Global Climate Change Science News

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snort

This is for science news NOT braindead conspiracy theories.

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22408341

Arctic Ocean 'acidifying rapidly'

The Arctic seas are being made rapidly more acidic by carbon-dioxide emissions, according to a new report.

Scientists from Norway's Center for International Climate and Environmental Research monitored widespread changes in ocean chemistry in the region.

They say even if CO2 emissions stopped now, it would take tens of thousands of years for Arctic Ocean chemistry to revert to pre-industrial levels.

Many creatures, including commercially valuable fish, could be affected.

They forecast major changes in the marine ecosystem, but say there is huge uncertainty over what those changes will be.

It is well known that CO2 warms the planet, but less well-known that it also makes the alkaline seas more acidic when it is absorbed from the air.

Absorption is particularly fast in cold water so the Arctic is especially susceptible, and the recent decreases in summer sea ice have exposed more sea surface to atmospheric CO2.

The Arctic's vulnerability is exacerbated by increasing flows of freshwater from rivers and melting land ice, as freshwater is less effective at chemically neutralising the acidifying effects of CO2.

The researchers say the Nordic Seas are acidifying over a wide range of depths - most quickly in surface waters and more slowly in deep waters.

The report’s chairman, Richard Bellerby from the Norwegian Institute for Water Research, told BBC News that they had mapped a mosaic of different levels of pH across the region, with the scale of change largely determined by the local intake of freshwater.

“Large rivers flow into the Arctic, which has an enormous catchment for its size,” he said.

“There’s slow mixing so in effect we get a sort of freshwater lens on the top of the sea in some places, and freshwater lowers the concentration of ions that buffers pH change. The sea ice has been a lid on the Arctic, so the loss of ice is allowing fast uptake of CO2.”

This is being made worse, he said, by organic carbon running off the land – a secondary effect of regional warming.

“Continued rapid change is a certainty,” he said.

“We have already passed critical thresholds. Even if we stop emissions now, acidification will last tens of thousands of years. It is a very big experiment.”

The research team monitored decreases in seawater pH of about 0.02 per decade since the late 1960s in the Iceland and Barents seas.

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[macdoc]

Sometimes a smack aside the head IS warranted to get the reality home

When he shows that graph to audiences, says Mann, "I often hear an audible gasp." In this sense, the hockey stick does indeed matter—for it dramatizes just how much human irresponsibility, in a relatively short period of time, can devastate the only home we have.

snip

Indeed, two just-published studies support the hockey stick more powerfully than ever. One, just out in Nature Geoscience, featuring more than 80 authors, showed with extensive global data on past temperatures that the hockey stick's shaft seems to extend back reliably for at least 1,400 years. Recently in Science, meanwhile, Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University and his colleagues extended the original hockey stick shaft back 11,000 years[HILITE]. "There's now at least tentative evidence that the warming is unprecedented over the entire period of the Holocene, the entire period since the last ice age," says Mann.[/HILITE]

good read....

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/ ... ate-change

[Jason]

“We have already passed critical thresholds. Even if we stop emissions now, acidification will last tens of thousands of years. It is a very big experiment.”

It's too late.

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22486153

Carbon dioxide passes symbolic mark

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have broken through a symbolic mark.

Daily measurements of CO2 at a US government agency lab on Hawaii have topped 400 parts per million for the first time.

The station, which sits on the Mauna Loa volcano, feeds its numbers into a continuous record of the concentration of the gas stretching back to 1958.

The last time CO2 was regularly above 400ppm was three to five million years ago - before modern humans existed.

Scientists say the climate back then was also considerably warmer than it is today.

Carbon dioxide is regarded as the most important of the manmade greenhouse gases blamed for raising the temperature on the planet over recent decades.

Human sources come principally from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.

(continued, but not for long for humans....for sure.)

[Tero]

Conspiracy nuts suspect Al Gore to be the source of chemtrails
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?sns=fb&v=g ... 26sns%3Dfb

[Thinking Aloud]

Interesting article in this week's New Scientist, talking about a previously overlooked effect of the loss of ice sheets on sea levels. (It's not on their public website yet.)

The basics are that the sheer mass of ice in an icecap quite naturally has a gravitational attraction on the waters of nearby oceans, and as a result is pulling the sea-level up around Antarctica and Greenland. Calculations suggest that, if the Greenland ice cap were all to melt, the local sea level (within a couple of thousand miles of Greenland) would fall by tens of metres - possibly up to hundreds - as the loss of mass, and hence gravitational attraction, causes the water to flow elsewhere (and the cumulative sea level rise elsewhere would be greater as a result). Overall sea levels would rise, of course, but locally things could be quite different. A similar effect would be seen if Antarctica lost a significant amount of its ice cap. Of course, with a loss of both ice caps, the shift in sea levels would play off against each other.

