Bruce Melton

Climate change Texas

Professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, writer, front man for the band Climate Change, Feb 21, 12.

Tagged with sprawl, sustainability, climate change, drought, global warming, science

If this is not dangerous climate change, then this is exactly what dangerous climate change will be like in as little as a decade. What has been happening in Texas, with its unprecedented (in time frames that matter) droughts and wildfires, is exactly what the climate scientists have been warning us about for over 20 years. We have been building up to this point since about the turn of the century, and now ecosystems have tipped over the edge. Climate feedbacks have kicked in hard.

The Texas Forest Service tells us that a half billion trees have died. The first of this series of droughts in 2005/6 was just classified as extreme. The last two have been one category worse than extreme—the exceptional category. The last 12 months were drier than the worst 12 months of the great drought of the 1950s. This has been a $10 billion drought, with another $1 billion in damages from the fires.

Worse, it’s hotter now. This past summer was 5.4 degrees warmer than average. This may not seem like a lot, but think how sick you would be if you had a 104 degree temperature.

The reason that increased heat makes such a big difference in a drought is that extra heat greatly increases evaporation. Four percent more water evaporates for every degree of temperature increase. With 5.4 degrees of warming above average, summertime evaporation in Austin was more than 22 percent greater than normal. In other words, the same drought is much worse if it is only a little hotter.

In the same breath, even with normal rainfall, because of warmer temperatures, drought can persist because of much greater evaporation. The warmer temperatures are easy to see looking at the average August temperature for the period of record.

It is important to talk about the urban heat island effect here too. The chaos of information presented by our media today does little to shed light on the latest climate science. An evaluation of regional temperature departure from normal for 2011 shows the exceptional nature of this most recent in a string of droughts.

...

Full Story: Climate change Texas: The worst-case scenario is happening now
Source: The Rag Blog, February 16, 2012

More Commentary