Climate Articles
Fact Check: "Climategate"
In late November 2009, more than 1,000 e-mails between scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the U.K.'s University of East Anglia were stolen and made public by an as-yet-unnamed hacker. Climate skeptics are claiming that they show scientific misconduct that amounts to the complete fabrication of man-made global warming. We find that to be unfounded:
* The messages, which span 13 years, show a few scientists in a bad light, being rude or dismissive. An investigation is underway, but there's still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible.
* Some critics say the e-mails negate the conclusions of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the IPCC report relied on data from a large number of sources, of which CRU was only one.
* E-mails being cited as "smoking guns" have been misrepresented. For instance, one e-mail that refers to "hiding the decline" isn't talking about a decline in actual temperatures as measured at weather stations. These have continued to rise, and 2009 may turn out to be the fifth warmest year ever recorded. The "decline" actually refers to a problem with recent data from tree rings.
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Antarctic icesheet losing mass
A new study has found the east Antarctic icesheet, which sits behind Australia's Casey Station, has lost billions of tonnes of ice in the past three years.
Researchers from the University of Texas have been studying the ocean-icesheet interaction in Antarctica for the past seven years.
They have found that since 2006, the east Antarctic icesheet is losing more ice than it is gaining.
The majority of the loss is in coastal regions and is estimated at 57 billion tonnes a year.
The Australian Antarctic Division's Dr Roland Warner says the study confirms Antarctica is contributing to a rise in global sea levels.
"This is confirming the sorts of things that one would expect in a warming world and the fact that this Antarctic system is not in some exact equilibrium at the moment, is in fact losing ice into the ocean, is an indication that things are changing," he said.
"That's contributing to half a millimetre of sea level rise per year."
It is estimated that sea levels are rising a total of three millimetres a year.
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This year 'in top five warmest'
This year will be one of the top five warmest years globally since records began 150 years ago, according to figures compiled by the Met Office.
The UK's weather service projects that, unless there is an exceptionally cold spell before the end of the year, temperatures will be up on last year.
Climate sceptics had pointed out that the temperature rise appeared to have stalled in the last decade or so.
That was caused in part by the Pacific La Nina current, which cools the Earth.
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The Discovery of Global Warming
A hypertext history of how scientists came to (partly) understand what people are doing to cause climate change.
This Website created by Spencer Weart supplements his much shorter book, which tells the history of climate change research as a single story. On this Website you will find a more complete history in dozens of essays on separate topics, updated annually.
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Washington Times: "Obama digs in on global warming" and "stolen e-mails mean less than they seem"
The Washington Times is the other DC newspaper, the "conservative" one. That's assuming you can call the primary DC paper - the one that loves un-fact-checked op-ed pieces attacking climate science and clean energy and that is now run by former Wall Street Journal editors - not conservative (see "Washington Post recycles another disinformation-filled WSJ op-ed, this time from coal apologist Bjorn Lomborg. Funny how two new senior Post editors came from the WSJ).
Still, as Wikipedia notes, The WashTimes was "founded in 1982 by Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, and is subsidized by the Unification Church community. The Times is known for its conservative stance on political and social issues."
The WT puts out a very useful daily Washington Insight/Energy (sub. req'd), which gives another perspective on inside-the-beltway analysis. As was widely reported last week, Obama to attend Copenhagen, announces "a U.S. emissions reduction target in the range of 17% below 2005 levels in 2020.?
Now, much of the status quo media remains stuck in an everything-progressives-are-doing-will-fail bandwagon, so they missed the key implications of that amazing announcement - Obama just doubled down on a domestic climate bill. Yes, I know, you keep reading stories about how the administration is walking away from the bipartisan climate and clean bill. Not. As the WT put it last Wednesday:
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Where's the data?
Much of the discussion in recent days has been motivated by the idea that climate science is somehow unfairly restricting access to raw data upon which scientific conclusions are based. This is a powerful meme and one that has clear resonance far beyond the people who are actually interested in analysing data themselves. However, many of the people raising this issue are not aware of what and how much data is actually available.
Therefore, we have set up a page of data links to sources of temperature and other climate data, codes to process it, model outputs, model codes, reconstructions, paleo-records, the codes involved in reconstructions etc. We have made a start on this on a new Data Sources page, but if anyone has other links that we've missed, note them in the comments and we'll update accordingly.
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Australia shipping alert over massive iceberg
SYDNEY (AFP) - Australian authorities Friday issued a shipping alert over a gigantic iceberg that is gradually approaching the country's southwest coast.
The Bureau of Meteorology said the once-in-a-century cliff of ice, which dislodged from Antarctica about a decade ago before drifting north, was being monitored using satellites.
