The Climate in Seattle is Changing

By Brian Abbey

My name is Brian Abbey, and I was born and raised in Seattle. Well, Burien, actually, and I spent a lot of time in Leavenworth. But I’ve lived in and around Seattle my whole life, where it rains, on average, 155.3 days per year and where we have 152 days of sunshine per year. You can learn a lot through statistics and averages. The average annual high temperature is 59º and the low is 45º and we have 2,019 average hours of sunshine per year. You can learn other things too, like that it doesn’t get real hot for real long, and eventually it always, and I mean always rains. But there are some things that statistics can’t tell you in any meaningful way. Like the fact that this year it got real hot, hotter than I can ever remember. And it was dryer than I can remember it ever being. And as these extreme weather events keep playing out, people start conflating a heat wave with climate change. Now, I’m not an atmospheric scientist, but I do have a degree in environmental studies, and I’ve studied these things enough to know that, well, it’s time we have the talk. See, I think most people out there don’t quite understand what the climate is, why it’s changing, or really why it should even matter to them. And while I’ve never been good with analogies, I think that under the circumstances we need a better way to convey the urgency with which we have to ask about climate change. What it comes down to is this: we have to make changes, or the earth will make them for us. For all the Brian Abbey’s and Joe Smith’s of the world.

First let’s think about climate as a system. No, let’s rewind even further than that. First, what even is the climate? I hear people saying things like, “I have a foot of climate change in my backyard ”, after a big snow. Well, I thought that the stupidity of a statement like that was obvious, but apparently it’s not — you shouldn’t fault people for not knowing what they don’t know. So maybe it’s better to ask what climate isn’t. Well, it isn’t the snow in your back yard any more than it is the most recent hurricane or heat wave. Anybody who claims that a weather event is evidence of climate change — or the lack thereof — should be viewed with skepticism. While we can point to repeated patterns of abnormal weather as examples of what a changing climate might look like, any single weather event is just that — the weather.

OK so let’s get back to the question of climate. Think about climate like personality, or temperament. The earth has a personality, and climate is one of the ways that it expresses that personality over time. Climate is the tendency for weather patterns to behave in certain fairly predictable ways on the whole. Like in Seattle, you know it’s gonna rain at least a little bit somewhere around 200 days a year. Ever really going to get more than 100°, never going to get much colder than about 25°F. Anybody that has lived in Seattle for the last hundred years or so can attest to these things being fairly true. Does that mean it never rains for less than 200 days? No, of course not. Does it mean that Seattle probably hasn’t been a desert in the recent past? Yeah that’s a safe assumption.

Part of the reason the general public has such a difficult time understanding and believing that climate change is a real threat to humanity is because it can seem like there is enough natural variability to make long-term predictions pretty difficult. And in a sense, they would be right. But let’s go back to that analogy. Sat you have a kid. The kid starts growing up and you notice that they have a certain temperament. They have a tendency to get really grumpy when they’re hungry, they have a tendency to like to play by themselves, they have a tendency to have a long attention span and like to figure things out on their own.

There are all sorts of ways that temperament plays out with a person. Within that temperament, there’s all sorts of natural variability. You can have a very good natured kid who has bad days, even bad weeks. Your kid will go through growth spurts, hormone changes etc. that will affect their mood, sometimes drastically. You might even have a stretch of months where you wonder if it’s the same kid that you knew two or three years ago. But then eventually, that temperament comes back to baseline. Because you haven’t done anything drastic to the inputs. That kid still has a stable home, their basic needs are being met, from social needs to nutritional needs to activity needs. They get enough exercise, enough food, enough sleep. As long as those basic needs and environmental inputs are steady, the kids temperament shouldn’t change drastically. Even though their mood might shift significantly in the short term. You get the picture.

Well, think of the earth like a really big, really old human being. The earth has been around for a long, long time, and we like to think about the history of change on the earth happening on what we refer to as geologic time scales. Meaning very, very slowly and over a very looooonnnng period of time. The earth has at times been very hot, and at times been like a big snowball. It has natural stabilizing features that help bring it to an equilibrium, which has been really a defining feature that has helped nurture life on earth as we know it.

