Trump Nudges Global Climate-Change Politics to the Right - The Atlantic

Without Visionary Leadership and a Global Effort Homo Sapiens future looks exceedingly bleak

At a basic level, this pattern holds up, well, everywhere. Every country except the United States supports the Paris Agreement on climate change. But no major developed country is on track to meet its Paris climate goals, according to the Climate Action Tracker, an independent analysis produced by three European research organizations. Even Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom—where right-wing governments have made combatting climate change a national priority—seem likely to miss their goals.

Simply put: This kind of failure, writ large, would devastate Earth in the century to come. The world would blow its stated goal of limiting atmospheric temperature rise. Heatwaves might regularly last for six punishing weeks, sea levels could soar by feet in a few short decades, and certain fragile ecosystems—like the delicate Arctic permafrost or the kaleidoscopic plenty of coral reefs—would disappear from the planet entirely. Read More

“Hothouse Earth” Co-Author: The Problem Is Neoliberal Economics

BY SHIFTING to a “wartime footing” to drive a rapid shift toward renewable energy and electrification, humanity can still avoid the

apocalyptic

future laid out in the much-discussed “hothouse earth” paper, a lead author of the paper told The Intercept. One of the biggest barriers to averting catastrophe, he said, has more to do with economics than science.

When journal papers about climate change make headlines, the news usually isn’t good. Last week was no exception, when the so-called hothouse earth paper, in which a team of interdisciplinary Earth systems scientists warned that the problem of climate change may be even worse than we thought, made its news cycle orbit. (The actual title of the paper, a commentary published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, is “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.”)

Coverage of the paper tended to focus on one of its more alarming claims, albeit one that isn’t new to climate researchers: that a series of interlocking dynamics on Earth — from melting sea ice to deforestation — can feed upon one another to accelerate warming and climate impacts once we pass a certain threshold of warming, even after humans have stopped pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The best chance we have for staying below that catastrophic threshold is to cap warming at around 2 degrees Celsius, the target enshrined in the Paris Agreement.

That’s all correct and plenty daunting. Yet embedded within the paper is a finding that’s just as stunning: that none of this is inevitable, and one of the main barriers between us and a stable planet — one that isn’t actively hostile to human civilization over the long term — is our economic system. Read More

Worst-case global warming predictions are the most accurate, say climate experts

Current predictions of climate change may significantly underestimate the speed and severity of global warming, according to a new study.

Reappraisal of the models climate scientists use to determine future warming has revealed that less optimistic estimates are more realistic.

The results suggest that the Paris Climate Agreement, which aims to keep global average temperatures from rising by 2C, may be overly ambitious.

“Our study indicates that if emissions follow a commonly used business-as-usual scenario, there is a 93 per cent chance that global warming will exceed 4C by the end of this century,” said Dr Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, who co-authored the new study.

This likelihood is an increase on past estimates, which placed it at 62 per cent. https://goo.gl/5jgsrd

Not if the Seas Rise, but When and How High

Once you’ve read an excellent book about climate change, which Jeff Goodell’s “The Water Will Come” most certainly is, you can never unremember the facts. Elected officials may be busy arguing about whether global warming is real. But most scientists are having other arguments entirely — about whether danger is imminent or a few decades off; about whether our prospects are dire or merely grim.
“Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity,” Goodell writes. “It will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine.”
Goodell has little trouble imagining it. He opens “The Water Will Come” with a fictional hurricane whipping through Miami in 2037. It sweeps the Art Deco buildings of South Beach off their foundations, disgorges millions of gallons of raw sewage into Biscayne Bay and eats the last of the city’s beaches. Thousands scramble for bottled water dropped by the National Guard. Zika and dengue fever start to bloom (so much moisture, so many mosquitoes). Out rush the retirees and glamour pusses; in rush the lawyers and slumlords. Within decades, the place is swallowed whole by the ocean. What was once a vibrant city is now a scuba-diving destination for intrepid historians and disaster tourists.
The whole scenario seems indecently feasible by the book’s end.
After this year’s calamitous flooding in Houston and the Caribbean, “The Water Will Come” is depressingly well-timed, though I’m guessing all good books about this subject will be from now on. Political time now lags behind geological time: If we don’t take dramatic steps to prepare for the rising seas, hundreds of millions could be displaced from their homes by the end of the century, and the infrastructure fringing the coast, valued in the trillions of dollars, could be lost.
Unfortunately, human beings are uniquely ill-suited to prepare for disasters they cannot sense or see. “We have evolved to defend ourselves from a guy with a knife or an animal with big teeth,” Goodell writes, “but we are not wired to make decisions about barely perceptible threats that gradually accelerate over time.”
So we stick our heads in the sand. Until the sand disappears, anyway.
https://goo.gl/8wuqjb

Lake Catalina Is On The Verge Of Releasing Up To 9 Billion Gallons Of Water

Lake Catalina Is On The Verge Of Releasing Up To 9 Billion Gallons Of Water

Scientists recently revealed the catastrophic history of Lake Catalina, which appears primed once again to outburst billions of gallons of freshwater. Through satellite images, researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark pieced together four massive outburst floods over the past 50 years.

