My worst global warming fear: buckeyes in Ann Arbor
Last week, I blogged about how wintertime minimum temperatures in the U.S. have risen so much in recent decades, that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) had to update their Plant Hardiness Zone Map for gardeners for the first time since 1990. The Plant Hardiness Zone Map is the standard by which gardeners and growers can determine which plants are most likely to thrive at a location. I got to looking at the new zone map for Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I live, and saw how we've shifted one 5-degree Fahrenheit half-zone warmer. Ann Arbor used to be in Zone 5, but is now solidly in the warmer Zone 6. This got me to wondering, what sort of plants in Zone 6, until now rare or unknown in Ann Arbor, might migrate northwards in coming decades into the city? Then, with a sudden chill, I contemplated a truly awful possibility: The Ohio Buckeye Tree.
Figure 1. Comparison of the 1990 and 2012 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Maps. Image credit: USDA and Arbor Day Foundation.
Buckeyes in Ann Arbor? The Horror!
For those of you unfamiliar the the buckeye tree, it is the emblem of Ohio State University. The Buckeyes of Ohio State have one of the most fierce rivalries in sports with that "school up north", the University of Michigan. As someone who spent twelve years of my life as a student at the University of Michigan, the thought of Buckeye trees in Ann Arbor is not one I care to contemplate. But the USDA Forest Service has published a Climate Change Tree Atlas which predicts that the most favorable habitat for the Ohio Buckeye Tree can be expected to move northwards with a warming climate. While they give their model for the Buckeye Tree a rating of "low reliability", it is nonetheless chilling to contemplate the potential infestation of Ann Arbor with this loathsome invader. I can only sadly predict that to stem the invasion, non-ecologically-minded University of Michigan students will unleash genetically engineered wolverines that eat buckeye seeds.
Figure 2. Potential changes in the mean center of distribution of the Ohio Buckeye tree. The green oval shows the current center of the range of the Buckeye Tree, well to the south of Ann Arbor. In a scenario where humans emit relatively low amounts of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide (light blue oval), the most favorable climate for the Buckeye Tree edges into Southern Michigan, and marches into Ann Arbor under the medium and high scenarios for emissions (other ovals.) Image credit: USDA Forest Service Climate Change Tree Atlas.
Libyan snowstorm triggered major Saharan dust storm
On February 6, a rare snow storm hit North Africa, bringing 2 - 3 inches of snow to Tripoli, Libya. It was the first snow in Tripoli since at least 2005, and may be the heaviest snow the Libyan capital has seen since February 6, 1956. The storm responsible for the North African snow also had strong winds that kicked up a tremendous amount of dust over Algeria during the week. This dust became suspended in a flow of air moving to the southwest, and is now over the Atlantic Ocean.
Figure 3. Dust storm on February 7, 2012, off the coast of West Africa, spawned by a storm that brought snow to North Africa on February 6. Note the beautiful vorticies shed by the Cape Verde Islands, showing that the air is flowing northeast to southwest. The red squares mark where fires are burning in West Africa. Image credit: NASA.
Have a great weekend, everyone, and I'll be back Monday with a new post.
Jeff Masters
NO SILLY NOT THE FOOTBALL TEAM .......THE REAL THING
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TEHRAN - Iran will soon unveil "big new" nuclear achievements, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Saturday while reiterating Tehran's readiness to revive talks with the West over the country's controversial nuclear program.
Ahmadinejad spoke at a rally in Tehran as tens of thousands of Iranians marked the 33rd anniversary of the Islamic Revolution that toppled the pro-Western monarchy and brought Islamic clerics to power.
Ahmadinejad did not elaborate on the upcoming announcement but insisted Iran would never give up its uranium enrichment, a process that makes material for reactors as well as weapons.
Link
No one has said anything about...
Poor wife! Visiting friends, right in the center of that plume, on the MI/IN border. Gonna be snowed in for sure.
Recent contributions of glaciers and ice caps to sea level rise
Thomas Jacob, John Wahr, W. Tad Pfeffer and Sean Swenson"
Thanks for the title. Neither Google nor Nature would cough up the article with Wahr Jacob Pfeffer Swenson used as the keywords.
