Physics and the Climate Casino - 201

 Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Chinooks, and Derecho Winds are complex weather phenomena some of which I have had close calls with. Luckily, I have avoided Hurricanes although a ship I served on pulled into Okinawa after a hurricane had stripped every single leaf from every tree and bush. Unaware of what had happened I asked a port employee why there was not a leaf to be seen. “Hurricane”, he said. This is when I decided I wanted no part of Hurricanes.

Tornadoes are another matter.

As a kid who grew up in Minneapolis. It was not unusual to hear the sirens go off when the skies turned dark. Tornadoes were common enough in Anoka County that our high school teams were called the Tornadoes.

I returned to Minneapolis after the Air Force to fly emergency medevac. One time I had to dodge a tornado to complete a mission. Luckily it was a single cell storm I could easily see and evade.

There is one storm from my high school years I will not forget. It was the afternoon of the 6^th of May, 1965. The skies darkened and the sirens went off. My family retreated to the basement. We heard no loud noises so after a bit we decided to exit our safe haven and take a look. The skies were green and debris was circling overhead. We beat a hasty retreat back to our basement bunker.

This infamous tornado, after passing overhead, landed in the Anoka County village of Fridley destroying or damaging 1,100 homes and killing 13.

Here in Gogebic County, if you remember, we had our own scare in July of 2016. This Tornado also went over my home only to wreak havoc downwind. Twice lucky.

Straight line winds like Derechos and Chinooks* are also dangerous.

Back the in 70s Chinook winds swooped down on the Air Force Academy rattling windows all night. Lucky for us the Academy had changed out all the windows after a similar windstorm a couple years before. The previous storm had disintegrated windows embedding shards of glass into the downwind walls of the dormitory rooms.  The cadets were ordered to grab their mattresses, blankets, and pillows. They spent an uneasy night in the halls listening to the windows shatter and embed themselves in the walls.

Then, unlike today, Colorado was not in a drought. Drought brought on Colorado’s three largest forest fires in one year, 2021. Each one over 200,000 acres.

But, I guess this was not enough climate destruction as the residents west of Boulder, CO discovered the consequences of Chinook winds blasting over desiccated landscape. These same seasonal Chinook winds I experienced dove down from the mountains and onto the communities west of Boulder, CO. They toppled power lines which ignited the tinder grass fields and burned 991 homes. The difference between my 1972 experience is the land, its trees and its grasses, were green all four years I was a cadet. Today, they are brown and dry.

Here is the bottom line on these complex weather disaster phenomena. Climatologists and meteorologists will not pin the destruction solely on climate change because there are many factors which must come together simultaneously for these weather phenomena to materialize.

While this is fact, there is also no question the chances these deadly weather events will happen have been made astronomically greater because of human caused global warming.

Do you remember the massive December tornadoes which hammered Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, and especially Kentucky? Were these solely the result of climate change? Meteorologists and Climatologists do not say this.

What these experts do say is the energy came from the climate warmed waters of the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, the December Tornadoes were preceded by RECORD BREAKING warm waters which evaporated an immense amount of energy laden water vapor into the atmosphere.

The atmosphere was additionally primed to carry the vapor north because it, too, reached near record temperatures everywhere in its path and in some cases set RECORD temperatures.  Water vapor is the fuel of storms. We must come to grips with the fact there is much more fuel so when the elements creating a storm come together the chances of being catastrophic are big and growing bigger.

 

When the USAF Academy changed out every window at the Aluminum U the costly modification allowed me to sleep safely in my room as the Chinook howled. This modification is an example of adaptation.

Since many wildfire ignition sources are old power lines, power companies must either bury lines or beef up the overhead infrastructure. This too is called adaptation. We will be confronted by expensive adaptation measures as extreme weather events find the fuel threatening our infrastructure and cities.

Although adaptation is essential it is not a fix. Nor can we expect to adapt out of the climate pickle we are in. Mitigation is the fix and it means changing power sources ditching fossil fuels and turning to clean green fuels which do not emit greenhouse gasses.

I found the Wall Street Journal article last week to be entertaining revealing a tactic now employed by deniers.  
The article was critical of Biden’s Build Back Better legislation. The whole editorial conveniently avoided mentioning BBB’s essential provisions combatting the fatal menace of climate change. I guess if you cannot mount an intelligent counter simply avoid the subject and assume the readers are so under informed they will miss the omission.

The Wall Street Journal has been in decline for years. If you wish to know why the Wall Street Journal is a climate science wasteland you only need to know one name, Rupert Murdock. He is the Australian climate denying media multi-billionaire who owns the Wall Street Journal and FOX news. He is famous in both Australia and the UK for his relentless misinformation in his tabloid publications.

“Denying to the Grave” is a pre-pandemic book (2017) which alerted us to the dark underlying causes of anti-science movements. This trend is reversing just in the nick of time in spite of the dereliction of duty by Rupert Murdock’s media sources. 

You may have noticed the science awareness of the public is getting keener. Most people realize science is on our side. Surveys reveal the US citizen holds both the science community and our military in high esteem.  The rapid deployment of the COVID vaccines, which has saved millions of lives, is not a miracle. It is the result of years of work by dedicated scientists funded by us through our government. We should be rightfully proud of this.

The revelation that science is on our side will be the impetus to adapt and mitigate against future pandemics and eventually reverse the climate catastrophes.

We do not have to listen to billionaire media moguls whose goal is to make us cynical doubters to sell controversy rather than solutions.

We will be surrounded by many who will go to their graves unable to grasp reality. Next week I will detour into the irrational world of motivated reasoning so we can vaccinate ourselves against unreasonableness and ignorance.

*Chinook Winds on the lee side of mountain ranges are more appropriately referred to as Foehn Winds.

Book about denial: “Denying to the Grave” Why We Ignore the Facts that Will Save Us by Sara Gorman, PHD, MPH and Jack Gorman, MD.