A Change in the Wind
A number of publications last week published compendiums of amazing images from the polar vortex's drunken stagger, in Chris Mooney's wonderful story, across nearly all the nation save drought-stricken CA. Frozen lakes, waterfalls, etc. Here's NASA's GOES satellite picture:
Fine. But what about the vortex of public reaction? Tom Toles sketches that one:
A few days after publishing my shockingly popular story on the Ventura fault last week, and thinking of the upcoming twenty-year anniversary of the Northridge quake, the Ventura County Star followed up with a brief story on seismic risk in Southern Califonia, quoting some of the same experts I qutoed.
The new story can be found here.
I'm disappointed that they didn't ask me to follow up. You know it's tough out there for a freelancer. But the paper did publish a hational hazard map of the Northridge quake, which intrigues:
If this is a map from l996, makes one wonder what the seismic hazard maps of today look like.
Several new studies funded by the Southern California Earthquake Center have identified Ventura as a hot spot for geological activity, with a fault running directly under downtown potentially far more dangerous than previously believed.
If the fault ruptures along its length and involves other faults, it could cause a major earthquake and massive damage, with the possibility of a strong local tsunami, researchers say.
Here's a story on the front page of the Ventura County Star about the "high hazard" the city and the region face from a network of earthquake faults.
My editor at the paper gave me a go-ahead to attend a scientific conference last month, and added a pretty wonderful graphic, and made this story free to the public on line for at least a day, all of which show it matters to the paper and all are facts for which I'm grateful.
But I hope this story doesn't get a whole lot bigger.
VENTURA EARTHQUAKE FAULT MORE DANGEROUS THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT, GEOLOGISTS SAY
Several new studies funded by the Southern California Earthquake Center have identified Ventura as a hot spot for geological activity, with a fault running directly under downtown potentially far more dangerous than previously believed.
If the fault ruptures along its length and involves other faults, it could cause a major earthquake and massive damage, with the possibility of a strong local tsunami, researchers say. The Ventura research was presented at an American Geophysical Union conference last month in San Francisco.
“We have a multiplicity of concerns about Ventura,” said Thomas Jordan, who directs the USC-based center.
“The Ventura fault that runs right through downtown is a very active structure, and Ventura County is an area with many big thrust faults, including San Cayetano, Red Mountain and Pitas Point.
“If you have a 7.3 out in the desert where there’s nothing but a small Marine base, it’s no big deal. But if you put a magnitude 6.3 in the middle of a city, there’s hell to pay, and the fault in downtown Ventura is capable of a lot more than that.”
Using holes drilled about 75 feet deep in a corner of the Ventura College campus, as well as sounding methods at various sites along Day Road in Ventura, researchers found evidence in the layers of stratification of a large earthquake 770 to 1,020 years ago.
The earthquake made a scarp — a fold in the Earth like a fold in a rug. Over hundreds of years, deposits from floods covered and smoothed it out. Today, it’s a gentle slope more or less along Poli Street and Foothill Road, not far from the base of the hills overlooking Ventura.
[a pic of the slope from the paper]
Note: Researcher Judith Hubbard, who graduated from Harvard in 2012, gave me a couple of charts that illustrate literally at a deeper level what is going on, and encouraged me to use them, so here are two profiles that show how deep the Ventura fault was thought to be in 1982 and how deep we think it goes today.
You can barely see a crack in the top graph: in the bottom it links with a whole floor of faults.
To continue with the story:
The earthquake made a scarp — a fold in the Earth like a fold in a rug. Over hundreds of years, deposits from floods covered and smoothed it out. Today, it’s a gentle slope more or less along Poli Street and Foothill Road, not far from the base of the hills overlooking Ventura.
The earthquake that made this slope was anything but gentle, found researchers James Dolan, a USC professor of geology, and Lee Mcauliffe, a graduate student working with Dolan.
“You’re talking about moving a whole chunk of the Earth’s crust in a few seconds,” Dolan said. “We’re talking 6 meters of uplift and 10 meters of displacement. That’s very, very energetic. You simply don’t see that in earthquakes of less than 7.5” magnitude.
