I’m slowly cleaning up the tagging on the posts here. This will break a few links. I probably won’t catch all of them, so if you find one, let me know.
Figures Lie and Liars Figure: Heat Waves on the Rise
- Image via Wikipedia
If you’re new here, you might want to read the previous Figures Lie and Liars Figure posts, a public conversation on climate change between my skeptical aunt and myself.
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Heat, ma’am! it was so dreadful here, that I found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones. ~Sydney Smith, Lady Holland’s Memoir
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An EPA slideshow on climate change indicators says that
The frequency of heat waves in the United States decreased in the 1960s and 1970s, but has risen steadily since then. The percentage of the United States experiencing heat waves has also increased. The most severe heat waves in U.S. history remain those that occurred during the “Dust Bowl” in the 1930s, although average temperatures have increased since then.
My aunt’s response to this was
Horrific heat wave (dust bowl) of 30s is mentioned as if it was a one time short period, but then says heat waves decreased in 60s and 70s, so question is were there heat waves 30s, 40s, and 50s. Now heat waves on rise again after 70s; perhaps 20-30 year cycles?
My aunt wants to know if heat waves happen in predictable cycles – if they do, maybe we’re just in an upswing of that cycle and we can’t use increasing heat wave frequencies to bolster the case for climate change.
Image via Wikipedia
Let’s start with the definition of a heat wave. Everyone is familiar with heat waves – the dog days of summer – when for days or weeks at a time it’s so hot all you can do is lie naked in front of a fan and dream of shaded creeks, air conditioning, and ice cream. They aren’t just uncomfortable – they are one of the most deadly kinds of natural disasters. A widespread heatwave just this past summer caused problems from Boston to Shenyang and was particularly deadly (and expensive) in Russia. Different governments and agencies define heatwaves slightly differently. I’ll primarily use the one adopted by the EPA when they built their heat wave index:
a four-day period with an average temperature that would only be expected to occur once every 10 years, based on the historical record.
That definition and all of the data and graphs below (unless otherwise noted) are from the document linked from the Learn more link on the EPA heat wave indicator slide my aunt takes issue with.
If we want to know if heat waves occur in cycles, we need to look at heat waves over time. This graph shows heat waves in the continental 48 states over the last century:
"The index value for a given year could mean several different things. For example, an index value of 0.2 in any given year could mean that 20 percent of the recording stations experienced one heat wave; 10 percent of stations experienced two heat waves; or some other combina- tion of stations and episodes resulted in this value."
My aunt asks were there heat waves 30s, 40s, and 50s. Clearly, there were. The 1930s have a very high heat wave frequency. That spike in the 30s obscures the increasing trend in heat wave frequency since the 70s. It does answer my aunt’s question about cycles, though: in the United States, over the last century, there is no clear cycle of heat waves.
Climate change is a global phenomenon and the US is a small fraction of the planet. So, if we consider heat waves worldwide, what do we see?
"Observed trends (days per decade) for 1951 to 2003 in the frequency of extreme temperatures, defined based on 1961 to 1990 values, as maps for the ... 90th percentile: (c) warm nights and (d) warm days. Trends were calculated only for grid boxes that had at least 40 years of data during this period and had data until at least 1999. Black lines enclose regions where trends are significant at the 5% level. Below each map are the global annual time series of anomalies (with respect to 1961 to 1990). The red line shows decadal variations. Trends are significant at the 5% level for all the global indices shown. Adapted from Alexander et al. (2006)."
We can’t directly compare the world graphs to the US annual heat wave index graph because they cover different time periods and because one shows a heat wave index and the other shows extreme temperatures directly. The both show, however, that there is no apparent periodicity in heat waves at the time scale we’re looking at and that heat waves have become more common, especially since the 1970s.
