Climate Articles

Mountaintop Removal Video
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Staggering video of our nation exhaling CO2
Scientists at Purdue University recently did an extremely detailed analysis of the emission of CO2 in the United States. They included every sector: power generation, manufacturing, transportation, etc., and then they used advanced atmospheric models to track the gas.
It's part of a research project they're calling "Project Vulcan," presumably because Vulcans looking down at our planet would either be unimpressed by our technology or wonder how an entire planet could breathe.
The result is both staggering and unnerving. Watching our nation wake up in the morning in this way is just plain freaky. The CO2 swells into the atmosphere, covering more of the nation hour by hour until folks get home and start relaxing more and consuming less.
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IPCC errors: facts and spin
Currently, a few errors -and supposed errors- in the last IPCC report ("AR4?) are making the media rounds - together with a lot of distortion and professional spin by parties interested in discrediting climate science. Time for us to sort the wheat from the chaff: which of these putative errors are real, and which not? And what does it all mean, for the IPCC in particular, and for climate science more broadly? Let's start with a few basic facts about the IPCC. The IPCC is not, as many people seem to think, a large organization. In fact, it has only 10 full-time staff in its secretariat at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, plus a few staff in four technical support units that help the chairs of the three IPCC working groups and the national greenhouse gas inventories group. The actual work of the IPCC is done by unpaid volunteers - thousands of scientists at universities and research institutes around the world who contribute as authors or reviewers to the completion of the IPCC reports. A large fraction of the relevant scientific community is thus involved in the effort. The three working groups are:
Working Group 1 (WG1), which deals with the physical climate science basis, as assessed by the climatologists, including several of the Realclimate authors.
Working Group 2 (WG2), which deals with impacts of climate change on society and ecosystems, as assessed by social scientists, ecologists, etc.
Working Group 3 (WG3) , which deals with mitigation options for limiting global warming, as assessed by energy experts, economists, etc.
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Seaweed beds, the 'cradle of the sea,' vanishing
Fisherman Hideo Kawamura recalls how the Suruga Bay seabed full of kelp and other sea grasses gave him an eerie feeling as a novice abalone catcher.
"I went down to find grasses dancing as if they were the long hairs of a woman. It was scary," the 75-year-old says, but he could harvest "lots of large abalones."
That was more than 50 years ago.
The rich seaweed beds stretching 8,000 hectares and brimming with fish in the western coast of the bay off Shizuoka Prefecture have been transformed into a barren wasteland.
The sea grasses began to disappear around 1985; by 1994, almost all were gone. So were the fish and abalones.
"After the seaweed beds died off, horse mackerels and striped pigfish quickly swam away," says fisherman Mitsugi Tomita, 70.
The area's annual catch of abalones, which feed on sea grasses, has plummeted from 23.5 tons in 1992 to less than 1 ton.
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Western Australian drought is 'proof of climate change'
The author behind a new study linking 30-year drought in Western Australia with heavy snowfall in Antarctica says it is strong evidence man-made greenhouse gases have provoked dramatic climate change.
The Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre in Tasmania said it had found a direct link between snowfall in eastern Antarctica and rainfall in Australia's southwest.
The heavier it snows in Antarctica, the less it rains in southern WA, the centre found.
Principal research scientist Tas van Ommen said the conclusion had been drawn from a study of 750-year-old ice-core samples.
The samples showed that as recently as about 1970, Southern Ocean winds had changed to deposit unusually heavy snow in Antarctica while circulating dry, cold wind - with little rainfall - to the southwest of Australia.
Dr van Ommen said it was the most significant climatic change found in the 750-year-old ice sample, and outside natural variation.
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Mackenzie River's fish contaminated with dangerous toxins: scientists
Warming of Arctic triggers burst of biological activity, leading to unexpected consequence
Scientists studying burbot in the Mackenzie River, one of the country's most pristine rivers, have been surprised to discover that mercury, PCBs and DDT in the fish are rising rapidly, a finding they say is linked to climate change.
The increase in the amount of harmful chemicals has been huge. In the period from the mid-1990s to 2008, PCBs have risen up to six times, DDT by three times, and mercury by 1.6 times in the burbot, a delicacy in the north described as tasting like a freshwater lobster.
Contaminant levels "going up so dramatically was quite surprising," said Gary Stern, a senior scientist with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and lead researcher on the study, which also involved scientists from the University of Manitoba and Geological Survey of Canada.
