California Drought Update 4-14

Posted on April 27, 2014 by gymnosperm

For some reason the validated CDC data for March in San Francisco have been excruciatingly slow, and judging from local data will be revised down slightly. This is peculiar because it was raining hard as March came to a close and the original data indication was from a few hours short of the end of the month. Anyway, it has rained in April and there is no way this years drought will be in the top ten for the Downtown San Francisco dataset, at 164 years the longest in the western U.S.

SF Cumulative 4-14

The data is structured July to June so April 2014 falls in the 2013/2014 season shown here as “2013”. Spooky how closely this year is tracking 1917. The four driest years are shown along with 2011 which was the first year of our so called “record drought”.

We checked the data for any indication that in dry years more rain was pushed into May and June. Nope. Although 1897-98 with only 9.38 total got 1.63 in May and June, the average for the ten driest years is only half the total average for May and June.

Drought American West Cook et al 2007

There is quite a bit of research on past droughts in California and the western U.S. This is from Cook et al 2007 using the Palmer Drought Severity Index. It is interesting as a big picture because it shows a persistent pattern of drought during the Medieval Warm Period and pretty damp until the present when the climate generally seems to be recovering from the Little Ice Age. Within the MWP notice the rapid transition from drought to damp from 1034 to 1100 and return to extreme drought by 1150. These human life scale changes should be bourn in mind. How crazy would “climate change” have seemed to the Anasazi. What sins would they have repented as they abandoned Chaco Canyon in 1130? The western U.S. is a big place and averages mask a lot of regional variation. Drought 34 56 These two years are considered iconic for the two most severe twentieth century western U.S. droughts. Notice the very different conditions for California and the Pacific Northwest between the two regimes.

Drought 951 1380

Zooming in to California we find more complexity from the sediments from our drying fluvial lakes.

Benson et al 2002

Benson 2002 cored Pyramid, Mono, and Owens lakes in the style of the Deep Sea Drilling Project and analyzed Carbon and Oxygen isotopes and other properties of the layers. I hate the units but 1.2=12000 years ago, the end of the last glaciation. One can see the Younger Dryas cold setback up to 11500 and tentative recovery in New Mexico but recovery from it seems to have taken longer to register in the Sierra. The dotted lines are suggested correlations. My eyechrometer says the northern Sierra and New Mexico are more often antiphase than not and the southern Sierra has its feet in both worlds. This is another reason to like the San Francisco dataset. We can expect that future rainfall for California will not necessarily be tandem to the rest of the western U.S. and may alternate between regions of the state.

 

SF Seasonal Totals

To whatever extent these 164 years represent the 12,000 years since the last glaciation, San Francisco, like California, has its fingers in many puddles. As you can see San Francisco is not particularly impressed with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, an observed pattern that seems to control the frequency of El Niño’s.

The good news is that the data shows that very rarely do dry periods last more than a few years.

Posted in California Drought, Climate | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Everyone Loves Lists, Should We Worry or Not?

Posted on April 26, 2014 by gymnosperm

Take a big leap back in time. It is 1974, forty years ago. The planet has been cooling for thirty years. There is very real concern about this. The Pentagon is making Ice Age contingency plans. The scientific community is agnostic. There is realization that we are beginning to put a lot of particulates and CO2 in the air. The concept of the human volcano is developed, but the consensus is definitely that we just do not know how this is going to play.

dT

How is the situation different today? The spectral properties of CO2 in a jar were worked out in the 1950’s. They had been well known for two decades in 1974. We have definitely become the volcano. Shucks, we’re a Large Igneous Province. Yet after enduring three decades of cyclical warming, we have experienced a temperature plateau for an historic human generation.

So let’s just make a list, bearing in mind the two perspectives of 1974 and 2014.

What reasons do we have to expect that Carbon dioxide is dangerously warming the planet?

1. It is a gas that resonates in the earth’s outgoing spectral frequencies .

(Yep, no different than 1974)

2. It is a gas whose increased human production correlated with temperature increase from 1976 to 1997.

(Yep, but it stopped a generation ago. Valuable data gained since 1974)

3. It is a gas that occupies top dead center of the outgoing power spectrum.

(Yep, here.)

