Climate Articles
Black Wave - The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez - Video
Documentary on the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, and the consequences it had on the environment and the life of the people affected by the oil spill
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As the World Waits on the U.S., a Sense of Deja Vu in Denmark? by bill mckibben
Twelve years ago in Kyoto, the world was poised to act on a climate treaty but looked for a clear signal from the United States. Now, with the Copenhagen talks set to begin, the outcome once again hinges on what the U.S. is prepared to do.
President Obama took much of the drama out of the Copenhagen talks earlier this month when he and other world leaders announced that there'd be no treaty at the end - in essence, they said, we'll wait for the U.S. Senate. Still, you can't call off the party entirely, and so the planet's climate scientists, bureaucrats, activists, skeptics and journalists will still descend on the Danish capital in a few days for a fortnight of meeting, marching, propounding, denying, and most of all spinning.
Almost all of what happens will be murky (and not just because Copenhagen in December averages 45 minutes of sunlight daily). Without the focus provided by the need to draw up a real document, much of the tension may go out of the proceedings - minus a deadline it's hard to push to resolution on anything. And yet it's the fate of the world being discussed: as British negotiator Ed Miliband put it, "Bretton Woods plus Yalta multiplied by Reykjavik." We'll see some kind of paper signed, but it won't commit anyone to much of anything - the talks will lurch forward into next year. Most of what occurs in Denmark will be shadow boxing, feeling each other out.
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Unsettled Science
Unusually, I'm in complete agreement with a recent headline on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page:
"The Climate Science Isn't Settled"
The article below is the same mix of innuendo and misrepresentation that it's author normally writes, but the headline is correct. The WSJ seems to think that the headline is some terribly important pronouncement that in some way undercuts the scientific consensus on climate change but they are simply using an old rhetorical 'trick'.
The phrase "the science is settled" is associated almost 100% with contrarian comments on climate and is usually a paraphrase of what 'some scientists' are supposed to have said. The reality is that it depends very much on what you are talking about and I have never heard any scientist say this in any general context - at a recent meeting I was at, someone claimed that this had been said by the participants and he was roundly shouted down by the assembled experts.
The reason why no scientist has said this is because they know full well that knowledge about science is not binary - science isn't either settled or not settled. This is a false and misleading dichotomy. Instead, we know things with varying degrees of confidence - for instance, conservation of energy is pretty well accepted, as is the theory of gravity (despite continuing interest in what happens at very small scales or very high energies) , while the exact nature of dark matter is still unclear. The forced binary distinction implicit in the phrase is designed to misleadingly relegate anything about which there is still uncertainty to the category of completely unknown. i.e. that since we don't know everything, we know nothing.
In the climate field, there are a number of issues which are no longer subject to fundamental debate in the community. The existence of the greenhouse effect, the increase in CO2 (and other GHGs) over the last hundred years and its human cause, and the fact the planet warmed significantly over the 20th Century are not much in doubt. IPCC described these factors as 'virtually certain' or 'unequivocal'. The attribution of the warming over the last 50 years to human activity is also pretty well established - that is 'highly likely' and the anticipation that further warming will continue as CO2 levels continue to rise is a well supported conclusion. To the extent that anyone has said that the scientific debate is over, this is what they are referring to. In answer to colloquial questions like "Is anthropogenic warming real?", the answer is yes with high confidence.
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Climate Data Sources
This page is a catalogue that will be kept up to date pointing to selected sources of code and data related to climate science. Please keep us informed of any things we might have missed, or any updates to the links that are needed.
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New Report Provides Update on Recent Climate Changes
A new global scientific synthesis report prepared by 26 of the world's top climate scientists, including JPL research scientist Eric Rignot and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center researcher Robert Bindschadler, concludes that several important aspects of climate change are occurring at the high end of, or even beyond the expectations of just a few years ago. The report, "The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science," documents key findings in climate change science since December 2005. That was the cutoff for scientific inputs used to prepare the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, released in 2007.
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On Thinner Ice: New photography project provides stark proof of melting glaciers on the roof of the world.
