Climate Articles

A conclusion of the 4th International Polar Year
This week, the "Oslo Science conference" the largest conference ever -it was claimed � was held on polar sciences at Lillestr�m, just outside Oslo. Some of the web-casts from that meeting are worth watching, and I found especially the talk by David Barber ("On Thin Ice: The Arctic and Climate Change", video link here) both a bit alarming as well as fascinating.
Storms and snow affect sea-ice growth, since a layer of snow on top of the ice insulates against the cold atmosphere and prohibits ice growth. Winds and extra mass can lead to break-up, and the amount of multi-annual ice is lower than expected; it has decayed and 'rotted'. A mission with the Canadian ice breaker apparently managed to break ice slabs much thicker than expected, due to weaker ice. Also more recent reversals of the Beaufort gyre, unexpected long swells, and new ice on top of clumps of old ice fooling the satellites to think there is more multi-year ice than really the case, are just part of the story. In the mean while, the sea-ice for this season from NSIDC is on a low note.
The main message that I took home from this was that the sea-ice is more important than I previously thought. It appears clearer now that it plays a role in the Arctic amplification � which clearly is really emerging.
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Arctic death spiral: Naval Postgrad School's Maslowski "projects ice-free* fall by 2016 (+/- 3 yrs)"
But in the land of make-believe, Watts and Goddard say: "Arctic ice extent and thickness nearly identical to what it was 10 years ago."
One of the country's leading experts on the Arctic projects it will be essentially ice-free (in the fall) decades ahead of the projections of the climate models used in the 2007 IPCC report. And that has quite dire implications and consequences for the likely future rate of climate change compared to those models.
The following chart is from Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School in a presentation at the March State of the Arctic Meeting (click to enlarge):
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NASA: The 12-month running mean global temperature has reached a new record in 2010
� despite recent minimum of solar irradiance
"We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade" and "there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20�C/decade that began in the late 1970s."
Note: Hansen wants comments on this draft, so keep 'em coming.
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has released a revised draft of "Global Surface Temperature Change," by James Hansen et al. It is a must read for warming junkies. There's also a a summary discussion of the paper (reprinted below), and two PowerPoint posters of key figures like this one:
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Melting at the microscale
Earth's northern polar cap is disappearing at unprecedented rates. To understand why, re�-searchers are getting up close and personal with ice.
Using satellites, scientists get a broad perspective on how the skin of sea ice atop the Arctic Ocean shrinks, on average, just a little bit more every summer. But zooming down to within a few meters of the surface brings some important little things into view. In particular, "microphysical" properties of the ice, such as how salty water percolates through it, turn out to play a surprising role in ice behavior.
Yet most models of melting don't incorporate information about sea ice microphysics. So some researchers are pushing to learn more about the ice's physical properties and to include the findings in next-generation analyses. "It's clear that we need to do better in terms of understanding and predicting the fate of the polar ice cap," says Kenneth Golden, a mathematician at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City who studies sea ice. "Monitoring transport processes in the sea ice is critical for understanding climate change."
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Researchers Calculate The Greenhouse Gas Value Of Ecosystems
Researchers at the have developed a new, more accurate method of calculating the change in greenhouse gas emissions that results from changes in land use.
The new approach, described in the journal Global Change Biology, takes into account many factors not included in previous methods, the researchers report.
There is an urgent need to accurately assess whether particular land-use projects will increase or decrease greenhouse gas emissions, said Kristina Anderson-Teixeira, a postdoctoral researcher in the Energy Biosciences Institute at Illinois and lead author of the new study.
The greenhouse gas
value (GHGV) of a particular site depends on qualities such as the number and size of plants; the ecosystem's ability to take up or release greenhouse gases over time; and its vulnerability to natural disturbances, such as fire or hurricane damage, she said.
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A Clean Energy Wake-up Call from the Gulf
Environmental activist Bill McKibben has been a prominent voice on the dangers of fossil fuels. He says the gulf catastrophe is a reminder of our daily damage to the planet.
