Paul MilenkovicAnd the ideas in a paper are tainted because one of its authors later got manipulated into endorsing a cause he didn't support?
I suggest you read what I said more carefully, sir. I never said that. What was discredited was the dishonest attempt by those with an agenda, often fueled by big oil grant dollars, to use his name to give weight to their denialist propaganda.
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/histgeol/chamber/chamber.htm
https://archive.org/stream/journalofgeology71899univ#page/544/mode/2up
https://archive.org/stream/journalofgeology71899univ#page/666/mode/2up
https://archive.org/stream/journalofgeology71899univ#page/750/mode/2up
https://archive.org/stream/jstor-30054630/30054630#page/n1/mode/2up
wanswheel The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart http://history.aip.org/climate/index.htm#contents
The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart
http://history.aip.org/climate/index.htm#contents
Another excerpt from the indispensible Spencer Weart
A crude idea of how the amount of CO2 could affect radiation was only the first half of a calculation of global warming. The other half would be a model for figuring how the amount of CO2 itself might change. A colleague of Arrhenius, Arvid Högbom, had already published some preliminary ideas. Arrhenhius's 1896 paper stimulated an American geologist and bold thinker, Thomas C. Chamberlin, to look into the planet's carbon system more deeply. In 1897 he published "a paper which, I am painfully aware, is very speculative..." The speculations revolved around the great puzzle of the ice ages. Chamberlin later remarked how ice ages were "intimately associated with a long chain of other phenomena to which at first they appeared to have no relationship." He was the first to demonstrate that the only way to understand climate change was to understand almost everything about the planet together — not just the air but the oceans, the volcanoes bringing gases from the deep interior, the chemistry of how minerals gradually disintegrated under weathering, and more.
Chamberlin's novel hypothesis was that ice ages might follow a self-oscillating cycle driven by feedbacks involving CO2. Drawing on Arrhenius's intuition, Chamberlin explained clearly how the gas acts as the long-term regulator of the daily atmospheric fluctuations of water vapor. CO2, he noted, was injected into the atmosphere in spates of volcanic activity. It was gradually withdrawn as it combined with minerals during the weathering of rocks and soil. If the volcanic activity faltered, then as minerals slowly leached the gas out of the atmosphere, the planet would cool. Feedbacks could make a temporary dip spiral into a self-reinforcing decline. For one thing, as the land cooled, bogs and the like would decompose more slowly, which meant they would lock up carbon in frozen peat, further lowering the amount of CO2 in the air. Moreover, as the oceans cooled, they too would take up the gas — warm water evaporates a gas out, cold water absorbs it. The process would stop by itself once ice sheets spread across the land, for there would then be less exposed rock and bogs taking up CO2. Reversing the process could bring a warming cycle.
Chamberlin seemed only to be adding to the tall pile of speculations about ice ages, but along the way he had pioneered the modeling of global movements of carbon. He made rough calculations of how much carbon was stored up in rocks, oceans, and organic reservoirs such as forests. He went on to point out that compared with these stockpiles, the atmosphere contained only a minor fraction — and most of that CO2 cycled in and out of the atmosphere every few thousand years. It was a delicate balance, he warned. Climate conditions "congenial to life" might be short-lived on geological time scales. Chamberlin quickly added that "This threat of disaster is not, however, a scientific argument..." He was offering the idea more for its value "in awakening interest and neutralizing inherited prejudice," namely, the assumption that the atmosphere is stable.
Other scientists were not awakened. While some admitted that geological processes could alter the CO2 concentration, on any time scale less than millions of years the atmosphere seemed to be unchanging and unchangeable. After all, nearly all of the carbon in Chamberlin’s system was locked up in sea water and minerals. Any emissions humans might produce seemed a negligible addition.
The CO2 model, "recommended to us by the brilliant advocacy and high authority of Prof. T.C. Chamberlin," did briefly become a popular theory to explain the ice ages and other slow climate changes of the past — better known, in fact, than Arrhenius's complicated calculation. But within a few years scientists dismissed the entire theory for what seemed insuperable problems.
https://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/16/10/pdf/i1052-5173-16-10-30.pdf
schlimm Deggesty I really wonder if Schlimm read all of Paul's first post concerning the aritcle from 1957, but instead dismissed it as irrelevant because of its age--and thus it would not support the suppositions of the current climate experts. Edited to correct a misspelled word. Yes, I read Paul's remarks. My comment was on the posting of stuff so old. Did you read my post of how Revelle was used by those who sought to minimize man's role in warming? I am not a climatologist. And nobody on here is. But I respect the opinions of scientists in their fields of research. Too bad many do not, for whatever reasons.
