In 2008, I took a tiny cargo plane to the Inupiaq village of Kivalina, in the northwest of Alaska above the Arctic Circle. I had heard the village would be lost to climate change from erosion, which I imagined to be a slow, gradual, and predictable process.

Touring the island and speaking to residents and government workers, I soon realized the erosion is actually often sudden, severe, and erratic, brought on by increasingly strong storms that threaten the peoples’ safety. Kivalina needs to be relocated. The problem is there is no policy or structure in place to relocate them.

While the continental U.S. shifts between weather extremes - from strong storms fueled by increased precipitation to prolonged droughts aggravated by heat – the changes in the Arctic have been much less ambiguous: steady warming.

Annual mean temperatures in the Arctic region are rising twice as fast as the global average. The warming is melting glaciers, allowing for the absorption of more heat, with recent studies suggesting the possibility of a completely ice-free summer by 2040or even 2030. Entire ecosystems are transforming, as rising seas pour into freshwater systems, making deltas and lakes more saline and inhospitable for some species, while attracting whole new species.

Continue reading: Relocating Alaska Natives: The Climate is Changing Faster Than Disaster Management and Adaptation Policies | ThinkProgress.

 

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has released its monthly global temperature data.  It reveals that there is no April in the temperature record before 2005 that was warmer than April 2011.

And that’s in spite of the fact that we are still in the tail end of a major La Niña and just coming out of “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.”  April 2011 is surpassed in warmth only by 2005, 2007, and 2010.  It tied with 2002 and just beat 1998.

The Australian Government’s Bureau of Meteorology foresees a transition to an El Niño this summer.  NOAA only foresees “ENSO-neutral conditions.”  NASA’s Hansen had predicted back in October that “It is likely that 2012 will reach a record high global temperature.”  An El Niño would make that an extreme likelihood.

We have, as reported, seen almost unbelievable extreme weather in this country (see Hell and High Water: Weather Channel labels Texas drought and Mississippi floods truly “exceptional”; Masters: This is “only” a “1-in-100 to 1-in-300 year flood).”

We have also been seeing record-smashing extreme weather around the globe, from England to Canada, from Colombia to China — but the U.S. media is so focused on the Mississippi that these events have received little attention here.

April was the hottest in the Central England Temperature record going back some 350 years:

UPI reports “Canada’s central province of Manitoba braced Thursday for the worst seasonal flooding in 300 years, local officials said.”  Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters has more here:

The flood is being called a 300-year flood, and damages are already in excess of $1 billion. In neighboring Alberta, the reverse extreme is causing havoc: severe drought and strong spring winds have made ideal conditions for wildfires,

And Colombia has been hit by “11 months of nearly nonstop rain” displacing over 3 million people.  Masters again has details:

“Some parts of the country have been set back 15 to 20 years”, said Plan’s Country Director in Colombia, Gabriela Bucher. “Over the past 10 months we have registered five or six times more rainfall than usual,” said the director of Colombia’s weather service, Ricardo Lozano. Up to 800 mm (about 32 inches) of rain has fallen along the Pacific coast of Colombia over the past two weeks (Figure 3). The severe spring flooding follows on the heels of the heaviest fall rains in Colombia’s History. Weather records go back 42 year in Colombia. Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos said, “the tragedy the country is going through has no precedents in our history.”

… See also my December 2010 post, Heaviest rains in Colombia’s history trigger deadly landslide.

China has been hit by a devastating drought.  The NYT reports today that:

A severe drought along the Yangtze River region in central China has rendered nearly 1,400 reservoirs in Hubei Province temporary unusable, devastated farm fields and made drinking water scarce, according to a report on Monday by Xinhua, the state news agency. The drought, which has lasted for five months, has brought water levels in the middle part of the Yangtze down to a near-record low.

AFP published this picture with the caption, “Chinese fishing boats are seen stranded a dried up river bank along the Yangtze river. Drought on the massive waterway has led to historically low water levels that have forced authorities to halt shipping, the government and media said Thursday”:

In his October analysis, Hansen warned, “Given the association of extreme weather and climate events with rising global temperature, the expectation of new record high temperatures in 2012 also suggests that the frequency and magnitude of extreme events could reach a high level in 2012. Extreme events include not only high temperatures, but also indirect effects of a warming atmosphere including the impact of higher temperature on extreme rainfall and droughts.”

