The Great Global Warming/Cooling Thread Part 2

[whitewind]

The Angry Summer continues..

Melbourne on track for hottest March on record

Press Release, Wednesday March 27, 2013 - 11:55 EDT Melbourne is on target for its hottest March on record despite a cool end to the month, according to weatherzone.com.au.

Both nights and days have been much warmer than normal up until today.

Overnight minimum temperatures have averaged 17.2 degrees and overnight maximums 28.5 degrees, both four degrees warmer than the long-term norm.

"A cooler change due tonight is highly unlikely to be strong enough to prevent this month from being a record hot one," weatherzone meteorologist Brett Dutschke said.

Even with the final four nights and days of the month expected to average about 13 and 22 degrees respectively, this will turn out to be the hottest March on record.

Taking these forecasts into account, overnight minimum temperatures will end up averaging about 16.8 degrees and maximums about 27.6 degrees. This would put nights in the top two warmest on record and days in the top three hottest on record.

The hottest March in terms of daytime maximum temperatures was 28.9 degrees in 1940. The warmest March in terms of overnight minimums was 16.8 degrees in 1974.

Combining nights and days this month the average temperature will be about 22.2 degrees, more than three degrees above average.

The previous hottest March in 157 years of records was in 1934 when the average temperature was 21.5 degrees (days averaged 27.8 degrees and nights averaged 15.1 degrees).

This months' heat has been helped along by 11 days of 30 degrees or hotter (second only to the March record of 14 days in 1940) and a record warm night of 26.5 degrees.

"Summer has dragged on into autumn with the aid of clearer-than-normal skies and a lack of strong fronts. For much of the month a high pressure system has been stationed over the Tasman Sea, deflecting cold fronts south of Victoria and keeping winds northerly." Dutschke said.

Today is an example of how late this heat is.

It has been eight years since Melbourne has exceeded 33 degrees this late in the season.

"There's a chance of reaching 35 degrees today, which would make it the hottest it has been this deep into autumn in since 1940."

For those fed up with the extended summer, the next few nights and days will be refreshingly cooler.

"Rain will develop tonight and ease tomorrow. For Easter weekend most of the city will be dry for ninety percent of the time. Showers will be mainly over Mornington Peninsula and will generally be light, brief and infrequent." Dutschke said.

[whitewind]

The Angry Summer still refuses to back down

Perth sweltering through record April heat

Ben McBurney, Monday April 8, 2013 - 15:34 EST

Perth is currently sweating through an unseasonal spell of April heat,

with the city seeing its hottest start to April on record.

The Western Australia capital has so far averaged a maximum 32.4 degrees over

its first eight days, well above its long-term average of 26 degrees.

This also makes it the hottest start to April in 137 years of records.

The last time it got even close to being this warm to kick off April was

back in 1949, when the first eight days averaged 32.1 degrees.

Today the mercury soared to 37.3 degrees at 1pm, which makes it the hottest

April day in 103 years and second hottest April day on record.

The April record is 37.6 degrees, set in 1910 on the 9th day of the month.

Perth has already seen 36-degree heat just four days ago, which has
only happened seven times in April in over 100 years of records. The
city has already seen 36-degree heat twice this month already, the
first time this has occurred in April.

The cause of the heat has been a low pressure trough sitting just off
the WA coast and a high pressure system over the Bight. These have
combined to direct northeasterly winds sourced from the interior,
where heat has has been building due to relatively clear skies and a
lack of strong cold fronts.

Heat lovers will be glad to know that the warm weather is going to
stick around for a few days yet. While the mercury should not soar to
the heights seen today, the next three days should reach the low 30's.

A weak cool change should bring maximums down into the high 20's from
about Friday, before a stronger cool change should see temperatures
drop close to average from Sunday. Unfortunately, these systems are
unlikely to bring much in the way of rain, with only a few light
showers likely.

[whitewind]

Why Britain's turbulent weather is getting even harder to predict

Extreme weather – snow, floods and drought – is the new norm.

The Observer

Sunday 7 April 2013

Punters wrap up warm as they make their way along the river Cam in Cambridge.

Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA

Britain's weather excelled itself last week. It produced an Easter Sunday that was the coldest on record in the UK. Temperatures stuck below zero in many regions; freezing conditions continued to disrupt transport; and experts warned of increasing threats to animals and birds already struggling to survive loss of habitat and climate change. The start of British Summer Time last Sunday night was marked in Braemar by temperatures that fell to -11C. For good measure, an unappetising April looks likely to follow this misery.