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Melting ice alters way of life in Iqaluit
When Joshua Kango heads out onto the ice near his home on the edge of Canada's Frobisher Bay these days, a half-frozen expanse of sea just south of the Arctic Circle, he finds he has to tread much more carefully.
A 64-year-old Inuit who has been hunting seals and caribou in the area all his life, Mr Kango has noticed alarming changes in the ice around the bay over the last decade or so, a potentially perilous development.
"The ice is getting thinner because there is now warm water flowing underneath it," says Mr Kango, wrapped up in a suit, gloves and boots made from harp and ring seals he has caught. Hunters here traverse the white moonscape, often for days at a time, and thought they knew the ice.
"Before the polynyas [open waters between islands] used to freeze over and we could snow mobile or dog-sled over the top of them. Not any more."
Mr Kango says the changes are most noticeable in the spring and autumn: "In the fall, the ice formation takes a lot longer than it used to. In the springtime, the ice melts really fast."
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Take close look at CO2, scientist urges
SALT LAKE CITY - Don't tell us how much carbon dioxide our farms and businesses can emit, say Utah legislators. To which Tyler Volk says: Maybe this would be a good time to understand the carbon cycle.
Volk, science director of environmental studies at New York University, will be in Utah later this week to give the keynote address at the Climate of Change conference at the University of Utah.
To not understand the science of carbon, he says, means you can be "swayed by the winds of politics, either by the disaster-mongers or those who say everything's fine, party on." What he wants, he says, is to "get people to a healthy level of concern."
Volk's appearance - 7 p.m. Friday at Orson Spencer Hall on the U. campus - comes on the heels of a 10-1 vote last week by the Utah House Natural Resources Committee that threw support behind a resolution urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to halt its plans to regulate carbon dioxide emissions as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. The committee expressed its skepticism about reports that the Earth's climate is undergoing a gradual warming.
And on Tuesday, the Utah House passed a bill that questions global warming. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Kerry Gibson, a dairy farmer from Ogden, initially included language referring to global warming as a conspiracy based on "flawed research."
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PLAN B 4.0 BY THE NUMBERS - Data Highlights on the Global Food Supply
World agriculture today faces pressure from many sources. On the production side, the amount of unused arable land worldwide has dwindled. Overworked soils are becoming eroded and degraded, and overpumped aquifers are being depleted. Meanwhile, as the global population grows and increasing biofuel production converts grain into fuel for cars, demand for food continues to climb. In Chapters 2 and 9 of Plan B 4.0, Lester Brown discusses these challenges. Here are some highlights from the supporting data:
In Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, human populations increased threefold from 1961 to 2007, while livestock populations grew 12-fold. Increasing foraging needs and human food needs have placed excessive demands on soils. The country is losing 867,000 acres of cropland and rangeland to desertification each year.
On the water front, Saudi Arabia stands out as a dramatic example. Following the 1970s Arab oil export embargo, the Saudis, fearing a retaliatory embargo on grain, decided to become self-sufficient in wheat. They heavily subsidized irrigation, pumping water at great depths from a non-replenishable fossil aquifer, in order to farm the desert. Yet in early 2008, after being self-sufficient in wheat for over 20 years, the Saudis announced that with their aquifer largely depleted, they would reduce their wheat planting each year until 2016, when wheat production will end. Although Saudi Arabia is the first country to acknowledge publicly how falling water tables are affecting harvests, over half the world's population lives in countries where aquifers are being depleted faster than they can be replenished.
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Climate 'Tipping Points' May Arrive Without Warning, Says Top Forecaster
ScienceDaily (Feb. 10, 2010) - A new University of California, Davis, study by a top ecological forecaster says it is harder than experts thought to predict when sudden shifts in Earth's natural systems will occur -- a worrisome finding for scientists trying to identify the tipping points that could push climate change into an irreparable global disaster.
"Many scientists are looking for the warning signs that herald sudden changes in natural systems, in hopes of forestalling those changes, or improving our preparations for them," said UC Davis theoretical ecologist Alan Hastings. "Our new study found, unfortunately, that regime shifts with potentially large consequences can happen without warning - systems can �tip' precipitously.
"This means that some effects of global climate change on ecosystems can be seen only once the effects are dramatic. By that point returning the system to a desirable state will be difficult, if not impossible."
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Water is central
Oslo - The main impact of climate change will be on water supplies and the world needs to learn from past co-operation such as over the Indus or Mekong Rivers to help avert future conflicts, experts said on Sunday.
Desertification, flash floods, melting glaciers, heatwaves, cyclones or water-borne diseases such as cholera are among the impacts of global warming inextricably tied to water. And competition for supplies might cause conflicts.
