Climate Central - News, Blogs & Features

The Larsen C Iceberg Finally Broke Away. Now There’s a Trillion-Ton Iceberg Adrift

2017-07-12T14:21:00+00:00

The inevitable moment of reckoning for the Larsen C ice shelf arrived. The growing rift that carved across one of the Antarctica Peninsula’s largest ice shelves reached its end, sending a 2,240-square mile iceberg spiraling into the sea. Welcome to the world, iceberg A68.

The massive slab of ice, equivalent to the size of Delaware and large enough to cover the U.S. in 4.6 inches of ice, will slowly melt over the coming years as it drifts away from Antarctica.

Satellites show when the Larsen C crack finally broke through.
Credit: Stef Lhermitte

The health of the remaining ice shelf will serve as a bellwether for how climate change could interact with natural processes to reshape Antarctica’s vast stores of ice. The growing instability of the continent’s ice has major implications for coastal communities around the world as it melts and pushes sea levels higher.

“The Peninsula as a whole is losing mass, it has been doing that for many, many decades, but more so now than 30-40 years ago,” Eric Rignot, an Antarctic researcher at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said.

{related}

The Larsen C crack had been growing since 2010 largely due to natural causes, according to most researchers. When it finally broke through sometime between Monday and Wednesday, it reduced the Larsen C ice shelf to its smallest size on record. The ice shelf was the fourth-largest ice shelf in the world, but following the calving event that cleaved off more than 12 percent of its area, it has been knocked down to fifth in the rankings.

Adrian Luckman, a scientist who has been watching the iceberg for years with Project MIDAS, said it would take months or years to document the health of the remaining ice shelf.

Though it has lost 2,240-square miles, Larsen C still spans roughly 15,000 square miles. That could make it more resilient than the neighboring Larsen B ice shelf that collapsed due a warm spell following a major calving event in 2002, but it’s not a guarantee.

Bethan Davies, a glacier researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, said one of the first things that researchers will look at is the “stress regime” that losing so much ice puts on the rest of the ice shelf. It’s akin to standing up against a teetering pile of books. If you shift your weight or put less effort to propping up the pile, it might start to wobble differently, a few books might fall off or the whole thing could topple over.

Scientist got am aerial view of the Larsen C rift in February.
Credit: Project MIDAS

Scientists will also be looking to see if other rifts open on the ice shelf. If that happens, it could mean more big calving events, putting further stress on the remaining ice. They’ll also be looking at the surface of the ice sheet for melt ponds, a process that’s already weakening ice shelves in other other parts of Antarctica.

“The critical time will be during the next warm austral summer,” Davies said. “If the ice shelf is destabilized by the removal of this large frontal portion, meltwater ponding on the ice surface may contribute to increased calving.”

Though most researchers agree that the rift itself was mostly due to natural causes, climate change will have a major role to play in defining a new era for the ice shelf and Antarctica as a whole. The disappearance of floating ice shelves will mean that land ice can spill into the sea faster.

“Climate change is a long-term trend. The peninsula has been warming for decades,” Rignot said. “Warm water is the main driver now (in Antarctica as a whole). If warmer air is sufficient to melt the surface, then the ice shelves will break up and sea level rise from Antarctica will be enormous.”

Rignot has previously led research showing that West Antarctica is on the brink of an unstoppable melt that could push seas up to 13 feet higher over a period of centuries. Other recent research has shown that even stable parts of East Antarctica, which tends to be colder, have experienced surface melt events and bizarre lakes forming inside ice shelves.

Coupled with a slew of other findings ranging from spectacularly ominous waterfalls to widespread melt ponds, it’s clear the Antarctic landscape is rapidly shifting due the ravages of climate change above and below the ice.

{like}

This Map Shows Warming’s Fingerprints on Weather

2017-07-11T15:26:00+00:00

The field of climate science that looks for the fingerprints of climate change on extreme weather events has been growing rapidly in recent years, making it hard to keep track of the dozens of studies that have been done.

A new interactive map put together by Carbon Brief, a UK-based data journalism site, makes that task easier. It rounds up the results of those attribution studies, as they are called, and color-codes them according to whether or not they found a discernable influence from human-induced warming. Nearly two-thirds of the 137 studies did find such an influence, in particular those looking at heat waves.

One of the authors of the analysis, Roz Pidcock, has written about many of the individual studies but said she was unaware of any place where they were gathered together. She thought such a map would be useful for keeping track of a fast-developing field that is aiming to broaden its scope.

“The temptation is to look at the result of one study and think that is the definitive last word, but in reality, the evidence needs to be considered in its entirety to make sense of how climate change is influencing extreme weather,” she said. “This technique avoids being selective and gives that necessary overview.”

Pidcock consulted with climate scientists who work in attribution, including Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford in England who works with a Climate Central-affiliated attribution program. “I think this is a very useful resource, in particular for the scientific community,” Otto said.

Attribution analyses look at whether or not the greenhouse gas-driven warming of the planet has changed either the likelihood or severity (or both) of an event like a heat wave or a drought by using weather observations and climate models. Observations can be used to see how the odds of such an event have changed over time, while climate models can compare how they change in a climate with and without warming.

Carbon Brief found 137 peer-reviewed studies that examined 143 individual weather events, ranging from the record setting rains that fell in Louisiana last summer to the deadly 2003 European heat wave.

Warming increased the frequency or severity of an event in 63 percent of the studies, according to Carbon Brief’s analysis. Nearly half of those were heat waves, which have a clear, direct link to overall warming temperatures.

A tourist uses an umbrella to cover from the sun and a fan to cool herself off as she walks in Alameda del Tajo park during a heat wave in Ronda, Spain on June 21, 2017.
Click image to enlarge. Credit: REUTERS/Jon Nazca

A recent analysis done as part of Climate Central’s rapid assessment program found that global warming made the recent heat wave in Europe that helped fuel deadly wildfires both more likely and more severe. That study, which Otto collaborated on, wasn’t included in the map as it hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, though the methods used have been.

Some studies found no clear influence from human-caused warming or were inconclusive, which could simply mean any climate change signal has yet to emerge from the noise of the natural year-to-year variations in the Earth’s climate.

Acknowledging when this is the case is important, Otto said, because “many people think all extreme events are getting more extreme and often blame events on climate change.” That can draw attention away from addressing other factors that exacerbate the impacts of extreme weather, like the way cities and towns are built.

Both Otto and Adam Sobel, a climate scientist at Columbia University who led a National Academies report on attribution, emphasized that the studies in the map don’t tell the whole story of how climate change is impacting extreme weather because they are not a random selection of events. They are often picked because they happen in researchers’ backyards or were particularly impactful.

“I think we cannot say often and loud enough that these studies are by no means representative of the impacts of human-induced climate change on extreme weather events in recent years, as they are only a very small and highly selective subset of all the events happening,” Otto said.

Attribution researchers are working to remedy this by expanding the types of events they are examining, as well as delving into relatively little studied areas, like South America and Africa. As new studies roll in, Carbon Brief plans to update its map.

The West Is on Fire As Heat Records Fall

2017-07-10T20:01:00+00:00

From Phoenix to Boise, high temperature records fell like dominoes over the weekend as an impressive heat wave engulfed the western U.S., helping to fuel several wildfires.

While heat waves are a regular part of summer weather, the steady warming of the planet means those heat waves are getting ever hotter, making record heat more and more likely.

