Climate Change News & Discussions

[erowind]

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[Lorem Ipsum]

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[wjfox]

You need to remove the bit starting with the ampersand.

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[weatheriscool]

8,000 years of Great Barrier Reef climate history revealed
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-years-gre ... imate.html
by University of Queensland

A group of Australian scientists has for the first time unraveled the history of climate change upheaval on the Great Barrier Reef over the past eight millennia.

Led by University of Queensland graduate Dr. Marcos Salas-Saavedra, the team analyzed rare earth elements in drilled reef cores, unveiling a deep history of wild weather.

"Eight thousand years ago, extreme runoff from an intense Indian-Australian summer monsoon affected water quality in the southern offshore Reef," Dr. Salas-Saavedra said.

"Water in the GBR was much dirtier, and poor water quality is known to be a major cause of reef decline around the world.

"But 1,000 years later, monsoonal rains eased and the water quality greatly improved.

"We noticed water quality declined during times of dampened El Niño Southern Oscillation frequency, which may have led to more La Niña-dominated wet climates in Queensland at those times—like the weather we have seen this year in Queensland."

[Tadasuke]

The global greenhouse effect has been know for 110 years:


Carl Sagan testifying before Congress in 1985 on climate change:


Global greenhouse gases emissions have been rising and rising:

However, they are now dropping in developed countries.

[caltrek]

A Cloudless Future? The Mystery at the Heart of Climate Forecasts
May 31, 2021

Introduction:

(News Release via EurekAlert) We hear a lot about how climate change will change the land, sea, and ice. But how will it affect clouds?
"Low clouds could dry up and shrink like the ice sheets," says Michael Pritchard, professor of Earth System science at UC Irvine. "Or they could thicken and become more reflective."

These two scenarios would result in very different future climates. And that, Pritchard says, is part of the problem.

"If you ask two different climate models what the future will be like when we add a lot more CO2, you get two very different answers. And the key reason for this is the way clouds are included in climate models."

No one denies that clouds and aerosols — bits of soot and dust that nucleate cloud droplets — are an important part of the climate equation. The problem is these phenomena occur on a length- and time-scale that today's models can't come close to reproducing. They are therefore included in models through a variety of approximations.

Analyses of global climate models consistently show that clouds constitute the biggest source of uncertainty and instability.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/954415

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Carbon Dioxide Levels Are Highest in Human History
Source: New York Times

The amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere broke a record in May, continuing its relentless climb, scientists said Friday. It is now 50 percent higher than the preindustrial average, before humans began the widespread burning of oil, gas and coal in the late 19th century. There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than at anytime in at least 4 million years, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials said.

The concentration of the gas reached nearly 421 parts per million in May, the peak for the year, as power plants, vehicles, farms and other sources around the world continued to pump huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Emissions totaled 36.3 billion tons in 2021, the highest level in history. As the amount of carbon dioxide increases, the planet keeps warming, with effects like increased flooding, more extreme heat, drought and worsening wildfires that are already being experienced by millions of people worldwide. Average global temperatures are now about 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than in preindustrial times.

Growing carbon dioxide levels are more evidence that countries have made little progress toward the goal set in Paris in 2015 of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic effects of climate change increases significantly. They are “a stark reminder that we need to take urgent, serious steps to become a more climate-ready nation,” Rick Spinrad, the NOAA administrator, said in a statement. Although carbon dioxide levels dipped somewhat around 2020 during the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic, there was no effect on the long-term trend, Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory, said in an interview.

The rate of increase in carbon dioxide concentration “just kept on going,” he said. “And it keeps on going for about the same pace as it did for the past decade.” Carbon dioxide levels vary throughout the year, increasing as vegetation dies and decays in the fall and winter, and decreasing in spring and summer as growing plants absorb the gas through photosynthesis. The peak is reached every May, just before plant growth accelerates in the Northern Hemisphere. (The North has a larger effect than the Southern Hemisphere because there is much more land surface and vegetation in the North.)

