Liquid water on Mars

There has been a lot of speculation about what is going to be revealed at a NASA press conference in 15 minutes or so. Nature Geoscience put an embargo till 11:00 am eastern US time. So the news is now out.

There are signs of liquid water on Mars.

The people who'll be there at the press conference provided a clue. They are:

• Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters
• Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters
• Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta
• Mary Beth Wilhelm of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California and the Georgia Institute of Technology
• Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) at the University of Arizona in Tucson

Pick the odd one(s) out. Lujendra Oiha co-authored a paper in Science a couple of years ago about water on Mars. (Mary Beth Wilhelm is interested in organic biomarkers.)

Neel V. Patel at Inverse guessed it correctly.

Read about it at the Guardian. Here's a preview:

Liquid water runs down canyons and crater walls over the summer months on Mars, according to researchers who say the discovery raises the odds of the planet being home to some form of life.

The trickles leave long, dark stains on the Martian terrain that can reach hundreds of metres downhill in the warmer months, before they dry up in the autumn as surface temperatures drop.

You can (maybe) watch the NASA press conference, though I'm having trouble. Probably too many people tuned in (more than 72,800 people are trying to watch it!).

Changes to lakes in the Andes, not in Canada but Ecuador!

With another "claim" headline, Anthony Watts whistles his mob of scientific illiterati to join in with lots of "scientists don't know nuffin'" comments. And they oblige. Or most of them do.

Under his "claim" headline, Anthony just copied and pasted a copy of the press release about a new paper in PLOS | One. (WUWT article archived here.) That's about all he's doing these days. Since Andrew Weaver was successful in his defamation suit, I haven't seen a WUWT article defaming an individual scientist. It's early days yet of course.

Laguna Llaviacu, a study site. Credit: Neal Michelutti.

About the paper - scientists have been studying the lakes high up on the top of the Andes in Ecuador. The team was led by Neal Michelutti of the Paleoecological Environmental Assessment and Research Laboratory (PERL) at Queens University in Canada.

There was some interesting info in the press release. Did you know that it is estimated that the tropical Andes have about one sixth of Earth's biodiversity? And did you know that this region has been warming about twice as fast as the global average over the past few decades?

Only at WUWT: California's water scarcity is "amusing"

This time it's not so much that Anthony Watts of WUWT doubts the findings (the word "claim" doesn't appear in the headline), it's that he is amused by the notion that there's yet another pressure on water availability in his part of the USA. Yes, he thinks it's humorous. (Archived here.)

A new paper was reported in a press release from UC Irvine, which said in part:

Freshwater runoff from the Sierra Nevada may decrease by as much as one-quarter by 2100 due to climate warming on the high slopes, according to scientists at UC Irvine and UC Merced.

Accelerated plant growth at higher elevations caused by increasing temperatures would trigger more water absorption and evaporation, accounting for the projected runoff declines, the researchers add.

A diminished river flow will only add to the burden of providing resources to the thirsty farms and homes that rely on it. The state is currently experiencing a severe drought, and some reservoirs and groundwater levels are at all-time lows.

The study findings appear this week in the early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

You can read the full press release here. The research was done by Michael L. Goulden and Roger C. Bales. I couldn't find the study at PNAS early edition. I expect it will be posted online shortly.

At WUWT the paper was treated with a mix of disdain, disinterest, disbelief from commenters, and "amusement" from Anthony Watts himself. He wrote:

From the University of California – Irvine and the “Environmentalists are never happy” department comes this amusing quandary.

The cause? Increased high-elevation plant growth fueled by climate warming

I don't think too many people in California and neighbouring states would be amused. California is suffering extreme drought at the moment, according to the US Drought Monitor:

Source: US Drought Monitor

Finally, if a "bit too late" - Anthony Watts talks about the drought in California

Many people will know that parts of the western USA are in the throes of a serious drought.  The dry conditions over parts of western USA have been mentioned here on HotWhopper a few times (eg here and here and here) and it's been all over the internet.

Finally Anthony Watts has written about it (archived here).  This is after the Governor of California has declared a drought emergency - while a wildfire raged in southern California during the heart of winter.

Perhaps Anthony felt he had to pre-empt suggestions that the record drought was associated with global warming, now that the news of it has spread far and wide.  He wrote:

And the cause of this? Certainly not “global warming” though I’m sure the activist idiots will use every trick in the book to try to create a linkage. The cause is a the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and a weak to neutral and persistent La Niña pattern that some are calling “La Nada”.