Very hot out there today! ☀��
A few long-standing records were broken this afternoon! #cawx #nvwx #azwx pic.twitter.com/EVzNBoCknr
— NWS Las Vegas (@NWSVegas) July 8, 2017

The heat came courtesy of a ridge of high pressure that moved in over the West, with the peak temperatures, including several records, occurring on Friday and Saturday:

Las Vegas hit 116°F on Friday, besting the record set in 1989 of 114°F. The city had a record-long streak of 23 days with highs above 105°F.
On Saturday, Reno, Nev., bested its old record of 99°F with a temperature of 104°F.
Los Angeles broke a record that had stood for 131 years, with the temperature downtown hitting 98°F (the old record was 95°F).
Temperatures in Phoenix soared to 118°F on Friday, besting the old record of 115°F set in 1905, and marking the third day of 2017 where temperatures were at or above that level, the second most on record.
In Salt Lake City, the temperature reached a record 104°F on Saturday. The city had three record highs in just four days last week.
The Boise airport also saw 104°F on Saturday, besting the record of 103°F set in 1968.

Daytime highs weren’t the only concern, as overnight lows stayed downright hot in some places, particularly in the Phoenix area. The temperature from Friday night to Saturday morning only reached as low as 95°F in Scottsdale, a record. (It was still 106°F at 1 a.m. that night.)

Overnight lows on Saturday morning in the Phoenix area stayed in the 90s.
Click image to enlarge. Credit: NOAA

The heat and accompanying dry conditions can also set the stage for wildfires, as was the case during this heat wave, which saw several wildfires ignited and grow across the region.

The Whittier fire, which started on Saturday in the Santa Ynez Mountains in Southern California, has burned more than 10,000 acres, while the nearby Alamo fire has burned nearly 29,000 acres and forced several thousand people to evacuate.

The ridge of high pressure is moving eastward this week, bringing sweltering temperatures — and the threat of wildfires — to the northern and central Plains before shifting back to bake the West again at the end of the week.

At that point it could strengthen, meteorologist Guy Walton wrote on his blog, keeping the West good and toasty for the next week or two.

Extreme heat is one of the hallmarks of global warming; as the average temperature of the planet rises, record heat becomes much more likely than record cold. And cities in the Southwest — where most of the region’s population lives — are some of the fastest-warming in the country.

While no formal attribution study has been conducted to see how much more likely a heat wave like this has become with warming, a recent study found that heat records were made both more likely and more severe for about 80 percent of the area of the globe that had good enough observational data.

With temperatures continuing to rise — and no substantial effort yet to curtail the greenhouse gas emissions driving that rise — the world at large stands to see more such extreme heat in the future. Another recent study found that half of the world’s population could be exposed to heat that reaches deadly levels by the end of the century even with the most stringent reductions in greenhouse gases.

Took this photo of the Whittier Fire while flying from SAN to SFO at 38,000 feet #WhittierFIRE #CAwx #caheat pic.twitter.com/Gt6ZScCW2B
— Photos4u2c (@photos4u2c) July 9, 2017

These kind of heat waves pose threats to public health, local economies and infrastructure. The increased use of air conditioning can tax the electric grid, while the heat can damage crops and curtail outdoor activities, such as construction. During a June heat wave, planes in Phoenix couldn’t take off because higher temperatures lead to thinner air, making it more difficult for planes to get off the ground.

And searing heat can be deadly to already vulnerable populations, such as the elderly, small children and those suffering from illnesses. High overnight temperatures are a particular concern when it comes to the health effects of heat waves, because they prevent the body from cooling down and recovering from the heat of the day.

Nighttime lows have risen across the Southwest since 1970, ranging from an increase of 1.7°F on average in California to 3°F in New Mexico.

{like}

Warming May Turn Africa’s Arid Sahel Green: Researchers

2017-07-08T12:00:00+00:00

By Alex Whiting, Thomson Reuters Foundation

LONDON — One of Africa's driest regions — the Sahel — could turn greener if the planet warms more than 2 degrees Celsius and triggers more frequent heavy rainfall, scientists said on Wednesday.

The Sahel stretches coast to coast from Mauritania and Mali in the west to Sudan and Eritrea in the east, and skirts the southern edge of the Sahara desert. It is home to more than 100 million people.

The road to Djenne, on the Bani River in Mali. The Sahel region could turn greener if the planet warms more than 2 degrees Celsius.
Credit: Carsten ten Brink/flickr

The region has seen worsening extreme weather — including more frequent droughts — in recent years.

But if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, the resulting global warming — of more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — could change major weather patterns in the Sahel, and in many different parts of the world, scientists say.

Some weather models predict a small increase in rainfall for the Sahel, but there is a risk that the entire weather pattern will change by the end of the century, researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) said.

"The sheer size of the possible change is mindboggling — this is one of the very few elements in the Earth system that we might witness tipping soon," said co-author Anders Levermann from PIK and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of New York's Columbia University.

If the Sahel becomes much rainier, it will mean more water for agriculture, industry and domestic use. But in the first few years of the transition, people are likely to experience very erratic weather — extreme droughts followed by destructive floods, the researchers said.

This level of unpredictability makes it very hard for people to plan for coming changes, they said.

"The enormous change that we might see would clearly pose a huge adaptation challenge to the Sahel," said Levermann.

"More than 100 million people are potentially affected that already now are confronted with a (multitude) of instabilities, including war," he said.

The region faces a range of conflicts, including some driven by groups such as Boko Haram and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

The researchers studied rainfall patterns in the months of July, August and September when the region receives most of its annual rain.

"There's a range of possible outcomes for societies in the Sahel which depend on the climate that eventually (develops)... and whether they are prepared for fluctuations," lead author Jacob Schewe, from PIK, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Climate change from burning fossil fuels "really has the power to shake things up", he said.

"It is driving risks for crop yields in many regions and generally increases dangerous weather extremes around the globe," he added.

The study was published on Wednesday in Earth System Dynamics, a journal of the European Geosciences Union.

(Reporting by Alex Whiting @Alexwhi, Editing by Laurie Goering)

The Larsen C Iceberg Is Expected to Have Company

2017-07-07T20:59:00+00:00

It’s stressful being an iceberg hanging on by a thread. If you want proof, look no further than the Larsen C ice shelf.

Just three miles stand between the crack that’s been cutting across the ice shelf since 2010 and open water. When it breaks through, it will cleave a trillion-ton iceberg. The stress of having a huge iceberg-to-be nearing its inevitable conclusion has caused that crack to crack up.

Animation of Sentinel-1 interferograms show the significant stages of the Larsen C rift, culminating in multiple branches observed in early July 2017.
Credit: Project MIDAS

New satellite imagery shows a host of new cracks branching off the end of the main rift. According to scientists working on Project MIDAS, an effort that’s closely monitoring the ice shelf, that means there will likely be a swarm of smaller icebergs that break off with or shortly after the main iceberg does.

“It is remarkable how the moment of calving is still keeping us waiting,” Project MIDAS researchers wrote on their blog.

Those icebergs will likely be formidable in their own right, but they’ll look lilliputian next to the iceberg that’s been in the process of breaking off since 2010. That iceberg represents 10 percent of the area of the Larsen C ice shelf and will stretch across an area the size of Delaware. If you squeezed all the ice into a column the area of a football field, it would reach more than halfway to the moon.

After losing icebergs large and small, Larsen C will be the smallest it has been in recorded history. The causes of the massive calving event are likely largely natural. But climate change could have a role in writing the next chapter for the ice shelf. Warm waters are likely to continue their push into the region, eating away at Larsen C and other ice shelves around Antarctica from below.

Editor's Note: This story has been updated to reflect that the ice would reach more than halfway to the moon (56 percent to be exact) if squished into the area of a football field, not two-thirds of the way.

{like}

The Arctic Has Been Crazy Warm All Year. This Is What It Means for Sea Ice

2017-07-06T21:06:00+00:00

Melt season has begun in earnest in the Arctic. Scientists will spend the next few months watching sea ice turn into open water until the ice pack hits its nadir in early fall.

The vagaries of the weather and ocean currents will play a major role in determining where this year’s Arctic sea ice minimum ranks. But the steady drumbeat of climate change ensures that it will likely be among the lowest on record.