Without that natural balance, species would have to be much more resilient and adaptable to change, which would mean smaller animals with shorter lifespans would be preferred, where genetic variations that adapt to changing conditions and drive evolution would happen more quickly. Larger, longer living organisms would be at a distinct disadvantage, because while they may have been born adapted to a particular set of conditions, once those conditions change, they may be only halfway through their life cycle and have had only one or two offspring. Whereas a small rodent may be on the 30th or 40th generation of offspring, and their offspring will have slowly shown preference to those individuals who showed adaptations that benefitted them in the new conditions.

But what we see on earth is that in the last few million years, humans have come along and been relatively stable in their growing distribution across the planet. We can use science to look to the ice cores and take sediment samples to get snapshots of what the climate was like over time. And what we see is that for the last 650,000 years or so in which we have fairly accurate data, that the climate hasn’t varied all that much. We’ve had slight dips in and out of what we call ice ages, but ultimately the climate doesn’t have to shift all that much to make that a reality. But the thing to remember is that those ice ages took place over millennia — thousands and thousands of years.

Long enough for the temperature to change slowly and for successive generations to slowly adapt and change with the changing temperatures and conditions. Keep in mind that 1º Celsius (~2º Fahrenheit) doesn’t sound like much of a change, and it isn’t. But we’re talking about an average change over the course of a year. Think about that in terms of a human temperature. That would be like going from a healthy temperature of 98.6º to a fever of 100.6º every day for the rest of your life. In some places, that amount of change is the difference between snow and ice forming and not. Between glaciers melting and not. Between some species living, and some dying.

So to get a better understanding of all of this, let’s start with the atmosphere and work our way down. But first, and I will say this again, loudly for the people in the back and because it bears repeating: CLIMATE IS NOT WEATHER. It is not the snow storm you had in April or the balmy weather on New Years day. I live in Seattle where we just had 19 inches of snow over a weekend and I laughed heartily at all my conservative friends' jokes about how they had a foot of global warming in their yard. Haha. Ha. Ha.

So, what is the climate? So ya, back to that climate-is-like-personality analogy again. So to repeat then, climate is what the weather is like over long periods of time, and weather is your mood today. You would say your friend is smart and kind and has good judgment, and that is like the climate. But last night she went to a bachelorette party and today she is hungover and cranky — that’s weather. But what about snowstorms and cold snaps that last for weeks or even months? We’ll get to that. First, how it works.

Solar radiation is the warm energy of the sun. It reaches the planet and is absorbed by dark areas like the ocean and pavement, and is reflected by light areas like glaciers and your white t-shirt. The relative measure of infrared radiation that is captured is expressed by the term albedo. As glaciers melt, the albedo of the planet decreases, increasing the amount of solar radiation that is absorbed into the earth’s mantle and trapped as energy in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases.

A greenhouse is a place we can grow food because it utilizes glass or plastic to amplify and contain the incoming heat. Greenhouse gases do the same thing on a large scale, and they are a good thing in general. Greenhouse gases are why we have a warm planet, and why you’d freeze your tail off on Mars. It’s not speculation, it’s science.

So there are a few of these greenhouse gases, and one in particular that gets a real bad rap - CO2. This is the part where I spare you my CO2 rap song. You’re welcome. WEll, CO2, or carbon dioxide, is a by-product of the burning or decomposition of carbon based life forms. This happens when a wildfire burns, or when we burn oil and gasoline. It’s also a by-product of natural systems like forest fires, and is necessary for plant life. Scientists know in pretty good detail the relationship between CO2 and temperatures over the last 600,000 years or so, because they have fancy pants tools and measure core samples from ice so old you wouldn’t dare put it in your cocktail. Gross.

So solar radiation enters the atmosphere, some is reflected and some is absorbed and leaks out more slowly as infrared radiation. But the insidious thing about the system is the positive feedback loops. Not positive like “hey, we’re doing great!”, but as in you point the microphone at the speaker and it obliterates your ear drums almost instantly.