I’ve often said of our current extreme weather, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”  Unfortunately, we may not have to wait that long to see the weather of the last year topped.

Related Posts:

• NASA’s James Hansen: “One sure bet is that this decade will be the warmest” on record
• 2010 Study: Global warming is driving increased frequency of extreme wet or dry summer weather in southeast, so droughts and deluges are likely to get worse
• Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding that harm humans and the environment
• NOAA: Monster crop-destroying Russian heat wave to be once-in-a-decade event by 2060s (or sooner)
• NCAR’s Trenberth on the link between global warming and extreme deluges:  “There is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.”

 

Well worth watching: http://hot-topic.co.nz/the-climate-show-7-box-and-boxsters-the-cryosphere-special/

 

Unfortunately for homo sapiens, it’s been staggeringly warm where the ice is.  I’ll do a post on Greenland shortly, but the NSF-sponsored researchers at UCAR/NCAR  have posted some staggering data on just how warm it has been in northern Canada:

To put this picture into even sharper focus, let’s take a look at Coral Harbour, located at the northwest corner of Hudson Bay in the province of Nunavut. On a typical mid-January day, the town drops to a low of –34°C (–29.2°F) and reaches a high of just -26°C (–14.8°F). Compare that to what Coral Harbour actually experienced in the first twelve days of January 2011, as reported by Environment Canada (see table at left).

• After New Year’s Day, the town went 11 days without getting down to its average daily high.
• On the 6th of the month, the low temperature was –3.7°C (25.3°F). That’s a remarkable 30°C (54°F) above average.
• On both the 5th and 6th, Coral Harbor inched above the freezing mark. Before this year, temperatures above 0°C (32°F) had never been recorded in the entire three months of January, February, and March.

The extremes have been just as impressive when you look high in the atmosphere above these areas. Typically the midpoint of the atmosphere’s mass—the 500-millibar (500 hPa) level—rests around 5 kilometers (3 miles) above sea level during the Arctic midwinter. In mid-December, a vast bubble of high pressure formed in the vicinity of Greenland. At the center of this high, the 500-mb surface rose to more than 5.8 kilometers, a sign of remarkably mild air below. Stu Ostro (The Weather Channel) found that this was the most extreme 500-mb anomaly anywhere on the planet in weather analyses dating back to 1948. Details are at the conclusion of Ostro’s year-end blog post.

Farther west, a separate monster high developed over Alaska last week. According to Richard Thoman (National Weather Service, Fairbanks), the 500-mb height over both Nome and Kotzebue rose to 582 decameters (5.82 km). That’s not only a January record: those are the highest values ever observed at those points outside of June, July, and August.

Previously I wrote about how Weather Channel expert Stu Ostro discussed Georgia’s record-smashing global-warming-type deluge:  “Nevertheless, there’s a straightforward connection in the way the changing climate “set the table” for what happened this September in Atlanta and elsewhere. It behooves us to understand not only theoretical expected increases in heavy precipitation (via relatively slow/linear changes in temperatures, evaporation, and atmospheric moisture) but also how changing circulation patterns are already squeezing out that moisture in extreme doses and affecting weather in other ways.”

Continue reading: 

Canada sees staggering mildness as planet’s high-presure record is “obliterated” « Climate Progress.

 

Skeptical Science has just released this superb and easy to understand PDF document on the evidence for AGW and the poor arguments presented by the so-called “climate skeptics”.

————————–

The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism

Scientific skepticism is healthy. In fact, science by its very nature is skeptical. Genuine skepticism means considering the full body of evidence before coming to a conclusion. However, when you take a close look at arguments expressing climate ‘skepticism’, what you often observe is cherry picking of pieces of evidence while rejecting any data that don’t fit the desired picture. This isn’t skepticism. It is ignoring facts and the science.

The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism looks at both the evidence that human activity is causing global warming and the ways that climate ‘skeptic’ arguments can mislead by presenting only small pieces of the puzzle rather than the full picture.

Continue reading and check the forums at: The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism.

 

November 15, 2010

This week marks the one-year anniversary of what the anti-science crowd successfully labeled ‘Climategate’.  The media will be doing countless retrospectives, most of which will be wasted ink, like the Guardian’s piece — focusing on climate scientists at the expense of climate science, which is precisely the kind of miscoverage that has been going on for the whole year!

