Newsgroups: lter.ced Path: LTERnet!news From: Bruce Hayden Subject: CED 4.1 & 4.2 Message-ID: <1995Feb1.221445.1235@lternet.washington.edu> Sender: news@lternet.washington.edu Organization: Long Term Ecological Research Date: Wed, 1 Feb 1995 21:11:54 GMT ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *********** *********** ********** *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * ********* * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** *********** *********** ********** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Vol.4 No.1 & 2 ::: January/February Issue ::: February 1, 1994 ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** CED METADATA ---- CED is the Climate/Ecosystem Dynamics bulletin board of the LTER network. In CED, you will find exchanges of ideas, information, data, bibliographies, literature discussions, and a place to find experts within the LTER community. We are interested in both climate controls on ecosystems and ecosystem controls on climate. As this is an inter-disciplinary activity, we hope to provide things that you might not come across in your work at your LTER site. CED is a product of the LTER climate committee and contributions to CED for general e-mail release may be sent to either David Greenland of Andrews LTER [Greenlan@oregon.uoregon.edu] or to Bruce Hayden of the Virginia Coast Reserve LTER [bph@Virginia.edu]. We expect that the scope of CED will evolve and reflect the interests of the contributors and users of this service. CED will be issued as the preparation work gets done (usually monthly). Back-issues of CED may be requested from Daniel Pommert [daniel@lternet.washington.edu] by the file name given in the masthead.Daniel can also add people to the CED mailing list. CED is now a part of the World Wide Web. Web users can link to the following URL: http://atlantic.evsc.virginia.edu/julia/CED.html Feedback on CED from LTER scientists is welcome (non-$$$$ contributions also welcome.) For example, please forward citations of climate & ecosystem publications on your site. We are keeping a LTER wide bibliography on Climate/Ecosystem Dynamics that we pass on via E-mail. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** THE MISSING CEDs *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Word has filtered back to Charlottesville that some faithful CED readers have not seen a CED recently. It is true. CED took a bit of a vacation. In a burst of dedication to my classroom teaching, I decided to redo my class and class notes from top to bottom, put it all in Framemaker software and do away with textbooks I hated to use and the students liked even less. Well, I am in the home stretch and can get back to the pleasures of e-mailing you my favorite cocktail party stories. The figures have been redrafted, the equations rewritten with type-set quality, tables crafted and tables of contents, lists of figures and tables and indexes can be generated. I can revise it with ease. I can give the students a disk or reproduce the stuff by Xerox. I figure I can save each student about $30. What a philanthropic sort I have turned out to be! So, here I am back to my old fun. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** SOUNDINGS IN THE ARCTIC *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** From time to time CED has visited the Arctic in hunt of the expected greenhouse warming. Jonathan Kahl provides us the most recent and by far the most detailed look at temperature histories. Jonathan has collected and studied almost all of the temperature soundings of the Arctic atmosphere that are available and has tortured the data until it has confessed. [land areas -- J.G. R. (1994) 98 D7:12,825-12,838 and marine areas -- Nature (1993) 361:335-337].A sounding is a record of temperature with height. Soundings are taken with balloon and instrument package or are droped out of a plane (dropsond). Why a sounding rather than simple surface temperatures. In a sense that is like asking why not take the temperature of you skin rather than under your tongue, through your sphincter, or in your ear. A sounding gives you an integrated measure of the bulk of the atmosphere and is not greatly altered by the patch work of surfaces and surface temperatures. Our numerical weather prediction models don't even bother to calculate surface temperatures. They use statistical models built at each weather station that relate surface temperatures to the patterns of meteorological variables in the free troposphere. We might remember that CO2 global warming according to the GCMs is to be found in the lower half of the atmosphere, over the continents more than the oceanic areas and in the high latitudes more than the low latitudes and in winter more than in summer. In short the signal hunter should cast her gaze to the polar environs and to the full thickness of the troposphere. This is what Jonathan has done. So what has he found? Well a lot but not much. Basically the atmosphere in the land area in polar regions has warmed in some areas (+3C/30 yrs) and cooled in others (-3C/30 yr) with, if anything, a slight advantage of the cooling places over the warming places but that could be just the result of where the weather stations that had the balloon are located (it is not statistically signifiant 0.05 level). So has the Arctic warmed due to CO2. Well, if it has something else must have canceled it out. So, the question: is there global warming due to CO2. Sure. Can we see it? No or not yet or maybe not for a long time. I am not even sure we know what to look for so complex are the synergisms with in the atmosphere and even more between the atmosphere and the biosphere. It is fantastic. Well, what about the surface. That is where we live and where we do most of our ecosystem research. How about warming there? Kahl found a -5C/40yr cooling over the western Arctic Ocean and none in the eastern area. As noted in an earlier CED on temperatures in bore-holes, there really have been changes in Arctic, subarctic, temperate and subtropical locations temperatures in the past (form 50 to 500 years ago). In that issue CED we made the case for the role of land use change to account for the change in temperature history. Study of paleoclimate patterns during past 10 thousand years indicate that some regions warm while others cool. One is hard pressed to find a past climate change that was all warmer or all cooler everywhere! It just does not work t hat way! ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** CHICKEN OR EGG *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** In the 1950 climatologists at the University of Wisconsin observed that a cloud line was often congruent with the northern edge of the boreal forest or southern edge of the tundra which ever you prefer. The question: Do the properties of the ecotone give rise to the a convergence zone that in turn supplies the upward motion evidenced in the cloud line? or Does the ecotone "take up" its position under this zone of convergence and cloudiness? What a nice chicken or egg problem it was. The ecotone causes the cloud line was tested at the North Temperate Lake LTER's newest regional test site -- Lake Mendota. Mendota, in winter, tolerates ice boating and other walking on water activities. So, why not build an ecotone out on the ice and directly measure the resulting convection. Reid Bryson, Heinz Letteau and others used the harvest of Madison's severed Christmas trees. holes were drilled in the ice, trees implanted and a forest built. Banks of anemometers and other meteorological instruments would tell the tale. Well, they could not establish the ecotone causes a line of convergence theory. With the possibility that the ecotone takes up residence under the average position of the convergence zone and cloud line, new studies were required. They asked the research question:has the ecotone been constant in position. Cores were taken across the treeline in the Ennadai Lake area revealed that the treeline in that area had been north of its current position and had been south of its current position. The variations had a geographic span of 200 km. Next the asked is the relationship between the treeline and the line of convergence was true from Alaska to Labrador. Bryson published his findings in 1966 of Canadian wind fields and showed that the northern border of the boreal forest coincided with the summertime position of the Arctic front. In contemporary times, the forest-tundra ecotone and the Arctic front geographically covary. Roger Barry later found a similar covariation in Asian forest-tundra order and published his findings. Earlier CED reported on others how have looked at the forest and tundra as thermodynamic forcers of the atmosphere. Now we have a new entry. Roger Pielke, affiliate of the CPR and BNZ LTERs weighs in with a report that the ecotone may indeed be a forcer of the atmosphere! Roger calculates the modification of the atmosphere on each side of the ecotone as a result of the fluxes of mass and energy from the surface to the atmosphere. They then asked if the atmosphere on either side of the ecotone has a steep enough gradient that it causes card-carrying meteorologists to declare it a front! Yes it does! Ecotones make fronts. The boundaries between the biomes give rise to boundaries in the atmosphere. Watch for Roger's article with Pier Luigi Vidale, "The Boreal Forest and the Polar Front", to appear in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Reid Bryson's work suggested it is the other way around. Boundaries in the atmosphere give rise to boundaries in the vegetation cover of the earth. What a great debate. What synergisms. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** Pielke IN ECOLOGICAL MONOGRAPHS *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** "Use of USGS-Provided Data to Improve Weather and Climate Simulations" by R. A. Pielke, T. J. lee, J. H. Copeland, J. L. Eastman, C. L. Ziegler and C.A. Finley (in press). Roger has been building a convective scale atmospheric model that over the course of a day builds thunderstorms and releases rainfall. He calls his model RAMS which stands for Regional Atmospheric Modeling System. The model takes as input the regional structure of the atmosphere and runs the convection of that day in his model. One of the requirements of his model is that he specify the surface topography and vegetation cover. He as been asking questions of fundamental importance to ecosystem ecologists. Does the type and heterogeneity of the vegetation effect the daily progression of thunderstorm development? He has run his model for the Konza and for Atlanta area. In his Atlanta simulation he runs his model twice. First he runs it for the Atlanta area using the vegetation cover of 1700 AD and then runs the same model for today's crazy-quilt of land surfaces and vegetation cover as represented in the USGS landcover data base. The progression of thunderstorm development turns out to be fundamentally different in the two cases. The vegetation controls in part where and when it rains. This is a must read for ecologists. After you read Roger's article you will have a few questions to answer yourself: For example, does the ecosystem differ if its gets it rainfall early in the day or late in the afternoon? Roger and the CSU group are doing pioneering work in climate-ecosystem dynamics. Roger is also working with the BNZ LTER on vegetation-thunderstorms-fire connections. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** WIND POWER! IT IS HARD TO BE GREEN. *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Residents North Friesland, that's in Germany, are all a-roar about noise pollution from wind mills that generate electricity for the citizens of a united Germany. A few issues ago I wrote about bull roarers and ultra-low frequency sound and just how far it travels. Well, our German friends are not yet at the stage of worry over low frequency sound, it is the stuff that everyone can hear that they are carping about. Five years ago the North Frieslanders organized an opposition group and now it is many groups. They snip at the power authorities because in fair weather the turning rotors yell 'clickety-clack'. These North Frieslanders, however, are not just fair-weather enemies. When the air turns foggy the rotors groan a 'woosh-woosh'. In North Friesland you can tell if it is foggy with your ears! When the sun shines, the flashes of light off the rotor blades makes this bucolic German state into a giant Disco. So far there are 740 wind power generators in North Friesland and by 2010 there will be 2,000 more. It could become the heavy metal capital of Europe. The power authorities give Frieslander farmers $7,742 per year per 'several square meters' of area needed for each unit. The farmers roar their appreciation. All this for 0.041% of Germany's power production. Choosing up sides is the hallmark of the late 20th century. Moral: be green in somebody else's back yard! ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** CLIMOMYTHOLOGY *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** A myth is something we believe without considering evidence or knowing even a shred stuff or junk to back it all up. A Climomyth is just what the word says. Climo-mythology has both a long and undistinguished pedigree. Climatology has long been a new age science, at least as far back as the ancient Greeks. Think it and it will be true! Such new age thinking has eons of tradition in climatology. I like to think of it as belief system never tested. In this issue of CED I am doing a sort of house cleaning and cleansing of my soul! Telling the truth and chuckling is good for the health. Now I don't have an ounce of proof for that either but it sounds good. The stuff of myth. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** SUNSPOT CLIMOMYTH *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** There are not many climatologists who put much stock in sunspots controlling weather. But in every age there are a few. At the turn of the century, the theory of the day was that the track of sunspots on the sun were linked with the tracks of storms here on earth. J. Kullmer of Syracuse and E. Huntington of Yale were the proselytizers of this theory. I have looked at North American storm tracks more than almost anyone alive today. Even with a modern computer and power spectrum analysis you just cant find any evidence for this theory. Yet, every place I go I find believers in the sunspot and weather connection. Most meteorologists are sort of hostile about it all. That's right. Hostile. They see it as just so much folklore bunk! Wishful thinking. New Age. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** SALUBRIOUSNESS *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** In the 1950s, meteorologists thought that climate was a constant and that climatology was sort of an actuarial science. The kind of thing Metlife employees might be well positioned to do. So, with very little that was legit to do, climatologists debated who's climate was most salubrious. The answer usually was, "Mine." Our friends and wasp soulmates on the islands off the west coast of Europe studied the tonic vs. sedative nature of their climate and found their homelands best. C. E. P. Brooks in his book The English Climate (English Universities Press, London. 1954) considering winds, humidity, temperature and sunshine offered a 5-part classification of climate-salubriousness: 1) very bracing, 2) bracing, 3) average, 4) relaxing, and 5) very relaxing. Us continental people tend to think England a rather climatically uniform place, sort of a giant Seattle or at least Vancouver Island. So, using the Brooks' classification, we might well find that the Reykjavik, aka "bay of smokes", Iceland is very, very bracing and Spitzbergen, Norway very, very, very bracing and the Cannes, France very, very relaxing and San Diego, California very, very, very relaxing. The British regions of relaxing or sedative climate are so because of the "moist, equable west or south-west winds." The authors of Environment and Man: Health and the Environment (ed. J. Lenihan and Wm. Fletcher, Academic Press. 1976) reporting on C. E. P. Brooks' salubriousness classification note that "Sunshine can cause marked changes in a white person's subjective sensations of health." This is found in a 1976 book that apparently sneaked past the reviewers just before political correctness settled in and just before we began to understand the lie in "sticks and stones will brake your bones but names will never hurt you." Climomyth notions like this, however, were rife in climatology until recently. You might consider see E. Huntington's work at Yale. He was the champion environmental determinist in North America. Such untested Environmental Determinism infiltrated may disciplines earlier in this century. Lenihan and Fletcher note other mythic factors in human health, such as "radiation, magnetic fields, cosmic rays and static electricity, whose significance can be assumed, but which have not yet been worked out." Climomyth. Assume it and it will be science! Apparently, New Agism escaped climatological sciences and infected Kevin Costner, Shirley McClain and the general public in the late 1980's. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** ANIMALS AS NEW AGE AGENTS *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Myth-and-believing-it-makes-it-so ideas make up much of animal based weather forecasting. Winter surely must be best know by animals who must prepare in advance for the hard days ahead. Well, we all know about and wait for the annual wooly bear forecast for the severity of the coming winter. The woolly bear caterpillar is black with a central brown band. The wider the brown band, the milder the winter will be. In my look-sees at 131 woolly bears in 1989, I came up with a failure to accept the woolly bear hypothesis. C. C. Abbott writing from the Smithsonian in 1883 concluded that the animals whose autumnal habits were most widely accepted as apocalyptic were most often undependable. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** BLOOD-SUCKING, BLOOD-LETTING PROGNOSTICATORS *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** My favorite animal-weather prognosticator was a Dr. Merryweather. A physician with that name could hardly have helped but dabbling in weather prediction. Dr. Merryweather unveiled his "storm warning system" during Britain's Great Exhibition of 1851. This system was a jar with 12 leeches and a small bell that would ring when the leeches became active. I have yet to learn the details of the bell ringing. Merryweather politicked the British Government to set up his leech, storm-warning systems all along the coast. It is believed that Dr. Merryweather got his idea from Spanish writing of the mid-1700s. With a 24-hour lead time, the Spanish leeches would give one of 9 warnings. Knowing how many leech collectors there are in the LTER Network Office and the difficult weather in the Pacific Northwest, CED has decided to provide the nine rules of leech-interpretation. 1) If the leech takes up a position in the bottle's neck rain is at hand. 2) If he forms a half-moon, when he is out of the water and sticking to the glass, it is a sure sing of tempest. 3) If he is in continual movement, thunder and lightning are coming soon. 4) If he seems as if he were trying to raise himself from the surface of the water, there will be a change in the weather. 5) If he moves slowly close to one spot, cold weather is coming. 6) If he moves rapidly about, expect strong winds when he stops. 7) If he lies coiled up on the bottom, fine, clear weather is coming. 8) If he forms a hook, clear, cold weather is coming. 9) If he is in a fixed position, very cold weather is certain to follow. While leeches have lost their historic luster in recent decades, modern, animalistic prognosticators now favor insects. "They are totally non-thinking minicomputers who's every action or reaction throughout their brief existence is predetermined. Think of how much more absolute an entomologist can be than a human behavioral psychologist, and how much more dependable a weather prediction based on insect behavior can be than one based on the individualized behavior of humans, or even sows" [source: A. Lee (1976) Weather Wisdom. Doubleday]. If blood-suckers fail you and you are in dire need of a storm forcast, watch for "mist over your asses' manger" for it will indicate a tempest. This last one comes from Theophrastus' work De Signis Aquarum et Ventorum and it survived in usage for the centuries until asses or at least mangers became rare. Some say that mangers are, today, far more rare than asses. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** A CED AXIOM *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** I have coined and come to trust the following CED axiom: A popular climate theory that is systematically untested year after year soon becomes a climomyth and believers tend to queue up. For example, since the 1960s the notion that declines in our protective ozone shield is giving rise to excess UV light and lots of cancers. Year after year, we systematically failed to test this theory against the bright light of observations. It became a climomyth in the late 1980s. When the observational data was looked at and found indicate that UV at the surface declined during the period of ozone decline (post-1969). The data did little good as the climate theory had transmogrified into a climomyth! To make matters worse, increased incidence of skin cancers were blamed on the changes in our UV environment even though UV had declined. The alternate hypothesis is that these extra cancers came about from increasing exposure of the human skin due to the sartorial minimalism of our age! James Watt, a fondly-remembered, barb-target of the early 1980s had a good idea after all: "Wear a hat!" Now Jim got a fine bum's rush for that one even though there had been no increase in UV. He got trapped in a climomyth. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is a team dedicated to climomyth generation in support of public policy. Each year they test no climate theory but repeat it. One of IPCC composer-leaders tells us that "The data don't matter. This is a model generated issue." The model is still theory. The IPCC team is a consensus-building team. They don't watch the polls of climatologists in which the global-warming-is-here people are greatly outnumbered. They just declare consensus of "scientists." Their consensus fast becomes myth. Most CED readers know that I am not the biggest fan of consensus science. We shouldn't use consensus as an epistemological tool for knowing. Some famous the-warming-is-here-now new-agers have declared that 99% of climatologists believe the warming is here. No such poll has ever been published with those results. With the help of a new-age sensitive public, they are fast changing climate theory to climomyth. I wonder if Theophrastus had a consensus building team for his "asses and mangers" climomyth? In fairness to the IPCC reports, reading of the body of the report is great. It is not the problem. The report tells it as it is in the literature. The IPCC document body is a literature review. By any standard, it is reviewed to death by climatologists. It is the summary, the part the policy wags use in their deliberations and the news people use to retell the summary and generate the column-inches. That is the problem. It doesn't match the body. Different people write it. Their goals are not the same. It does not say what the body of the report says. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** HELP FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** In a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal (Nov. 1, 1994), I was in search of the daily quote on my four shares of NYNEX and there before my eyes I read of social scientists standing accused of pontification and prognostication with little penalty for their history of abject failure in seeing the future! The data don't matter. You make a bad forecast and well, so what! The Journal notes that the social prognosticators of the 80s are still going strong, still trusted in their visions of the future, and still in demand by the policy wags. Where is social Darwinism when you need it. It was wonderful to realize that dynamics of what I called climomyth infects and infests other academic disciplines. It is indeed wonderful when you know you are not along.