November 20, 2009
Global warming is melting 18,000 Himalayan glaciers - the largest concentration of glaciers outside the great polar ice sheets. If the present melt rate continues, many of these glaciers will be gone by the middle of this century, disrupting the perennial water supply to hundreds of millions of people.
To explore this growing collection of glacier images from the "roof of the world" - including a must-see video made by mountaineer and filmmaker David Breashears, Founder and Project Leader of Glacier Research Imaging Project (GRIP) - go to the Asia Society's "On Thinner Ice" website.
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Uber-ironic 1962 ad touts oil's ability to melt glaciers!
David Roberts at Grist has the winner of the irony-can-be-so-ironic award:
From a sharp-eyed reader comes this ad for Humble Oil (which later merged with Standard to become, yes, Exxon). It may win the All Time Millenial Award for Maximal Irony. It's from a 1962 edition of Life Magazine, available on Google Books (click for larger version):
oil melts glaciers pictures
2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003
Hmm, in December 2008, I blogged on an AP story about data presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union:
More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.
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Over 100 icebergs drifting to N.Zealand: official
SYDNEY (AFP) - More than 100, and possibly hundreds, of Antarctic icebergs are floating towards New Zealand in a rare event which has prompted a shipping warning, officials said on Monday.
An Australian Antarctic Division glaciologist said the ice chunks, spotted by satellite photography, had passed the Auckland Islands and were heading towards the main South Island, about 450 kilometres (280 miles) northeast.
Scientist Neal Young said more than 100 icebergs -- some measuring more than 200 metres (650 feet) across -- were seen in just one cluster, indicating there could be hundreds more.
He said they were the remains of a massive ice floe which split from the Antarctic as sea and air temperatures rise due to global warming.
"All of these have come from a larger one that was probably 30 square kilometres (11.6 square miles) in size when it left Antarctica," Young told AFP.
"It's done a long circuit around Antarctica and now the bigger parts of it are breaking up and producing smaller ones."
He said large numbers of icebergs had not floated this close to New Zealand since 2006, when a number came within 25 kilometres of the coastline -- the first such sighting since 1931.
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East Antarctic ice sheet may be losing mass
The East Antarctic ice sheet has been losing mass for the last three years, according to an analysis of data from a gravity-measuring satellite mission.
The scientists involved say they are "surprised" by the finding, because the giant East Antarctic sheet, unlike the west, has been thought to be stable.
Other scientists say ice loss could not yet be pinned on climate change, and uncertainties in the data are large.
The US-based team reports its findings in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The data comes from Nasa's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) mission.
Grace has previously shown that the smaller West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are losing mass.
These two bodies of ice contain enough water to raise sea levels by about six to seven metres (20ft) each if they melted completely.
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The Oceans' SOS: Save our Seas
Earth is a blue planet, but its color is fading fast. The world's oceans, two thirds of the planet's surface, are in rapid decline. Climate change and overfishing lead the list of culprits: to save our seas we must cut carbon and put away our nets.
Species extinction is a sure sign of a dying ecosystem. So when scientists from the Zoological Society of London said in October 2009 that the only way to save coral reefs was to cryogenically freeze them, it was a stunning declaration of the sickly state of our seas.
Life began in the oceans and still depends on them. Oceans make the weather-what if the Gulf Stream stopped?-they absorb about a third of our CO2 emissions, and provide food for billions. Now that they are in trouble, we are in trouble too.
The Turning Tide
Failing coral reefs are not even the worst of it.
The North and Norwegian Seas, the South and East China Seas, and the North American northwest Atlantic are actually the unhealthiest oceans, according to a map published in 2008 by the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In these areas the ecosystem in the poorest shape is the rocky continental shelf-the area offshore 60 to 200 meters deep where most fisheries operate.
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Climate Tipping Points
See 12 places on Earth that will suffer most from climate change!
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Warming's impacts sped up, worsened since Kyoto
WASHINGTON - Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated - beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then.
As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.
And it's not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the dozen years leading up to next month's climate summit in Copenhagen:
_The world's oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.
_Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from the U.S. West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.
