Google Earth Map of CO2 Emissions in the US

This is a bummer:

A NASA satellite to track carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere failed to reach its orbit during launching Tuesday morning, scuttling the $278 million mission.

“It’s a huge disappointment to the entire team that’s worked very hard over years and years and really did their best to see it through,” said Charles P. Dovale, the launch manager. “The reason not everyone is able to do this is it’s hard. And even when you do the best you can, you can still fail. It’s a tough business.”

On the bright side, NASA and some Purdue scientists, working on something called the Vulcan Project, just launched a new Google Earth map that lets you see the amount of CO2 being emitted in the United States every hour. (The Purdue folks are the ones who put together this impressive map animation.) Here is a demonstration flyover:



It shows information about emissions at the state and county levels, and even gives information on specific source points, such as airports. It also breaks down emissions by sector, showing relative contributions from air traffic, electricity production, industry, commercial, transportation, and residential sources. It really does a good job of helping the viewer visualize carbon emissions - a sort of nebulous and abstract thing to try to think about - and that may prove to make it a very valuable tool in public efforts to decrease those emissions. You can download the Google Earth map at this site (though it ran a bit slow for me). And by the way, kudos to the Purdue folks for picking a badass name for their research project. You gotta know how to market this stuff, people!

Temperature Anomalies and Global Warming

Weather Underground updates this map every month.



It shows the temperature anomalies around the globe for January 2009 relative to the average between 1961 and 1990. As has usually been the case over the last ten or fifteen years, the global average temperature was above average for the month; it was the 7th warmest January on record, in fact. (And look at Siberia: it's been looking like that a lot lately - the climate seems to be changing there really dramatically.) However, among the few areas of the world that were below average were Western Europe and the Northeastern and Midwestern United States. For the US as a whole, it was only the 59th warmest January out of the last 114. (Note, too, the coolish temperatures over the central Pacific: a symptom of La Nina.)

One inevitable consequence of cold snaps during the winter is that global warming skeptics will say sarcastic things about the weather. And some people become more receptive to denialist claims - claims by people like George Will who recently wrote a denialist editorial that was pretty much entirely composed of falsehoods. But of course the fact that the temperature of the planet is gradually rising doesn't mean there will never again be any temperatures anywhere that are below average - and you can see clearly enough that a significant cold snap in some of the densely populated parts of the industrialized world is perfectly consistent with the world having temperatures somewhere in the neighborhood of the 5% warmest ever.

Ricky Rood makes a related point at his blog on Weather Underground, where he shows these maps of the continental US temperature anomalies from the Januaries of 2008 (top) and 2009. It so happened that in 2008, most of the big cities in the US were warmer than average, and this year they were colder (the major exception being the cities on the west coast). Overall, though, the months were similar for the country as a whole, and near average. But for two reasons, the denialists have had more fodder this year: 1) the colder weather disproportionately hit the places where lots of people live - if the map were a cartogram (which would make no sense) it would be overwhelmingly blue, including in big media centers where opinions tend to get amplified; and 2) the colder weather this year hit places that are naturally colder, which makes it seem more dramatic. Record lows in Oregon are gonna be chilly for the folks there, but not freezing; it's a lot more startling when it hits -40 degrees in Maine. As Rood says, "I don’t remember a lot of rhetoric that 'global warming is spurious' coming out in 2008, from say, Seattle."

Well, these points probably seem obvious to most people. And for that committed minority who don't believe in anthropogenic global warming, there is an entire industrial-media apparatus (of which George Will is obviously a card-carrying member) designed to confirm their views, and no amount of data is likely to win them over. But maps like these are still a good corrective to the impulse we all have to extrapolate global trends from the anecdotal events we read about in the news.

Australia Fires

Via Jeff Masters, here's a satellite image of the plumes of smoke from the fire areas of southeastern Australia.



Says Masters:

It is difficult to imagine more hellish fire conditions than those observed in Victoria state's capital, Melbourne, on Saturday (February 7). The temperature soared to 115°F (46.4°C), the hottest ever recorded in the city, besting the previous record of 114°F (45.6°C) set on January 13, 1939. Humidities as low as 4% and sustained north winds that reached 43 mph, gusting to 51 mph, accompanied the furnace-like heat. The dry winds were easily able to fan fires in the parched vegetation. Severe drought conditions reign in Southeast Australia, where some regions--including the city of Melbourne--have experienced their worst drought on record over the past eight years.

More than 170 people have died in the fires so far. The weather events that allowed the conflagrations to flourish - including drought and high temperatures - are consistent with those predicted by most climate models that anticipate significant global warming.

Arctic Sea Ice

Speaking of Arctic sea ice, The Cryosphere Today has a nice map of sea ice extent, which they update daily. Today it looks like this:



It's a little less than a million sq. km. below average, about where it's been the last few winters.

Global Warming Melts the Arctic; Nations Lick Their Chops at Potential Oil Bonanza

Via Andrew Sullivan, this map animation from the Economist depicts the shrinking of the Arctic ice, and the brewing competition between the Arctic nations over the region's resources.



The six countries involved - Russia, Canada, the US, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark - are, apparently without irony, determined to lay claim to the oil and natural gas that is becoming increasingly accessible as a warming climate continues to erode the Arctic sea ice.

One of the horrors of addiction is that, as the addictive substance becomes less and less satisfying, and its negative effects mount over time, it becomes even more necessary to consume more of the substance to provide escape from the greater and greater suffering the substance is causing.

CO2

An incredible map animation of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States:



The Purdue U. researchers who put this together are also working to recapitulate the effort on a global scale with something they call the Hestia Project. Should be even more fascinating.

Meanwhile, in other CO2-related news, Western forests are dying at an increasing rate:

Jan 23rd, 2009 | GRANTS PASS, Ore. -- Trees in old growth forests across the West are dying at a small, but increasing rate that scientists conclude is probably caused by longer and hotter summers from a changing climate.

While not noticeable to someone walking through the forests, the death rate is doubling every 17 to 29 years, according to a 52-year study published in the Friday edition of the journal Science. The trend was apparent in trees of all ages, species, and locations.

"If current trends continue, forests will become sparser over time," said lead author Phillip J. van Mantgem of the U.S. Geological Survey's Western Ecological Research Center.

The West is a brittle environment to begin with. And this sort of thing has the potential to catalyze some nasty feedback loops:

These thinner and weaker forests will become more vulnerable to wildfires and may soak up less carbon dioxide, in turn speeding up global warming, they said...

Warmer temperatures may be encouraging pine beetles and other organisms that attack trees, the researchers said. That, along with the stress of prolonged droughts, may be accelerating death rates.

Frightening. And we're still waiting for the first wisp of evidence that humanity is remotely capable of dealing with this issue...

UPDATE: Paul Rosenberg has more on the Western forests.