Global Warming or Climate Change

Did 58 Scientific Papers Published in 2017 Say Global Warming is a Myth?

2017-06-09T11:28:00.000-07:00

An article on Breitbart News used flawed interpretations from a climate skeptic blog to amplify a grossly inaccurate understanding of climatological research.

On 6 June 2017, Breitbart News ran an article titled “‘Global Warming’ Is a Myth, Say 58 Scientific Papers in 2017”. This article, which is in essence merely a link to a post from a blog that goes by the name “No Tricks Zone” and some added musings on “grant-troughing scientists,” “huxter politicians,” “scaremongering green activists,” and “brainwashed mainstream media environmental correspondents,” claims that this ragtag collection of studies proves that the long-standing scientific consensus on climate change is nothing but a myth.

The blog post Breitbart linked to is a list of 80 graphs (so many graphs!) taken from 58 studies. The analysis of the findings presented by No Tricks Zone is crude, misinformed, and riddled with errors.

The basic thesis presented by No Tricks Zone is that these graphs, which are inferred records of things like temperature and precipitation from specific localities through time, show that the climatological changes happening right now are neither dramatic nor man made. The charts highlight times from the somewhat recent pre-industrial past that were either warmer or more dramatically variable then they are now, or show evidence of change attributed to clear natural causes. As Breitbart puts it:

What all these papers argue in their different ways is that the alarmist version of global warming — aka Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) — is a fake artefact.

This is false. We reached out to many of the authors of the studies included on this list via email to see if they agreed with Breitbart and No Tricks Zone’s analysis. While not everyone we reached out to responded, not a single researcher that we spoke to agreed with Breitbart’s assessment, and most were shocked when we told them that their work was presented as evidence for that claim.

A representative response came from Paul Mayewski, author of one of the studies included on the No Tricks Zone list and director of the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute:

They are absolutely incorrect!!!! Quite the opposite, the paper deals with the impacts of greenhouse gas warming and Antarctic ozone depletion — both human caused — and describes future scenarios. Yet another example of downright lies.

Outside of the fact that all of these papers have squiggly lines that represent climatological change through time, they cover a diverse range of highly technical topics and have little in common with each other. In many cases, listed studies are applicable only to a very specific region and were created not to investigate the influence of humans on climate, but to understand how the climate system works in general.

This was the case for University of Washington PhD candidate Bradley Markle, whose paper (“Global Atmospheric Teleconnections During Dansgaard-Oeschger Events”) was also included in the No Tricks Zone:

My study, and almost all I saw mentioned on the blog post, are studies of climate change in the past. My study investigates connections between different parts of the climate system during climate events that happened over 10,000 years ago. Studying climate change in the past can provide context for recent climate change. However, my study in no way investigates or tries to attribute the causes of recent climate change. It does not deal with human influences on climate at all.

This echoes the response of USGS research scientist Julie Richey, whose paper (“Multi-Species Coral Sr/Ca-based Sea-Surface Temperature Reconstruction Using Orbicella Faveolata and Siderastrea Siderea from the Florida Straits”) really resonated with the Breitbart science desk:

Our paper presents a 280-year sea surface temperature record based on the ratio of strontium to calcium in corals we sampled in the Dry Tortugas National Park. It shows that sea surface temperatures measured over many decades in the Florida Straits are variable, and that variation has been dominated for nearly the past three centuries by a natural oscillation called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. […] Neither of these findings refutes the role of anthropogenic activity in global climate change.

Many researchers told us that, even by the crude metrics of the No Tricks Zone post, and even without intending to address anthropogenic climate change in their research, their papers’ data actually support anthropogenically driven recent warming. This was the case for Claremont McKenna professor Branwen Williams, whose paper (“North Pacific 20th Century Decadal-Scale Variability Is Unique for the Past 342 Years”) was featured:

I do not agree with this assessment of my work. The seawater temperature data clearly show a warming.

In other cases it appears that the analysis provided by the author of the No Tricks Zone post was so superficial that the graphs pulled from some studies were not actually part of any new dataset, but comparison datasets from earlier studies. Geologist Fatima Abrantes’ paper “Historical Climate off the Atlantic Iberian Peninsula” fell victim to this oversight:

The article on Breitbart.com is so bad that the author did not even realize that the figure extracted from my paper is not my new data record but the record of the northern Spain atmospheric temperature anomaly, produced by [another group in 2011] that I have used for comparison. […] [Our] results agree with both the global and regional projections that indicate this region of Europe with highest potential vulnerability in regard to current global warming.

These charts, when accurately cited, provide ammunition against two clearly false straw man arguments invented by No Tricks Zone: 1) That climatic change happens in concert and in the same way uniformly around the globe, and that 2) evidence of any natural force influencing climate is — at the same time — also evidence against the notion that humans are playing a role in current climatic change. The fact that the 1257 Samalas eruption altered grape harvests, as one study in the post demonstrated, does not mean humans cannot also alter climate, as the No Trick Zone post implied.

We rank the claims made by both Breitbart and No Tricks Zone as false, because they dramatically misrepresent the findings of the scientists who conducted the research and utilize poorly-articulated straw man arguments to further misrepresent the significance of the work of those scientists. These studies were local in nature, narrow in scope, meant to address how the climate system functioned in the past, and pose no threat to the tenets of anthropogenic climate change.

Global warming, as implied by the name, is a global process. That does not, however, mean that every part of the globe reacts to this process in the same way or at the same rate, or even at all. Richey, the author of the USGS Florida sea-surface temperature record, succinctly described this fallacy:

Anthropogenic climate change is characterized by variable climate responses across the globe. No climate record taken at a single point in space is representative of the global climate.

Heartbroken Scientist Admits the Great Barrier Reef is Now 'Terminal'

2017-04-10T22:07:00.002-07:00

"We've failed."

FIONA MACDONALD

10 APR 2017

The last thing the world needs now is more bad news, but unfortunately we can't ignore the fact that, after yet another mass bleaching event, scientists are now admitting Australia's Great Barrier Reef is in a "terminal stage".

After a record-hot Australian summer, the latest surveys reveal that two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef has now been damaged by severe coral bleaching – less than 12 months after 93 percent of it experienced bleaching in 2016. This year, the damage has spread further south.

Out of the 2,300 km (1,430 miles) of Great Barrier Reef, 1,500 km (932 miles) is now bleached, the surveys found – and this year we can't blame an El Nino event.

Researchers estimate that it would take even the fastest growing coral about a decade to recover - but that would require a year or two without any bleaching to give the corals an opportunity to regrow.

"This is the fourth time the Great Barrier Reef has bleached severely – in 1998, 2002, 2016, and now in 2017. Bleached corals are not necessarily dead corals, but in the severe central region we anticipate high levels of coral loss," said one of the researchers, James Kerry from James Cook University's ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

"It takes at least a decade for a full recovery of even the fastest growing corals, so mass bleaching events 12 months apart offers zero prospect of recovery for reefs that were damaged in 2016."

Coral bleaching occurs when water temperatures get so warm that corals stress out and eject the beautiful vibrant, symbiotic algae that live in their tissue, providing them colour and food in exchange for a home.

Without that algae, the coral turns bone white and begins to starve, leaving them vulnerable to destruction.

You can see what that looks like in footage from the latest aerial survey below (warning: this made us want to cry):

The only positive news from this year's reef survey is that it was the middle third of the reef – rather than the fragile northern third – that was worst affected this year. And the southern third appears to be unscathed.

Still, James Cook University water quality expert, Jon Brodie, who wasn't involved in the study, told Christopher Knaus and Nick Evershed over at The Guardian that the reef was now in a "terminal stage".

"We've given up," said Brodie, referring to inaction on the part of the Australian government. "It's been my life managing water quality, we've failed."

"I showed the results of aerial surveys of bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef to my students, and then we wept," lead researcher Terry Hughes, tweeted after last year's results.

In the latest study, Hughes and his team conducted aerial surveys across more than 8,000 km (5,000 miles), covering nearly 800 individual coral reefs.

You can see the devastation this year compared to last year (right) in the maps below, with the damage this year spreading 500 km (311 miles) further south:

Things are especially bad this year because, coupled with the 2017 mass bleaching event, Tropical Cyclone Debbie also hit a section of the Great Barrier Reef in March, causing damage along a path up to an estimated 100 km (62 miles) wide – "which unfortunately struck a section of the reef that had largely escaped the worst of the bleaching," a press release explains.

While the cyclone did bring cooler water with it, the team explained that the benefits of this were negligible in relation to the damage it caused.

It's easy to despair the fact that most of our children will no longer get the chance to see the Great Barrier Reef with their own eyes.

Bette Willis/ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

But perhaps it's better to focus on what we can do to protect the remaining sections of the reef, and prevent this from happening to other coral reefs around the world.

"Clearly the reef is struggling with multiple impacts," explains Hughes.

"Without a doubt the most pressing of these is global warming. As temperatures continue to rise the corals will experience more and more of these events: 1°C of warming so far has already caused four events in the past 19 years."

"Ultimately, we need to cut carbon emissions, and the window to do so is rapidly closing," he added.

World, if you're waiting for a wake up call, this is it.

The results of the latest survey are yet to be published, but the 2016 bleaching event has been reported in the journal Nature.

Reaching global warming targets under ice-free Arctic summers requires zero emissions by 2045

2017-01-31T15:39:00.001-08:00

Ice-albedo feedback as a result of sea-ice melting, notably in the Arctic, is known to reinforce global warming. What is less known, however, is the impact of a no-summer ice scenario on the world's ambition to maintain global warming below 2°C by 2100. A study conducted under the TRANSRISK project paints a rather dark picture, highlighting the need to better understand the impact of rapid climate change in the region.

'More stringent mitigation efforts globally.' This is what researchers of the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) have come to recommend after studying the potential consequences of an Arctic ice-free month of September 2050 - something doomed to happen according to the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report.

Whilst in line with the growing number of pessimistic studies on the pace and impact of climate change, the new study takes a new approach, highlighting the remaining gap in our understanding of the Arctic's role in the regulation of Earth's temperature. It considers the implications of climate change mitigation to below-2°C levels in the presence of the SIAF - a process that sees sea-ice melting, resulting in more open water being exposed to solar radiation, absorbing more energy and generating a self-reinforcing warming mechanism.

Although important, this feedback process is currently not incorporated into integrated assessment models. This led the TRANSRISK team to study the consequences of a sea-ice-free month of September 2050 and, in light of the current debate about a potential recovery of Arctic sea ice in a low-carbon scenario, they decided to consider three potential trajectories following this no-ice scenario: partial recovery, stabilization, and continued loss of sea ice.

'The sooner the sea-ice-free condition occurs, the more difficult it will be to control climate change, especially if sea-ice recovery does not occur,' the study reads. 'Emissions reductions should increase significantly compared to current mitigation scenarios that do not include Arctic sea-ice loss.'

The team highlights measures that should be taken, notably a quicker replacement of existing energy infrastructures and earlier adoption of policy instruments that could make such improvements feasible. All in all, the studied scenario shows that the only way to achieve the 1.5°C target in the presence of SIAF would be through negative emissions, which means that the implications of considering Arctic sea-ice-free conditions for the transformation of the global energy system are 'severe.'

'We find that global CO2 emissions would need to reach zero levels 5–15 years earlier and that the carbon budget would need to be reduced by 20%–51% to offset this additional source of warming,' the study concludes. 'The extra mitigation effort would imply an 18%–59% higher mitigation cost to society. Our results also show that to achieve the 1.5°C target in the presence of ice-free summers negative emissions would be needed.'

