Riding the drought-flood cycle

Well, folks, worries about extended drought conditions in Northern California are easing a bit with the arrival of this energetic series of storms. They're predicting 4 inches at sea level and 8 inches in the bay area hills over the next 3 days. Ten feet of snow at Lake Tahoe and more at higher elevations. Until now, for this rain season (which began measuring last July) we've been at between 40 and 60 of normal. We should make it back to normal by next week.

It's coming down pretty steady right now, with winds gusting up to (my estimate, based on the large eucalyptus trees across the street) 40 mph. We're supposed to see gusts of up to 75 mph tomorrow, especially in the hills.

There's nothing extraordinary about this storm; we've seen at least 2 of these every winter that we've lived here. Sometimes enough storms link together that the sustained rains and ground saturation cause slides and flooding. Ground saturation is not a problem at this point. We'll just wait and see what the skies actually deliver. Weather prediction on the Pacific Coast is still a dicey proposition.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, the downpours of December - in spite of their intensity - have barely made a scratch in the ongoing drought conditions afflicting the state.

Heavy rain and snow earlier this month may have turned streets into rivers and allowed Arizona Snowbowl to open on time, but they did little to stop a 13-year drought.

National Weather Service forecaster Valerie Meyers said it would take numerous storms to replenish aquifers and get river levels back to normal.

To end the drought, Meyers said, "give yourself three good (storm) events like that each month during the winter, then carry that forward to having good precipitation over the summer months, and then let's repeat it for another year or two.

The rain that fell on Arizona replenished reservoirs to their 2006 levels, making it the third wettest December since the state began keeping records 108 years ago.

Time-lapse drought map

Watercrunch provides this neat 53-second animation of the U.S. Drought Monitor's maps from March of this year to the present.

Improving drought forecasting

Drought is called "the creeping disaster" because most people are unaware that their local water supplies are shrinking until the alarm goes off, announcing conservation measures and high-level concern with the impending crisis. With the prospect that more areas around the world may be subject to drought conditions - long range or short - we need better forecasting techniques for earlier detection of approaching drought. Such early detection will allow preparations to be made well in advance of the actual water shortage.

This article from Sign of the Times describes a focus on streamflow measurement and cloud reflectivity as a means of discovering higher risk for drought. One interviewee was Dr. Ashutosh Limaye, a hydrologist at the National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) in Huntsville, Alabama. He described the stream flow part.

Streamflow is a term used by water management specialists to mean, very simply, the amount of water in streams and rivers. Areas of drought have reduced streamflow, and experts believe they can better forecast droughts by studying this key indicator of dry conditions.

"Streamflow is always changing, from day to day and even minute to minute, for a wide variety of reasons: evaporation from the soil and from bodies of water, runoff from rainfall and snowmelt, transpiration by plants and trees, and other natural and human influences," [Limaye] explains. National Weather Service River Forecast Centers have to consider all of these factors when they forecast streamflow.

"If we can help forecasters estimate any of these elements more accurately, they can better predict drought conditions months in advance," says Dr. Limaye. "These predictions are critical because they influence important decisions about measures like withholding water in reservoirs and restricting water use."

The reflectivity part? Dr. Mike Smith of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) suggests that satellite measurement of cloud cover could provide closer estimates of evaporation rates that directly affect stream flow.

Why clouds? "Because most of the water that falls on the ground goes up in evaporation, evaporation is a huge component of the total surface water," explains Limaye. "So it's important to get those numbers right. Clouds affect radiation, which has a big influence on evaporation."

National Weather Service cloud cover estimates from the 1960s to the 1990s went like this: A trained technician literally walked outside, tilted his or her head back, eyeballed the sky like an old farmer, and rated the cloud cover on a 1-8 scale.

In the 90s, these manual observations were replaced by a device called a "ceilometer," part of the Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS), which has a laser beam that aims at the sky. Returns from this beam are used to detect clouds.

The Adaptation "Aha" Moment?

At the Framework Convention on Climate Change, taking place on Bali, there have been calls for having the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - which recently released its latest report and has normally convened to update its report every 5 or 6 years - convene to update its current report next year...and pretty much to continue operating continuously from now on.

