Hill Heat

10:40: Juday They are self-reliant people, and their environment is changing. Pack ice should be present right about now, and they’re not able to be safely on the ice. The permafrost definitely is warming. The boreal forest is dying. Sea ice is retreating and thinning.

10:45: Haseltine Data shows a decline of about 10% per decade in sea ice extent. This year had about 40% less ice than 1979. There’s a growing scientific concern that sea ice has been pushed past a threshhold of catastrophic change.

10:51: Siegel The polar bear will likely be listed as endangered in the next year, but the listing won’t be enough to save the polar bear or the sea ice they depend on. The polar bear depends on sea ice. The situation for polar bears in a rapidly warming Arctic is grim. We know that business as usual cannot continue and we need to limit CO2 concentrations to below 450 PPM. Anything else we do may be futile if we don’t address this most important of greenhouse gases. By attacking methane and black carbon emissions we can have an immediate effect on the Arctic and give ourselves a chance to save the polar bear in the long term. According to conservative estimates of the EPA we can eliminate 70 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent methane with no-cost or cost-benefit actions.

11:04 AM: Rohrabacher Ms. Siegel, what’s your educational background?

Siegel I got a degree in anthropology and and economics from Williams & Mary and I am an attorney.

Rohrabacher I believe Jim Hansen has received a significant amount of money from George Soros. Has anyone on the panel received money from Mr. Soros? There’s no question the earth is undergoing a warming trend. The major question is whether this is caused by human activity, and then wheter we can arrogantly think we can reverse what nature… and we’re looking at the effects of this on polar bears. I remembed the predictions of dire and doom for caribou. The caribou population has dramatically expanded since we built the pipeline. Quite often we hear people with these dire predictions to accomplish other political ends. We know the ice cores and these things give us an understanding of range in the planet. Timothy Ball stated that ice cores show that temperature leads increases in CO2. Dr. Juday was mentioning how methane gas was bubbling up as the temperature increases. Seems to me you’re backing up Dr. Ball’s observation.

Alley If I were to overpay and go into debt, I would also have to pay interest payments. We know that the historical variations in temperature are due to the earth’s orbit. The interest payments of CO2 must be included in our explanation of today’s observed warming.

Rohrabacher I must admit I don’t understand a thing you said.

Juday The only way to explain the trends. Something is dampening heat loss, not adding heat in the summer. Those are the characteristics of greenhouse gases.

11:14 AM Miller Dr. Hansen denies receiving money from Mr. Soros. He’s not here to defend himself, but we have a statement from him and we are entering it into the record.

Miller Do you know any scientists named Steve that don’t believe in global warming? How about scientists named Steve that do? [Two Steves that believe in global warming are mentioned.]

Juday We need to poke holes in the tundra and see if there’s charcoal in them. We’re seeing fires now; previous fires aren’t known to have existed, but we should check.

11:19 AM Rohrabacher I don’t have any scientists named Steve, but Patrick Michaels suggests that all the reports of melting ice on Greenland are exaggerated. Since Bill Clinton became President of the United States to get grants you had to say that global warming is caused by human beings.

This senior senior scientist says that polar bear populations are increasing.

Haseltine The 13 populations, in the reassessment we did, 5 are declining, 2 are depressed due to hunting, and none are increasing. I’m quoting from a study by Ian Serling, a senior polar bear scientist for Canada.

Rohrabacher It was a lot warmer in Greenland and I don’t know how many polar bears there were then. I’m not sure if that’s the natural number of polar bears in the world we should have now than what we have today. We have only one degree warmer, and we have five times less volcanic activity, which would tend to make it warmer, not to mention sunspots, which would imply natural causes, not an SUV, not to mention the warming going on Mars and Jupiter.

Juday I was the lead author in the Arctic climate assessment. I’d refer you to that if you’re interested in what happened when. You’ve brought up several different ideas and I’d offer to help you disentangle what happened and why.

Alley Scientists bubble with ideas and you help pay for activities to assess what makes sense and not. The National Academy of Sciences have looked at volcanoes, sunspots, etc., and have come to a high degree of scientific certainty that humans are responsible for the current warming. You quoted a scientist who claimed scientists modify their positions to get funding and personally, I’m under oath. And I would never ever ever do that. I am not lying to you.

11:30: Siegel If we take action on methane and black carbon we could start to see results by 2009.

Rohrabacher I’m surprised my staff hasn’t submitted that list yet. But here’s another respected scientist, William Grey suggests that so many people are invested in this, they’re scaring people to get more investment. How many polar bears were there 1000 years ago?

Haseltine We don’t know how many, but we know they existed then.