I’ll save that my media critiques for Part 2, since I think that Climategate’s biggest impact was probably on the media, continuing their downward trend of focusing on style over substance, of missing the story of the century, if not the millennia.

Continue reading here “A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice « Climate Progress.”

 

September 20, 2010

Sea-level rise has the potential to reshape the coastal environment.

High resolution (Credit: NOAA)

Scientists analyzing measurements taken in the deep ocean around the globe over the past two decades find a warming trend that contributes to sea level rise, especially around Antarctica.

Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, cause heating of the Earth. Over the past few decades, at least 80 percent of this heat energy has gone into the ocean, warming it in the process.

“Previous studies have shown that the upper ocean is warming, but our analysis determines how much additional heat the deep ocean is storing from warming observed all the way to the ocean floor,” said Sarah Purkey, an oceanographer at the University of Washington and lead author of the study.

This study shows that the deep ocean – below about 3,300 feet – is taking up about 16 percent of what the upper ocean is absorbing. The authors note that there are several possible causes for this deep warming: a shift in Southern Ocean winds, a change in the density of what is called Antarctic Bottom Water, or how quickly that bottom water is formed near the Antarctic, where it sinks to fill the deepest, coldest portions of the ocean around much of the globe.

The scientists found the strongest deep warming around Antarctica, weakening with distance from its source as it spreads around the globe. While the temperature increases are small (about 0.03°C per decade in the deep Southern Ocean, less elsewhere), the large volume of the ocean over which they are found and the high capacity of water to absorb heat means that this warming accounts for a huge amount of energy storage. If this deep ocean heating were going into the atmosphere instead – a physical impossibility – it would be warming at a rate of about 3°C (over 5°F) per decade.

“A warming Earth causes sea level rise in two ways,” said Gregory Johnson, a NOAA oceanographer at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, and the study’s co-author. “The warming heats the ocean, causing it to expand, and melts continental ice, adding water to the ocean. The expansion and added water both cause the sea to encroach on the land.”

Sea level has been rising at around 3 mm (1/8 of a inch) per year on average since 1993, with about half of that caused by ocean thermal expansion and the other half because of additional water added to the ocean, mostly from melting continental ice. Purkey and Johnson note that deep warming of the Southern Ocean accounts for about 1.2 mm (about 1/20th of an inch) per year of the sea level rise around Antarctica in the past few decades.

The highly accurate deep-ocean temperature observations used in this study come from ship-based instruments that measure conductivity through salinity, temperature and depth. These measurements were taken on a series of hydrographic surveys of the global ocean in the 1990s through the World Ocean Circulation Experiment and in the 2000s in support of the Climate Variability program. These surveys are now coordinated by the international Global Ship-based Hydrographic Investigations Program.

The study, “Warming of Global Abyssal and Deep Southern Ocean Waters between the 1990s and 2000s: Contributions to Global Heat and Sea Level Rise Budgets,” authored by Sarah G. Purkey and Gregory C. Johnson, will be published in an upcoming edition of the Journal of Climate.

NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources. Find us on Facebook.

via NOAA – Scientists Find 20 Years of Deep Water Warming Leading to Sea Level Rise.

 

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 21st September 2010.

The closer it comes, the worse it looks. The best outcome anyone now expects from December’s climate summit in Mexico is that some delegates might stay awake during the meetings. When talks fail once, as they did in Copenhagen, governments lose interest. They don’t want to be associated with failure, they don’t want to pour time and energy into a broken process. Nine years after the world trade negotiations moved to Mexico after failing in Qatar, they remain in diplomatic limbo. Nothing in the preparations for the climate talks suggests any other outcome.

A meeting in China at the beginning of October is supposed to clear the way for Cancun(1). The hosts have already made it clear that it’s going nowhere: there are, a top Chinese climate change official explains, still “huge differences between developed and developing countries”(2). Everyone blames everyone else for the failure at Copenhagen. Everyone insists that everyone else should move.

But no one cares enough to make a fight of it. The disagreements are simultaneously entrenched and muted. The doctor’s certificate has not been issued; perhaps, to save face, it never will be. But the harsh reality we have to grasp is that the process is dead.