Just don't build on all that newfound land, eh? Water goes out... water comes in.

[macdoc]

related article

Hawaii to suffer most as global sea levels rise, study says

NASA

The Hawaiian Islands, seen from space, are the most vulnerable to uneven global sea level rise due to melting glaciers and ice sheets.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

Melting ice in Greenland, Antarctica and elsewhere will push up seas unevenly around the world, according to a new study that finds some of the highest waters will inundate Honolulu, Hawaii.

At the poles, sea levels will actually fall because of the way sea, land and ice interact. For example, the sheer mass of water held in ice in Greenland and Antarctica generates a gravitational field that pulls in the surrounding water. As ice there melts, the gravitational pull weakens and the water is redistributed.

In addition, the melting ice on Antarctica and Greenland will lighten the load on the land beneath it, allowing the land to rebound up and the seafloor to drop a corresponding amount.

"Meaning that as the seafloor deepens, there is another component of sea-level fall, ironically, around these piles of ice," Charles Fletcher, a geologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, explained to NBC News.

Fletcher was not involved in the new study but is familiar with its findings, particularly the vulnerabilities of Hawaii — and, more broadly, tropical islands in the Pacific Ocean — to global sea-level rise.

Modelling glacier wastage
The research was co-led by Giorgio Spada, a professor of Earth physics at the University of Urbino in Italy. It is "the first study to examine a regional pattern of sea-level changes using sophisticated model predictions of the wastage of glaciers and ice sheets over the next century," he told NBC News via email.

He and colleagues used the model to investigate sea level under two future scenarios of sea-level rise: a mid-range, likely-to-happen one and one closer to the upper limit of what’s plausible. Under both, maximum sea-level rise is expected at Honolulu, the researchers reported Feb. 13 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

In the mid-range scenario, worst-affected equatorial oceans could see as much as two feet of sea-level rise, when the fact that water expands as it warms is taken into account. Under the high end, the rate of sea-level change in Honolulu will exceed 0.3 inches a year during the second half of this century.

Sea-level rise will also be greater than average in Western Australia and throughout the atolls and islands in the tropical Pacific Ocean. In Europe, sea levels will rise, but will likely be lower than the global average given the continent’s proximity to Greenland and the dropping sea levels there.

Incomplete picture
But the picture is far from complete, cautioned Fletcher.

"What this paper and other models have not been able to do because, ultimately, it is too chaotic, is to predict what the winds will be doing," he explained.

For example, enhanced trade winds associated with a phenomenon called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation are pushing the Pacific Ocean surface westward. As a result, annual sea-level rise in Hawaii is currently about half the global average rate of about 0.1 inch a year, while in the western Pacific the rate is more than 0.3 inch a year.

This may, or may not, change with the next phase of the oscillation, noted Fletcher, whose own research recently highlighted how groundwater beneath land rises with sea levels and could breach the surface, causing severe flooding in places such as Honolulu.

"Overall, the (new) paper is one more twig in the bundle of concerns that low-lying coastal cities, and especially Pacific islands, are highly vulnerable to this problem of sea-level rise," he said, adding that "these Pacific islands have contributed almost nothing to the problem of global warming."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/us/in ... .html?_r=1&

In Midwest, Drought Gives Way to Flood

CHICAGO — The nation’s midsection, which was for months parched by severe drought, suddenly finds itself contending with the opposite: severe flooding that has forced evacuations, slowed commercial barge traffic down the Mississippi River and left farmers with submerged fields during a crucial planting time.

The flooding, driven in part by rainfall of as much as eight inches in some places last week, has affected a remarkably wide stretch in states along swollen rivers in the Midwest.

The deaths of at least three people have been linked to the flooding in the past week, officials said.

“It’s so pervasive,” said Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois, who flew in a helicopter to survey the scope of damage to his state the other day. He recalled seeing an “ocean” beneath him.

Other sights he has seen: basement after basement where household items floated, ruined; sneakers bobbing through a flooded school.

“It is heartbreaking how many people suffered damage,” he said.

In parts of Missouri, towns along the swollen Mississippi River on Thursday continued to brace for high waters, creating sandbag levees and makeshift barriers. In Chicago’s suburbs and towns in Indiana and Michigan, residents were assessing the costs of damage already left behind in scores of soggy homes, cars and businesses. And in Fargo, N.D., officials were activating an elaborate preparation system and placing hundreds of thousands of sandbags to protect the city against the looming possibility of flooding as snow melts near the Red River.