Rohrabacher We could assume there were fewer polar bears. What’s the natural number of polar bears?

Haseltine I don’t know if there’s a “natural” number, there’s the number the habitat can support.

Rohrabacher I think it’s wonderful seeing pictures of skinny polar bears, which then gives people the acceptance to regulate their lives the reality is 1000 years ago the polar bear population was totally different. What was the level of ice in Greenland 1000 years ago?

Alley I am one of the authors of a report that will be coming out. We’re in the temperature range we were 1000 years ago.

Rohrabacher It was dramatically warmer 1000 years ago and 8000 years go.

Juday No. We are probably warmer than we were 1000 years ago.

Miller I have one more question for Dr. Alley. You said the release of permafrost methane was a big hole in the IPCC modeling. Do you have a sense how big it could be?

Alley If we humans build all our fossil fuel, the methane feedbacks are on the order of 10-30%.

Juday If you burned up all of the readily accessible methane in the tundra it would double atmospheric CO2.

11:43 Miller Our hearing is now adjourned.

At this hearing Committee Members sought a better understanding of the state of energy storage technologies and how the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) energy storage program could further advance these technologies.

Today, electricity is generated as it is used, with very little electricity being stored for later use. While this system has worked for decades, it is not very efficient. Demand for power varies greatly throughout the day and throughout the year as demands for lighting, heating and cooling fluctuate through the seasons. Because the capacity for generation of power matches the consumption of power, the electricity supply system must be sized to generate enough electricity to meet the maximum anticipated demand, or peak demand.

This inefficiency becomes more evident when considering that it is possible that the peak electricity demand for any given year could be for a very short period – a few days or even hours. Rather than maintain massive generation systems that are designed around a short-lived peak demand, energy storage technologies would provide a means to stockpile energy for later use and essentially reduce the need to generate more power during times of peak electricity demand.

Advances in energy storage technologies are often regarded as key to increasing the reliability and widespread use of many renewable energy technologies. Together, potential benefits from broad deployment of energy storage technologies would help to improve our energy security. Because our economy relies heavily on an affordable and reliable electricity delivery system, the energy security benefits achieved from greater use of energy storage systems could be significant.

“With both stationary and mobile energy storage, we cannot let an opportunity to establish a domestic manufacturing base for these technologies pass us by. And unfortunately, we may already be losing this race. New R&D activities with the Department of Energy are critical to advancing energy storage technologies, and we should pursue this aggressively to ensure U.S. participation in this field,” added Chairman Lampson.

Witnesses reported that there are a number of promising energy storage technologies being developed for different applications, but there is still a role for the federal government to help accelerate energy storage technologies into the marketplace.

Ms. Lynda Ziegler, Sr. Vice President for Customer Services at Southern California Edison testified, “We believe that with continued engineering advances and appropriate public policy support, the widespread use of advanced batteries in plug-in vehicles and in stationary storage applications will become one of the nation’s most effective strategies in the broader effort to address energy security, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reduce air pollutants.”

Ms. Mary Ann Wright, Vice President and General Manager Hybrid Systems for Johnson Controls added, “I passionately believe that electrification of the vehicle powertrain in part or in whole can make a dominant contribution to America’s energy security and transportation sustainability. Electric powertrains by nature are incredibly more efficient than their internal combustions counterparts.”

Overview of Hurricanes and Climate Change (a.k.a. global warming)

The understanding of climate change, including its effects on hurricanes, rests on three essential scientific techniques: theory, observation, and computational modeling. Each of these three approaches has unique strengths and limitations. In this talk, I will discuss the application of each of these to understanding the effect of climate change on hurricane activity and demonstrate that while each approach is compromised by uncertainties, taken together they present a persuasive picture of increasing hurricane risk as the climate warms.

Notes:

There are beginnings of downscaling techniques to seed GCMs with fledgling cyclonic storms. Their preliminary results show decreases overall, some increases. Decrease in frequency but increase in intensity and rainfall. But they predict less change than we have already observed over the past 50 years.

Rainfall Extremes, Saharan Dust, Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change

Trends in tropical rainfall are more readily detectable in the form of changes in rainfall characteristics, rather than in rainfall total. From satellite data, we find that in the tropics there is a strong positive trend in extreme heavy and very light rains, coupled to a negative trend in moderate rain. Climatologically over tropical oceans, a large portion (over 60%) of most extreme heavy rainfall (top 5%) can be identified with those coming from tropical cyclones. Over the Atlantic, the contribution of tropical cyclones to heavy rain events has almost doubled in the last quarter century. Over the Pacific basin, the increase is lesser at about 10%. The differences in the basin may be related to the percentage change in the warm pool (SST> 28 ºC) areas in both oceans. Overall, tropical cyclones appear to be feeding more extreme rainfall events in the tropics in recent decades.