4. The stratosphere cooled as the surface air warmed.

(Yep, must be accounted for, yet any resonating gas at earth frequencies has the same effect. Ozone depletion accounts for most of this.)

That’s it. If you can think of any other reasons, please, help me out!

Turn the worm and list the reasons to expect Carbon dioxide is not dangerously warming the planet.

1. We’re actually clueless.

(Yep, improved marginally since 1974)

2. The lower atmosphere has not warmed in a human generation.

(Yep, in spite of accelerating human CO2 and particulate production.)

3. Lower atmospheric temperature has been higher than today twice since the last glaciation and at peaks of the last interglacial period.

(Yep, before we began huffing and puffing)

4. Ice core data show that historically temperature has controlled CO2.

(Yep, but this does not constrain the possibility that recent additions could have changed the program)

That’s it. These lists are very short. A sad measure of our understanding. We will include one last list of possible ways to reconcile the paradox, and to explore mechanisms how addition of large amounts of resonating gas might not warm the planet very much.

1. Scale. CO2 represents only 2% of H2O by mass in the atmosphere. These two gasses do nearly all the work. Everything else being equal one should expect the effect to be proportionate. Humans are thought to be responsible for about 1/4 of the total CO2 in the atmosphere so that would amount to half a percent. But things are not equal. Gasses do not resonate as a mass, they do it as individual molecules. Water has an atomic weight of 8 and CO2 has an atomic weight of 22. In any given mass there will be nearly three times as many molecules of water as CO2. The half a percent just got divided again.

2. Saturation. Lots of HITRAN measurements have resulted in an empirical parameter, “Absorption Factor” that describes a roughly logarithmic diminution of effect by concentration.

CO2Abs4x

Compare this to the entire outgoing earth spectrum.

saturated

 

The units are different but the saturated bands at 15 microns in the first image from realclimate  are the big shark bite out of the middle of the piece of pie here. This cancels concern number 3, that CO2 occupies the top of the power spectrum. It also means that many of the teeth in that bite may come from water, whose absorption spectrum overlaps.

There are actually two different kinds of saturation in play. One is the absorption factor saturation where adding more gas has little effect. The other is light saturation where adding more light has little effect. The entire outgoing spectrum is light saturated. There is confusion here because light is considered a constant, yet more light energy cycles between resonating gasses and the surface than the earth receives from the sun. Greenhouse gasses effectively create more light by recycling the energy in the system..

3. Effective Sequestration. Most of the action in the photon food fight takes place near the surface where water in the atmosphere is strongly concentrated. Statistically, a molecule of CO2 has little chance of getting in the game.

4. About half of the “greenhouse” effect is not related to outgoing or foodfight recycled radiation, but rather from direct absorption of incoming solar radiation. Water is very active in these spectra and CO2 is a wimp. Blue is water, green CO2.

drawing

5. The very existence of the pause guarantees that there are natural forces at least equal to our production in play.

Another short list. In 1974 there had never been a credible correlation between human CO2 and temperature. We were well aware of the Physics as we are today. In the last 40 years we  have seen temperatures rise and suddenly level off as our production of CO2 has accelerated. Computer models predict temperatures will rise and cyclical models predict they will fall. In the end, we find ourselves in a situation much like 1974.

 

Posted in Climate, Climate Change, Cold is the New Hot, Global Warming, Greenhouse Effect, Greenhouse Spectra, Large Igneous Provinces, Photon Food Fight, Spectra, the "Pause" | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Pacific Doughboy and the Core

Posted on April 22, 2014 by gymnosperm

Here at the Trunkmonkey Research Institute we’ve been possessed of late by the Doughboys.

Doughboys

This representation is not really very good. It is a plate carree projection extruded as a box. Trouble is, when you bend it round like our planet, the surface, which is 2900 kilometers above the core (CMB) must grow substantially.