Craig Nicholson, a geophysicist at UC Santa Barbara, pointed out that the 1994 Northridge quake was 6.7 in magnitude. A 7.5 would be about 30 times as strong as the Northridge quake, which caused about $40 billion in damage, according to Nicholson.
EXAMINING DATA, HISTORY
Dolan cited new studies by Judith Hubbard, a structural geologist now at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and Tom Rockwell, a geology professor at San Diego State University. Hubbard used oil industry data to help find and profile the Ventura fault. Rockwell used old photos to identify uplifted plateaus along the coast north of the city.
Both have deepened geologists’ understanding of the Ventura fault system.
“Previously, there had been some debate as to whether the Ventura fault was capable of generating large earthquakes or whether it was a surface feature and not much of a factor,” Dolan said. “What this study and other studies … are showing is that these are large displacement events. That means many meters of slip, which indicates that this fault is capable of an earthquake well in excess of a 7” magnitude.
Hubbard spent four months analyzing seismic profiles of the Ventura region provided by the oil industry. The profiles, based on sound waves sent miles below the surface by explosions, provide records of stratification in rock.
Scientists believe that the longer and deeper a fault runs, the more risk it poses. Previous study of the Ventura fault estimated it extended about 1,000 feet below the surface. Hubbard’s results show it extends at least 7,500 feet below.
This means it likely connects to numerous other faults in the region, extending north toward Santa Barbara along the Red Mountain fault, out to sea along the Pitas Point fault, eastward along the San Cayetano fault and southward along the Lion fault.
Note: Hubbard stressed that maps that show faults at the surface, which don't appear to connect, are misleading in the Ventura basin, because we don't see what's happening below. Here's a graph of hers that uses oil rigs to give a sense of the Ventura fault's depth.
And here's one that maps various basin faults at depth, showing how closely they lie.
Sorry! Perhaps the edtor was right. Back to the story:
Hubbard's study estimated that terraces along Highway 101 north of Ventura, which thousands of years ago were beneath the sea, were raised by 16 to 32 feet per earthquake.
“This much uplift would require large earthquakes (magnitude 7.7 to 8.1) involving the entire Ventura/Pitas Point system, and possibly more structures such as the San Cayetano fault,” Hubbard wrote. “Due to the local geography and geology, such events would be associated with significant ground shaking amplification and strong regional tsunamis.”
‘HIGH HAZARD’ SEEN
Rockwell has documented four earthquakes along the Ventura/Pitas Point faults in the past 7,000 years, most recently about 1,000 years ago. Rockwell estimates earthquakes strike there every 400 to 2,800 years, but the long intervals are not entirely good news. It suggests a fault rupture will occur over a greater length and may involve more than one fault.
Ventura County has few large earthquakes in its historical record. A well-documented earthquake in 1812 damaged several missions along the Central Coast, including the San Buenaventura Mission. A second earthquake later that year caused a tsunami that struck Goleta, Santa Barbara and Ventura, according to historical records compiled in the late 1970s by the California Division of Mines and Geology.
Using sonar and seismic instrumentation, Rockwell has been working with graduate student Gulsen Ucarkus, a researcher at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, on an undersea survey of the Ventura-Pitas Point fault system as it moves offshore. He also is working with Steve Ward, a professor at UC Santa Cruz, on this fault’s potential to cause tsunamis. Also in the works is a model of the potential for ground shaking.
“If you look at the national hazard maps … you will see an extremely high hazard in the Ventura basin,” Lucile Jones, a nationally recognized seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said at last month’s conference. “It’s a confluence of faults that are moving very rapidly, and there’s probably a lot of buried faults that we can’t see, too, in such a fast-deforming basin.
“You’re one of the hot spots in California.”
And here's a link to the paper's excellent interactive graphic — with comments apparently from Lucy Jones, independent of my reporting — which the paper kindly encouraged sharing.