_Species now in trouble because of changing climate include, not just the lumbering polar bear which has become a symbol of global warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs and entire stands of North American pine forests.
_Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer than the dozen years leading up to 1997.
Even the gloomiest climate models back in the 1990s didn't forecast results quite this bad so fast.
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The Copenhagen Diagnosis:A HOTTER PLANET MEANS LESS ON OUR PLATES
In the Sunday November 22, 2009 issue of Outlook in the Washington Post, Lester Brown discusses the significant implications of food security in the upcoming Copenhagen Conference.
As the U.N. climate-change conference in Copenhagen approaches, we are in a race between political tipping points and natural ones. Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to keep the melting of the Greenland ice sheet from becoming irreversible? Can we close coal-fired power plants in time to save at least the larger glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau? Can we head off ever more intense crop-withering heat waves before they create chaos in world grain markets?
These are all climate-change issues, but they have something else in common: food. Copenhagen will be about climate, of course, but in a fundamental sense, it must also be about whether we will have enough to eat in the decades to come.
We need not go beyond ice melting to see that the world is in trouble on the food front. As the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets continue to shrink, sea levels will rise, threatening rice harvests around the globe. Recent projections show that the sea could rise up to six feet this century (if the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, it would rise by 23 feet). According to the World Bank, it would take only a three-foot rise in sea level to cover half the rice fields in Bangladesh, a country of nearly 160 million people. Such an increase would also inundate much of the Mekong Delta, which produces half the rice crop in Vietnam, the world's No. 2 rice exporter. And it would submerge parts of the 20 or so other rice-growing river deltas in Asia.
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Common Plastics Chemicals Phthalates Linked to ADHD Symptoms
ScienceDaily (Nov. 23, 2009) - Phthalates are important components of many consumer products, including toys, cleaning materials, plastics, and personal care items. Studies to date on phthalates have been inconsistent, with some linking exposure to these chemicals to hormone disruptions, birth defects, asthma, and reproductive problems, while others have found no significant association between exposure and adverse effects.
A new report by Korean scientists, published by Elsevier in the November 15th issue of Biological Psychiatry, adds to the potentially alarming findings about phthalates. They measured urine phthalate concentrations and evaluated symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) using teacher-reported symptoms and computerized tests that measured attention and impulsivity.
They found a significant positive association between phthalate exposure and ADHD, meaning that the higher the concentration of phthalate metabolites in the urine, the worse the ADHD symptoms and/or test scores.
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CO2 curve ticks upward as key climate talks loom
The readings at this 3 km high station show an upward curve as the world counts down to climate talks: Global warming gases have built up to record levels in the atmosphere, from emissions that match scientists' worst-case scenarios.
Carbon dioxide concentrations this autumn are hovering at around 385 parts per million, on their way to a near-certain record high above 390 in the first half of next year, at the annual peak.
"For the past million years we've never seen 390. You have to wonder what that's going to do," said physicist John Barnes, the observatory director.
One leading atmospheric scientist, Stephen Schneider, sees "coin-flip odds for serious outcomes for our planet".
Far from this mid-Pacific government observatory, negotiators from 192 nations gather in wintry Copenhagen, Denmark, next month to try to agree on steps to head off the worst of the climate disruptions researchers say will result if concentrations hit around 450 parts per million - in 30 years at the current rate. Some say the world has already passed a danger point, at 350 ppm, and must roll back.
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Can Climate Change Cause Conflict? Recent History Suggests So
A survey delving into the past 30 years in sub-Saharan Africa reveals that temperature changes match up with a significant increase in the likelihood of civil war
Some experts call the genocide in Darfur the world's first conflict caused by climate change. After all, the crisis was sparked, at least in part, by a decline in rainfall over the past 30 years just as the region's population doubled, pitting wandering pastoralists against settled farmers for newly scarce resources, such as arable land.
"Is Darfur the first climate change war?" asked economist and Scientific American columnist Jeffrey Sachs at an event at Columbia University in 2007. "Don't doubt for a moment that places like Darfur are ecological disasters first and political disasters second."