The satellite photos show the outbursts of fresh water took place between 1966 and 2012 when ice that dammed Lake Catalina in Greenland failed. The outbursts of water are estimated to have been between 6.7 and 9 billion gallons of water released in one instance. Now, it appears the lake is primed for another catastrophic release of water in the next couple years.

The next outburst is certainly building and may happen as soon as 2018-19 - Aslak Grinsted, head of the research team.

The Lake Catalina is situated on Renland, a long and narrow island in Scoresbysund Fjord in East Greenland. What is equally as surprising as the amount of water released, is that the events were previously unknown by the scientific community and locals living in the area.

(https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2017/08/23/lake-catalina-verge-releasing-9-billion-gallons-water/

When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job

In the photo: Glaciologist Jason Box, left, at work on the Petermann Glacier on Greenland’s northwest coast, which has lost mass at an accelerated pace in recent years. Box and his family left Ohio State for Europe a couple years ago, and he is relieved to have escaped America’s culture of climate-change denial.

Jason Box

The incident was small, but Jason Box doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s been skittish about the media since it happened. This was last summer, as he was reading the cheery blog posts transmitted by the chief scientist on the Swedish icebreaker Oden, which was exploring the Arctic for an international expedition led by Stockholm University. “Our first observations of elevated methane levels, about ten times higher than in background seawater, were documented … we discovered over 100 new methane seep sites…. The weather Gods are still on our side as we steam through a now ice-free Laptev Sea….”

As a leading climatologist who spent many years studying the Arctic at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State, Box knew that this breezy scientific detachment described one of the nightmare long-shot climate scenarios: a feedback loop where warming seas release methane that causes warming that releases more methane that causes more warming, on and on until the planet is incompatible with human life. And he knew there were similar methane releases occurring in the area. On impulse, he sent out a tweet.

“If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we’re f’d.”

The tweet immediately went viral, inspiring a series of headlines:

CLIMATOLOGIST SAYS ARCTIC CARBON RELEASE COULD MEAN “WE’RE FUCKED.”

CLIMATE SCIENTIST DROPS THE F-BOMB AFTER STARTLING ARCTIC DISCOVERY.

CLIMATOLOGIST: METHANE PLUMES FROM THE ARCTIC MEAN WE’RE SCREWED.

Box has been outspoken for years. He’s done science projects with Greenpeace, and he participated in the 2011 mass protest at the White House organized by 350.org. In 2013, he made headlines when a magazine reported his conclusion that a seventy-foot rise in sea levels over the next few centuries was probably already “baked into the system.” Now, with one word, Box had ventured into two particularly dangerous areas. First, the dirty secret of climate science and government climate policies is that they’re all based on probabilities, which means that the effects of standard CO2 targets like an 80 percent reduction by 2050 are based on the middle of the probability curve. Box had ventured to the darker possibilities on the curve’s tail, where few scientists and zero politicians are willing to go. More

 

©

Antarctica's ice collapse threatens metres of sea level rise within decades

Scientists know that if Antarctica's ice sheets and glaciers collapse, sea levels could rise 5 metres. But the idea that it will take 200 years to happen is based on a linear model, writes Dady Cherry. In fact, the process is exponential - and could take place 'within decades'.

We conclude that this sector of West Antarctica is undergoing a marine ice sheet instability that will significantly contribute to sea level rise in decades to come.

Imagine further that a thick layer of ice covers, not only the surface of the island that lies above the sea but also an extensive portion of the perimeter that is beneath the sea.

The peaks are higher above sea level than on any continent. In winter, the sea freezes because temperatures drop to less than -80 degrees Celsius (-112 degrees Farenheight), and the island's area grows to about 10 million square miles.

In summer when some of the ice melts, the ice cover remains on average more than a mile thick, although the overall surface area of the island shrinks to about 5 million square miles. Even in summer, however, the island is still larger than Europe or Australia. It is Antarctica, and it is impossible to imagine.

When glaciers no longer rest on bedrock, they are doomed

So let us instead consider an island that is a large glacier with a thick cover of ice that extends outward, well beyond its land area. The island is shaped roughly like an infinity symbol, with the right (east) side much larger than the left (west).

The west side is really a peninsula and archipelago that share a common bedrock, but this is invisible because of the ice cover. What we can see is that even at the perimeter, where there is no land above sea level, there is ice. In some places, the ice reaches down, well beneath the water surface, all the way to the bedrock.

This situation is unstable, because in principle, the mass of ice that is beneath the sea and in continuous contact with liquid water should eventually melt. When it does, this initially leaves an overhanging shelf of ice over the water at the island's perimeter.

Being less dense than water, this shelf will want to float up and, given enough time, will eventually break away from the more interior ice that is pinned to land above sea level. Indeed, about 40% of Antarctica's perimeter consists of such ice shelves. In another 40% of the perimeter, the ice cover reaches all the way down to the bedrock.

