Derek “Deke” Arndt speaks at A-B Tech during a Sept. 22 seminar..

From Staff Reports

A-B Tech’s Institute for Climate Education explored recent exreme weather trends during a Sept. 22 seminar in Ferguson Auditorium on the school’s Asheville campus.

Derek “Deke” Arndt, chief of the climate monitoring branch at National’s National Climatic Data Center, addressed “The Extreme Weather of 2011: Is this Climate Change in Action?” About 50 people attended. His presentation was followed by a question-and-answer session.

“We’ve seen a really extreme weather year,” Arndt said of second the hottest summer in 117 years or recordkeeping, which was preceded by an unusually cold winter.  The year also featured the biggest drought in 12 years in parts of the country, while “more and more of the country has been dealing with more and more water (precipitation) ... We had a really violent spring for tornadoes.”

He noted that this year has already hit the record books with 10 separate weather-related disasters in the United States, each with economic damage costs of more than $1 billion.

“It’s pretty clear that greenhouse gases are driving the temperature change,” Arndt said, noting that “almost all of the increase (in greenhouse gases) is manmade.” He also asserted that “the greenhouse effect, itself, has been here since we’ve had” an atmosphere. However, he added, “The case is really never closed in science ... In science, you’re always open to new and better information ....

Weaverville resident Jim Reeves questioned whether U.S. weather experts had a “conflict of interest” in their work for the United Nations.

“The bottom line is, it would be irresponsible to blame it (the recent weather extremes) on climate change. It was would be just a irresponsible to dismiss the role of climate change.” He also stressed that the assumptions in his presentation “are all based on physics.”

To get violent weather, four conditions are necessary, he said, including instability, wind sheer, a front and lots of moisture.

Arndt distinguished between weather and climate, comparing climate to the individual who trains a boxer and weather to the one who throws the punches. “Heat waves in the summer are all weather. But that fact that they (temperatures) have been increasing in the last 30 years, that’s climate.”

He said climate change “is only one thing that might be driving this ... It could be due to El Niño or La Niña,” the Arctic Oscillation, global patterns “and then there’s natural weather.”

Therefore, he said, “the suspect is across the board,” but “the increase seems to be due to an increase in greenhouse gases,” which are gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.

During the question-and-answer period, a man asserted that weather experts do not understand cloud physics and it has resulted in a huge controversy.

“We understand cloud physics,” Arndt countered. “I’m not so sure it’s as big a controversy as you might think.”

A woman wondered if the earth’s orbit around the sun has an effect on the weather.

“We’re not in a fixed orbit,” Arndt replied. “There’s some wobble ... There’s been a long-term sloshing phenomenon — not just El Niño. Also, volcanic eruptions” are affecting the weather.

A man said, “It’s always good to err on the side of caution ... Unless we find ways” to solve today’s problems, “it would be good if the science went back thousands of years” to provide more data for projections.

“There’s a lot of science that is a hundred years old or less,” Arndt answered. “I hope I haven’t come across to (suggest) what we should do ... I think I tried to tell you what is going on.” However, he did say he is “looking forward” to the scientific community getting a better grasp of what went on during earlier periods of history.

Jim Reeves of Weaverville asked who compensated Arndt and other U.S. weather experts during a recent trip to a United Nations conference. Reeves said if they were compensated by the U.N., Arndt and the others were guilty of “a conflict of interest.” He added, “it’s not the U.S. that’s going to benefit from carbon derivative trading,” as proposed by the U.N.

Arndt said it is good for scientists to meet, compare notes and learn from one another, as at the U.N. conference. Arndt said he and others from the U.S. were not compensated by the U.N. He later told the Daily Planet, “In the science community, our integrity is pretty much what we have.” He added that the U.S. pays dues to the U.N.

A man told Arndt, “You keep mentioning ‘climate change,’ but you don’t define it ... If you go back, we’re definitely cooler than the Roman period.”

After going back and forth in discussion with the man, Arndt declared, “Again, understanding the physics of what is happening is helpful.” He added that the rate of climate change “is pretty constant.”

The seminar was the second for the institute, with more to follow, including one on Oct. 13 with a focus on hurricanes and tropic storms, and at a date still to be determined in Nocember, focusing on what kind of winter Western North Carolina can expect.

The 2011 weather disasters exceeeding $1 billion in damage include the following:
• In late January and early February, the Groundhog Day blizzard killed 36 people, brought major U.S. cities to a standstill, leading to $2 billion in damages.

• The April 4-5 outbreak of 46 tornadoes in the Midwest and Southeast killed nine and cost $2.3 billion.

• Three days later, April 8-11, nearly 60 tornadoes swepth through the central and southern U.S., causing $2.2 billion in damage.

• Three days after that, April 14-16, another outbreak of 160 tornadoes in the southern and central U.S. killed 28 people and caused $2 billion in damage.

• Barely a week later, April 24-30 saw 305 tornadoes rip through the Southeast, Midwest and Ohilo Valley, killing 327 people and causing more than $9 billion in damage.

• A month later, a May 22-27 outbreak of 180 tornadoes killed 177, most of them in Joplin, Mo., and caused more than $7 billion in damage.

• Historic spring and summer floods on the Mississippi, and recordbreaking floods in summer on the Missouri and Souris rivers, led to at lest seven deaths and a cost of $3 billion to $5 billion. The total damage of the two weather disasters have yet to be tallied. Loss of crops and homes led the list of damage, and thousands of people evacuated as the floodwaters surged.

• The Southern U.S. is in the midst of a historic drought centered on Texas. Coupled with a record-setting heat wave, the ongoing weather disaster has runined a majority of crops and cost $1 million a day in wilfire-fighting costs. The disaster’s cost is $5 billion and climbing.