Shop Local, Save the World!

            The holidays are upon us, dear readers! Whatever your faith, whatever your traditions, I hope your homes are filled with light, love, and warmth in these dark winter months.

            Some of our traditions around this time of year involve gift-giving. After two upending years battling a novel virus, our holidays undeniably look very different. We’re all learning in real time how complex the global supply chain truly is, and it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate how high our relative standard of living is compared to all of humanity who came before us.

Even kings and queens in the 1800s didn’t have the luxuries we every-day folk enjoy today and often take for granted: clean, reliable drinking water, hot water from a tap on-demand, fruits and vegetables from distant farmlands available in any season, etc. Most of us possess communication devices that use satellites in space to make any whim or desire we might have quite tangible and real. With a click of a button on a smart phone, you can activate an entire global supply system and get a good (or service!) delivered directly to your door. This year, however, labor and material shortages in other countries are influencing our shopping options and habits.

We often don’t think about the energy required to manufacture, package, and ship each one of the gifts we can purchase with a simple tap of the finger, but the energy costs are great and steep. Consumption was made cheap through fossil fuel subsidies and easy due to technological advancements.

Everything than cannot be grown or harvested must be mined. Metals, rare earth elements, common elements: all of it must be dug out of the ground, usually by fossil-fuel powered heavy machinery. Each one of those pieces of equipment must be controlled and operated by a human. All of those materials must be transported to a processing center to make raw materials into refined, workable materials. Industrial processing includes chemical, physical, electrical, and mechanical alteration, and this requires tremendous amounts of energy (again, usually sourced from fossil fuels) dedicated to furnaces, smelting, molding, and distillation, to give just a few examples. Once the good is manufactured, it must be transported to its final destination.

Maybe this year is the best possible year to shop locally and directly support our friend- and neighbor-owned businesses. There are so many fantastic options for gifts just up and down Main Street in Weaverville, and I know lots of long-time residents can think of other hidden gems of businesses throughout the county.

Books, gear, clothing, tools, keepsakes, jewelry, auto parts, food items, pottery, artwork, the list goes on and on and all of it is right here nestled in our beautiful mountains. No need for shipping. No wait lists. Just money in exchange for goods, money placed directly into the hands of our business-owning friends and neighbors. There are also options to gift experiences, like dance lessons, yoga sessions, hair and beauty gift certificates. Maybe you could offer to pay for an oil change or new set of tires. If you’re on a tight budget, gift certificates can be purchased in many instances. If you can’t spare money at the moment, you can always offer your time. I’m very confident that there is a gift for everyone. If you have additional ideas, write in and share them!

            I’m very grateful and consider myself extraordinarily blessed to live in this community. It’s been a rough journey the last few years and we’re all weary, worn-out, and wondering when the chaos will subside and normalcy will return. I think keeping our dollars local this year and helping our own county’s economy survive will be a good step toward bolstering our recovery. Everything we need, we have right here. And most of everything we want is also right here, waiting for us to find it.

            Thank you for reading. I wish you peace, calm, and comfort this holiday season and beyond.

Paleoclimatology and Proxy Records

Greetings to all!

            Paleoclimatology is the study of ancient climates. We obviously don’t have high-resolution data from 10 or 100 million years ago because we didn’t exist! Today we have satellite measurements, meters, gauges, sensors, etc. which give us a very vivid, clear, detailed picture of our reality. But when we look back into deep time, we must gather data through proxy records. Proxy records are “physical, chemical and biological materials preserved within the geologic record” (https://www2.usgs.gov/landresources/lcs/paleoclimate/proxies.asp) and these materials contain pertinent information about events that took millions (or tens of millions) of years to unfold. Today, we will barely scratch the surface.

            We more or less understand tree rings, right? Trees grow outward, year after year. The more rings, the older the tree. The light rings are summer growth, and the dark lines are winter growth. Thicker summer rings indicate favorable growing conditions with sufficient water, light, and nutrients. Thin rings indicate poor growing conditions.

            Now let’s take that a step further. Plants and trees have preferred climatic conditions and they release pollen to reproduce. This pollen wafts on the wind to various destinations and becomes part of the geologic record. Scientists can analyze the relative abundance of certain species over others to determine an approximate temperature and precipitation regime for the area. With error bars, of course as 100% certainty is never guaranteed. Plant macrofossils can also be used in a similar manner to reconstruct past plant assemblages and infer their preferred climate conditions.

Ice cores also offer us glimpses into ancient atmospheres by trapping tiny pockets of air. Glaciers form via the accumulation and compaction of snow, and some ice cores have visible layers much like tree rings. Air trapped in the pore spaces between snowflakes eventually become bubbles trapped in the ice. Scientists use the amount of methane and carbon dioxide to determine a range of likely temperatures based on our observations and understanding of atmospheric chemistry and climate sensitivity. The Vostok ice core contains 400,000 years’ worth of atmospheric data, and it clearly shows how much of an outlier our current CO2 concentration actually is. (http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/ice-cores/ice-core-basics/).

            Then there are sediment records. Scientists can use the texture, color, structure, density, and magnetic properties of sediments to determine where the sediment came from, where it was likely deposited, which direction wind or water was flowing, how much chlorophyll or rust is present (and therefore what the oxygen conditions were like and how much biological activity occurred), and many other helpful bits of information. Now is a good time to brush up on that chemistry refresher article explaining what isotopes are! And might as well review the slow carbon cycle article, too. Their respective links are below. http://www.trinityjournal.com/community/columnists/article_e52b01a4-0529-11ec-bd09-c720e79ed003.html http://www.trinityjournal.com/community/clubs_and_organizations/article_4471c402-102b-11ec-9805-176802389de5.html

Plankton are microscopic organisms in the ocean that form calcium carbonate shells. The oxygen in these shells can either be O16 or O18, meaning it can either contain 8 neutrons, or 10 neutrons, respectively.

