Expansion of the Hadley Cells

[thandeanderson]

According to Chris Wayan's Global warming projection, areas north of the subtropics projected in most models to become desert won't become desert due the rain patterns clinging more closely to the Hadley cells. I did some research and found global warming could cause Hadley cells to expand while weakening them. Although I first assumed their drying effects would weaken, I did some further research and discovered there is a strong probability the expansion creates desert. Is Wayan correct?

[Esquire]

Anytime you see one person disagreeing with a dozen more widely-accepted models... Bet against that person.

[thandeanderson]

I acknowledge Wayan's model was incorrect. I hoped it would be because I'm working on a fictional global warming scenario and Dubia had many more habitable regions than the typical [url=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... balWarming]"Everywhere but the Inland Far North dies"[url/] one.

[thandeanderson]

I acknowledge Wayan's model was incorrect. I hoped it would be because I'm working on a fictional global warming scenario and Dubia was more interesting than the typical scenario in which Scandinavia/Canada/Siberia are the only beneficiaries of rising temperatures. It had the southern Sahara, Australia, the Altiplano, the Nevada Dry Lakes, Central Arabia, Manchuria, the Ordos River Valley, Antarctica, the Pampas, Nambia, the Congo Rainforest, Lake Chad, Central Asian Lowlands, the Punjab, the Deccan, Eastern U-Tsang, and the Southeast Asian islands.

[Esquire]

So run with it; the models we've got are extremely complicated and constantly changing. For the purposes of a story, it's certainly not SoD-breaking for them to have been slightly over-pessimistic.

[thandeanderson]

First off, are you referring to Wayan's model or the Standard model?
Second off, what does SoD mean?

[Elheru Aran]

First off, are you referring to Wayan's model or the Standard model?
Second off, what does SoD mean?

He's saying write whatever you want.

SoD is Suspension of Doubt. Essentially, how 'believable' a story is. For example, the Death Star doesn't violate suspension of doubt within Star Wars because it's obviously a very special, new, highly powerful piece of equipment. A Stone Age caveman being able to use modern automatic weapons without training... probably would violate SoD.

Good writing goes a long way towards SoD by being aware of inherent issues. If said Stone Age caveman meets a modern person, who teaches him how to use the firearm, clean it, change the magazine and all that, then that helps. It's still somewhat of a stretch, but it helps.

In your case, he's saying that you can use whatever theory you want as long as you write it well, mostly because most people reading it aren't going to be particularly aware of things like that.

[Esquire]

Exactly what Elheru said. Nobody but a few thousand climate scientists worldwide would actually notice you using an inaccurate model, and most of them would be completely fine with it, especially if you stuck in even the most cursory nod to the current theories - "Gee, Character A, it sure is nice that the 21st Century climate models were a little pessimistic, isn't it?" "It sure is, Character B, it sure is."

[thandeanderson]

Now back on topic. According to "Widening of the tropical belt in a changing climate", the Hadley cells expanded between 2 and 4.5 degrees between 1979 and 2008. Of course, it won't necessarily expand to the 60th parallel as featured in Mark Lynas' apocalyptic book "Six Degrees". But it may encompass subtropical regions such as Mexico and Southwestern US, desertifying them completely. If the expansion occurs over a century, how will the U.S Government and the UN deal with the disappearance of one entire nation and the complete destruction of a region?

[Esquire]

They won't.

A century-long process is well beyond the planning scope of either organization. However, Mexico will not disappear and the Southwestern United States will not be completely destroyed; stop overreacting. Neither tropics nor deserts are uninhabitable, and it's entirely within human capacity to adapt to changing climatic conditions. Obviously it would have been preferable to avoid the need to do so, but the doomsayers are just as silly as the climate-change deniers, albeit in a more productive direction. One might see Southern California switching from an agriculture-based economy to a solar power-exporting one, as a pure stab in the dark.

[LadyTevar]

Warning Buttons are NOT to be used because you "made a mistake" or "need to edit". They are to be used to warn Moderators when there is a Violation of Board Rules, and ONLY for that reason.

[thandeanderson]

@LadyTevar: OK, I won't use the warning buttons to try editing.
@Esquire: The "Widening" article argued the expansion would bring "even drier" conditions to the regions in question , so I assumed that would be disastrous.