But new research would suggest the answer to Sachs's question is no, at least regarding the novelty of Darfur. Agricultural economist Marshall Burke of the University of California, Berkeley and his colleagues have analyzed the history of conflict in sub-Saharan Africa between 1980 and 2002 in a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Global warming science alarming, say climate experts
Three UK groups studying climate change have issued a strong statement about the dangers of failing to cut emissions of greenhouse gases across the world.
The Royal Society, Met Office, and Natural Environment Research Council (Nerc) say the science of climate change is more alarming than ever.
They say the 2007 UK floods, 2003 heatwave in Europe and recent droughts were consistent with emerging patterns.
Their comments came ahead of crunch UN climate talks in Copenhagen next month.
'Loss of wildlife'
In a statement calling for action to cut carbon emissions, institutions said evidence for "dangerous, long-term and potentially irreversible climate change" was growing.
Global carbon dioxide levels have continued to rise, Arctic summer ice cover was lower in 2007 and 2008 than in the previous few decades, and the last decade has been the warmest on average for 150 years.
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Sobering Update on the Science
On the eve of the Copenhagen conference, a group of scientists has issued an update on the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Their conclusions? Ice at both poles is melting faster than predicted, the claims of recent global cooling are wrong, and world leaders must act fast if steep temperature rises are to be avoided.
Ahead of talks in Copenhagen, a group of leading climate scientists has issued a new report summarizing the most recent research findings from around the world and concluding that scientists have underestimated the pace and extent of global warming. The report - titled "The Copenhagen Diagnosis" - finds that in several key areas observed changes are outstripping the most recent projections by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and warns that "there is a very high probability of the warming exceeding 2 °C unless global emissions peak and start to decline rapidly" within the next decade.
The report points to dramatic declines in Arctic sea ice, recent measurements that show a large net loss of ice from both Greenland and Antarctica, and the relatively rapid rise in global sea levels - 3.4 millimeters per year - as particular reasons for concern. Sea-level rise this century, it states, "is likely to be at least twice as large" as predicted by the most recent IPCC report, issued in 2007, with an upper limit of roughly two meters.
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Studies: Fighting global warming reduces diseases
WASHINGTON - Cutting global warming pollution would not only make the planet healthier, it would make people healthier too, newly released studies say.
Slashing carbon dioxide emissions could save millions of lives, mostly by reducing preventable deaths from heart and lung diseases, the studies show. They were published in a special issue of The Lancet British medical journal, released Wednesday.
The calculations of lives saved were based on computer models that looked at pollution-caused illnesses in certain cities. The figures are also based on the world making dramatic changes in daily life that may at first seem too hard and costly to do, researchers conceded.
Cutting carbon dioxide emissions would also reduce other types of air pollution, especially tiny particles that lodge in the lungs and cause direct health damage, doctors said. Other benefits could come from encouraging more exercise and less meat consumption, to improve heart health, researchers said.
"Reducing greenhouse gases not only helps save the planet in the long term, but it's going to improve our health virtually immediately," said Christopher Portier, associate director of the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. That agency helped fund the studies along with the Wellcome Trust and several other international public health groups.
"It's not 50 years from now, it's now," Portier said.
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Satellite data stunner: "Our data suggest that EAST Antarctica is losing mass...
Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea-level rise."
The East Antarctic ice sheet has been losing mass for the last three years, according to an analysis of data from a gravity-measuring satellite mission.
That's from the BBC story. Nature Geoscience just published the study online, "Accelerated Antarctic ice loss from satellite gravity measurements." It begins, "Accurate quantification of Antarctic ice-sheet mass balance and its contribution to global sea-level rise remains challenging, because in situ measurements over both space and time are sparse," and it concludes:
Our results suggest that over the WAIS [West Antarctic ice sheet] (especially the ASE [Amundsen Sea Embayment]) there is accelerated ice loss since around 2005 and/or 2006, with the EAIS showing correlated changes of the same sign in this period, attributed to increased ice loss over EAIS coastal regions in recent years. Using a simple linear projection for the period 2006-2009, Antarctic ice loss rate can be as large as -220plusminus89 Gt yr-1. These new GRACE estimates, on average, are consistent with recent InSAR fluxes4 but, in contrast to previous estimates, they indicate that as a whole, Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea-level rise.