The persistence of the spring's grim weather is particularly striking for it comes after a series of other extreme meteorological events in recent years. Last winter, a severe drought triggered stern warnings by the Environment Agency that water rationing and hosepipe bans would soon have to be introduced – until several months of torrential rain produced widespread flooding.

Our weather, always unpredictable, is now fluctuating on a grand scale and becoming increasingly hard to forecast long-term. The challenge for meteorologists is to explain these unexpected outbreaks of climatic unpleasantness.

"There is no doubt that the recent weather has been highly changeable – on both sides of the Atlantic," said meteorologist Nicholas Klingaman of Reading University. "We have blizzards and flooding. America has had droughts and scorching temperatures."

Nor is it difficult to pinpoint the immediate cause, Klingaman said. The problem lies with the jet stream, a narrow band of strong winds that sweeps round the planet between the tropics and the Arctic. "Its behaviour has changed dramatically in the past few years and has produced these lengthy bouts of extreme weather. The real question, of course, is an obvious one: why has the jet stream changed its behaviour?"

The answer is very worrying, for it transpires that meteorologists may find it increasingly hard to make long-term assessments of future weather with their former confidence. The planet's weather systems are being stirred and shaken and the cause is closely linked to climate change, the result of the trillions of tonnes of carbon that we have been pumping into our atmosphere.

The jet stream gets its name because its circulates at an altitude of around 10km to 15km, the height at which most jet planes fly. It runs from west to east, a feature that can give aircraft significant boosts on eastbound flights across the Atlantic and Pacific. However, in recent years this giant river of air has begun to meander and to slow down, trapping regions of high or low pressure over the same part of the globe, including the freezing air that has hung over Britain for the last six weeks. As to the reason for this change in the jet stream's flow, more and more meteorologists now point to global warming. In particular, they pinpoint the most dramatic manifestation of climate change on the planet today – the warming of the Arctic – as the most likely culprit for the destabilising weather patterns we have been experiencing.

"The Arctic is warming faster than any other place on Earth," said meteorologist Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, New Jersey. "Arctic temperatures have increased at more than twice the global rate. You can see this in the sea ice in summer there. In just the three decades, it has declined by 40%. About 1.3m square miles of sea ice have disappeared. That is an astonishing amount of ice to lose and it shows just how much heating is going on up there. More to the point, that warming is now changing weather patterns across the northern hemisphere."

How the warming of the Arctic affects our weather has much to do with the origins of the jet stream. Air in the tropics is warmer than the Arctic and it rises. As a result, the atmosphere there is higher than it is over the Arctic. "A gradient is created and air slides down this atmospheric hill towards the Arctic," said Francis. "This flow of air, high up in the atmosphere, from the tropics to the Arctic, is the crucial ingredient in the creation of the jet stream.

"The world rotates from west to east, however, and that rotation whips up this northward flow of air that descends over higher latitudes and sends it flying east round the globe as the jet stream. Earth rotates from west to east and that is what drives the jet stream in the same direction."

Until recently, this mighty stream of air flew round the planet, in a slightly wavy path, between 30 and 60 degrees north. However, times are changing – and so is our atmosphere.

"The trouble is that the gradient between the atmosphere in the lower latitudes and in the Arctic is being disrupted by global warming," said Francis.

"As the Arctic heats up disproportionately, so does the atmosphere at the north pole and as it warms up, it rises. The net effect has been to erode the gradient between the top of the atmosphere over the tropics and the top of the atmosphere over the Arctic. Less air pours down towards the north pole and less air is whipped up by Earth's rotation to form the jet stream. It is becoming less of a stream and is behaving more like a sluggish estuary that is meandering across the upper atmosphere at middle latitudes."

The effects of this meandering are now being felt. As the jet stream slows, weather patterns tend to stick where they are for longer. In addition, the modest waves in the stream have increased in amplitude so that they curve north and south more frequently, bringing more weather systems northwards and southwards. Hence the cold conditions that have been brought south over Britain and which have persisted for so long.

Most scientists believe the link between rising Arctic temperatures and the resulting disruption of the jet stream is the most convincing explanation for the increased bouts of extreme weather in the northern hemisphere. However, some sound notes of caution. "I think the link between Arctic warming and weather disruption is convincing but it is not the only possible explanation," said Klingaman.