[Esquire]

So what? Agriculture will be harder in what were already unproductive regions. That's not the same thing as 'Mexico will disappear completely.' People can, have, and do live in all manner of ridiculously inhospitable areas, they're not going to stop just because those areas are in different places than usual. If you've got reputable projections which say otherwise, I'd be interested to see them.

[thandeanderson]

The image above is derived from study conducted by the National Center of Atmospheric Research.
The readings are given in the Palmer Drought Severity Index, which accounts for long-term drought. If -6 refers to Dust-bowl level conditions, given that -4 refers to extreme drought, then Mexicans will have to move north to avoid the dust storms.

[Esquire]

Which study, conducted when, using which models? What are the confidence intervals on those predictions? Does '-6' in fact refer to Dust Bowl conditions? What precisely does that mean to you, and to the study authors?

Proper citations, please. You can't just upload a graph and call it a day.

[madd0ct0r]

I note that people inhabit a lot of red areas in the present day map. The further away it gets from green temperate the harder it is to live, but we're an adaptable species.

Ideas
: south american desert farmers use nets to cstch moisture that comes in as sea fogs

Microclimates: even in a map painted red there will be cooler places, the shady valley between two mountains, the patch of land above a rock fault that bubbles with springs.

Lots of places feed their cities on aquifiers. Thats easy, simple and a possible source of dramatic tension as the wells get lower and lower. See Palm Springs for the strangest example ive seen.
seasonal catchments. Drier might mean long droughts with heavy rains every few years. Resivoirs, dams, water bunkers ect.

Desalination. Energy hungry, but india already has irrigation channels roofed wth solar and its how the med will be supplied. If you have dry clear skies the tempreture will drop at night, thats enough of a cycle to drive stepped desalination tents without any energy input.

Next is adaptive tech. Look at Spanish polytunnel farms. They grow fresh veg for half of Europe and the only water lost is that shipped out inside vegetable cells. Obvious developments would be drier crops, grey water systems, up to sealed enviroments with water recovery. We already do that with heat in passivehaus btw.

Finally theres geoengineering. Boreholes and cracking rock minerals for water, or fliating pumps spraying a mist of seawater high in the air to encourage clouds to roll inland.

[thandeanderson]

@Esquire: The article's name is "Drought under global warming: a review", 2010, using the Palmer Drought Severity Index. Although the PDSI goes down to -10, only values -4 to 4 are assigned values.
The author's model is consistent with regional projections of projected aridity. The results mean that large areas of the globe may experience severe drought.
@maddoct0r: Confronted with your rebuttals, I concede my claim expansion would be disastrous.Accepted?

[Esquire]

Let me rephrase: please provide a link to the paper, so that I can discuss it with you properly.

[thandeanderson]

The link is here

[Esquire]

First things first:

Lots of places feed their cities on aquifiers. Thats easy, simple and a possible source of dramatic tension as the wells get lower and lower. See Palm Springs for the strangest example ive seen.

Wow, that's just... wow.

Anyway:

The article's name is "Drought under global warming: a review", 2010, using the Palmer Drought Severity Index. Although the PDSI goes down to -10, only values -4 to 4 are assigned values.
The author's model is consistent with regional projections of projected aridity. The results mean that large areas of the globe may experience severe drought.

Yes, nobody denied that. It's blatantly true; the process is well underway already and will only accelerate over the coming decades. However, as madd0ct0r pointed out and Dai confirms in his conclusion, severe drought does not mean collapse of civilization. It means that Palm Springs won't be able to support 100 grass-covered golf courses, and that extremely water-intensive plant life (read: trees, unmodified crops, etc.) won't be able to be grown in California anymore, barring even more extensive irrigation or some kind of elaborate hydroponics establishment. We have all manner of adaption tools, more are developed every day, and as the author himself ackowledges there's a real chance that the existing models simply won't work for the new climate patterns global warming will (/is) cause (~ing). Either way, it's not like Mexico and the Southwestern United States will of necessity become uninhabitable death zones, which is the claim I'm arguing against.

[thandeanderson]

I concede.

[Esquire]

There's no winners or losers here; that's the great thing about science pursued honestly. And I stress that you can write anything that strikes your fancy, so long as its internally consistent nobody will mind if you stretch the models a little.

[madd0ct0r]

@Esquire: The article's name is "Drought under global warming: a review", 2010, using the Palmer Drought Severity Index. Although the PDSI goes down to -10, only values -4 to 4 are assigned values.
The author's model is consistent with regional projections of projected aridity. The results mean that large areas of the globe may experience severe drought.
@maddoct0r: Confronted with your rebuttals, I concede my claim expansion would be disastrous.Accepted?