I don't know how Anthony is so sure of himself.  He doesn't cite any research on the subject.  Here is some relevant research which he could have cited, from the IPCC AR5 WG1 report (my bold italics):

Recent long-term droughts in western North America cannot definitively be shown to lie outside the very large envelope of natural precipitation variability in this region (Cayan et al., 2010; Seager et al., 2010), particularly given new evidence of the history of high-magnitude natural drought and pluvial episodes suggested by palaeoclimatic reconstructions (see Chapter 5). Low-frequency tropical ocean temperature anomalies in all ocean basins appear to force circulation changes that promote regional drought (Hoerling and Kumar, 2003; Seager et al., 2005; Dai, 2011). Uniform increases in SST are not particularly effective in this regard (Schubert et al., 2009; Hoerling et al., 2012). Therefore, the reliable separation of natural variability and forced climate change will require simulations that accurately reproduce changes in largescale SST gradients at all time scales.

So at present, the drought may or may not be exacerbated or precipitated by global warming, but that cannot be definitively demonstrated at present. Anthony is wrong to be so sure of himself.  In any case, all weather these days is affected by global warming.  If there wasn't this amount of energy in the system, weather would be different to what it is.  Whatever the weather, it's against the background of the warmer world.

For example, there is this research I've mentioned before from Schwalm et al (2012) in Nature Geoscience:

Figure 4b Normalized CMIP5 summer precipitation from 1900 to 2100, five-year mean. Horizontal line denotes the turn of the century drought severity. Red and blue shading shows dryness more or less severe, respectively, than the turn of the century drought. Arrows indicate the turn of the century drought. Source: Schwalm12

A bit too late...

Anthony has a lot of cheek, too.  He wrote (my bold italics):

Yesterday, Governor Brown declared a drought emergency, which is probably a bit too late. 

I don't know what Anthony meant by "a bit too late".  But what struck me was that Anthony's article could equally well be described as "a bit too late".  AFAIK this is the first time he's mentioned it at WUWT.  And remember when last year he replied to a tweet by Peter Gleick about the California drought with: "Big F*&ing Deal" - "it's happened before" - meaning "so what!".

Anyway, he's finally changing his tune and acknowledging that it is indeed a  "Big F*&ing Deal".  It's a bit late though!

California has been in drought more often than not since the early 1980s.  Here is a chart from Jeff Master's blog at wunderground.com.

Source: NOAA via wunderground.com

What to do?

Governor Brown is urging people to reduce water consumption by (another?) 20%.  (I believe residential water consumption per capita has dropped a lot in California, following successive public awareness campaigns and imposition of water restrictions.  I wasn't able to find any specific data - if someone knows of any maybe they can point to it).

In researching for this article I came across an interesting paper by Ryan Cahill and Jay Lund, which was published last year, with the title: Residential Water Conservation in Australia and California.  Below is a table from that paper using data for 2010 - I've highlighted Australia, Portland Oregon and Californian cities for comparison:

The very low residential consumption in Melbourne and Brisbane in particular reflects the severe droughts experienced there at the time, with water storages extremely low, strong water restrictions plus wide public awareness.  Remember the table is for 2010.  It is likely/possible that per capita consumption in the USA has dropped since then, but I don't know the numbers.

---

Cahill, Ryan, and Jay Lund. "Residential water conservation in Australia and California." Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management 139, no. 1 (2012): 117-121.

Schwalm, Christopher R., Christopher A. Williams, Kevin Schaefer, Dennis Baldocchi, T. Andrew Black, Allen H. Goldstein, Beverly E. Law, Walter C. Oechel, and Russel L. Scott. "Reduction in carbon uptake during turn of the century drought in western North America." Nature Geoscience 5, no. 8 (2012): 551-556.

---

From the WUWT comments

Here are a few comments to Anthony's article (archived here).


Bill Jamison says, wrongly, that "models have been predicting an El Nino for a while now".  They haven''t - at least the POAMA models at BoM haven't been.  They've been reporting ENSO neutral for quite some time:

January 18, 2014 at 2:51 pm
“If the Nino 3.4 model ensemble is to be believed, then California will likely see a strong precipitation rebound in 2014/2015.”
Those models have been predicting an El Nino for a while now. They have no skill unfortunately. We need a pattern change and the high pressure ridge to break down but I don’t see that happening any time soon. There just isn’t enough amplitude right now to break it down.