Let’s say snow has a reflective albedo of 1.0, and a black rock is 0. Sea water is about.1. As glaciers melt and the surface temperatures warm, more dark colored ocean and land is exposed, which absorbs solar radiation. As ice disappears, land and ocean warms faster. And what about those anomalies that seem to happen with growing regularity, like a foot of snow in Seattle, or ten inches of rain in a storm? Remember back to science class about air temperature and moisture? Warmer temps cause increasing evaporation and also increase the capacity for the air to hold more moisture befure reaching full humidity which precipitates rainfall. So, climate change models predict not just warmer air, but changing precipitation models where wet places (coasts) get wetter and dry places get dryer.

In addition to disruptions in the atmosphere, the addition of growing amounts of solar energy in the ocean are disrupting and changing ancient global deep ocean currents that are powered by differences in ocean temperature and salinity from the equator to the poles. THese deep ocean currents are responsible for innumerable processes, from species migration to transport of food and nutrients between the poles and the equator. Think of it like deep sea escalators that move materials and supplies from where they are in abundance to where they are in short supply. These currents also influence global climate.

So the question is, why is this a big deal? I mean, scientists are estimating a few degrees celsius warming, it can’t be that big of a deal, right? Well, this is where things get tricky.

First, and most importantly, all plants and animals have native ranges to which they are endemic. Their biological systems have over time evolved and adapted to an often narrow range of climatic variables — namely temperature and precipitation. They can withstand a certain amount of hot or cold and a certain abundance or absence of water. Much like humans start withering above say a hundred degrees, so do plants and all manner of animal life when these variables get outside the norm.

Take salmon, for example. Salmon are endemic to a particular river, so there are dozens of biologically unique salmon runs that have over time adapted to very specific conditions unique to their home river. In some cases, salmon cannot survive if water temps fluctuate more than about 2ºC during their downstream migration or upstream spawning. Such a small variation in temperature, particularly in the more vulnerable, lower-flow rivers could be catastrophic. And this is just one species. Not all species are as vulnerable as salmon, but many are.

Climate change is already impacting agriculture as well. In addition to the direct threat posed by climate change, there are indirect threats as well. All over the world, spring is a sign that it’s time to open up shop and dust off the cobwebs of winter. And all over the world, spring is coming earlier and barreling into hot, dry summers. The premature appearance of spring is disrupting delicate cycles of timing for animals and insects alike.

Poor baby insects, wah! They’ll just evolve, right? Well, historically evolution has happened over what we call a geologic time scale. Meaning that as temperatures slowly shifted over tens or hundreds of thousands of years, which worked out to hundreds or thousands of generations, evolution had time to slowly select for the individuals that could withstand the changes. In the course of human-induced climate change, we are looking at having about a hundred years, or just a few generations. Some resilient species will weather the changes, and some likely won’t. I’m not gonna get all doomsday, but it’s worth noting that the scientific community at large thinks this is a pretty big deal, and I tend to perk my ears up when they all agree.

So, we’ve talked about CO2, but there is another culprit that is stinking up the climate, and that’s methan. We’re not fartin 'around, ti’s about 40X as potent as CO2. And where does it come from? Well, despite your cousin Benny’s reputation for letting one rip at the dinner table, the worst offenders are cows to fulfill our lust for milk and beef. They let out a lot of methane. And speaking of cows, they have a pretty massive environmental footprint, but we’ll come back to them.

So when cows aren’t ripping farts, where else does methane come from? So glad you asked. Way up in the frozen tundra, peat bogs that have been frozen in the ground for millenia are beginning to thaw and release massive amounts of methane. Remember the whole positive feedback loop thing? Whelp, this is part of it. The warmer it gets, the more of the peat bogs thaw, and the more methane is released, warming the atmosphere further. Ugh. We tried not to get sad. We really did. It was just the thought of it all. Those. Farts.

Ok. Moving on. To be continued in … Episode Two (coming soon)