Saharan dust can affect tropical cyclones development, and may be a factor contributing to long-term hurricane statistics and possibly in seasonal hurricane forecasts. The Saharan Air Layer (SAL) can suppress tropical cyclogenesis through entrainment of hot, dry air into a developing cyclone, increasing stability and denying the developing system of its moisture supply. Saharan dust may also pre-condition the Atlantic, cooling the ocean surface through attenuation of solar radiation, during the early hurricane season. Additionally, differential radiative heating of the atmosphere by Saharan dust may induce changes in the large-scale circulation over the West Africa and Atlantic region. All these effects may provide a feedback on the coupled ocean-atmosphere system over the Atlantic, modulating the seasonal statistics of hurricanes. Analyses of satellite data and historical records show a more (less) active hurricane season is generally associated with less (more) Saharan dust over the Atlantic.

Global Warming and Hurricane Activity

The past century has seen North Atlantic hurricanes occurring in three periods of relatively stable frequency separated by sharp upward transitions. Each period has experienced 50% more hurricanes than the previous one and each was associated with a distinct change in eastern Atlantic sea surface temperatures (SSTs). After taking account of missing cyclones in earlier periods due to poor observing systems, we have experienced an 80-100% increase in hurricane frequency over since the early 1900s. Natural variability has contributed to some of the observed changes, but the compelling conclusion is that the overall increase has been substantially influenced by greenhouse warming. Superimposed on this increasing hurricane frequency is a completely independent oscillation in the proportions of major and minor hurricanes (compared to all storms). This oscillation has no distinguishable net trend and may arise largely from internal oscillations of the climate system. The period of enhanced major hurricane activity during 1945-1964 arose entirely from this oscillation. Unfortunately, the period since 1995 has experienced a double-whammy of a sharp increase in both numbers of hurricanes and the proportion of major hurricanes.

This heightened hurricane activity is unlikely to decrease in the future and we may see further increases. If so, current planning, building and coastal levee systems may prove to be inadequate, leading to more New Orleans-type disasters. The National Hurricane Research Initiative is designed to provide us with the tools to assess this future threat, to develop improved forecast and community response approaches, and to establish coastal planning approach to minimize the potential for future disasters. It is an initiative of critical national importance, which deserves strong and urgent support.

Long-term changes in Tropical Cyclone Activity: Looking Forward and Looking Back

To understand how human-induced climate change influences global and Atlantic tropical cyclone activity it is essential to have accurate records of past tropical cyclone variations and to model future climate conditions. The ways that tropical cyclones are measured have evolved over time, thereby influencing the homogeneity of the record. Statistical techniques can help, however, to estimate these deficiencies in the century-scale record. To project future conditions, global climate models (GCMs) – though not perfect – are our best tools. Although current computing power prevents GCMs from explicitly representing tropical cyclones, GCMs do indicate robust changes in many of the large-scale environmental conditions that are known to influence tropical cyclone activity, such as the thermodynamic structure of the atmosphere and vertical wind shear. Analyses of climate models and reconstructions of past tropical cyclone records indicate:

• Observational evidence for century-scale changes in tropical cyclone activity is mixed, depending on the metric chosen, on the statistical correction applied to the data and on the time interval being examined.
• Climate model projections of the Atlantic and East Pacific response to global warming exhibit mixed changes in cyclone-relevant parameters, with both an increase in thermodynamic potential intensity of tropical cyclones and an increase in vertical wind shear. More refined methods are needed to understand the detailed response of tropical cyclones to these environmental changes.
• Outside of the Atlantic and East Pacific, projected changes to both the thermodynamic potential and the wind shear indicate conditions more favorable to tropical cyclone activity under global warming.
• Although questions remain about the detailed response of tropical cyclone activity to human-induced climate change, we have relatively much greater confidence in the projected response of other large-scale climate conditions to increasing greenhouse gases (e.g., global warming, surface temperatures over land warm faster than over ocean, Arctic sea ice reduction, increase in ocean heat content, etc.).

Estimating how many tropical storms we missed before satellite observations, based on ship tracks. We have real observation gaps during WWI and WWII.

Model results show temperatures and wind shear increasing in most areas, not pointing in a clear direction for potential intensity. In the West Pacific and Indian Ocean, however, the trends all point toward increased cyclonic frequency.