While  wazsah points out:

January 18, 2014 at 3:12 pm
This month the SOI index has moved positive – towards La Nina – both 30day and 90 day averages are trending more positive.

http://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/seasonalclimateoutlook/southernoscillationindex/30daysoivalues/

So just now any talk of El Nino is a touch creative.

(From BoM: Sustained positive values of the SOI above +8 may indicate a La Niña event, while sustained negative values below −8 may indicate an El Niño event. Values of between about +8 and −8 generally indicate neutral conditions. There was a recent HotWhopper article on ENSO.)


Gary Pearse says the opposite of what deniers in Australia typically advocate and says (excerpt):

January 18, 2014 at 2:51 pm
Desalination would seem to be good investment if drought is periodic. Personal ones from $1000 to $5000 producing 1 quart to 7 gallons an hour (yachtsmen know these things).

Pamela Gray says:

January 18, 2014 at 9:10 pm
ENSO neutral is a mistaken label in my opinion. I have said it before (and may have coined the label) that La Nada/El Nado may be where all the action is and should be studied as much if not more than El Niño/La Nina is.

And finally, a bit of global warming humour from down under, where we're having another hot and fiery summer.   Green Sand says:

January 18, 2014 at 3:57 pm
Overheard on OZ TV:-
Hot? Jeez, chickens are laying omelets!

WUWT comment of the week - why the earth isn't dry

Fun fact.  Here is a picture of all the water on or near the surface of the earth compared to the size of our planet, courtesy of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Source: APOD NASA

That's a precursor.  This morning, Andy Skuse reminded me of something that appeared the other day at WUWT.

Do you know why the oceans haven't all drained down the plug hole to the centre of the earth?

No?  Then read on (archived here):

ferd berple says (my bold italics):

November 13, 2013 at 4:12 am

Ben Wouters says: November 13, 2013 at 3:28 am
Total nonsense. We’re living on a planet that consists of molten rock, with a core a molten metal.

==========
Agreed. In scale, the crust of the earth is thinner than the skin of an apple. Under the thin skin, the apple is molten rock.

Most folks think that the oceans rest on top of the earth’s crust, like water in a swimming pool. This is incorrect. The oceans extend well below the bottom of the ocean basins. They saturate the earths crust and descent towards the interior until they reach the boiling point of water under high pressure (600-800C). At which point they can descend no further.

Without the molten core of the earth to hold them in place via steam pressure, earth’s oceans would have long ago drained into the interior and the surface of the planet would be dry.

It is at this boundary layer that limestone (fossilized CO2) and steam are reduced in the presence of iron to produce hydrocarbons. Being lighter than water these percolate upwards toward the surface and are occasionally captured by rock formations. Otherwise the hydrocarbons are released to the atmosphere and digested by bacteria to continue that carbon cycle necessary for life.

Click here for a very nice video explaining what is known about earth's inner structure.

And here is a link to some NASA pages on the carbon cycle.

Is there a vast amount of water in inner Earth?  Here is the related paper in Science.

Water and clouds, weather and climate and denier nonsense at WUWT

Clouds and water are today's fare at Anthony Watts' science denier blog, WUWT.

About clouds

First of all there is some discussion on WUWT about a new paper from the Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets (CLOUD)  experiments at CERN, which David Appell covered on his blog a couple of days ago.  Two findings of interest were reported from CERN.  Firstly that amines, even at very low concentrations (typical of atmospheric concentrations), combine with sulphuric acid to form highly stable aerosol particles at rates similar to those observed in the atmosphere.  This is important because apparently amines are expected to increase in the atmosphere from human activity, according to the press release.  Secondly, for all the cosmic ray fans, "cosmic ray ionisation has only a small effect on the formation rate of amine-sulphuric acid particles but they don’t rule out more significant effects if sulphuric acid particles nucleate with other vapours in the lower atmosphere".

About water

Then there is another article on WUWT titled: "Climate change is dominated by the water cycle, not carbon dioxide".  Steve "mad, mad, mad" Goreham has decided, against all the evidence, that water vapour and clouds are increasing by magic, or something.  Why do they always pick on poor little much maligned CO2?  Any decent science denier will tell you that CO2 is plant food and must be all good.

Now if Steve had written that water is a major player in weather, I doubt he'd have made much of a splash.  Everyone knows that.  Even Wondering Willis has figured out that water is important in weather (if not why).