"For example, there is a phenomenon known as the Madden-Julian oscillation which controls how rainfall is distributed around the tropics on a weekly and monthly basis and it has been shown to influence the position of the jet streams. It is possible this oscillation may been involved in some way in our changing weather patterns."

Professor Piers Forster of Leeds University also urged caution. "I think it is too early to say that climate change is definitely involved in all the extreme weather events we have seen. The evidence suggests it might well be but we need more studies to confirm the link."

But Francis said she was confident of the link.

"The droughts, heatwaves and freezing weather of recent years are just the types of phenomena that are expected to occur more frequently as the world continues to warm and the Arctic continues to lose its ice," she said.

[whitewind]

Argentina's weather service had warned of severe thunderstorms, but nothing like the rainfall that fell this week.
More than 400mm drenched La Plata in just a few hours late on Tuesday and early on Wednesday – more than has ever been recorded there for the entire month of April.

Unsurprisingly, the aftermath was incredibly severe. It seems that the amount of additional energy in the atmosphere which appears to only amount to a very small quantity of extra heat, is destabilising our complex and clearly quite sensitive weather patterns. I am strongly beginning to suspect that the climate scientists have vastly under-estimated the problems we are going to see from climate change, and together with the Deniers who have tried to make out that even these problems will be but trivial, there are going to be some extremely serious consequences.

Argentinian rescuers search for bodies after devastating floods

Argentina's weather service had warned of severe thunderstorms, but nothing like the rainfall that fell this week. More than 400mm drenched La Plata in just a few hours late on Tuesday and early on Wednesday – more than has ever been recorded there for the entire month of April.

Dozens have been killed and more than 250,000 left without power after torrential rain in Buenos Aires and La Plata

Associated Press in La Plata
guardian.co.uk
Friday 5 April 2013 09.39 BST



Residents leave their homes by boat after the floods in La Plata, Argentina. Photograph: Reuters

Argentinian police and soldiers searched house to house, in creeks and culverts, and even in trees for bodies on Thursday after floods killed at least 57 people in the province and city of Buenos Aires.

As torrential rains stopped and the waters receded, the crisis shifted to guaranteeing public health and safety in La Plata, the capital of Buenos Aires province with a population of nearly 1 million people. Safe drinking water was in short supply, and more than a quarter of a million people were without power, although authorities said most would get their lights back on overnight.

Many people barely escaped with their lives after seeing everything they owned disappear under water reeking with sewage and fuel that rose nearly two metres (6ft) high inside some homes. The wreckage was overwhelming: piles of broken furniture, overturned cars, ruined food and other debris.

Their frustration was uncontainable as politicians arrived making promises. The president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the governor Daniel Scioli, the social welfare minister Alicia Kirchner and the mayors of Buenos Aires and La Plata were all booed when they tried to talk to victims. Many yelled: "Go away" and "You came too late."

"I understand you, I understand you're angry," Kirchner said before she and the governor fled in their motorcade from an angry crowd.
"There is no water, there is no electricity. We have nothing," said Nelly Cerrado, who was looking for donated clothing at a local school. "Terrible, terrible what we are going through. And no one comes. No one. Because here, it is neighbours who have to do everything."
The nearby Ensenada refinery, Argentina's largest, remained offline after flooding caused a fire that took hours to extinguish in the middle of the rainstorm, the state-run YPF oil company said. YPF said it would take 36 more hours just to drain excess water from the damaged refinery, and at least another seven days before the refinery could renew operations. The company also said it was putting into place an emergency plan to guarantee gasoline supplies, and would invest $800m to replace a damaged coking unit where the flood had caused a fire with a newer, higher-capacity unit.

Scioli said the death toll had risen to 51 people in and around La Plata following six deaths in the national capital from flooding two days earlier. But he said nearly all of the missing had been accounted for.

The victims included a member of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo human rights group, Lucila Ahumada de Inama, who was found under about 1.7 metres of water inside her home. She died without having found her grandson, born in captivity after her pregnant daughter-in-law was kidnapped by Argentina's dictatorship in 1977.