"Mariners are advised that at 1200 GMT on December 9, an iceberg approximately 1,700 kilometres (1,054 miles) south-southwest of the West Australian coast was observed," it said, giving the iceberg's coordinates.
"The iceberg is 140 square kilometres in area -- 19 kilometres long by eight kilometres wide."
Experts believe the iceberg -- known as B17B -- is likely to break up as it enters warmer waters nearer Australia, creating hundreds of smaller icebergs in a hazard to passing ships.
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Climate change to cost trillions, say economists
PARIS - Estimates vary widely on the costs of damage from climate change, easing these impacts and taming the carbon gas stoking the problem, but economists agree the bill is likely to be in the trillions of dollars.
Figures depend on different forecasts for greenhouse-gas emissions and the timeline for reaching them. In addition, key variables remain sketchy.
How will rainfall, snowfall, storm frequency and ocean levels look a few decades from now? How will they affect a specific country or region? And how fast will nations introduce low-carbon technologies, carbon taxes and other policies that alter energy use?
Despite these uncertainties, economists share a broad consensus: climate change will ultimately cost thousands of billions of dollars, a tab that keeps rising as more carbon enters the atmosphere.
"The cost of climate impacts goes up with the delay on emissions mitigation," said Sam Fankhauser of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics (LSE).
"On the cost of adaptation, there's a timing issue. For instance, there's no point building sea walls now if the sea levels are only going to rise gradually over the next 50 years. But we do know that costs of adaptation will go up non-linearly, in other words exponentially, with the degree of warming that we have."
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A special report on climate change and the carbon economy
Unpacking the problem
ONLY half of man-made global warming comes from CO2. The rest comes from a variety of sources, including hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), black carbon (soot), methane and nitrogen compounds. Packing them all up together gives the Kyoto protocol an elegant framework which in theory should solve the problem with a single set of numbers-the national caps that are designed to cut the whole range of greenhouse gases.
Critics point out that the Kyoto protocol has achieved a great deal less than the Montreal protocol, which was designed to prevent the use of ozone-depleting CFCs.
Montreal, implemented in 1987, was originally expected to cut half of its gases in 12 years. In the event it got rid of all of them in ten years. It has had a huge global-warming side-benefit. CFCs are greenhouse, as well as ozone-depleting, gases. According to a study in 2007, the Montreal protocol prevented the emission of 189 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent. Kyoto has abated around 10 billion tonnes.
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Confronting the role of non-CO2 pollutants in global warming
Swift action on other greenhouse agents could solve the "fast half" of the climate problem, researchers say.
Aggressively reducing emissions of non-CO2 climate drivers could forestall abrupt climate change for up to 40 years, according to a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2009, DOI 10.1073/pnas.0902568106). Without such efforts, even drastic cuts to CO2 emissions will fail to put the brakes on planetary warming soon enough to avoid climate tipping points, the authors warn.
Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), black carbon (soot), ground-level ozone, and methane together represent an estimated 40-50% of the warming caused by human activities. "We're on track for a 2 °C warming that will put us in the danger zone, and current research shows it's coming faster than anticipated," says study coauthor Durwood Zaelke of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development. "Restricting CO2 emissions is absolutely critical, but it won't be enough. So the question is how quickly we can deliver cooling on the non-CO2 side."
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A Bipartisan Call for Climate Action
In an open letter published [last week] on a full page of the Washington Post, members of WWF's current and past Boards of Directors call for "a clear bipartisan blueprint from the Senate prior to Copenhagen, followed by final passage of legislation early next year," saying that it is "vital to securing corresponding actions by other countries in a new global pact to head off the worst impacts of climate change. "
That's from the World Wildlife Fund's news release on their "Bipartisan Call for Climate Action." The video is from one of the signers, The Honorable William K. Reilly, Chairman Emeritus of WWF and EPA Administrator during the entire Bush Sr. presidency. Another signer is The Honorable Russell E. Train, Founder Chairman Emeritus of WWF and President Nixon's and Ford's EPA Administrator from 1973-1977.
The text of the letter and list of signers follows
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Toronto Star: 'Why media tell climate story poorly'
I apologize on behalf of my profession.
If it's true that Canadians and Americans have become less concerned about the potential impact of climate change, and that more consider global warming a hoax, some blame can certainly be directed at the news media.
"The media (are) giving an equal seat at the table to a lot of non-qualified scientists," Julio Betancourt, a senior scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, told a group of environment and energy reporters during a week-long learning retreat in New Mexico.
I was among them, listening to Betancourt and two of his colleagues describe the measurable impacts climate change is having on the U.S. southwest. Drought. More frequent and damaging forest fires. Northward migration of forest and animal species. Hotter, longer growing seasons. Less snow pack. Earlier snow melt.
