Blackcap Blog

Published at 22:02 on 1 November 2012

Executive summary: Maybe. It’s impossible to say with any certainty. But that’s not the real issue to be concerned about.

Climate science is pretty unanimous that the Earth is warming and that human activity is responsible for that. But, the amount of warming so far has been a degree or two Fahrenheit. That’s far less than the natural variability that weather systems provide (deviations of ten degrees above or below norms are common).

It’s one of the things that makes life easier for deniers: “Look! There was a terrible, cold winter on the East Coast! That proves that the Earth cannot be getting warmer.” No, it doesn’t: add a degree of warming to a cold snap that sends temperatures twenty degrees below normal, and you have a cold snap that sends temperatures nineteen degrees below normal. Still a severe cold snap.

Might global warming have tipped things “over the edge” in this case, and caused a superstorm where none would have existed otherwise? It’s possible. Possible. Not certain. We can’t say. Weather is an extremely complex system and it’s not possible to predict specific outcomes well in advance.

Hurricanes have always happened. They happened well before humans started burning fossil fuels and dramatically increasing the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

But that’s irrelevant. There’s plenty of evidence that global warming will make storms like Sandy more common. Whatever Sandy’s root causes, Sandy offers a preview of what will become increasingly common in a warming world — and the more warming, the more common such storms will be.

That, and not any claim that Sandy must have been caused by global warming, is the real lesson to take from this week’s news.

Published at 19:57 on 30 July 2012

If you’d accuse the average Seattleite of having a “suburban mindset” you’ll probably get a blank stare of confusion. Or perhaps indignation at having been given the ultimate insult. But face that same person with the possibility that his neighborhood of single-family detached homes, all on lots larger than 5,000 square feet, might soon get a slight bit more urban and dense, and watch the sense of outrage build; you might as well be delivering the same news to a resident of Phoenix or Orange County.

Exhibit A is this article in a recent Seattle Weekly, and particularly the responses to it. One would think all the ranting about Latinos being “illegals” might have been written by Joe Arpaio’s demographic in conservative Phoenix. No, this is what the typical Seattle liberal acts like when his suburban ideal is violated.

Look, I’ll grant that some of the houses being built are definitely over the top. If you go here and look at a gallery of them maintained by their opponents, you can see some examples of this. The houses at 6222 5th Ave NW and 5501 Kensington Pl. N definitely look shoehorned in (particularly the former).

But many of them are obviously being built on double lots. Take a look at the photos of 3954 SW Rose St., 151 N 78th St., and 1605 21st Ave., for example. Why did such houses have such large “side yards” like that, prior to the new construction? Because when they were built, their owners purchased the lot next door, and the two lots have sold as a package ever since, that’s why.

Turning a house built on a 10,000 square-foot lot with a very large side-yard into two houses on 5,000 square-foot lots (in a neighborhood of houses on such lots) is not “wedging” a new house into a neighborhood.

Obviously, doing things like building a three-story monstrosity on a tiny 1,200-square-foot lot is over the top, particularly when (unlike in the anomalously-large-side-yard case) nobody has the least inkling such a separate lot existed in the first place. A single-story 800-square-foot cottage would be fine there, and a reasonable set of regulations and design reviews could have limited new construction to something like that.

Unfortunately, a reasonable set of new regulations is the least likely outcome in all this. You only have to look to the gallery with all its hyperbole to understand that.

Or to look at Seattle today and see how a history of exclusionary zoning, pushed by homeowners who, by and large, act like insecure suburbanites instead of city dwellers, has pushed those who cannot afford or do not desire to live in detached single-family homes on generous lots to the least desirable and most compromised areas of the city.

Published at 13:48 on 29 July 2012

First off, I will have to say that I wince every time someone spouts off about the most recent heat wave (or hurricane, or tornado outbreak, or other episode of extreme weather) being obviously caused by global warming. No, it’s not. Extreme weather was happening naturally before the Industrial Revolution started changing the composition of the atmosphere. Its mere existence is evidence of nothing save the existence of extremes, and extremes always happen in any varying, natural phenomenon.

Of course, this cuts both ways: neither is the continued existence of cold snaps any definitive proof against global warming. But I digress.

Anyhow, it’s not surprising that one of local meterologist Cliff Mass‘s recurring themes is poking holes in such claims. Such hole-poking is well and fine. Up to a point. Because, of course, there’s far more stupid and dangerous behavior going on with respect to global warming than some misinformed comments made by advocates of doing something about it.

Sure, it’s fun to play Devil’s Advocate, and even useful to the debate for a healthy measure of same to go on, but there’s also this thing called scientific responsibility. And given what the downsides of continued, unabated modification of the atmosphere to future generations are, responsibility is not evidenced by being obsessed with debunking one sides’ errors, particularly when that side, flawed though it may be, is the one advocating for action to address the issue.