An uncomfortable equilibrium is coming to an end

Island, ice and sea have coexisted for millennia in an uncomfortable equilibrium. In particular, the sea temperatures have not grown sufficiently warm to erode the ice edge irreversibly.

Furthermore, the mass of ice on the surface has remained relatively constant, with the seasonal flows of water out to sea in the summer being replaced by deposits of ice in winter.

The ice shelves have not thinned sufficiently to become so weak that they would snap and float away out to sea. This was all before the one-degree Celsius warming in the Earth's surface since around 1980.

Currently, the warmer seawater is eroding the island's submerged perimeter of ice. Simultaneously, the warmer air is also melting the ice cover at such an accelerated rate that it cannot be entirely replaced in the winters.

The process is irreversible

Once both kinds of erosion become irreversible, meaning that no net ice is replaced, the ice mass will shrink and become more and more bare, in a process that will accelerate out of control until the ice appears suddenly to vanish.

This is more or less the story that Eric Rignot and his colleagues reported about West Antarctica in a Geophysical Research Letters article that was accepted for publication on May 12, 2014.

They used satellite-based radar interferometry to map the edges of a series of glaciers that drain into a large bay called the Amundsen Sea Embayment, and combined their data with the results of other kinds of surveys.

Beating a rapid retreat

They discovered that between 1992 and 2011:

• Thwaites Glacier retreated 8.7 miles (14 km) at its core and zero to six miles (1 to 9 km) at its edges,
• Haynes Glacier retreated 6 miles (10 km) at its edges,
• Smith / Kohler Glacier retreated about 22 miles (35 km), and its ice shelf is barely pinned to the surface.
• Pine Island Glacier retreated 19 miles (31 km) at its center and snapped and detached from the ground.

All these retreats occurred mostly between 2005 to 2009. The authors note that they must have had a common cause and that the most reasonable explanation is the general warming of the ocean. They further explain that there is no natural land mass to prevent the movement of the massive glaciers out to sea. They conclude:

"The retreat is proceeding along fast-flowing, accelerating sectors that are thinning, become bound to reach floatation and un-ground from the bed.

"We find no major bed obstacle upstream of the 2011 grounding lines that would prevent further retreat of the grounding lines farther south.

"We conclude that this sector of West Antarctica is undergoing a marine ice sheet instability that will significantly contribute to sea level rise in decades to come."

In other words, the disappearance of West Antarctic ice is well under way, and it is irreversible.

The melting is exponential, not linear

It is notable that this research was done under difficult circumstances. For example, the authors write that, since 2001, the ERS-2 satellite has operated without its gyroscopes, and "This made it difficult to control the antenna pointing ... ".

They further observe that "In July 2011, ERS-2 terminated its mission after 16 years of services, far exceeding its planned operational lifespan."

In addition, they make a point of acknowledging "two anonymous reviewers for their comments." Possibly, the report was delayed, and some of its more frightening arguments had to be removed before publication.

In a later publication for the general public, Rignot stressed that the estimate of 200 years for the Radmunsen sea collapse, which has been repeated again and again in the press, is based on the melting continuing at its current rate.

This we know to be impossible because the melting is an exponential process that has been accelerating all the time and will continue to accelerate even more.

How long before sea rise is catastrophic?

The acceleration is driven, among other things, by an accelerated warming of the atmosphere and sea surface, continued expansion of the ozone hole, strengthening of currents that bring greater masses of warm waters from the tropics to Antarctica, weakening of the ice shelves due to accelerated melting of the surface ice, weakening of the attachment of the ice below sea level due to an accelerated erosion, and decreasing reflectivity of the Earth.

With regard to climate change, again and again, exponential processes have been treated as if they would develop linearly, despite scientists knowing quite well that they would not. Consider for example, a storm that is approaching your house from six miles away.

The storm is currently moving at five miles per hour, but it is expected to double its speed with every new mile. Do you make sure to have cover within one hour and 12 minutes, or within about 22 minutes?

Again and again, scientists have done the equivalent of feigning surprise when their timelines, based on a completely bogus linearity, have turned out to be too long. Things have gone much too far for us to continue to play such numbers' games.

West Antarctic ice sheet could raise sea levels 5m 'within decades'

Rignot blames carbon emissions, which have tripled since the Kyoto Protocol, for the current state of affairs, and he categorically says that the collapse of the ice cover from "the Amundsen sea sector of West Antarctica [is] unstoppable, with major consequences - it will mean that sea levels will rise one metre [more than 3 feet] worldwide.

"What's more, its disappearance will likely trigger the collapse of the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which comes with a sea level rise of between three and five metres [10 to more than 16 feet]. Such an event will displace millions of people worldwide."

The sea-level rise of 10 to 16 feet will come in decades, rather than 200 years. It will submerge essentially every port city in the world, including Guangzhou, Mumbai, Shanghai, Ho Chi Minh City, Kolkata, Osaka-Kobe, Alexandria, New York, New Orleans, Miami, and indeed all of South Florida.

This will likely displace over 300 million people, many of them in countries that have equated development with movement of the majority of their populations to low-elevation coastal zones in port cities.

What other impacts will follow?