As reported by Andy Revkin on DotEarth:

The discussions in Bali about more frequent climate assessments echo a growing call within the scientific community for the climate panel and other big climate-research institutions to shift more from basic science to real-world forecasting, helping communities exploit or withstand changes for the better or worse.

Such forecasts need to be improved because significant warming is unavoidable for decades to come even if countries begin to trim greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the climate panel’s latest studies.

Kevin Trenberth, a longtime contributor to the U.N. panel’s reports and senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., put it this way early this year:

“For me the issue is that the climate is changing and we cannot stop it. We can slow it down, and should, but realistically I don’t believe that we will ever get to level emissions, let alone reduced ones. So climate change will continue and we must adapt. But adapt to what?”

Adapt to what, indeed? Getting more specific local forecasts would help localities set proper directions for preparations for climate change. But such forecasts are not simple to make. As the Pew Center for Global Climate Change says in its paper, "Coping With Global Climate Change: The Role of Adaptation in the United States,"

The processes of adaptation to climate change in both human and natural systems are highly complex and dynamic, often entailing many feedbacks and dependencies on existing local and temporal conditions. The uncertainties introduced by the complexity, scale and limited experience with respect to anthropogenic climate change explains the limited level of applied research conducted thus far on adaptation, the reliance on mechanistic assumptions, and widespread use of scenarios and historical analogues.

But it's not too early to begin improving the local communications infrastructure and habits that communities will need when their forecasts become more concrete and reliable. Some places are already thick into adaptation - to what may become annual flooding, chronic drought, frequent storms, more extreme temperatures and all of the indirect consequences of these weather effects.

Turn up the Dire Dial a click or two

Joe over at Climate Progress once again points us to stake-raising news, this time in an article just published in Science (subscription required). The gist of it is that forecasts from in the latest IPCC report underestimate the pace and impact of current changes due to global warming. The broad consensus required among scientists and participating national agendas to publish the IPCC's conclusions served as a censor to many findings which are now being confirmed as accurate.

The emphasis on consensus in IPCC reports, however, has put the spotlight on expected outcomes, which then become anchored via numerical estimates in the minds of policy-makers. With the general credibility of the science of climate change established, it is now equally important that policy-makers understand the more extreme possibilities that consensus may exclude or downplay.

The IPCC group did not include many of the feedback effects on ice sheet melting or carbon emissions released from natural storage sources as temperatures rise. These effects - which are well under way right now - stand to accelerate impacts such as sea level rise well beyond the stated limits in the IPCC's conclusions. This is critical information for dynamic risk assessment, preparation, adaptation and certainly for mitigation action.

[N]ational governments now need to confront a more fundamental question of how often they need comprehensive assessments of climate change. Addressing the special risks entailed in particular aspects of the climate system, like the ice sheets or carbon cycle, might be better approached by increasing the number of concise, highly focused special reports that can be completed relatively quickly by smaller groups, perhaps even by competing teams of experts. At this juncture, full assessments emphasizing consensus, which are a major drain on participants and a deflection from research, may not be needed more than once per decade.

A closer look at sea level risk for the San Francisco Bay region

In previous articles I've pointed to sites like Future Sea Level, which focuses on the prospects and impacts in the San Francisco Bay region and the National Environmental Trust page that shows animations of several major U.S. cities being inundated by rising seas. These give you the general idea, but can't tell you much about incremental sea level rise because the sensitivity of their maps to vertical elevation are so crude. With low vertical resolution, it's difficult to estimate just how much damage will be done a by "minor" sea level rise of, say, one meter.

One of the presenters at the California Climate Change Conference this past Monday was Noah Knowles, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, based in Menlo Park, CA. He presented some new maps of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Delta that provide a much more accurate assessment of the risks of inundation due to sea level rise. Here's the PDF of his presentation with samples of their maps. Below is an image of San Francisco showing the Embarcadero and downtown areas.