The real evidence for global warming looks more like this:

Extremes of cold are still happening, but global warming has loaded the dice. Not so much as in Krugman’s claim of 4 sides in favor of heat, 1 normal, 1 cool, but loaded nonetheless. Extremes of heat now really do happen more frequently than those of cold.

For starters, it would help if Mass discussed evidence like this more often.

Published at 09:36 on 12 May 2012

The ease at which information can easily be distorted by propagandists is illustrated by this article, which exhibits confusion about two distinct statements, which the author erroneously assumes are contradictory.

The first statement, made by MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel, is that it is not possible to point to global warming as the cause for any one outbreak of abnormally warm weather. The second, made by NASA climatologist James E. Hansen, is that there is statistical evidence that global warming is already making outbreaks of abnormally warm weather significantly more common than they used to be.

There is no contradiction between the two, because Emanuel’s claim is about specific events and Hansen’s is about overall trends. It’s just the sort of claims one would expect each to make: Emanuel specializes in studying short-term phenomena, while Hansen specializes in long-term ones. That’s the difference between meteorology and climatology.

It’s like a set of dice loaded to make snake eyes come up more frequently: when a roll comes up double ones, it is not possible to say if the loaded dice are responsible for this outcome or not. (Fair dice sometimes do come up snake eyes, after all.)

This is also why a record cold spell is by itself no evidence against global warming. Even loaded dice will occasionally land on sides not favored by the loading.

Published at 10:35 on 26 January 2012

The up to 34% greater efficiency cited for them is a bogus number if you live in a cool climate where the energy you consume heating a home is significantly more than that spent cooling it.

Most of the heat energy wasted by a tankless heater literally goes down the drain. In contrast, most of the energy “wasted” by a tanked heater escapes to the environment around the tank. Since the heater is almost always in an interior space, this means that during the heating season, that energy is not, in fact, “wasted” at all — every therm of natural gas a tanked heater ends up spending on heating its surrounding environment is a therm of natural gas the furnace does not have to consume toward that same end.

If you live someplace like Texas where energy consumed on cooling dominates, then it’s the other way ’round, of course. But for those of us that live in cool climates (I live in a place where the vast majority of residences do not even have air conditioning), the efficiency gains of tankless heaters (which we have already established are mostly bogus even without this latest insight) are perforce inflated.

Published at 12:49 on 23 January 2012

Let’s do a little math.

First, Wikipedia states that a navy shower can use “as little as” 3 gallons of water, while leaving the water running can use “as much as” 60 gallons. So, in the best case (this is important), a Navy shower uses 1/20th the water as leaving the water running.

Second, according to the US Green Building Council, a tankless heater can heat water as much as 34 percent (again, another best case) more efficiently than a conventional tanked one.

Now, let’s give tankless heaters the benefit of the doubt here: We’ll compare the two best cases, and then weight the comparison in favor of tankless heaters by ignoring how much more water one sends down the drain while adjusting the temperature.

In other words, we will assume that we’re heating 20 times the water, but doing it 34% more efficiently:

20 ÷ 1.34 = 14.9253

That’s right, a tankless heater is nearly fifteen times more wasteful than an old-fashioned tank-style heater if you’re already used to taking a navy shower (as I am; in fact, I prefer it). I’ll repeat that: fifteen times. Not fifteen percent more wasteful, fifteen times. An order of magnitude.

If you’re not already taking navy showers, you can therefore save far more energy just by changing your usage habits than you can by changing your water heater (and I’m not even including the energy cost of manufacturing and transporting the new water heater in this).

For other uses, the wastage isn’t so great. For rinsing off a few dishes, I figure I’m maybe using three times the water. Even then, it doesn’t look so good for a tankless heater:

3 ÷ 1.34 = 2.2388

Wow, just slightly over twice as wasteful. I’m so… impressed.

Given the choice, I’ll stick with with an old-fashioned tank, thank you very much.

Published at 11:19 on 23 January 2012

Tankless water heaters probably do not save much energy, either. And may actually even waste it [update: they almost certainly do, see next article] compared to conventional tanked heaters. In short, they are generally overhyped.

After having coped with one for a little over six months, I think I am qualified to make those statements.

When I first took a shower in my current residence (which has such a heater), I was astounded at how much water I had to first run down the drain before it got the least bit warm. For a moment, I even thought the water heater had just broke, then I realized that not only does a tankless heater have to warm the pipe between the fixture and the heater (the reason you have to let the water run with any type of water heater), it also has to first warm up the water heater itself.