No concession sought. Any of those techniques require time to organise and knoweledge and money. History is also full of man-worsened disasters through nothing more complex than myopia or mistakes.

Lets assume the rains fail for two years in mexico. The cities keep sucking on aquifiers. The rural poor gradually have to abandon their fields for the cities. Food prices rise in cities. The chance of riots rise. Thats one thread.
Dustbowl has further effects. Road clearances and ditches being buried as one minor one, effect on the cities is less clear but could point to chinese efforts to control dust by tree plsnting. How are the trees planted? How are they paid for? How do they need less water? Ect

[Sea Skimmer]

Right now the world produces far more mere food then it needs. However about 65% of all US farmland is used to grow feed for cattle, and that ratio can be found in many other countries in the world. Some of this land is marginal and only growing hay, but that's precisely the kind of land that is going to become totally non productive. So is a lot of the marginal land used to make ethanol, the rest will get priced back into human food production easily. Ethanol has always been expensive, and used by say, Brazil, primarily to keep foreign exchange internal.

Meanwhile it takes something like 8 pounds of grain to make one pound of cow, including bone mass, and the human diet doesn't get anything like that much energy back out of it.

So what's likely to happen is meat prices skyrocket, and a number of deserts expand collapsing herd sizes when a big enough drought event occurs. That's not going to be a long term thing either, I think it will happen in a timescale of 5-7 years when it does happen. A huge number of underweight cattle will just be marched to the slaughter, not to be replaced until we fix the climate or develop far more advanced industrial farming methods like vat grown meat. This is not going to be world ending, it basically just points to the large margin of safety human demands for meat have built into the food supply. We have to exhaust that before disaster. It is also possible the process of herd reduction will be more gradual, but it could be very short too in the utter worst case for mass world drought. 2-3 years in that case, as the animals just won't survive at a useful weight longer.

This will probably cause a huge wave of protectionalism and export bans for farming around the world to protect local food supplies. However that's as dire as things get in any useful planning timescale. Unless you believe the whole world will collapse into a WAR FOR BEEF (local wars for water are plausible) were not going to have some colossally insurmountable calamity.

[Sea Skimmer]

Meanwhile in man vs nature the road to victory news:

Navy patents proven way to turn electrical power and seawater into jet fuel, gasoline and natural gases! This is basically proof were never going to run out of liquid fuel. Eventually enough solar panels with long enough lifespans will just win on energy costs. This method does increase the amount of CO2 in the air, but it could certainly be adapted to use carbon capture from other sources for non naval uses.

Posted By: Bryant Jordan June 21, 2016

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory has been granted the first U.S. patent for a method of simultaneously extracting carbon dioxide and hydrogen from seawater – a single process that will provide all the materials necessary to produce synthetic hydrocarbon fuels.

Synthetic fuel production translates into logistical and operational advantages by reducing dependency on future in-theater fossil fuel availability and reducing the vulnerabilities that come with unprotected fuel delivery at sea.

“A ship’s ability to produce a significant fraction of the battle group’s fuel for operations at sea could reduce the mean time between refueling, and increase the operational flexibility and time on station,” said Cmdr. Felice DiMascio, one five co-authors and inventors of the method.

DiMascio said that reducing the logistics tail on fuel delivery and potentially increasing the Navy’s energy security and independence, all with minimal impact on the environment, were key factors in the developing the Electrolytic Cation Exchange Module, or E-CEM.

The method should give the Navy a capability to develop synthetic fuel stock for the production of LNG, CNG, F-76, and JP-5 while at sea or in remote locations.

The E-CEM, located at NRL’s Marine Corrosion Facility, Key West, Florida, has successfully demonstrated proof-of-concept simultaneous recovering from seawater CO2 and H2 that are catalytically converted to hydrocarbons in a second additional, synthetic step.

A second-generation, large-scale E-CEM research prototype is still to be demonstrated at the Key West facility. The size and scale of the E-CEM is the next step towards integrating and commercializing these systems, the Lab said in a statement.

Others named on U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Patent #9303323 to the lab’s Material Science and Technology Division are M. Kathleen Lewis of the Office of Naval Research, and Dennis Hardy, Heather Willauer and Frederick Williams, all of the Naval Research Laboratory.