Environmentalist Bill McKibben has long called Americans' use of fossil fuels a dangerous addiction, and he says the disaster in the Gulf is just a reminder of the damage we do to the planet every day. With oil continuing to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, McKibben tells host Jeff Young it's time the Obama administration seize the moment as a rallying point for public support of clean energy.
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Philadelphia joins U.S. cities requiring cool roofs
The City of Brotherly Love, aiming to become America's greenest, has joined other U.S. cities in requiring energy-efficient reflective roofs for new buildings.
Philadelphia's "Cool Roof" bill, signed into law last month by Mayor Michael Nutter, follows similar steps taken in Chicago, California and New York, according to Builder magazine. Unlike traditional black asphalt roofs, cool ones (often white) reflect the sun's rays back into the atmosphere and release absorbed heat. This keeps buildings cooler, reducing the demand for air conditioning by 10% to 30%.
"This legislation is a simple step to reduce energy consumption and is virtually cost-neutral for new construction," its sponsor Councilman Jim Kenney said at a press conference overlooking Philadelphia's City Hall from the white roof of 1515 Market Street.
The new law, which applies to all new buildings with little or no roof slope, will likely affect only row houses and commercial buildings. Not many single-family homes have flat or near-flat roofs.
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Defending Boston from the sea
A massive ocean barrier. Hidden Holding tanks. With Sea Levels Rising, Urban Planners Start Envisioning a More Waterproof City For 400 years the sea has been kind to Boston. Maritime trade fed the city's early economic rise, and countless cod laid down their lives to feed its inhabitants. With the exception of boatloads of occupying redcoats, the Atlantic hasn't given the city much to complain about. When the area has flooded � as it did this spring � it hasn't been because of the mighty Atlantic, but the placid Charles.
But when Boston's planning visionaries think about the future, increasingly, it's the sea they're worried about. Huge swaths of the city are on landfill, just a few feet above sea level, and as ocean levels rise in the coming decades � as most earth scientists project they will � Boston faces the prospect of an ocean that is higher and more dangerous than the one it has long known. So-called 500-year floods � freak meteorological events of extreme destructive power, now expected only twice a millennium � will become 100-year floods, and 100-year floods will become 20-year floods.
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'Citizens science' tests state's water
KODIAK -- No matter what you believe about climate change, ocean chemistry doesn't lie. Even toy store chemistry tests will show that the seas are becoming more acidic, and the off-kilter levels can have a scary impact on sea creatures: Acid dissolves them.
The oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, produced mostly by tailpipes and coal and oil-fired power plants. The CO₂ increases acidity (pH) in the ocean, which robs it of calcium carbonate, the building block of sea creatures' skeletons and shells. Scientists estimate the ocean is 25 percent more acidic now than it was 300 years ago.
Corals, oysters and clams in the wild already show corrosion from the rising acid levels, and tests on king crab have been under way in Kodiak labs for several years. At a seminar last week, reports of potential impacts on pollock, Alaska's largest fish resource, raised eyebrows and more questions.
In tests on 1-year-old pollock at varying levels of pH, researchers at NOAA Fisheries Newport lab discovered that the fish seemed to compensate for increased levels of carbon dioxide by boosting levels of bicarbonate in their blood.
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Climate change a growing humanitarian challenge: UN
SYDNEY � Weather-related catastrophes brought about by climate change are increasing, the top UN humanitarian official said Sunday as he warned of the possibility of "mega-disasters". John Holmes, the Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, said one of the biggest challenges facing the aid community was the problems stemming from changing weather patterns. "When it comes meteorological disasters, weather-related disasters, then there is a trend upwards connected with climate change," Holmes, who is in Australia for high-level talks on humanitarian aid, told AFP.
"The trend is there is terms of floods, and cyclones, and droughts."
Holmes, who is the UN's emergency relief coordinator, said it had been a tough year due to January's devastating earthquake in Haiti, which killed more than 250,000 people.
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Ancient oceans belched stagnant CO₂ into the skies
At the end of the last ice age, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels shot up by nearly 50 per cent. But where did the CO₂ come from? This long-standing climatic mystery has now been solved.