In the exercise below we have taken a less sophisticated series of cross sections we could get our hands on and projected it down to the core in Arcglobe. These sections to not show the doughboy extrusion up to the 660 km discontinuity where they flatten out like thunderheads hitting the stratosphere. Oh well, they show the real world position of the lower sections in the globe.

Myglobe.png

The amazing result of this is that when you center the doughboy in the view, you can see no continents. When you pan it any direction you find one real fast. The doughboy is nearly smack dab in the center of the Pacific ocean if you include what is now called the Southern Ocean.

We believe the doughboys are extrusions from the core.The outer core is molten. It is above the Curie point of Iron and has lost its magnetism. The Doughboy’s edges at least are probably above the Curie point . We believe the Doughboys are the armature of the earth’s magneto.

Posted in Climate, Geoid, Geology, LLSVP, LLSVP's are Doughboys, Seismic Tomography | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Doughboys

Posted on April 13, 2014 by gymnosperm

I have seen the following attributed to Ritsema and van Heist but have not found it in any of their papers.

Doughboys

People with no sense of verbal aesthetics have named the red things LLSVP’s for Large Low Shear Velocity Provinces. Sometimes they are called LLVSP’s, but if either of these acronyms were a glass of wine, I would pour it out. Clearly, those things are Pillsbury Doughboys, and will be referred to as doughboys henceforth.

The doughboys are low velocity  because they are warmer, less physically dense, or both. This aspect is controversial and though they are visible by both S and P earthquake waves the signs are  inverted and this is unusual.

The dots on the surface are presumed plumes, kimberlite (diamond forming) pipes, or Large Igneous Provinces. It has been observed that much of this activity can be mapped above the 1% attenuation plane which would be an imaginary line drawn about a quarter inch up from the bases of the doughboys. This is very interesting, but it makes no sense because we cannot see anything rising up from this plane which is very low in the mantle.

This correspondence with the 1% contour is touted as evidence the doughboys are very old, and it is certainly reasonable to suspect that they are, but some folks have gone hog wild with computer games moving them all around for the last three billion years and postulating plumes and slab return paths we don’t even have evidence for today.

It is important to consider that these doughboys seem to have little relationship to the configuration of ocean spreading ridges, and these ridges, like the Hawaiian hotspot, seem to be shallow pools of molten rock somehow maintaining themselves without deep mantle support.

Ritsema One need only compare our conceptions of the mantle and ocean ridges not so long ago to realize that these innocent doughboys have an attitude when it comes to our cherished preconceptions.

Dashed Conceptions

It is also very strange that Africa is sitting right on top of a doughboy. Africa is considered the keystone of Pangaea, having moved very little during the breakup. If the doughboy is indeed old, this would mean that Africa has been perched on its doughboy for a quarter of a billion years.

 

 

Posted in Africa Keystone of Pangea, Asthenia, Geoid, Geology, Large Igneous Provinces, LLSVP, LLSVP's are Doughboys, Moho, Seismic Tomography | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Pause That Refreshes

Posted on April 11, 2014 by gymnosperm

We hear more and more about the Pause. This pause refers to a hiatus in lower atmospheric warming for a human generation since 1997. This “pause” by its very name implies that warming will resume sometime soon.

Only zealots will claim to know whether warming will resume or not. What we do know is that lower atmospheric temperatures declined from 1945 to 1976. The following quote from Newsweek in 1975:

April 28, 1975  “There are ominous signs that Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically….The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it….The central fact is that…the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down…If the climate change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic.”

It did not turn out that way at all. It was the end of a 60-70 year cycle that we do not understand. Will it still be a “pause” if temperatures decline for another twenty years?

Holocene_Temperature_Variations_Rev

This is the average of a bevy of proxies since the last glaciation. The lunch money stuff  between WWII and the present doesn’t even register here. One can see there have been several “pauses” along the way, and several episodes of warming.