Table 1: Inverted 2003-2010 mass balance rates -- Uncertainties are given at the 95% confidence level.
-11 plus-or-minus 02 gigatons/year _ 1. Iceland
-03 plus-or-minus 02 gigatons/year _ 2. Svalbard
000 plus-or-minus 02 gigatons/year _ 3. Franz Josef Land
-04 plus-or-minus 02 gigatons/year _ 4. Novaya Zemlya
-01 plus-or-minus 02 gigatons/year _ 5. Severnaya Zemlya
002 plus-or-minus 10 gigatons/year _ 6. Siberia and Kamchatka
003 plus-or-minus 06 gigatons/year _ 7. Altai
-04 plus-or-minus 20 gigatons/year _ 8. High Mountain Asia
-05 plus-or-minus 06 gigatons/year _ 8a. Tianshan
-01 plus-or-minus 05 gigatons/year _ 8b. Pamirs and Kunlun Shan
-05 plus-or-minus 06 gigatons/year _ 8c. Himalaya and Karakoram
007 plus-or-minus 07gigatons/year _ 8d. Tibet and Qilian Shan
001 plus-or-minus 03 gigatons/year _ 9. Caucasus
-02 plus-or-minus 03 gigatons/year _ 10. Alps
003 plus-or-minus 05 gigatons/year _ 11. Scandinavia
-46 plus-or-minus 07 gigatons/year _ 12. Alaska
005 plus-or-minus 08 gigatons/year _ 13. Northwest America excl. Alaska
-33 plus-or-minus 05 gigatons/year _ 14. Baffin Island
-34 plus-or-minus 06 gigatons/year _ 15. Ellesmere, Axel Heiberg and Devon Islands
-06 plus-or-minus 12 gigatons/year _ 16. South America excl. Patagonia
-23 plus-or-minus 09 gigatons/year _ 17. Patagonia
002 plus-or-minus 03 gigatons/year _ 18. New Zealand
-222 plus-or-minus 09 gigatons/year _ 19. Greenland ice sheet
-165 plus-or-minus 72 gigatons/year _ 20. Antarctica ice sheet
-536 plus-or-minus 93 gigatons/year _ Total
-148 plus-or-minus 30 gigatons/year _ Glaciers(and)IceCaps excl. Greenland and Antarctica PGICs
-384 plus-or-minus 71 gigatons/year _ Antarctica and Greenland IceSheets and PeripheralGICs
1.48 plus-or-minus 0.26 millimetres/year _ Total contribution to SeaLevelRise
0.41 plus-or-minus 0.08 millimetres/year _ SeaLevelRise due to GICs excluding Greenland and Antarctica PGICs
1.06 plus-or-minus 0.19 millimetres/year _ SeaLevelRise due to Antarctica and Greenland IceSheets and PGICs
LOoks like a nice Ohio Valley Snow Storm coming in about 4 days!
Nice dip of the Jet!
Lot of talking from the manly keyboard warriors as well
THE ROVING EYE
The return of the Keyboard Warriors
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NB11Ak02 .html
Be afraid. Be very afraid. The Return of the Keyboard Warriors - a prized Return of the Living Dead spin-off - is at hand. From Republican chicken hawks to public intellectuals, right-wing America is erupting in renewed neo-conservative revolt. The year 2012 is the new 2002; Iran is the new Iraq. Whatever the highway - real men go to Tehran via Damascus, or real men go to Tehran
non-stop - they want a war, and they want it now.
Go ahead and jump Exhibit A is an op-ed piece at the Wall Street Journal [1] - similar to countless others popping up virtually everyday not only in this Masters of the Universe vehicle but also in the Washington Post and myriad rags across "Western civilization".
The festival of fallacies ranges from the usual "diplomacy has run its course" to "the sanctions are too late" - culminating in the right-wing weapon of choice; "Iran is within a year of getting to the point when it will be able to assemble a bomb essentially at will." Why bother to follow what the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is doing, not to mention the National Intelligence Estimates released by the US intelligence community?