Deggesty I really wonder if Schlimm read all of Paul's first post concerning the aritcle from 1957, but instead dismissed it as irrelevant because of its age--and thus it would not support the suppositions of the current climate experts. Edited to correct a misspelled word.
I really wonder if Schlimm read all of Paul's first post concerning the aritcle from 1957, but instead dismissed it as irrelevant because of its age--and thus it would not support the suppositions of the current climate experts.
Edited to correct a misspelled word.
Yes, I read Paul's remarks. My comment was on the posting of stuff so old. Did you read my post of how Revelle was used by those who sought to minimize man's role in warming?
I am not a climatologist. And nobody on here is. But I respect the opinions of scientists in their fields of research. Too bad many do not, for whatever reasons.
A paper is too old? Never heard that from any journal editor I ever worked with. And the ideas in a paper are tainted because one of its authors later got manipulated into endorsing a cause he didn't support? Those side-bar stories never bothered me if the math in the paper was correct.
"But I respect the opinions of scientists in their fields of research. Too bad many do not, for whatever reasons."
Let me offer some of the "whatever reasons."
The Bern Model: the IPCC reports offer that as explanation that not only are we as humans emitting huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, what we put there stays there, for hundreds of years. Pretty scary.
On the other hand, a couple of heretics have (recently, by the way) been arguing that the "residence time" of CO2 added to the atmosphere is very short -- short being 7-20 years long. One such heretic is Murry Salby, who has made much of the strong correlation between global temperature changes and the year-to-year fluctuation in the increase in atmospheric CO2, which he defines as "net CO2 emissions." Murry Salby is author of peer-reviewed articles along with textbooks on atmospheric science that we have in our libraries at the U and which I have read, but he is "off the reservation" on climate change. He has a bit of a snarky 'tude on him too, judging from his videos, and he has gotten himself in some major trouble with more than one funding agency/academic institution, where the "Deniers" say its a conspiracy against him and the "Warmists" say that the man is a "piece of work."
Another heretic is Gosta Petterrson, who has called attention to the "bomb test curve." It turns out that the U.S. and the Soviet Union, in our nuclear arms race testing of ever bigger H-bombs, emitted the rare, radioactive carbon 14 isotope (C14) into the air. It also turns out that his emission of C14, apart from smaller contributions from France and China, abruptly stopped in 1963 by a treaty between the U.S. and the Soviets.
What happened to this C14? It went away, it got swallowed up by the land and sea carbon sinks on the order of a 7-20 year time frame. The reason for the uncertainty is the difficulty in knowing the pre-Bomb Test baseline, along with correcting for the "Suess Effect" (Hans Seuss being coauthor to that "old paper" that no one is supposed to heed anymore?), the Suess effect being that human CO2 emissions are modifying the baseline isotopic composition of the atmosphere.
The idea that the human-emitted CO2 doesn't stay there for hundreds of years but would quickly right itself were human to stop emitting that CO2, well, that causes heads to explode. Salby and Pettersson are wrong, wrong, wrong, I tell you, I cannot tell you why they are wrong apart from Salby being an acerbic grant-money misappropriator and Pettersson being some Swedish old-retired guy, and hey, he is some sort of chemist but not even a climate scientist!
It is this kind of petulant response that leads portions of the non-scientist public to think there is something fishy about the whole thing.
Well, as a non-climate scientist research engineer, I needed to know an answer as to why Salby and Pettersson are wrong, not a patronizing "because experts." I found a clue in a nasty, snarky remark posted on Judith Curry's blog, another one of these retired-scientist heretics. That nasty (anonymous, natch) remark offered a clue putting me on a trail that led to the Revelle and Seuss paper that schlimm apparently disrespects as outdated and "misused by the Deniers."