(8 protons + 8 neutrons = an atomic weight of 16)

(8 protons + 10 neutrons = an atomic weight of 18)

            O16 is preferentially evaporated, meaning it becomes gaseous before the heavier O18 does. In periods of extensive glaciation when continental ice sheets are at their thickest, we clearly see more O16 in the ice core records and, here’s the kicker, more O18 in the calcium carbonate shells in ocean sediments! More O18 in the ocean means bigger glaciers. More O16 in the ocean means significantly less glaciation. Coral reefs also create calcium carbonate skeletons and they grow outward and form growth layers, also similar to trees. Proxy records can be used for comparison and calibration as we refine our estimates. There are always more data to discover.

            To those with a knack for chemistry, biology, and geology, proxy records provide rich treasure troves of information about the vast, mysterious, magical world that is our home planet.

            Keep exploring and never stop learning, friends!

Topography and Microclimates

            Hello, readers!

            Last edition, we dipped our toes into the three astronomical cycles that drove the advance and retreat of massive, mile-thick continental ice sheets for millions of years. These cycles relate to Earth’s obliquity (tilt on its axis), eccentricity (how circular or ovular our orbit is), and axial precession (the top-like wobble in Earth’s revolutions). These cycles interact in ways that sometimes dampen (decrease) and sometimes amplify (increase) the total amount of sunlight reaching the northern hemisphere. Less sunlight = more ice.

We will talk more about ice ages in the future because they are one of Earth’s coolest (pun intended) natural events. Today, however, we will define key terms and discuss the power of the landscape in shaping microclimates.

            WEATHER is the movement of heat and moisture around the planet in currents of air and water driven by pressure gradients that fluctuate day to day and hour by hour. CLIMATE is the overall temperature and precipitation regime of a location, averaged over time (decades or longer). Put another way, climate is your wardrobe, and weather is the outfit you wear for the day. We have high-resolution climate data for 150 years, and we have innumerable paleoclimate proxy records that offer data hundreds of millions of years old. Time series data are data collected over a period of time long enough to deduce statistical averages and overall trends.

We can clearly see a stark, rapid upward trend in both atmospheric CO2 and global temperature, and these movements are increasing exponentially. This is bad. Like, really, really bad. Like, extinction-level bad. Even though we should be entering an astronomically-driven cooling period, we see planet-wide decreases in ice coverage as every studied glacier in the world (except one in Greenland) is melting faster than it is regenerating (https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2925/why-a-growing-greenland-glacier-doesnt-mean-good-news-for-global-warming/). This is altering ocean currents that have cycled uninterrupted for millions of years. We, as a human race, are not prepared for these changes. Our infrastructure is not prepared, and our supply chains are weak and fragile. We must adapt if we want to survive.

I have my fingers crossed that this winter brings cold, wet, La Niña conditions to our beautiful slice of NorCal. We desperately need snow. Have you ever wondered why snow falls on top of mountains instead of in the bottom of river valleys? It’s due to something called the “adiabatic lapse rate”, or the inverse relationship between temperature and altitude in the troposphere. The higher up in the troposphere you travel, the colder it gets! I said “inverse” relationship, because as one variable increases (altitude), the other variable decreases (temperature). The adiabatic lapse rate varies slightly with relative humidity, but generally speaking, for every 1,000 feet of altitude you gain, you lose about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/adiabatic-lapse-rate). This is why it snows on mountain peaks first and, as the weather gets colder, the snowline creeps down the mountain flanks.

Mountains also have the unique capability of squeezing precipitation from clouds as they loft up and over the peaks. Have you noticed that the west side of the Cascades is lush, green rainforest, and the east side is high, dry desert? This influence of mountains on precipitation is called the “orographic effect”, aka the “rain shadow” (https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth111/node/751). Imagine clouds as sponges, heavy with water. As these clouds collide with mountain ranges, they are forced up, higher into the troposphere, where it is colder. Cold air holds less moisture than warm air. Thus, in order to loft up and over the obstacle, the clouds precipitate, like a sponge being wrung out. In our unique topographical locale, we are on the wetter side of the Cascade Mountain range, an invaluable, life-giving gift in the form of lakes, streams, and rivers.

            If you’ve been on the fence regarding rain catchment, this is the time to install it. It will serve you well in the future and provide a cushion in times of water scarcity.

            Be well, dear readers.

The Milankovitch Cycles Drove the Ice Ages for Millions of Years, Long Before Humans Arrived

            Welcome back, readers!

            The Milankovitch Cycles are named after Milutin Milankovitch, who correctly calculated the collective (and varying) amounts of solar insolation reaching the mid-latitudes (30-60 degrees) attributed to three specific orbital cycles. Rather than whirl around like a stationary seat on a merry-go-round, Earth actually wobbles like a top as it orbits the sun, sometimes more steeply tilted on its axis, and sometimes making more of an oval-shaped orbit instead of a perfectly circular orbit. These cycles are referred to as precession, obliquity, and eccentricity, respectively.

We humans cannot feel these astronomical movements because they take a long time to unfold. The shape of Earth’s orbit (eccentricity) becomes more ovular or more circular over the course of 100,000 years. This is because Jupiter and Saturn, the largest gaseous planets in the solar system, have a strong enough gravitational pull to warp our Earthly orbit. “When Earth’s orbit is at its most elliptic, about 23% more incoming solar radiation reaches Earth at our planet’s closest approach to the Sun each year than does at its farthest departure from the Sun. Currently, Earth’s eccentricity is near its least elliptic (most circular) and is very slowly decreasing.” (https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2948/milankovitch-orbital-cycles-and-their-role-in-earths-climate/).