What is causing the drought in the West? Could it be a jetstream phenomenon connected to the cold winter being experienced back East? Which could be connected to blockages interrupting the polar vortex, causing it to spill southward into places like the Ohio Valley? And could those blockages be connected — as researchers such as Jen Francis contend — to global warming?
In other words — could global warming be bringing us dryness here in California?
The possibility could be a big story, with — as they say in the journalism trade — lots of moving parts.
Many studies have suggested the possibility that global warming could intensity drought in the West, but some of the leading modelers have tried to replicate the causal mechanism without success statistically, resulting in a genuine controversy in the field. In turn, the modelers have been sharply criticized for ignoring crucial factors such as soil mositure, by the likes of Kevin Trenberth, as discussed by Joe Romm in a ClimateProgress report.
Not all climate science is settled to the nth degree. As long as reputable scientists are presenting research disputing the global warming/Western drought connection, the truth of the charge is unproven.
Still, it's hard to avoid the possibility, especially in the High Sierra.
Let me offer an example:
On the shoreline at Lake Tahoe, where snow should be piled high by now, Valerie Chown and her family this week stumbled across a most unusual winter phenomenon.
There, on the beach, was a nude sunbather.
"It was crazy," said Chown, 59, of Los Altos Hills, about the encounter at Secret Cove, where a few too many secrets were revealed, at least for this time of year.
Only in California. That's from Peter Fimrite of the San Francisco Chronice.
Here's Bettina Boxer's version in the LA Times:
The signs aren’t good when the chief of California’s snow survey has to walk over bare ground to take a snowpack measurement in the Sierra Nevada, as Frank Gehrke did Friday near Echo Summit.
Manual and electronic readings up and down the range placed the statewide snowpack at 20% of normal for this date, adding to worries that 2014 could be a bad drought year.
The meager snowpack was not a surprise. Last year was California’s driest in 119 years of records, according to the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno.
This story includes a picture, though it's not much fun. All the officials are looking down:
Meanwhile, as Climate Central reports, the center of the country is being hit hard by an outbreak of the polar vortex, depicted here in a model for January 6 by WeatherBELL Analytics:
Or, more precisely, in the words of Climate Central:
The cause of the Arctic outbreak can be traced to northeastern Canada and Greenland, where an area of high pressure and relatively mild temperatures is set to block the eastward progression of weather systems, like an offensive lineman protecting the quarterback from the other team.
The atmospheric blocking is forcing a section of the polar vortex to break off and move south, into the U.S. The polar vortex is an area of cold low pressure that typically circulates around the Arctic during the winter, spreading tentacles of cold southward into Europe, Asia, and North America at times. Except this time, it’s not a small section of the vortex, but what one forecaster, Ryan Maue of WeatherBELL Analytics, called “more like the whole enchilada” in a Twitter conversation on Thursday.
How cold will it get? Computer model forecasts project low temperatures on Monday night in Washington to drop to near zero, and below zero in Boston and possibly New York City as well. Dayton, Ohio, is likely to see lows from 10-20°F below zero, and parts of Iowa could see temperatures into the minus 30s°F.
This raises the inevitable connection: Is there a Western onnection?
According to Fish Out of Water, for KOS, the answer is…yes:
This image shows that the lower half of the atmosphere above the northeastern Pacific was much warmer and thicker than normal in 2013, blocking jet stream flow that would bring storms to California.
The jet stream tracked far north of normal in 2013, leaving the west coast of the U.S. in drought. A dome of warmer than normal air and higher than normal pressure pushed west coast storms towards Alaska.
But is this atmospheric high pressure system the cause of California's drought, or a consequence of an oceanic pattern?
An alternative view puts responsibility at the feet of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, better known as the PDO. As Bill Patzert told the LA Times:
Climatologist Bill Patzert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge blames a long-lasting weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
In the cycle's negative phase, the surface waters of the western Pacific warm while the eastern Pacific cools, rather like a big La Niña that pushes the jet stream and the storms it carries to the north of California.
