Spencer Michels, the bald tire of PBS climate change coverage

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Who does not know some person who re-treads his or her outdated information base, trying to move around on bald tires, and worse yet, without admitting to the dangerous limitation?  

In contrast,  I have a good friend who went through hard economic times with a worn-out pair of shoes and worn tires on his car, but gosh, he knew! No kidding. 

I'm calling for the retirement of a journalist who doesn't seem to know he's become the bald tire himself, slipping up on news stories. It's too late for him to put the brakes himself.

As an aging person myself, I am on the alert for "What am I missing" pieces, and I hope someone diplomatically pulls me aside if my data base is worn out, before an accident could happen. 



 P.S. Reminder to self: El Niño is coming in, so I expect a slushy winter ahead and it is literally time to shop for snow tires!



Posted to Climate Progress:

Spencer Michels is a journalist's version of bald tire, running on old information, slipping up, and apparently unwilling to brake himself. 

PBS didn't persuade him to retire (pun intended) before he slid off the road and brought embarrassment to PBS. 

Posted to the PBS Ombudsman, Michael Getler:

I protest the openly biased Spencer Michels' piece on climate change shown 9-17-2012 on The News Hour.

Spencer Michels himself used the term, “climate change believers,” not one of his interviewees. Given the common meaning of the word believer, as faith-based rather than fact-based, Michels has revealed a bias of his own. He stepped beyond the ‘balance’ convention of counterpoint interviews.

Michels gave a lot of airtime to a blogger, Watts, whose assertions have been disproved, without Michels bringing forward the facts that discredit Watts.

Michels routinely reports from San Francisco, and claims to “hooked on California’s water” (“California Water: Old Song, New Lyrics” PBS News Hour, August 2, 2012). He neglected and still neglects to mention that the California Department of Water Resources predicts that the snow pack that supplies San Francisco is expected to decline by 25% by 2050.

He is failing to keep up with the information base on the most influential news story of our time. Climate change affects food and water, affects economies, and affects governments.  The Pentagon has already identified climate change as a security threat.

It is overdue for Michels to retire from PBS. 

Also, for your own sakes, get a better researcher on climate change on the News Hour staff, one who can understand scientific abstracts as well as policy statements.

Climate Change Tree Atlas may offer some clues for gardens

The US Forest Service has developed an interactive Climate Change Tree Atlas that meshes climate-change models with the needs of tree species.

Because foresters and arborists wait multiple years for a harvest (oh the lovely thoughts of fruit and nuts, and maple syrup, as well as wood products)  the USFS model has a longer time frame than  USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map.

It seems boggling to imagine doing for garden vegetables what the USFS did for trees, but I can dream.

Asphalt

I take asphalt for granted, most of the time.

Summer is the season for road work, when asphalt gets ripped up and replaced. Following the detours prompts a slight awareness that roads in upstate New York are not at all like stone Roman roads. Roman roads were and are obviously bumpy, but capable of function for centuries with little maintenance.  New York asphalt roads have the winter disease of pothole-making as well as the unnamed summer disease where the asphalt softens up and ripples downhill in slow motion. The New York asphalt roads don't live as long as as a stone Roman road. But I hardly think of that factor in the usual course of errands in a car.

What gives a yet greater pause for awareness are parking lots, vast parking lots. Each has been created from those molecules of crude oil that are too branched or long-chain to be convenient for combustion or making plastics. The sheer volume of parking lots is a piece of evidence of how much petroleum has been drawn from the earth.  The roads I see only a bit at a time, but the dimensions of a big-box store parking lot gets to me.  I have to wonder how many people are like me, casting a fleeting glimpse at the vastness of the parking lot before ducking into the more manageable almost cosy dimensions of a car interior.

As the world consumes more difficult deposits of petroleum, the cost of new asphalt mix has jumped. This is somewhat counter-intuitive, as the bitumen from tar sands is dense like asphalt.