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/clim ... ecord.html

[caltrek]

Including All Types of Emissions Shortens Timeline to Reach Paris Agreement Temperature Targets
June 6, 2022

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) Countries around the world pledged in the Paris Agreement to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or, at most, 2 degrees Celsius. As emissions rates gradually begin to decline, countries are looking at how many greenhouse gases can still be emitted while remaining below these temperature targets, which are deemed the upper limits to avoid the most catastrophic impacts to the climate system.

New research led by the University of Washington calculates how much warming is already guaranteed by past emissions. While previous research has explored this question for carbon dioxide, the new work includes related emissions such as methane, nitrogen oxide and aerosols, like sulfur or soot.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/954682

Conclusion:

“This paper looks at the temporary warming that can't be avoided, and that’s important if you think about components of the climate system that respond quickly to global temperature changes, including Arctic sea ice, extreme events such as heat waves or floods, and many ecosystems,” said co-author Kyle Armour, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences and of oceanography. “Our study found that in all cases, we are committed by past emissions to reaching peak temperatures about five to 10 years before we experience them.”

The paper finds that if countries aim to achieve their goals of staying below 2 degrees Celsius of warming, then the total amount of carbon that humans can still emit, the remaining “carbon budget,” is significantly smaller than previous estimates.

“Our findings make it all the more pressing that we need to rapidly reduce emissions,” Dvorak said.

[caltrek]

Textile Filter Testing Shows Promise for Carbon Capture
June 6, 2022

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) North Carolina State University researchers found they could filter carbon dioxide from air and gas mixtures at promising rates using a proposed new textile-based filter that combines cotton fabric and an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase – one of nature’s tools for speeding chemical reactions.

The findings from initial laboratory testing represent a step forward in the development of a possible new carbon capture technology that could reduce carbon dioxide emissions from biomass, coal or natural gas power plants. And while the filter would need to be scaled up in size significantly, the researchers think their design would make that step easier compared with other proposed solutions.

“With this technology, we want to stop carbon dioxide emissions at the source, and power plants are the main source of carbon dioxide emissions right now,” said the study’s lead author Jialong Shen, postdoctoral research scholar at NC State. “We think the main advantage of our method compared to similarly targeted research is that our method could be easily scaled up using traditional textile manufacturing facilities.”

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/955028

Further point made in the article:

Capturing the carbon dioxide is just one part of the process – they also are working on the problem of how to recycle the liquid after it exits the filter, as well as the process of turning the bicarbonate back into carbon dioxide so it can be stored and disposed of, or used for other commercial purposes.

[erowind]

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[Time_Traveller]

Climate crisis could make humans shrink in size, says fossil expert

Tue 7 Jun 2022

The climate crisis may lead the human race to shrink in size, as mammals with smaller frames appear better able to deal with rising global temperatures, a leading fossil expert has said.

Prof Steve Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, suggested that the way in which other mammals have previously responded to periods of climate change could offer an insight into humans’ future.

He likened the potential plight of people as similar to that of early horses, which became smaller in body size as temperatures rose around 55m years ago, a period called the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum.

“There’s a great fossil record across this global warming event, it’s really the most recent big global warming event in the geological record,” he said. “The two plots are eerie, how similar they are.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... sil-expert

[caltrek]

Before we go to hog wild in condemning neo-liberal trade policies, we might want to consider the arguments presented in this article:

Protectionism Threatens the Climate Transition
by Ken Heydon
June 8, 2022

Extract::

(Arab News via Eurasia Review) Trade is a key multiplier in spreading the technology vital to the climate transition. But protectionist tendencies embedded in the implementation of the climate transition pose a major threat to the global trading system.

Technological innovation — backed by a carbon tax to make it competitive — is the essential requirement for transition to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. And trade, by stimulating competition, is a catalyst of innovation.

Three areas of technological transformation stand out. Australia and its Asia Pacific neighbours have a stake in each of them.
The first is solar photovoltaic technology that uses solar panels to convert sunlight into electricity…

The second area of trade-augmented innovation is the export of low-carbon hydrogen, important in hard-to-electrify sectors like steel production and facing a potential six-fold increase in demand by 2050…

The third area of innovation is CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). This gene-editing helps countries decarbonise their food systems by making export crops that are resistant to disease or bad weather, reducing the need for increased farmland via deforestation — the source of 10 per cent of global carbon emissions.