In 2012 the only global deal for limiting greenhouse gas emissions – the Kyoto Protocol – expires. There is no realistic prospect that it will be replaced before it elapses: the existing treaty took five years to negotiate and a further eight years to come into force. In terms of real hopes for global action on climate change, we are now far behind where we were in 1997, or even 1992. It’s not just that we have lost 18 precious years. Throughout the age of good intentions and grand announcements we spiralled backwards.

Nor do regional and national commitments offer more hope. An analysis published a few days ago by the campaigning group Sandbag estimates the amount of carbon that will have been saved by the end of the second phase of the EU’s emissions trading system, in 2012(3). After the hopeless failure of the scheme’s first phase we were promised that the real carbon cuts would start to bite between 2008 and 2012. So how much carbon will it save by then? Less than one third of one per cent.

Worse still, the reduction in industrial output caused by the recession has allowed big polluters to build up a bank of carbon permits which they can carry into the next phase of the trading scheme. If nothing is done to annul them or to crank down the proposed carbon cap (which, given the strength of industrial lobbies and the weakness of government resolve, is unlikely) these spare permits will vitiate phase three as well. Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, the EU’s emissions trading system will remain alive. It will also remain completely useless.

Plenty of nations – such as the United Kingdom – have produced what appear to be robust national plans for cutting greenhouse gases. With one exception (the Maldives), their targets fall far short of the reductions needed to prevent more than two degrees of global warming.

Even so, none of them are real. Missing from the proposed cuts are the net greenhouse gas emissions we have outsourced to other countries and now import in the form of manufactured goods. Were these included in the UK’s accounts, alongside the aviation, shipping and tourism gases excluded from official figures, the UK’s emissions would rise by 48%(4). Rather than cutting our contribution to global warming by 19% since 1990, as the government boasts, we have increased it by around 29%(5). It’s the same story in most developed nations. Our apparent success results entirely from failures elsewhere.

Hanging over everything is the growing recognition that the United States isn’t going to play. Not this year, perhaps not in any year. If Congress couldn’t pass a climate bill so feeble that it consisted of little but loopholes while Barack Obama was president and the Democrats had a majority in both houses, where does hope lie for action in other circumstances? Last Tuesday the Guardian reported that of 48 Republican contenders for the Senate elections in November only one accepted that manmade climate change is taking place(6). Who was he? Mike Castle of Delaware. The following day he was defeated by the Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell, producing a full house of science deniers. The Enlightenment? Fun while it lasted.

What all this means is that there is not a single effective instrument for containing manmade global warming anywhere on earth. The response to climate change, which was described by Lord Stern as “a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen”(7), is the greatest political failure the world has ever seen.

Nature won’t wait for us. The US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that the first eight months of 2010 were as hot as the first 8 months of 1998 – the warmest ever recorded(8). But there’s a crucial difference. 1998 had a record El Nino – the warm phase of the natural Pacific temperature oscillation. The 2010 El Nino was smaller (an anomaly peaking at roughly 1.8, rather than 2.5C), and brief by comparison to those of recent years(9). Since May the oscillation has been in its cool phase (La Nina)(10): even so, June, July and August this year were the second warmest on record(11). The stronger the warnings, the less capable of action we become.

Where does this leave us? How should we respond to the reality we have tried not see: that in 18 years of promise and bluster nothing has happened? Environmentalists tend to blame themselves for these failures. Perhaps we should have made people feel better about their lives. Or worse. Perhaps we should have done more to foster hope. Or despair. Perhaps we were too fixated on grand visions. Or techno-fixes. Perhaps we got too close to business. Or not close enough. The truth is that there is not and never was a strategy certain of success, as the powers ranged against us have always been stronger than we are.

Greens are a puny force, by comparison to industrial lobby groups, the cowardice of governments and the natural human tendency to deny what we don’t want to see. To compensate for our weakness, we indulged a fantasy of benign paternalistic power, acting, though the political mechanisms were inscrutable, in the wider interests of humankind. We allowed ourselves to believe that, with a little prompting and protest, somewhere, in a distant institutional sphere, compromised but decent people would take care of us. They won’t. They weren’t ever going to do so. So what do we do now?

I don’t know. These failures have exposed not only familiar political problems, but deep-rooted human weakness. All I know is that we must stop dreaming about an institutional response that will never materialise and start facing a political reality we’ve sought to avoid. The conversation starts here.

www.monbiot.com

via Monbiot.com » The Process Is Dead.