Total Arctic sea ice thickness and its departure from normal for June.
Credit: Zack Labe

New data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center show that sea ice extent was at its sixth-lowest mark for June. Sea ice was missing from 348,000 square miles of the Arctic Ocean, an area about three times the size of Arizona.

After the string of record- or near-record low months late last year and early this year, the sixth-lowest extent might sound like an improvement. It’s not. As of July 2, sea ice extent was on par with 2012, a year that went on to set the mark for lowest Arctic sea ice minimum on record. That year, a major storm in August helped churn the ocean and smash ice to smithereens.

{related}

There are signs this year’s ice would struggle to sustain itself if a similar scenario plays out. This winter saw a string of warm weather like no other in the Arctic. The number of freezing-degree days, a measure of how cold it’s been, are well below 2012. Fewer freezing-degree days translates to higher temperatures that cut into ice pack.

And while ice extent isn’t record low right now, ice volume is at a record-low level, according to data gathered by the University of Washington’s PIOMAS program. Thinner ice is largely driven by rising temperatures.

Departures from average in cumulative freezing degree days, from July 1 for a given year through July 1 of the next year.
Credit: NSIDC

“The lack of winter cold is consistent with the low spring ice thickness seen in PIOMAS,” Mark Serreze, the director of NSIDC, said in an email. “But the winter warmth is also a result of low ice extent in winter. In areas of open water in winter, there are large heat fluxes from the ocean to the atmosphere, warming the atmosphere. Hence, it’s a two-way street.”

The brittle ice covering the Arctic now is part of a long-term trend. Warming air and water have eaten away at older, more solid ice. That has in turn been replaced by younger, thinner ice more prone to melting each year.

As newer ice spreads across the Arctic Ocean, it makes widespread melt more likely in a vicious feedback cycle that’s compounded by dark ocean water trapping more heat and melting ice even further.

Rising carbon emissions have caused this scenario to play out and the sea ice minimum has shrunk 13.7 percent per decade since record keeping began in the late 1970s. Scientists project that even if the world manages to cut carbon pollution enough to keep global warming below 3.6°F (2°C), the Arctic could still face ice-free summers in the coming decades.

While climate change has helped weaken this year’s sea ice, weather will ultimately be the big driver in determining how low it will go. Serreze said the weather patterns that usually drive widespread sea ice loss haven’t set up this year, but there are still two more months of summer. If 2012 is a reminder, things can change in a hurry.

{like}

The World Is on the Brink of an Electric Car Revolution

2017-07-06T17:48:00+00:00

The internal combustion engine had a good run. It has helped propel cars — and thus humanity — forward for more than 100 years.

But a sea change is afoot that is forecast to kick gas-powered vehicles to the curb, replacing them with cars that run on batteries. A flurry of news this week underscores just how rapidly that change could happen.

Robots at the Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif. put together electric cars.
Credit: Tesla Motors

A quick recap: On Monday, Tesla announced that the Model 3, its mass-market electric car, would start rolling off production lines this week with the first handful delivered to customers later this month. Then on Wednesday, Volvo announced that every car it produces will have a battery in it by 2019, putting it at the forefront of major car manufacturers. Then came France’s announcement on Thursday that it would ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2040.

{related}

All this news dropped just in time for Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s latest electric car report, which lays out why electric cars are the way of the future and when they’re projected to take over the market. The authors said although electric vehicles are currently a tiny fraction of the car market, that market could reach an inflection point sometime between 2025-2030. After that, electric car sales are slated to increase rapidly.

Driven by the falling cost of batteries and the growing number of automakers producing a wider variety of electric cars, Bloomberg NEF expects that electric cars will account for 54 percent of all car sales globally by 2040. That’s a huge uptick from its forecast last year of electric vehicles accounting for 35 percent of all sales.

The shift to electric vehicles will disrupt the fossil fuel industry. The 530 million total electric cars forecast to be on the road by 2040 will require 8 million fewer barrels of oil a day to run.

A new forecast for electric cars shows explosive growth in new sales, particularly in China.
Credit: Bloomberg NEF

One of the big pitches for electric cars is their positive benefit for the climate because they reduce the use of oil. But they will require a lot more power from the electric grid. Energy use from electric vehicles is expected to rise 300 times above current demand, putting more strain on power generation.

How that energy is produced will go a long ways toward determining how climate-friendly electric cars actually are. A recent Climate Central analysis looked at all 50 states and found that the energy mix was clean enough in 37 of them to ensure electric cars are more climate friendly than their most fuel-efficient combustion engine counterparts.

That’s a sharp uptick from a 2013 analysis, which found that there were just 13 states where electric cars were cleaner than gas-powered ones, and it’s driven in large part by a precipitous drop in coal use.

While the U.S. is projected to be one of the biggest drivers of the electric vehicle revolution, China and the European Union will also be major players. By 2025, Bloomberg NEF’s projections show that China will be the biggest buyer of electric vehicles in the world, a trend that continues through 2040.

That means how China’s energy mix develops will be one of the most important factors to determining how climate friendly all the new electric vehicles on the road will be.

{like}

Scientists Know How Big the Larsen C Iceberg Will Be

2017-07-05T19:34:00+00:00

It’s the final countdown. The European Space Agency said on Wednesday that just three miles separate the Larsen C crack — a rift slicing the front off a major Antarctic ice shelf — from open water.

Like a tailor with a tape measure, scientists have been measuring the crack using ESA satellites. The next Sentinel-1 satellite pass will happen later this week, providing a high-resolution look at whether the Larsen C ice shelf has finally calved an iceberg.

ESA’s CryoSat mission has been used to measure the thickness of the eventual Larsen C iceberg. On average, it will be about 625 feet thick but could dip as far as 690 feet below the water's surface.
Credit: ESA

While the Sentinel-1 satellite has provided the clearest view of the state of the crack, CryoSat, another ESA mission monitoring ice at both poles, has the ability to see through water and ice, providing the clearest understanding of the volume of the soon-to-be iceberg.

According to remoting sensing expert Noel Gourmelen from the University of Edinburgh, the iceberg will average about 625 feet in thickness from top to bottom, maxing out at about 690 feet below the water’s surface. Knowing the surface area will cover about 2,550 square miles has allowed scientists to estimate that the iceberg will contain roughly 277 cubic miles of ice.

{related}

The iceberg is expected to have enough ice to fill more than 463 million Olympic swimming pools. Or put another way, it’s enough to cover all 50 states in 4.6 inches of ice, allowing you to skate coast-to-coast and take victory laps around Hawaii and Alaska. So yeah, it’s a huge ice cube, the likes of which has rarely occurred in modern history.

Because it’s breaking off of an ice shelf already floating in the ocean, the iceberg will not have an impact on sea levels. But scientists will be tracking its path through the Southern Ocean because of the threat it could pose to ships, particularly as it calves comparatively smaller icebergs.

The paths of all icebergs observed by ESA from 1999-2010. The yellow box shows where the Larsen C iceberg will start its journey.
Credit: ESA

The Weddell Sea, which is where the iceberg will begin its journey, typically spits floating ice on a path along the Antarctic Peninsula. From there, icebergs have usually followed a path out into the south Atlantic or along the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, according to historical data compiled by the ESA.

Beyond monitoring the threat to mariners, scientists will be intently checking on what remains of the Larsen C ice shelf. The iceberg-to-be represents approximately 10 percent of the ice shelf’s area. Losing that much mass at once is likely to change how the ice shelf behaves and scientists will be watching closely to see if more icebergs form or if the shelf exhibits other signs of weakness.