Read more here: https://www.eurasiareview.com/08062022 ... analysis/

[weatheriscool]

Antarctic glaciers losing ice at fastest rate in 5,500 years, finds study
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-antarctic ... years.html
by Caroline Brogan, Imperial College London

At the current rate of retreat the vast glaciers, which extend deep into the heart of the ice sheet, could contribute as much as 3.4 meters to global sea level rise over the next several centuries.

Antarctica is covered by two huge ice masses: the East and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, which feed many individual glaciers. Because of the warming climate, the WAIS has been thinning at accelerated rates over the past few decades. Within the ice sheet, the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers are particularly vulnerable to global warming and are already contributing to rises in sea level.

Now, a new study led by the University of Maine and the British Antarctic Survey, including academics from Imperial College London, has measured the rate of local sea level change—an indirect way to measure ice loss—around these particularly vulnerable glaciers.

They found that the glaciers have begun retreating at a rate not seen in the last 5,500 years. With areas of 192,000 km2 (nearly the size of the island of Great Britain) and 162,300 km2 respectively, the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers have the potential to cause large rises in global sea level.

Co-author Dr. Dylan Rood of Imperial's Department of Earth Science and Engineering says that they "reveal that although these vulnerable glaciers were relatively stable during the past few millennia, their current rate of retreat is accelerating and already raising global sea level."

[caltrek]

Liquified Natural Gas Boom Could Add Over 90 Million Tons of Annual Emissions
by Brett Wilkins
June 9, 2022

Introduction:

(Common Dreams) A boom in U.S. liquefied natural gas exports driven by Russia's invasion of Ukraine could add a staggering 90 million tons or more of planet-heating greenhouse gases annually, a report published Thursday revealed.

The Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) publication—entitled Playing With Fire: The Climate Impact of the Rapid Growth of LNG
(https://environmentalintegrity.org/wp-c ... 6.9.22.pdf) —notes that the United States went from exporting no liquefied natural gas in 2015 to becoming one of the world's leading LNG exporters by 2021.

Now, with the Russian invasion causing "unprecedented supply disruptions" and driving fuel prices to record levels in much of the world, the paper says the U.S. is soon expected to lead the world in LNG export capacity.

The report notes that this gas export boom "will have a significant environmental impact," as 25 LNG construction or expansion projects in the U.S., including four new terminals being built in Texas and Louisiana, "could emit more than 90 million tons of greenhouse gases per year."

"That's almost as much climate-warming pollution as 18 million passenger vehicles running for a year—more than from all the cars and trucks in Florida or New York state," the paper says.

Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022 ... emissions

caltrek’s comment: Europe was caught flat footed by the war in the Ukraine. They should have long ago accelerated the change to renewables that also involved zero greenhouse gas emission. Now we have this mess, with U.S. corporations pushing natural gas like an enabling provider pushes drugs on an addict.

[Time_Traveller]

Weather forecast – latest: Today hottest day of the year, confirms Met Office

16 minutes ago - 15 June 2022

The Met Office has confirmed that today is the hottest day of the year so far after 28C was recorded in St James Park in central London this afternoon.

The forecaster added that the record would be beaten this year as temperatures are set to reach highs of 34C on Friday.

An increase in warm weather over the years in the UK has been linked to climate change, the Met Office has warned describing the sweltering conditions as “rare” for June.

Dr Mark McCarthy, the head of the Met Office National Climate Information Centre said: “Climate change has increased the average temperature of UK summers, and it is also increasing the likelihood of experiencing more extreme temperatures during hot spells and heatwaves.”

The Met Office and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) issued a level 3 heat-health alert for south east England, London and east England while a a level 1 alert is in place for northern England.

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-c ... 01281.html

[Time_Traveller]

Huge methane emission from Russian coal mine

4 hours ago



A Canadian firm that operates orbiting methane sensors says it's detected the biggest emission of the gas from a single facility it's ever seen.

