A Change in the Wind
Ted Rall said he enjoyed drawing this 'toon.
I think he deserves credit for putting together two impressive stats (even if I can't find the number for those Americans who don't think climate change is a problem, one-third of voters is in the ballpark).
In the last couple of weeks a virtual avalanche of appalling news about newspapers and their field workers — the species newsosauras, according to one wit — has come down on me.
On a list of best and worst jobs, according to a career agency cited by the WSJ, reporters come in 196th, almost last, well below such glamorous and lucrative occupations as roofing, waitressing, and sheet metal working.
Then there's this charming chart from GeekWire, based on a Pew Study, showing where ad revenue is going today. Not to newspapers, that's for sure:
Not to mention this one, showing the decline in newsroom employees, from an editors group:
Guess I needn't worry about finding free-lance work. Who else will do the job?
A month ago Heidi Cullen, the hardest working weatherperson around, penned a NY Times op-ed about the least known proof of global warming, phenology:
The climatologist Mark D. Schwartz at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and colleagues at the USA National Phenology Network have developed an index that can be used to estimate the date of the onset of the spring growing season (as opposed to the date in March when daylight and darkness are of equal length, the technical definition of the first day of spring, which falls on Tuesday). This “first leaf” index estimates the first day that leaves appear on plants. Here in the lower 48, spring now arrives approximately three days earlier. “First leaf” has gone from March 20 (1951-1980 average) to March 17 (1981-2010 average). This forward creep is consistent with the effects of an overall warming climate, roughly 1.4 degrees over the past century, what we refer to as global warming.
Winter 2012 will go down as the fourth warmest on record for the contiguous United States, according to the National Climatic Center. And so far, March will be remembered for the more than 2,200 warm temperature records that were set around the nation. The warm weather, with daytime high temperatures close to 40 degrees above average in some places (high temperature records are outpacing cold records by a ratio of about 19-to-1 so far this March), set the stage for severe thunderstorms that spawned rare, damaging tornadoes near Detroit. It used to be that a warm day in March felt like a gift, but now it feels as if we’re paying for it.
We're now up to 15,000 heat records broken around the country this spring. Still no mention of Midwestn heat wave at climate change denier central, Watts Up With That, even though according to NOAA the first three months of this year were the warmest on record.
Scrolled through a search for all of March at the hackish Watts Up With That, and all I found was a mention of a mild winter nationally, sourced at NASA, and numerous posts about cold and snow in the Pacific Northwest. What's up with that, Anthony?
Guess he must've overlooked the heating, somehow. Lost it in the couch.
At Dot Earth, Andy Revkin takes another whack at the link between recent extreme weather events and climate change. He begins as I did a couple of posts back, with the debate between Rahmstorf/Coumou at RealClimate and Marty Hoerling at NOAA. He doesn't put the March heat wave into the mix, but does add useful perspectives from John Wallace and Michael Tobis' great post
Disequilibrium is Not Your Friend.
Which uses a Calder mobile sculpture to illustrate a crucial, logical, but little-understood reality.
It’s a general principle of complex equilibria that the more they are disturbed, the more complex the processes involved in restoring their equilibrium.
And there's more, lots more.
It's a beautiful description, but troubling too. .
Today was reported the death of the great reporter Mike Wallace, of 60 Minutes fame. Sharon Waxman, an excellent reporter herself, recalls meeting him, and hearing of a now forgotten side of Mike Wallace, and of his great friends Art Buchwald and William Styron too:
[Mike] Wallace always seemed fearless and in fact on that day — vibrant and powerful late in his 80s – he seemed timeless too.
Wallace was one of [Art] Buchwald’s closest friends. They would spend summers on the Vineyard together (that day Wallace had just come up from exercising on the beach, visiting Art who was recovering from a stroke).
And Art was a friend of mine, a late-breaking relationship during which we talked for hours. One of the things we talked about was Art’s recurring bouts with depression. It was the thing that he shared with two of his closest friends: William Styron, the novelist, and Mike Wallace.
The three of them would discreetly appear together at support groups, calling themselves “The Blues Brothers,” Buchwald told me.
I could understand Buchwald and Styron as suffering from depression: a humorist (a common affliction among them), and a novelist who wrote about the illness in “Darkness Visible.”
But Wallace was a surprise. Familiar to us all as the aggressive journalist who asked the fearless questions of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Malcolm X, that seemed hard to fathom.
But it was the case. In 1996, Wallace went public with his illness, and asked the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging for more federal funds for depression research.
He told the committee that he had felt “lower, lower, lower than a snake’s belly,” and had tried to commit suicide. (The depression apparently first appeared after being sued for libel by Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who sought $120 million for a 1982 “CBS Reports” documentary, “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception.”)
I don’t know if Wallace succeeded in winning funds for research. But he overcame his depression and went on to continue one of the most storied careers in American journalism.
He is missed, and a man worthy of our great admiration.
I recall Wallace declaring then that he intended to spend the rest of his life on Zoloft. I wonder if he did.
The incandescent writer Terry Tempest Williams — whom you must go see read if you ever get the chance — sends along a print called. Cherry tree in the wind.
The artist, Ethan Friedland, says this is a pencil and charcoal drawing tinted yellow.
Williams says he's twelve years old.
Probably yes, the recent heat wave in the Midwest can be attributed to global warming, write Stefan Rahmstorf and Dim Coumou for RealClimate. They conclude their statistical discussion with:
…let’s take the most simple case of a normal distribution that is shifted towards the warm end by a given amount – say one standard deviation. Then, a moderately extreme temperature that is 2 standard deviations above the mean becomes 4.5 times more likely […]. But a seriously extreme temperature, that is 5 standard deviations above the mean, becomes 90 times more likely! Thus: the same amount of global warming boosts the probability of really extreme events, like the recent US heat wave, far more than it boosts more moderate events.