Meanwhile, Earth’s axial tilt (obliquity) ranges from 22.1 to 24.5 degrees every 41,000 years, which doesn’t sound like a lot to us, but makes a HUGE difference at the poles. When the Earth is less tilted (closer to 22.1 degrees), the sun’s rays hit the poles at a low, indirect angle. This promotes glaciation, i.e. the growth of continental ice sheets via the reduction of summer melt such that snow and ice can chronically accumulate. Twenty- to ten-thousand years ago, continental ice sheets covered North America down to New York and Washington state! In contrast, when Earth is tilted at 24.5 degrees, more direct sunlight can hit the polar regions, which contributes to summer melt such that it outpaces snow and ice accumulation, i.e. deglaciation. “Earth’s axis is currently tilted 23.4 degrees, or about half way between its extremes, and this angle is very slowly decreasing.” (Ibid.)

Finally, Earth wobbles like a top over the span of 26,000 years. This has several effects. First, seasons become more extreme in one hemisphere and less extreme in the other. The northern hemisphere has more land mass for continental ice sheets to grow upon. Therefore, the amount of solar radiation reaching the northern hemisphere specifically drives the glaciation/deglaciation cycles. Milder seasons in the northern hemisphere promote ice growth. Second, axial precession also changes the timing of the seasons, causing them to begin earlier over time. Hey, our Gregorian calendar is just a social construct, after all! Third, precession causes us to point to new North Stars. Currently they are Polaris and Polaris Australis, but several thousand years ago, they were Kochab and Pherkad. (Ibid).

Don’t panic! The Milankovitch Cycles were easily the most difficult concept for me to grasp as an undergraduate. The main takeaway is that humans have absolutely no ability to influence our orbital movements, and these orbital movements drove the advance and retreat of the ice ages for millions of years before we even arrived on scene. What humans most assuredly DO have the ability to influence is atmospheric chemistry. We alter the carbon cycle every day on a massive scale. This is why we have extraordinarily fast warming, light-speed geologically speaking. We should be entering a gradual cooling period, slipping into the next ice age, but instead we are sky-rocketing in the opposite direction, with global CO2 and temperature increasing exponentially. We know precisely why.

On an unrelated note, I checked the Climate Prediction Center again. It looks like we have equal chances (50:50) forecasted for a normal precipitation year! Let’s hope we receive some of the La Niña moisture expected for the Pacific Northwest. We are technically part of the Cascades, overlying the subduction zone between the Juan de Fuca and North American tectonic plates. Did you know Lassen Peak is the southernmost Cascade volcano? I will continue to hope for plentiful precipitation this winter, ideally in the form of snow.

Be well in the meantime.

Global Warming Exacerbates Wildfires

Some background on this article: On September 29th, a confused and stubborn 86-year-old climate-change-denying man (one of the original two who inspired me to write Megan’s Climate Corner back in June) submitted a letter to editor that was so piss-poor in its climate and fire science comprehension, that it doesn’t deserve to be re-published. Especially not here. The letter writer claimed, “Wildfires are not getting worse and global warming causes greening of the Earth.” These blatantly wrong conclusions provoked me to write a retort. My response was as follows:

Greetings, readers! Let’s debunk some poppycock and balderdash!

Let’s recap a few key concepts. First, global warming does NOT cause wildfires, it exacerbates them. ‘Exacerbates means ‘to make worse’. Only an ignition source like lightning or a spark of anthropogenic origins can cause a wildfire. As the atmosphere, oceans, and landmasses warm, the hydrological cycle becomes more energetic. Evaporation increases in some places while other areas receive record-breaking rainfall and floods.

Second, the American West is aridifying, which is different from drought. Evapotraspiration (the movement of water from vegetation and soil into the atmosphere) will, in the long term (over decades), vastly outpace precipitation, thus altering this local ecosystem to become more drought-adapted. Oaks and scrubby shrubs will dominate this Northern California landscape in the future. If we’re lucky.

Third, the Wintu people burned this landscape every single year for thousands of years. They managed the forests better than we do today. We’ve allowed fuels to build up in the understory, and that means there’s more energy available for fires. Although the number of fires in the USA shows a slight downward trend in the last 30 years, overall acreage shows a slight increase (https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10244). Megafires didn’t exist before now because the fuels were never this dense. This is more a result of direct human mismanagement, rather than a strict byproduct of global warming.

Fourth, the “greening” of Earth observed since the 1990s is largely due to reforestation and conservation efforts in India and China (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/human-activity-in-china-and-india-dominates-the-greening-of-earth-nasa-study-shows/). We will talk more about this momentarily.

Mr. Jeans (hereafter referred to as ‘LW’ for ‘letter writer’) slightly misrepresented reality in his September 29th submission. Let’s deep dive into the paper he cited: ‘Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Global Burned Area in Response to Anthropogenic and Environmental Factors: Reconstructing Global Fire History for the 20th and Early 21st Centuries.’

“Fire regimes are largely regulated by climate [Morton et al., 2013] and human activities [Marlon et al., 2008]; meanwhile, burning of biomass can speed up climate change through altering atmospheric radiative characteristics and land surface albedo [Andreae, 1991; Langmann et al., 2009; Levine et al., 1995; Randerson et al., 2006; Y. Liu et al., 2013].”

This means that humans have used fire to clear forested landscapes for crops and livestock for millennia. When a forest has been cleared, this results in a higher albedo. Albedo is the shininess of an object, and Earth actually bounces light back out into space just like the other planets we observe in the sky. Without dark, heat-absorbing forests dominating Earth’s surface, light-colored soil can bounce light and heat back out into space. At the same time, wildfires release MASSIVE amount of CO2 into the air, thus exacerbating the positive feedback loop of warming.

“In the future, the global fire regimes may be quite different from the present pattern due to rapid climate change [Bowman et al., 2009], and anthropogenic effects on fire might become less important than climatic influences [Pechony and Shindell, 2010].”