Some flooded residents were being lauded as heroes. Alejandro Fernández, a 44-year-old policeman who was off-duty when the rains started, pulled out his rubber boat and shuttled about 100 neighbours to higher ground. His neighbour, Dr Jose Alberto Avelar, turned his home into a clinic, treating dozens for hypothermia.

Fernández "won't say it because he's too humble, but what he did was incredible", Avelar said. "His action got everyone else helping as well."

A store and an elementary school were looted, but police and troops were helping residents guard neighbourhoods to prevent more crimes. In addition to 750 provincial police officers, the national government sent in army, coast guard, police and social welfare workers.

Mobile hospitals were activated after two major hospitals were flooded, and government workers were handing out donated water, canned food and clothing. The provincial health minister Alejandro Collia said hepatitis shots were being given at 33 evacuation centres, and that spraying would kill mosquitoes that spread dengue fever.

"The humanitarian question comes first. The material questions will be resolved in time," said Scioli, who promised subsidies, loans and tax exemptions for the victims.

Scioli also thanked Pope Francis for sending a message of support. The governor said: "This has to give us all the strength to accompany these families."

Argentina's weather service had warned of severe thunderstorms, but nothing like the rainfall that fell this week.

More than 400mm drenched La Plata in just a few hours late on Tuesday and early on Wednesday – more than has ever been recorded there for the entire month of April.

In both Buenos Aires and La Plata, sewage and storm drain systems were overwhelmed, and low-lying neighbourhoods looked something like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, with all but the upper parts of houses under water.

And in both cities, politicians sought to fix blame on their rivals as residents complained that the government in general was ill-prepared and providing insufficient help.

It didn't help that the mayors of both cities were on holiday in Brazil when disaster struck.

The Buenos Aires mayor, Mauricio Macri, said the president needed to foster expensive public works projects to cope with storms that will become more frequent because of climate change.

The La Plata mayor, Pablo Bruera, meanwhile, arrived home to an additional, self-inflicted disaster: while he was in Brazil, a tweet sent from his official Twitter account falsely claimed he had been "checking on evacuation centres since last night". The tweet even included an old picture of Bruera handing out bottled water.

Bruera told reporters on Thursday that he would not resign over the false claim, and that he had instead fired the people responsible for what he called a "mistake by my communications team".

[qualia]

The future of civilisation and much biodiversity hangs to a large degree on whether we can replace fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – with clean, safe and affordable energy within several decades. The good news is that renewable energy technologies and energy efficiency measures have advanced with extraordinary speed over the past decade.

Energy efficient buildings and appliances, solar hot water, on-shore wind, solar photovoltaic (PV) modules, concentrated solar thermal (CST) power with thermal storage and gas turbines burning a wide range of renewable liquid and gaseous fuels are commercially available on a large scale. The costs of these technologies have declined substantially, especially those of solar PV. In 2012, despite the global financial crisis,global investment in these clean, safe and healthy technologies amounted to US $269 billion. Denmark, Scotland and Germany and several states/provinces around the world have official targets of around 100% renewable electricity and are implementing policies to achieve them.

The principal barrier is resistance from vested interests and their supporters in the big greenhouse gas polluting industries and from an unsafe, expensive, polluting, would-be competitor to a renewable energy future, nuclear power. These powerful interests are running a campaign of renewable energy denial that is almost as fierce as the long-running campaign of climate change denial. Both campaigns are particularly noisy in the Murdoch press. So far the anti-renewables campaign, with its misinformation and gross exaggerations, has received little critical examination in the mainstream media.

The renewable energy deniers rehash, among others, the old myth that renewable energy is unreliable in supplying base-load demand.

Renewable electricity is reliable

In a previous article for The Conversation I reported on the initial results of computer simulations by a research team at the University of New South Wales that busted the myth that renewable energy cannot supply base-load demand. However at the time of the article I was still under the misconception that some base-load renewable energy supply may be needed to be part of the renewable energy mix.

Since then Ben Elliston, Iain MacGill and I have performed thousands of computer simulations of 100% renewable electricity in the National Electricity Market (NEM), using actual hourly data on electricity demand, wind and solar power for 2010. Our latest research, available here and reported here, finds that generating systems comprising a mix of different commercially available renewable energy technologies, located on geographically dispersed sites, do not need base-load power stations to achieve the same reliability as fossil-fuelled systems.

