to score him positively on this particular issue. In what universe does Ted Cruz think that his position is making him look electable?

Oh. Right. In the universe known as "Texas".

As I happen to be a Texan, I can understand how somebody who spends all of his time here might well not realize that denial of global warming is a strategy for political failure. It plays well in some parts of this state. There are folks here who seem to have a major disconnect between the part of their brain that depends on the products of science and the part of their brain that controls what they say about climate change.  On the one hand, they want all those tech goodies that result from scientists using scientific method to learn how the universe actually works. But, whenever global warming is mentioned, they either take the position that science is irrelevant or, as Cruz does, they claim that scientists don't know what science has revealed.

Some days, I'm not all that proud to be a Texan.

Solar Plenty

An article in ScienceDaily reports on new research concluding that enough solar power generation could be installed in California to supply three to five times the state's energy needs.

This is not exactly a surprise.

I have followed the development of alternative energy sources for several years now.  Previous research has shown that wind power alone is enough to supply the energy needs of the entire United States.

Of course, the sun does not always shine and the winds do not always blow.  But that's only an engineering concern. We know how to make batteries. Ongoing research continues to make them cheaper and last longer.

So, if the United States truly wants energy independence from foreign oil, what's stopping us?

A wonderful management exercise is for a company's leaders to ask themselves the question, not of what business they are in, but what business it would be profitable for them to think that they are in. Eventually, oil companies will wise up and figure out that it would be best for them to think that they are in the energy business, rather than the oil business. I have heard that some of them are already moving in that direction.

Oil companies that insist on remaining oil companies will soon become dinosaurs. By contrast, those that invade the burgeoning alternative energy sector can be big winners.

That said, there is one teensy thing about solar and wind energy that has bothered me: To the best of my knowledge, nobody has yet done any research to pin down the consequences of using these energy sources.

Think about it: If you put up a wind generator on the plains of Texas, you extract energy from the wind flow. That means that, in one tiny location, the wind is flowing differently than it would flow if you had not taken some of the energy from it.  Now repeat that a million times, with wind generators spread across the continent. What is the consequence of the resulting change in the flow of air over the earth's surface?

If you put up solar generating facilities, whether home rooftop units or gigantic industrial facilities, you extract some energy that would otherwise contribute to warming the earth's surface at that location. You then transmit that energy over wires to other places where some of it will be used to power our devices and the rest will be released as heat. What is the consequence of changing the flow of heat on the earth's surface?

I hate to say it, but there is every possibility that this generation of alternative energy proponents, motivated by the need to combat global warming, may someday be succeeded by a new generation who blame us for the destruction of their environment because we failed to look at the consequences of the solutions that we implemented.

Somebody needs to look into this.

Second Warmest February

Tom Yulsman's blog at Discover tells us that NASA has released figures showing that this February and this past winter are the second warmest on record. He also has a great animated graphic of the disparity between a lot of people's perceptions and the reality of global warming in light of recent weather.

Yulsman combines NASA images of temperature anomaly -- departure of monthly average temperature from the long-term mean for the same month -- for the three months of the winter that many in the US just suffered through. His post also has a great explanation of just what the situation was that made the eastern part of the U.S. experience such cold and wintry weather.

Predictably, quite a few people who experienced that cold are yet again calling into question whether there can be any such thing as global warming. They feel cold. How can the earth be warming?

This is a lot like a person going into a coal mine on a bright and sunny day, turning off the lights, and then claiming that the sun has gone out.  "I can't see the sun, so I guess it stopped shining." Or, "I feel cold, so I guess global warming is a myth".

But the whole idea of global warming is that, though it may be unseasonably cold in some places, it's a lot warmer in other places, so that the average temperature of the earth is warmer compared to earlier periods in history.  Look carefully at the animation above. During the period when the eastern part of the U.S. was so much colder than normal, what was happening over all of Siberia and the northwestern half of North America? How much of the southern hemisphere had warmer temperatures than normal?