The release was observed to come from the vast Raspadskaya coal mine, in Kemerovo Oblast, Russia, on 14 January.

GHGSat says the greenhouse gas was entering the atmosphere at a rate of nearly 90 tonnes per hour.

It's the sort of quantity that in a domestic supply would power hundreds of thousands of homes.

But in this case, the methane (also referred to as CH4) was being lost straight into the air.

Methane's global warming potential is 30 times that of carbon dioxide over a 100-year time period.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61811481

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

Coastal Cities Are Sinking
by Michael Allen
June 6, 2022

Introduction:

(Hakai Magazine) In the next few years, Indonesia will start moving its capital city from one island, Java, to another, Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo. There are a few reasons for the move, but one of the biggest is that the country’s current capital, Jakarta, is sinking at an alarming rate. By the middle of this century, one-third of the city will be underwater.

It would be easy to mistake Jakarta’s pending demise as the work of sea level rise. Yet the city’s decline is actually being driven by another force—land subsidence spurred by groundwater extraction.

Projections of sea level rise have put a countdown on several coastal cities. But a new study shows that the combination of coastal subsidence and sea level rise acts like a welcome mat for water. Using satellite data, the researchers measured subsidence rates in 99 coastal cities around the world. They found that most are sinking faster than sea levels are rising. In many cities, such as Manila in the Philippines, Tampa in Florida, and Alexandria in Egypt, this means coastal flooding will become an issue much sooner than predicted by models of sea level rise alone.

The worst affected cities are all in Asia. These cities, including Chattogram in Bangladesh, Semarang in Indonesia, and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, have areas with subsidence rates of more than 20 millimeters per year, which is 10 times higher than the global mean sea level rise of two millimeters per year. In one-third of the 99 cities studied, however, at least part of the city is sinking by 10 millimeters or more per year.

“A lot of cities are planning for sea level rise, but they are not aware of the compounding effect of coastal subsidence,” says Meng (Matt) Wei, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island and one of the study’s authors. For instance, he has not seen any reports of subsidence in Barcelona, Spain, but found that the airport, the port, and a residential area are all sinking faster than the sea is rising.

Read more here: https://hakaimagazine.com/news/coastal ... -sinking/

[caltrek]

Feedback Loops: How the ‘Greening’ of the Alps Could Lead to More Warming
by Chad Small
June 6, 2022

Introduction:

(Grist) It seems like every year a report is released documenting the scale of snow or ice loss in the Arctic. But, what about the climate significance of rising temperatures in snowy regions nowhere near the Poles? A recent study from researchers at University of Lausanne and the University of Basel has explored this exact question as it pertains to the European Alps.

In a first-of-its-kind study, published in the journal Science, the researchers used satellite imagery to investigate changes in Alpine snow cover over the last 38 years. As climate change has warmed the region, more precipitation has fallen as rain instead of snow.

But the climate-driven changes to the region did not just manifest snow loss: While the researchers did find that Alpine snow cover had decreased significantly in about 10 percent of the observed area, vegetation levels had increased significantly in 77 percent of this observed area. This result even surprised the study’s authors. Sabine Rumpf, lead author of the study and assistant professor at the University of Basel, noted that “The scale of the change has turned out to be absolutely massive in the Alps.”

Although the finding that Alpine snow cover has only diminished by 10 percent may sound like good news, it still does not bode well for the region. The possibility of further Alpine snow loss, in both extent and thickness, could have dire consequences on lives and economies in the region. Snow in the Alps is critical to European water reserves; as much as 40 percent of European freshwater comes from the Alps. Additionally, regional tourism is heavily dependent on abundant snow. Between 1960 and 2017, the Alpine snow season lost 38 days.

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Furthermore, the study’s researchers warned that the unprecedented “greening” of the Alps might imperil future snow cover. Warmer temperatures have allowed more plant species to thrive and essentially out-compete traditional Alpine flora, Rumpf explained. This increase in green coverage could actually intensify warming from climate change.

Read more here: https://grist.org/science/feedback-loo ... -warming/