The old myth was based on the incorrect assumption that base-load demand can only be supplied by base-load power stations; for example, coal in Australia and nuclear in France. However, the mix of renewable energy technologies in our computer model, which has no base-load power stations, easily supplies base-load demand. Our optimal mix comprises wind 50-60%; solar PV 15-20%; concentrated solar thermal with 15 hours of thermal storage 15-20%; and the small remainder supplied by existing hydro and gas turbines burning renewable gases or liquids. (Contrary to some claims, concentrated solar with thermal storage does not behave as base-load in winter; however, that doesn’t matter.)

The real challenge is to supply peaks in demand on calm winter evenings following overcast days. That’s when the peak-load power stations, that is, hydro and gas turbines, make vital contributions by filling gaps in wind and solar generation.

Renewable electricity is affordable

Our latest peer-reviewed paper, currently in press in Energy Policy journal, compares the economics of two new alternative hypothetical generation systems for 2030: 100% renewable electricity versus an “efficient” fossil-fuelled system. Both systems have commercially available technologies and both satisfy the NEM reliability criterion. However, the renewable energy system has zero greenhouse gas emissions while the efficient fossil scenario has high emissions and water use and so would be unacceptable in environmental terms.

We used the technology costs projected to 2030 in the conservative 2012 study by the Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics (BREE). (In my personal view, future solar PV and wind costs are likely to be lower than the BREE projections, and future fossil fuel and nuclear costs are likely to be higher.) Then, we did thousands of hourly simulations of supply and demand over 2010, until we found the mix of renewable energy sources that gave the minimum annual cost.

Under transparent assumptions, we found that the total annualised cost (including capital, operation, maintenance and fuel where relevant) of the least-cost renewable energy system is $7-10 billion per year higher than that of the “efficient” fossil scenario. For comparison, the subsidies to the production and use of all fossil fuels in Australia are at least $10 billion per year. So, if governments shifted the fossil subsidies to renewable electricity, we could easily pay for the latter’s additional costs.

Thus 100% renewable electricity would be affordable under sensible government policy, busting another myth. All we need are effective policies to drive the transition.

http://theconversation.com/baseload-power-is-a-myth-even-intermittent-renewables-will-work-13210

Edited April 10, 2013 by qualia

[qualia]

People cool off in the water of the Trocadero's fountains on August 19, 2012 in Paris. Summers in the northern hemisphere are now warmer than at any period in six centuries, according to climate research published on Wednesday in the science journal Nature.

Harvard researchers are adding statistical nuance to our understanding of how modern and historical temperatures compare.

Through developing a statistical model of Arctic temperature and how it relates to instrumental and proxy records derived from trees, ice cores, and lake sediments, Martin Tingley, a research associate in Harvard's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Peter Huybers, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, have shown that the warmest summers in the last two decades are unprecedented in the previous six centuries. Their work is described in an April 11 paper published in Nature.

"We call upon multiple proxies—-including those derived from trees, ice cores, and lake sediments—-to reconstruct temperature back through time using a Bayesian statistical approach," Tingley said. "What we are trying to do is put statistical inference of past changes in temperature on a more solid and complete footing."

"Saying this year is warmer than all other years included in the reconstruction is a very different thing than saying this year is warmer than a particular year in the past," he added. "You have to think about the uncertainty in the temperature estimate for each year, and then be able to say that recent years are warmer than all past years simultaneously."

To assess such probabilities, Tingley and Huybers use a statistical model that gives a large ensemble of equally likely temperature histories for the last 600 years, as opposed to the single best estimate provided by most other reconstructions of Earth's temperature. "By sorting through these many plausible realization of what Earth's temperature may have looked like", Huybers said, "it becomes possible to find the probability associated with a great variety of relevant quantities, such as whether the 2010 Russian heat wave was more anomalous than all other events or whether the trend in average temperature over the last 100 years is uniquely large."

Perhaps the most basic quantity is average Arctic temperature, and Tingley said that the summers of 2005, 2007, 2010 and 2011 were each warmer than all years prior to 2005 in at least 95% of the ensemble members. Furthermore, the rate of temperature increase observed over the last century is, with 99% probability, greater in magnitude than centennial trends during any other interval in the last 600 years. At a more regional level, the summer of 2010 featured the warmest year in western Russia with 99% probability and also featured the warmest year in western Greenland and the Canadian Arctic with 90% probability.