In his WUWT article, Steve claims, wrongly, that: "Even the greenhouse effect itself is dominated by water. Between 75 percent and 90 percent of Earth’s greenhouse effect is caused by water vapor and clouds."  Although Steve links to Schmidt et al (2010) he tells a big fib.  (Why do deniers do that?  Link to a paper and tell fibs about what's in it?  Do they assume that no-one will check?)  The paper itself states that water vapour and clouds account for up to 75%, not "between 75% and 90%".  From Schmidt et al (2010):

With a straightforward scheme for allocating overlaps, we find that water vapor is the dominant contributor (∼50% of the effect), followed by clouds (∼25%) and then CO2 with ∼20%. All other absorbers play only minor roles. In a doubled CO2 scenario, this allocation is essentially unchanged, even though the magnitude of the total greenhouse effect is significantly larger than the initial radiative forcing, underscoring the importance of feedbacks from water vapor and clouds to climate sensitivity.

Steve Goreham goes on to argue that the world warmed by magic.  He doesn't use the word "magic" - he just says that oceans and water cause climate change, not CO2.  He doesn't say why water suddenly started acting up when it was swimming along nicely, barely making a climate ripple for the last 10,000 years until things started to heat up a lot in the last 100 years or so.  Pixies?  Goblins? Gods getting angry?  Some of Wondering Willis' thunderstorms had a gabfest and decided it was time for a change? I don't know what's in his mind because he doesn't say.

From the WUWT comments

This first one is from empty-headed Janice Moore on the CLOUD article (WUWT archived here):

October 7, 2013 at 10:56 am
Note: the phrase “… a quick fix for global warming” in the above article implies that the conclusions of these folks are to be regarded with caution, for their thinking is clearly hampered by the unsupported conjecture that humans can do ANYTHING to change the climate of the earth. LAUGH — OUT — LOUD. As if.

Janice Moore again, this time arguing that a 40% increase is "tiny".  Wonder what she'll say to a doubling?

October 7, 2013 at 12:21 pmMr. Mosher, you, perhaps unintentionally, mischaracterize the position of (as Dirk put it) “fringe skeptics” such as I. It is the tiny proportion of human CO2 to which we point as evidence. First of all, as you said, total CO2 is a small ppm, BUT, the key is: human CO2 is FAR outweighed and can easily be completely overwhelmed by natural CO2.

The next lot (archived here) are in the same vein, but in response to Mad, Mad, Mad Steve's article:

Martin Hertzberg says all the science is wrong:

October 7, 2013 at 4:00 pm

As I have written and said many times, in comparison to water in all of its forms: the ocean, clouds, snow and ice cover, CO2 is about as significant as a fart in a hurricane.

Chad Wozniak confused local weather effects with global climate change and writes:

October 7, 2013 at 3:54 pm
@PWilson -
Further proof of what you say is the fact that the west coasts of North American and Europe have much milder climates than farther inland. It’s because the oceans control air temps, not CO2.

Jimbo is right, but not for the reason he thinks:

October 7, 2013 at 3:47 pm
Sometimes I feel we are flogging a zombie horse.

peter is right too, but maybe isn't aware that CO2 works in the same way as water vapour, but on a global scale when he says:

October 7, 2013 at 3:36 pm
seems to me that Desserts are very real test beds for the effect of water vapor in the air. In extremely dry deserts you get radical temperature changes when the sun goes down and the temperature plummets.

Konrad doesn't "believe" there is such a thing as gas molecules absorbing radiation and has thought up some quiz questions that he presumably thinks are very sciency:

October 7, 2013 at 4:21 pm
To understand why the radiative green house hypothesis is in error, you only need to be able to answer the following simple physics questions -

1. Do radiative gases such as H2O and CO2 both absorb and emit IR radiation? Yes or No?

2. Are Radiative gases critical to strong vertical tropospheric convective circulation? Yes or No?

3. Does altering the quantity of radiative gases in the atmosphere alter the speed of tropospheric convective circulation? Yes or No?

4. Is convective circulation including water vapour the primary mechanism for transporting energy from the surface and lower atmosphere to the upper atmosphere? Yes or No?

5. Are radiative gases the primary mechanism for energy loss to space from the upper atmosphere? Yes or No?

6. Does down welling LWIR emitted from the atmosphere significantly effect the cooling rate of liquid water that is free to evaporatively cool? Yes or No.

Ronald "OMG it's insects" Voisin makes a brief appearance and replies to Konrad:

October 7, 2013 at 4:41 pm
Konrad, I like it.

dbstealey makes a small concession to Anthony's weak espousal of the greenhouse effect and adds the word "measurable" when he urges Sisi not to read anything that might challenge the denialist stance:

October 7, 2013 at 5:27 pm
Sisi,
CO2 does not cause any measurable global warming.
Stop reading the Guardian and you will do fine.