Using photogramettry - where aerial photographs taken from six different angles were digitally processed to yield maps with vertical scale accuracy of 10-20 cm - combined with tide data, he described the current situation where, on a daily basis, about 500 square kilometers of tidal land and land protected by levees are below water level at high tide. With a 1-meter rise in sea level, that area would increase by 30% and would - under the current circumstances - be inundated at high tide. That would include all of the levee-dependent islands and agricultural lands of the Delta and much developed land surrounding the Bay including much of our highway system.

The Weekend Backlog

Take a couple days off from posting and stories pile up.

How do you deal with local ordinance "deniers"? A S.F. Chronicle writer rants about lawn-waterers during a growing water shortage: So Where's the Drought-rage?

It's like watching someone clean out their car and just toss all the garbage onto the street. Do you say anything? Is it worth it? Just watching this river forming in the gutter is its own form of water torture. Is it time to engage in complete and total DROUGHT-RAGE!?

We ain't seen nothin' yet. British meteorologists forecast that global warming will become more intense after 2009.

Global warming is forecast to set in with a vengeance after 2009, with at least half of the five following years expected to be hotter than 1998, the warmest year on record...

A major insurer describes the changing landscape of risk management. Lloyd's Chairman speaks:

Above all, what insurers want to see is a focus on contingency planning. Preparedness is key – yet you may be surprised to know that many businesses aren’t ready to face disaster when it strikes. In our recent research, almost 40 per cent of business leaders admitted that they do not have adequate disaster plans in place to respond to terrorist attacks². Some think that contingency planning is too expensive, but in fact the most important steps for surviving a crisis often cost little. Being unprepared can be the most expensive strategy of all.

California Dreamin' - at least we've reached the point where the analysts can say "more analysis needed." This is part of the California Climate Change Portal.

In response to Executive Order S-3-05, the California Energy Commission and the California Environmental Protection Agency commissioned an assessment of potential climate change impacts to California entitled “the Scenarios Project”. This report summarizes the findings from individual research efforts and compares them with earlier studies. Findings include increases in temperature, changes to the hydrologic cycle, and more frequent and severe extreme weather events. More information and analysis is needed to understand the vulnerability of economic sectors, ecosystems, and human health.

Global Warming remedies will be expensive. As if we hadn't guessed. But this NY Times story provides examples, dollar signs and lots of zeros. Of course, if you compare it to the cost of our military adventure in Iraq, it ain't so much.

Global warming is by nature a big-enough problem to create the kind of necessity that could be mother, father and midwife to invention. And plenty of big ideas are out there to address it, some that may even lead to substantial enterprises much as our military needs have

Forecasting and the Cone of Uncertainty

Paul Saffo, a noted Bay Area futurist, wrote a valuable piece for the Harvard Business Review titled Six Rules for Effective Forecasting. Given that the whole premise of Climate Frog is based on forecasting the impacts of climate change, Saffo's rules help put my writing into proper perspective. Forecasting is not predicting.

The role of the forecaster in the real world is quite different from that of the mythical seer. Prediction is concerned with future certainty; forecasting looks at how hidden currents in the present signal possible changes in direction for companies, societies, or the world at large. Thus, the primary goal of forecasting is to identify the full range of possibilities, not a limited set of illusory certainties. Whether a specific forecast actually turns out to be accurate is only part of the picture—even a broken clock is right twice a day. Above all, the forecaster’s task is to map uncertainty, for in a world where our actions in the present influence the future, uncertainty is opportunity.

The implications of my Climate Frog articles - that humans should be planning their futures based on forecasts of the possible effects of climate change - are certainly not predictive. If it were certain that sea levels would rise in a predictable pattern, we would be seeing a lot more preparation for that in the planning and development of coastal cities and towns. But the element of uncertainty in the forecasts regarding sea level rise makes expensive changes in policy a bit of a gamble in the present, both economically and politically. No one today could secure the legislation and funding to relocate major sea level highways. Even the most pessimistic predictor of sea level rise recognizes the fact that climate change is full of uncertainties today.

Saffo describes change as an "S curve" that begins slowly and hits an inflection point where change accelerates rapidly for a period until it flattens out and recedes.