 

The amount of warming we are going to subject our children and countless future generations to depends primarily on three factors:

1. The sensitivity of the climate to fast feedbacks like sea ice and water vapor (how much warming you get if we only double CO2 emissions to 560 ppm and there are no major “slow” feedbacks). We know the fast feedbacks are strong by themselves (see Study: Water-vapor feedback is “strong and positive,” so we face “warming of several degrees Celsius” and detailed analysis below).

2. The real-world slower (decadal) feedbacks, such as tundra melt (see Science: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and venting and links at the end).

3. The actual CO2 concentration level we are likely to hit, which is far beyond 550 ppm (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories are being realised” — 1000 ppm).

Given that the anti-science, pro-pollution forces seem to be succeeding in their fight to keep us on our current emissions path, it’s no surprise that multiple recent analyses conclude that we face a temperature rise that is far, far beyond dangerous:

* Hadley Center: “Catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path

* M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F

* Our hellish future: Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year — and that isn’t the worst case, it’s business as usual!”

* “The Copenhagen Diagnosis” warns “Without significant mitigation, the report says global mean warming could reach as high as 7 degrees Celsius by 2100.”

And this is all consistent with the best recent analyses of paleoclimate data (see Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher — “We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm”).

There is a small group of self-proclaimed “lukewarmers” who don’t know the scientific literature well or are just outright anti-science disinformers. They assert, despite all the science to the contrary, that the sensitivity of the climate to fast feedbacks is very low. They then blindly ignore factors #2 and #3 above in order to claim total warming this century will be maybe 1°C — or 2°C at most — no big deal, according to this dangerously confused and/or misguided group.

Skeptical Science has a good post on this, “A detailed look at climate sensitivity,” that I am reprinting in its entirety below.

Continue reading at A detailed look at climate sensitivity « Climate Progress.

 

PARIS (AFP) – – Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming debate, should be halved, according to Dutch and US scientists.

In the last two years, several teams have estimated Greenland is shedding roughly 230 gigatonnes of ice, or 230 billion tonnes, per year and West Antarctica around 132 gigatonnes annually.

Together, that would account for more than half of the annual three-millimetre (0.2 inch) yearly rise in sea levels, a pace that compares dramatically with 1.8mm (0.07 inches) annually in the early 1960s.

But, according to the new study, published in the September issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, the ice estimates fail to correct for a phenomenon known as glacial isostatic adjustment.

This is the term for the rebounding of Earth’s crust following the last Ice Age.

Glaciers that were kilometers (miles) thick smothered Antarctica and most of the northern hemisphere for tens of thousands of years, compressing the elastic crust beneath it with their titanic weight.

When the glaciers started to retreat around 20,000 years ago, the crust started to rebound, and is still doing so.

This movement, though, is not just a single vertical motion, lead researcher Bert Vermeersen of Delft Technical University, in the Netherlands, said in phone interview with AFP.

“A good analogy is that it’s like a mattress after someone has been sleeping on it all night,” he said.

The weight of the sleeper creates a hollow as the material compress downwards and outwards. When the person gets up, the mattress starts to recover. This movement, seen in close-up, is both upwards and downwards and also sideways, too, as the decompressed material expands outwards and pulls on adjacent stuffing.

Often ignored or considered a minor factor in previous research, post-glacial rebound turns out to be important, says the paper.

It looks at tiny changes in Earth’s gravitational field provided by two satellites since 2002, from GPS measurements on land, and from figures for sea floor pressure.

These revealed, among other things, that southern Greenland is in fact subsiding, as the crust beneath it is pulled by the post-glacial rebound from northern America.

With glacial isostatic adjustment modelled in, the loss from Greenland is put at 104 gigatonnes, plus or minus 23 gigatonnes, and 64 gigatonnes from West Antarctica, plus or minus 32 gigatonnes.

These variations show a large degree of uncertainty, but Vermeersen believes that even so a clearer picture is emerging on icesheet loss.

“The corrections for deformations of the Earth’s crust have a considerable effect on the amount of ice that is estimated to be melting each year,” said Vermeersen, whose team worked with NASA’s Jet Propulsation Laboratory and the Netherlands Institute for Space Research.