That paper offers a reference to the earlier Revelle paper establishing the "Revelle buffer", the chain of chemical reactions by which CO2 absorbed by ocean water, not pure water but a complex chemical stew, is sequestered in "soluble carbonate" chemicals. Were the ocean pure water, a bulk human addition of CO2 to the atmosphere would be absorbed just as quickly as the bomb-test radioactive CO2. Salby and Pettersson use an absorption model based on pure water chemistry (Henry's Law) and hence they are wrong.
The correct absorption model is the Revelle buffer described in the 1957 paper. According to the Revelle buffer model, the "extinction" of an isotope concentration takes place 10 times more quickly than the absorption of a pulse of CO2 that materially increases the total CO2 concentration (the combustion of fossil fuels). But we are in a kind of scientific Dark Age, where even scientists rely on argument-by-authority and no longer read the "old" papers to the point where they don't know how to refute Salby or Pettersson except by personal attacks, credentialism (not proper "climate scientists"), or invective.
But Salby and Pettersson are not entirely wrong. As I said, taking the Revelle buffer into account and making IPCC assumptions about the land carbon cycle to "balance the books", 1) half of the human CO2 emissions add to the CO2 in the air, 2) the other half of emissions is split about evenly between land and ocean "sinks", and 3) the preponderance of the increased CO2 is because of human activity. But this model does not account for Salby's "large variability in net emission in relation to anthropogenic (human caused) CO2 emission."
This variability is a hard, verifiable, concrete, physical fact, and it points to an equally large natural source of CO2 emission -- already adding to the atmospheric CO2 in combination with the human contribution. This inference is corroborated by very recent publications on the temperature-driven emission of CO2 from soils.
So you have a 1957 paper (an old, old stale paper) that establishes the mechanism by which the human emission of CO2 is not swallowed up the ocean in its entirety. Since 1957, it is inferred that the ocean is not well mixed -- this builds upon the Revelle and Suess ocean model -- which in a quasi-static model, explains why the CO2 is increasing and why humans are almost entirely at fault. This is the incremental progress that is inherent in science.
As recently as the two-thousand-teens, people are noticing that there is a large temperature-driven source of human emission that no one accounted before -- the soils. In my non-climate-scientist expertise in looking up references, reading them, and making sense of both linear and non-linear models (in my discipline they are called electric and electronic circuits, respectfully, and chemists and other scientists use the math of electric circuits to model effects in their disciplines), I am giving you all a heads up that some more changes are potentially "on the way" in the scientific understanding of atmosphere and climate.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
Research that is unchallenged is nothing more than opinion. When the challenging voice is arbitrarily silenced true scientific principle is denied.
Norm
schlimmGee ya think more recent research would be a tad more relevant than a 59 year old article?
I would suspect that it would be far less politically biased than anything that came out in the 1990's and beyond - no one was trying to make a buck off it then.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
Wasn't able to follow my own post. Glad there was lots of discussion. Not the most technical article, but here is another look at why the coal industry is down and not likely to get back up: http://www.vox.com/2016/2/22/11090878/us-coal-industry-falling-apart
Johnny
schlimm wanswheel I see you link to the article by Revelle and Suess (1957) Gee ya think more recent research would be a tad more relevant than a 59 year old article?
wanswheel I see you link to the article by Revelle and Suess (1957)
Gee ya think more recent research would be a tad more relevant than a 59 year old article?
Did you read any of my remarks regarding Revelle and Seuss (1957)? How this paper was foundational in scientific understanding of how the capacity of the ocean to hold CO2 is vast yet the chemical reactions taking place in ocean water limit the amount that the ocean can absorb from the atmosphere? How taking these balancing effects into account, the 1957 paper expressed doubt that the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere was entirely the result of human activity and hypothesized an unknown natural source of the increase?
Did you read my explanation that since the 1957 paper, the scientific understanding is that the ocean waters are not rapidly mixed, and that the combination of Revelle's chemical "buffer" along with the mixing time of ocean water accounts for a limit on the amount of ocean uptake of CO2? And that this limit is corroborated by 1) radiocarbon ages of ocean water at different depths, 2) the miniscule depletion of the atmospheric oxygen concentration, which only in recent decades has the precision of chemical measurements allowed to quantify, and 3) the observed increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, which in a quasi-static model, is explained in its entirety by human emission of CO2 combined with terrestrial and oceanic "sinks"?