"The main manifestations of rising temperatures... are about water," said Zafar Adeel, chair of UN-Water which co-ordinates work on water among 26 UN agencies.
"It has an impact on all parts of our life as a society, on natural systems, habitats," he told Reuters in a telephone interview. Disruptions may threaten farming or fresh water supplies from Africa to the Middle East.
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Report: 38 per cent of land faces desertification
Study claims previous estimates of desertification have failed to account for the growing impact from changing land use
Over a third of the world's land could be turned into desert, according to a new report published in the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment that warns increased rates of desertification could have a huge impact on global food and water supplies.
In a series of two papers, authors from the Institute of Agro Food Research and Technology (IRTA) included the impact of desertification in lifecycle analyses of land use impact to ascertain how much land was at risk.
They assessed aridity, erosion, the risk of fire, and overuse of aquifers, as parameters leading to desertification, and concluded that vast swathes of land are at risk of becoming irrevocably unproductive unless unsustainable land use practices are halted.
"Using geographical information systems, calculation of the characterisation of factors for the aridity variable shows that 38 per cent of the world area, in eight out of 15 existing eco-regions, is at risk of desertification," the authors said. "The most affected is the tropical/subtropical desert."
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Romanticism undone: Invasive species, global warming taking toll on plants at Thoreau's Walden Pond
According to a paper published January 26 in the journal PLoS ONE, climate change has given invasive and nonnative species a leg up in the Walden Pond area, and native species are suffering the losers. (A nonnative species is considered invasive if it has the potential to disperse widely and rapidly, especially within habitats that are minimally maintained by humans. Some nonnative species do not spread quickly enough to qualify as invasive.)
Researchers compared Thoreau's information with data on temperature and plant populations from this century as well as full information on plant phenology (flowering time, germination, migration and other seasonal activities). They found that the average temperature in Concord, Mass., has increased 2.4 degrees Celsius since Thoreau's time, and that some nonnative plants have adapted by flowering as much as three weeks earlier than they used to. Some native species, by contrast, were less flexible and have not been able to adjust their flowering times. As a result, their populations have dropped.
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'Rewilding' the World: A Bright Spot for Biodiversity
As burgeoning human populations place greater pressure on wild areas, a strategy is emerging for preserving threatened lands and wildlife. Known as 'rewilding,' it involves expanding core wilderness areas, connecting them via corridors that allow humans and animals to co-exist, and protecting and reintroducing top predators.
Five years ago, when I began researching a book about efforts to stem biodiversity loss, environmental politics was dominated - as it still is - by climate change, a parallel crisis that greatly exacerbates damage to ecosystems and loss of species. Essential as the emphasis on climate is, however, it has engendered a kind of despair among biodiversity specialists, casting a shadow over this other fundamental issue. Talk to people in the conservation trenches, and they will agree with Rodrigo Fuentes, director of a biodiversity center in the Philippines: "Biodiversity loss is a forgotten crisis. It rarely makes the headlines."
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The Continuing Climate Meltdown
It has been a bad-make that dreadful-few weeks for what used to be called the "settled science" of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.
First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.
Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there's no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC's headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously.
Take the rain forest claim. In its 2007 report, the IPCC wrote that "up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state."
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Global warming is a 'nightmare' for coffee.
coffeeMan-made global warming has "affected Kenyan coffee production through unpredictable rainfall patterns and excessive droughts, making crop management and disease control a nightmare." Joseph Kimemia, director of research at Kenya's Coffee Research Foundation (CRF), told reporters that hotter temperatures and unpredictable rainfall are damaging his nation's ability to grow coffee:
We have seen climate change in intermittent rainfall patterns, extended drought and very high temperatures. Coffee operates within a very narrow temperature range of 19-25 degrees (Celsius). When you start getting temperatures above that, it affects photosynthesis and in some cases, trees wilt and dry up. We have see trees drying up in some marginal coffee areas.
Global warming-related droughts, heat waves, and climate change are also damaging coffee production in top exporters such as Uganda, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Nicaragua, as growers are "being forced uphill to higher altitudes, at a rate of three to four meters a year on average, as temperatures rise."

State of the Climate: Global Analysis
Global Highlights
    The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for January 2010 was 0.60^oC (1.08^oF) above the 20th century average of 12.0^oC (53.6^oF). This is the fourth warmest January on record.