Again, the fact that we have had fires in the past doesn’t really matter. The last time carbon dioxide concentrations were this high (409 parts per million) was THREE million years ago (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide). Humans have only existed for two million years. The tight link, the positive correlation between carbon dioxide and warming, has been scientifically proven since the 1850s thanks to the unsung chemical work completed by Eunice Foote (https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.20210823a/full/).

We are careening toward temperatures we may not be biologically capable of surviving. (We might be able to adapt with the assistance of technology like air conditioning . . . for a time).

The study LW cited uses something called ‘process-based fire modeling’ to enter many variables (relative humidity, aboveground biomass, fires spread rate, etc.) into a computer model to then compare to old, charred, carbon-dated biomass. It’s a tricky objective, and these estimates are significantly less precise than our modern-day satellite imagery and data.

In the authors’ own words: “Model simulated fire patterns are not often consistent with each other. For example, Kloster et al. [2010] estimated global fire patterns based on the modified CTEM-Fire model and found a declining trend in burned areas from the 1900s to the 1960s and an increasing trend from the 1970s to the 1990s. However, the estimation by Li et al. [2013] based on CLM-Fire model presented a declining trend from the 1870s to the 1990s.”

The 1870s to 1890s was a time of great industrialization. Much of the forest was intentionally cleared away for timber, the development of large residential units, and for agriculture. Fewer trees, fewer fires.

Global warming does not cause “significant greening of the earth.” Greening can only be accomplished with sufficient water. In contrast, the West is browning up due to aridification. Rather, global warming increases the length of the growing season by warming earlier in the year and delaying the first frost of autumn later in the year. As previously mentioned, the reason we have observed overall greening since the 1990s via satellite imagery is due to India and China planting more trees. My alma mater Boston University led the study! Read about it here: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2019/humans-are-officially-greening-the-earth-is-that-a-good-thing/.

“In the western United States, wildfire frequency has increased since the mid-1980s in response to the climate warming and extended fire season [Westerling et al., 2006].” It is well-understood that fires are growing larger, more severe, and more destructive with massive acreage as the fire season lengthens. Maybe as our forests burn away, we will have fewer megafires. Our trees are burning faster than they are regrowing. And of course, we are increasingly short on water: tree mortality by desiccation and beetle damage are also on the rise.

            “It isn’t true that facts never change minds. They just don’t change minds that are already made up. If you see your ideas as identities to defend, you twist and resist data to rationalize your views. If you treat ideas as a hunch to test, you embrace data to update your views.” Adam Grant.

            LW cited an article that uses imprecise methods for past fire reconstruction and cherry-picked the ONLY two sentences that supported his false claim, “Wildfires are not worsening.” Dude, they totally are.

Indigenous elders used to consider potential environmental, ecological, and cultural impacts seven generations down the line. Our society refuses to consider the welfare of even the presently living and breathing. I face insults and slander quite regularly for writing this article, but I’m doing it because I know for a fact that I have former students in the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades reading it.

Those kids need to hear a voice roar for them, they need to see someone going to bat for their right to exist on a habitable planet. I cry often, because I feel that elders like LW are actively opposed to the welfare of everyone currently in existence, and everyone yet to come. Then I wipe my tears away, and put my fingers to the keyboard.

Next time, we’ll debunk Mr. Jeans’ claim that ‘because ice ages used to occur, this extremely rapid, planet-wide heating can’t possibly be caused by humans.’ Or some illogical balderdash. At long last, we’ll learn about the Milankovitch Cycles and how they drove the ice ages to a steady rhythm for the last two million years. Stay tuned.

It’s Still a Wonderful World

Greetings, readers! I hope this week’s article brings a bit less brain and a little more heart.

            I hope I don’t appear as though I don’t care about the Monument Fire and River Complex by writing this science column in a somewhat “ostrich with her head in the sand” manner. I care very much about the current events unfolding in these mountains. It’s all I think about, why I decided to speak up and write in the first place. My heart breaks for all those displaced, who have lost homes and are surviving the chaos of destruction and evacuation as best they can.

There is little more I can say beyond what has been written in the feature fire articles and the informative pieces offered by longstanding TC columnists. All I can add is that I am so sorry this is our shared reality and that there is been so much suffering. I’m inspired to see the way helpers spring forth from this community to care for their own. The fires of this season will not burn for eternity. The firefighters and residents of this county will do everything they can to see that these fires go cold. I hope this short article is a brief reprieve from pain.

            Today we’ll review and recollect. We know Earth is a round planet, spinning on its axis, orbiting the sun. This means that sunlight reaches Earth’s surface at different angles: the equator receives direct sunlight over a smaller, more concentrated area, and the latitudes and poles receive light at lower angles that are less direct and allow the beams to spread over a larger geographic area. Here’s a helpful refresher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_Sun_angle_on_climate. We have climate zones (tropical rainforests, mid-latitude deserts and grasslands, arctic tundra, polar ice caps) because of these variations in solar energy striking Earth’s surface.

            We also know that materials can move from place to place (sphere to sphere) through chemical reactions or phase changes. Just as water moves between the sky and water bodies (atmosphere and hydrosphere), carbon moves between the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere by taking the form of CO2, methane, hydrocarbons, and carbonate rocks (limestone and marble). A tree or brick of coal becomes atmospheric CO2 through the chemical reaction of combustion, and CO2 becomes biomass (trees, calcium carbonate planktonic shells) via photosynthesis. In summary, energy and materials are constantly flowing from place to place around the planet in perpetuity, and at varying rates (days to hundreds of millions of years).