And did you read my remark that Revelle and Seuss' 1957 conjecture the humans are not the only cause of the increasing atmospheric CO2 is brought back "into play" by recent consideration that the year-to-year increase in atmospheric CO2 is highly variable and highly correlated with changes in global temperature? Here is the link http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100324/full/news.2010.147.html to the Bond-Lamberty and Thomson 2010 paper on the temperature-driven emission of CO2 from soils?
The summary presents the temperature-driven emission of CO2 from soil as a dangerous positive feedback -- it gets warmer, more CO2 gets in the air, which in turn makes it warmer yet. But this effect has been going on in the past -- it has gotten warmer, and this has added CO2 to the atmosphere in excess of the human contribution, and this effect is corroborated by the high degree of correlation between global temperature and the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.
That the CO2 level in the atmosphere has not already increased more drastically indicates that the negative feedback mechanism of plants growing more vigorously in response to higher CO2 levels is also stronger than previously considered. But the 1957 Revelle and Seuss paper, old that it may be, made an important contribution to current scientific understanding of where all of the CO2 goes, and it may continue to make a contribution as more is learned about the "terrestrial side" of the carbon balance. In light of more recent discoveries, their speculation that humans are contributing some but not all of the increase in atmospheric CO2 still merits consideration.
http://history.aip.org/climate/Revelle.htm
Well said, sir. I also think Trains did reasonable reporting with the climate article.
wanswheelI see you link to the article by Revelle and Suess (1957)
Update [from Wiki] on how Reveille's research was distorted by denialists:
In 1991, Revelle's name appeared as co-author on an article written by physicist S. Fred Singer and electrical engineer Chauncey Starrfor the publication Cosmos: A Journal of Emerging Issues, titled "What to do about greenhouse warming: Look before you leap," which was published in the summer of 1992. The Cosmos article included the statement that "Drastic, precipitous—and, especially, unilateral—steps to delay the putative greenhouse impacts can cost jobs and prosperity and increase the human costs of global poverty, without being effective. Stringent economic controls now would be economically devastating particularly for developing countries...".[7] The article concluded: "The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time. There is little risk in delaying policy responses."[7]
These particular statements and the bulk of the article, including the title, had been written and published a year earlier by S. Fred Singer, as sole author.[9] Singer's article stated that "there is every expectation that scientific understanding will be substantially improved within the next decade," and advocated against drastic and "hastily-conceived" action at the time without further scientific evidence. It does not, however, deny climate change or global warming.
Justin Lancaster, Revelle's graduate student and teaching assistant at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 1981 until Revelle's death, says that Revelle was "hoodwinked" by Singer into adding his name to the article and that Revelle was "intensely embarrassed that his name was associated" with it.[10][11] In 1992, Lancaster charged that Singer's actions were "unethical" and specifically designed to undercut then–Senator Al Gore's global warming policy stance; however, to end a lawsuit brought by Singer against Lancaster with support of the Center for Public Interest in Washington, D.C., Lancaster gave Singer a statement of apology, but refused to admit that anything he said was false. In 2006, prompted by Robert Balling and others continuing to state that Revelle actually wrote the article, Lancaster formally withdrew his retraction and reiterated his charges.[10][12]
When Gore was running for the vice-presidential nomination in 1992, The New Republic picked up on the contrast between the references to Revelle in Gore's book, Earth in the Balance, and the views in the Cosmos article that could now be attributed to Revelle. This was followed up by Newsweek and elsewhere in the media. Patrick Michaels boasted that the Cosmos article had been read into the Congressional Record. The issue was even raised by Admiral James Stockdale in the televised vice-presidential debate. Gore's response was to protest that Revelle's views in the article had been taken out of context.
Roger's daughter, Carolyn Revelle, wrote:
Contrary to George Will's "Al Gore's Green Guilt" Roger Revelle—our father and the "father" of the greenhouse effect—remained deeply concerned about global warming until his death in July 1991. That same year he wrote: "The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time." Will and other critics of Sen. Al Gore have seized these words to suggest that Revelle, who was also Gore's professor and mentor, renounced his belief in global warming. Nothing could be further from the truth. When Revelle inveighed against "drastic" action, he was using that adjective in its literal sense—measures that would cost trillions of dollars. Up until his death, he thought that extreme measures were premature. But he continued to recommend immediate prudent steps to mitigate and delay climatic warming. Some of those steps go well beyond anything Gore or other national politicians have yet to advocate. [...] Revelle proposed a range of approaches to address global warming. Inaction was not one of them. He agreed with the adage "look before you leap," but he never said "sit on your hands."[13]
Paul Milenkovic I see you link to the article by Revelle and Suess (1957) on an early attempt at understanding the contribution of the oceans to regulating the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Have you studied that article?