Also notable, Tingley said, was that although summer temperatures are clearly on the rise, they found no indication that the variability of temperature has changed. Events like the 2010 Russian heat wave and the 2003 Western European heat wave are consistent with the increase in mean temperature, after accounting for the fact that they are selected as some of the hottest years and locations.

"Insomuch as the past is prologue for the future", Tingley said, "these results suggest that the hottest summers will track along with increases in mean temperature." He explained that, "if instead the distribution of temperatures were becoming wider, as well as shifting towards higher values, then the probability of extreme events would go up even more rapidly."

But Tingley also pointed out the limitations of the results and the need for further work. "The proxies, unlike thermometers, generally only give information about seasonal average temperatures, and we have not explored changes in variability at the daily and weekly timescales associated with weather patterns. It will be interesting to further explore instrumental records and higher resolution proxies for trends at these shorter timescales."

More information: Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11969 Provided by Harvard University

http://phys.org/news/2013-04-northern-hemisphere-summers-warmest-years.html

[qualia]

A vendor rides his tricycle near a coal-fired power plant in Beijing on Friday, April 12, 2013. China, the world's largest producer of carbon dioxide, is directly feeling the man-made heat of global warming, scientists conclude in the first study to link the burning of fossil fuels to one country's rise in its daily temperature spikes. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

China, the world's largest producer of carbon dioxide, is directly feeling the man-made heat of global warming, scientists conclude in the first study to link the burning of fossil fuels to one country's rise in its daily temperature spikes.

China emits more of the greenhouse gas than the next two biggest carbon polluters—the U.S. and India—combined. And its emissions keep soaring by about 10 percent per year.

While other studies have linked averaged-out temperature increases in China and other countries to greenhouse gases, this research is the first to link the warmer daily hottest and coldest readings, or spikes.

Those spikes, which often occur in late afternoon and the early morning, are what scientists say most affect people's health, plants and animals. People don't notice changes in averages, but they feel it when the daily high is hotter or when it doesn't cool off at night to let them recover from a sweltering day.

The study by Chinese and Canadian researchers found that just because of greenhouse gases, daytime highs rose 0.9 degree Celsius (1.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in the 46 years up to 2007. At night it was even worse: Because of greenhouse gases, the daily lows went up about 1.7 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit).

China is the world's biggest producer and consumer of coal, which is the largest source of man-made carbon dioxide emissions. While the country has made huge investments in alternative energy such as wind, solar and nuclear in recent years, its heavy reliance on coal is unlikely to change any time soon.]

About 90 percent of the temperature rise seen by the researchers could be traced directly to man-made greenhouse gases, the study said. Man-made greenhouse gases also include methane and nitrous oxide, but carbon dioxide is considered by far the biggest factor.

The study appeared online in late March in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Smoke is emitted from chimneys of a cement plant in Binzhou city, in eastern China's Shandong province on Thursday, Jan. 17, 2013. China, the world's largest producer of carbon dioxide, is directly feeling the man-made heat of global warming, scientists conclude in the first study to link the burning of fossil fuels to one country's rise in its daily temperature spikes. The study appeared online in late March 2013 in the peer reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters. (AP Photo)

The study uses the accepted and traditional method that climate scientists employ to attribute a specific trend to man-made global warming or to rule it out as a cause.

Researchers ran computer simulations trying to replicate the observed increase in daily and nighttime high temperatures in China between 1961 and 2007. They first plugged in only natural forces—including solar variation—to try to get the heat increase. That didn't produce it.

The only way the computer simulations came up with the increase in daily high and low temperatures that occurred was when the actual amounts of atmospheric heat-trapping greenhouse gases were included.

"It is way above what you would expect from normal fluctuations of climate," study author Xuebin Zhang of the climate research division of Canada's environmental agency said in a telephone interview. "It is quite clear and can be attributed to greenhouse gases."

China did not become the largest emitter of greenhouse gases until 2007; for much of the period studied, it had a smaller economy. Because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for about a century, China and its defenders maintain that the U.S. and other developed nations bear more responsibility for climate change.

Outside experts praised the research as using proper methods and making sense. An earlier study didn't formally blame the proliferation of U.S. heat records to a rise in greenhouse gases but noted that they were increasing substantially with carbon dioxide pollution.

"The study is important because it formalizes what many scientists have been sensing as a gut instinct: that the increase in extreme heat that we've witnessed in recent decades, and especially in recent years, really cannot be dismissed as the vagaries of weather," said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann.