The displacement and homelessness from the changes in sea level might be the least of humanity's problems. More

 

© 2014

Global Climate Will Cause Abrupt World Changes

If nations ignore the imminent problem of the increasing global climate, it will cause the world to endure abrupt changes that one single country is not prepared to handle.

Food and water supplies will be interrupted, the economy will diminish, millions of people will be displaced and civil unrest and violence will be triggered. The changing climate is causing permanent damage to ecosystems across the world, such as the loosening melt of Greenland, parching of the Amazon rainforest and melting of the Himalayan ice. Climate observations from around the world could prove to the naysayers that global warming is more than just a scientific theory. Many people of industrialized nations have a flat-earth view of the global climate change situation, which they think is an overreaction of tree huggers claiming the earth is warming up due to human abuse of the planet.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) composed a 29-page draft that summarizes various ways to prepare for increasing temperatures, scorching heatwaves, floods and heightened sea levels. The 29-page draft evaluates food and water shortages, extinction of animal and plant life and projects crop yield to remain the same or decline in range of up to two percent a year. More than a 100 governments and scientists will convene in Japan on March 25-29 to modify and approve the report. It will direct policies for the upcoming 2015 UN summit that is taking place in Paris, to circumvent greenhouse gas emissions. Almost 200 governments have agreed to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels. The report outlines options for more efficient planning for catastrophes; like floods, hurricanes, efforts to cultivate drought and/or flood resistant crops and implementing practices conducive to water and energy conservation.

Another report released by several U.S. organizations, including the Environmental Defense Fund, is arguing that it is hard to measure world abrupt changes caused by global climate change. The changes of nature can be determined more easily than economic impact. Computer models give a more accurate view at rising sea levels and temperature predictions than the effects of drought and floods. The loss of biodiversity is hard to calculate and famine, social chaos community displacement are caused by other factors rather than just climate change alone.

A lead scientist of the IPCC report has commented that global climate change is shifting from environmental research to real-world observations of extreme climate events and added the climate is much different from thirty or forty years ago. Such as the drought in California, which is experiencing one its driest winters ever.

The most at-risk area of the world are the coastal regions of Asia, especially those living in the cities. Experts claimed they could endure the worst effects of global warming than any other part of the world. Millions of homes can be destroyed by flood and rising sea levels and famine could wipe out a large portion of the population. Climate change in coastal Asian urban centers will break down economic and social infrastructure prompting for extreme poverty and sociopolitical conflict. The causes of the global climate are already destroying the planet, however government, businesses and individuals can slow down the process of climate warming to prevent abrupt world changes. More

 

© 2014

New NASA Study Warns Of Climate Change’s Pace

CAPE CANAVERAL (CBSMiami) – NASA jumped back into the discussion of global climate change Tuesday with a new study that showed Earth’s climate will experience roughly 20 percent more warming than estimates originally stated, despite a recent slowdown.

NASA said the new predictions were based on more detailed calculations of the sensitivity of Earth’s climate to factors like greenhouse gas emissions, which help warm the planet.

Global temperatures have risen at a rate of 0.22 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1951. But according to NASA, since 1998 the rate slowed to 0.09 per decade, despite an increase in some greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

Some studies have since suggested greenhouse gases may not impact Earth as much as previously thought. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agreed and slightly lowered the range of Earth’s potential warming.

The new research focused on what’s called Earth’s “transient climate response.” This measurement looks at how temperatures will change as carbon dioxide increases until the total amount of carbon dioxide has doubled.

Previous estimates put the transient climate response at anywhere from 1.8 degrees to 2.52 degrees Fahrenheit. According to NASA’s new study, the transient climate response is approximately 3.06 degrees and not likely to fall below 2.34 degrees Fahrenheit.

The study focused on looking at how aerosols from natural sources like volcanoes and wildfire combined with manufacturing activities, cars, and energy production interacted. NASA said depending on the make-up of the aerosols, some cause warming and some cause cooling.

According to the study, the Northern Hemisphere will likely see more of an impact from aerosols as most man-made aerosols are released from industrial zones north of the equator and most of Earth’s landmasses are in the Northern Hemisphere.

“I kept thinking, we know the Northern Hemisphere has a disproportionate effect, and some pollutants are unevenly distributed,” the study’s author, climatologist Drew Shindell said. “But we don’t take that into account. I wanted to quantify how much the location mattered.”

Shindell said that based on his calculations, industrialized countries must reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the higher end of proposed restrictions to avoid the most damaging consequences of climate change. More

 

© 2014

Tree find confirms Italian Alpine melt

It was only a single, withered conifer needle, but it told a dramatic story of climate change. Glaciologists found it in a set of ice cores drilled through a glacier on top of Mount Ortles, in the Italian Alps.

It lay about 80 metres below the glacial surface, encased in solid ice, and carbon dating confirmed that it had blown from the branches of Larix decidua, the European larch, 2,600 years earlier.

It was found about 30 kms from a far more dramatic exposure: the body of Ötzi the Iceman, a mummified bronze age corpse revealed by a melting glacier in 1991.