            We also know Earth is a complex system with time lags (processes don’t happen instantaneously), non-linear (mostly exponential) relationships, and built-in feedback loops that can either amplify (increase) a change in the system, or dampen (decrease) a change in the system. We know from direct observation and from ancient climate records that Earth doesn’t usually react in a predictable, linear way. There are numerous of examples of a forcing (a change in the system) going undetected for a good long while (the flat part of the exponential curve), but then suddenly manifesting in a rapid, lightning-fast flip into a new equilibrium (the steep, rocket-ship trajectory part of the exponential curve).

I grew up in New Hampshire. Before I was born, acid rain was falling from the sky and filling the lakes. Rather than having the fish die off in a gradual manner, with the death count increasing year after year, they survived for years with no apparent change in their population. Then, in the course of one summer, there was a massive fish die-off in the lakes that happened all at once, seemingly without warning. Once the waters were tested, scientists understood that the fish had been chronically poisoned, and then were pushed past the threshold of survival when the water became too acidic for sustained life and procreation.

            We live on a miraculous, one-of-a-kind planet that is awesome and fearful in its complexity and interconnectedness. As John Muir once wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” If we can better understand these nuances and intricate relationships, we can better care for and nurture this spectacular Earth. Agapé.

The Slow Carbon Cycle: Long-Term Climate Thermostat

Let’s delve into the slow carbon cycle!

Fluxes include: respiration and photosynthesis (between the biosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere), sedimentation and metamorphosis, (between the biosphere and lithosphere), weathering, erosion, volcanism, and fossil fuel combustion (between the lithosphere and atmosphere), dissolution and outgassing (between the hydrosphere and the atmosphere), and precipitation, melting, evaporation, and sublimation (between the cryosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere).

When plants photosynthesize, they “inhale” CO2 and combine it with sunshine to produce sugars and oxygen. 6CO2 + 6H2O —> C6H12O6 + 6O2. (Plankton in the ocean create calcium carbonate (CaCO3) shells). Photosynthesizers literally build plant matter and tiny shells out of atmospheric CO2, storing it in their biomass. How neat is that? Plants, trees, and plankton are therefore carbon sinks, meaning they remove atmospheric CO2 and store it in a woody/leafy/carbonate shell form. When plants, trees, and plankton die, they degrade and decompose, thus succumbing to the reverse process and releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere.

Think of a carbon sink like a literal sink: the only way to drain the atmospheric bathtub of CO2 is to open a drain, or to store the carbon somewhere that is not the atmosphere. Biogeochemical cycles are the fluxes to other reservoirs.

If biomass becomes buried (undergoes sedimentation) and is subjected to intense heat and pressure (undergoes metamorphosis) instead of respiring into the atmosphere, it can become: limestone rock that precipitates from the sediments produced by dead plankton, oil or natural gas(plankton metamorphosing under different temperature and pressure regimes and in different geologic formations), or coal (buried trees, usually having decayed anoxically in ancient swamps). Technically, limestone precipitates from the biogenic material in seawater, and quick note, marble is metamorphosed limestone.

Metamorphosis occurs deep within the lithosphere, specifically the aesthenosphere: the boundary between crust and mantle. The lithosphere is therefore also a carbon sink, as sedimentation, metamorphosis, weathering, and erosion are the fluxes that take up to hundreds of millions of years, to unfold, but allow the geosphere to store the largest amount of carbon. An estimated 65,500 billion metric tons (a billion in scientific notation is 1 x 10^9) are stored in the crust and aesthenosphere as sediments, and sedimentary and metamorphic rocks (https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/CarbonCycle).

Weathering and erosion (the mechanical and chemical breakdown of rocks), transports carbon from the atmosphere to the lithosphere via a brief stop in the hydrosphere! Rainwater dissolves CO2, forming a weak carbonic acid that erodes the lithosphere over many hundreds of millions of years. Geoscientists call this “atmospheric scrubbing” because the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more acidic the rainwater. And remember, more CO2 —> higher temperatures —> more active hydrological cycle —> more atmospheric carbon scrubbing. This is an example of a negative feedback loop, meaning the increase of CO2 leads to an increase in weathering, which dampens the effect of warming caused by the initial increase in CO2. Chemical weathering is one of the greatest, long-term (again, HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of years, an astronomically long time) correcting mechanisms for when Earth’s atmosphere finds itself with excess CO2. But unfortunately for humans, it doesn’t operate on a timescale that can benefit us and our survival as a species this upcoming century. Additionally, mountain building events, like the collision of the India subcontinent and the Eurasian plate causing the uplifting of the Himalayas, are needed to spur on weathering by providing fresh rock surfaces. Plate tectonics is also, you guessed it! an extraordinarily slow geologic process.

Dissolution and outgassing are intuitive. Gases can either dissolve into a solution (like water), or they can be released from a material in which they were frozen, dissolved, trapped, or absorbed. We know the hydrological cycle quite well, so won’t waste more time here.

The slow carbon cycle (metamorphosis, weathering, erosion, sedimentation) acts as a climate thermostat by keeping the atmospheric amount of CO2 relatively stable, within a certain range of values.

We’re piecing it all together . . .

Quick thank you to Dr. Tom Brandes and Trinity Bob for mentioning Eunice Foote’s work in the 1850s discovering the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide!

Image sourced from: http://euanmearns.com/the-carbon-cycle-a-geologists-view/

The Chemistry of Combustion

Greetings! Let’s brush up on chemistry. We’ll need it!

            An atom is, “the smallest unit into which matter can be divided without the release of electrically charged particles” (https://www.britannica.com/science/atom). It consists of positively charged protons and neutral neutrons in a nucleus (center) surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged electrons.

Powerful attracting forces between protons and electrons maintain atomic cohesion. The majority of an atom’s mass is concentrated in the nucleus, but the electrons have massive orbits. If the nucleus were scaled up to the size of a basketball, its electrons would orbit two miles away! Atoms are roughly the same size, regardless of the number of electrons. Electrons exist at higher or lower energy states, populating different orbital “shells” surrounding the nucleus. Higher energy = electrons in the largest shell farthest from the nucleus, lower energy = electrons in the smallest shell closest to the nucleus.