I see you link to the article by Revelle and Suess (1957) on an early attempt at understanding the contribution of the oceans to regulating the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Have you studied that article?
Thanks for commenting. I’m nowhere near qualified to study it. I read it through, with and without comprehension, in order to try to understand what I was posting.
wanswheel http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Revelle/revelle_2.php http://www.riversimulator.org/Resources/ClimateDocs/CarbonDioxideExchangeBetweenAtmosphereOceanIncreaseOfAtmosphericCO2Revelle1957.pdf
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Revelle/revelle_2.php
http://www.riversimulator.org/Resources/ClimateDocs/CarbonDioxideExchangeBetweenAtmosphereOceanIncreaseOfAtmosphericCO2Revelle1957.pdf
Have you studied that article? The amount of CO2 incorporated into ocean water is vast, about 50-fold the quantity in the atmosphere. That article attempts to address the question of why doesn't any addition of CO2 to the atmosphere get swallowed up in the ocean.
Roger Revelle was interest in the question because even "back then" it was believed that the CO2 being added to the atmosphere was diluting the amount of radioactive carbon 14, and this in turn was "throwing off" carbon dating of artifacts from the 20th century.
In that article, the authors describe the "Revelle buffer", the chemical balance between different forms of dissolved CO2 in ocean water owing to ocean water being a soup of minerals, sea salt being only one. The chemical balance means that a 10% increase in CO2 concentration of the atmosphere results in only a 1% increase in CO2 concentration in the ocean. But because the ocean starts with 50 times the CO2 of the atmosphere, were 6 units of CO2 emitted into the air, only 1 unit would remain in the atmosphere and the remaining 5 units would go into the ocean. As about half of our emitted CO2 is remaining in the atmosphere, this suggest that there is some unknown natural source contributing to the rise in atmospheric CO2 along with the human contribution -- this is all in the article, by the way.
The more modern view is that the ocean is not well mixed, and the "deep ocean" can be treated as a separate "compartment" from the "surface ocean", with a long time for the two compartments to exchange CO2. Estimates of the mixing time can be derived from the differing "radiocarbon" apparent ages of the surface and deep ocean -- the article goes into radiocarbon ages of sea shells but doesn't go much further than that.
Taking into account the "Revelle buffer" and adding a mixing time between ocean layers based on radiocarbon ages, the exchange of CO2 between atmosphere and oceans is known. Also the partition between CO2 absorption between the land side of things, dominated by biological processes, and the ocean side, dominated by CO2 dissolving into the ocean mineral soup, this is known from recent accurate measurements of the minute changes in the concentration oxygen in the atmosphere over time.
The exchange of CO2 with land plants taking it up and dead vegetation putting it back is less well understood than Revelle's chemical "buffer" for CO2 in ocean water, but the IPCC view of things is that the land system has to "make up the difference" between what we know man emitts, how much CO2 has increased in the air, and what Roger Revelle told us the oceans do.
Making assumptions regarding the land side of things, you pretty much end up with the consensus view that about half of human CO2 emissions are ending up increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere, with the remaining half of those emission being absorbed in "sinks", with half of that ending up in the ocean and half in net growth of plants over rotting of dead plants.
But, the year-to-year change in atmospheric CO2 is large in comparison to how much CO2 should steadily increase from human emissions. The Wood for Trees http://woodfortrees.org/ site is a source for this information -- the person running that site "has an agenda", but the data, that the atmospheric CO2 increase fluctuates whereas human emissions are not known to modulate by factors of 2 or more -- economic recessions don't reduce industrial output that much.
This fluctuation in "net CO2 emissions" is also highly correlated with global temperature changes. There are two possible sources for this natural CO2 emission. One is temperature-stimulated increase in CO2 emissions from soils. The other is that global temperature may be related to ocean currents that bring to the surface water from the deep layers. On a century scale, the surface and deep ocean are not well mixed, but there can be bursts of mixing from El Nino and other cycles.