Both finds deliver the same uncompromising message: for at least 5,000 years – because Ötzi perished around that time – the Italian Alps had continued to stay frozen throughout the year.

And now they are melting. Or, to put it the scientific way, in the words of Paolo Gabrielli, of Ohio State University, who led the project: "Our first results indicate that the current atmospheric warming at high elevation in the Alps is outside the normal cold range held for millennia. This is consistent with the rapid, ongoing shrinking of glaciers at high elevation in this area."

The problem for all climate scientists – and for glaciologists in particular – is that direct measurements are relatively recent: the oldest thermometer readings date back little more than three centuries, and consistent world coverage began only in the 20th century.

Since climates undergo natural cycles of change on a scale of centuries, measurements over a short period are not, in themselves, of much use. Glaciers, in particular, are a problem: retreat or advance would have been imperceptible to the small populations likely ever to have observed them.

Visual records – paintings dating from the early 19th century, in most cases – indicate that today's glaciers are in retreat, but romantic age painters weren't particularly interested in climate or precision topography, so the evidence from paintings is limited.

But direct measurement of surviving ice really can tell a story, and Gabrielli's team produced a fragment of this narrative in San Francisco at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

The Alps are warming at twice the global rate, and the glaciers are everywhere in retreat. Alto dell'Ortles is the highest glacier in the eastern Alps, at 3,900 metres: its ice is likely to hold much more evidence of climate change and human impact.

As they drilled into the glacier, the research scientists from six nations found that the first 30 metre layer was composed of grainy compacted snow that had partly melted. Below that was nothing but solid, enduring ice all the way down to frozen bedrock. More

 

Climate change to have double impact - study

As the world awaits the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) latest verdict on the state of the climate, new research out this year finds that climate change could have double the impact previously thought.

The peer-reviewed study published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Societyargues that conventional conclusions on climate sensitivity - the extent to which global temperatures respond to greenhouse gas emissions - underestimate the role of some amplifying feedbacks that may intensify climate impacts in ways that many models tend to overlook.

Traditional estimates of climate sensitivity such as that adopted by the IPCC focus on "fast feedbacks" like water vapour, natural aerosols, clouds, and snow cover, but do not sufficiently account for slower feedbacks including "surface albedo feedbacks from changes in continental ice sheets and vegetation", and climate greenhouse gas feedbacks "from changes in natural (land and ocean) carbon sinks."

These types of feedbacks refer to self-reinforcing process which, once human-induced emissions create a change in a particular eco-system, lead to further changes beyond the initial human forcing as different parts of the system continue to respond. With 'albedo', for instance, the reduction of snow and ice cover due to melting induced by global warming means less surfaces reflecting sunlight back into the atmosphere, and thus more absorption of heat, which leads to further melting - and potentially a self-reinforcing cycle that contributes further to overall warming.

With 'carbon sinks', as the oceans absorb CO2 and excess heat due to global warming, they could reach a saturation point where their ability to absorb is continually reduced, in turn allowing global warming to accelerate - eventually, the oceans themselves could become an increasing source of CO2 if this process continues.

Climate sensitivity estimates based on fast feedbacks alone, ignoring the above processes, average out at suggesting a doubling of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions would lead to a global temperature rise of about 3C. However, the new paper by a multidisciplinary team led by Columbia University's Earth Institute, notes that ice sheet and vegetation surface have wrongly been assumed to be irrelevant "based on the long-standing notion that continental ice sheet changes occur so slowly (over several millennia)."

The paper cites "evidence from the palaeoclimatic record for sea-level changes of several metres per century" as well as "present-day observations of increasing melt and overall mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica", which together "imply that ice sheet changes can occur more rapidly than previously recognized." They also point to several studies indicating that "significant vegetation response can occur on decadal-to centennial time-scales." Taking these processes into account gives an estimate known as the 'Earth system sensitivity', which the study finds is double that of other estimates at between 6 to 8C. The dramatic changes that this higher sensitivity implies would occur over "several centuries to about a millennium", if not "several millennia."

Despite that long time-scale, unfortunately some early impacts could still be seen this century. The study warns:

"The higher Earth system sensitivity thus implies a real possibility of exceeding the 2C global warming threshold if atmospheric GHG concentrations are sustained at or above present-day levels. This needs to be communicated clearly to policymakers and to the general public in order to ensure appropriately informed decisions about future GHG stabilization."

The difficulties in estimating the Earth system sensitivity, the paper points out, are due to "the lack of palaeo-analogues for the present-day anthropogenic forcing" as well as because "current models are unable to adequately simulate the physics of ice sheet decay and certain aspects of the natural carbon and nitrogen cycles." More

 

Industrial Soot Linked to the Abrupt Retreat of 19th Century Glaciers

A NASA-led team of scientists has uncovered strong evidence that soot from a rapidly industrializing Europe caused the abrupt retreat of mountain glaciers in the European Alps that began in the 1860s, a period often thought of as the end of the Little Ice Age.

The research, published Sept. 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help resolve a longstanding scientific debate.