Modeling the Response of Atlantic Hurricanes to Climate Variability and Change

A pressing question concerning ongoing global warming is whether human-caused warming of the planet has had any discernible impact on Atlantic hurricane activity. Confidence in any such a link is currently hampered by both data quality issues for the hurricane observational record and by limited work specifically targeting this question from a modeling perspective. Based on existing studies to date:

• Observed data, including consideration of data problems, give conflicting indications on whether there have been significant increases in Atlantic tropical storm and hurricane numbers. U.S. land-falling numbers have not increased. Models have not yet reproduced some reported long-term (~100 yr) increasing trends in basin-wide numbers.
• High resolution models consistently project increasing hurricane intensities and rainfall rates for the late 21st century, but whether there will be more or fewer hurricanes remains uncertain.
• A new modeling approach reproduces many important aspects of Atlantic hurricane activity observed since 1980, and thus shows promise as a tool for both understanding past variations and for making more reliable projections of future hurricane activity.

Biographies Dr. Kerry Emanuel is a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has been on the faculty since 1981, after spending three years as a faculty member at UCLA. Professor Emanuel’s research interests focus on tropical meteorology and climate, with a specialty in hurricane physics. His interests also include cumulus convection, and advanced methods of sampling the atmosphere in aid of numerical weather prediction. He is the author or co-author of over 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers, and three books, including Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes, recently released by Oxford University Press and aimed at a general audience, and What We Know about Climate Change, published by the MIT Press.

Dr. William Lau is currently the Chief of the Laboratory for Atmospheres at NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, and Adjunct Professor at Department of Meteorology U. of Maryland. His research work spans three decades and covers a wide range of topics including climate dynamics, tropical and monsoon meteorology, ocean-atmosphere interaction, and climate variability and change.

Dr. Lau has received numerous awards for his research and his scientific leadership, including among others, the AMS Meisinger Award in 1997; the John Lindsay Award,1998; the NASA Exceptional Science Achievement Award, 1991; the William Nordberg Award (GSFC highest award in Earth Sciences), 2002. He is a Goddard Senior Fellow, a fellow of the American Meteorological Society since 1988, and a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, 2007. Dr. Lau has published over 190 refereed papers, book Chapters in refereed journals. He is the principal author of a book “Intraseasonal Variability in the Tropical Ocean-Atmosphere System”, published in 2006. Dr. Lau received his B. Sc. in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Hong Kong, and his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Washington, Seattle.

Dr. Greg Holland is currently Director of the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, where he is involved scientifically with hurricane landfall, genesis and climate related work. He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society as well as the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. Dr. Holland has several areas of research interests which have carried through to applications and include improved forecasting of tropical cyclone motion, scale interactions associated with cyclogenesis, establishment of field facilities, establishment of programs on coastal impacts of tropical cyclones and the development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).

Dr. Holland has authored or co-authored more than 120 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles and book chapters, as well as dozens of planning documents, scientific prospectuses and workshop papers. He has given several hundred invited talks worldwide, as well as many contributed presentations at national and international conferences on hurricanes and related. He has also convened several national and international workshops, and served on several national and international committees and science-planning initiatives.

Dr. Gabriel Vecchi is a Research Oceanographer at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, New Jersey, where he has been working since 2003. GFDL, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is one of the world’s leading climate modeling centers. Dr. Vecchi received a B.A. in Mathematics from Rutgers University, and an M.S. in Oceanography, an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Oceanography from the University of Washington. His scientific research focuses on the interactions between the atmosphere and oceans on timescales from weeks to centuries. His recent research has focused on understanding long-term changes to tropical circulation and variability, including characterizing changes relevant to the possible impact of climate change on hurricanes.

Dr. Vecchi currently serves on the Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) Indian Ocean Panel, and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. His awards include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the American Geophysical Union’s Editor’s Citation for Excellence in Refereeing for Geophysical Research Letters, and the Cook College, Rutgers University Marine Sciences Student of the Year. He has over 30 publications in peer-reviewed science journals or book chapters.

Thomas R. Knutson has been a Research Meteorologist at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, New Jersey since 1990. GFDL, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is one of the world’s leading climate modeling centers. Mr. Knutson has authored several modeling studies in major scientific journals on the potential impact of climate change on hurricanes. He now leads a project at GFDL aimed at simulating past and future Atlantic hurricane activity using regional high-resolution models.

He currently serves on the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Expert Team on Climate Impacts on Tropical Cyclones, and was a major contributor to the December 2006 WMO “Statement on Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change”. He is a member of a U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) committee developing an assessment report on “Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate,” the AMS Climate Variability and Change Committee, and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Climate. Mr. Knutson has over 30 publications in peer-reviewed science journals or book chapters.