            The periodic table is extremely useful. The atomic number describes how many protons (and therefore electrons) are present in the atom. Hydrogen has one proton, one electron, and one neutron. Thus, the atomic number is 1. Atomic weight is a different metric. Atoms can have different numbers of neutrons in their nucleus. We call these atoms isotopes. A hydrogen isotope with 2 neutrons is called deuterium, and with 3, tritium. Deuterium and tritium have higher atomic weights than hydrogen because they contain extra particles (neutrons).

When we’re ready to explore climate proxy records hundreds of millions of years old, we’ll need to understand oxygen isotopes, specifically O16 (“oxygen-16”, which has 8 protons and 8 neutrons) and O18 (“oxygen-18”, which has 8 protons and 10 neutrons). Ditto for other elements and their isotopes. For now, I digress.

            Molecules form when atoms share electrons. One pair of shared electrons = one bond. Atoms that don’t have equal numbers of protons and electrons to maintain a neutral charge are called ions. Cations are positively charged while anions are negatively charged.

Oxygen has 8 protons, and so is stable when 8 electrons populate its orbital shells. To form a water molecule (H2O), an oxygen atom forms two single, covalent bonds with two hydrogen atoms by sharing 4 total electrons: 2 from the oxygen atom, and 1 from each hydrogen atom. Hydrogen only has one electron to share, so it can only form a single bond with one other atom, often carbon or oxygen. Some molecules have double or triple bonds (i.e. 4 or 6 electrons are shared in each bond). Nitrogen often forms a very stable triple bond with other nitrogen atoms.

It’s important to mention here that phase changes (moving from solid, to liquid, to gas) do not cause any separation within a single molecule: a molecule of water remains one oxygen atom bound to two hydrogen atoms no matter whether it is ice, water, or steam. Phase changes refer to the degree of inter-molecular movement (movement between molecules): ice molecules are frozen in place arranged in a crystal structure, liquid water molecules are hydrostatically attracted to each other but pass by easily, and vapor molecules are spread so far apart that they expand to the volume of whatever container they fill.

Hydrocarbons are hydrogen bonded with carbon. All fossil fuels are hydrocarbons, and they are packed full of energy for precisely this reason! The burning of fuel, or combustion, is an oxygen-adding, heat-releasing reaction between a fuel and an oxidant. Combustion of hydrocarbons would be written in the following equation:

2C8H18(1) + 25O2(g) —> 16CO2(g) + 18H2O(g)

Hydrocarbons + oxygen = carbon dioxide + water. In every reaction, mass must be conserved, meaning there will be the same number of atoms on both sides of the equation. You’ll notice the equation is balanced and there remain 16 carbon atoms, 36 hydrogen atoms, and 50 oxygen atoms at the end, thus maintaining the Law of Conservation.

Methane is CH4. Propane is CH3CH2CH3. Coal is C135H96O9NS (it’s 85% carbon by mass). CO2 is the inevitable product of fossil fuel combustion. To argue otherwise is to rage against Nature, against the unfolding of reality.

Only by understanding the problem can we solve it. We understand it. Now let’s solve it.

Thank you to my friend, Dr. Menger for her review and edits for several sentences. Having only achieved a B+ in college chemistry, I thought it best to consult someone who knows much more about the subject matter than I do. Congratulations, Dr. Menger on earning your PhD in Chemistry. You’re a rockstar.

Submit your climate questions to tjclimatecorner@gmail.com.

 Image sourced from: https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-hydrocarbon-definition-formula-compounds.html

Drought vs. Desertification

August 11th, 2021

Water truly is a miraculous substance. Did you know that only 1% of all the water on Earth is freshwater and available for human use? Did you know the adult human body is about 60% water? We’re all feeling the stress of water scarcity this summer, and rural residents are especially vulnerable.

Folks depending on wells and surface water are watching creeks and wells run dry. Remember that change in nature is often nonlinear: this is the inevitable result of a long-term climatic trend brought about by our centuries-long consumption of fossil fuels. The explosion of illegal cannabis grows (an estimated 3,000-4,000 in the County) likely was the catalyst here, the final stressor. But we also have to acknowledge that we, all of us, collectively pump groundwater faster than it can recharge. This is unsustainable.

Aridification/desertification is "the degree to which a climate lacks effective, life-promoting moisture" (Glossary of Meteorology, American Meteorological Society). This is different from drought, which is "a period of abnormally dry weather sufficiently long enough to cause a serious hydrological imbalance". Even though Weaverville experienced a torrential monsoon on Friday, July 30th, deluging nearly 1” of rain in 30 minutes, that was just a drop in the bucket of the freshwater deficit we’ve accrued.

We are not in a drought. We are in the process of aridification and ecological succession. This will unfold over decades and centuries, but unfold it will. We have pushed the ball off the top of the hill and it is rolling into a valley.

            I consulted the Climate Prediction Center for this article and, although I wasn’t surprised, my heart sank at the winter forecast: less than average precipitation, higher than average temperatures. There will be no drought-buster this winter. Next summer will be worse. We won’t replenish our supplies until we have a massive drought-busting year, most likely when the next El Niño event occurs. Hopefully. Although cyclical, they occur somewhat irregularly. This video explains El Niño and La Niña: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVlfyhs64IY&t=89s.

            To understand aridification, we must understand evaporation (liquid transforming to gas) and evapotranspiration (water evaporating from soil moisture/transpiring from vegetation). As Earth’s atmosphere warms, more energy is available to break the liquid molecular bonds, and more water vaporizes. Solar energy combined with thermal energy re-radiated back down to Earth’s surface from GHGs allows for more moisture to become vapor. More heat = more evaporation.