Climate scientists have suspected - but never been able to prove - that the CO₂ was the result of a huge belch of gas from the oceans. They predicted that the ice age had slowed ocean circulation, trapping CO₂ deep within it, and that warmer temperatures reversed this process.
Signs of stagnant CO₂-rich water have now been discovered 3700 metres beneath the Southern Ocean's seabed, between Antarctica and South Africa.
Stewart Fallon of the Australian National University in Canberra and his colleagues collected samples from drill cores of the marine crust of tiny marine fossils called foraminifera.
Different species of these lived at the surface and the bottom of the ocean. The chemical composition of their shells is dependent on the water they form in and how much CO₂ it contains.
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Wind Farms and Birds
GOLDENDALE, Klickitat County � Biologist Orah Zamora spends her days walking around wind turbines in search of dead birds and bats. Most of her surveys turn up nothing, but every once in a while she finds a carcass that may have been felled by a whirring blade.
"It's like a crime scene, and you try to figure out what happened. Sometimes, it's really obvious because you see a slice mark," Zamora says.
Zamora's monitoring at the Windy Flats project is part of a larger series of surveys to assess how the wind-power boom is impacting birds that must now share air space with the towering turbines.
The surveys, which are financed by the wind industry, indicate that wind power is a relatively minor hazard to birds. But some scientists say it is still too soon to discount the risks posed by the rush to develop Northwest wind power. They are particularly concerned with the plight of hawks, eagles and other raptors, which are large, long-lived birds at the top of the food chain.
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Amazon forest fires 'on the rise'
The number of fires destroying Amazon rainforests are increasing, a study has found.
A team of scientists said fires in the region could release similar amounts of carbon as deliberate deforestation.
Writing in Science, they said fire occurrence rates had increased in 59% of areas with reduced deforestation.
As a result, the rise in fires could jeopardise the long-term success of schemes to reduce emissions from deforestation, they added.
The researchers - from the University of Exeter, UK, and Brazil's National Institute for Space Research - based their findings on satellite-derived data on deforestation and forest fires. "The results were a surprise because we expected that fires would have decreased with the decrease of deforestation," said co-author Luiz Aragao from the University of Exeter.
"The implication for REDD is that we first need a system that can monitor fires," he told the Science journal.
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Warning about strawberry field chemical ignored, scientists say
California pesticide regulators plan to approve a new agricultural chemical called methyl iodide for the state's coastal strawberry fields, allowing levels of exposure that the state's own experts say will put farmworkers and bystanders at risk.
The Department of Pesticide Regulation has set acceptable exposure levels for methyl iodide that are 120 times higher than recommended by its own scientists and an eight-person panel the department commissioned to peer-review its work.
The decision to increase exposure levels has caused a rift within the DPR, a little-known but powerful agency that oversees a major segment of the state's multibillion-dollar farming industry. In interviews, all eight peer-review scientists said their warnings and scientific analysis of the health risks of methyl iodide appear to have been disregarded.
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Lobster Stocks Found Failing
Due to a combination of climate change creating warmer water conditions and continued pressure from fishing, lobster stocks in southern New England have been badly depleted, and a five-year moratorium is needed for recovery.
This is the recommendation of a technical panel for the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission in a report discussed last week.
"Overwhelming environmental and biological changes coupled with continued fishing greatly reduce the likelihood of southern New England stock rebuilding," the report said.
Robert Glenn, senior fisheries biologist for the state Division of Marine Fisheries and a state expert on lobsters, spoke at an informational meeting at the University of Massachusetts at South Dartmouth last Thursday. More than 60 lobstermen attended. If it is approved, the moratorium would take effect in July of 2011 from the southern New England coast to Virginia, for both commercial and recreational lobster fishing.
Word of the proposed moratorium reached the Menemsha waterfront over the weekend. Stephen Larsen, a Menemsha lobsterman since 1974, said a fishing ban would have a devastating impact. "It would put us out of business. We all have mortgages," he said. Mr. Larsen said he and other Menemsha fishermen are already struggling to earn a living.