If we are going to match trends, which one do we match? The Newsweek from 1975 which was absolutely correct in its assessment of the trend, or this one from the BBC in 1997, equally correct for the trend at that time:

November 7, 1997, (BBC commentator): “It appears that we have a very good case for suggesting that the El Niños are going to become more frequent, and they’re going to become more intense and in a few years, or a decade or so, we’ll go into a permanent El Nino. So instead of having cool water periods for a year or two, we’ll have El Niño upon El Niño, and that will become the norm. And you’ll have an El Niño, that instead of lasting 18 months, lasts 18 years.”

This one did not turn out so well either, and if you could only know, it would be well to avoid rash predictions on the cusp of phase changes.

What the “pause” certainly tells us is that natural cycles at least equal human changes to the climate.

When it is getting hot, a pause is always refreshing.

 

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Huston, We have a Few More Problems

Posted on April 7, 2014 by gymnosperm

Humans are not naturally inclined to science. We yearn for certainty, the sort of certainty mathematical equations could provide if only we could be certain of the factors. We cannot.

We don’t really yearn for mathematics, it is just another weird hieroglyphic language but for the allure of certainty. We really yearn for cosmology, for some shaman to tell us that first there was Hydrogen, which begat Helium, and so on until the pantheon is full give or take a few elements generated in accelerators.

Huston, we believed in the asthenosphere. We believed in hotspots and mantle plumes. We believed the ocean basins spread evenly away from the ridges like a giant basaltic recording tape, gently pushing and pulling the toy sailboats of continents about, all moving easily atop asthenia, a magical layer of plastic rock.

Huston, we have used earthquake waves to take pictures that make the things we believed in appear as childish cartoons.

Hawaii no Plume

Huston, here is the hotspot under Hawaii, where being the plume?

Incredulous, we lowered “thumpers” to the ocean floor and using computer models and “SKS” data were finally able to extract this image:

SKS

Huston, what the hell is that? How does it move relative to other hotspots? Where is the signal for asthenia (aside from the neatly drawn white line)? It gets worse.

Mantle

This stuff looks like funky dentistry. The continents have roots deeper than the asthenosphere, the Moho, which is discontinuous and lacking mojo. The ocean basins and their magnetic stripes are cut by lineations we have no explanation for. There are granitic structures in the ocean floor that have no right to be there. Ocean floor sediments have been baked by ocean floor younger than the sediments themselves.

Huston, we are coming home. Home to a world less certain than the one we left.

 

Posted in Asthenia, Geology, Large Igneous Provinces, Magnetic Reversals, Moho, Oceanography, Plate Tectonics, Seismic Tomography | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Spectra, Goddess of Light

Posted on March 31, 2014 by gymnosperm

We worship in strange and disjointed ways. One seeking to better understand how Spectra’s blessings arrive and leave our planet is confronted with a bewildering array of graphics.

drawing

This one shows incoming light in nanometers.

curve_s

This one shows outgoing in inverse centimeters.

CO2Abs4x

This one shows the saturation of outgoing CO2 bands in microns.

A fine kettle of fish. It reflects poorly the clarity of those paid to understand the Goddess when not a single unit matches anywhere and the inverted wavenumbers read backwards relative to microns and nanometers.

First, we clarify what CO2 saturation looks like in the parallel universe of inverted centimeters.

saturated

According to the Beer-Lambert law fluorescent response to a constant light source decreases approximately logarithmically with increased concentration of gas until saturation is reached and increases in the gas have no more effect. We have plotted Gavin Schmidt’s saturation bands. Boy, if anyone had bothered to do this before, what reason would there ever have been to worry?

Finally, we normalize all the discordant units into the big picture as our offering.

Normalized 1

 

 

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Large Igneous Provinces, Temperature, Sea Level, and Extinctions

Posted on March 25, 2014 by gymnosperm

We had been looking at the stuff one can easily google regarding global temperature and large igneous provinces (LIP’s) and it seemed there might be something, so we dug in. There is an organization, largeigneousprovinces.org, that has excel data in some sort of Arcmap format. We were interested in big events so we set a standard of a million cubic kilometers of production. We took the total volume and spread it over the period of production.

Sometimes you just have to concede that what little we know just doesn’t make much sense. The graph below is basically a study of our ignorance.