The worldwide graph does something interesting – it separates out warm night and warm days. Extremely warm nights are increasing faster than extremely warm days. The additional information linked from the EPA slideshow shows that the same thing is happening in the US. And while the 1930s heat wave index for the US shows that it was very, very bad – certainly worse than the last thirty years – the frequency of extremely warm nights is now higher than it was even during the dustbowl.
Why are hot nights such a big deal? Think back to the last unbearably hot summer you experienced and how much you looked forward to evening or a thunderstorm for just a little break from the heat. I don’t have air conditioning even though daytime temperatures in the summer are usually in 80s. I’m rarely uncomfortable, though, because nights are in the 40s and 50s, even during the hottest part of the summer. Every evening, we open the windows and the house cools down. It doesn’t start to get uncomfortably warm until midday. If it didn’t cool down so much at night, I’d spend most of the summer sweaty, sleep deprived, and majorly cranky. Cooler night time temperatures provide major relief for people and other animals during heat waves. More hot nights make heat waves extra deadly.
You may wonder, if we’ve been pumping more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere through the entire time period these graphs show, why did we see a decline in heat waves in the 1960s and 1970s? The 60s and 70s were actually quite cool, but this doesn’t mean that climate change – in the warming direction – isn’t occurring. You see, greenhouse gases aren’t the only thing we’re dumping in the atmosphere. We’re also putting lots and lots of sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere, which can have a cooling effect on the climate. While they cooled things down in the 60s and 70s, warming has overwhelmed their effects since then.
ASIDE: Putting more sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere is a geoengineering proposal that’s gotten quite a lot of press. It could, in theory, buy us more time to get our act together in dealing with climate change. However, quite a few people (myself included) object to using the entire earth as an experiment, and the long list of potential and probably side effects (drought, ozone depletion, uglier skies, warming of other layers of the atmosphere, changing cloud formation, affecting sunlight diffusion to influence plant growth, interfering with solar energy production, pollution as sulfur is deposited, and uneven effects) is daunting.
So, to recap: Heat waves are dangerous natural phenomena that are becoming more frequent worldwide because of human activities, as predicted by climate change models.
Related articles
- Soil responsible for heat waves (physorg.com)
- From Snowstorms to Heat Waves, How Global Warming Causes Extreme Weather and Climate Instability (dandelionsalad.wordpress.com)
- Insurers Are 3rd to Get Nailed by Climate Change (planetsave.com)
- Munich Re warns of soaring climate change costs (businessgreen.com)
Gods’ games
Cover of Wyrd Sisters (Discworld Novels)
It would be a pretty good bet that the gods of a world like this probably do not play chess and indeed this is the case. In fact no gods anywhere play chess. They haven’t got the imagination. Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god’s idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.
From Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett
Flattr Update: Breaking Even and Accepting Donations
- Image via CrunchBase
I started using the microdonation service Flattr back in September. I like it better than advertising because it doesn’t clutter up websites with annoying ads and better than Paypal because it’s far more flexible (and principled). What do I mean by flexible? In addition to making one time microdonations through Flattr, you can subscribe and give microdonations for a specified number of months or you can donate a specific amount instead of giving a microdonation (a slice of your Flattr ‘pie’). It’s even possible to Flattr things in the flesh!
Image from Sita Sings the Blues. Image via Wikipedia
While I’m not exactly making big bucks on Flattr, I am doing a little better than breaking even: I give away 2 euro a month to support content I think is awesome (like Sita Sings the Blues), but I make a little more than that through microdonations on this blog. Considering that I only get about 40 visitors a day, I think that’s awesome. I imagine bigger sites do much better than a couple euros a month. Which brings me to the problem I’ve had with Flattr from the beginning – it still hasn’t been widely adopted by English sites. The blogs and news sites I read every day still don’t have Flattr, and neither do the artists, authors, or musicians I love.
The barrier to entry is very low – just 2 euro. Even if you choose not to keep using Flattr, the money is donated to charity, so you can at least walk away with the warm fuzzies. If you have ads on your website, I suggest replacing them with Flattr, especially if you’re a little blogger like me – I’ve made more in the 4 months I’ve been using Flattr than I ever have using Google ads or Amazon referrals.