Here in the aridifying West, evaporation is a vastly larger flux than precipitation. I highly recommend reading this paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/22/11856.

            Interestingly enough, warm air holds more moisture than cold air. Water itself is a greenhouse gas! We’ll explore atmospheric chemistry in great detail in a later edition, but molecules with multiple chemical bonds (CH4 has four bonds, CO2 and H2O have two bonds) can capture and store energy (i.e. thermal energy) in those bonds, and release it back into the environment in all directions, including back down to Earth’s surface. Here’s a video about the greenhouse effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SN5-DnOHQmE&t=140s.

            This causes a positive feedback loop, wherein more heat leads to more evaporation, which increases water vapor in the atmosphere, which traps more heat, and increases the temperature, causing more evaporation . . .

            Increased thermal energy has intensified the hydrological cycle. It’s no coincidence that Boston and NYC had torrential downpours and near-Biblical flooding around the same time the PNW was shattering heat-wave records. As sea-surface temperatures grow warmer, hurricanes grow stronger. More energy = more intense storms.

This is simple chemistry. These are the laws of the physical natural world we inhabit. We need to be prepared. Here are some steps we can take:

1)     Obtain rainwater-capturing infrastructure! Acquire tanks and piping to harvest rainwater. 1” of rain over 1,000 ft2 of impermeable surface = 600 gallons.

2)     Recycle gray water and limit non-food/non-livestock watering.

3)     Coordinate with neighbors and stagger groundwater pumping times. This avoids cumulative impacts.

4)     Advocate for receiving aid via the California Disaster Assistance Act.

We only have one home planet. Take care of yourselves and each other.

Image sourced from: https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/scientists-say-desert

Systems Thinking: Unlocking A Complex Earth

July 28th, 2021

Earth is a complex, multi-system wonder! Just as the human body consists of multiple systems that all work in tandem to sustain human life, the Earth System is composed of multiple systems that sustain a vast quantity and variety of life forms. These subsystems are: the lithosphere, also called the geosphere (rocks, soil, molten rock, fossil fuels), the hydrosphere (oceans, rivers, lakes, groundwater, etc.), the atmosphere (tropo-, strato-, meso-, thermo-, magneto-, and exo-sphere), the biosphere (oceanic and terrestrial plants and animals), and some climatological conventions separate out the cryosphere (ice and snow).

To understand how the Earth System operates, we need to understand “systems thinking”. It helps to break Earth down into “stocks” (nouns) and “flows” (verbs). A stock/reservoir is any entity that can be filled or depleted, like a bathtub filling or draining. We just listed the Earth System stocks: the lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and cryosphere. We concern ourselves with how materials and energy flow throughout the system, i.e. how water, nitrogen, carbon, phosphorous, and other elements of key interest move throughout the different spheres. This means that the flows/fluxes are actions, or processes through which materials can move from one sphere to another.

Most of us confidently understand the hydrological cycle. Evaporation is the flux that moves water from the hydrosphere and lithosphere (in the form of soil moisture) up into the atmosphere. Precipitation is the flux that moves water back down from the atmosphere to the hydrosphere and lithosphere. Condensation is another flux/process in the hydrological cycle, but in this example, it does not transfer water from one sphere to another, but occurs solely within the atmosphere.

Systems Thinking also requires us to understand residence times and time lags, nonlinear relationships, as well as feedback loops. Residence times refer to how long a material remains within a stock. Sticking to our hydrological cycle example, here’s how long a water molecule stays, on average, within a given stock: Oceans/Seas (at a depth of 2,500 m) 4,000 years, Lakes/Reservoirs 10 years, Swamps 1-10 years, Rivers 2 weeks, Soil Moisture 2 weeks-1 year, Groundwater (120 m) 2 weeks-10,000 years, Ice Caps/Glaciers 10-1,000 years, Atmospheric Water 10 days, Biospheric Water 1 week (https://www.spokaneaquifer.org/the-aquifer/what-is-an-aquifer/residence-time-of-groundwater/).

For each of the cycles we’ll cover (rock, carbon, nitrogen, etc.) there will be different residence times for the material of interest. I cannot over-emphasize how important it is to consider the residence time of a given material. For some cycles, the residence time is hundreds of millions of years!

            The lag time we experience every day is the diurnal (daily) temperature lag. Noon is when we receive the most sunlight, but peak daytime temperatures occur several hours after noon. That’s because air warms (and cools!) faster than water, dirt, and rock. The earth continues to radiate heat well past noon, maintaining warm temperatures. Another example is seasonal ocean temperatures: northern hemisphere oceans tend to reach their warmest temperature in August and September, 2-3 months after the summer solstice! (https://www.seatemperature.org/atlantic-ocean). This is due to the massive heat capacity of water: it takes 4,184 joules to warm 1 kilogram of water by 1°C (by comparison, it takes 385 joules to warm 1 kilogram of copper 1°C) (https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/specific-heat-capacity-and-water?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects). Thus, the ocean continues to warm well beyond the longest day of the year.

Exponential growth is the most crucial nonlinear relationship to understand in the Earth system. Human population is one example: it took about 12,000 years to reach 1 billion people (in the year 1800), and then it only took 120 years to grow to 7.9 billion (https://ugc.berkeley.edu/background-content/population-growth/).

Lastly: feedback loops. Positive feedback loops amplify or increase the effect of a forcing, negative feedback loops dampen or decrease the effect of a forcing. A positive feedback: as sea ice melts, dark ocean water is revealed. Dark ocean water absorbs sunlight (as opposed to reflective white ice and snow), and so absorbs more heat, which melts more ice, on and on and on. Right now, permafrost in the arctic is melting and releasing methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more powerful than CO2 but with 1/10th the atmospheric residence time (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2014.0423).