It seemed a sudden, dizzying reversal for a region that had since last summer been contending with a drought that left water supplies in doubt, farm fields shriveled and water levels along the Mississippi River so low as to threaten, at times, to close down commercial traffic. By Thursday, because of high waters — and more than 100 barges that broke loose from their moorings near St. Louis over the weekend — portions of the river were, in effect, closed.

“We were just praying for rain three months ago, and now we’ll pray for less,” said Colin Fogarty, a lieutenant and a spokesman for the United States Coast Guard. “It’s somewhat ironic. The conditions are so different, but the results, in a way, are the same.”

(continued, *G-d is listening....in his own way?)

*Been reading elsewhere that the jet stream as, in the last couple of weeks, shifted once again to the unusual position widely blamed for last years mega-drought.

[rainbow]

“We have already passed critical thresholds. Even if we stop emissions now, acidification will last tens of thousands of years. It is a very big experiment.”

It's too late.

It is never too late to panic.

[macdoc]

The heat goes on...

Scientists Find Extensive Glacial Retreat in Mount Everest Region


Members of the team conducting these studies will present their findings on May 14 at the Meeting of the Americas in Cancun, Mexico -- a scientific conference organized and co-sponsored by the American Geophysical Union.

Glaciers in the Mount Everest region have shrunk by 13 percent in the last 50 years and the snowline has shifted upward by 180 meters (590 feet), according to Sudeep Thakuri, who is leading the research as part of his PhD graduate studies at the University of Milan in Italy.

Glaciers smaller than one square kilometer are disappearing the fastest and have experienced a 43 percent decrease in surface area since the 1960s. Because the glaciers are melting faster than they are replenished by ice and snow, they are revealing rocks and debris that were previously hidden deep under the ice. These debris-covered sections of the glaciers have increased by about 17 percent since the 1960s, according to Thakuri. The ends of the glaciers have also retreated by an average of 400 meters since 1962, his team found.

The researchers suspect that the decline of snow and ice in the Everest region is from human-generated greenhouse gases altering global climate. However, they have not yet established a firm connection between the mountains' changes and climate change, Thakuri said.

He and his team determined the extent of glacial change on Everest and the surrounding 1,148 square kilometer (713 square mile) Sagarmatha National Park by compiling satellite imagery and topographic maps and reconstructing the glacial history. Their statistical analysis shows that the majority of the glaciers in the national park are retreating at an increasing rate, Thakuri said.

To evaluate the temperature and precipitation patterns in the area, Thakuri and his colleagues have been analyzing hydro-meteorological data from the Nepal Climate Observatory stations and Nepal's Department of Hydrology and Meteorology. The researchers found that the Everest region has undergone a 0.6 degree Celsius (1.08 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in temperature and 100 millimeter (3.9 inches) decrease in precipitation during the pre-monsoon and winter months since 1992.

In subsequent research, Thakuri plans on exploring the climate-glacier relationship further with the aim of integrating the glaciological, hydrological and climatic data to understand the behavior of the hydrological cycle and future water availability.

"The Himalayan glaciers and ice caps are considered a water tower for Asia since they store and supply water downstream during the dry season," said Thakuri. "Downstream populations are dependent on the melt water for agriculture, drinking, and power production."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 174811.htm

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... y-research

Climate change: human disaster looms, claims new research

Some of the most extreme predictions of global warming are unlikely to materialise, new scientific research has suggested, but the world is still likely to be in for a temperature rise of double that regarded as safe.

The researchers said warming was most likely to reach about 4C above pre-industrial levels if the past decade's readings were taken into account.

That would still lead to catastrophe across large swaths of the Earth, causing droughts, storms, floods and heatwaves, and drastic effects on agricultural productivity leading to secondary effects such as mass migration.

Some climate change sceptics have suggested that because the highest global average temperature yet recorded was in 1998 climate change has stalled. The new study, which is published in the journal Nature Geoscience, shows a much longer "pause" would be needed to suggest that the world was not warming rapidly.

Alexander Otto, at the University of Oxford, lead author of the research, told the Guardian that there was much that climate scientists could still not fully factor into their models. He said most of the recent warming had been absorbed by the oceans but this would change as the seas heat up. The thermal expansion of the oceans is one of the main factors behind current and projected sea level rises.

The highest global average temperature ever recorded was in 1998, under the effects of a strong El Niño, a southern Pacific weather system associated with warmer and stormy weather, which oscillates with a milder system called La Niña. Since then the trend of average global surface temperatures has shown a clear rise above the long-term averages – the 10 warmest years on record have been since 1998 – but climate sceptics have claimed that this represents a pause in warming.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/us/hi ... ience&_r=0

Wells Dry, Fertile Plains Turn to Dust

HASKELL COUNTY, Kan. — Forty-nine years ago, Ashley Yost’s grandfather sank a well deep into a half-mile square of rich Kansas farmland. He struck an artery of water so prodigious that he could pump 1,600 gallons to the surface every minute.