And why not add imperial disdain tinged with racism, as in "Iran is a Third World country that can't even protect its own scientists in the heart of Tehran". Of course not; they are being killed by the Iranian terror group Mujahideen-e-Khalq, merrily trained, financed and armed by Israel's Mossad, as US corporate media has just discovered. [2] Everybody in Iran has known this for months.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NB11Ak02 .html
1-2 inches isn't what I would call a nice snow storm....
gfs
Ugly thing...
So the 1003mb and is absorbed, the 1008mb dissipates, while the 1004 moves fast north and deepens to 967mb over Nova Scotia, and a new developing storm force low takes shape at 996mb south of it.
Cool, lol
We have analyzed records of these sounds and found that most of their spectrum lies within the infrasound range, i.e. is not audible to humans. What people hear is only a small fraction of the actual power of these sounds. They are low-frequency acoustic emissions in the range between 20 and 100 Hz modulated by ultra-low infrasonic waves from 0.1 to 15 Hz. In geophysics, they are called acoustic-gravity waves; they are formed in the upper atmosphere, at the atmosphere-ionosphere boundary in particular. There can be quite a lot of causes why those waves are generated: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, storms, tsunamis, etc. However, the scale of the observed humming sound in terms of both the area covered and its power far exceeds those that can be generated by the above-mentioned phenomena.
It goes on to site two theories. First the increased solar activity & second increased energy forces at the core of the earth causing the gravity waves. Based on all this it's forecast to worsen with this sun cycle & peak 2013-14 with a flurry of quakes, volcanoes & extreme weather...kinda confirming they are the sounds of the apocalypse.
im on chrome rite now how do i upgrade
AO going neg really helped save some ice from being pushed out into the Atlantic. Forecast to go positive again..
Predictions are for a new record low maximum (which should be within the next three to four weeks), a faster than normal drop through July, a new record low minimum in September--and even worse for the following summer.
Of course that's only a two dimensional representation of Arctic sea ice. What that graph does not show is how much thinner the ice is than it was in 2007.
Thinner ice means, assuming normal weather conditions, a new record low ice level for this coming fall. Last melt season we saw a new low produced by moderate weather conditions.
Things could be very interesting in a few months....
Looks like a line of strong summer thunderstorms, but no: It's a snow squall forecasted to move through Virginia and Maryland this afternoon. Could see a quick inch of snow with it!
Ooooooo, that shows snow in my area.
Nope, it would be rain down in NC...
im in central NC> will i git any
That's stupid :|
As the time wave crest nears, the resonance is responding to it.
The Great attractor is closer now than ever before, and every second it closes the Gap between us.
Time is approaching it's end in the linear scale.
The Globe resonates that, as the eschaton nears.
???????????????????????????????
This could be some sort of tipping point if it verifies.
Last year the methane torches were really bad. This year they should be much worse if the melt season is significantly worse than last year.
It's shocking how bad the quality of ice is on the Atlantic side between Greenland and Russia, even compared to last year.
Daily Sea Ice map
The 80 to 100% quality between Greenland and Russia has been severely eroded compared to last year.
I doubt changes in cloud cover would make that big a difference to the satellites.
It remains very poor indeed.
The only place on the Atlantic side that may be an improvement from last year is a tiny sliver near Nova Scotia.
If this keeps up, we'll only be 3 standard deviations below the norm. :P
There's a lot of open water on the Atlantic side of the Arctic at the moment. We'll likely see ice form in that area, but as you point out the end of the freeze season is close.
Extent will likely grow but the new ice will be very thin and soon give away to encroaching sunshine and residual warm water.
If that area melts early in the season then the resulting loss of albedo and increased heated water is going to eat into the Central Arctic ice pack.
This is mainly just sensationalism. I've yet to see any real scientific research on the supposed phenomena, and any videos of the phenomena are very much suspect. Especially if most of the sound energy is supposed to be at infra-sound levels.
At any rate, there's no point worrying about it. If indeed the world were about to enter a new age of geological upheaval we'll all be dead in short order anyway.
the timeframe when temperatures go below 72F and i dont sweat, and everything is cold and the wind is cold and i dont get thunderstorms, just ol boring snow.
Thats winter xD
Well that thought just made my day!!! :)
Only 110 days until June 1rst.
:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D::D:D:D:D:D:D
getting close, but sooooo far..
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