“We have concluded that the Greenland and West Antarctica ice caps are melting at approximately half the speed originally predicted.”

If the figures for overall sea level rise are accurate, icesheet loss would be contribute about 30 percent, rather than roughly half, to the total, said Vermeersen. The rest would come mainly from thermal expansion, meaning that as the sea warms it rises.

The debate is important because of fears that Earth’s biggest reservoirs of ice, capable of driving up ocean levels by many metres (feet) if lost, are melting much faster than global-warming scenarios had predicted.

In 2007, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted oceans would rise by 18-59 centimeters (7.2 and 23.6 inches) by 2100, a figure that at its upper range means vulnerable coastal cities would become swamped within a few generations.

The increase would depend on warming estimated at between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees Celsius (1.98-11.52 degrees Fahrenheit) this century, the IPCC said. It stressed, though, the uncertainties about icesheet loss.

via Climate: New study slashes estimate of icecap loss – Yahoo! Singapore News.

 

August 31, 2010

A unique ‘natural laboratory’ in the Mediterranean Sea is revealing the effects of rising carbon dioxide levels on life in the oceans. The results show a bleak future for marine life as ocean acidity rises, and suggest that similar lowering of ocean pH levels may have been responsible for massive extinctions in the past.

That’s the opening (and headline) of a news release from the Geological Society of London.  The new study is “Modern seawater acidification: the response of foraminifera to high-CO2 conditions in the Mediterranean Sea” (subs. reqd.) in the latest Journal of the Geological Society.

For background on ocean acidification, see Nature Geoscience: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.

The study identified a tipping point at “mean pH 7.8?:

The scientists, from the University of Plymouth and the University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, studied a single celled organisms called Foraminifera around volcanic carbon dioxide vents off Naples in Italy. The study, published in the September issue of the Journal of the Geological Society, found that increasing CO2 levels caused foram diversity to fall from 24 species to only 4.

‘Previous studies have shown a reduction in diversity of 30%, but this is even bigger for forams’, said Dr Jason Hall-Spencer, one of the study’s co-authors. ‘A tipping point occurs at mean pH 7.8. This is the pH level predicted for the end of this century’.

The figure below [not from the study] shows the pH trend vs. the CO2 trend around “Station ALOHA, the HOT deep-water station (22 45?N, 158W) located about 100 km north of Oahu, Hawaii:

Uhh, pH 7.8 — here we come.

I would note that this study, based as it on a natural laboratory, doesn’t even include the behind impact of rising ocean temperatures with rising acidification.  For an analysis of what that could mean, see 2009 Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years.”

Back to the news release:

Rising carbon dioxide levels acidify the ocean, which has a particularly devastating effect on organisms that have calcium carbonate shells, like Foraminifera.

‘Forams are well preserved in the fossil record, which is why we chose to study them’, says Dr Hall-Spencer. ‘We knew the results were likely to show a decline in foram diversity but we weren’t expecting such a seismic shift’.

Forams record past events in the geological record – in particular, the effect of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period of massive carbon release and rapid warming, 55 million years ago, accompanied by extinctions in marine life. It is also thought to have seen a period of ocean acidification.

‘That was a period when massive changes in marine ecology happened’ says Dr Hall-Spencer. ‘Our natural laboratory provides a glimpse into the future of our oceans’.

‘These are the first CO2 vents to be used to study ocean acidification. They allow us to observe how ecosystems react to changes in ocean acidity. We can see for our own eyes what increasing CO2 levels do to marine communities’.

‘At a mean pH level of 7.8, calcified organisms begin to disappear, and non calcifying ones take over. We are headed towards that being the case in this century. The big concern for me is that unless we curb carbon emissions we risk mass extinctions, degrading coastal waters and encouraging outbreaks of toxic jellyfish and algae.’

It is self-destructive for the nation and world not to begin rapid and sharp CO2 reductions.

via Geological Society: Acidifying oceans spell marine biological meltdown “by end of century” « Climate Progress.

 

Many of Asia’s glaciers are retreating as a result of climate change.

This retreat impacts water supplies to millions of people, increases the likelihood of outburst floods that threaten life and property in nearby areas, and contributes to sea-level rise.

Talk about your well-timed studies — see “One-fifth of Pakistan is under water.”