The team also insists that future research should focus on more precise scenarios of sea-ice loss derived directly from physical models. Indeed, SIAF is not the only feedback process that had yet to be considered.

Explore further: Enhanced nitrous oxide emissions found in field warming experiment in the Arctic

More information: Project website: transrisk-project.eu/

Scientists Have Figured Out Why Big Hurricanes Keep Missing the U.S.

2017-01-31T15:34:00.001-08:00

Palm trees bend in the winds of Hurricane Wilma as the storm makes landfall in Plantation, Florida on Oct. 24, 2005. Wilma was the last major hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. Bloomberg—Bloomberg via Getty Images

WEATHER

Scientists Have Figured Out Why Big Hurricanes Keep Missing the U.S.

Justin Worland

Jan 04, 2017

Scientists have scratched their heads in recent years as a series of major hurricanes have steered clear of the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts, defying probability.

Now, new research published in the journal Nature explains the unlikely phenomenon as at least in part the result of an occurrence called "protective barriers," which help keep major hurricanes from making landfall. Cool ocean temperatures combine with strong vertical wind shear, a measure of how quickly wind changes speed or direction, off the Atlantic coast. Faced with those conditions, major hurricanes tend to slow down, according to the research.

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Here's Why Hurricanes Are Getting Stronger

Weather forecasters expect Hurricane Matthew to drop nearly a foot of of water in some places with winds hitting 140 mph. Those are frightening numbers, but meteorologists say a phenomenon known as storm surge may be responsible for the most damage.

Sea surface temperatures have risen globally in recent years as a result of man-made climate change, but the results have not affected every region equally. Temperatures have spiked toward the middle of the Atlantic, where hurricanes form, while just off the Atlantic coast temperatures have remained relatively cool.

The high sea surface temperatures toward the middle of the ocean may increase the total number of hurricanes that form in the region. as climate change shifts global precipitation patterns. Many of those storms hit Caribbean islands hard but leave the U.S. largely unscathed (think of Hurricane Matthew in 2016). The last major hurricane—defined as a Category 3 storm or stronger with sustained winds of at least 111 miles per hour—to hit the U.S. was Hurricane Wilma in 2005.

"When Mother Nature encourages lots of hurricanes to form and strengthen in the tropics, she also tends to slam the door on them if they come near the U.S. coast," says study author James Kossin, a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). "This is especially true for major hurricanes that threaten the U.S. coast."

The phenomenon uncovered in the new research has thus far been good news for the U.S., but the change may not be permanent, Kossin says. Atmospheric patterns in the North Atlantic can take more than a decade to shift, meaning the wind shear and coastal sea surface temperatures that protect the U.S. could easily disappear. Combine that with continued global warming further out in the ocean, and the coast could face many more major hurricanes that make landfall.

Still, many of the variables at play remain unanswered.

"What I found is a natural see-saw mechanism in the climate system," says Kossin. "It’s going to take some work to figure out how climate change might affect this system."

Much remains uncertain about the link between climate change and hurricanes, but scientists are now better able to attribute extreme weather events to climate change than they have been before. Droughts and flooding in particular have been linked to man-made global warming.

Limited sign of soil adaptation to climate warming

2017-01-31T15:32:00.002-08:00

Date:: January 30, 2017
Source:: University of New Hampshire
Summary:: While scientists and policy experts debate the impacts of global warming, Earth’s soil is releasing roughly nine times more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than all human activities combined. This huge carbon flux from soil, which is due to the natural respiration of soil microbes and plant roots, begs one of the central questions in climate change science. As the global climate warms, will soil respiration rates increase, adding even more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and accelerating climate change?
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While scientists and policy experts debate the impacts of global warming, Earth's soil is releasing roughly nine times more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than all human activities combined. This huge carbon flux from soil, which is due to the natural respiration of soil microbes and plant roots, begs one of the central questions in climate change science. As the global climate warms, will soil respiration rates increase, adding even more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and accelerating climate change?

Previous experimental studies of this question have not produced a consensus, prompting University of New Hampshire scientist Serita Frey, professor of natural resources and the environment, and more than 40 researchers from across the globe to review data from 27 studies across nine biomes, from the desert to the Arctic. Their analysis was published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This work represents the world's largest dataset to date of soil respiration response to experimental warming.

"This work is important because, rather than focusing on the warming response at a single site, it aggregates data collected from many sites across a range of ecosystems. This makes the conclusions and predictions more robust," Frey said.

One conclusion from the synthesis is that rising global temperatures result in regionally variable responses in soil respiration, with colder climates being considerably more responsive. "Consistently across all biomes, we found that soil respiration increased with soil temperature up to about 25° C (77° F)," said Joanna Carey, a postdoctoral scientist in the Marine Biological Laboratory Ecosystems Center in Woods Hole, Mass., and the lead scientist on the study. Above the 25°C threshold, respiration rates decreased with further increases in soil temperature. "

"That means the Arctic latitudes, where soil temperatures rarely, if ever, reach 25°C, will continue to be most responsive to climate warming. Because there is so much carbon stored in frozen soils of the Arctic, this has really serious repercussions for future climate change," Carey said.

The team also found that soil microbes in experimental warming studies showed no sign of adaptation -- meaning a muted respiration response to rising temperatures -- in all of the biomes studied, except desert and boreal forest. This indicates that soils will typically respond strongly to increasing temperature by releasing more carbon dioxide, said Jianwu Tang with the Marine Biological Laboratory Ecosystems Center and a lead scientist on the study.

"Going forward, we need to better explore the biome-specific responses as global temperatures shift beyond the historic range," Frey said. To understand how global carbon in soils will respond to climate change, the authors stress, more data are needed from under- and nonrepresented regions, especially the Arctic and the tropics.

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of New Hampshire. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

Joanna C. Carey, Jianwu Tang, Pamela H. Templer, Kevin D. Kroeger, Thomas W. Crowther, Andrew J. Burton, Jeffrey S. Dukes, Bridget Emmett, Serita D. Frey, Mary A. Heskel, Lifen Jiang, Megan B. Machmuller, Jacqueline Mohan, Anne Marie Panetta, Peter B. Reich, Sabine Reinsch, Xin Wang, Steven D. Allison, Chris Bamminger, Scott Bridgham, Scott L. Collins, Giovanbattista de Dato, William C. Eddy, Brian J. Enquist, Marc Estiarte, John Harte, Amanda Henderson, Bart R. Johnson, Klaus Steenberg Larsen, Yiqi Luo, Sven Marhan, Jerry M. Melillo, Josep Peñuelas, Laurel Pfeifer-Meister, Christian Poll, Edward Rastetter, Andrew B. Reinmann, Lorien L. Reynolds, Inger K. Schmidt, Gaius R. Shaver, Aaron L. Strong, Vidya Suseela, Albert Tietema. Temperature response of soil respiration largely unaltered with experimental warming. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2016; 113 (48): 13797 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1605365113

Global warming never 'paused' and could soon accelerate, warns Nasa scientist

2017-01-31T15:30:00.003-08:00

A woman searches for dry land after a flood in Bangladesh, a country already affected by cyclones, floods and drought Probal Rashid

The idea that global warming “paused” has been comprehensively refuted by the record warm temperatures over the last three years – and the rate of increase could soon start to accelerate, a leading Nasa scientist has warned.

Dr Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said some people had been “confused” by temperatures that were below the average rate of increase, mistaking what was simply a blip as the sign of a long-term trend.

But the last three years have each seen successive, record average global temperatures, according to Nasa’s figures, partly fuelled by the natural El Nino effect, but mostly because of human-induced climate change.

This, Dr Schmidt said, was “almost certainly” just another blip as random factors take temperatures above the average rising trend, which remains virtually the same as it has since the late 1990s.

But he also said the rising amount of energy being put into the atmosphere and oceans as a result of greenhouse gas emissions had led scientists to believe the pace of global warming would get faster over the next decades.

Writing on the Real Climate website, Dr Schmidt asked himself whether he had to “mention the ‘pause’”.

“Apparently yes,” he said. “The last three years have demonstrated abundantly clearly that there is no change in the long-term trends since 1998.

“A prediction from 1997 merely continuing the linear trends would significantly under-predict the last two years.

“The difference isn’t yet sufficient to state that the trends are accelerating, but that might not be too far off.”

He said it was perfectly reasonable for scientists to analyse variations in climate on a yearly basis.

But he added that the figures “should serve as a reminder that short-term variations should not be conflated with long-term trends. One is not predictive of the other”.

Speaking to The Independent, Dr Schmidt said discussions about annual changes in temperature before the record warmth of the last three years had been exploited by some in a reference to those known as “sceptics” or “deniers”.

“None of them are going to be jumping up and saying ‘look how much it’s warmed since 2014’, none of them are going to say that,” he said.

“The whole thing was somewhat delusional from the beginning.

“It’s not that today is warmer than yesterday or this year is warmer than last year. It’s the long-term trend – that’s what we’re talking about.

“So this notion that global warming has stopped was bunk from the start.”

While he said the recent high temperatures were equally likely to be statistical noise, studies of how much extra energy is being absorbed by the atmosphere and particularly the oceans suggest global warming is going to gather pace over the next 20 years or so.

“The fact there’s more energy coming into the system than is leaving, we think that’s increasing over time,” Dr Schmidt said.

“The larger that difference gets, the faster we think things will warm. We’re anticipating an acceleration of temperature changes on a multi-decadal time scale.”

Climate scientists present their best arguments for man-made global warming

2017-01-31T15:28:00.002-08:00

By Marion Renault
The Columbus Dispatch

Scientists declared 2016 the warmest year on record last week, mostly blaming man-made global warming. It was the third straight record-breaking year.

A majority of Americans - 61 percent - say they are "very" or "somewhat" worried about global warming, according to a national survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication shortly after the presidential election in November.

But the same Yale program found last year that about 1 in 5 Americans was doubtful or dismissive of global warming and tended to oppose climate action.

President Donald Trump's nominee for secretary of state, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, expressed doubt during testimony before a Senate committee this month about greenhouse-gas predictions. Trump has called global warming a "Chinese hoax."

As for consensus, studies show that more than 97 percent of scientists agree that humans are responsible for ongoing climate change.

So how do experts convince doubters? The Dispatch asked a group of scientists to share their most-compelling evidence. Here are their responses:

Michael Mann, Department of Meteorology, Penn State University

In response to the very popular denialist talking point that "climate changes all the time," if I had to boil it down to one point, it would be this:

Yes, natural factors influence climate. But natural factors, such as volcanoes and changing solar intensity, have actually been nudging the climate in the direction of slight cooling over the past half century. It is only the human factor - i.e., the burning of fossil fuels and resulting increase in the "greenhouse effect"- that can explain the warming.

Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education

I have to confess to a degree of skepticism about the idea that there's a silver bullet in countering climate-change denial. This is in part due to the variety of forms that climate-change denial takes. All that said, there is something that is close to a one-size-fits-all argument to counter climate-change denial.

The evidence here is not scientific but more sociological.

And it is that the overwhelming consensus - over 97 percent - of the relevant scientific community is that recent climate change is a real phenomenon driven by humans. That evidence is supported by multiple studies conducted by different researchers in different ways ... but the results are the same. The evidence supporting human-caused global warming has produced a clear scientific consensus.