"The scientific evidence reported in peer-reviewed journals is growing by the day, and it suggests the pace of climate change has surpassed the worst-case scenarios predicted just a few years ago.
Betancourt is the first to admit the science is constantly evolving and that the work at hand is highly complex. One challenge is separating the part of climate change caused by naturally occurring cyclical systems from the part caused by humans, who since the Industrial Revolution have dumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate.
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Will other coastal communities share Leeville's fate?
LEEVILLE - For nearly a century, the homes and businesses between Golden Meadow and Fourchon have disappeared one by one, victims of sinking land, surging surf and the occasional hurricane.
The most marked change has occurred in the village of Leeville, once home to more than 1,000 people. Now it is down to an estimated 50 or 60 mostly part-time residents on a 1.6-mile stretch that dead-ends where a dismantled bridge crossing Bayou Lafourche once stood.
It is for Louisiana's bayou communities what the Ghost of Christmas Future was to Scrooge, experts and policy makers say.
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Predictions for climate change this century
Following is a summary of expert opinion of potential impacts from climate change by the end of the century.
The source is the Fourth Assessment Report, published in 2007 by the UN's Nobel-winning scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The magnitude of impacts will mainly depend on the level of warming, which the panel predicted would be in a range of 1.8-4.0 C (3.2-7.2 F) by 2100, a figure that two recent studies have said could be under-estimated by up to 2.4 C (4.3 F).
ASIA: Between 120 million to 1.2 billion Asians will experience increased water stress by 2020, and 185 to 981 million by 2050. Cereal yields in South Asia could drop in some areas by up to 30 percent by 2050.
Even modest sea-level rises will cause flooding and economic disruption in densely-populated mega-deltas, such as the Yangtze, Red River and Ganges-Brahmaputra.
Cholera and malaria could increase, thanks to flooding and a wider habitat range for mosquitoes.
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Climate 'time bombs' stoke scientists' fears
PARIS, Nov 29 (AFP) Nov 29, 2009
Whatever the outcome of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, Nature may have some extremely nasty surprises up its sleeve, say scientists.
They say Earth's biosphere has numerous "tipping points" -- triggers that cause global warming and its impacts to lurch up a gear or two, rather than occur than in a smooth, incremental way.
In other words, the planet itself would become the main driver of warming, making the crisis far more difficult to manage.
Many of the tipping points have only been discovered within the last decade or so, and experts admit to many unknowns as to how and when they could occur.
Here is a summary of the main triggers, outlined by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and in studies published in peer-reviewed journals:
ARCTIC SEA ICE LOSS
The Arctic ice cap, which in winter covers some 15 million square kilometres (5.8 million square miles), is shrinking. Whether the region's first ice-free summer happens in five years or 50 is only a matter of 'when', not 'if', many scientists say.
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Once taboo, population enters climate debate
For decades, debate over whether to limit global population growth was stifled or ignored, branded as immoral and a return to heartless Malthusian logic.
But the potential impact on climate change of a planet teaming with up to ten billion souls has again forced the issue into the open ahead of the December 7-18 UN climate conference in Copenhagen.
In a sign of change, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has declared that braking the rise in Earth's population would be a major contribution to fighting greenhouse gases.
"Slower population growth... would help build social resilience to climate change's impacts and would contribute to a reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions in the future," the agency said in report in November.
If, by 2050, Earth's population stood at eight billion rather than nine billion, that would save between one and two gigatonnes of carbon per year, buying precious time for cleaner technology and other policies, its report said.
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The Localization of Agriculture
Lester R. Brown
In the United States, there has been a surge of interest in eating fresh local foods, corresponding with mounting concerns about the climate effects of consuming food from distant places and about the obesity and other health problems associated with junk food diets. This is reflected in the rise in urban gardening, school gardening, and farmers' markets.
With the fast-growing local foods movement, diets are becoming more locally shaped and more seasonal. In a typical supermarket in an industrial country today it is often difficult to tell what season it is because the store tries to make everything available on a year-round basis. As oil prices rise, this will become less common. In essence, a reduction in the use of oil to transport food over long distances-whether by plane, truck, or ship-will also localize the food economy.
This trend toward localization is reflected in the recent rise in the number of farms in the United States, which may be the reversal of a century-long trend of farm consolidation. Between the agricultural census of 2002 and that of 2007, the number of farms in the United States increased by 4 percent to roughly 2.2 million. The new farms were mostly small, many of them operated by women, whose numbers in farming jumped from 238,000 in 2002 to 306,000 in 2007, a rise of nearly 30 percent.