The U.S. Geological Survey collaborated with 39 international scientists — “the most knowledgeable glaciologists for each geographic region covered” — on “The Glaciers of Asia,” which reports on “the status of glaciers throughout all of Asia, including Russia, China, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan.”

Here’s more of their release:

“Of particular interest are the Himalaya, where glacier behavior impacts the quality of life of tens of millions of people,” said USGS scientist Jane Ferrigno. “Glaciers in the Himalaya are a major source of fresh water and supply meltwater to all of the rivers in northern India.”

As glaciers become smaller, water runoff decreases, which is especially important during the dry season when other water sources are limited. Climate change also brings warmer temperatures and earlier water runoff from glaciers, and this combined with spring and summer rains can result in flood conditions. The overall glacier retreat and additional melt can increase the amount of water dammed in the vicinity of a glacier, and the added pressure enhances the likelihood of disastrous outburst flooding.

Significantly, an August 8 news article, “Officials point to Russian drought and Asian deluge as consistent with climate change,” reports:

Pakistani glaciologist, Prof M. Iqbal Khan, told the Associated Press of Pakistan that the flooding was linked to melting glaciers in upper Pakistan.

“I have warned everyone about the floods in Peshawar, Charsadda and Nowshera due to the global warming in my previous interviews but nobody took notice and the result is before us,” he said, adding that “it is the glaciers which are adding fuel to the fire and due to the melting of glaciers the flood situation is aggravated.”

Experts say a warming world increases the likelihood and severity of flooding in some regions since warmer temperatures causes increases the volume of water vapor in the air leading to heavier precipitation events.

More water vapor also feeds severe storms, boosting their strength and severity. Asia has not been alone in experiencing unusually severe flooding. A number of record floods also hit the United States over the last six months.

And so we have a double climate whammy — glacial melt plus more atmospheric water vapor (and possibly a triple climate whammy, if changing air circulation patterns also contributed, as somemeteorologists believe).

The USGS release continues:

While most glaciers in Asia are in recession, some glaciers have been found to advance. Some of the advancing glaciers are surge-type glaciers, which move forward more rapidly than average in a short period of time. The reason for this is being studied by glaciologists, and is likely due to unique and local condition

Glacier studies in each area started at different times depending on accessibility of glaciers and scientific interest. For example, the earliest description of glaciers in China was in 630 A.D., while studies in the Caucasus area of Russia began in the mid 1800s and modern studies in Nepal started in the 1950s.

The time period for retreat also differs among each glacier. In Bhutan, 66 glaciers have decreased 8.1 percent over the last 30 years.  Rapid changes in the Himalaya is shown in India by the 12 percent retreat of Chhota Shigri Glacier during the last 13 years, as well as retreat of the Gangotri Glacier since 1780, with 12 percent shrinkage of the main stem in the last 16 years.

Glaciers in Russia and in the four republics once part of the Former Soviet Union have the largest area of glaciers in Asia, covering 30,478 square miles, which is about the size of South Carolina. The glaciers of China have the second largest area of glaciers in Asia, covering 22,944 square miles, which is about twice the size of Massachusetts. In Afghanistan, the more than 3,000 small mountain glaciers that occur in the Hindu Kush and Pamir mountains provide vital water resources to the region.

“This report was a collaboration between U.S. and foreign authors, the most knowledgeable glaciologists for each geographic region covered,” said USGS scientist Richard S. Williams, Jr. “The USGS published historical and modern data authored by local experts. Some analyses of past climate conditions were conducted by studying ice cores from high-mountain areas of Asia.”

The bottom line is that ice is melting pretty much everywhere you look these days, with dangerous implications for human health and well-being:

• Satellite data stunner: “Our data suggest that EAST Antarctica is losing mass…. Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea-level rise.”
• Nature: “Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized.”
• Large Antarctic glacier thinning 4 times faster than it was 10 years ago: “Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier.”
• De-Icer: USGS report details “recent dramatic shrinkage” in U.S. glaciers, matching global decline
• USGS reports dramatic retreat of ice shelves in southern Antarctic Peninsula
• North Pole poised to be largely ice-free by 2020: “It’s like the Arctic is covered with an egg shell and the egg shell is now just cracking completely”
• Another one bites the dust, literally: Bolivia’s 18,000 year-old Chacaltaya glacier is gone
• Another climate impact coming faster than predicted: Glacier National Park to go glacier-free a decade early
• World’s Glaciers Shrink for 18th Year