If the ice shelf does eventually disappear, it could accelerate the rate of sea level rise by unleashing a torrent of ice currently clinging to the Antarctic Peninsula. It’s a story playing out not just with Larsen C, but with other ice shelves around Antarctica as warming waters and air driven by climate change cut them down to size (though the Larsen C rift is likely due to natural causes). Their continued health is one of the key factors in determining how much oceans will rise.

Editor's Note: A previous version of this story said the Larsen C iceberg contained enough ice to cover all 50 states in an inch of ice. In fact, it could cover them in 4.6 inches of ice.

{like}

This Is How Climate Change Will Shift the World’s Cities

2017-07-05T14:02:00+00:00

Summers around the world are already warmer than they used to be, and they’re going to get dramatically hotter by century’s end if carbon pollution continues to rise. That problem will be felt most acutely in cities.

The world’s rapidly growing population coupled with the urban heat island effect — which can make cities up to 14°F (7.8°C) warmer than their leafy, rural counterparts — add up to a recipe for dangerous and potentially deadly heat.

Currently, about 54 percent of the world’s population lives in cities, and by 2050 the urban population is expected to grow by 2.5 billion people. As those cities get hotter, weather patterns may shift and make extreme heat even more common. That will in turn threaten public health and the economy.

To illustrate just how hot cities’ future could be and the choices they face, Climate Central created the interactive above in partnership with the World Meteorological Organization. It shows how the average summer high in the future in each of these cities compares to other cities of today. In some cases, the shift puts them in a completely new temperature zone.

Under the high-pollution scenario, currently mild Ottawa, Canada could have the tropical climate of Belize City by 2100. Mountainous Kabul, Afghanistan could feel like coastal Colombo, India. Already hot Cairo, Egypt could feel like its downright sweltering neighbor Abu Dhabi.

The average land temperature is projected to rise 8.6°F (4.8°C), but due to the vagaries of geography, some cities will warm much more. Sofia, Bulgaria has the biggest overall temperature shift, with temperatures rising nearly 15°F (8.4°C) by 2100. That would make its summers more like Port Said, Egypt.

Up to a dozen cities will heat up so much, their summers will have no analog currently on Earth. Khartoum, Sudan’s average summer temperature is projected to skyrocket to 111.4°F (44.1°C) if carbon pollution continues unchecked. That shift underscores that unless carbon pollution is curbed, the planet could be headed toward a state humans have never experienced.

Reducing carbon emissions still means temperatures will rise in cities (and everywhere else). In Khartoum, moderate cuts mean the city’s summer average high is projected to top out at 106.9°F (41.6°C), a high that is still hot (as hot as Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to be exact) but at least of-this-planet hot.

Dealing with less extreme heat makes adaptation easier and less expensive, and given that choice, perhaps it’s no surprise cities are leading the charge on climate change. They face the worst impacts of extreme heat and are home to billions. That’s why thousands of mayors from around the world have banded together and pledged to reduce their emissions. That includes multitudes of U.S. cities committing to meet the Paris Agreement goals after President Trump announced he was pulling the U.S. from the pact, and even more ambitious moves like Oslo’s pledge to nearly zero its emissions by 2030.

WMO and Climate Central are launching a series of climate reports by TV weather presenters from across the world. The first videos are from Barcelona, Madrid and Hanoi. Others will roll out in the coming weeks.

Climate Central's James Bronzan contributed data analysis for this story.

Antarctica’s Ice-Free Areas to Increase By 2100

2017-07-04T12:00:00+00:00

By Michael Slezak, The Guardian

Climate change will cause ice-free areas on Antarctica to increase by up to a quarter by 2100, threatening the diversity of the unique terrestrial plant and animal life that exists there, according to projections from the first study examining the question in detail.

If emissions of greenhouse gasses are not reduced, projected warming and changes in snowfall will cause ice-free areas — which currently make up about 1 percent of Antarctica and are home to all of the continent’s terrestrial plants and animals — to increase by as much as 17,000 square kilometers.

An iceberg in the Southern Ocean.
Credit: Ted Blanco/Climate Central

Since many of the ice-free areas on Antarctica are isolated from one another, they have acted like islands in the ocean, with the life existing in each one forming distinct groups. As those areas expand in the future, they will become closer to one another, with many coalescing, allowing the distinct groups to mix and potentially homogenise.

By 2100, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, the expansion of ice-free patches will lead to their overall number decreasing from more than 5,500 to fewer than 3,000, according to the work by Jasmine Lee from the Australian Antarctic Division and colleagues published in the journal Nature.

If emissions begin to reduce from 2040, the expansion of the patches will be limited and as many as 4,000 distinct patches could remain.

About 85 percent of the new ice-free areas will emerge in the Antarctic peninsula, which extends out into the Southern Ocean towards Chile. The Antarctic peninsula has experienced the most rapid warming in the southern hemisphere already and is predicted to see five metres of ice melt by 2100.

As a result, the Antarctic peninsula will emerge as the region of Antarctica with the most ice-free area, overtaking the Transantarctic Mountains.

The researchers found the South Orkney Islands were likely to become completely ice-free by 2100 if global temperatures exceeded 2°C of warming, leading to what the researchers described as “a complete transformation of the physical environment” there.

Some further expansion of ice-free areas was projected to occur on the opposite side of Antarctica from the peninsula, in East Antarctica.

As the ice-free areas expand, the researchers said several threats were likely to be realised, with winners and losers emerging.

Some native species were likely to expand their available habitat, accessing new resources and thriving. But those changes could have destabilising effects on the ecosystems there, enabling the spread of invasive species, which were already posing a substantial threat to native species.

“While this might provide new areas for native species to colonise, it could also result in the spread of invasive species and, in the long term, the extinction of less competitive native species,” said Aleks Terauds from the Australian Antarctic Division, a co-author on the paper.

In May, another team of researchers found native plant life on Antarctica had already responded dramatically to temperature increases, growing at a rate four or five times faster than in the 1950s.

Reprinted with permission from The Guardian.

Climate Change Could Disrupt Food ‘Chokepoints’

2017-07-02T12:00:00+00:00

By Umberto Bacchi, Thomson Reuters Foundation

International trade in food relies on a small number of key ports, straits and roads, which face increasing risks of disruption due to climate change, a report said.

Disruptions caused by weather, conflict or politics at one of those so-called "chokepoints" could limit food supplies and push up prices, the study by British think-tank Chatham House warned.

Workers unload imported rice from Vietnam from a ship at Tanjung Priork port in Jorth Jakarta, Indonesia, December 15, 2015.
Credit: REUTERS/Darren Whiteside

"The risks are growing as we all trade more with each other and as climate change takes hold," Laura Wellesley, one of the study's authors, said in a statement.

Almost 25 percent of all food eaten around the world is traded on international markets, the report said.

The amount of maize, wheat, rice and soybean moved across the world each year is enough to feed some 2.8 million people and more than half of it passes through at least one of 14 inland routes, ports, and straits, like the Panama and Suez canals.

About 20 percent of global wheat exports, for example, transit via the Turkish Straits, while more than 25 percent of soybean exports is shipped across the Straits of Malacca.

But infrastructure at these junctures is often old and ill-suited to cope with natural disasters, which are expected to increase in frequency as the planet warms, said Wellesley.

Roads in Brazil, the world's largest exporter of soy bean, for instance, were exposed to the risk of flooding and landslides caused by heavy rains, while U.S. Gulf Coast ports could suffer more storm surges boosted by rising seas, she said.

That posed risks for the food security of importing countries and the economies of those exporting food, she added.

The report called on governments to invest in "climate-resilient" infrastructure as well as taking other precautionary measures such as diversifying food production and stocks.

Reporting by Umberto Bacchi, Editing by Ros Russell

Global Sea Level Rise Accelerates Since 1990

2017-07-01T12:00:00+00:00

By Alister Doyle, Reuters

The rise in global sea levels has accelerated since the 1990s amid rising temperatures, with a thaw of Greenland's ice sheet pouring ever more water into the oceans, scientists said this week.