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El Nino Resurging in November 2009
El Nino is experiencing a late-fall resurgence. Recent measurements of sea level height from the Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason-2 oceanography satellite showed that a strong wave of warm water, known as a Kelvin wave, had spread from the western to the central and eastern Pacific. This warm wave appears as the large area of higher-than-normal sea surface heights in the area between 170 degrees east and 100 degrees west longitude.
This image was created with data collected OSTM/Jason 2 during a 10-day period centered on November 1, 2009. Red and white areas in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific were 100 to 180 millimeters (4 to 7 inches) above normal. In the western equatorial Pacific, blue and purple areas show where sea levels were between 80 and 150 millimeters (3 and 6 inches) below normal.
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The Jellyfish Menace
A silent, blobbing menace swarms the seas, thanks to overfishing, climate change and even "dead zones". Jellyfish seem set to regain their dominance of the oceans in future-and that could be bad news for humans.
The two-meter long jellyfish known as Nomura have begun swarming year after year off the coast of Japan, 500 million or more of them fouling fishing nets thanks to agricultural runoff from China spurring plankton blooms. With fewer fish, the Nomura giants can dominate.
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Warming's Impacts Sped up, Worsened Since Kyoto
Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated - beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then.
As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.
And it's not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the dozen years leading up to next month's climate summit in Copenhagen:
- The world's oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.
-Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from the U.S. West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.
-Species now in trouble because of changing climate include, not just the lumbering polar bear which has become a symbol of global warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs and entire stands of North American pine forests.
-Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer than the dozen years leading up to 1997.
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Winds Blow Stronger Over Warming Lake Superior
As the world's largest lake warms, it is kicking up stronger winds. The extra-blustery weather on Lake Superior is causing faster currents, and possibly changing the ecology of the lake and the distribution of local air pollution.
So says a new study of Lake Superior -- the world's largest lake by surface area, containing 10 percent of the unfrozen freshwater on the planet -- published this week in Nature Geoscience.
"We're certainly moving away from a mental frame of mind that the lake is huge and has lots of inertia and is relatively insensitive to global changes to one where we're seeing all kinds of changes going on in the lake." said Robert Sterner of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, who was not a part of the study.
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Carbon Dioxide: sources outpacing sinks
Galloping increases in human fossil fuel emissions now appear to be outrunning the ability of the world's oceans to absorb them. The first year-by-year accounting of the oceans' role as a carbon sink shows that, even as they soak up record amounts, the seas are absorbing a smaller proportion of the rising total.
Carbon released by fossil fuel burning (black) continues to accumulate in the air (red), oceans (blue), and land (green). The oceans take up roughly a quarter of manmade CO2, but evidence suggests they are now taking up a smaller proportion. Credit: Samar Khatiwala, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Oceanographer Samar Khatiwala of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, lead author of the report, published in the current issue of the journal Nature, says the oceans appear to be reaching a natural limit.
"The more carbon dioxide you put in, the more acidic the ocean becomes, reducing its ability to hold CO2," he said. "Because of this chemical effect, over time, the ocean is expected to become a less efficient sink of manmade carbon. The surprise is that we may already be seeing evidence for this, perhaps compounded by the ocean's slow circulation in the face of accelerating emissions."
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The Difficulties of Predicting Climate Change
Climate researchers use some of the most powerful computers in the world to run their models. Still, the sheer amount of data that must be crunched mandates that many details are simply left out. How accurate are the results?
"Give me ten parameters, and I'll simulate an elephant for you. Give me one more, and he'll wag his tail." The saying sums up the problem with many models. Models allow you demonstrate anything and everything, as long as there are enough knobs to turn. The real test of how good a model really is comes when you compare it to reality.
But when it comes to climate change, researchers are faced with a practically insoluble problem: We won't know for sure until the end of the century whether climate predictions for the year 2100 are correct or not. But with climate scientists around the world warning of the dangerous consequences of climate change, it becomes apparent that we can hardly afford to wait that long.
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