The reverse ocean temperature pattern prevails when the oscillation is in the positive phase, producing wetter, El Niño-like conditions.
For more than a decade, the oscillation has tended toward the negative. "Since 1997-98 more or less, we've been in a dry pattern" in the West, Patzert said.
A glance at the weather service records backs that up. Of the 10 driest years recorded in downtown L.A., two — 2013 and 2007 — have occurred in the last decade.
Which is to say — natural variability. And the KOS blogger does admit the possibility, and fall into speculation in the conclusion to his post:
I suspect the weakening of the thermohaline circulation around Antarctica resulting from the freshening of the waters is driving an acceleration in the trade winds and the ocean currents. About 20% less water is sinking around Antarctica, so the thermal gradient is increasing around Antarctica. This is paradoxically increasing Antarctic winter sea ice while the global oceans warm up faster than expected.
And he adds:
Of course, there are natural cycles and there's always natural variability.
To which one can only say: Of course.
Frankly, at this point, we can only hope for an outbreak of natural variability — anything to vary the pattern from dryness.
Went to Death Valley after Christmas and was struck by the fact that it seemed only slightly drier than the rest of Southern California. Which usually by now has had more than an inch or so of rain, when absolutely none is foreseen for this month:
It's worrisome — kind of like the Devil's Gold Course in Death Valley National Park. 
From a gloom-and-doom appraisal of the book trade in the Times — which may well be on the mark, may I say — a great quote from the late great John Cheever:
I can't write without a reader. it's precisely like a kiss — you can't do it alone.
A pic of Cheever from at home:
Cigarettes are evil.
What is evil?
"Evil is movement towards void," said (memorably) the novelist Don Delillo.
In the context of cigarettes, evil is intending to push users towards the void — to sicken or kill them.
But how can a naturally occuring substance, a venerable plant such as tobacco, express malice?
Here's how — by taking over the body's machinery, and using it against us.
Not unlike HIV, if you think about it. A fascinating study (and science fiction-esque video) detail the process, but the central point is that nicotine acts as a "pharmacological chaperone" to assemble nicotine receptors, and make them "more abundant" in the brain.
Here's a visualization of this process in close-up — video available]
To hardwire us for more addiction, even as it is addicting us. That's evil in physical form.
Update: as if to prove the point beyond dispute, a study by the Massachusetts public health agency released in January showed that many cigarette-makers steadily increased the level of nicotine in their cigarettes in the last decade or so –by about 15%.
Consciously plotting to addict users to a substance that causes cancer and disease. That's evil.
Back in l988, physicist/climatologist James Hansen told Congress that that we had begun to change the earth's atmosphere. This was during a heat wave in Washington, and his testimony made headlines. That's rare for a scientist of any sort.
"Global warming has began, Expert tells Senate" reported the NYTimes.
"It's time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here," [Hansen] told a Senate panel. He added that it was "99 per cent certain" that the warming trend was not a case of natural variation.
He testified:
''Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming. It is already happening now.''.
Since then the Kyoto Protocol — an international pact that grew out of a UN effort to begin a global conversation about climate change — has come and gone. The goal at that time was "stablization of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the cimate system."
We have not yet succeeded in avoiding this oncoming disaster, and Hansen's views are not unique among scientists. A poll conducted by Naomi Orestes of UC San Diego found a 97% consensus of climatologists on the basic facts of global warming, and the fundamental idea that heating the atmosphere and the oceans poses serious risks to our civilization. .
Yet no matter how many times Hansen states the scientific argument, American culture continues to shrug off his warnings, and silence him when he speaks out.
This month he revealed he and a formidable group of collaborators cannot publish a study warning of the consequences of inaction on climate in the in the most estemmed of public science journals, PNAS [an outlet associated with the National Academy of Sciences].
Hansen gave the keynote speech to a crowd of of perhaps 2500 scientists at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco. The speech ranged from the potential extinction of the Monarch butterfly to the threat to coastal cities around thew world, and included numerous attempts to puncture our shield of denial. At one point Hansen pointed out that energy departments at the state and federal level publish graphs showing fossil fuel extraction skyrocketing, and emissions too, indefinitely, "as if that had to happen."