The art of forecasting is to identify an S-curve pattern as it begins to emerge, well ahead of the inflection point. The tricky part of S curves is that they inevitably invite us to focus on the inflection point, that dramatic moment of takeoff when fortunes are made and revolutions launched. But the wise forecaster will look to the left of the curve in hopes of identifying the inflection point’s inevitable precursors.

Action to mitigate the impacts of climate change are certainly in that slow, beginning stage today. Perhaps - if events in the world become compelling enough and the link to climate change is illustrated more clearly - action will accelerate rapidly at some point in the future. Climate Frog is a risk in terms of the time I invest in it, but I'm attempting to aggregate the forecasts based in today's research and world events in order to provide the most current reports on those actions.

Saffo recommends that we "embrace the things that don't fit" in the precursor stages, as these may actually be indicators of conditions that will be present at the inflection point of the S-curve.

More often than not, indicators look like mere oddball curiosities or, worse, failures, and just as we dislike uncertainty, we shy away from failures and anomalies. But if you want to look for the thing that’s going to come whistling in out of nowhere in the next years and change your business, look for interesting failures—smart ideas that seem to have gone nowhere.

Many climate change skeptics point to conditions that look counter-intuitive to global warming scenarios. Why would it be getting colder than average in some places if it's all about "warming." And wouldn't a warmer climate make some regions more productive and attractive than before? Well, sure, there will be an upside for some people in some places. And maybe those places will serve as refuges for migrating populations. It may all be part of the actual global scenario that unfolds for us.

Saffo's fourth rule is to "hold strong opinions weakly," which means to continually update your forecasts based on changing conditions. My main premise is that we should be making tentative plans to defend ourselves from the impacts of climate change. In making those plans, we should be prepared to implement them rapidly since much of climate change forecasting includes tipping points and feedback loops that are likely to cause rapid changes in sea level and weather-related vulnerabilities. I don't know how climate change will unfold, but I'm convinced that it's unfolding.

The fifth and sixth rules are Look Back Twice as Far As You Look Forward and Know When NOT to Make a Forecast. These are easy for me to follow. Human history is full of stories of whole populations not recognizing risk or impending disaster. We are creatures of habit with short future horizons. We don't easily change our habits unless forced to by Nature. And I know better than to make a specific forecast of what is to come. This blog is more about observation of human behaviors in reaction to whatever indicators of climate change are observable, whether or not they are absolute.

The IPCC Report: Resigned to Catastrophe

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released on April 16 predicted plenty of damage as the sea level rises - the greater the rise the greater the damage, of course. In the summary material headed Hurricanes and Sea Level Rise: Key passages from the IPCC's "Climate Change 2007", we find projections and recommendations, but I sense a resignation to the historic tendency to not prepare for uncertainty.

Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina clearly illustrated the "vulnerability of North American infrastructure and urban systems that were either not designed or maintained to adequate safety margins."

"North America very likely will continue to suffer serious losses of life and property simply due to growth in property values and numbers of people at risk (very high confidence)." (Italics mine) This statement was followed by enumeration of property values vulnerable to North Atlantic storm damage. Of the total property value in some states, the majority is vulnerable. "This economic value includes 79% of the property in Florida, 63% of the property in New York, and 61% of the property in Connecticut."

But here's where I think you can feel the authors' collective pessimism. In the money terms applied to home ownership, defensive home improvements don't pay for themselves unless they actually save the home under the onslaught of a major storm.

Extensive property damage in Florida during Hurricane Andrew in 1992 led to significant revisions to the building code. If all properties in southern Florida met this updated code in 1992, then property damage from Hurricane Andrew would have been lower by nearly 45%. Florida will, however, still experience extensive damage from hurricanes through damage to the large number of older homes and businesses. Other financial barriers come from the challenge property owners face in recovering the costs of protecting themselves. Hidden adaptations tend to be undervalued, relative to obvious ones. For example, homes with storm shutters sell for more than homes without this visible adaptation, while less visible retrofits, such as tie-down straps to hold the roof in high winds, add less to the resale value of the home, relative to their cost.

And in general, projections of possible or probable sea level rise lead only to predictions of massive damage. Readiness? Barely detectable.