Lonnie Thompson, Department of Earth Sciences, Byrd Polar Research Center, Ohio State University

Our research concentrates on the record in the:

â€¢ Ice and the loss of glaciers globally

â€¢ Unprecedented carbon-dioxide levels in our atmosphere as documented by the 800,000-year history archived in the bubbles of trapped air in ice cores

â€¢ Sea-level rise

â€¢ Global ocean warming

â€¢ Increase in the extreme events

â€¢ Increases globally in losses from global insurance companies

â€¢ The fact that the only way we can explain the changes observed in climate over the last 50 years is by adding the human influences

â€¢ 20th century extinctions

â€¢ The spread of tropical diseases to higher latitudes and altitudes

Probably the most convincing argument is of all the scientists who have studied climate change over the years, no one has yet come up with a better scientific explanation for what we are observing in the real world.

Benjamin Santer, Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison Program, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

In my opinion, the most convincing piece of evidence for a "discernible human influence" on global climate is the very distinctive pattern of warming of the lower atmosphere (the troposphere) and cooling of the upper atmosphere (the stratosphere).

We know of no natural causes that can produce such changes. This pattern of tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling is a clear 'fingerprint' of human-caused changes in greenhouse gases ...; and it was predicted 50 years ago by Suki Manabe and his colleagues at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab in Princeton using only very sparse temperature measurements from weather balloons.

Subsequent satellite observations confirmed professor Manabe's prediction.

Richard Alley, Department of Geoscience, Penn State University

You might think of the evidence for human-caused global warming/climate change from fossil-fuel CO2 as a four-legged stool, with physics, models, data and history.

Start with physics. We know of no way that it is possible to raise CO2 in the atmosphere without turning up the Earth's thermostat - the physics that gives us such high confidence is used successfully in many other ways every day, with no serious questions. In all of these implementations, CO2 causes warming, and nobody has found any way to build a physically realistic model in which that does not occur. Turn off the warmth from CO2, and models tend to turn the Earth into a giant frozen snowball.

And this applies in history. Climate has always changed, and that has always had large impacts on living things. Many causes of climate changes exist, and we see their influence in the past. The understanding that works for recent events also works far back in the past, with more CO2 bringing more warmth.

With this four-legged stool, we can go to the public and say that human release of CO2, especially from burning fossil fuels, is changing the climate, that the changes will continue to grow if we continue to burn fossil fuels and release the CO2, and that this will have large impacts on us.

But this doesn't rest on one bit, or one idea, or one piece of evidence - it rests on the interwoven evidence of science, from fundamental understanding, implemented in models and painstakingly tested against recent data and Earth's long history, leading to predictions that are repeatedly proving to be accurate.

mrenault@dispatch.com

@MarionRenault

Climate Change Effect: Global Warming Could Increase Toxic Mercury In Plankton

2017-01-31T15:24:00.001-08:00

BY HIMANSHU GOENKA @HIMGOJOURNO ON 01/28/17 AT 5:59 AM

Erik Björn of Umeå University, Sweden, is injecting small amounts of isotopically enriched mercury to the sediments for the mesocosm experiment. By adding stable (not radioactive) isotopes of mercury the scientists could trace how methylmercury was formed and accumulated in plankton in the mesocosm systems. Photo: Sofi Jonsson

The ill-effects of mercury are now much better known than in times past, but the danger of a large number of people being affected by mercury poisoning is far from over. And according to a study published Friday, climate change could be making the problem a lot worse.

Mercury, in many of its forms, is toxic to humans and other species. In humans, it affects the nervous, digestive and immune systems, as well as the lungs, kidneys and eyes. And it also negatively impacts the cognitive development of children. The element is released into the environment as a result of human activity, such as coal burning, mercury and gold mining, residential heating systems and waste incinerators. On entering the environment, it gets naturally transformed into methylmercury, a toxic substance that bioaccumulates.

This bioaccumulation — the increasing accumulation of a substance in an organism — affects fish a lot, and they are the most common source for human mercury poisoning. The study, titled “Terrestrial discharges mediate trophic shifts and enhance methylmercury accumulation in estuarine biota,” considered the increasing amount of runoff and the resultant increase of organic matter in large water bodies — caused by global warming — and its impact on plankton.

When organic matter gets mixed up in water, it reduces the amount of sunlight that can reach under the surface, which can lead to a drop in the production of phytoplankton, which depend on sunlight for sustenance. These phytoplankton form the base of the marine food chain, since they are eaten by zooplankton and fish. This in itself could create an imbalance in the food chain.

But the study, published in the journal Science Advances, also found that reducing phytoplankton would be replaced by bacteria, and the phenomenon could increase the possibility of methylmercury reaching zooplankton and bigger fish. In accordance with climate change models for large regions of the northern hemisphere, the precipitation and runoff into marine bodies will rise by 15-20 percent, which the study found would lead to a two to sevenfold increase in methylmercury content in zooplankton.

“The study has revealed a phenomenon that has not been described before. The results are critical in the prediction of how global climate changes can affect the exposure of methylmercury to ecosystems, and humans,” Erik Björn, associate professor at Umeå University, Sweden, and leader of the research project, said in a statement.

How climate change transformed the Earth in 2016

2017-01-22T14:44:00.003-08:00

Polar bears, increasingly land-bound due to vanishing ice sheets in the Arctic, are a poignant example of climate refugees.

DUSTIN STEPHENS/CBS NEWS

2016 was a milestone year in the continued warming of the planet. From unstable agriculture to the drought in California to melting ice sheets to extreme weather events and heat waves, climate change has disrupted virtually every corner of the world.

It’s impossible to exhaustively list all the ways in which climate change was felt in 2016, but here’s a guide to understanding the year that was for the planet:

A carbon dioxide milestone

“In the centuries to come, history books will likely look back on September 2016 as a major milestone for the world’s climate,” Brian Kahn of Climate Central wrote earlier this year.

That’s because, during September, a month in which atmospheric carbon dioxide — a heat-trapping greenhouse gas —is usually at its lowest, the monthly value failed to drop below 400 parts per million. The 400 ppm mark has sad significance in the climate community, as it has long been considered a point of no return for the atmosphere by scientists.

On pace to be the hottest year yet

This year is poised to be the hottest year in the 137-year official record, with global temperatures climbing even higher than record-breaking 2015, according to data released in November from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Temperatures were particularly high in the first half of the year due to the power of El Niño.

People collect water at a slum area in Mumbai, India, April 30, 2016, during a week-long heat wave that decimated crops, killed livestock and left at least 330 million Indians without enough water for their daily needs.

RAJANISH KAKADE, AP

Though final data from December is not yet in, January to November 2016 was the warmest such period worldwide on record, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

If 2016 ends up with the title of hottest year on record, as expected, that would mean that 16 of the 17 hottest years on record have occurred in this century. The only outlier was 1998, according to the WMO.

Still need perspective? Research released this year shows that, if we take a much longer view of Earth’s temperature history and consider temperature averages in 5,000 year increments, the Earth is now warmer than it has been in 120,000 years.

Transforming the Arctic

Global warming has had a particularly dramatic impact on the Arctic, which has been transformed by significantly warmer temperatures, lower levels of sea ice, and more open water in recent years.

NASA animation of Arctic sea ice cover, 1979-2015.

NASA SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION STUDIO

Last month, the average Arctic sea ice extent — the measurement scientists use to represent the area of ocean where there is at least some sea ice — was 17.7 percent below the averages from 1981 to 2010, according to NOAA. That’s the lowest November extent since the NOAA began keeping records in 1979.

“For the people in the Arctic, no one has to tell them an abrupt climate change has hit,” Paul Mayewski, professor at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, told CBS News in an interview last week.

Continued melting of polar ice could lead to catastrophic sea level rise and flooding on coastlines around the world. Some 13 million Americans could become “climate refugees” by the end of this century if the worst projections come to pass, one study this year warned.

Scientists say human activities are directly linked to Arctic warming: driving a gas-powered car about 90 miles – the distance between New York and Philadelphia – produces enough carbon pollution to melt about a square foot of Arctic sea ice during the critical month of September, research shows.

Around the world, instability in agriculture

The continued warming of the planet in 2016 is having a destabilizing impact on agriculture worldwide.

Play VIDEO

Climate change could have dramatic impact on coffee

Those disruptions were particularly felt in coffee production, which supports an estimated 120 million of some of the world’s poorest people in Africa, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia.

In the mountains of eastern Uganda, a coffee-rich region, growers struggled to protect their crops — which require just the right altitude and temperature and the right amounts of rain and sunshine — from the effects of global warming. Faced with headaches such as new pests and diseases, and beans rendered inedible from too much sunshine, many small-scale family farmers can no longer rely on coffee production to feed their families, pay for medical care, and send their kids to school.

Experts project that by the middle of this century, climate change could rule out as much as half of the land now used for coffee production worldwide, CBS News’ Mark Phillips reported in December.

A troubling new chapter for the Great Barrier Reef

Warming oceans in 2016 caused the largest die-off of corals ever recorded on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, scientists said in November. The reef’s coral cover suffered significant bleaching this year due to the El Nino weather effect and continued climate change.

Coral bleaching occurs when unusual environmental conditions, like increased sea temperatures, result in corals expelling the small algae which normally provide oxygen and nutrients. The loss turns the corals white. Reefs can recover if temperatures drop and the algae resettle, but if not, the corals will die.

This year’s coral die-off was “substantially worse” than the previous worst-ever event in 1998, Australian scientists reported. Experts estimate the Great Barrier Reef has lost 50 percent of its coral cover in the past three decades.

A resilient body, the Great Barrier Reef could regain the corals it’s lost, Australian officials said. But even under good conditions, that could take 10 to 15 years, scientists said, and the acceleration of climate change threatens to derail the natural rhythm of loss and recovery.

Climate change: Fresh doubt over global warming 'pause'

2017-01-22T14:35:00.002-08:00

By Matt McGrathEnvironment correspondent

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES

Image captionGlaciers have continued to melt at increasing rates over the past 20 years despite the supposed pause

A controversial study that found there has been no slowdown in global warming has been supported by new research.

Many researchers had accepted that the rate of global warming had slowed in the first 15 years of this century.

But new analysis in the journal Science Advances replicates findings that scientists have underestimated ocean temperatures over the past two decades.

With the revised data the apparent pause in temperature rises between 1998 and 2014 disappears.

The idea of a pause had gained support in recent years with even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reporting in 2013 that the global surface temperature "has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years".

But that consensus was brought into question by a number of studies, of which a report by the the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) published in Science last year was the most significant.

Researchers from Noaa suggested that the temperatures of the oceans were being consistently underestimated by the main global climate models.

The authors showed that the ocean buoys used to measure sea temperatures tend to report slightly cooler temperatures than the older ship-based systems.

Back in the 1990s, ship measurements made up the vast majority of the data, whereas now the more accurate and consistent buoys account for 85% of measurements.

Image copyrightZEKE HAUSFATHER

Image captionThe new analysis of buoy and satellite data shows that ocean temperatures have increased steadily since the 1990s

When the researchers corrected the data to take this "cold bias" into account, they concluded that the oceans had warmed 0.12C per decade since 2000, nearly twice as fast as previous estimates of 0.07 degrees.

As a result, the authors said that the warming experienced in the first 15 years of the 21st Century was "virtually indistinguishable" from the rate of warming between 1950-99, a time generally acknowledged to have seen significant rates of warming from human emissions of CO2.

The study did not go down well with climate sceptics. Members of the US House of Representatives subpoenaed the author's emails which Noaa refused to hand over.

However, this new analysis supports the findings of the Noaa report. The scientists involved believe the problems in the original temperature estimates for the oceans came from attempting to mesh together data from ships and buoys.