 

July 29, 2010

Scientists may have found the most devastating impact yet of human-caused global warming — a 40% decline in phytoplankton since 1950 linked to the rise in ocean sea surface temperatures.  If confirmed, it may represent the single most important finding of the year in climate science.The headlines above are from an appropriately blunt article in The Independent about the new study in Nature, “Global phytoplankton decline over the past century” subs. req’d.  Even the Wall Street Journal warned, “Vital Marine Plants in Steep Decline.”  Seth Borenstein of the AP explains, “plant plankton found in the world’s oceans  are crucial to much of life on Earth. They are the foundation of the bountiful marine food web, produce half the world’s oxygen and suck up harmful carbon dioxide.”We’ve known for a while that we are poisoning the oceans and that human emissions of carbon dioxide, left unchecked, would likely have devastating consequences — see “2010 Nature Geoscience study: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.”  And we’ve known those impacts might last a long, long time — see  2009 Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years.”But until now, conventional wisdom has been that big ocean impacts might not be seen until the second half of the century.  This new research in Nature suggests we may have much less time to act than we thought if we want to save marine life — and ourselves.  The study concludes:In the oceans, ubiquitous microscopic phototrophs phytoplankton account for approximately half the production of organic matter on Earth. Analyses of satellite-derived phytoplankton concentration available since 1979 have suggested decadal-scale fluctuations linked to climate forcing, but the length of this record is insufficient to resolve longer-term trends. Here we combine available ocean transparency measurements and in situ chlorophyll observations to estimate the time dependence of phytoplankton biomass at local, regional and global scales since 1899. We observe declines in eight out of ten ocean regions, and estimate a global rate of decline of ~1% of the global median per year. Our analyses further reveal interannual to decadal phytoplankton fluctuations superimposed on long-term trends. These fluctuations are strongly correlated with basin-scale climate indices, whereas long-term declining trends are related to increasing sea surface temperatures.

via Nature Stunner: “Global warming blamed for 40% decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton” « Climate Progress.

 

Can weather change the demographics of an island over the course of a single lifetime? If we take Pablo Preciado’s word for it, it can. Pablo Preciado is the leader of the island of Carti Sugdub, one of the Panamanian islands. Global warming and erosion of the coral reefs are threatening to submerge a lot of Caribbean islands that make up Panama.Pablo Preciado says that in his childhood floods were rare and the water levels barely wetted his toes. Now, it’s a different picture altogether. Rising water levels are forcing Panamanians to leave their coastal homes and move inland.The coral reefs used to be a natural buffer against the buffeting waves, but rampant mining has shaved off the protective barrier. Pablo Preciado is leading a group of his villagers in an imminent move further inland. They are preparing their new settlements by clearing tropical forests. Nearly 2000 people may make the move. The government says that rising sea levels threatens the livelihood of 32,000 of the Carti Sugdub denizens.The retreat of the Panama Islanders could be among the first that’s caused by global warming and rising sea levels. Such a drastic shift in livelihood patterns and migration to the hinterland could become across the world. Already signs are ominous from communities as far apart as Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Fiji. The exodus could represent the uprooting of millions and have far-reaching effects.Hector Guzman, a marine biologist and coral specialist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama told Reuters –“This is no longer about a scientist saying that climate change and the change in sea level will flood a people and affect them.”According to Guzman who has been studying the Kuna people of the Carti Sugdub islands, coal mining to build artificial breakwaters and islets has also accelerated their problems. Te people are fiercely protective of their customs and have a belief that God will protect them.The Kuna could rank among the first examples of ‘climate refugees’. It’s a term that will get more common as sea levels continue to rise. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has warned that seas could rise 2 meters 6.5 feet by the end of the century, putting in danger millions of people in cities from Tokyo and Shanghai to New Orleans.

via Rising Sea Makes Panama Islanders Relocate to the Mainland.

 

We hear a lot of talk about carbon dioxide as the most dangerous climate culprit. And we should. So far, loading the atmosphere with CO2 is the single biggest cause of climate disruption. But, in the final analysis, methane may prove to be the most deadly of all greenhouse gases.

via t r u t h o u t | BP’s Methane Monster: From the Gulf to the Globe.