Related articles
- Flattr Rolls Out Direct Donations, Wikileaks Likely To Benefit Greatly (techcrunch.com)
- Flattr micropayment app arrives in the Android Market (downloadsquad.switched.com)
- WikiLeaks continues to fund itself via tech startup Flattr (eu.techcrunch.com)
Grad school applications: stalled
I started today motivated about working on my grad apps, got frustrated with a cranky repairman, and then scrubbed my kitchen and installed a new blog theme. (Let me know if anything is broken please!) I’ve got about two hours before a friend comes over for dinner and a movie. I could read a few papers and outline some possible projects, but I’d rather practice Russian. Maybe I’ll give myself an hour for both?
Follicles
Doing something about migraines
Migraines get in my way. I’ve canceled on seeing the same person three times in the last week alone. Migraines don’t happen randomly – people with migraines have triggers. Some people have lots of triggers, some people have few. Some triggers are obvious and some are really hard to figure out. One thing that makes triggers so hard to figure out is that they’re additive. I think of them like rocks in a boat: get enough weight and the boat sinks.
From Flickr user StephenTaylor430
When the boat sinks, the migraine happens. I’ve talked mostly about barometric pressure here because that’s a big, big rock in my boat. But there are a lot of small rocks that can add up to a migraine for me: any change in my sleep, any overwhelming emotion, being tense, being hungry, eating the wrong thing, bright lights, loud noises, getting hot, getting cold, being cold and getting hot, perfumes and many chemical odors. Keeping as many rocks as possible out of my boat reduces the number of migraines I get.
Controlling and reducing triggers is a big part of David Buchholz’s Heal Your Headache. He totally gets how any sort of ‘surprise’ to a migraine sufferer’s body can be a rock in the boat.
“Regularity is key: you should sleep, eat and exercise on a regular basis. Get enough sleep each night, seven to eight hours or more, and don’t oversleep sporadically, as on weekends.”
Heal Your Headache has been recommended to me multiple times and seems to work very well for some people.
By recommended, I mean pushed on me by people who believe it like holy rollers believe the Bible.
The book recommends three main steps: 1) Stop taking abortive migraine medications 2) Follow the migraine diet 3) If you followed steps one and two, you should be healed, but here are some preventative medications you might consider otherwise.
I’ve done step one, and not by choice. I ran out of options. Narcotics don’t work anymore, barbiturates don’t work anymore, triptans make me violently ill, OTC migraine meds don’t work, aspirin/Tylenol/naproxen doesn’t do a damn thing, exciting cocktails of the previous don’t work/make me violently ill. Even when I could take narcotics or barbiturates, taking them more than once a week meant that I’d end up with rebound headaches.
Step two involves avoiding all these foods:
Click to embiggen. Also, I am not responsible for the overzealous highlighting. Or the ham helper. I am not sure what ham helper is, but I am pretty sure it is not food.
Imagine avoiding all those foods for FOUR MONTHS. I’ve done it, mostly. It sucks. This is a very restrictive diet and my bank account at the time restricted it further. I ended up getting MORE migraines because I wasn’t getting enough food with enough of what I need. Despite that, I’ve been good about reducing or cutting a lot of those things out of my diet in general (the preserved meats and fish, MSG, alcohol, processed foods, dairy). Still my attempts to identify dietary triggers have not been very successful.
Dietary triggers are tricky. One doctor told me food can affect headaches 3 days from when it’s eaten, which makes identification of a trigger pretty hard, especially when it isn’t enough to sink the migraine boat by itself. Theoretically, I could cut out a few things at a time, but it’s impossible to keep all other triggers constant during that period, so I’d never really know which migraines were influenced by weather/sleep/stress and which by food. But I know food influences my migraines. If I eat a piece of pizza, I’m usually alright. If I have pizza for 2 meals a day for 2 days, I will not be alright. With all the experimentation with my diet, I did develop a feel for some things that probably give me migraines – aged cheeses and dairy in general, processed or fast food, any alcohol, and too many pickled or preserved things (like hot okra pickles or sauerkraut). Maybe there are other things I eat on a regular basis that are dropping rocks in my boat, but I don’t think there’s much else I can do to discover them.