Then I learned to my shock that one can’t start showering and incrementally adjust the temperature as the pipe warms up further. Tankless heaters operate in a very delicate and easily-disturbed equilibrium. Adjust the flow of either the hot or the cold water, and you disturb that equilibrium, and it takes almost as long to regain it as it did for the water to get warm in the first place. So you have to let more water run down the drain — heated water, this time — until the hot water running down the drain has reached its maximum piping-hot temperature.

Then you start adjusting the temperature. This takes significantly longer than doing so with a tanked heater, because each time you touch a faucet, you disturb that delicate equilibrium and have to wait for the temperature to stabilize again (typically it will oscillate after you make a change). During that time, you send even more heated water down the drain. If you don’t, you will find yourself being scalded or frozen by a temperature fluctuation.

And forget about taking a “navy shower” to save water. If you shut the water off to lather up, you have just destroyed the delicate equilibrium you spent so much time and water creating. You’re better off just letting the water run and pushing the shower head to the side so more heated water gets sent down the drain while you soap up, because that will waste less water and energy than starting the process from scratch again.

And it’s not just during showers. Want to quickly wash a few dishes? You’ll send several times more cold water down the drain than with a tanked heater. Going to wash another dish after that? Better just leave the water running, because if you turn it off you’ll destroy the equilibrium, the water will get cold in the middle of that second dish, and you’ll waste at least as much water letting it run and warm up again as you would if you didn’t turn the faucet off.

Somehow, I have the sneaking suspicion that the calculations which show tankless heaters saving energy don’t take into account how the different usage patterns they force cause so much water (mostly heated water, at that) to get sent down the drain, unused.

If I were building a “green” house, I’d focus on other solutions, like super-insulating the water tank and putting it on a timer, to minimize energy usage. I bet it wouldn’t be hard to beat a tankless heater with such strategies, simply because I’d be sending far less hot water down the drain.

Published at 17:56 on 22 January 2012

When snow melts here, it tends to melt fast compared to more continental climates. Our winter mildness is driven by marine influence, not ample sunshine. When temperatures normalize, they stay above freezing day and night. Our thaws don’t happen incrementally in daylight hours only, they go on 24/7, often with winds and rain to expedite the process. There is also no thick layer of frozen ground to slow down the melting.

Because the ground seldom freezes deeply, the grass is green when the snow melts. I remember I once had a dream while in my teens of snow melting to reveal green grass, and I thought it unrealistic, because everyplace I had lived where it could snow always had brown grass in the winters. Not here.

Published at 19:28 on 19 January 2012

It keeps going, and going, and going…

Last night’s freezing drizzle intensified through the night, becoming mixed with sleet. From 1/3 to 1/2 inch of ice accumulated, depending on whether you measure it on twigs or on flat surfaces. Around 2:15 this afternoon, the sleet changed back to light snow.

Sometimes, it’s hard to forecast when the arctic air will finally get scoured out, and apparently this is one of those times. I really think it’s going to end tonight or tomorrow morning, though: the outflow winds that have been feeding us cold air from the Fraser Gorge via Bellingham have really collapsed this evening.

But sometimes storm systems have a way of reviving declining arctic outflows: arctic air has high pressure, and storms have low pressure, and the wind blows from high to low. However, it’s noteworthy that this is the first time the northerly winds have abated since this storm began (they never did abate yesterday evening, which made me doubt that I’d awaken to a thaw this morning).

The mild marine air always wins in the end, the only question is when.

It’s still been a surprisingly tenacious and strong storm for a place with a mild marine climate, even if the snow totals weren’t as whoppingly huge for us as forecast (though they certainly were whopping to the south).

Published at 17:35 on 18 January 2012

The forecasters really couldn’t make up their minds on this one. First it was supposed to be the storm that ends this current cold spell by dragging the normal mild marine air back. Then, it was supposed to start as snow but turn to mild rain and end the cold spell anyhow. Then the amount of initial snow went up to amounts that would create a slushy mess when the rain came. Then it was supposed to be all snow, huge amounts of it.

Those huge amounts of snow went south (Chehalis, a lowland town that gets no more snow on average than Seattle does, got a whopping 17 inches). We ended up with a little over 4 inches here in West Seattle, still a very significant accumulation for the lowlands.

It all wound up as forecast around 2PM. Or so I thought. I woke from the nap I took after my walk in the woods, and looked out at a puzzling sight: tiny little drops on the outside of the window, a haze in in the distance as if it was still snowing, but no flakes falling and no evidence of the least bit of melting.

I went outside and the mystery was solved: the leaves on the laurel bush out front were becoming glazed with ice. Freezing drizzle. It’s sundown and there’s now a distinct crust on the snow, and the tree branches are making that creaking sound in the wind that they do when encrusted.

Up until this week, I had been worried that this was going to be a dud of a La Niña winter. No longer.