Global Warming: The North Carolina Solution

Colington Island, North Carolina (Wikipedia)

by Jesse C Moore

Comedians and late-night talk-show hosts have had a lot of fun with North Carolina's solution to rising sea levels caused by global warming.

The legislature passed a law to deal with it.

North Carolina lawmakers recently passed HB 819, which included a four-year moratorium on the state Coastal Resources Commission authorizing any sea-level forecast to be used as the basis for regulations while the issue is studied.

"North Carolina should not ignore science when making public policy decisions," Governor Bev Perdue said.

And then she ignored science by refusing to veto HB 819, allowing it to come become law. Any time a law forbids scientific research, you can be sure there is a special interest group behind it.

A group called NC-20 claims that floodplains should be determined by historic trends which suggest the seas will only rise 8 inches this century, rather than the scientific data which projects three times that.

Republican Rep. Pat McElraft explained,"What we have done is ask them to use a blend of models, to use historical data, to use some real science that we can all trust when we start making laws here in North Carolina".

McElraft, who is a former real estate agent, denied that campaign contributions ever influence her. However, the largest industry contributors to McElraft's campaigns have been the North Carolina Association of Realtors, followed by the North Carolina Home Builders' Association.

And you can be sure that when politicians say "real science", it is usually to get around acting on what is actually, real science.

Real Science

Scientists have found that the sea levels have been rising in response to thermal expansion of the ocean and the melting of glaciers.

The scientific data shows that sea levels have been rising about 3.2 mm per year, which is about 14 inches per century, but that could increase to several feet if the ice sheet on Antarctic and Greenland melt.

However, global warming does not cause the sea levels to rise everywhere at a uniform rate and they are rising much more quickly along the Atlantic Coast of the United States.

The U.S. Geological Survey recently released a study that shows the East Coast from Cape Hatteras to Boston has already seen a sea level rise three to four times higher than most of the world in the past 20 years, and will likely continue to do so.

The North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission's 13-member panel of scientists conducted a nine-month study and warned in 2010 that sea levels in North Carolina could rise by more than 3 feet by 2100 and threaten more than 2,000 square miles of coastal land.

There is some very expensive real estate on the Barrier Islands and along the coast of North Carolina that is only a few feet above sea level. Sea level rise threatens the value of that property and makes it more vulnerable to storm surges from hurricanes.

Real estate developers might be prohibited from building - or rebuilding homes damaged by hurricane Sandy and Irene - if low-lying areas were to be designated as a floodplain by the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission.

As an insurance adjuster in North Carolina explained it, "NC has dumped the coastal flooded homes on the National Flood Insurance Program for years. They build the homes in a predicted floodplain. Lo, and behold the homes on the coast are flooded. The Feds then have to pick up the tab for NC building homes in known floodplains. They are even today rebuilding homes where they were flooded previously in the exact same spot - in an ocean floodplain."

It's a sweet deal, the North Carolina developers and builders profit by building homes in the floodplain, and the federal government picks up the tab when the homes flood. Apparently the legislature is not going to let a little science interfere with that sweet deal.

(c) 2013 J.C. Moore

Dr. J.C. Moore is a physical chemist whose interests are spectroscopy,computational chemistry, professional ethics, and science education. He taught chemistry, physics, and general science at the college level for 38 years. Since retirement, he has established http://JCMooreonline.com, a website that examines current events from a science and research perspective.

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Hottest 12-Month Period Confirmed: So What Role Did Humans Play?

Climate map of Australia (Wikipedia)

by David Karoly, University of Melbourne and Sophie Lewis, University of Melbourne

It’s official, the past 12 months have been the hottest in Australia for more than a hundred years.

Temperatures averaged across Australia between September 2012 and August 2013 were hotter than any year since good records began in 1910.

The previous record was held by the 12-month period from February 2005 to January 2006.

The new record follows a suite of broken records following last year’s “angry summer”, including the hottest summer since records began.

New weather records are being set all the time. Sometimes these are record cold temperatures, but more often in recent times these have been record hot temperatures. A common question is what is the human role, if any, in these records compared with natural variations of weather and climate?

The link between global warming and human causes has been firmly established over the last two decades. Multiple studies have shown that it is very unlikely that natural variations in climate can explain recent global climate change.

While these results are clear, it is still helpful to determine the influence of global warming on regional climate extremes, since such extremes are often more influenced by natural variability.

However, attributing a single event or a record to human activities isn’t easy. But last year Hurricane Sandy put the spotlight on climate change and extreme weather.

And in late June this year, our scientific study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters showed human-caused climate change substantially increased the likelihood of the very hot 2013 Australian summer.

Human influences on the climate system increased the chances of our record hot summer by more than five times.

Using the same approach, we have now analysed the past 12-month’s temperatures across Australia. Our results show that human influences on the climate very likely increased by more than one hundred times the chances of the record 12-month Australia temperature.

We started our analysis by considering more than 20 of the latest generation of climate models. These models all participated in an international initiative that undertakes standardised climate model experiments.

From these we selected the nine models that best captured the observed variability in Australian average temperature to perform our analyses.

Using these remaining nine state-of-the-art global climate models, we investigated the chances of setting a new record high 12-month average temperature across Australia. The previous record was set in 2005.

We compared temperature probabilities from a suite of model simulations of the climate including only natural climate influences (volcanoes and solar radiation changes) with a parallel set of model simulations including natural and human influences on the climate, such as increasing greenhouse gases.

The results were clear. When human influences were included in the model simulations, the probability of setting a new record, as occurred at the end of August 2013, was dramatically higher.

Indeed, it was very likely (with 90% confidence) that human influences increased the odds by at least 100 times of setting a new record 12-month temperature.

Probabilities of average September-August temperatures for Australia from observations (dashed line) and climate model simulations for 1911-2005. The vertical lines show the temperature anomalies for September 1997 to August 1998 (the hottest September to August on record) and for February 2005 to January 2006 (the previous hottest 12-month period in the observational record). David Karoly & Sophie Lewis

As above, but now showing the probabilities from observations (1911-2005) and climate model simulations for 2006-2020 including human influences on the climate, such as increasing greenhouse gases. The probability of exceeding the previous 12-month record is now at least 100 times more likely than without human influences. David Karoly & Sophie Lewis

When we considered the repeated model simulations with just natural climate factors, we found only one 12-month period out of more than 5700 years that exceeded the record set in 2005.

However, when we considered the model simulations including human influences on the climate, as well as natural variability, for the period 2006 to 2020, we found 41 12-month periods out of 465 years exceeded the record.

Hence, it would be nearly impossible to get such a new Australian temperature record due to natural climate variations alone. However, such records become quite common, about once every eleven years in our current climate, with increased global average temperatures due to human activity.

The recent record temperature is also notable because it occurred at a time when El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions were neutral (neither El Niño nor La Niña occurring), which typically produces normal, rather than warm, temperatures across Australia.

The model experiments also show that these types of extreme Australian temperatures will become more severe and more frequent in the future, with further global warming.

David Karoly receives funding from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science. He is a member of the Science Advisory Panel to the Climate Commission, a member of the Climate Change Authority, and a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists.

Sophie Lewis is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.