The annual rate of sea level rise increased to 3.3 millimeters (0.13 inch) in 2014 — a rate of 33 centimeters (13 inches) if kept unchanged for a century — from 2.2 mm in 1993, according to a team of scientists in China, Australia and the United States.

Ice in Greenland.
Credit: United Nations Photo/flickr

Sea levels have risen by about 20 cm in the past century and many scientific studies project a steady acceleration this century as man-made global warming melts more ice on land.

Until now, however, scientists have found it hard to detect whether the rate has picked up, is flat or has fallen since 1990. The study found that early satellite data had exaggerated the rate of sea level rise in the 1990s, masking the recent acceleration.

The confirmation of a quickening rise "highlights the importance and urgency" of working out ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to protect low-lying coasts, the scientists wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change.

A thaw of Greenland's ice sheet accounted for more than 25 percent of the sea level rise in 2014 against just 5 percent in 1993, according to the study led by Xianyao Chen of the Ocean University of China and Qingdao National Laboratory of Marine Science and Technology.

Other big sources include loss of glaciers from the Himalayas to the Andes, Antarctica's ice sheet and a natural expansion of ocean water as it warms up from its most dense at 4 degrees Celsius (39.2°F).

A U.N. panel of climate scientists said in 2014 that sea levels could rise by up to about a meter by 2100.

Several climate experts who were not involved in the study welcomed the findings.

"This is a major warning to us about the dangers of a sea level rise that will continue for many centuries even after global warming is stopped," Peter Wadhams, of the University of Cambridge, said in a statement.

"A big question in climate science has been whether the rise in global sea level rise is accelerating. Now there is strong evidence that this is indeed the case," said Brian Hoskins of Imperial College, London.

A rise in sea levels will threaten low-lying coasts from Miami to Bangladesh, cities from Shanghai to San Francisco and small island states such as Tuvalu in the Pacific.

Reporting By Alister Doyle; Editing by Gareth Jones

Global Warming Tipped Scales in Europe’s Heat Wave

2017-06-29T21:00:00+00:00

Global warming gave a clear boost to the searing temperatures that blanketed Western Europe earlier this month — a heat wave that helped fuel deadly wildfires in Portugal.

The greenhouse gas-driven warming of the atmosphere has made the intensity and frequency of such extreme heat up to 10 times as likely, according to a new analysis from researchers working with Climate Central’s World Weather Attribution program and several outside partners.

It is the latest such attribution analysis to show that the warming that has occurred over the last century — nearly 2°F (1°C) — has already had a clear influence on such extreme heat events.

“Global warming has already put a thumb on the scales; it’s already tipped the odds,” Noah Diffenbaugh, a Stanford University climate scientist who wasn’t involved with the work, said.

The heat wave was the result of hot, dry air moving northward from over northern Africa earlier in the summer season than is typical for such heat events, especially in northwestern Europe. London’s Heathrow Airport had its hottest June day in more than 40 years on June 21, with the temperature reaching 94°F (34.5°C).

“It was really, really hot for Oxford” in England, climate scientist Friederike Otto, part of the WWA team, said.

{related}

Spain and Portugal saw the highest temperatures, with much of the southern Iberian Peninsula surpassing 104°F (40°C). One of the highest temperatures recorded was 109°F (43°C) in Evora, Portugal, on June 18.

The heat and accompanying dry conditions helped to fan the flames of a wildfire thought to have been triggered by lightning from dry thunderstorms in the area. A fire in the central Pedrógão Grande area killed 64 people who were trapped in their cars trying to flee the flames.

France and the Netherlands activated their respective heat action plans, the former of which was put into place after a 2003 heat wave that contributed to hundreds of deaths. That heat wave was also found to have a climate change influence in one of the first attribution studies.

Fire and smoke is seen on the IC8 motorway during a forest fire near Pedrógão Grande, in central Portugal on June 18, 2017.
Click image to enlarge. Credit: REUTERS/Miguel Vidal

To evaluate the role of global warming in the recent heat wave, the researchers used both historical temperature observations and climate models to see how the odds of such an event have changed over time and to compare the odds in a climate with and without warming, respectively.

They found that the likelihood of such a heat wave had at least doubled across the region and was up to 10 times more likely in the worst-hit places, Spain and Portugal. What was once a rare heat event can now happen every 10 to 30 years, and is more likely to happen earlier in the summer.

The findings fit with other studies, including one by Diffenbaugh that found that record heat was both more likely and more severe over 80 percent of the part of the globe with good enough observational data.

That trend toward more and more severe heat will continue, especially if the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that are driving global temperature rise aren’t curtailed.

Click image to enlarge.

“What is still an unusually hot June today would be a normal June later this century,” the researchers wrote in their analysis.

Another recent study found that heat waves that reach deadly levels of temperature and humidity could affect half the world’s population by the end of the century even under the most stringent greenhouse gas reductions.

With President Trump’s announcement that he will be pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, meeting those targets becomes more difficult, though numerous cities, states and businesses have pledged to still meet their targets.

In the meantime, the new analysis shows that “we can expect another hot June like this before too long,” the team wrote.

{like}

Climate Change Will Hit the Poorest the Hardest in the U.S.

2017-06-29T18:00:00+00:00

Union County is tucked in northern Florida, half an hour north of Gainesville and an hour west of Jacksonville. It’s Florida’s smallest county, a mostly unremarkable landlocked stretch of pine forest interspersed with lakes.

More than 15,000 people call it home, working largely in healthcare, transportation and public administration. The state prison and Target distribution center are among the county’s notable employers. The unemployment rate is low at around 4 percent, but most jobs aren’t high paying. As a result, Union County is Florida’s poorest county by per capita income.

New research shows there’s something else that makes Union County unique: it’s ground zero for the economic damage that climate change will cause in the U.S.

County-level annual damages in median scenario for climate during 2080-2099 under business-as-usual emissions trajectory (RCP8.5). Negative damages indicate economic benefits.
Click image to enlarge. Credit: Hsiang, et al. 2017

Researchers published a landmark study in Science on Thursday that analyzes what climate change will mean for the economies of all 3,144 counties in the U.S. The analysis is the first of its kind, but the results show what’s becoming a common refrain when it comes to the impact of climate change: Rising temperatures will cause the poorest to suffer the most, even in the wealthiest nation in the world.

Union County is just one of a host of poor counties in the South that will be hit disproportionately hard by the impacts of climate change. In contrast, more wealthy counties in the northern third of the country are likely to be insulated from the effects of climate change and could even make economic gains because of new agricultural land opening up and fewer deaths due to cold weather. The findings have broad implications for county planning and the need for a strong, coordinated response to address climate change at the national level.

{related}

“For the first time, we have a strong-evidenced based relationship between temperatures and damage (at the county level),” Amir Jina, an economist at the University of Chicago who co-authored the new study, said. “At high resolution, there will be winners and losers from climate change within the U.S.”

To get their results, Jina and his colleagues used climate projections that have carbon pollution continuing on its current trajectory to 2100. They then modeled how climate change could impact eight economic indicators including agriculture, energy expenditures, mortality, labor productivity, crime and coastal damage from sea level rise.

Their findings show that poor counties, particularly those in the South, will suffer greatly from rising temperatures. The poorest 100 counties are projected to suffer an average loss of 11 percent of their GDP due to climate change. The richest 100 counties are projected to lose just 1 percent of their county GDP.

The reason for the dramatic losses in poor counties in the South is because they’re right on the brink of dangerous temperature thresholds. Once summer highs pass a certain point, mortality and crime tend to increase while productivity drops.