It has been argued in a recent publication that the increased emission of CO2 from dead plant matter in soils with increasing global temperature is a dangerous positive feedback mechanisms leading to an unstopable, runaway Greenhouse Effect. Another way to look at that data is that if the 20th century increase in global temperature has stimulated soil CO2 emission that much, we would not have the increase in atmospheric CO2 at only one half the human emissions -- that figure is a reasonable firm value based on accurate measurements of the CO2 along with assays of what our industrial civilization emits. This means that the CO2 we are emitting is more vigorously stimulating plant growth than previously accounted for, and there is corroboration of that in satellite measures of vegetation, the so-called "greening" of the Earth.
Do we really understand the global carbon cycle well enough to even blame most of the increase in atmospheric CO2 on industrial activity? There is support for this understanding, attributed to the scientist Callendar in the Revelle and Seuss article, in steady-state conditions, but given the strong correlation between fluctuation in atmospheric CO2 and the changes in global temperature, only a fraction of the increased CO2 may come from us.
wanswheel Excerpt from article With bigger storms and extreme weather events as "the new normal"--and scientists warning the trend is not about to slow down anytime soon--is the railroad industry ready to deal with the impacts? In the months after Hurricane Sandy blasted the Northeast, a Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, prepared with the help of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists, reported that, compared to 1950, climate-change-related increases in sea level had doubled the probability of flooding similar to that seen during the storm. It also stated that storms and flooding like Hurricane Sandy could become an annual occurrence in the future. Such statistics are why the authors of the National Climate Assessment--a report produced in 2014 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program with the help of more than 300 experts--believe shifting weather patterns will have a major impact on transportation systems in the future. In some ways, they already do. "Climate change is already impacting the rail industry in countless ways," says Michael Kuby, an Arizona State University professor who helped write the transportation section of the assessment. Among the obvious impacts are washouts and damage from flooding related to extreme rainstorms and rising sea levels. Kuby says even conservative estimates have the ocean level rising 1 to 4 feet by 2100, which could impact low-lying rail lines. Rising sea levels can also contribute to stronger storms that will spread their impact further inland, much as Hurricane Irene did in Vermont in 2011 when more than 200 miles of state-owned rail lines had to be repaired due to washouts, according to the climate assessment. Other potential impacts include extreme temperatures that can result in "sun kinks," when rails gets so hot they buckle. Extreme winds can batter and damage lineside infrastructure like catenary, signals, or communication towers. Massive wildfires brought on by extreme drought can destroy bridges, snow sheds, and even wooden cross ties. Extreme winter storms can dump massive amounts of snow on rail lines that block the tracks or trigger avalanches that destroy infrastructure. Rail lines can even warp if the permafrost on which they are built begins to melt. (Rail lines have been built on permafrost in Canada and Alaska, and a large portion of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway in China.) "The warming of the climate is changing weather patterns," Kuby says, "and that'll have big impacts on the transportation industry." https://sustainability.asu.edu/person/michael-kuby/
Excerpt from article
With bigger storms and extreme weather events as "the new normal"--and scientists warning the trend is not about to slow down anytime soon--is the railroad industry ready to deal with the impacts?
In the months after Hurricane Sandy blasted the Northeast, a Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, prepared with the help of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists, reported that, compared to 1950, climate-change-related increases in sea level had doubled the probability of flooding similar to that seen during the storm. It also stated that storms and flooding like Hurricane Sandy could become an annual occurrence in the future.
Such statistics are why the authors of the National Climate Assessment--a report produced in 2014 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program with the help of more than 300 experts--believe shifting weather patterns will have a major impact on transportation systems in the future. In some ways, they already do.
"Climate change is already impacting the rail industry in countless ways," says Michael Kuby, an Arizona State University professor who helped write the transportation section of the assessment.
Among the obvious impacts are washouts and damage from flooding related to extreme rainstorms and rising sea levels. Kuby says even conservative estimates have the ocean level rising 1 to 4 feet by 2100, which could impact low-lying rail lines. Rising sea levels can also contribute to stronger storms that will spread their impact further inland, much as Hurricane Irene did in Vermont in 2011 when more than 200 miles of state-owned rail lines had to be repaired due to washouts, according to the climate assessment.