China has rapidly grown from a nation of subsistence farmers at the end of the 1970s into the world's second-largest economy behind the U.S., and the environmental costs of such change are often visible.

Beijing is no longer dominated by bicycles but by cars, and the skyline is barely visible at times because of thick pollution. More people are living in cities, buying air conditioners and other energy-hungry home electronics and consuming more energy for transportation and heating.

China passed the United States as the No. 1 carbon dioxide emitter about six years ago and "the gap is widening, it's huge," said Appalachian State University professor Gregg Marland, who helps track worldwide emissions for the U.S. Energy Department.

When developed countries around the world in 1997 agreed to limit their greenhouse gas emissions, developing countries, including China, were exempted.

U.S. Energy Department statistics say that China gets 70 percent of its energy from coal, compared with 20 percent in the United States. China is also a world leader in the production of cement, a process that also causes greenhouse emissions.

Journal reference: Geophysical Research Letters

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

http://phys.org/news/2013-04-greenhouse-gases-high-temps-hotter.html

[woof woof woof]

WONKY WEATHER NEWS FROM THE U.ASS.A!

Posted by: Dr. Jeff Masters, 7:27 PM GMT on April 12, 2013 +38

The extreme 2012 drought in the Central Great Plains of the U.S. was more intense than any drought since record keeping began in 1895, says a new NOAA assessment of the historic drought, released Thursday. However, the study was unable to pinpoint the cause of the drought. Other major global droughts in recent years have been linked to global warming and/or natural variation in patterns of sea surface temperatures, but these factors were seemingly not important in causing the drought of 2012, said the team of 19 atmospheric scientists, led by Martin Hoerling of the NOAA Modeling, Analysis, Predictions and Projections Program (MAPP). Their study attributed the drought to a random natural variation in the jet stream, which caused it to become "stuck" far to the north in Canada. Since rain-bearing low pressure systems travel along the jet stream, the northwards displacement of the jet stream resulted in abnormally dry conditions over the Central U.S. "This is one of those events that comes along once every couple hundreds of years," said Hoerling.



Key findings of the report
The researchers focused on a six-state region--Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri and Iowa, and found that the amount of precipitation in 2012 was only 53% of the long-term average. This was the driest year since record keeping began in 1895, surpassing the previous record driest years of 1934 and 1936, during the great Dust Bowl drought.

The researchers called the 2012 drought a "flash drought"--it developed suddenly in May, and was unrelated to the 2011 drought over Texas and surrounding states. The 2011 drought had a separate and well-understood trigger (a change in the jet stream and storm tracks, due to a La Niña event in the Eastern Pacific.)

The 2012 drought was not predicted by long-range weather forecast models. The new report concluded that our ability to predict drought is limited, but some new experimental techniques could improve future drought forecasts. For example, NOAA's long-range GFDL forecast model and the European EUROSIP model correctly anticipated the summer 2012 heat and dryness over the Central U.S. in projections made as early as January 2012.


Figure 1. Drought-damaged corn in a field near Nickerson, Nebraska, Aug. 16, 2012. The great U.S. drought of 2012 was the most extensive U.S. drought since the 1930s Dust Bowl. Over a six-state region--Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri and Iowa--precipitation during 2012 was only 53% of the long-term average., making it the driest year since record keeping began in 1895. Damage from the 2012 drought is at least $35 billion, and probably much higher. The associated heat wave killed 123 people, and brought the U.S. its second hottest summer on record. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

Criticism of the report
Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research was critical of the report's conclusions. In comments posted in Joe Romm's blog at climateprogress.org, Dr. Trenberth said that the study failed to "say anything about the observed soil moisture conditions, snow cover, and snow pack during the winter prior to the event in spite of the fact that snow pack was at record low levels in the winter and spring" and "no attempt was made to include soil moisture, snow cover anomalies, or vegetation health" in the climate model runs performed.

I would have liked to have seen the paper mention the growing body of research that has linked unusually early May snow melt in the Northern Hemisphere and Arctic sea ice loss in recent years to unusual summertime jet stream patterns, like the jet stream pattern observed during 2012. A March 2013 paper by scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany found that under special conditions, the atmosphere can start to resonate like a bell. This causes the jet stream pattern to freeze in place and amplify, leading to months-long periods of weather extremes. They showed that warming of the Arctic due to human-caused climate change might be responsible for this resonance phenomenon, which became twice as common during 2001 - 2012 compared to the previous 22 years. One of the more extreme examples of this resonance occurred during the summer of 2012, and could have been the cause of the 2012 drought.