So many tiny minds with barely a coherent thought between them, and they all hang out together at places like WUWT.

(If you're a stray reader, I'm really a very nice person :)  I wouldn't pick on the regulars who comment at WUWT if they showed any signs of having learnt anything.  But the same people have been denying science for years and insist on boasting about their ignorance, thinking it's something to be admired.  They are all stuck, each in a different fantasy world of their own.  They talk past each other, repeating their own individual fixations ad infinitum.)

Willis is a drip, again

Willis Eschenbach shows yet again that he is a fully paid up member of the DuKE (TM) of deniers.  He's put an article up on WUWT trying to prove that atmospheric water vapour can't rise by a large amount in a hotter world.

His article refers to this paper (subs req'd) by Kunkel et al (2013) which discusses the Probable Maximum Precipitation as climates change and, in particular, under the RCP8.5 scenario.

When it rains it pours...

Probable Maximum Precipitation (PMP) is a measure of heaviest downpours possible at a particular location.  It is defined as:

"...the greatest depth of precipitation for a given duration meteorologically possible for a given size storm area at a particular location at a particular time of the year, with no allowance made for long-term climatic trends." (Source: WMO, 1986 via Bureau of Meteorology)

According to the abstract, Kunkel et al postulates (my bold)

"Climate model simulations indicate a substantial future increase in mean and maximum water vapor concentrations. For the RCP8.5 scenario, the changes in maximum values for the continental United States are approximately 20–30% by 2071–2100....Thus, our conclusion is that the most scientifically sound projection is that PMP values will increase in the future due to higher levels of atmospheric moisture content and consequent higher levels of moisture transport into storms."

Let's look at the RCP8.5 scenario of IPCC AR5:

It's the one where we let things get way out of hand and results in a radiative forcing of 8.5 W/m2 by 2100.

How Willis ignores the hydrological cycle

Willis calculates the energy required to increase water vapour by 20% and says it can't be done.  Now I'm not about to try the calculation myself - I'll leave that to you if you're interested.  The thing I did notice was that Willis left out half the equation.  He calculated the energy needed to evaporate water but didn't calculate the energy released when that water condenses into clouds and then falls as rain and snow.  Nor did he even mention it. (Update: In the comments, Nick Stokes among others points out that the energy needed to evaporate more water is needed only once, not repetitively, but Willis is not having a bar of it.)

Willis puts up a chart that he says shows global precipitation.  He says the chart shows no trend, despite the fact that just eyeballing the chart it appears as if mean precipitation has been rising at least since the 1980s.  I haven't done a trend analysis, but other people have.

The hydrological cycle is pretty well self-sustaining (for a given solar input).  If water didn't fall down as rain and snow after it evaporated, we'd have all drowned in a moisture-laden atmosphere long before we'd even evolved - using Willis' type of logic:)

As the world heats up, more water evaporates.  This additional water vapour has the effect not just of making the world heat up more (water vapour is a greenhouse gas) but of making more precipitation.  The water cycle rotates in hours to days.  (According to SkepticalScience, it's estimated that for every degree Celsius rise in average global temperature there is a 6-7.5% increase in water vapour.)

Are you building a dam?

If you are planning on building a dam or any building that you want to survive several decades, it would pay to take note of expected Probable Maximum Precipitation (PMP) as your local climate changes in this warming world.  If you're in Australia, this 2009 paper from the Bureau of Meteorology is a useful start.  As it states in the Executive Summary (my bold):

For certain applications (including the design of dams) engineers need an estimate of what is referred to as the ‘PMP Design Flood’. PMP is one of the required inputs when estimating the PMP Design Flood. However, PMP estimation currently does not take into account that estimates might change under a changing climate. Since structures designed using such estimates have long life spans it is vital to consider potential effects of climate change on estimates of Probable Maximum Precipitation.

Caution

Do your homework.  Would you trust a scientific specialist or a science-denying blogger? I reckon you ought to avoid Willis E Constructions if you want your dam or building to endure more than a decade or so :(

Tool Poll

After using a computer to generate his charts, Willis makes the comment:

The part I really don’t like in all of this is that once again, all of their claims are built on computer models.

I've added a poll to the sidebar so you can pick which tool or tools you think deniers use to make climate projections.

Basketballs, Franklin water and saving the world from Climate Change

A Sunday arvo video for all the Ben Pobjie fans out there.

Enjoy!