Last year, Mr. Yost was coaxing just 300 gallons from the earth, and pumping up sand in order to do it. By harvest time, the grit had robbed him of $20,000 worth of pumps and any hope of returning to the bumper harvests of years past.

“That’s prime land,” he said not long ago, gesturing from his pickup at the stubby remains of last year’s crop. “I’ve raised 294 bushels of corn an acre there before, with water and the Lord’s help.” Now, he said, “it’s over.”

The land, known as Section 35, sits atop the High Plains Aquifer, a waterlogged jumble of sand, clay and gravel that begins beneath Wyoming and South Dakota and stretches clear to the Texas Panhandle. The aquifer’s northern reaches still hold enough water in many places to last hundreds of years. But as one heads south, it is increasingly tapped out, drained by ever more intensive farming and, lately, by drought.

Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers.

And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.

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Climate change will push up New York's heatwave deaths

* 18:10 21 May 2013 by Michael Marshall
* For similar stories, visit the Climate Change Topic Guide

The Big Apple is cooking: climate change will increase the number of temperature-related deaths within decades.

A warmer climate means more extremely hot days in summer, and fewer extremely cold days in winter, meaning people are more likely to die in summer than they used to be, and less so in winter.

Radley Horton of Columbia University in New York and colleagues have now calculated the net effect. They matched daily temperature data for Manhattan with death rates between 1982 and 1999 to estimate how sensitive the city's population is to temperatures, then used future temperature forecasts to estimate future death rates. In all their 16 models, temperature-related deaths increased almost immediately (Nature Climate Change, doi.org/mkc).

Death tolls rose by roughly six per cent by 2020, by 10 to 15 per cent by 2050, and up to 30 per cent by 2080.

The biggest increases occurred in May and September. According to Horton's calculations, death tolls could roughly double by 2080 during these months. "Today New York doesn't think about heatwaves in those months, but in the future they may be part of the summer," says Horton.

New York is already taking action to protect its citizens from extreme heat, as part of a broader initiative called PlaNYC that aims to protect the city from climate change. The city is planting extra trees, painting roofs white and creating "cooling centres" where people can escape the worst of the heat. Many other mid-latitude cities will need to adapt, says Horton. "Efforts under way in New York City are a valuable example."

Green areas like parks act as "oases of cool" where people can go to escape the heat, says Andrew Pullin of Bangor University, UK. One recent study (Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, doi.org/b7fxbh) suggests that the cooling effect of a park extends a few hundred metres into the surrounding built-up area, so parks might help keep the entire city cool.

Journal reference: Nature Climate Change, doi.org/mkc

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... eaths.html

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22913559

Climate change overseas likely to affect UK food supplies

Climate change abroad will have a more immediate effect on the UK than climate change at home, a report says.

Research by consultants PWC for Defra says the UK is likely to be hit by increasingly volatile prices of many commodities as the climate is disrupted.

It warns that global production of some foodstuffs is concentrated in a few countries.

These are likely to suffer increasing episodes of extreme weather.

The report says there will be opportunities for the UK from climate change but these are likely to be far outweighed by problems.

The opportunities include the ability to export British know-how and reduced shipping costs if the Arctic becomes ice-free. The Arctic looks likely to be a big business opportunity; research estimates suggest that it is likely to attract more than £64bn of investments over the next decade.

Food spikes
The biggest threats are increased volatility in food prices and protectionist measures over food, like India's ban on selling rice.

"What's interesting is that threats from climate change overseas appear an order of magnitude higher than domestic threats," PWC's Richard Gledhill told BBC News.

"This doesn't just refer to the most vulnerable countries like the small island states... climate events in developed countries could damage the UK economy by impacting on food and other resources. We could also suffer damage to assets from events like the floods in central Europe or Superstorm Sandy; this all feeds back into the UK economy."

The report warns that as the climate changes, there will be pressure for the UK to increase its aid budgets (already under threat from back-bench Conservatives).

The report is a follow-up to the recent UK Government Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA) which assessed domestic threats and opportunities and the Foresight study into international climate change.

It is based on the UN's "medium CO2 emissions scenario" which is broadly aligned with the 2C maximum temperature increase - a target that is unlikely to be met. That means the study is on the optimistic side, it says.

The paper draws on research from Chatham House describing climate change as a multiplier of other threats.

"Already, price volatility of resources is the new normal," lead author Bernice Lee told BBC News.

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