"Only a small fraction of the ocean measurement data is being used by climate monitoring groups, and they are trying to smush together data from different instruments, which leads to a lot of judgement calls about how you weight one versus the other, and how you adjust for the transition from one to another," said Zeke Hausfather, the new paper's lead author.

Hausfather and colleagues decided to put together three independent data sets from satellites, buoys and robotic floats to find the true scale of ocean warming, so there was no mixing or matching of data.

"Our approach was to create three separate ocean temperature records from the three different instruments, and it turns out that all three agree really well with the new Noaa record," he said.

"The conclusion is that Noaa got it right, the scientists at Noaa were not cooking the books or manipulating the data in any way and that three independent sets of data back up their results."

The controversy that surrounded the original paper proved a strong motivation for attempting to replicate the findings says another author, Dr Kevin Cowtan from the University of York.

"We were initially sceptical of the Noaa result, because it showed faster warming than a previous updated record from the UK Met Office. So we set out to test it for ourselves, using different methods and different data. We now think Noaa got it right, and a new dataset from the Japan Meteorological Agency also agrees."

The new study is unlikely to quieten sceptics but the authors say their new work shows that the rate of warming in the last two decades is no different from the rate of warming since 1970 or from 1950.

As for attempts by politicians to subpoena emails in an attempt to suggest that scientists are committing fraud, the idea gets short shrift from the new paper's authors.

"If people disagree with things they should ask other scientists to look into it rather than demanding access to scientists' emails," said Zeke Hausfather.

How We Know Humans Are to Blame for the Arctic’s Extremely Warm Winter

2017-01-01T14:54:00.002-08:00

Andrew King, University of Melbourne / The Conversation Global @_TCGlobal

Dec. 22, 2016

"If we do not reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, we estimate that by the late 2040s this event will occur on average once every two years"

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It’s Hard to Describe Just How Badly the Arctic Is Doing

"This year we have really seen the deepening of the change signal in the Arctic"

For the Arctic, like the globe as a whole, 2016 has been exceptionally warm. For much of the year, Arctic temperatures have been much higher than normal, and sea ice concentrations have been at record low levels.

The Arctic’s seasonal cycle means that the lowest sea ice concentrations occur in September each year. But while September 2012 had less ice than September 2016, this year the ice coverage has not increased as expected as we moved into the northern winter. As a result, since late October, Arctic sea ice extent has been at record low levels for the time of year.

These record low sea ice levels have been associated with exceptionally high temperatures for the Arctic region. November and December (so far) have seen record warm temperatures. At the same time Siberia, and very recently North America, have experienced conditions that are slightly cooler than normal.

Extreme Arctic warmth and low ice coverage affect the migration patterns of marine mammals and have been linked with mass starvation and deaths among reindeer, as well as affecting polar bear habitats.

Given these severe ecological impacts and the potential influence of the Arctic on the climates of North America and Europe, it is important that we try to understand whether and how human-induced climate change has played a role in this event.

Arctic attribution

Our World Weather Attribution group, led by Climate Central and including researchers at the University of Melbourne, the University of Oxford and the Dutch Meteorological Service (KNMI), used three different methods to assess the role of the human climate influence on record Arctic warmth over November and December.

We used forecast temperatures and heat persistence models to predict what will happen for the rest of December. But even with 10 days still to go, it is clear that November-December 2016 will certainly be record-breakingly warm for the Arctic.

Next, I investigated whether human-caused climate change has altered the likelihood of extremely warm Arctic temperatures, using state-of-the-art climate models. By comparing climate model simulations that include human influences, such as increased greenhouse gas concentrations, with ones without these human effects, we can estimate the role of climate change in this event.

This technique is similar to that used in previous analyses of Australian record heat and the sea temperatures associated with the Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching event.

To put it simply, the record November-December temperatures in the Arctic do not happen in the simulations that leave out human-driven climate factors. In fact, even with human effects included, the models suggest that this Arctic hot spell is a 1-in-200-year event. So this is a freak event even by the standards of today’s world, which humans have warmed by roughly 1℃ on average since pre-industrial times.

But in the future, as we continue to emit greenhouse gases and further warm the planet, events like this won’t be freaks any more. If we do not reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, we estimate that by the late 2040s this event will occur on average once every two years.

Watching the trend

The group at KNMI used observational data (not a straightforward task in an area where very few observations are taken) to examine whether the probability of extreme warmth in the Arctic has changed over the past 100 years. To do this, temperatures slightly further south of the North Pole were incorporated into the analysis (to make up for the lack of data around the North Pole), and these indicated that the current Arctic heat is unprecedented in more than a century.

The observational analysis reached a similar conclusion to the model study: that a century ago this event would be extremely unlikely to occur, and now it is somewhat more likely (the observational analysis puts it at about a 1-in-50-year event).

The Oxford group used the very large ensemble of Weather@Home climate model simulations to compare Arctic heat like 2016 in the world of today with a year like 2016 without human influences. They also found a substantial human influence in this event.

All of our analysis points the finger at human-induced climate change for this event. Without it, Arctic warmth like this is extremely unlikely to occur. And while it’s still an extreme event in today’s climate, in the future it won’t be that unusual, unless we drastically curtail our greenhouse gas emissions.

As we have already seen, the consequences of more frequent extreme warmth in the future could be devastating for the animals and other species that call the Arctic home.

Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, Marc Macias-Fauria, Peter Uhe, Sjoukje Philip, Sarah Kew, David Karoly, Friederike Otto, Myles Allen and Heidi Cullen all contributed to the research on which this article is based.

You can find more details on all the analysis techniques here. Each of the methods used has been peer-reviewed, although as with the Great Barrier Reef bleaching study, we will submit a research manuscript for peer review and publication in 2017.

Andrew King is a Climate Extremes Research Fellow at University of Melbourne

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

How climate change transformed the Earth in 2016

2017-01-01T14:49:00.001-08:00

Polar bears, increasingly land-bound due to vanishing ice sheets in the Arctic, are a poignant example of climate refugees.

DUSTIN STEPHENS/CBS NEWS

It’s impossible to exhaustively list all the ways in which climate change was felt in 2016, but here’s a guide to understanding the year that was for the planet:

A carbon dioxide milestone

“In the centuries to come, history books will likely look back on September 2016 as a major milestone for the world’s climate,” Brian Kahn of Climate Central wrote earlier this year.

On pace to be the hottest year yet

RAJANISH KAKADE, AP

Though final data from December is not yet in, January to November 2016 was the warmest such period worldwide on record, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Transforming the Arctic

Global warming has had a particularly dramatic impact on the Arctic, which has been transformed by significantly warmer temperatures, lower levels of sea ice, and more open water in recent years.

NASA animation of Arctic sea ice cover, 1979-2015.

NASA SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION STUDIO

Around the world, instability in agriculture

The continued warming of the planet in 2016 is having a destabilizing impact on agriculture worldwide.

Play VIDEO

Climate change could have dramatic impact on coffee

Experts project that by the middle of this century, climate change could rule out as much as half of the land now used for coffee production worldwide, CBS News’ Mark Phillips reported in December.

A troubling new chapter for the Great Barrier Reef

Why Some People Doubt Global Warming

2017-01-01T14:46:00.003-08:00

By Janice Wood
~ 1 min read

As winter wallops the nation, global warming may be the last thing on most people’s minds.

“The local weather conditions people experience likely play a role in what they think about the broader climate,” said Utah State University researcher Peter Howe. “Climate change is causing record-breaking heat around the world, but the variability of the climate means that some places are still reaching record-breaking cold. If you’re living in a place where there’s been more record cold weather than record heat lately, you may doubt reports of climate change.”

Howe notes that people’s beliefs about climate change are driven by many factors, but a new study in which he participated suggests weather events in your own backyard may be an important influence.

The study, conducted with researchers from Boston University, the George Washington University, and the University of Oxford, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Howe, an assistant professor of human-environment geography in Utah State University’s Department of Environment and Society and the Utah State University Ecology Center, generated the public opinion dataset used in the analysis.

The collected information is based on a statistical model of more than 12,000 survey respondents across the nation from 2008 to 2013 collected by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication.

“We found that places with more record high temperatures than lows have more residents who believe the planet is warming,” he said. “Conversely, in places with more record low temperatures, more people tend to doubt global warming.”

The study notes part of this dichotomy may be because early terminology used to describe climate change suggested the earth was simply warming, rather than changing in innumerable ways.

“One of the greatest challenges to communicating scientific findings about climate change is the cognitive disconnect between local and global events,” added Michael Mann of George Washington University. “It’s easy to assume that what you experience at home must be happening elsewhere.”

The scientists note the importance of differentiating between weather, the temperatures of a relatively short period of time, such as a season, and climate, the average temperature over a period of 25 or 30 years. Emphasizing the different between weather and climate may help the scientific community more effectively explain climate change, they say.

“Our work highlights some of the challenges of communicating about climate change, and the importance of situating people’s experiences at the local level within the larger global context,” Howe said.

Source: Utah State University

Photo: A new study finds local weather may play an important role in Americans’ beliefs about climate change. Credit: Mark Buckawicki.

Still so much confusion about weather versus climate

2016-12-25T09:27:00.003-08:00

tudy finds climate change beliefs in the U.S. linked with personal weather experiences

Staff Report

Meteorologists, climate scientists and journalists have apparently failed to convey the message that global climate change and local day-to-day weather conditions are two separate things. A study published this week suggests that Americans’ beliefs about global warming are based on how often they personally experience weather-related events.

One of the paper’s co-authors explained the findings in a press release.

“One of the greatest challenges to communicating scientific findings about climate change is the cognitive disconnect between local and global events,” said Michael Mann, associate professor of geography at George Washington University. “It is easy to assume that what you experience at home must be happening elsewhere.”

The study found that Americans who experience more record highs than lows in temperature are more likely to believe the earth is warming. Conversely, Americans who live in areas that have experienced record low temperatures, such as southern portions of Ohio and the Mississippi River basins, are more skeptical that the earth is warming.

According to the study, the language of climate communications may be key, with the phrase ‘global warming’ resulting in a cognitive disconnect. That term might have led residents living in areas that experienced an unusually cold winter to doubt that climate change is occurring.

“Who do Americans trust about climate change; scientists or themselves?” said Robert Kaufmann, professor in the department of geography and the Center for Energy & Environmental Studies at Boston University and lead author of the paper. “For many Americans, the answer seems to be themselves.”

The researchers also found that a recent period of lower-than-average temperatures offset the effect of a long warming period, further supporting their findings that people’s belief in climate change is local and experiential.

The scientists note the importance of differentiating between weather, the temperatures of a relatively short period of time such as a season, and climate, the average temperatures over a period of 25 or 30 years. Emphasizing the difference between weather and climate may help scientists more effectively communicate about climate change.

The paper, “The Spatial Heterogeneity of Climate Change: An Experiential Basis for Skepticism,” was published in Proceedings National Academy of Sciences.

Plastic Island

2016-12-01T03:41:00.001-08:00

http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2016/12/world/midway-plastic-island/

Midway Atoll, North Pacific Ocean (CNN) -- The distance from humanity yawns out in front of you when you stand on the pale sands of this tiny Pacific island.

Midway Atoll is just about the furthest piece of land from civilization and its constant engine whir, data and jostle.

Standing on the island's remote shoreline brings a calm and humility -- until you look down at your feet.

On the beach lies a motorcycle helmet, a mannequin's head, an umbrella handle, and a flip-flop. They didn't fall from a plane or off a ship, and there aren't any civilians living here who could have left them behind.

They were washed in with the tide, most likely from China or the US, thousands of miles away -- part of an enormous plastic garbage patch, spinning in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which you probably contribute to. And these are just the bits of it we can see.