Statistics in the report from the technical committee paint a stark picture of a fishery in steep decline.
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Monckton tries to incite academic hearing against author of devastating science-based evisceration of his disinformation
In the ongoing saga of The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley vs. reality, TVMOB tosses up an air ball in response to Prof. John Abraham's evisceration of his standard talk. Maybe the better analogy is one of bad sportsmanship, a basketball thrown directly at the head of Abraham.
TVMOB is, of course, a shameless purveyor of hate speech and anti-science disinformation (see TVMOB hate speech shocker: Lord Monckton repeats and expands on his charge that those who embrace climate science are "Hitler youth" and fascists and links below). [Please note that the picture on the right is not TVMOB nor do I think he would ever participate in this.] So it is no surprise his 'response' devolves into a nasty threat:
Now you will understand why I have already initiated the process of having Abraham hauled up before whatever academic panel his Bible College can muster, to answer disciplinary charges of wilful academic dishonesty amounting to gross professional misconduct unbecoming a member of his profession.
It is of course laughable that TVMOB questions Abraham's or anyone else's honesty � or their credentials.
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What Lies Beneath: An Interview with Permafrost Expert Larry Hinzman
Permafrost is not your garden-variety soil. Beneath the frozen depths of the Arctic, the icy soil stores an estimated 1.5 trillion tons of carbon � including methane and other hydrocarbons -- twice as much as is found in the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases are locked up in frozen ground that covers 24 percent of the exposed land in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, as well as Antarctica and the Patagonia region of Argentina and Chile.
Greenhouse gases are now escaping the permafrost and entering the atmosphere at an increasing rate -- up to 50 billion tons of methane per year � due to a global thawing trend. This is particularly troublesome because methane heats the atmosphere with 25 times the efficiency of carbon dioxide. The release of this stored carbon could change climate in the Arctic in ways researchers have yet to fully understand. Researchers, such as Larry Hinzman of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, are digging deeper to find out more. Hinzman is the director of the International Arctic Research Center at the University, and a leading expert on permafrost.
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Why NASA Keeps a Close Eye on the Sun's Irradiance
For more than two centuries, scientists have wondered how much heat and light the sun expels, and whether this energy varies enough to change Earth's climate. In the absence of a good method for measuring the sun's output, the scientific conversation was often heavy with speculation.
By 1976, that began to change when Jack Eddy, a solar astronomer from Boulder, Colo., examined historical records of sunspots and published a seminal paper that showed some century-long variations in solar activity are connected with major climatic shifts. Eddy helped show that an extended lull in solar activity during the 17th Century -- called the Maunder Minimum -- was likely connected to a decades-long cold period on Earth called the "Little Ice Age."
Two years after Eddy published his paper, NASA launched the first in a series of satellite instruments called radiometers, which measure the amount of sunlight striking the top of Earth's atmosphere, or total solar irradiance. Radiometers have provided unparalleled details about how the sun's irradiance has varied in the decades since. Such measurements have helped validate and expand upon Eddy's findings. And they've led to a number of other discoveries�and questions�about the sun.
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NASA Center for Climate Simulation: Data Supporting Science
Debuting in spring 2010, the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) is the new name for a Goddard Space Flight Center organization that has provided supercomputing resources to NASA scientists and engineers for over 25 years.
"Computation here at Goddard is primarily to create datasets and make them available for science researchers around the world," said Phil Webster, chief of Goddard's Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office, which includes NCCS. With climate and weather modeling representing the bulk of NCCS computing, the new name hreflects "our mission to support NASA Earth science."
This science is carried out by hundreds of NCCS users from Goddard, other NASA centers, laboratories, and universities across the U.S. The two largest user groups are Goddard's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO), headed by Michele Rienecker, and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), directed by Jim Hansen. NCCS-hosted simulations span time scales from days (weather prediction) to seasons and years (short-term climate prediction) to decades and centuries (climate change projection).
