As Olympia ponders the development of the waterfront and the downtown area I thought it might be helpful to review the weather report.

The City of Olympia is already attempting to develop plans for sea level rise of 1 foot, 2 feet, and 3 feet and the planners state that these plans will be useless if the Greenland glacial melt speeds up.  I think the quote from Steve Hall and Mike Mucha on Greenland was that all bets are off if Greenland melts.  We have no plan to respond to a sea level rise of that scale.  

Here is a roundup of some of the latest thinking:

from the scientific journal Nature as covered at Wired Science:

Could Methane Trigger a Climate Doomsday Within a Human Lifespan?

The potential problem here is the release of huge amounts of methane that are currently frozen away.  The arctic melt has potential to release the methane and methane is a potent greenhouse gas.  This is not a knife-edge type change where the impact could go either way, this is a tipping point, a feedback loop, that can reasonably be expected to accelerate and contribute to rising temperature.  

The upside to this story is that methane has potential as a relatively clean burning fuel.  If it was possible to start trapping and using methane to replace fuels that produce more greenhouse gases, there might be a silver lining to the methane question.  Unfortunately, I think the methane is spread over a very large area and I have no idea how we might trap significant amounts of it instead of just letting the rising temperature release this gas into the atmosphere.  But instead of working on that kind of technological challenge we are trying to increase drilling for petrol deposits offshore that we really can't use because of the carbon footprint of that fuel.  Good money in that venture for Halliburton, Exon, KBR over the next few business cycles.  

from Science Daily, June 20 2008:

Expect More Droughts, Heavy Downpours, Excessive Heat, And Intense Hurricanes Due To Global Warming, NOAA

This is the fact that people just know in their guts.  The weather has changed.  Folks in Florida and the Gulf Coast who watch hurricane season with more than passing interest know it.  Folks living near the Mississippi River know it as they see 100 year flooding every 15 years.  Folks living in California know it as they watch for wildfires and wonder when the drought will end.  Folks living in the Northwest know it as we experience flooding and torrential rain more often.  As Bobby Dylan noted: You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.  

From Science Daily June 19 2008:

Ocean Temperatures And Sea Level Increases 50 Percent Higher Than Previously Estimated

Not really much of a surprise.  I have said repeatedly that the changes will happen more quickly and be greater than expected because of the inherently conservative nature of science and the political pressure that has brought to bear on climate scientists over the past couple of decades. 

from this article: "New research suggests that ocean temperature and associated sea level increases between 1961 and 2003 were 50 percent larger than estimated in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report."  

Keep in mind that the 2007 IPCC report was a bit of a wake-up call and raised lots of complaints that it was making too much of the problem, but as the data continues to accrue it becomes clear that the recommendations and findings of the 2007 IPCC climate report were conservative and cautious, not wild and unfounded.  

So if actual sea level rise from 1961 to 2003 was actually 50 percent larger than estimated, what can be inferred from the sea level rise predictions in the 2007 IPCC report?  

On a local level, how long before we see water on Water Street?   

From National Geographic June 19 2008:

Greenland Ice Shows Rapid Climate Flips, Study Says

from the article:  " Violent swings in weather patterns occurred after Earth's climate crossed "tipping points" thousands of years ago, a new study argues. In as little as three years, patterns in the atmosphere have suddenly shifted and flipped into a new state, apparently contributing to rapid warming of the Northern Hemisphere, according to the new analysis of an ice core from northern Greenland."

I found nothing new in the Catalytic Converter Global Warming category.