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Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Evolutionary Weather Patterns Arising?

Some meteorologists on the weather channel today made an interesting comment concerning the large record breaking storm hitting Chicago and several states around it in every direction.

They said "it is more like a hurricane" than anything else.

The storm has a record low pressure for that area in October.

The storm has the swirl, the circular rotation like a hurricane, the strong winds approaching hurricane force, and it is so big that its clouds cover several states.

I have heard it said that one of the odd things about hurricanes is that they do some good, some balancing, in the overall heat management of global weather.

It sounds strange, but in that regard here is what is said about hurricanes:
They are essential features of the Earth’s atmosphere, as they transfer heat and energy between the equator and the cooler regions towards the poles.
(BBC). Under normal climate patterns hurricanes provide an important function in that they take heat from the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico then move that heat northward so the ocean waters are cooled, which is like an air conditioner of sorts.

What happens when the oceans and the atmosphere, even in the north, heat up as they are now doing with record breaking temperatures?

Are there going to be any effects on hurricanes and other storms that would have an evolutionary impact on general weather patterns?

Or perhaps the mutations will change even the basic nature of climate as we have known it since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution?

While it is true that this year was above average for tropical storms & hurricanes, there were no "great" hurricanes that would be expected if global warming makes hurricanes more violent.

The weather may be evolving in an unexpected way as the global temperatures evolve.

The vegetation of the Earth is evolving a response, so it would not be surprising if the storms of the Earth likewise evolve.

Hurricanes could diminish in power while other storms that are not normally like hurricanes in the sense of having a function of moving heat toward the poles, could evolve in unexpected ways.

Such storms are more often than not fireworks due to temperature contrasts as well as interplay between high pressure areas with low pressure areas.

But are we considering all of the evolutionary factors?

There are complaints by several climate scientists that we are missing some important contributing factors of climate change, one of them being "fossil water":
An important climate question is the contribution of this fossil water, through irrigation, to local, regional and global transpiration and [evaporation] from soils and other surfaces. This is a flux of water vapor into the atmosphere that would otherwise not occur.
(The Role Of Fossil Water On Climate). It is one important consideration, because water vapor & carbon dioxide are important factors in global warming:
"Water vapor and clouds are the major contributors to Earth's greenhouse effect, but a new atmosphere-ocean climate modeling study shows that the planet's temperature ultimately depends on the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide."
(Carbon Dioxide & The Kooks, emphasis added). Another factor to consider when contemplating the evolution of climate, is the factor of cycles.

It is well known by scientists that some of the foundational cycles of global climate, which could be compared to the steel I-beams of a sky-scraper, are being damaged by anthropomorphic behaviors:
Humanity may soon be approaching the boundaries for global freshwater use, change in land use, ocean acidification and interference with the global phosphorous cycle ...

Our analysis suggests that three of the Earth-system processes — climate change, rate of biodiversity loss and interference with the nitrogen cycle — have already transgressed their boundaries. For the latter two of these, the control variables are the rate of species loss and the rate at which N2 is removed from the atmosphere and converted to reactive nitrogen for human use, respectively. These are rates of change that cannot continue without significantly eroding the resilience of major components of Earth-system functioning. Here we describe these three processes.

...

... biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene has accelerated massively. Species are becoming extinct at a rate that has not been seen since the last global mass-extinction event.

...

Modern agriculture is a major cause of environmental pollution, including large-scale nitrogen- and phosphorus-induced environmental change. At the planetary scale, the additional amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus activated by humans are now so large that they significantly perturb the global cycles of these two important elements.
(The Damage Can Not Be Undone?). The voodoo economics of "cost effective environmental laws" fails to consider the long term costs of human government excursions willy-nilly into the unknown.

We are making the Frankenstein monster that will be the undoing of civilization if our carelessness continues.

UPDATE: The lowest millibar setting of all time was recorded in at least two states (Minnesota, Wisconsin) during the "over-land hurricane". Some reports indicate the same for North Dakota, Illinois, and Michigan.

UPDATE 2: The fauna of the Earth are being decimated to the point of extinction:
A fifth of the world's vertebrates are facing extinction because of invasion and the effects of agriculture ... at least 41 percent of amphibians are closer to extinction ... Thirteen percent of birds ... On average, 50 species of mammal, bird and amphibian move closer to extinction each year ...
(CNN). Such damage to tangible species certainly implicates the less visible climate system too.

1 comment:

  1. Some meteorologists are calling it a "land hurricane" because it resembles an ocean hurricane so much, and it even has millibar ratings lower than several named ocean hurricanes.

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