As for step three? I never found a preventative that even touched my migraines without some other significant decrease in my quality of life.
Some of the info in Heal Your Headache is great. A lot of it is complete bullshit. All in all, I agree with these assessments of Heal Your Headache:
His conviction that that people who “fail” with his approach likely don’t follow it to the letter or are attention-seekers is offensive. And, oh yeah, he dismisses scientific research that he doesn’t agree with and blames other doctors for making themselves not believe in food triggers. [The Daily Headache]
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I stopped drinking caffeine and alcohol and stopped eating chocolate, cheese, M.S.G., nuts, vinegar, citrus fruits, bananas, raspberries, avocados, onions, fresh bagels and donuts, pizza, yogurt, sour cream, ice cream, aspartame and all aged, cured, fermented, marinated, smoked, tenderized or nitrate-preserved meats.
For a couple of weeks, I was ravenously hungry, cranky, spaced out and vaguely, deprivedly resentful. But I felt, headache-wise, somewhat improved. I had six or nine migraines, but they were less severe. And, once I got used to it, I came to almost enjoy being on my diet, exploring my capacity for hunger and self-abnegation, obsessing over what foods I could eat, and how, and when. At the very least, the diet made my friends happy. Renouncing food, renouncing pills, is so often, in our time, seen as the right and righteous, pure and wholesome thing to do.
And then the headaches returned, with a vengeance. [Judith Warner]
Heal Your Headache‘s advice isn’t going to cure me. The few things that might help, I already know. I started reading Heal Your Headache knowing its claims were too good to be true, but I was still (pitifully) hopeful. One of the reasons books like Heal Your Headache appeal to people like me is that they give you something to do. If I know it won’t hurt me (and sometimes even when I don’t), I will try a migraine remedy just to feel like I have some control in a situation where I very clearly do not. It feels good to try to make my body better, even if I know it probably won’t work.
Which brings me to my next migraine-control attempt: The Complete Book of Ayurvedic Home Remedies. This book was sent to me several months ago by reader donutszenmom after an interesting conversation about Ayurveda. The recommendations aren’t backed up by science, but as long as they’re safe, I’ll try them!
First it suggests a pitta-pacifying diet. This is complicated, but less restrictive than the migraine diet recommended above. Still, I’m not ready to make a change that big yet. Instead I’ll try the ‘preventative breakfast,’ which is banana, ghee, sugar, and cardamom. Yum! I’ll also do the specific yoga postures and breathing exercises suggested; those shouldn’t hurt me and will almost certainly help with the muscle tension I tend to accumulate during a migraine.
Another recommendation is an herbal mixture composed of Asparagus racemosus, Bacopa monnier, Nardostachys grandiflora, and Cyperus rotundis. They seem relatively safe, at least alone and in small quantities. However, most of them have quite a number of badly researched secondary compounds. This means that they’re more likely to actually do something – helping or hurting hasn’t been studied in a controlled way. Who knows if I’m allergic to one of these things!? Plus, there’s the issue of finding the right extracts in accurately reported dosages with accurately reported ingredients. Ayurvedic drugs aren’t exactly regulated by the FDA. I think I’ll do the diet and dig around for a few more papers before I actually try this.
My FAVORITE remedy is called ‘a healing yawn’ (I hear you snickering!). It most certainly does not make my migraine go away, but it feels great and gets some fun weirded out looks on the bus. It’s definitely okay to try at home, too. Here’s how: pull down on your earlobes while you yawn. I have no idea why it’s so soothing for me, but I won’t complain.
I’ll report back on the preventative breakfast in a few weeks.