“We’ve known for 10 years or so that there’s a lot of important threshold effects in all these impacts,” Jina said. “Labor productivity is a classic example. It looks like temperature doesn’t affect the time you work in agriculture or manufacturing until your day gets up to about 35°C (95°F) and then suddenly you start working a lot less. So if I’m in a place close to threshold, then a small change in threshold has big risks on the economy or well-being.”

Range of economic damages per year for groupings of U.S. counties, based on their income. Damages are a fraction of county income. White lines are median estimates, boxes show the inner 66 percent of possible outcomes, outer whiskers are inner 90 percent of possible outcomes.
Click image to enlarge. Credit: Hsiang, et al. 2017

In Union County, for example, the average summertime high is around 90°F. By the end of the century, it will likely surpass 95°F, a tipping point for more heat-related deaths and violent crime while also contributing to a drop in labor productivity. When all the changes are calculated, Union County stands to see costs in excess of 27 percent of its county income.

That pattern plays out across the South. Of the 100 counties that will lose the most due to climate change, all but three of them are in the Southeast (the outliers are in New Mexico and Arizona).

In comparison, the 100 counties that will benefit or lose the least from climate change are all in the northern part of the country with the exception of higher elevation counties in the Appalachians and Rockies.

The research builds off a 2014 report and sets a baseline for what will happen if the U.S. makes no effort to adapt to climate change even as the impacts get worse. That means the findings are the clearest indication yet of what’s at stake for the U.S. economy if leaders choose to ignore reducing carbon pollution or adapting to its impacts.

“You’re able to see where our policy priorities should be by comparing those (economic sectors),” Jina said. “We wanted to make sure we had this context to say here’s this study that puts them next to each other.”

The research was widely praised by economists for its unique approach.

“From a methodological perspective, ‘bottom up’ county-level damage estimates are a massive step forward for this literature,” Noah Kaufman, an economist at the World Resources Institute said. “Typically, damage estimates are at the country level at best, which limits real-world applicability. County-level estimates will have important implications for adaptation and resilience planning, and, as the paper emphasizes, the findings tell a new and compelling story about within-country distributional effects of climate damage.”

The study also creates a template for what can be done in other countries to assess their own climate risks and how to prepare for them.

Thomas Sterner, an environmental economist at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, said in an email that the study was innovative and detailed and that the researchers “belong to the forefront of climate science modelling when it comes to damage estimates.

“Similar studies can and should be done in many countries and eventually we will start to get a better picture of the damage to be expected. This will be important to decisions on both mitigation and adaptation investments.”

{like}

The Larsen C Rift is Racing to Its Conclusion

2017-06-28T21:08:00+00:00

A rift has torn the Larsen C ice shelf asunder and now the outside edge of the ice is moving at an unprecedented pace. When it breaks off, it will become one of the largest icebergs ever recorded.

The crack is just eight miles away from breaking off what will likely be the second-biggest iceberg observed. The massive hunk of ice has already started to wiggle like a loose tooth. That includes ice near where the crack began, which is moving at an unprecedented speed of 33 feet per day. In the world of glacial-paced ice, that’s the equivalent of an all-out sprint.

Ice on the back end of the Larsen C crack is moving faster than it ever has before in another sign that calving is imminent. The images show ice shelf movement on the ocean side of the rift in early June (left) compared to late June (right).
Credit: Project MIDAS

“In another sign that the iceberg calving is imminent, the soon-to-be-iceberg part of Larsen C ice shelf has tripled in speed to more than 10 meters per day between 24th and 27th June 2017,” the scientists wrote on their Project MIDAS site. “The iceberg remains attached to the ice shelf, but its outer end is moving at the highest speed ever recorded on this ice shelf.”

{related}

The speed-up is the latest sign that an iceberg is truly on the brink of forming. Project MIDAS researchers have been monitoring the state of the ice shelf since October 2015. During that time, they’ve observed periods of massive growth in the length of the crack across the ice shelf, widening to the point where you could lay the Empire State Building on its side to form a bridge across the chasm. More recently, a new branch sprouted, further warping the ice.

The latest change brings the break-off date that much closer to happening, though researchers cautioned it could still be weeks before the crack breaks through completely. When it does, though, it will drastically alter one of the largest ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula.

Scientists estimate that 10 percent of the ice shelf will break off, an area roughly as large as Delaware. That will change how the remaining ice shelf behaves, though it will take years of monitoring to see how those changes play out.

The Larsen C rift is driven by natural processes, but climate change could play a role in what comes next for the ice shelf, either from warm water undercutting what’s left of the ice shelf or warm air causing melt ponds on the surface. Both would weaken the remaining ice and make it more susceptible to melt and possibly collapse, though it will take years for researcher to tease those signals out.

“The area of ice about to be lost has a different stress regime to the central parts of the ice shelf,” Bethan Davies, an Antarctic ice researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, said. “This change in stress regime may make calving easier and result in an increase in calving events. We will be watching this over the next few years.”

{like}

Sunnier Skies Driving Greenland Surface Melt

2017-06-28T19:11:00+00:00

In the past two decades, the Greenland ice sheet has become the biggest single contributor to rising sea levels, mostly from melt across its vast surface. That surface melt is, in turn, driven mostly by an uptick in clear, sunny summer skies, not just rising air temperatures, a new study finds.

A late summer sunset and clouds over the Black and Bloom field camp in Greenland in August 2016.
Click image to enlarge. Credit: Black and Bloom (@Glacier_Albedo)

What’s causing the decline in cloud cover isn’t yet clear, but the work shows that understanding what’s behind the trend and developing ways to better represent clouds in global climate models will be crucial to predicting how much Greenland will melt in the future.

The nearly two-mile-thick Greenland ice sheet covers an area about three times the size of Texas and holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by 23 feet if it were all to melt. While that is unlikely to happen anytime soon, even smaller-scale melt can raise sea levels to the point that large swaths of coastal land will be claimed by the oceans by the end of the century, including many major cities, such as Miami and Shanghai.

Global sea level has already risen by about a foot since 1900. Greenland’s contribution to that rise has jumped since the 1990s, accounting for about 30 percent of sea level rise since then.

While some of the water Greenland is flushing out to sea comes from warming ocean waters lapping away at the glaciers that drain the ice sheet, most is due to the melt across its surface during the summer.

{related}

Stefan Hofer, a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol in England, and his colleagues looked into what the main drivers of that surface melt were, in particular the effect of cloud cover on melt.

In satellite data spanning the past two decades, they saw a significant decrease in cloud cover over Greenland starting in the mid-90s, which would mean more sunlight was falling on the ice and driving melt.

Climate models the team used suggest that every 1 percent reduction in cloud cover leads to another 27 gigatons of melt (the U.S. uses about 1.3 gigatons of water per day, according to data from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey).

That sensitivity to cloud cover was “pretty astounding,” William Colgan, a senior researcher with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland who wasn’t involved in the study, said in an email.

The work, detailed Wednesday in Science Advances, shows that about two-thirds of Greenland’s surface melt in the past two decades has been driven by decreasing clouds cover and only one-third by warmer air temperatures.

“Our results clearly show that the reduction in summer cloud cover is an important driver in the recent melt increase on the Greenland ice sheet,” Hofer said in an email.

Large meltwater lakes forming over the Greenland ice sheet in August 2016.
Click image to enlarge. Credit: Black and Bloom (@Glacier_Albedo)

The results of the study jibe with the results of another study released Monday in Nature Climate Change that found that the acceleration of global sea level rise over the past decade was mostly due to Greenland melt.

Other factors can come into play in particular melt events, such as the major surface melt that occurred in mid-July 2012, when 97 percent of the ice sheet experienced some degree of melting. In that case, particularly high temperatures played a role, as did soot from wildfires that darkened the ice surface, making it absorb more sunlight, according to previous research.