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Global Warming
Throughout its long history, Earth has warmed and cooled time and again. Climate has changed when the planet received more or less sunlight due to subtle shifts in its orbit, as the atmosphere or surface changed, or when the Sun's energy varied. But in the past century, another force has started to influence Earth's climate: humanity
What is Global Warming?
Global warming is the unusually rapid increase in Earth's average surface temperature over the past century primarily due to the greenhouse gases released by people burning fossil fuels. How Does Today's Warming Compare to Past Climate Change?
Earth has experienced climate change in the past without help from humanity. But the current climatic warming is occurring much more rapidly than past warming events.
Why Do Scientists Think Current Warming Isn't Natural?
In Earth's history before the Industrial Revolution, Earth's climate changed due to natural causes unrelated to human activity. These natural causes are still in play today, but their influence is too small or they occur too slowly to explain the rapid warming seen in recent decades.
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New greenhouse gases accumulating 'rapidly'
40 different types of greenhouse gases are measured at Cape Grim. (ABC News: Sarah Clarke)
It is windy, cold and isolated. Cape Grim is at the most north-west point in Tasmania.
It is also home to some of the cleanest air on the planet and for that reason, it is the most important air measuring station in the southern hemisphere.
The Cape Grim research station, perched on the cliffs overlooking the Southern Ocean, is recording the most precise account of the earth's changing atmosphere.
But it is not all good news - over the last 12 months scientists have identified two potent greenhouse gases that are accelerating rapidly.
Paul Fraser from the CSIRO has been coming to the station since it opened in 1976 and he says that over the last 30 years, carbon dioxide levels have increased by 15 per cent.
"Almost entirely that increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is due to fossil fuels and that's entirely man-made," he said.
In fact, 40 different types of greenhouse gases are measured at Cape Grim.
But it is two new gases recently identified that are accelerating rapidly.
One, nitrogen trifluoride, is used in the manufacture of plasma televisions. The other is sulphuryl fluoride, a fumigant used on crops.
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Global Warming Deniers and Their Proven Strategy of Doubt
For years, free-market fundamentalists opposed to government regulation have sought to create doubt in the public's mind about the dangers of smoking, acid rain, and ozone depletion. Now they have turned those same tactics on the issue of global warming and on climate scientists, with significant success.
In recent months, a group called the Cooler Heads Coalition � a creation of the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) � has fostered a public image of climate science as a criminal conspiracy. The CEI itself has accused NASA, the largest funder of climate science, of faking important climate data sets. In February, U.S. Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, whose positions are frequently cited and promoted by CEI, called for a criminal investigation of 17 climate scientists from a variety of institutions for allegedly falsifying or distorting data used in taxpayer-funded research.
The recent shift in the community of global warming deniers from merely attacking mainstream climate scientists to alleging their involvement in criminal activity is an unsurprising but alarming development in the long campaign to discredit the established scientific fact that burning fossil fuels is causing the world to warm. This latest escalation fits seamlessly into a decades-old pattern of attempts to deny the reality of environmental ills � smoking, acid rain, ozone depletion, and global warming. Similar or even identical claims have been promoted for decades by other free-market think-tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, and, most persistently, the George C. Marshall Institute. These think tanks all have two things in common: They promote free-market solutions to environmental problems, and all have long been active in challenging the scientific evidence of those problems.
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Twilight of the Coal Era?
The electricity market is in the doldrums, but the market for new generating stations that use natural gas is going strong, industry experts say. Why? Because gas is beginning to replace coal, according to Randy H. Zwirn, president of the Siemens Power Generation Group.
On Monday, Siemens is announcing [pdf] that it has won contracts to supply five new high-efficiency gas plants to Progress Energy at two sites in North Carolina that have old coal-fired generators. It is also replacing old gas-fired plants in Florida.
The H.F. Lee Energy Complex, near Goldsboro, has three coal-fired generators that began operating in 1951, 1952 and 1962. The three coal-fired generators at the Sutton plant, near Wilmington, went into service in 1954, 1955 and 1972.
The six plants are among 11 that Progress owns in North Carolina that do not have sulfur scrubbers. The company has said it will eventually close all 11.
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