And they include a couple of telling graphs, including this one from the most recent IPCC report:
But no, argues Marty Hoerling, for NOAA:
A black swan most probably was observed in March 2012 (lest we forget 1910). Gifted thereby to a wonderful late winter of unprecedented balmy weather, we also now know that all swans are not white. The event reminds us that there is no reason to believe that the hottest, "meteorological maddest" March observed in a mere century of observations is the hottest possible. But this isn't to push all the blame upon randomness. Our current estimate of the impact of GHG forcing is that it likely contributed on the order of 5% to 10% of the magnitude of the heat wave during 12-23 March. And the probability of heatwaves is growing as GHG-induced warming continues to progress. But there is always the randomness.
And Hoerling has an example to point to, in which conditions in models in February led to a record predicted heat wave:
The key feature of the evolving predictions is a sudden and abrupt emergence of a very warm March prediction for the Upper Midwest/Ohio Valley region in the February initialized forecasts. These are substantial changes statistically because each plot represents a 40-run average. Prior forecasts had anticipated warm conditions mostly along the southern tier of the U.S., consistent with the impact of ongoing cold tropical Pacific SSTs associated with a La Nina event.
It's puzzling to me that Hoerling should be able to see an extreme heat wave in model runs from February, but still doubt that a black swan event could be attributed to climate change.
I'm missing something, I guess.
Kids today pay more attention to Slate than most newspapers, and stories like Jessica Grose's A Death in Yellowstone make it clear why.
Here's one quote, but you really can't sum it up in a 'graph or two.
Peacock doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as natural or unnatural behavior when it comes to grizzlies, at least not as the bear managers define it. "It is within the range of the ‘natural behavior’ of any grizzly to kill a human during his or her average life span," Peacock wrote in his memoir of his first 20 years spent photographing and living in the Western Wilderness, The Grizzly Years. "The combination of a grizzly’s disposition on a particular day and the nature of its confrontation with any particular human is also probably unique. It would probably never happen again."
But despite thinking all grizzly behavior is "natural," he believes that some grizzly behaviors are predictable, and he gives me the standard set of instructions for what to do should we encounter any in the Pelican Valley. He tells me, "Just stay behind me and don’t do a thing. Don’t move a muscle. Just stay in a little knot and don’t do anything any of those other people did. Don’t scream. Don’t run."
It's too good a yarn, even if it's not a campfire story.
The new movie blockbuster, The Hunger Games, turns out to be shockingly good. Not because it's futuristic — with a little magic, it could easily have been set in ancient times. Not because it stars a teenager, or a young woman; the same story could be told through a male perspective, if less imaginatively. But simply because it's a great story: mesmerizing, suspenseful, surprising.
The movie includes a brush with a forest fire — a moment of real terror:
But this movie fire cannot compare in magnitude to the real fire that burned through much of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana in l910, a story brilliantly told in Timothy Egan's great book The Big Burn.
Here's how Egan describes this fire, as it exploded from Idaho into Montana, eastern Washington state, back towards Glacier National Park, and across the border into British Columbia.
…the wall of flame took over the forest, hundreds of feet high, at least thirty miles wide in some parts, and still gaining strength, still fanning out, consuming oxygen in heaves, and picking up intensity as its core temperature rose. The firest was a classic convection engine now: heat rising, pulling the hottest elements upward, a gyro of spark and flame. After racing through the Clearwater and Nez Perce forests, leveling nearly all living things in the Kelly Clark region, the fire swept up trees at the highest elevations. At this altitude, along the spine of the Bitterroots, the wind moved without obstruction, and the fire itself threw brands ten miles ahead of the flame front. The storm found the Montana border and spit flames down into the heavily settled Bitterroot Valley. It found the Lolo forest and crossed over the pass and along the summits, jumping ridgeline to ridgeline. At the peak of its power, it found the Coeur d'Alene forest, leading with a punch of wind that knocked down thousands of trees before the flames took out the rest of the woods. By now, the conscripted air…was a firestorm of hurricane-force winds, in excess of eighty miles an hour. What had been nearly three thousand small fires throughout a three-state region of the northern Rockies had grown into a single large burn.
An incredible fire that led to extraordinary heroism, and the Forest Service as we know it today.
On tour last night in Ventura, the increasingly popular Kathleen Edwards concluded with her near-hit Change the Sheets, which opens:
My love took a ride on a red-eye plane
Going home
And we're never gonna feel the same
Change this feeling under my feet
Change the sheets and then change me
This central idea reminds me of what a true rock and roller, Craig Goris of Ojai's much-loved Char-Man band, said to me a while back, a year or so before he passed away, far too young. I had expressed the idea that rock was fundamentally opposed to the idea of "the same" and Craig said:
That's what rock and roll is always about. That moment when everything changes.
I'm paraphrasing from memory, but that's what I believe he said, and I think it's true.
Edwards knows it. She can be gritty:
Asking for flowers
Is like asking you to be nice
Don't tell me you're too tired
10 years I've been working nights
She can be classic, in Neil Young's From Hank to Hendrix:
Somewhere on a desert highway
She rides a Harley-Davidson
Her long blonde hair is riding in the wind
She's been running half her life
The chrome and steel she rides
Colliding with the very air she breathes
The air she breathes
And she can be tough, in her crowd favorite Back to Me:
I've got lights you've never seen
I've got moves I've never used
I've got ways to make you come
Back to me
Whether or not she becomes a big star, Kathleen Edwards rocks:
Kit Stolz