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
Reader Comments
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Special Statement
Statement as of 5:09 PM EST on February 11, 2012
... An Arctic blast will bring strong winds and cold...
The arrival of an Arctic blast this evening will bring strong
northwest winds. Winds this evening will gust up to 40 to 45 mph.
As temperatures tumble... the wind will make it feel as if it were
in the single numbers to around 10 degrees at times late tonight
and Sunday morning. The actual temperature will drop to 20 to 25
degrees overnight.
Not much of a temperature recovery is expected on Sunday. The
Mercury will struggle to reach above 40 degrees and for much of
the day it will feel as if it is below freezing. The incoming air
mass will also be very dry with afternoon relative humidity around
20 percent.
Any loose objects outside should be secured to prevent them from
being damaged. Exposed plumbing will be susceptible to freezing
and preventative measures are suggested to prevent damage.
Rjd
I guess that must be the same software they used for Iraq. That explains a lot actually.
It's very similar. There is only one country that the US doesn't win more than 70% of the time: Russia.
Wind Direction (WDIR): NW ( 320 deg true )
Wind Speed (WSPD): 22.0 kts
Wind Gust (GST): 26.0 kts
Atmospheric Pressure (PRES): 29.99 in
Air Temperature (ATMP): 69.4 °F
Water Temperature (WTMP): 78.1 °F
Iraq and china are different missions with different parameters.
In conventional warfare, the U.S. destroyed all of Iraq's units in about 2 days. We only had about a dozen or so injuries and fatalities to our own units, and even this would have been avoidable. Several of these were actually due to accidents, as I recall.
It was only when the "policing" part of the insane mission started when we started to suffer casualties...due to Geneva Convention and the "don't shoot the 'good' muslims who are protecting the evil suicide bombing muslims" thing..
Additionally, in Iraq, our idiot leaders were attempting to teach democracy and morality to people who don't really know what that is, but are governed by fanaticism and a religion's blanket command to "kill all infidels".
Give democracy to evil people and they'll still vote for evil leaders, and they'll still follow the same evil ideology.
It never made any sense.
In China, there's no excuse because it would theoretically be a conventional war or a nuclear war...either way, the stupid "policing" by squads of infantrymen to "protect" the "good/democratic" muslims would not be an issue.
In a simulation, "winning" was probably defined as destroying and disabling enough of the enemy's military and infrastructure so that they would no longer be a critical threat to ours.
It probably was not defined in terms of some ridiculous political goals, as Iraq was.
In the simulations that lasted longer than 5 years, China won 65% of the time.
I hate you just a lil bit.
Haha, I fell for it earlier as well. That is from yesterday.
The only way to win the game, is not to play.
That's called an attractor.
If the armies are indeed evenly matched, then the war could last very long, and yes, the home turf still favors the home team due to proximity and what we call "defender's advantage".
Defender's advantage is simply the idea that their production facilities and training grounds would be adjacent to the battle, so easier to reinforce.
So yes, if they somehow survived the first several years it's likely they could continue to put up a fight...
so yes, I'd agree with that assessment, as it's extremely logical.
The longer a war goes the more it favors the defending nation.
I think that we have very different ideas of what "win" means.
These "war games" do not include the use of nuclear weapons.....
How about a nice game of chess?
GFS also has 0.03in of rain in forecast for the 17th.
I dont like.
Not now Joshua.
im playing chess rite now! kinda good too lol...
If i am not mistaken we are still in a La Nina, but it probably wont last throughout summer.
yes..
Defitions of Win, as it regards warfare:
win - nobody goes to war.
Pros: nobody dies.
Cons: doesn't work. Bad guys don't follow this.
Win - make peace and negotiate, etc.
Pros: nobody dies.
Cons: Muslims define "peace" as the unconditional annihilation of infidels, so this is chasing one's tail.
Win - "whoever wins makes the rules". (which is what happened in "real" wars, like when we declared independence, or WWI and WWII.)
Pros: they are no longer a threat for a very, very long time.
Cons: violates geneva convention, but then again, if you win at least you live.
i.e. if Germany had won WWII, they probably would have systematically exterminate all Jews, Gypsies, and other non-arians they deemed "undesirables" in every nation.
They probably would have backstabbed Japan and Italy eventually and exterminate them too.
After all, Germany backstabbed almost everyone anyway. When they make a treaty, it was practically a declaration of war!
Forgot one:
Win: Nuclear Annihilation of all hostiles:
Pros: No war for a very, very, very long time
Cons: Everyone is dead.
Ah, I see. You're definition of "win" is limited to just who can win militarily. That's a very narrow and ultimately useless metric to define winning. I would think that our post cold war endeavors would have demonstrated this quite effectively by now.
I would say you have an equal chance at guessing with a coin toss if you're looking that far out. :)
It's a good thing too. You know how Blockbuster is always after our precious bodily fluids.
The Nazi's were human beings too.
Yet there were countless of them who were "in the know" about the extermination camps, and could have and should have rebelled against their leaders, and didn't.
If half the Germans had any sense of morality, they would have rebelled against the other half, but that didn't happen, now did it? Well, there were some, but seriously?
All "human beings," even as they operated death camps...death camps that Muslim "human beings" in the middle east in Iran,a nd even in Iraq and Afghanistan that we just "liberated" continue to deny existed.
You say "you can't fight a war against an ideal".
Well, then the west is doomed to always be in these stupid cycles of "regime change" in the middle east, since the ideal is precisely the problem, which nobody admits.
If their religion didn't command them to kill Christians, Jews, and other "infidels" then they probably wouldn't be a threat, and we wouldn't have fought most of the world's conflicts of the past 60 years.
Reminds me of Isabel that hit the East Coast last season.
Looking at that link some of the correlations to 1957 make sense.
I didn't forget it.
It's just obvious, so not much worth mentioning.
China has a minimum deterance policy, which means they hope a few nukes prevent anyone from messing with them.
the U.S. and Russia each have an "assured destruction" policy.
This means each country made enough WMD that they will be able to wipe the other country out even if they are wiped out first.
See, not only does each country have enough bombs to annihilate one another. They each have enough bombs BURIED in bunkers to annihilate one another again after they're annihilated the first time.
The cold war era was nuts.
They had scenarios of drilling under mountains and storing nukes with large drills, which would wait till all the enemy nukes detonated, then pop up and launch another volley of our own nukes at the enemies...then there was the nuclear submarines, etc.
I don't know what the exact numbers are, but I think we once had around 30,000 of 20 megaton warheads, not counting all the other nuke bombs. That number might be the total of all nukes. It's not completely declassified.
But hey, we made enough nerve gas and bio weapons to kill everything on earth several times as well. God only knows where all this stuff is stored, because much of it still exists.
We probably still have several hundred or several thousand kiloton bombs which are small enough to fit on a Tomahawk missile as well, because it's transparently declared specs say so...
The singularity speaks to us, from the past..
NEXRAD Radar
Base Reflectivity 0.50° Elevation
Range 124 NMI
Link
Dad made a 100...
Mom made a 66 LOL
I'm right outside of Mobile, Al. The temp has dropped from 51 to 41 degrees in the last three hours.
It's headed your way.
Jesse
you do know thats decades old right
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