I hope to update this post over time as I find more statistics about asphalt, and explore the consequences to earth covered by asphalt.  How do street trees get enough air and water to their roots when only a little neck of open soil is left around their trunks?  The rest of their root system is largely under concrete or asphalt.

we..again!

Part of the journalist’s challenge is getting to know her or his readership to develop the sense of “we,” as we face a crisis together.
One of the best pieces of advice that came out of Y2K was to make peace with our neighbors, because not a one of us has all the tools of survival.
We can face this.
Fear preys on those who feel they are alone.

I also posted this at Climate Progess.

Don't get your hopes up for a Heinrich event

In Heinrich events, glacier-bergs carried sediment and fresh water out to sea. In melting, the bergs left detritus on the ocean floor and the fresh water altered the thermohaline circulation for thousands of years, knocking down global temperature by as much as 2C on average.  The two most recent Heinrich events were 14,000 ybp and 8,200 ybp.  As global warming proceeds, people watch Greenland and Antarctica and wonder if it could happen again.

NOAA Paleoclimatology Program page on Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data3.html

 The 2C estimate is from Elsa Cortijo et al (1997)  "Changes in sea surface hydrology associated with Heinrich event 4 in the North Atlantic Ocean between 40° and 60°N" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X96002178




A blog post from Spike this weekend at Climate Progress quotes a sciencedaily on ice saddle melt that is associated with abrupt shifts in thermohaline circulation. Backtracking to the original Grigoire et al. abstract, the authors estimated saddle-melt between domes of continental glaciers was in the order of "nine metres of sea level rise over 500 years."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22785319

From the abstract we might infer that the authors only estimated added ocean volume due to continental surface melt, without further addition of volume to include ocean thermal expansion due to the natural warming at that time. But they might have.  In our present circumstances, the ice saddles of both Antarctica and Greenland should be of interest.

In my observation, increased climate instability is knocking down agriculture long before a Heinrich event could be expected to kick the earth's temperature back down a few degrees.

Stitch in Time before Solar Flares Zap Nine?

The solar cycle is due to peak in 2013, and with it brings the greater likelihood of electromagnetic pulses (EMP) from the sun, and their geomagnetic consequences.

Given the great dependence on electricity for communications and control systems, I'm wondering what the odds are of a multi-month blackout.
Suppose North America was brought to a halt, electrically speaking, while Asia went unscathed. Or vice versa.
Nearly everything depends on something electric. 

In the UK a government adviser is urging a 'hardening' of electrical systems, particularly the UK's National Grid.  Seems like a good Stitch in Time, Saves Nine.  Wonder who is listening. 

National Grid in the UK is also running the grid in upstate New York and parts of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, so this is of more than passing personal interest to some in the US.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2191936/Government-adviser-fight-save-Earth-devastating-solar-storms-expected-knock-National-Grid-2013.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

The challenge of subterranean fires

Russian subterranean fires have been burning at roughly the same latitude as Poland, UK and southern Canada; they are mid-latitude organic soil fires, not Arctic.
Further south, in US this year the Duck Lake fire in Michigan and the Muskego muck fire near Bucyrus, Ohio have both been partly subterranean fires.
In the Muskego fire, "The fire was most likely caused by spontaneous combustion. As peat moss decomposes, it heats up. It was so hot and dry that it caught fire, Canterbury said." (Bucyrus Telegram Forum)

Drying out organic soils is a fire hazard.

More from Bucyrus:
"Two other options for extinguishing the fire -- flooding the field or digging the fire up -- are not feasible because of the conditions of the ground and the lack of water sources available.
There isn't a big enough water source close to the area to flood the field, and because the ground is unstable, almost quicksand-like, trucks would be in danger of getting stuck. With ground temperatures anywhere from 200 to 400 degrees, digging up the fire is out of the question as well."

From Newberry, Michigan:
"When underground organic mass such as swamp peat (a heavy turf of decayed vegetation and moss) catches fire, said Chingwa, "it doesn't even look like it's burning. It just looks like dry leaves, but it's extremely hot. And it can move across large areas without you even knowing it.”  Benjamin Reeves, IBT