In the decades following the 1850s, Europe underwent an economic and atmospheric transformation spurred by industrialization. The use of coal to heat homes and power transportation and industry in Western Europe began in earnest, spewing huge quantities of black carbon and other dark particles into the atmosphere.

Black carbon is the strongest sunlight-absorbing atmospheric particle. When these particles settle on the snow blanketing glaciers, they darken the snow surface, speeding its melting and exposing the underlying glacier ice to sunlight and warmer spring and summer air earlier in the year. This diminishing of the snow cover earlier in each year causes the glacier ice to melt faster and retreat.

The Little Ice Age, loosely defined as a cooler period between the 14th and 19th centuries, was marked by an expansion of mountain glaciers and a drop in temperatures in Europe of nearly 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius). But glacier records show that between 1860 and 1930, while temperatures continued to drop, large valley glaciers in the Alps abruptly retreated by an average of nearly 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) to lengths not seen in the previous few hundred years. Glaciologists and climatologists have struggled to reconcile this apparent conflict between climate and glacier records.

"Something was missing from the equation," said Thomas Painter, a snow and ice scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who led the study. "Before now, most glaciologists believed the end of the Little Ice Age came in the mid-1800s when these glaciers retreated, and that the retreat was due to a natural climatic shift, distinct from the carbon dioxide-induced warming that came later in the 20th century. This result suggests that human influence on glaciers extends back to well before the industrial temperature increases."

To help the scientists understand what was driving the glacier retreat, Painter and his colleagues turned to history. The researchers studied data from ice cores drilled from high up on several European mountain glaciers to determine how much black carbon was in the atmosphere and snow when the Alps glaciers began to retreat. Using the levels of carbon particles trapped in the ice core layers, and taking into consideration modern observations of how pollutants are distributed in the Alps, they were able to estimate how much black carbon was deposited on glacial surfaces at lower elevations, where levels of black carbon tend to be highest.

The team then ran computer models of glacier behavior, starting with recorded weather conditions and adding the impact of the lower-elevation pollution. When this impact was included, the simulated glacier mass loss and timing finally were consistent with the historic record of glacial retreat, despite the cooling temperatures at that time.

"We must now look more closely at other regions on Earth, such as the Himalaya, to study the present-day impacts of black carbon on glaciers in these regions," said Georg Kaser, a study co-author from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and lead author of the Working Group I Cryosphere chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's upcoming Fifth Assessment Report.

"This study uncovers likely human fingerprints on our changing environment," said co-author Waleed Abdalati, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder. "It's a reminder that the actions we take have far-reaching impacts on the environment in which we live."

CIRES is a joint institute of the university and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Other institutions participating in the study include the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor and the University of California, Davis. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA. More

Black Soot and Snow, A Warmer Combination -- a report from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies

 

Melting Permafrost Found in Antarctica's Dry Valleys

Antarctica's Dry Valleys are home to the oldest ice on Earth. The first signs of the massive thaw disturbing the Arctic's frozen ground have now appeared in one of these valleys, melting a glacier buried since the last Ice Age.

Antarctic Dry Valley

The Dry Valleys are different from the rest of Antarctica. Their ice, some of which is millions of years old, is buried under scoured boulders and dust as fine as flour. The arid landscape looks like Mars and, until now, hadn't changed much since the continent froze about 15 million years ago.

"The Dry Valleys range from being somewhat stable to extremely stable in terms of landscape," said Joseph Levy, a research associate at the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics.

But in 2009, Levy said, helicopter pilot Dustin Black spotted a new feature in Garwood Valley, one of the Dry Valleys near McMurdo Research Station where he ferries scientists to and from research camps. "I discovered this huge chunk of buried ice that was beginning to melt," Levy told LiveScience. "It was changing, and changing fast." [Images of Melt: Earth's Vanishing Ice]

The melting ice is a stranded glacier, buried under lake and river sediments for at least 7,000 years. In the past few years, the thawing ground has formed a 50-foot-tall (15 meters) ice cliff that's retreated by 30 feet (10 m), according to a study led by Levy published today (July 24) in the journal Nature Scientific Reports. The thawing ground is melting as quickly as Arctic permafrost, Levy said. Permafrost, or permanently frozen ground, covers about 25 percent of the Northern Hemisphere, and some is thawing in warming regions.

A crumbling ice cliff

"We're seeing the first Arctic-style change to the permafrost in Antarctica, and it's exciting and a little bit scary," Levy said. "The Dry Valleys are host to a lot of very special climate records, and when the ice melts, it's like someone going into a laboratory and breaking all of your experiments."

Ice cliff erosion since 2001. The solid white lines indicate infrared radiometer and sonic ranger field of view. The dashed line indicates the area of erosion between the initial ice and sediment deposition (Pleistocene/Holocene epochs) and 2001.

Credit: Joseph Levy, University of Texas Institute for Geophysics.

View full size image

The unique Dry Valley ecosystem — which has adapted to the harsh, dry climate —could also be affected by the sudden influx of meltwater, Levy said.