Other potential impacts include extreme temperatures that can result in "sun kinks," when rails gets so hot they buckle. Extreme winds can batter and damage lineside infrastructure like catenary, signals, or communication towers. Massive wildfires brought on by extreme drought can destroy bridges, snow sheds, and even wooden cross ties. Extreme winter storms can dump massive amounts of snow on rail lines that block the tracks or trigger avalanches that destroy infrastructure. Rail lines can even warp if the permafrost on which they are built begins to melt. (Rail lines have been built on permafrost in Canada and Alaska, and a large portion of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway in China.)
"The warming of the climate is changing weather patterns," Kuby says, "and that'll have big impacts on the transportation industry."
https://sustainability.asu.edu/person/michael-kuby/
It is amazing that Bruce Kelly describes that article this way on the previous page:
"Now that the issue of Trains in question has finally reached my local retailer, and I've had a chance to give the Climate Change story a quick read, I find that Justin Franz did a fine job of it. No obvious signs of bias on his part, just a solid presentation of recent events which railroads have had to contend with, plus commentary and perhaps a wee bit of opinion from various sources.
While the photos depict what may indeed be climate or weather-related outcomes, it's worth noting that such scenes (fire, flood, mudslide, avalanche, etc.) have been playing out on railroads since their creation, and certainly long before that. In North America alone, look back to the hundreds of lives lost to railway avalanches in the Selkirks and Cascades in 1910, and the smaller number killed on Marias Pass in the 1920s, events which prompted the construction of snowsheds and, eventually, substantial realignments.
Railroads have a long history of needing to adapt to nature's wrath. Could it be a bigger deal today? Perhaps. Hence the need for intelligent consideration of the solutions. With a fair percentage of California's ag production already migrating up to the Northwest, railroads will need to follow that aspect of change, as well. And they already are. Talk about a subject crying for feature coverage: the continuing growth of ag-related rail terminals in WA, OR, ID, and MT.
All this talk keeps reminding me of the five pages in the July 1983 Trains which covered the widespread devastation across the West, water and mud which buried Thistle, UT, erased NWP in Eel River Canyon, severred Tehachapi, and more. Same story, different time. That fact that Trains chose to highlight the more recent examples and interview rail officials on their plans is journalism plain and simple. Continued coverage of a seasonal or cyclical subject that merits a closer look now, judging by the impact to service and the cost in terms of both loss and mitigation."
***********************************************************
Sure, no obvious signs of bias and just a wee bit of opinion in the Trains article called CLIMATE CHANGE. Just journalism plain and simple.
zugmann Euclid Yes, it might just end at a wall with nothing behind it. We could all just be a computer simulation.
Euclid Yes, it might just end at a wall with nothing behind it.
We could all just be a computer simulation.
Maybe it is just Maya.
Euclid Now I am confused. Are you saying that the article is just about railroads coping with storms, floods, and other natural disasters without connecting these types of weather disasters with the theory of manmade climate change? If it is just about the business as usual about railroads coping with natural disasters, why does the magazine cover say: "CLIMATE CHANGE How Will it Affect the Industry?"
Now I am confused. Are you saying that the article is just about railroads coping with storms, floods, and other natural disasters without connecting these types of weather disasters with the theory of manmade climate change?
If it is just about the business as usual about railroads coping with natural disasters, why does the magazine cover say: "CLIMATE CHANGE How Will it Affect the Industry?"
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Euclid zugmann Euclid And the universe extends in all directions with no end to it. That we know of. Yes, it might just end at a wall with nothing behind it.
zugmann Euclid And the universe extends in all directions with no end to it. That we know of.
Euclid And the universe extends in all directions with no end to it.
That we know of.
Yes, it might just end at a wall with nothing behind it.
RME zugmann We could all just be a computer simulation. Pass me the red pill and we'll find out.
zugmann We could all just be a computer simulation.
Pass me the red pill and we'll find out.
zugmannWe could all just be a computer simulation.
EuclidYes, it might just end at a wall with nothing behind it.
It's been fun. But it isn't much fun anymore. Signing off for now.
The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer, any other railroad, company, or person.t fun any
EuclidIf it is just about the business as usual about railroads coping with natural disasters, why does the magazine cover say: "CLIMATE CHANGE How Will it Affect the Industry?"