    The global land surface temperature for January 2010 was 0.83^oC (1.49^oF) above the 20th century average of 2.8^oC (37.0^oF)-the twelfth warmest January on record. Land areas in the Southern Hemisphere were the warmest on record for January. In the Northern Hemisphere, which has much more land, comparatively, land surface temperatures were 18th warmest on record.
    The worldwide ocean surface temperature for January 2010 was the second warmest-behind 1998-on record for January, 0.52^oC (0.94^oF) above the 20th century average of 15.8^oC (60.5^oF). This can be partially attributed to the persistence of El Ni�o across the equatorial Pacific Ocean. According to NOAA's Climate Prediction Center (CPC), El Nino is expected to continue through the Northern Hemisphere spring 2010.
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The Climate Science Project, Part 2: How we know global warming is happening
Skeptical Science explains: It's the oceans, stupid!
Memo to climate scientists, environmentalists, and others: If you're going to give an interview or speak in public, you need to know the FULL scientific literature. If you just stick to reading up on your area of expertise, you won't have the sharpest answers for reporters or for a tough questioner in the audience.
Reading the BBC's interview of Dr. Phil Jones, the climate scientist at the center of the hacked e-mail scandal, makes clear that even an experienced and widely published researcher like Jones doesn't appear to know the full climate literature or the clearest answers to basic questions. The interviewer, the BBC's environment analyst Roger Harrabin, also doesn't, or he probably wouldn't have asked "Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?"
Now the snappiest answer to such a question comes from Ken Caldeira to the AP in October: "To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous." You could also quote NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt from that same story, "The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record. Even if you analyze the trend during that 10 years, the trend is actually positive, which means warming."
I'd also recommend mentioning two major scientific studies from last year, which demonstrate that when you look at where 90% of the human-caused warming was expected to go - the oceans - you find steady warming in recent years.
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NOAA: Warmest January in both satellite records
Warming is +0.18^oC (.32^oF) decade
Last week, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its monthly "State of the Climate Global Analysis" for January.
We see blowout warming in the satellite temperature record, which is so beloved of the anti-science crowd since they think - incorrectly - it doesn't show warming. Note that in UAH, we crushed the previous record.
In NOAA's own surface dataset, January is slightly less record-shattering: The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for January 2010 was 0.60^oC (1.08^oF) above the 20th century average of 12.0^oC (53.6^oF). This is the fourth warmest January on record.
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Reducing CO2 with Virtualization
While it seems technology budgets will remain relatively flat in the year ahead for construction companies, priorities are shifting significantly that could create some new demands on technology.
Specifically, virtualization has piqued the interest of many IT professionals. In fact, the No. 1 technology priority for 2010 is virtualization, according to a survey from Gartner, www.gartner.com, Stamford, Conn. And there are a number of reasons why companies might consider virtualization-from lower hardware costs to less downtime. Another reason some construction firms are turning to virtualization is improved energy efficiency.
Explorer Software, www.explorer-software.com, West Vancouver, B.C., a provider of software for the construction industry, has found the virtual model can help reduce CO2 output and operating costs. The company recently estimated that its virtual model helped save an estimated 1,500 tons of CO2 emissions a year.
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Compostable Plastics Have a Sweet Ending
ScienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2010) - Food packaging and other disposable plastic items could soon be composted at home along with organic waste, thanks to a new sugar-based polymer.
The degradable polymer is made from sugars known as lignocellulosic biomass, which come from non-food crops such as fast-growing trees and grasses, or renewable biomass from agricultural or food waste.
It is being developed at Imperial College London by a team of Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council scientists led by Dr Charlotte Williams.
The search for greener plastics, especially for single use items such as food packaging, is the subject of significant research worldwide. "It's spurred on not only from an environmental perspective, but also for economic and supply reasons," explains Dr Williams.
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Asian pollution delays inevitable warming
Dirty power plants exert temporary protective effect.
The grey, sulphur-laden skies overlying parts of Asia have a bright side - they reflect sunlight back into space, moderating temperatures on the ground. Scientists are now exploring how and where pollution from power plants could offset, for a time, the greenhouse warming of the carbon dioxide they emit.
A new modelling study doubles as a thought experiment in how pollution controls and global warming could interact in China and India, which are projected to account for 80% of new coal-fired power in the coming years. If new power plants were to operate without controlling pollution such as sulphur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOX), the study finds, the resulting haze would reflect enough sunlight to overpower the warming effect of CO2 and exert local cooling.
But this effect would not be felt uniformly across the globe and would last only a few decades. In the long run, CO2 would always prevail, and the world could experience a rapid warming effect if the skies were cleaned up decades down the road.
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