In 2001, the study's baseline, about 2,800 cubic feet (80 cubic meters) of ice and sediment melted out of the buried glacier, the researchers found. Between January 2011 and January 2012, more than 388,000 cubic feet (11,000 cubic m) of the ice cliff disappeared.

"You can see giant blocks calving off and tumbling down the cliff," Levy said.

Before the discovery, scientists thought the Dry Valleys were a sea of stability in the rapidly changing polar regions — seasonal freeze and thaw cycles neither added nor took away from the underlying permafrost. And unlike regions of Antarctica that are warming, temperatures in the Dry Valleys stayed the same or cooled in the past 20 years.

The sun shines in

But in their search to explain the sudden melting in Garwood Valley, Levy and his colleagues found one weather shift in the valley. For still-unknown reasons, the U-shaped gorge is baking under more intense sunlight. Weather stations record increased sunlight in the valley in recent years, which means more solar radiation is heating the thin, dark blanket of dirt on top of the frozen ground. The ice is effectively cooking underneath.

"Right now, we have the observations that we are getting more sunshine reaching the ground, but we don't have a good model as to why," Levy said.

He added that it's unlikely that all of Antarctica's Dry Valleys will start melting to the extent seen in Garwood Valley. Some have thicker sediment layers that insulate permafrost, instead of absorbing and transmitting heat. "There are parts of the deep interior Dry Valleys that seem very resistant to melting," Levy said. More

 

Waiting on new climate deal 'will set world on a path to 5C warming'

The world cannot afford to wait for a new global climate changeagreement to come into force in 2020, because doing so will mean an end to hopes of limiting global warming to moderate levels, one of the world's foremost authorities on energy has warned.

Fukushima Cleanup

Carbon dioxide emissions from energy rose by 1.4% in 2012 to a record high of more than 31bn tonnes, according to a report from the International Energy Agency on Monday, driven in part by a striking 6% rise in emissions from Japan following its phase-out of nuclear power and continuing growth in emissions from China.

Fatih Birol, chief economist at the IEA, and one of the world's most respected energy experts, told the Guardian that greenhouse gas emissions were continuing to rise so fast that pinning hopes on a replacement for the Kyoto protocol would set the world on a path to 5C of warming, which would be catastrophic.

Birol urged governments to take urgent action on improving energy efficiency, replacing fossil fuels with low-carbon power, stopping the construction of inefficient power plants and phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, as low or no-cost ways of reducing emissions quickly. "This will not harm economic growth, and they are policies that can be taken in a fragile economic context," he said.

The IEA has calculated that making clean energy investments sooner would be cheaper than leaving them until after 2020. About $1.5 trillion should be spent before 2020 to meet climate targets, it found, but if the investments are left until after 2020 it will take $5tn to achieve the same results.

Governments are negotiating under the United Nations to forge a global deal on emissions that would be signed in 2015 but not come into force until 2020. Until then, most countries have their own voluntary goals to curb carbon, but these fall well short of the cuts scientists say are needed to limit temperature rises to no more than 2C above pre-industrial levels, which is regarded as the limit of safety beyond which warming is likely to become catastrophic and irreversible.

Birol said: "I am very worried about the emissions trends. The chance of keeping to 2C is still there, technically, but it is not very great. It is becoming extremely challenging."

Officials are meeting in Bonn this week in the next round of the ongoing UN talks, and Birol urged "a change in political mood" in the run-up to the 2015 deadline. He noted that there were a few positive trends among the rising carbon levels identified by the IEA, the gold standard on energy and emissions data. Emissions from energy in the US are now at levels not seen since the mid 1990s, having dropped by 3.8% in 2012 due to the effects of the shale gas boom that has led to gas replacing coal.

But Birol warned that this could not be replicated globally: "Shale gas is not a panacea. It can only be helpful if we see these other low-carbon technologies also [coming into widespread use] if we are serious about 2C."

Birol also saw positive trends in China, the world's biggest emitter. Although China's emissions rose by more than 300m tonnes, this was one of the smallest annual increases in two decades, Birol said. "The Chinese government has made huge efforts in energy efficiency, and a major effort on renewable energy such as hydroelectricity and wind."

Lord Stern of Brentford, author of the landmark Stern review of the economics of climate change, said the IEA report showed the importance of making investments quickly in cleaner energy. He said: "Government-induced policy risk from lack of clarity on energy and climate policy is, in many parts of the world, a major deterrent to long-term investment. This is surely unacceptable at a time of idle resources, low interest rates, strong liquidity within much of the private sector, attractive medium-term prospects for low-carbon growth and a climate at great risk." More

 

"We are engaged in an unprecedented experiment." Scientist Michael Mann on 400ppm

"We are engaged in an unprecedented experiment." Scientist Michael Mann on 400ppm

Water World: Sea Level Rise in Real Life

Sea levels have risen along the East Coast around 6 to 8 inches since 1960. Under different global warming scenarios, seas could rise 8 inches to several feet by 2100.

The longer term concern is that if warming causes the collapse of the Greenland and/or Antarctic ice sheets, seas could rise tens of feet, although it is thought a rise of that magnitude would take hundreds of years.