Plastic has become a vital part of our lives of convenience. Yet the coffee cup lids, water bottles and bags we use once and throw away do end up somewhere -- in landfills, but also in the ocean.

Nearly every piece of plastic ever made still exists today. More than five trillion pieces of plastic are already in the oceans, and by 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea than fish, by weight, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Some 8 million tons of plastic trash leak into the ocean annually, and it's getting worse every year. Americans are said to use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.

Nothing is an emergency until you feel the burn, or see the red lights. Here plastic's impact is staring you in the face.

Midway is out of sight, but again it is on the front line. Once home to the decisive battle that turned World War Two in favor of the US in the Pacific, it's now locked in a new fight.

The smell of decay

You have to fly to Midway at night. Only then do the millions of birds that swarm the island in high season vacate the runway. We could only get here with permission from the US government and the help of a private jet.

The smell hits you first, and catches in your throat. It's the whiff of decay, of thousands of birds' bodies rotting. Part of this is nature: CNN visited the island in June -- the time of year when the Laysan albatross lay their chicks, who must learn to fly, or die.

But part of it is man-made: When you tear open the fragile ribcages of the birds who did not survive -- as oceanographer Matthew Brown did in front of us -- the sheer volume of plastic waste now in our world becomes apparent.

Inside the slight skeleton of one albatross, we found bottle tops and a cigarette lighter amongst seemingly endless tiny shards of plastic. It's as if plastic actually was the bird's diet.

These brightly colored plastic fragments were picked out of the sea by the bird's parents, who mistook them for food, then fed them to their offspring. The birds can't digest the plastic pieces but they still feel full, which causes malnutrition and death, according to researchers. Volunteers here have an almost full-time job scooping up the corpses.

kilograms of plastic have entered the ocean since you started reading

They have tried to clean Midway up; the huge dump of plastic trash sitting on the runway awaiting collection by boats is evidence of that. But it's almost impossible because so much washes ashore daily -- not to mention the five tons the birds fly onto the island inside in their stomachs each year, according to Brown.

The Eastern Island is now littered with tiny fragments of plastic. The birds die and decay, but the plastic inside them stays forever in the sand -- a layer of man's doing that will never go away. Midway will probably vanish under rising ocean levels before the plastic decays.

Albatrosses walk along a plastic-littered beach in Midway. Jackson Loo/CNN

The plastic-filled stomach of a dead albatross. Jackson Loo/CNN

"These are the classic 'canary in the coal mine' scenarios," said Brown, who works for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

"This is an animal that relies entirely on the ocean for its survival, just like 3 billion people do. If their children, their chicks, are being impacted by plastic this much, it is simply a forbearer of what is coming for us."

From fish to plate

So much of the damage is on the edge of the invisible. If you kneel down on Midway and stick your hand into the hot sand, you can pull up a troubling multicolored array of particles.

These are what activists call the "new sand" -- plastic that has broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, and then become part of the shoreline.

Are you eating your own

toothbrush?

Your toothbrush is one of many everyday items made of plastic. Most plastics are made from oil.

Plastic production has surged in the past 50 years and could double again by 2036.

15 million tons in 1964

311 million tons in 2014

612 million tons in 2036

Billions of toothbrushs are thrown away every year.

But less than 14% of plastics are recycled globally.

At least 8 million tons of plastic enters our oceans each year - that's one garbage truck a minute.

More than 5 trillion pieces of plastic are in our oceans, weighing 269,000 tons - the same as 3,585 blue whales.

By 2050, there may be more plastic in our oceans than fish.

Most plastic doesn't biodegrade - it breaks down into smaller pieces, which attracts toxins...

You could be ingesting up to 11,000 pieces of microplastic each year - and the toxins that come with them.

Sources: Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Lisbeth Van Cauwenberghe

These smaller particles are what end up in the food chain. The smallest ones, called nano-plastics, sink deep into the ocean and can end up in plankton. Larger pieces, known as micro-plastics, float in a soup, suspended in water, and are eaten by fish. The fish then get eaten by "apex predators" higher up the food chain -- including humans, or the Hawaiian Monk Seal.

We don't know as much as we want to about what plastic has done to these seals -- they're endangered, so there are restrictions on opening them up for study by scientists. But there are already troubling signs.

Marine biologist Jessica Bohlander, also from the NOAA, says the seals are acting as a "sentinel for exposure to plastics and other persistent organic pollutants for humans."

"A few individual animals we have seen have very high levels [of micro-plastics], particularly in adult males," she said.

Bohlander says plastic ingestion could be causing reproductive problems for the seals -- and the bigger the animal, the bigger the concentration of plastic.

"It is very troubling," she said. "With every step of the food chain, the concentration that can be measured in the tissues of animals becomes magnified."

11,000 pieces of plastic each year

Seafood is essential to human life, but there is growing evidence that fish may prefer eating plastic to food.

Swedish scientists recently demonstrated that larval Perch raised in waters containing micro-plastics "only ate plastic and ignored their natural food source of free-swimming zooplankton."

This diet of plastic stunted growth rates, reduced hatching rates, and caused abnormal behaviors in the young fish, according to the study.

There's also evidence that plastic is harmful to humans. The US government says styrene -- one of the key ingredients in plastic -- is probably a human carcinogen. It is studying the effects of plastic litter on marine life and plans to launch an inquiryinto the effects on human health, including fetal formation.

One study found that man-made marine debris may cause "physical harm" to humans when ingested via seafood. Another estimated that Europeans who eat shellfish could be exposed to 11,000 pieces of micro-plastic each year.

What science hasn't proven yet is whether the plastic in the fish we eat directly damages our health. But it's getting there, and the case for real government concern is growing.

And Midway, just by dint of its own distance and damage, is making that case.

Matthew Brown told me he eats sushi much less than he used to.

"Plastics also attract other contaminants, so if you are eating food that has little bits of blue and red in there, these are attracting ... other contaminants in the ocean. This has a real impact on our primary food source."

The choice the world has made

We took a boat out from the island, towards the coral reef that surrounds it. There, you can feel the awesome power of nature.

Caught in the reef nearby was a sight far more troubling than the bottles we had seen float past us on the water. In one inlet was a soup of tiny white pellets. A huge piece of Styrofoam packaging had been caught, now bobbing and slowly breaking down. In its thick soup was a bottle-top, a feather, and other gunk. You could swim into it easily, let your head emerge up in its midst.

Signs of resilience and defiance in nature abounded, but in one corner, man's carelessness had occupied a visible space and, perhaps for longer, an invisible one. We simply do not know what we have already done.

The hardest part about the journey to Midway is the sense of powerlessness it leaves you with. The damage there began with choices -- and litter -- made decades ago. And the problem is growing, not shrinking, as humanity gets more environmentally aware.

Stopping this flow of trash would require an incredible change in the daily behavior of 7 billion people.

China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Sri Lanka are considered the five worst offenders when it comes to plastic pollution, according to a study published in Science, and you can anticipate as much success telling people there to stop using disposable plastics as you would do in the US. Road test the phrase: "I'm sorry, you can't have that coffee as you haven't brought your own reusable cup."

kilograms of plastic have entered the ocean since you started reading

So what can you do? Very little, unless we all do it. You can start by bringing water bottles to work, or a reusable fork to the café, or insisting on less packaging for products.

For now, the balance of convenience versus the likely risk to human health is in the favor of the coffee cup. If the science isn't there yet, public opinion won't be either.

There is a tiny glimmer of hope amidst this looming disaster, one I often heard while talking to researchers, one that shows people can change.

It's a recent example of something so glaringly, obviously bad for the planet -- and people -- that for centuries was accepted as a normal part of our happy, modern world.

Remember smoking? We don't do that as much anymore.

CNN's Nick Thompson, Kenneth Uzquiano, India Hayes, Sean O'Key and Lauren Moorhouse contributed to this report.

The hydropower paradox: is this energy as clean as it seems?

2016-11-12T08:19:00.001-08:00

In July, UN Secretary Ban Ki-Moon highlighted the role of hydropower in boosting the use of renewable energy globally, when he visited a nonprofit institute in China that helps emerging nations develop and build hydropower plants. Many countries consider hydroelectricity a clean source of power because it doesn’t involve burning dirty fossil fuels. But that’s far from true. Hydropower is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions: a new study shows that the world’s hydroelectric dams are responsible for as much methane emissions as Canada.

Hoover Dam near Las Vegas. Hydroelectric dams are a rich source of greenhouse gas emissions, but the emissions aren’t part of global greenhouse gas inventories. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The study from Washington State University finds that methane, which is at least 34 times more potent than another greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, makes up 80% of the emissions from water storage reservoirs created by dams. What’s more, none of these emissions are currently included in global greenhouse gas inventories. These are already revealing a worrisome future in which rising global temperatures will likely cause environmental changes such as rising sea levels and stronger hurricanes, which could uproot communities and intensify competition for food and other resources.

“I think this study shows that dams as a source of energy aren’t without their greenhouse gas costs,” says Bridget Deemer, a research ecologist at the US Geologic Survey, who led the study during her prior position as a research associate at Washington State. “Even though it’s a renewable source of energy, people should keep the greenhouse gas side of the picture in mind when making planning and policy decisions regarding dams.”

The research, which examines 100 recent studies on greenhouse gas emissions from 267 large reservoirs around the world, also calls into question the wisdom of building more hydroelectric dams as countries try to nix their dependence on coal, natural gas and oil. An estimated 3,700 new dams are proposed or under construction around the globe, the study reports. It suggests the hydropower industry will need to control its emissions.

But industry officials in the US say the study misrepresents the benefit of hydropower in the fight to rein in global warming.

“Singling out hydropower is irresponsible and inaccurate, to say the least,” says LeRoy Coleman, a spokesman for theNational Hydropower Association, based in Washington DC. “Hydropower is needed to meet federal and state clean energy goals.”

Hydropower represents 6% of all energy generation in America, according to the US Energy Information Administration. For newly built power plants, hydropower’stotal cost of construction and operation runs about $68 per megawat-hour, which is comparable to solar, slightly more expensive than wind, and cheaper than coal and natural gas when those sources incorporate technology to capture carbon emissions.

Hydropower is often considered a source of renewable electricity because its fuel, water, is constantly replenished by nature. By that standard, hydropower produces 52% of all renewable electricity in the US, according to the National Hydropower Association.

Only 3% of reservoirs in the US are equipped to produce hydropower, Coleman says. Others are limited to water storage and flood protection duties, and some of them are good candidates for electricity generation, he adds.

“The responsible and logical approach would be to capture the energy potential of these reservoirs and combat climate change by installing hydropower equipment,” Coleman says.

Top 10 power plants in the world/ Illustration: Ucilia Wang/The Guardian

As recently as a decade ago, little was known about emissions from water storage reservoirs. But understanding has evolved rapidly. For instance, researchers initially thought shallow reservoirs in tropical regions were the largest emitters because their stored water was more prone to heating up, which could fuel greenhouse gas production.

But analysis by Deemer and her colleagues shows that the latitude and depth of water are not leading factors. Instead, “biological activities” in a reservoir – such as decaying vegetation and nutrient runoff from watersheds upstream – are more important indicators of greenhouse gas emissions. The nutrient runoff can be from natural processes or from farming, logging and land development.

Using data from the 267 reservoirs, the authors estimate total emissions from all reservoirs worldwide and conclude that those water storage facilities account for 1.3% of all manmade greenhouse gas emissions.