The decrease in cloud cover noted in the new study is in turn linked to a shift in a natural climate cycle called the North Atlantic Oscillation, which has been in a strongly negative phase since the mid-90s (the most strongly negative phase in 160 years of data). That negative NAO phase, in turn, leads to less cloud cover over Greenland.

But what is ultimately causing that negative NAO isn’t yet clear. It could be a particularly wild natural fluctuation, or it could be linked to shifts in the major circulation patterns of atmosphere caused by the rapid warming of the Arctic. But that latter link is a contested area of research.

The study does make it clear, though, that to accurately predict just how much Greenland’s melt will contribute to future sea level rise, climate scientists need to get a better handle on what is driving these shifts and better representing them in climate models, which don’t capture the recent shift in cloud cover.

“This study shows how important cloud processes are to get right in models when calculating the amount of melt from the ice sheet and this is one of the big challenges in climate modeling in general,” Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute, who also wasn’t involved in the study, said in an email.

{like}

These NASA Images Show Siberia Burning Up

2017-06-28T18:31:00+00:00

Siberian wildfire season is off and running with multiple blazes searing the boreal forest and tundra. It’s the latest example of the vast shifts happening to the forests that cover Siberia and the rest of the northern tier of the world as climate change alters the landscape.

Those forests are burning at a rate unheard of in at least 10,000 years due largely to rising temperatures. They contain vast reserves of carbon stored in trees and soil and when they burn, they send that carbon into the atmosphere. That creates a dangerous cycle of more severe wildfires and ever rising temperatures.

A satellite image captured on June 23, 2017 shows the extent of wildfires burning across Siberia.
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

The current constellation of conflagrations had burned through roughly 133,000 acres to the west of Lake Baikal in southern Siberia as of last week. Strong winds have sent smoke spiraling hundreds of miles northeast, impacting air quality across the region.

{related}

NASA’s satellites captured the scene on Friday from a few different vantage points. The Aqua satellite captured the extent of the thick plumes of smoke and fires dotting the region while the Suomi NPP satellite was able to analyze the air quality. Both show the stunning breadth of impacts wildfires can have. The Suomi NPP measurements in particular show that the aerosol index — a measure of air quality — hit 19, a mark that denotes very dense smoke.

According to NASA Earth Observatory, scientists are also investigating signs that the fires were burning so intensely, they altered the local weather. There’s evidence pyrocumulus clouds formed, a phenomenon that occurs when wildfires burn so hot that they cause localized convection that eventually forms clouds.

The region where fires are burning has been a hot spot on the global temperature map. Since November, temperatures have been up to 7°F above average with some months far exceeding that mark. Climate change has been driving up temperatures around the world, but the northern tier of the planet has seen temperatures rise twice as fast.

Temperatures in Siberia were up 7.2°F above normal from November 2016-April 2017.
Credit: N ASA

The extra heat has caused a string of severe wildfire seasons not just in Siberia, but in other stretches of the boreal forest that also covers Canada and Alaska. Last year, a massive blaze overran Fort McMurray, Alberta and became the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history. The year prior, Alaska had an explosive early start to its wildfire season. This is the third year in a row massive fires have lit up Siberia.

These individual events are part of a new reality that the boreal forest is burning at a rate unprecedented in modern history. Large fires in Alaska are twice as common as they were 75 years ago, according to Climate Central’s own research. That same report found that Alaskan wildfire season is 40 percent longer as well. Similar changes have been observed in Canada as well.

Climate change is expected to continue driving conditions that make destructive fires more common in boreal forests. That will reshape some of the most unique ecosystems on earth and the climate system itself. Boreal forests store about 30 percent of the world’s carbon. When they burn, they put that carbon in the atmosphere, increasing the impacts of climate change and creating a vicious cycle that will likely lead to more fires.

{like}

States Betting on Giant Batteries to Cut Carbon

2017-06-28T14:23:00+00:00

Some states and electric power companies are rolling out a new weapon against fossil fuels — giant batteries.

A growing number of states are requiring large batteries to be used to store electricity to help expand wind and solar power. The trend is catching on quickly as at least three states have created energy storage targets or incentives so far this year.

A Portland General Electric energy storage system.
Credit: PGE/flickr

Lawmakers in New York passed a bill last week requiring the state to create an energy storage target. Nevada passed a bill incentivizing energy storage in May, and Maryland passed an energy storage tax credit in April. Those measures follow California, Oregon, and Massachusetts, which have mandates for electricity storage in batteries.

Electric power plants have historically been America’s largest source of carbon pollution contributing to climate change. Today, electric power plants that run on both coal and natural gas emit large volumes of carbon dioxide — the primary cause of global warming.

But as more wind farms and solar power plants are built to help reduce climate pollution, electric power companies encounter one of the fundamental challenges with renewables: The flow of electricity from wind and solar farms isn’t steady — it fluctuates as the wind blows and the sun sets. Sometimes excess energy they produce goes to waste.

“We only produce solar electricity when the sun shines. We consume energy 24/7. We need to have means of supplying the electricity to consumers 24 hours a day. That’s one of the basic roles of energy storage,” said Janet Joseph, vice president of innovation and strategy for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.

Batteries help solve that problem.

If batteries are used to capture renewable power as it is generated, electric companies can use that stored electricity when it is needed the most, usually during the day when air conditioners are blasting and businesses have all their lights on. Today, electric power used for those high demand times comes from power plants running on natural gas.

{related}

The batteries that electric power companies use are huge. The Tesla PowerPack, for example, is composed of 16 pods that together weigh more than 3 tons and are 7 feet tall. The pods are daisy-chained together and provide hundreds of kilowatts of power.

New York officials say batteries are critical to the state’s goal of generating half of its electricity from renewables by 2030. As more states create energy storage incentives and targets, more power plants using fossil fuels are likely to be eventually replaced or supplemented with batteries, helping to cut the amount of time the power plants are used.

Jeremy Firestone, director of the Center for Carbon-free Power Integration at the University of Delaware, said mandates and incentives for energy storage in some of the most populous states will help reduce climate pollution and drive innovation. They will also help to lower energy storage costs as batteries are adopted more widely, just as costs for wind and solar installations have fallen as more have been built, he said.

“While climate is a ‘state’ goal, by leading the way and reducing the cost of storage, these states will facilitate the implementation of storage in other states and countries, leading to further climate benefits,” Firestone said.

Big companies are getting in the utility-scale solar game, including electric automaker Tesla. The company is producing large batteries that allow individual homes to store solar energy they’ve produced. Tesla is also building major utility-scale battery storage projects for electric companies in Hawaii, Connecticut and California.

Tesla partnered with Southern California Edison, a Los Angeles-area electric power company, to complete an energy storage facility in January large enough to supply electricity to 15,000 homes for four hours during times of highest electric power demand.

An Avista energy storage battery in Washington State.
Credit: Jay Inslee/flickr

The project was built in response to the massive 2015 Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility leak, which jeopardized the supply of natural gas to electric power plants. The state required utilities to find other ways of generating power during gas supply disruptions.

“The idea was to have non-natural gas (electricity) generation in Southern California,” giving the company greater flexibility to generate electricity and prevent power disruption, said Vibhu Kaushik, manager for generation strategy at Southern California Edison.

The company also uses batteries to supplement energy from some natural gas power plants at times of peak electricity demand. The batteries have allowed the plants to reduce the time they operate by about half, cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent, Kaushik said.

In Arizona, which has no energy storage mandate, Arizona Public Service is conducting a test of energy storage used in both homes and at electric substations that will help the utility cope with the irregular flow of electricity from rooftop and utility-scale solar plants.

Arizona Public Service spokeswoman Annie Degraw said batteries help supplement the flow of power from a rooftop solar panel when a cloud blocks the sun, resulting in the panel producing less electricity for a few minutes.

The company is paying homeowners participating in the program a $30 monthly credit for 20 years to help test batteries connected to the power grid, Degraw said.