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Dalai Lama says climate change needs global action
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Tibet's exiled Buddhist spiritual leader the Dalai Lama entered the climate change debate on Monday, urging governments to take serious action and put global interests ahead of domestic concerns.
Australia's government is struggling to have its key climate change policy, a carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS), passed by a hostile upper house Senate this week ahead of U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen from December 7-18.
In Sydney for a series of talks, the Dalai Lama called for individual and collective action to tackle climate change.
"In my own case I never use bathtub, only shower. Whenever I leave my room I always put off my light," the Dalai Lama told a news conference.
"Taking care of the environment ... (is now) part of my life. Taking care of the environment should be part of our daily life."
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Climate change to hit water-scarce Arab world hard
Climate change is likely to hit the water-starved Arab world harder than many other parts of the globe and threatens to slash agricultural output in the area, U.N. and Arab League officials said.
Arab governments have shown more awareness of the issue but need to cooperate further to improve research and policies, they said.
"Climate change will be critical for the Arab world because this region in particular already suffers from poverty, widespread aridity, water scarcity and social marginalisation," said Sima Bahous, Deputy Secretary General for Social Development in the Arab League.
Fifteen percent of people in the Arab world already have limited or no access to potable water, the officials said, speaking on Tuesday at the launch in Cairo of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) report on climate change.
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'Nations will vanish and millions lose their homes to rising seas'
A rise in sea levels of 1.4m predicted today in a major climate report would result in the loss of entire nations and the displacement of about ten per cent of the world's population, according to scientists.
The scenario described in the latest report of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research would leave tropical islands such as the Maldives and Tuvalu submerged and result in the loss of large parts of Bangladesh and the Indian Ocean Coast.
In Britain, billions of pounds would have to be spent to protect low-lying cities such as London from being inundated from flood surges that could be even more extreme than the average increase.
"Once set in motion, sea-level rise is impossible to stop. The only chance we have to limit sea-level rise to manageable levels is to reduce emissions very quickly, early in this century. Later it will be too late to do much," said Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, on whose research the 1.4m figure was based.
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Climate change, sea levels will split rich, poor - study
CLIMATE change will empty the pockets of Melbourne's most vulnerable residents as rising temperatures and sea levels drive up the cost of living, a new report said.
As the Federal Government continued weeks of debate on the validity of an emissions trading scheme, the report concluded that climate change is real and would drive a wedge between the rich and the poor if communities didn't act quickly.
"Alarming evidence continues to mount about the rate at which our climate is changing and the implications this has for the ecological and social systems we depend on," the report said.
"Unabated and unaddressed, climate change will exacerbate existing social inequities."
The report, released today by the Melbourne Community Foundation, reviewed previous studies on community infrastructure needs and identified climate change as one of seven key factors that will have a dramatic impact on the quality of life by 2030.
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USGCRP Scientific Assessments
About the USGCRP Scientific Assessments:
In the United States, the Global Change Research Act (GCRA) of 1990 mandates that every four years an assessment of the impacts of global change in the U.S. be conducted by the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). Responding to this mandate, the USGCRP carried out during the late 1990s the first National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change in the United States. Between 2004 and 2009, the Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), which incorporated the USGCRP, produced a series of 21 Synthesis and Assessment Products(SAPs).
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Past climate anomalies explained
Unusually warm and cold periods in Earth's pre-industrial climate history are linked to how the oceans responded to temperature changes, say scientists.
The researchers focused particularly on intervals known as the "little ice age" and "medieval warm period".
In the journal Science, they report that these climate "anomalies" were likely caused by changes to El Nino and the North Atlantic Oscillation.
They say studying the past in this way could help refine climate models.
"We reconstructed patterns of [the Earth's] surface temperature during those two intervals," explained Professor Michael Mann from Pennsylvania State University in the US, who led the study.
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As emissions increase, carbon 'sinks' get clogged
World's oceans, forests becoming less able to absorb CO2
Relying on nature to compensate for human excesses sounds like a win-win situation -- except that these resources are under stress from the very emissions we are asking them to absorb, making them less able partners in the pact.
Consider it the latest inconvenient truth about climate change.
The benefits of these natural carbon "sinks" are many: Their diverse ecosystems soak up carbon dioxide. What's more, the international carbon enables industries to compensate for their emissions at a fraction of the price of installing cleaner technology, essentially by investing in forests; meanwhile, poorer countries that are rich in woodland profit from selling not lumber but carbon credits.
Now, a global society of conservation biologists has launched a lobbying campaign, asking key decision-makers -- from the Danish officials chairing next week's climate talks in Copenhagen to U.S. lawmakers -- to push for steeper emission cuts to ensure that humans do not exhaust forests' capacity to store carbon in the decades to come.
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