Another new study published by the journal PLOS One reaches similar conclusions, although it finds carbon dioxide to be a bigger share of emissions than methane. After examining data from more than 1,400 dams worldwide, it identifies the rate of soil erosion into a reservoir as a leading predictor of carbon dioxide emissions.

Led by Laura Scherer, a research associate at the Swiss university ETH Zurich, that study concludes the “carbon footprint of hydropower is far higher than previously assumed”.

“These are massive emissions, and we can’t ignore that,” says Kate Horner, executive director of the environmental group International Rivers, based in Berkeley, California. “There are a massive number of dams that are currently proposed to be built. It would be a grave mistake to continue to finance those with the impression that they were part of the solution to the climate crisis.”

Coleman contends that it’s premature to use data from these studies to criticize hydropower because the science remains uncertain.

It is challenging to measure reservoir emissions because so many factors can play a role, Deemer acknowledges. The scientific community also doesn’t follow a standard practice for counting emissions, even though the International Hydropower Association and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) published a set of guidelines in 2010.

Emissions vary according to a wide variety of factors, including water and air temperatures, season and time of day, vegetation and soil types in both the reservoir and the upstream watershed, and watershed management practices.

Hydropower dams constantly manipulate water levels to make electricity, a process that also affects the amount of emissions that make their way into the atmosphere from the reservoir. As water levels decline, the hydrostatic pressure on submerged soils also lowers and allows gas bubbles to escape. Sometimes the methane in these bubbles is absorbed by the water column and never reaches the surface. Other times it makes the great escape into the air.

Deemer and her colleagues note that many studies don’t sample emissions thoroughly enough both across reservoir surface area and over time. As a result, she says, the emissions estimates in her study are probably low.

The challenge in measuring emissions also makes it difficult to figure out how to reduce them. Researchers speculate it may be possible to reduce emissions by managing water levels in a reservoir differently. This, however, could affect electricity generation, fishery and flood protection, and other operations.

Protecting watersheds to reduce erosion into reservoirs could also reduce emissions as well as improve water quality, forest health and aquatic habitat.

Global greenhouse gas inventories currently do not include emissions from reservoirs at all, but that is changing.

At an October meeting in Bangkok, a committee of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change took a first step by agreeing to include reservoirs, which it categorizes as “flooded lands”, in an updated guidance document that instructs nations on accounting for their greenhouse gas emissions. But it may be several more years until that document is formally approved.

The US government does not account for reservoir emissions in its own greenhouse gas inventory. The country is dotted with roughly 79,000 dams, including more than 2,200 private and public hydropower plants. The US Bureau of Reclamation, for example, manages 337 reservoirs, and a science advisor to the agency, Dave Raff, says the bureau is taking on the emissions accounting task.

“We’re engaged in trying to understand what the different mechanisms are for reservoirs as they generate these greenhouse gases,” Raff says. “And ultimately, what are the management levers we have to pull that could mitigate those. I do think we feel a sense of urgency to be on that path.”

The article was amended on 6 November 2016 to show that the cost of building and operating a hydropower plant is about $68 per megawtt-hour, not kilowatt-hour.

2016-11-12T08:17:00.000-08:00

Surcharges of 40% on beef and 20% on milk would compensate for climate damage and deter people from consuming as much unhealthy food

Food production causes a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, largely from the raising of cattle and other livestock. Photograph: Mike Kemp/Getty Images

Climate taxes on meat and milk would lead to huge and vital cuts in carbon emissions as well as saving half a million lives a year via healthier diets, according to the first global analysis of the issue.

Surcharges of 40% on beef and 20% on milk would account for the damage their production causes people via climate change, an Oxford University team has calculated. These taxes would then deter people from consuming as much of these foods, reducing both emissions and illness, the team said.

Food production causes a quarter of all the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global warming, largely from the raising of cattle and other livestock. These emissions are increasing as people around the world become richer and eat more meat.

Marco Springmann, from the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, who led the study, said: “It is clear that if we don’t do something about the emissions from our food system, we have no chance of limiting climate change below 2C.

“But if you’d have to pay 40% more for your steak, you might choose to have it once a week instead of twice.”

The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, evaluated the tax required for each food type to compensate for the climate damage its production causes. Beef has a heavy footprint, due to the deforestation and methane emissions associated with cattle and the grains they are fed, and needed a 40% tax on average across the world.

The scientists then assessed how much less of each food type would be eaten as a result of the taxes. They examined different tax regimes and found the optimum arrangement in terms of both emissions and health was to combine the taxes with subsidies for healthy foods, such as fruit and vegetables, and payments to people to compensate for price increases. This ensured poorer people did not end up with worse diets as the result of taxation.

This optimum tax plan would reduce climate emissions by 1 billion tonnes a year – the same as the entire global aviation industry. This huge potential cut in emissions surprised Springmann, as did the heavy impact of dairy products.

Changes to how food is produced and consumed have largely been ignored in the battle against climate change, due to public sensitivity about their food choices, fears about increasing hunger in poorer parts of the world and the lack of straightforward measures to tackle the problem.

“If people see any food price rise, they get angry, so you have to explain why you are doing it,” said Springmann, adding that a successful food tax policy could spend all the money it raised on ensuring people could afford healthier diets. He said a tax in Denmark on unhealthy saturated fats, where the government simply kept all the revenue, was aborted after a year. But in Mexico, a sugar tax on soft drinks has been successful after the funds were spent on free drinking water in schools.

Most of the foods with big climate impacts also happen to be unhealthy when eaten in large quantities, such as beef and dairy. Therefore, if climate taxes cut consumption, fewer people would die from related diseases such as heart disease, strokes and cancers. In the US, for example, people eat three times the recommended level of meat. The researchers found climate taxes would save more than half a million early deaths every year, largely in Europe, the US, Australia and China.

However, cutting the demand for meat and dairy would not be easy, said Rob Bailey, research director at UK thinktank Chatham House: “The challenge is political. As the new research demonstrates, in many countries there is a very strong public health and climate case for dietary change, but it isn’t happening. Governments are reluctant to ‘interfere’ in people’s lifestyle choices for fear of a public backlash and criticism for ‘nanny statism’, as well as the reaction from powerful interests in the food industry and agricultural lobby.”

Bailey said there was currently little pressure on governments to act, partly because the public understanding of the link between diet and climate change is low. But, when people are informed, they find meat taxes far less unpalatablethan is supposed, he said.

Calls to cut meat-eating, by the UN and high-profile figures including climate change experts and the economist Lord Stern, have so far been both rare and controversial.

The new research found the taxes needed to compensate for climate damage were 15% on lamb, 8.5% on chicken, 7% on pork and 5% on eggs. Vegetable oil required a large tax of 25%, but this was due to the low initial price of the product, making a relatively modest surcharge look high.

These tax levels were global averages but there was significant variation with, for example, the beef tax being higher in Latin America, where cattle-raising produces more emissions than in other regions. The optimum tax plan also had regional variations, including limiting climate taxes to beef in the lowest income countries, to ensure people there were still able to afford decent diets.

Springmann said it was critical to find a way to cut the environmental impact of food production: “Either we have climate change and more heart disease, diabetes and obesity, or we do something about the food system.”

Global 'greening' has slowed rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, study finds

2016-11-12T08:15:00.001-08:00

Natural vegetation absorbs about a quarter of the carbon emissions created by burning fossil fuels. Photograph: Kuni Takahashi/Getty Images

A global “greening” of the planet has significantly slowed the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the start of the century, according to new research.

More plants have been growing due to higher CO2 levels in the air and warming temperatures that cut the CO2 emitted by plants via respiration. The effects led the proportion of annual carbon emissions remaining in the air to fall from about 50% to 40% in the last decade.

However, this greening is only offsetting a small amount of the billions of tonnes of CO2 emitted from fossil fuel burning and other human activities and will not halt dangerous global warming. “Unfortunately, this increase is nowhere near enough to stop climate change,” said Dr Trevor Keenan, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US, who led the new work.

The absolute level of CO2 in the atmosphere is continuing to rise, breaking the milestone of 400 parts per million (ppm) in 2015, and rising temperatures continue to surpass records.

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) warned on Tuesday that 2011-15 was the hottest five-year period ever recorded and that climate change had increased the risk of half of extreme weather events, with some heatwaves made 10 times more likely by global warming.

The new study on global greening is published in Nature Communications by an international team of scientists who concluded cutting carbon emissions remains vital to preventing severe climate change.

“Enhanced carbon uptake by the biosphere to date has slowed the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 and our results [suggest] uptake has been especially strong recently,” they wrote. “Without effective reduction of global CO2 emissions, however, future climate change remains a stark reality.”

Prof Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia, who was not part of the new research, said: “Natural vegetation is a fantastic help in slowing down climate change by absorbing about a quarter of our carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels.

“Fundamentally though, this help is not enough to stop the planet warming – far from it – carbon emissions have to drop to almost zero to stop global warming.”

The scientists used extensive land, air and satellite data to assess how carbon uptake by plants has changed over recent decades and used modelling to help untangle the different factors underlying the changes. It has been unclear whether the fertilisation effect of higher CO2 levels for plants is outweighed by the harm caused to them by warming and droughts.

The researchers found that between 1960 and 2000 the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere was increasing every year, but that after 2000 the rate slowed to about the same increase every year. They found that the main factor was the higher CO2 levels, which were just 290ppm at the start of the last century, compared to 400ppm today.

Another factor was the slower rate of global temperature increase after 2000, the so-called “pause” during which more of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases went into the oceans than the air. This meant the increasing respiration of plants driven by rising heat was curbed, trapping more carbon.

Prof Chris Rapley, at University College London, said: “The researchers make it clear that this effect is almost certainly temporary. The ‘greening’ effect of CO2 will ultimately be overwhelmed by the plants’ own respiration and decay, which will cause even more CO2 to be released.”

The research also shows the importance of preserving forests and other ecosystems that absorb carbon, said Prof Dave Reay, at the University of Edinburgh: “The land and oceans have been bailing us out of dangerous climate change for decades. Unless key carbon sinks such as forests are better protected, the delicate green veil that has saved our worst climate blushes will be in tatters.”

The WMO submitted its new report to the UN climate change summit taking place in Morocco. “We just had the hottest five-year period on record, with 2015 claiming the title of hottest individual year. Even that record is likely to be beaten in 2016,” said WMO secretary-general, Petteri Taalas.

“The effects of climate change have been consistently visible on the global scale since the 1980s: rising global temperature, both over land and in the ocean; sea-level rise; and the widespread melting of ice,” he said. “It has increased the risks of extreme events such as heatwaves, drought, record rainfall and damaging floods.”

Antarctica Will Become Habitable In The Next Two Centuries Due To Climate Change

2016-11-12T08:11:00.001-08:00

(Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Could Antarctica become habitable in the next two centuries? originally appeared on Quora: the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Answer by Dave Consiglio, Chemistry and Physics High School Teacher and Community College Professor, on Quora:

Could Antarctica become habitable in the next two centuries? Amazingly, the answer is yes! First, to be clear, we can live there now, but only with food shipped in. And no matter how intense global warming gets, Antarctica will always have one enemy: darkness.

It’s conceivable that the temperatures on Antarctica, particularly on the coast, could be warm enough for “normal” people to live there, but the maximum solar angle is still so low for the entirety of the continent that plants would really struggle to survive.

The maximum angle of the sun on the summer solstice is given by:

A = 90 – L + 23.5

Where L is the latitude.

Since almost all of Antarctica is south of the Antarctic circle (66.5 degrees south), the maximum solar angle on the longest day of the year is:

90 – 66.5 + 23.5 = 47 degrees.