Nickolay Lamm, a 24-year-old researcher and artist from StorageFront.com, was motivated to gain a better idea of what such a devastating rise in sea level would look like. And so he created a set of surreal images showing treasured landmarks swallowed by sea water.

To create these visualizations, Lamm took stock photos of the different landmarks, used Google Earth to determine their exact location, and applied mapped sea level rise projections obtained from Climate Central.

In addition to the Jefferson and Washington monuments, he created visualizations from landmarks in Miami, New York City, and Boston viewable in a multimedia post at Mashable.com

“The inspiration for these sea level rise photos came from What Could Disappear from the New York Times,” Lamm wrote on his blog. “Because the maps shown were not in a high enough resolution to figure out exactly which places would be flooded, I got in touch with Remik Ziemlinski from Climate Central who gave me access to more precise versions of the same maps that New York Times used.”

Even if you’re skeptical of some of the more alarming and dramatic sea level rise projections from global warming, these visuals can give you a realistic sense of what hurricane storm surge flooding could do in these East Coast cities. Major hurricanes could bring double digit foot surges up and down the East Coast (although a 25-foot surge is probably unrealistic – in the current climate).

Hurricane Sandy swamped sections of New York City with a 14 foot surge, and, in 2003, Hurricane Isabel sent an 8-foot surge up the Potomac River.

Related: If Hurricane Sandy had come south: the dramatic storm surge scenario for Washington, D.C.

(Sources of images: StorageFront.com). More

 

Thin Ice Film

Thin Ice Film (high quality ~ 2.7 GB file) from Thin Ice Climate on Vimeo.

 

ORIGINS

Thin Ice is a joint initiative between Oxford University, United Kingdom, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (VUW), and London-based DOX Productions. Both Universities have active programmes with world-wide networks of collaborators in climate change and related research. For Oxford see www.climateprediction.net andwww.eci.ox.ac.uk, and for VUW see www.victoria.ac.nz/antarctic and www.victoria.ac.nz/climate-change.

The project began over a cup of coffee at a Climate Change and Governance conference in Wellington in March 2006. Peter Barrett (VUW) suggested to Simon Lamb (Oxford) that he make a film about it with his friend David Sington (DOX Productions)

The aim from the outset was to give people from all walks of the life the chance to see the astonishing range of human activity as well as scientific endeavour that is required to help us understand our changing climate. Our idea was then we would all be better able to decide both individually and collectively how we might deal with it.

What we have done

We have visited researchers on 4 continents and the ocean as they studied the changes in the atmosphere, oceans and ice sheets through measurements (from instruments, satellites, ice and rock) and computer modelling. We have to think not only in human time scales (hundreds of years), but also Ice Age time scales (tens of thousands of years), and even beyond (before 2-3 million years ago) when Earth was naturally warmer.

FILM CREDITS

A David Sington/Simon Lamb Film

Directors: David Sington and Simon Lamb

Co-producer: Catherine Fitzgerald

Executive Producers: Peter Barrett and Philip England

Editor: David Fairhead

Music: Phillip Sheppard

Photographer: Simon Lamb

Additional photography: Tony Burrows, Christoph Lerch and Chris Terpstra

Sound: Sarah Kinsella, Michael Kerslake, Tony Williams,

Rudolf Schwarz, Steve Cochran and James Rae

WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO:

Oxford University Department of Earth Sciences

Victoria University of Wellington:

- Research Office (Professor Neil Quigley)

- Victoria University Foundation (Tricia Walbridge)

- Faculty of Science, Architecture & Design (David Bibby)

- Teaching Aids (Steve Cochran and staff)

Antarctica New Zealand:

- Lou Sanson and staff in Christchurch

- Staff at Scott Base for logistical support during the 2007/8 Antarctic field season

United States National Science Foundation:

- Office of Polar Programs

- Staff at McMurdo Station for logistical support during the 2007/8 Antarctic field season

National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA):

- The captains and crews of the of the RV Tangaroa and RV Kaharoa

University Museum of Natural History, Oxford University:

- Prof. Jim Kennedy

British High Commission, New Zealand:

- Chris Harrington, Philippa Norton and Ric Nye

Glassworks, Wellington, New Zealand:

- Grant Franklin

British Embassy, Copenhagen, Denmark:

- Mogens Olsen

ALSO THANKS FOR:

Satellite imagery courtesy of Geoeye and NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Scientific Visualization Studio (www.geoeye.com and http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/)

Ocean current animation courtesy of CSIRO, Australia, kindly animated at 1080p by Graeme Whittle.

One year computer weather simulation courtesy of the UK - Japan Climate Collaboration (www.earthsimulator.org.uk)animated by R. Stockli & P.L. Vidale.

Global temperature data courtesy of Goddard Institute of Space Studies - GISTEMP Project (Dr James Hansen and Robert Schmunk) http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/.

Ice core record courtesy of NOAA Ice Core Gateway, Etheridge et al. 1996, Jouzel et al. 2007, Luthi et al. 2008, www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/antarctica .

CO₂ historical emissions data courtesy of Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre (CDIAC), www.cdiac.ornl.gov .