Coastal communities and habitats will be increasingly stressed by climate change impacts interacting with development and pollution. Population growth and the rising value of infrastructure in coastal areas increase vulnerability to climate variability and future climate change, with losses projected to increase if the intensity of tropical storms increases. Current adaptation is uneven and readiness for increased exposure is low [very high confidence].

Evidence or Oddity?

The question is and will remain, "Is what we're seeing today an indication of the way it will continue to be?" Climate change skeptics may continue, for years, to insist that nothing has been proven by dramatic shifts in the weather. Thus - based on that conviction - no behavioral changes are warranted. Normalcy will return eventually.

Climate Frog doesn't argue that question, but waits to see if, first, individuals and, then, populations begin to change behaviors out of frustration or necessity.

Take, for example, the state of Alabama, which was just (July 2) declared a national disaster area by the Department of Agriculture. Rainfall across the state is 20 inches below the annual normal of 32. Farmers are taking it on the chin, suffering tremendous losses.

The New York Times reports that, "Northern Alabama has become acre after acre of shriveled cornstalks, cracked red dirt for miles and days of unrelenting white heat." It's the most severe drought in over a century. Across the Southeast, ranchers are selling off their cattle and river levels are so low that power companies are worried and barges are unable to navigate the sandbars. Farmers are burning through their cash reserves and facing bankruptcy. Huge stands of southern pine are infested with bark beatles.

Whether or not this year's extreme drought is simply a short-term anomaly or an indication of long-term climate change, it's clear that it stands to change the behaviors, professions and lifestyles of many of the region's residents. A farmer who suffers through a year like this one may leave the vocation behind, especially if the prospect for similar weather is increasingly likely. If large expanses of timber are lost, so will be many jobs in the lumber and paper industries. If power generation is affected by low water for hydro, we may even see power rationing and blackouts.

So the question becomes, What are the thresholds of climate impact that motivates people to change dramatically? Not simply to cut back on driving or lawn watering, but to change jobs or to move to different areas.

Out at Mr. Bragg’s 7,000-acre, third-generation spread just north of Huntsville, immediate worries are pressing: he is facing the classic farmer’s debt squeeze, with heavy investment — $1 million in giant new silos, a down payment on an ethanol-based future — and little revenue to pay for it. Mr. Bragg is contemplating a $500,000 loss.

Mr. Sanderson’s grain bins cost $400,000. “Not only have we lost our revenue, I’m also $400,000 in debt,” he said.

Mr. Bragg said, “My salary is tied to how much it rains.” He is luckier than most because some of his crop is irrigated by giant sprayers. He still has “the potential to work for this whole year and not get paid.”

In his cotton fields, the stalks are not high enough to be reached by the mechanical picker. Every stalk should have 10 bolls, but these barely have four or five.

The drought takes a psychological toll. Mr. Bragg spoke of a tight feeling in the pit of his stomach when drought sets in. “Mentally, we expect it,” he said, “but genetically, we can’t handle it.”

Proof of Threat

In kidnapping/ransom situations, those negotiating for the release of the hostage will often demand proof of life - some undeniable evidence that the person who being held is still alive. Without that proof, the ransom may be paid for no good reason - the hostage is already dead.

Climate Frog demands proof of threat - convincing evidence of an urgent need to take immediate action to offset damage that is already occuring or that is sure to come. The keyword here is urgency.

One current so-called "green" activity is the movement to use carbon offsets as a way to reduce overall carbon emmissions around the world. An article in the New York Times (registration required) explains the controversy around this practice and why it doesn't exhibit the Climate Froginess required to serve as an example here.

Under the carbon offset program (of which there are many, with varying standards), an airline might allocate a certain amount of its revenues to purchasing "credits" that would pay for some activity (planting trees) that would absorb the amount of carbon being emmitted by its jet engines over a period of time. The carbon would still be pumped into the atmosphere, but at least some action would be taken to deal with that fact. This, to me, seems like the anti-urgent path to carbon responsibility. How long will it take for those tree seedlings to grow to a size where they could actually absorb the carbon from a year's flights?

In Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, but Is It Green? by Andrew Revkin we learn just how controversial carbon offsetting has become in the environmental community.

“The worst of the carbon-offset programs resemble the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences back before the Reformation,” said Denis Hayes, the president of the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental grant-making group. “Instead of reducing their carbon footprints, people take private jets and stretch limos, and then think they can buy an indulgence to forgive their sins.”

“This whole game is badly in need of a modern Martin Luther,” Mr. Hayes added.

Proponents of carbon offsets say that it's better than nothing - that it's the only way that most carbon-produding corporations with shareholders can justify environmental responsibility. I don't buy it. As Auburn Professor Michael Solomon tells the article's author,

“Consumers are always going to gravitate toward a more parsimonious solution that requires less behavioral change,” he said. “We know that new products or ideas are more likely to be adopted if they don’t require us to alter our routines very much.”

In Climate Frog's world, carbon offsets would be like persuading the frog that he can stay longer in the heating water because someone somewhere is making a deal that will eventually slow the gas flow to the burner beneath the pot.

Melting Ice. Can we afford to take our time?

Thanks to the excellentClimate Progress blog for calling my attention to the following.

Though it's not by any means the only serious impact of climate change, rising sea levels are probably the impact most directly linked to that change. Only the most hardened skeptic would refuse to connect global warming with melting ice caps. And only a boob would refuse to admit that those melting ice caps contribute to rising seas and the damage they will cause to human habitation.

Scientists have been following the freezing and thawing of the Arctic ice and lately it's been bothering them a lot because of the seemingly accelerated pace of thawing and the shrinking size of the winter freeze. Until recently, most scientists felt comfortable with a forecast that the ice cap would exist at least until 2040, but doubts have arisen and more money is now being allocated for deeper study.

From now until March 2009, as part of the International Polar Year, 63 nations will funnel $1.7 billion into polar research, aiming to determine which changes in the frozen landscape are natural, which are man-made and which, if any, are preventable. "There's been a rallying cry," says Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado. "We have to figure out how to tell policymakers, and the public, where and when to expect a big change."

So far, the studies don't look good. In mid-March, the journal Science devoted a section to the polar regions that was uniformly depressing: lower latitudes pollute pristine pole, read one headline. Another paper warned that Greenland and Antarctica are shedding 125 gigatons of ice per year, and though the southern continent has picked up some new ice from increased snowfall, it's not enough.

Hopefully, some of that $1.7B will help get scientists the equipment they need to keep up with the changes that are so swiftly happening. Compared to spending for, oh let's say the military, expenditures on the tools for measuring and forecasting worldwide flooding is pitifully small.

Despite the publicity around the IPY, scientists still have limited access to the technology they need. The U.S. Arctic Research Commission recently published a wish list of monitoring equipment, topped by icebreakers (America rents some ships from Russia and Sweden), a better sensor network of buoys and river gauges, and satellites.

And here's a boondoggle: the US did not contribute funding to the launch of the radarsat-2 satellite that will be necessary to analyze the changes in the ice cap in the coming years, and as one scientist claims, he's "not aware that any federal agency has a budget to buy" its data after 2009.

Why do I get the feeling that governments are gonna screw things up again?

The IPCC has hit the fan

As expected, the reaction to the release of the report on "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability" ranged from the responsible scientific to the politically expedient. The wording had been modified over the past few days to soothe the fears of those (like the U.S. and China) who feared that people would become so alarmed as to curtail the means of production and wealth generation. We are being told by the more purely scientific sources that the language of the release was watered down.

Nevertheless, the warnings do come across strongly and nations ignore them at their peril. We'll be visiting the particulars of the report over the next few days. There's more press about climate change this week than I've ever seen in such a short period of time. For a while, at least, we can expect to feel the affects of such concentrated attention. But again, we'll be looking for evidence of actual action toward mitigation, not just concern and hand-wringing.

Can people be scared out of taking action?

In anticipation of the April 6 release of the IPCC report about the regional impacts of climate change, a Reuters article released today, Global warming happens: but is it "catastrophic"?, begins with this:

OSLO (Reuters) - Likely headlines predicting a global warming "catastrophe", "disaster" or "cataclysm" after a U.N. report due on Friday risk sapping public willingness to act by making the problem seem too big to tackle, some experts say.

Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Program, is on of those "some experts," and he cites the tendency for journalists and politicians to instill dread by predicting doomsday and then six weeks later describe the fear they created as "hysteria."

A climate frog needs to feel motivated to act. A climate frog needs hope that doing something will make a positive difference in the outcome. But a climate frog also needs to understand the stakes in order to understand the dire need for action and intentional adaptation. If one recognizes a potential outcome as "catastrophic," it shouldn't feel like overreaching to use that term.

"It is legitimate to use those words in specific scenarios," he [Steiner] told Reuters. "But does that mean that the whole climate change debate should be about doom and gloom? No, because we are finding that we can do something about it."

Sometimes - perhaps most of the time - that "something" will prove to be disruptive, painful, expensive, difficult...lot of other negatives. It's hard to frame all of the adaptive and mitigating necessities in an attractive way. Nature can be a terrible master, and the prospect of forced migration will never be framed as an "adventure in human adaptation."

So, no, appropriate action won't be pleasant for most people, but giving up and doing nothing is not an option. The sooner you can recognize the impact of climate change on your local situation, the sooner you can decide what to do about it. Meanwhile, burn less carbon always.

Your neighborhood doom predictions

It's one thing to say that climate change is upon us. It's another to say that you can predict the climate that will exist at your address. But that's the new service of Climate Appraisal Services LLC.

Yes, folks, "Climate Appraisal literally 'brings home' address-based, potential environmental risks by putting such scientific data at your fingertips."

I guess there are many people who can't figure out the "potential" climate-related risks that lurk in their future. But I tend think that it's just those people who will never discover the existence of this business.

Shock the Frog

Front stoops, no more houses. Plaquemines Parish, LA.

The way the urban legend went, the temperature of the water in the pot rose so gradually and evenly that the frog never noticed it getting hotter. He adapted as every degree was added and eventually succumbed, not aware that the water was too hot to support his life. We could apply that same model to humanity - that we might adapt to a slow, steady increase in temperature, or in rainfall, or in lack of rainfall, until conditions get so bad that no action will save our sorry asses.

But that's not how we're going to experience climate change. The best explanation I've read so far of how things are likely to unfold is in a report by the Global Business Network titled (what else?) Impacts of Climate Change. Originally written for the Pentagon, it raises some of the possible scenarios that are likely to play out as a result of how climate change manifests itself around the world.

Far from the slow and linear change of the "boiling frog" story, we'll see more climatic excursions from the linear -- record-breaking temperatures, droughts and storms, interspersed with years of relative normality. But the impacts of the intermittent extreme events will be devastaing and will last for years or even for generations. Huge populations may be displaced, tremendous losses of life may take place, witnessed virtually by millions or billions, just as Katrina and the Indonesian tidal wave were. Violent conflicts will break out as millions migrate in desperation across borders.

This is a particularly good paper to read because its authors acknowledge that impact studies about climate change are difficult to do.

...they are not predictable enough to be actionable because the exact nature of the event that will jar the planet in the near- and long-term future -- the wheres, whens and hows of climate change -- remains both unknown and unknowable.

So, the authors took another tack.

Instead of starting with climate change and working out toward impacts, we focus on systems that are already generally vulnerable first, and then consider what the geophysics of climate change may do to them.

It's a low-hanging fruit approach; make the easy predictions -- the ones with the highest level of confidence -- and see where that gets us. In this case, even with the relatively safe probabilities described in the report, there is enough potential damage to life, property, culture, politics and the global mood to guarantee that we'll be challenged on all levels in the decades to come.

This passage, I think, is the most succinct description of how the impact will land:

Finally, the high likelihood of extreme events and nonlinear excursions in global climate intersects with the question of threshold effects. As extreme events -- perhaps compounded by medium-term excursions -- take place, the chance that any given event will exceed the resiliency of a natural or human system rises dramatically. And when such a threshold is passed, the amount of damage also rises steeply.

Katrina was a perfect example.