This heats the planet, which melts more permafrost, which releases more methane, etc. Same with wildfires: combustion moves carbon from the biosphere to the atmosphere, and the train runs away.

Canary in the coal mine? Or arctic tern on the burning permafrost graveyard . . .?

Image sourced from: https://ugc.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Human-Pop-Growth-2019.jpg

The Fantastic Formation of the Solar System!

July 14th, 2021

Welcome to Megan’s Climate Corner!

            The Universe is ancient, much older than human beings can really fathom, at a whopping 12-13 billion years! We have determined this age range from examining the cosmic microwave background (the “after-glow” of the Big Bang, when electrons began forming the first atoms), estimating the age of different stars in globular clusters (groupings of a million or more stars, all of which are different densities and burn at different rates), and by observing the current rate of expansion to extrapolate back in time. You can read more about the age of the universe here: https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/question28.html. Today, we concern ourselves only with our own solar system: our yellow medium star, the sun, and the eight planets that orbit it.

Gravity is a measurable, calculatable force (proportional to mass) that pulls objects toward one another. It’s what pulls everything toward the center of the Earth, and binds all objects in space to a regular orbit. We orbit our sun. Our Milky Way galaxy orbits itself, pinwheel arms spiraling away from its center, where a supermassive black hole resides.

            Our Solar System formed about 4.5 billion years ago from a thick cloud of gas and dust, which condensed rapidly (perhaps from the shockwave of a supernova) and became a swirling spinning disk called a solar nebula, thus creating the sun, the rocky inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars), and the gaseous outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune). Read more here: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/our-solar-system/in-depth/

Under the force of this spinning and the force of gravity, the elements of Earth separated out to form distinct layers: the light, silicate minerals floated to the outer shell to form the crust while the heavy, super dense iron and nickel condensed in the center of the planet, into our hot, slightly radioactive core. 

            The sun fuses hydrogen into helium and releases tremendous amounts of energy. This is nuclear fusion. While the sun is a constant supply of energy, it is incorrect to state that, “The sun drives our climate.” Reality is more complex. 

            Our climate is driven by: Earth being a sphere, tilted on its axis, wobbling like a top, and the orbit being sometimes more ovular and sometimes more circular. This is why we have distinct climate zones, opposing seasons in the northern and southern hemispheres, a new North Star every 12,000 years, and why we had regular Ice Ages. We’ll delve into the Milankovitch Cycles in a later edition. 

            Earth is a materially closed, energetically open system. This means that, with some exceptions, like meteors/comets bringing novel minerals to the surface, Earth contains all of the material it will ever contain. We cannot obtain more ore for mining or more water for drinking and farming. Everything we have is everything we'll ever have. Being energetically open, however, means the sun is constantly bombarding us with energy in the form of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light, and radio waves, x-rays, and gamma rays. We are supplied with energy forever (as far as humans are concerned!), but mind you: the sun is about halfway through its lifespan.

            The Equator is hot and humid because, at the equinoxes, the surface of the equator is at 90 degrees to the sun, thereby receiving twice the amount of energy of the same area at a latitude of 60 degrees. This solar energy causes massive quantities of water to evaporate, which then condenses into clouds. This also creates a low-pressure system where warm air rises, reaches the top of the troposphere, then begins to cool and settle over the subtropics, ~23.5° latitude N and S. In these subtropical high-pressure systems we find dry deserts, where little moisture falls. 

As the seasons change and we progress through the summer and winter solstices, the thermal equator shifts north and south of the true equator, driving the pressure changes that swing winds and weather systems north and south.

The temperate latitudes are at a less direct angle from the sun, experiencing variable solar energy and weather. The poles vacillate between sunless winter and summers when the sun doesn't set at all! This occurs at and above the Arctic Circle (66.5°N) during northern hemisphere summer solstice, and in the Antarctic Circle (66.5°S) during the southern hemisphere summer a.k.a. winter solstice.

The poles are the extremes of our Earth system, experiencing the largest fluctuation in solar energy. They are extremely fragile ecosystems that serve as the proverbial canary in a coal mine with regard to climate change. Stay tuned.

**Thank you to John Porritt for his corrections to a previous draft of this article. See his very helpful, well-articulated email below.**

“Hi Megan,

I'm so glad to have a science-based column addressing climate change in the Trinity Journal and wish you every success.

That said, I find one of your points misleading. The equator is hotter not because it is "physically closest to the sun"; the earth is millions of miles closer to the sun in January than in July. The reason the equator is hotter is because at the equinoxes the surface of the equator is at 90 degrees to the sun, therefore receiving twice the energy of the same area at a latitude of 60 degrees. At all other times, the thermal equator is north or south of the equator, driving the pressure changes and swinging the wind belts north or south. Due to this, Trinity County enjoys half a year of a desert climate and half a Pacific Northwest climate.

I will be following you with interest.

Best regards,

John Porritt”

Teamwork makes the dream work! Thank you, John, for your assistance in clarifying seasonal solar energy budgets on a spherical planet.

Image sourced from: https://www.livescience.com/our-solar-system.html

Welcome to Megan’s Climate Corner!

Greetings! This is a digital version of a bi-monthly science column I write for the Trinity Journal in northern California. Current events in Trinity County often appear in my writing as I apply the science of global warming to a regional setting with real, lived climate consequences. These explanations, resources, and links are applicable to many other settings and circumstances, however, and I encourage you to dive deeper into the wonders of the natural sciences. Nature is complex and fascinating, vast and mysterious. I hope we can all find a spark of curiosity to learn about our miraculous planet and how we can become better stewards of Earth. Please join in on the joy (and yes, sometimes sorrow) and fulfillment of learning about a prescient, era-defining, future-deciding issue. And if you feel like it, tell a friend.

Do you have a question about climate? Please submit it to tjclimatecorner@gmail.com and I will do my best to articulate the most complete, accurate answer possible.