LIP etc3

 

The resulting LIP production is shown in red. The first surprise is that the vaunted Siberian and Deccan events that correspond closely to the PTr and KPg extinctions are not impressive in terms of volume. If these events played a part in the extinctions it was a qualitative and not a quantitative factor. The second surprise is the extreme “twin towers” bracketing the Cretaceous Normal Superchron and the high levels between them.

It would be easy to develop an hypothesis that swings of polarity depend on internal pressures that when relieved by massive extrusions, reduce the dynamo’s tendency to flip.

Another huge surprise is the low sea level during the Triassic. The steric (thermal expansion) rise of the current ocean is thought to be about half a meter per degree warming of the entire column. It was five degrees warmer then so an equivalent volume of the current ocean should have been a few meters higher than today. There were no glaciers storing water on land. Yet sea level was about 25 meters lower than  today, and we live in an ice age. Furthermore, sea level continued to drop as temperatures began to recover in the late Permian and early Triassic and reached a nadir at about the apex of temperature.

Really weird. This coincidence of low sea level and high temperature may speak more profoundly to the severity of the extinction than the Siberian basalt.

The oldest surviving ocean floor is about 250 million years old and it is not until about 150 mya that we get enough floor area to accurately gauge the output volumes of LIP’s. So we really don’t know how much was being produced in the Triassic, but we do know that LIP’s are typically emplaced in isostatic “rises” that displace ocean and that the volume of basalt displaces more ocean, so it could be that the Triassic was a time of low volcanic activity. So why was it so bloody hot?

It is quite clear that temperature has little to do with extinctions, at least when sea level is high. It seems that LIP’s have little to do with temperature. It seems temperature has little to do with sea level.

So all we get is LIP’s raising sea level and temporarily switching the dynamo to DC?

Posted in Climate, Cretaceous normal superchron, Extinctions, Geology, Large Igneous Provinces, Magnetic Reversals, Paleo Sea Level, Paleoclimate | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Nature and Chaos

Posted on March 16, 2014 by gymnosperm

We don’t even know what randomness is. In gambling and cryptography computer algorithms are used to create “pseudo” random strings that are difficult to cipher, but ultimately these are “determined” by the algorithm.

To get “true” randomness we resort to physics. Lava lamps were used, but they were simply analog generators like dice in the universe of Newtonian Physics. We derive true randomness by delving into the parallel universe of quantum physics, the end of science, where nothing is reproducible, where to perceive something we irrevocably change it and even create it in the form it is perceived.

Photon, the god of chaos.

It is as if the universe of quantum were encrypted in a fashion contrary to our nature. Fortunately, quantum is an atomic scale nano universe largely irrelevant at planetary scale.

Life has always stood as a glaring exception to the second law of thermodynamics. The elders of such laws smile indulgently and allow that special exceptions can be made in some circumstances, and that in the case of life, pockets of organization will be allowed.

Very kind of them.

Entropy and chaos, Newtonian and quantum. One is tempted to throw in cacophony. These are enemies of life. It is the nature of life to self organize. To claw and grab and secrete. To perceive photons through the “two slits” of our eyes and derive 3D information.

We submit that life is fully deserving its own law of thermodynamics.

Posted in Anthropology, Biology, Chaos, Fourth Law of Thermodynamics, god of chaos, Randomness | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

California Drought Update Early March

Posted on March 7, 2014 by gymnosperm

2013-14 SF Seasonal

San Francisco did break the record of 1917 as of January, but just barely. Had the rains begun a day earlier as forecast, the monthly record would have held. Anyway, the drought is definitely not the end of life as we know it and it would be premature to abandon our cliff dwellings and migrate north.

The nearly half a foot of rain in February already guarantees that the 2013-14 season will be wetter than 1850 and 1975, and it is my very strong suspicion that rains thus far in March will push the season past 1897 as well. Not even in the top three!

What is truly remarkable is how closely the season is tracking 1917. I still want to find the time to sort the data for patterns like this. For background on the graph see here and here.

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