"Isn't there such a thing as free will?" he said. "It's still possible for us to get on another path, but not if we don't try to do it."
Hansen went on to recount his struggles with the PNAS, which unlike most science publications makes its papers freely available to the public He mentioned that the paper that he and his esteemed colleagues, eventually published elsewhere was repeatedly slapped down for "normative" language.
For, in other words, for suggesting that we should act to defuse the threat of global warming.
"It tooks us three years to publish this paper, and part of the reason was that we submitted it to PNAS, And although it got the highest ratings by the referees, the editor gave it to the editorial board, and they insisted that we remove "normative statements" from the paper."
Hansen smiled, but not happily.
"Which is a little strange. It seems to me that pointing out the implictions of science should not be prohibited," Hansen said, in his dry, matter of fact, Midwestern voice. "It got to the point with one anonymous board member reviewer that even the word "dangerous" was considered "normative."
He laughed — exasperated. And showed us a telling graph.
He ponted out that instead of trying to reduce carbon extraction and output, politicians from both parties were "falling all over themselves" to take credit for more fossil fuel extraction, which would only add to the peril. His frustration was evident, and he appeared weary. The ambitious speech seemed to go over the heads of the crowd at times, and he suggested at the conclusion that just as he was struggling to communicate the crisis, we were struggling too, to understand it.
Here's perhaps the simplest form of this plea for action on global warming:
A pic/quote from one of the early titans in the field, tweeted from the conclusion of another excellent talk — by RealClimater Gavin Schmidt — on the difficulty of moving the needle on this issue.
Scott Simon of NPR tweets the news:
Some guy in a red suit on a sleigh buzzed our airplane. NORAD, get after him!
— Scott Simon (@nprscottsimon) December 24, 2013
But already it seems Ted Rall has thought it through:
In this time of giving thanks, I am grateful for a new national park in the heart of coastal California, the lovely Pinnacles. Not big (only 26,000 acres) but big enough to be home to two dozen condors, and numerous other interesting species — and much beauty.
Via ecowatch.
Marc Gunther runs a new sustainability blog for The Guardian, and brings an acerbic intelligence to the topic — no little b.s. stories about how a tiny innovation or change will save us from a big problem.
Example: plastic bags. Adam Corner for the blog writes:
In 2014, England will follow the example set by Wales and Scotland and introduce a carrier bag charge. If the Welsh and Scottish experiences are anything to go by, the policy will drastically reduce the number of bags in circulation, keeping unnecessary waste out of landfill and removing a little polythene from the diet of our cities' seagulls.
Like recycling, re-using carrier bags has become something of an iconic "sustainable behaviour". But whatever else its benefits may be, it is not, in itself, an especially good way of cutting carbon. Like all simple and painless behavioural changes, its value hangs on whether it acts as a catalyst for other, more impactful, activities or support for political changes.
The evidence from Wales is not encouraging. My colleagues at Cardiff University analysed the impact of the introduction of the carrier bag charge. Although their use reduced dramatically, rates of other low-carbon behaviours among the general public remained unaffected.
To be clear: fewer plastic bags would be a small, good thing. But as a major two-day conference at the Royal Society headquarters in London this week made clear, "every little helps" is a dangerously misleading mantra when it comes to climate change.
Of course, it's always possible that cloth or old shopping bags will open the door to something bigger, and there's no harm in it. Just a tinge of frustration. Can't we sacrifice just a little for the planet? Is this the best we can do?
But my fav Gunther piece came right at Thanksgiving, on the eve of Black Friday, where he opened a column with a blast of sarcasm at those who would shop their way to happiness:
Ah yes, ’tis the happiest time of year, the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas when people buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, to create impressions that won’t last, on people they don’t care about.
The older I get, the less Christmas shopping seems to matter.
Some people disagree:
Kidding. It's from Wes Craven, who tweets: "Let's keep it civil out there."
Kit Stolz