Now, while that sounds quite high, it’s really not. The sun is only that high at solar noon, and only on one day of the year (around December 21st – Antarctica’s summer solstice).

During the summer, the sun is above the horizon for long stretches, but always at low angles. During the spring and fall, the sun is above and below the horizon for roughly equal periods of time, but when the sun is above the horizon, it’s only barely so. And of course, in winter, it’s dark for very long stretches. I thought these conditions would be unsuitable for subsistence agriculture, but it turns out there’s a place very much like what the coast of Antarctica might be like on a much warmer Earth: Vesterålen, Northern Norway. This lovely Norwegian town is just north of the Arctic circle. The Antarctic coast is more or less on the Antarctic circle, and thus gets similar amounts of insolation. As you can from the pictures on this site, some plants do grow here, but you’d have to be pretty selective in your crop choice. Barley and potatoes can be grown, as well as grasses for grazing.

Antarctica is currently very dry, but with climate change going the way it is, it’s possible that not only temperature but precipitation could significantly increased, and if it did, it’s possible that humans could live there without food from the outside.

Life will never be self-sustaining in a traditional agricultural sense much farther south than the coast. As you can see in the second link above, farming becomes less and less tenable the farther from the equator you get. Get south of around 75 degrees, and there simply isn’t enough sunlight to farm. In addition, even with major levels of global warming, it would still be quite cold there due to the long stretches of darkness and isolation from the oceans.

One final note: two centuries is not that much time for our climate. If we continue burning fossil fuels without slowing down for the next 200 years, I suspect the coastal temperature in Antarctica might rise as much as 10 degrees Celsius, maybe even more. That’s enough for a legitimate growing season, warm enough for grazing animals, and habitable enough for a self-sufficient human colony.

I’ll say it again: amazingly, the answer is yes!

You can now calculate how much Arctic sea ice you’re destroying with your CO2 emissions

2016-11-12T08:08:00.005-08:00

Flickr/Mario Hoppmann (CC BY 2.0)

Today’s study is a new piece in this massive, complex puzzle

by Rachel Becker Nov 3, 2016, 2:10pm EDT http://www.theverge.com/

The carbon dioxide emissions I produce as an average American destroy about 650 square feet of Arctic sea ice every year. That’s according to a new study that directly links the amount of annual CO2 released in the atmosphere to the amount of disappearing sea ice in the Arctic.

The findings, published today in the journal Science, could help scientists make better predictions about when exactly we’ll start seeing ice-free Arctic summers. The new calculations also show that previous climate models underestimated how much ice is lost — and that could have catastrophic consequences for our planet.

Every summer, the Arctic experiences some natural ice loss, but on average between 2.7 to 3.5 million square miles of ice persist. That ice is key because it acts like a refrigerator for the planet’s poles. If that ice disappears completely, the global temperature would rise and the planet would experience changing ocean currents and more severe storms. It would also affect indigenous peoples who depend on sea ice for hunting, as well as species like polar bears and Arctic seals that depend on ice for their survival.

“It’s a scientific puzzle, what’s going on up there,” says Axel Schweiger, the head of the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study. “Increasing our ability to make predictions for the future will enable us to manage things better on the planet in terms of greenhouse gasses, hopefully, but also in terms of politics [and] mitigation strategies.” And today’s study is a new piece in this massive, complex puzzle.

Dirk Notz from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and Julienne Stroeve from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado analyzed the area of summer sea ice recorded between 1953 and 1978, and 1979 through 1997. They found that for every metric ton of CO2 emitted, about 32 square feet of summer sea ice disappeared. When they plugged their calculations into various climate models, they found a similar linear relationship — but the models significantly underestimated sea ice loss compared to what had actually been observed.

The reason for this relationship probably has to do with carbon dioxide’s notorious role as a greenhouse gas, Notz and Stroeve say. The amount of sea ice depends on a delicate balance with heat from the atmosphere and the Sun. If temperatures increase, the ice edge retreats north to a region with lower incoming sunlight to maintain that balance, and the ice cover shrinks. The authors estimate that by the end of the century, we will have ice-free summers in the Arctic, even if the global temperature increase is kept to just 2 degrees Celsius, like the Climate Paris Accord recommends.

“Their targets right now for what sort of warming to limit the planet to by the end of the century are not going to be enough, and ... they’re going to have to be more aggressive in reducing CO2 emissions,” Stroeve says. “We don’t really know the full implications of what could happen if we have no summer sea ice.”

The new projections are key for a number of reasons. Climate models are used as justification for protecting endangered species, for example. They’re also used to write up policies about climate change and global emissions. Finally, being able to tie a tangible change to individual carbon dioxide emissions could help drive home a sense of personal responsibility, Notz says. “There was always this feeling of ‘how much does it really help if I change my behavior?’” Notz says. “It really has changed the way I perceive my day to day actions.”

Global warming continues; 2016 will be the hottest year ever recorded

2016-11-12T07:57:00.001-08:00

John Abraham

July 2016 was the hottest month every recorded according to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). Photograph: GISS/NASA

We know the world is warming – no factor can explain it aside from human emissions of greenhouse gases. Despite this, people who deny the basic facts of climate change have tried to argue that the Earth is either not warming or is only slowly heating. Well that just isn’t true anymore. The last three years are the nail in the coffin of the deniers of climate change. We have enough data this year to call 2016 as the hottest year ever record – and we have three more months left to go.

So, just how hot is 2016? Well my early predictions are shown in the graph below. I have taken temperature data from NASA and superimposed my predictions for 2016 – it isn’t even close. And by the way, it doesn’t matter whose data you use (NASA, NOAA, JMA, Hadley Centre) the results are the same. 2016 is going to blow 2015 out of the water.

Average global surface temperatures.

A few things to note. First, these temperatures are surface temperatures that are taken across the globe. But, you can measure temperatures elsewhere and see the same result. Most importantly, measurements in the oceans, where 93% of the extra heat is stored are the best proof of global warming. I recently coauthored an open-access paper on this very topic which interested readers can get here.

You can measure sea level rise as the heated water expands, you can measure ice loss across the globe, you can measure temperatures in the lower part of the atmosphere. It doesn’t matter where; the story is the same.

What is the big deal? Well first of all, 2016 blows away 2015 which was previously the hottest year ever and that had beaten 2014 as the hottest year ever – call this a three-peat. Three records in a row and the last two are by large margins. Does this mean global warming all of a sudden has gotten worse?

No, surface temperatures fluctuate a lot – you can see that in the figure. Temperatures will go up or down from year to year without apparent reason. This is why we are interested in the long term trends. This is also why we are interested in looking at other measures of warming (especially in the oceans). All of our measurements agree with each other – we know the Earth was warming long before this set of records began falling in 2014.

One thing these temperatures can do is enable us to compare computer models with measurements. We’ve seen that models have done an excellent job of correctly predicting the rate of heating of the Earth. My own research shows that in the oceans, the models are slightly under-predicting the rate of heating.

To compare models and measurements at the Earth’s surface, I’ve borrowed a figure from Dr. Gavin Schmidt of Nasa and I’ve overlaid the 2016 surface temperatures. A star shows where 2016 will be. The star should be compared to the three heavy dashed lines in the figure. The upper and lower dashed lines show the uncertainty in the models and the middle dashed line shows the average.

Global surface temperature observations vs. CMIP5 model simulations.

Is the 2016 data within the upper and lower lines? Yes it is.

Is the 2016 data close to the middle dashed line? Yes again. In fact, the 2016 temperatures are above the average which means the models under-predicted the temperature of 2016.

Before we get too anxious, it is almost certain that 2017 will be cooler than 2016. In fact, we may not set another record for a few years. But just as a few hot years doesn’t prove global warming, a few cooler years wont disprove it. The long-term trend is clearer upwards through and the models are spot on.

All this aside, there are still things we can do to bend the arc of this curve. There are actions we can take as individuals and as collectives to reduce our emissions and our dependence on polluting fuels. That message is, and continues to be, the most important one.

But one thing we cannot do is deny facts.

Climate change may be escalating so fast it could be 'game over', scientists warn

2016-11-12T07:53:00.003-08:00

New research suggests the Earth's climate could be more sensitive to greenhouse gases than thought, raising the spectre of an 'apocalyptic side of bad' temperature rise of more than 7C within a lifetime

It is a vision of a future so apocalyptic that it is hard to even imagine.

But, if leading scientists writing in one of the most respected academic journals are right, planet Earth could be on course for global warming of more than seven degrees Celsius within a lifetime.

And that, according to one of the world’s most renowned climatologists, could be “game over” – particularly given the imminent presence of climate change denier Donald Trump in the White House.

Scientists have long tried to work out how the climate will react over the coming decades to the greenhouse gases humans are pumping into the atmosphere.

According to the current best estimate, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if humans carry on with a “business as usual” approach using large amounts of fossil fuels, the Earth’s average temperature will rise by between 2.6 and 4.8 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

However new research by an international team of experts who looked into how the Earth’s climate has reacted over nearly 800,000 years warns this could be a major under-estimate.

Because, they believe, the climate is more sensitive to greenhouse gases when it is warmer.

In a paper in the journal Science Advances, they said the actual range could be between 4.78C to 7.36C by 2100, based on one set of calculations.

Some have dismissed the idea that the world would continue to burn fossil fuels despite obvious global warming, but emissions are still increasing despite a 1C rise in average thermometer readings since the 1880s.

And US President-elect Donald Trump has said he will rip up America’s commitments to the fight against climate change.

Professor Michael Mann, of Penn State University in the US, who led research that produced the famous “hockey stick” graph showing how humans were dramatically increasing the Earth’s temperature, told The Independent the new paper appeared "sound and the conclusions quite defensible".

“And it does indeed provide support for the notion that a Donald Trump presidency could be game over for the climate,” he wrote in an email.

“By ‘game over for the climate’, I mean game over for stabilizing warming below dangerous (ie greater than 2C) levels.

“If Trump makes good on his promises, and the US pulls out of the Paris [climate] treaty, it is difficult to see a path forward to keeping warming below those levels.”

Greenpeace UK said the new research was further evidence that urgent action was needed.

Dr Doug Parr, the environmental campaign group’s chief scientist, said: “The worrying thing is the suggestion climate sensitivity is higher [than thought] is not incompatible with higher temperatures we have been seeing this year.

“If there is science backing that up, that there’s a higher sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gases, that puts at risk the prospect of keeping the globe at the Paris target of well below 2C.

“Anybody who understands the situation we find ourselves in would have already have realised we are in an emergency situation.”

Donald Trump Could Put Climate Change on Course for ‘Danger Zone’

2016-11-12T07:50:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/

President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China at the United Nations conference on climate change in

WASHINGTON — For a look at how sharply policy in Washington will change under the administration of Donald J. Trump, look no further than the environment.

Mr. Trump has called human-caused climate change a “hoax.” He has vowed to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency “in almost every form.”

And in an early salvo against one of President Obama’s signature issues, Mr. Trump has named Myron Ebell of the business-backed Competitive Enterprise Institute to head his E.P.A. transition team. Mr. Ebell has asserted that whatever warming caused by greenhouse gas pollution is modest and could be beneficial. A 2007 Vanity Fair profile of Mr. Ebell called him an “oil industry mouthpiece.”

Global warming may indeed be the sharpest example of how policy in Washington will change under a Trump administration. President Obama has said his efforts to establish the United States as the global leader in climate policy are his proudest legacy.

But if Mr. Trump makes good on his campaign promises, experts in climate change policy warn, that legacy would unravel quickly. The world, then, may have no way to avoid the most devastating consequences of global warming, including rising sea levels, extreme droughts and food shortages, and more powerful floods and storms.