Must be something from the fake news media. With the current political flavor of the day all news is fake! You can only trust the National Enquirer and The Onion for real hard hitting journalism! [/sarcasm]
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
EuclidAnd the universe extends in all directions with no end to it.
BaltACDAs we spin around the Sun, and the Sun spins around the Milky Way, and the Miiky Way spins around the center of the Universe -
And the universe extends in all directions with no end to it.
Bruce Kelly Now that the issue of Trains in question has finally reached my local retailer, and I've had a chance to give the Climate Change story a quick read, I find that Justin Franz did a fine job of it. No obvious signs of bias on his part, just a solid presentation of recent events which railroads have had to contend with, plus commentary and perhaps a wee bit of opinion from various sources. While the photos depict what may indeed be climate or weather-related outcomes, it's worth noting that such scenes (fire, flood, mudslide, avalanche, etc.) have been playing out on railroads since their creation, and certainly long before that. In North America alone, look back to the hundreds of lives lost to railway avalanches in the Selkirks and Cascades in 1910, and the smaller number killed on Marias Pass in the 1920s, events which prompted the construction of snowsheds and, eventually, substantial realignments. Railroads have a long history of needing to adapt to nature's wrath. Could it be a bigger deal today? Perhaps. Hence the need for intelligent consideration of the solutions. With a fair percentage of California's ag production already migrating up to the Northwest, railroads will need to follow that aspect of change, as well. And they already are. Talk about a subject crying for feature coverage: the continuing growth of ag-related rail terminals in WA, OR, ID, and MT. All this talk keeps reminding me of the five pages in the July 1983 Trains which covered the widespread devastation across the West, water and mud which buried Thistle, UT, erased NWP in Eel River Canyon, severred Tehachapi, and more. Same story, different time. That fact that Trains chose to highlight the more recent examples and interview rail officials on their plans is journalism plain and simple. Continued coverage of a seasonal or cyclical subject that merits a closer look now, judging by the impact to service and the cost in terms of both loss and mitigation.
Now that the issue of Trains in question has finally reached my local retailer, and I've had a chance to give the Climate Change story a quick read, I find that Justin Franz did a fine job of it. No obvious signs of bias on his part, just a solid presentation of recent events which railroads have had to contend with, plus commentary and perhaps a wee bit of opinion from various sources.
All this talk keeps reminding me of the five pages in the July 1983 Trains which covered the widespread devastation across the West, water and mud which buried Thistle, UT, erased NWP in Eel River Canyon, severred Tehachapi, and more. Same story, different time. That fact that Trains chose to highlight the more recent examples and interview rail officials on their plans is journalism plain and simple. Continued coverage of a seasonal or cyclical subject that merits a closer look now, judging by the impact to service and the cost in terms of both loss and mitigation.
Today's ME, NOW, society seems to believe that history has never happened. That the hurricanes, floods, droughts, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunami and all the other natural happenings never happened in the past. They are only happening NOW.
The Earth has had 4.5 Billion years of nothing but climate change. From 'Snowball Earth' to 'Tropical Earth' and every thing in between, multiple times - all without human intervention.
The more we think we know, the more we know that there very much more that we don't know and potentially will never know.
As we spin around the Sun, and the Sun spins around the Milky Way, and the Miiky Way spins around the center of the Universe - every instant we (the Earth) are occupying a segment of space that we have never occupied before. If we know one thing about nature, it is that in nature NOTHING IS CONSTANT.
All this talk keeps reminding me of the five pages in the July 1983 Trains which covered the widespread devastation across the West, water and mud which buried Thistle, UT, erased NWP in Eel River Canyon, severred Tehachapi, and more. Same story, different time. The fact that Trains chose to highlight the more recent examples and interview rail officials on their plans is journalism plain and simple. Continued coverage of a seasonal or cyclical subject that merits a closer look now, judging by the impact to service and the cost in terms of both loss and mitigation.
LensCapOn Murphy Siding What month does the swimsuit issue usually come out? Saaaaaaaay! Could that be a "thing"? (unless it's a typical train crew in swimsuits....)
Murphy Siding What month does the swimsuit issue usually come out?
What month does the swimsuit issue usually come out?
Carriers do have some women among train and engine crews that might do swimsuits justice!
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