Many in the industry see a future when renewables and battery storage provide most of the electricity on America’s electric power grid. John Zahurancik, president of Virginia-based AES Energy Storage, which has built energy storage projects in several states, said that the company envisions a time in the near future when energy storage could account for at least 10 or 20 percent of America’s electric generating capacity.

Costs for the lithium-ion batteries used in energy storage projects have fallen by half in the past five years, already making them competitive with the cost of natural gas power plants today, he said.

“We have systems available today that are proving to be cost effective,” Zahurancik said. “We’re already starting to see batteries replace fossil fuel power plants.”

{like}

Warming Brews Big Trouble in Coffee Birthplace Ethiopia

2017-06-25T12:00:00+00:00

By Damian Carrington, The Guardian

Global warming is likely to wipe out half of the coffee growing area in Ethiopia, the birthplace of the bean, according to a groundbreaking new study. Rising temperatures have already damaged some special areas of origin, with these losses being likened to France losing one of its great wine regions.

Ethiopia’s highlands also host a unique treasure trove of wild coffee varieties, meaning new flavour profiles and growing traits could be lost before having been discovered. However, the new research also reveals that if a massive programme of moving plantations up hillsides to cooler altitudes were feasible, coffee production could actually increase.

Coffee cherries, hand-picked in Africa.
Credit: rogiro/flickr

Coffee vies with tea as the world’s favorite beverage and employs 100 million people worldwide in farming the beans alone. But climate change is coffee’s greatest long-term threat, killing plantations or reducing bean quality and allowing the deadly coffee leaf rust fungus to thrive. Without major action both in the coffee industry and in slashing greenhouse gas emissions, coffee is predicted to become more expensive and worse-tasting.

The research combined climate-change computer modelling with detailed measurements of current ground conditions, gathered in fieldwork that covered a total distance of 30,000km within Ethiopia. It found that 40-60 percent of today’s coffee growing areas in Ethiopia would be unsuitable by the end of the century under a range of likely warming scenarios.

But the study, published in the journal Nature Plants, also shows that major relocation programmes could preserve or even expand the country’s coffee-growing areas. “There is a pathway to resilience, even under climate change,” said Aaron Davis, at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in the UK, who conducted the work with Ethiopian scientists. “But it is a hugely daunting task. Millions of farmers would have to change.”

However, by 2040, such moves uphill will have reached the top of Ethiopia’s mountains. “It literally reaches the ceiling, because you don’t have any higher place to go,” Davis said.

The impacts of global warming are already being seen as temperatures have been rising steadily in Ethiopia for decades. Farmers report a longer, more extreme dry season and more intense rain in the wet season, with good harvests much less frequent than in their parents and grandparents’ time.

Coffee trees in Africa.
Credit: carsten ten brink/flickr

One famous coffee location likely to be lost is Harar. “In one area, there are hundreds if not thousands of hectares of dead trees,” said Davis. “It is a world renowned name and has been grown in that area for many centuries. But under all [climate change] scenarios, it’s going to get worse.

“Some of the origins, what you would call terroir in the wine industry, will disappear, unless serious intervention is undertaken,” he said. “It would be like losing the Burgundy wine region. Those areas are found nowhere else but Ethiopia, and because of the genetic diversity, the diversity of flavor profiles is globally unique.”

Both arabica and robusta coffee originated in Ethiopia and wild arabica plants are virtually unknown outside the country. The wild arabica varieties may well harbor traits for disease and drought resistance that could prove vital for the future health of coffee crops.

Prof Sebsebe Demissew, from the University of Addis Ababa and one of the research team, said: “Coffee originates from the highland forests of Ethiopia, and it is our gift to the world. As Ethiopia is the main natural storehouse of arabica genetic diversity, what happens in Ethiopia could have long-term impacts for coffee farming globally.”

The new research is a “brilliant piece of work”, according to Tim Schilling, chief executive of the World Coffee Research programme: “This is the only comprehensive, country-specific study I have seen that uses some of the best methods in climate modelling coupled to very rigorous ground-truthing — extremely useful for governments and industry and a model to be repeated.”

Just-picked coffee beans at farm in Cauca, southwestern Colombia.
Credit: CIAT/flickr

Schilling led an expedition into South Sudan in 2013 to confirm wild arabica coffee was also present in the Boma forest: “What we found was major degradation caused by climate change on the forest and the wild coffee under its canopy. That is pretty much what I think we can expect if nothing is done to preserve the arabica genetic treasure chest in Ethiopia.”

Schilling said new varieties and growing methods must be developed and that plantation “migration will have to be part of a plan B”. He added: “Plan C might be moving up in latitude and growing coffee in Southern France and Texas!” But he said funding all this is difficult when coffee producers are not making much money at present.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in 2014: “The overall predictions are for a reduction in area suitable for coffee production by 2050 in all countries studied. In many cases, the area suitable for production would decrease considerably with increases of temperature of only 2-2.5°C.” It said that in Brazil, the world’s biggest coffee producer, a temperature rise of 3°C would slash the area suitable for coffee by two-thirds in the principal growing states. In 2016, other researchers predicted climate change will halve the world’s coffee-growing area.

“People should also be thinking about the millions of smallholder farmers who put their coffee on the table,” said Davis. “The coffee farmers of Ethiopia are really on the frontline [of climate change] — they are the people who will pay the price first. In the longer term, the only truly sustainable solution is to combat the root causes of climate change.”

Reprinted with permission from The Guardian.

Nuclear Decommissioning Threatens Climate Targets

2017-06-24T12:00:00+00:00

By Geert De Clercq, Reuters

Decommissioning nuclear plants in Europe and North America from 2020 threatens global plans to cut carbon emissions unless governments build new nuclear plants or expand the use of renewables, a top International Energy Agency official said.

Nuclear and wind in Drôme, France.
Credit: Jeanne Menjoulet/flickr

Nuclear is now the largest low-carbon power source in Europe and the United States, about three times bigger than wind and solar combined, according to IEA data. But most reactors were built in the 1970s and early 80s, and will reach the end of their life around 2020.

With the average nuclear plant running for 8,000 hours a year versus 1,500-2,000 hours for a solar plant, governments must expand renewable investments to replace old nuclear plants if they are to meet decarbonization targets, IEA Chief Economist Laszlo Varro told Reuters.

"The ageing of the nuclear fleet is a considerable challenge for energy security and decarbonization objectives," he said on the sidelines of the Eurelectric utilities conference in Portugal.

Renewables have grown rapidly in the past decade but about 20 percent of new low-carbon capacity has been lost from the decommissioning of nuclear plants in the same period, he said.

"This is just a taste of thing to come," Varro said.

Russia and India were building new plants, while China was bringing a new plant online every quarter, Varro said.

Kalinin Nuclear Power Plant in Moscow, Russia.
Credit: IAEA Imagebank/flickr

However, he said future projects in Japan were uncertain after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, while there was less appetite for new nuclear projects in Europe and the United States.

Financing new nuclear plants has become more challenging, partly because several new builds were running over budget, while in the United States nuclear has been struggling to compete against plants run on cheap shale gas.

Governments who chose the renewables route would have to consider upgrading power grids and invest in power storage to offset the variable nature of renewable generation, while those choosing nuclear would need to offer financial support as Britain has done for its plans, Varro said.

Wind and solar generation was expanding rapidly, but the pace needed to increase to meet climate stabilization goals. "At the moment it is not quickly enough," he said.

The biggest challenge was in Europe and the United States, where nuclear energy capacity was steady or falling, he said.

"If we do not keep nuclear in the energy mix and do not accelerate wind and solar deployment, the loss of nuclear capacity will knock us back by 15 to 20 years. We do not have that much time to lose," he said.

Reporting by Geert De Clercq; Editing by Edmund Blair