Mr. Trump has already vowed to “cancel” last year’s Paris climate agreement, which commits more than 190 countries to reduce their emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution, and to dismantle the Clean Power Plan, Mr. Obama’s domestic climate change regulations.

“If Trump steps back from that, it makes it much less likely that the world will ever meet that target, and essentially ensures we will head into the danger zone,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which produces global reports on the state of climate science.

Mr. Trump cannot legally block other countries from fulfilling their Paris agreement commitments, nor can he quickly or unilaterally erase Mr. Obama’s climate rules.

But he can, as president, choose not to carry out the Paris plan in the United States. And he could so substantially slow or weaken the enforcement of Mr. Obama’s rules that they would have little impact on reducing emissions in the United States, at least during Mr. Trump’s term.

That could doom the Paris agreement’s goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions enough to stave off an atmospheric warming of at least 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the point at which, many scientists say, the planet will be locked into an irreversible future of extreme and dangerous warming.

Without the full participation of the United States, the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas polluter, after China, that goal is probably unattainable, even if every other country follows through on its pledges.

And, the experts say, without the participation of the United States, other governments are less likely to carry out their pledged emissions cuts.

“That target is already extremely difficult to achieve, but it could be done with very hard, very diligent work by every single country,” Mr. Oppenheimer said.

The election of Mr. Trump is likely to cast a pall over Marrakesh, Morocco, where global negotiators have gathered for a 12-day conference to hash out the next steps for the Paris accord: how to verify commitments are being met, and how to pay for enforcement by poor countries that cannot afford the technology or energy disruptions.

Traveling in New Zealand, Secretary of State John Kerry was asked if he still planned to attend the conference, given the results of the election.

“I’m absolutely going to Marrakesh, perhaps even more important,” he said. “And I look forward to being there very, very much.”

Pessimism appears to be warranted. Mr. Oppenheimer and other climate policy experts said all major emitters needed to take action in the near term to stave off the 3.6-degree increase.

Scientific reports released over the last two years have concluded that the measurable warming of the planet because of human activities has already begun. This year is on track to be the hottest on record, blasting past the previous records set in 2015 and 2014.

An analysis by Climate Interactive, a scientific think tank that provides data used by many governments, concluded that the policies by the United States would account for about 20 percent of the expected greenhouse gas reductions under the Paris plan from 2016 to 2030. But absent the expected policy actions in the United States under the Trump administration, scientists at Climate Interactive said, the math of emissions reductions will be much more difficult to maintain.

“Pessimists will find abundant support for despair this morning,” John Sterman, a professor of system dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in a Climate Interactive analysis on Wednesday morning.

“With Mr. Trump in the Oval Office and Republican majorities in both houses,” Mr. Sterman wrote, “there is little hope that the Clean Power Plan will survive in the Supreme Court or for federal action to meet the U.S. commitment under the Paris accord. Worse, other key emitter nations — especially India — now have little reason to follow through on their Paris pledges: If the U.S. won’t, why should developing nations cut their emissions?”

The Clean Power Plan is the ambitious centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s climate change legacy and the key to his commitment under the Paris accord. At its heart is a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations intended to curb planet-warming pollution from coal-fired power plants. If enacted, the rules could transform the American electricity sector, close hundreds of coal-fired plants and usher in the construction of vast new wind and solar farms. The plan is projected to cut United States power plant emissions 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030.

But the program is currently under litigation by 28 states and more than 100 companies, and it is expected to go before the Supreme Court as early as next year.

Nasa: Earth is warming at a pace 'unprecedented in 1,000 years'

2016-08-31T04:23:00.004-07:00

The sun sets beyond visitors to Liberty Memorial as the temperature hovers around 100F in Kansas City, Missouri, last month. Photograph: Charlie Riedel/AP

Records of temperature that go back far further than 1800s suggest warming of recent decades is out of step with any period over the past millennium

The planet is warming at a pace not experienced within the past 1,000 years, at least, making it “very unlikely” that the world will stay within a crucial temperature limit agreed by nations just last year, according to Nasa’s top climate scientist.

This year has already seen scorching heat around the world, with the average global temperature peaking at 1.38C above levels experienced in the 19th century, perilously close to the 1.5C limit agreed in the landmark Paris climate accord. July was the warmest month since modern record keeping began in 1880, with each month since October 2015 setting a new high mark for heat.

But Nasa said that records of temperature that go back far further, taken via analysis of ice cores and sediments, suggest that the warming of recent decades is out of step with any period over the past millennium.

Proxy-based temperature reconstruction. Photograph: Nasa Earth Observatory

“In the last 30 years we’ve really moved into exceptional territory,” Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said. “It’s unprecedented in 1,000 years. There’s no period that has the trend seen in the 20th century in terms of the inclination (of temperatures).”

“Maintaining temperatures below the 1.5C guardrail requires significant and very rapid cuts in carbon dioxide emissions or co-ordinated geo-engineering. That is very unlikely. We are not even yet making emissions cuts commensurate with keeping warming below 2C.”

Schmidt repeated his previous prediction that there is a 99% chance that 2016 will be the warmest year on record, with around 20% of the heat attributed to a strong El Niño climatic event. Last year is currently the warmest year on record, itself beating a landmark set in 2014.

“It’s the long-term trend we have to worry about though and there’s no evidence it’s going away and lots of reasons to think it’s here to stay,” Schmidt said. “There’s no pause or hiatus in temperature increase. People who think this is over are viewing the world through rose-tinted spectacles. This is a chronic problem for society for the next 100 years.”

Schmidt is the highest-profile scientist to effectively write-off the 1.5C target, which was adopted at December’s UN summit after heavy lobbying from island nations that risk being inundated by rising seas if temperatures exceed this level. Recent research found that just five more years of carbon dioxide emissions at current levels will virtually wipe out any chance of restraining temperatures to a 1.5C increase and avoid runaway climate change.

Temperature reconstructions by Nasa, using work from its sister agency the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found that the global temperature typically rose by between 4-7C over a period of 5,000 years as the world moved out of ice ages. The temperature rise clocked up over the past century is around 10 times faster than this previous rate of warming.

The increasing pace of warming means that the world will heat up at a rate “at least” 20 times faster than the historical average over the coming 100 years, according to Nasa. The comparison of recent temperatures to the paleoclimate isn’t exact, as it matches modern record-keeping to proxies taken from ancient layers of glacier ice, ocean sediments and rock.

Scientists are able to gauge greenhouse gas levels stretching back more than 800,000 years but the certainty around the composition of previous climates is stronger within the past 1,000 years. While it’s still difficult to compare a single year to another prior to the 19th century, a Nasa reconstruction shows that the pace of temperature increase over recent decades outstrips anything that has occurred since the year 500.

Lingering carbon dioxide already emitted from power generation, transport and agriculture is already likely to raise sea levels by around three feet by the end of the century, and potentially by 70 feet in the centuries to come. Increasing temperatures will shrink the polar ice caps, make large areas of the Middle East and North Africa unbearable to live in and accelerate what’s known as Earth’s“sixth mass extinction” of animal species.

A climate scientist and economist made big bucks betting on global warming

2016-08-02T00:50:00.000-07:00

Climate scientist James Annan and climate economist Chris Hope made a nice sum this year for a bet they made on global warming in 2008. As Hope tells the story:

The record warmth of 2015 just made me £1,334 richer. While the extra cash is a nice bonus, it sadly demonstrates that the atmospheric dice remain loaded towards increasing climate change.

So, how did I turn increasing temperatures into cash? About five years ago I was at a conference in Cambridge where most of the participants were sceptical about the influence of humans on the climate. I took the microphone and asked if any of them would care to make a £1,000 bet with me about whether 2015 would be hotter than 2008. Two brave souls, Ian Plimer and Sir Alan Rudge, agreed.

Like a good economist, Hope hedged his bets. Plimer and Rudge had given him even odds, and Hope found a climate scientist, James Annan, who gave him 4-to-1 odds on the opposite wager:

I asked him what odds he would give me. In 2011, he was confident enough in the reality of climate change to offer me odds of 4 to 1 against 2015 being cooler than 2008 ... now I was perfectly hedged: I would win £1,333 if 2015 were cooler than 2008, and £1,334 if it were warmer.

2015 was of course hotter than 2008, so Plimer and Rudge each lost £1,000, with £1,334 going to Hope and £666 going to Annan on Hope’s hedged bet.

A particularly foolish bet by the GWPF advisors

While research has shown that betting against global warming is generally a great way to lose money, this particular bet was especially foolish. 2008 saw a strong La Niña event, which cause ocean surface and therefore global surface temperatures to temporarily cool. It was the coolest year since 2000 - what mathematicians call a “local minimum” because the temperature was lower than all the nearby years. And the bet was made about 5 years ago, so the participants knew that.

Between 2008 and 2015 there would be more than 0.1°C of human-caused global warming, so for 2015 to be cooler would have required a huge La Niña event, or big volcanic eruption, or perhaps the contrarians were banking on human-caused global warming being wrong.

Whatever their reasoning, it was a foolish bet to make. 2015 was a record-breaking hot year, about 0.32°C hotter than 2008. It wasn’t even close. In fact, it’s quite possible that we won’t see another year as cool as 2008 in our lifetimes. 2011 saw a big La Niña event, but it was still significantly warmer than 2008. The further away that year gets in the rear-view mirror, the more global warming humans are causing, and the less likely we’ll see another year as cool as 2008.

It’s worth noting that the two individuals who made this bet - Ian Plimer and Alan Rudge - are both members of the Global Warming Policy Foundation academic advisory board. The GWPF is a UK anti-climate advocacy group that generallyrelies upon unreliable sources of climate information. That their advisors make such foolish wagers does not inspire confidence in the group.

Climate scientists dare deniers: put your money where your mouth is

It’s easy for those who deny the threats associated with human-caused global warming to talk a big game. For their efforts they’re often paid handsomely viathe web of denial, media outlets that practice false balance give them undeserved prominence, and in most cases they’re old men who won’t live to see the worst consequences resulting from their efforts to delay climate action.

Climate scientists want to change this by engaging them in more bets like Hope’s.My colleagues and I managed to engage a group of contrarians in a wager that in the satellite estimates of the temperature of the Earth’s lower atmosphere, 2011–2020 (so far, a 0.27°C anomaly) will be hotter than 2001–2010 (0.22°C). Our side was willing to put up nearly three times more money (for charity) than the contrarians. Not surprisingly, we already have a comfortable lead.

At this year’s American Geophysical Union conference - the largest gathering of climate scientists in the world - several scientists are holding a session on this very topic (Annan is one of the invited speakers):

Opponents of science-informed policy cite uncertainty as a reason to delay action. Mainstream science acknowledges and objectively quantifies uncertainty, whereas opponents often use the language of certainty. Because communication is typically more persuasive when a message is conveyed with certitude, contrary voices may appear stronger than scientific voices to the public. To redress this imbalance, we must find a way to determine whether expressed opinions represent true opinions. One longstanding method is through wagering, and this session will examine the role of bets in exposing actual beliefs related to climate change and associated risk.

In other words, if you’re as confident as Plimer and Rudge that global warming is nothing to worry about, put your money where your mouth is like they did. Chris Hope also discussed the possibility of implementing climate betting markets, and noted:

they could offer a financial incentive for people who disagree about the likelihood of climate change to carefully assess the risks, instead of just shouting their disagreement across the void.

If we do nothing, all the signs are that dangerous climate change is one of the safest bets around.

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