Other blogs on the report
Yes, Climate Change Is Worsening U.S. Drought — NOAA Report Needlessly Confuses The Issue by Joe Romm at climateprogress.org

Global Warming Not Significant in 2012 Drought: Report by Andrew Freedman of climatecentral.org

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Jeff Masters

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2384

[qualia]

ON A LARGE WOODEN deck on a coral cay island in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef, research assistant Aaron Chai removes the lid from one of 12 circular white water tanks.

"This is the 'do nothing' tank," he says, peering inside at a careful arrangement of dead, slimy, algae-covered and bleached-white corals.

In July last year, this small reef ecosystem looked very different - corals of vivid purples and blues beside the bright greens of turtle weeds. Since then the levels of carbon dioxide and temperature in the bowl-shaped tank have been changed to the kind of conditions expected by the end of this century if the world 'does nothing' about climate change and its fossil fuel use.

"It's the slippery slope to slime," says the University of Queensland's Associate Professor Sophie Dove, who is running this experiment on the university's research station on Heron Island, about 80 kilometres off Gladstone in central Queensland.

The World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef is already under stress from natural and man-made hazards. There's climate change and ocean acidification, both driven by burning fossil fuels; run-off from farmland; attacks by crown-of-thorns starfish; cyclones; fishing; and shipping.

A study led by the Australian Institute for Marine Sciences found that since 1985 the reef has lost more than half its coral cover, with two thirds of that loss occurring since 1998.

Tanks of tests

Dove's experiment aims to find out what the future may hold for the reef. All the tanks have inside a near-identical mini-ecosystem with specimens taken from a reef slope next to Heron Island. Each tank is filled with sediments, rocks, 11 different types of coral, two types of snails and various other species such as sea cucumbers, small crabs and blenny fish.

There are three 'control' tanks where temperature and carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels change every two hours in line with measurements taken by a sensor on the reef slope.

Conditions in three 'pre-industrial' tanks are treated to temperatures about 1°C less than today and CO₂ levels at 100 parts per million below current levels in the atmosphere, a reduction of around 25 per cent.

Then there are the future tanks. One future scenario presumes the world will do something on emissions so that as we approach the end of this century temperatures are about 2°C warmer and CO₂ levels rise a further 220 ppm.

The ecosystems in three 'do nothing' tanks undergo temperatures about 4.5°C above today with CO₂ levels raised 600ppm.

All of the different scenario tanks move in tandem with the control tanks, meaning they undergo the normal daily and seasonal changes that happen on the reef.

Coral in Tank 4 in July 2012. This tank imitated contemporary conditions on the reef.

Coral in Tank 4 in March 2013. The coral has developed as expected.

 

Slime

In the 'do nothing' tanks all but one of the corals has died and is being slowly covered in algae. Some of the coral skeletons have actually started to dissolve in the increased acidity of the water.

"If you look at those reefs in those future tanks now, they are really not all that attractive to tourists," says Dove. "It's not something that people would want to go and see. It is becoming more of a mono-culture and that stuff probably isn't that palatable to the fish. That slippery slope to slime looks to be coming true."

As humans have pumped more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, oceans have absorbed about a third of this extra CO₂. This makes the water slightly more acidic and in theory makes it harder for corals to maintain their skeletons.

Coral in Tank 3 in July 2012. Conditions in this tank mimicked those expected in around 100 years if the world does nothing to kerb its fossil fuel use, with higher temperatures and acidity.

Coral in Tank 3 in March 2013. The coral has not survived and algae has taken over.

Warmer and cloudier water can also slow down the growth of corals and some studies have found corals are already growing more slowly in parts of the reef.

When increased temperatures put stress on corals their relationship with their colour-giving algae can break down, leaving behind a "bleached" coral.

"There's always life and death on the reef," says Dove. "We want to see if those corals that are bleached can spring back and go again.

"But we do need to look at what happens to dead coral because most of our live coral sits on a bed of dead stuff underneath. You don't want to be standing on a ladder that's full of woodworm.

"We want to keep the experiment running because we want to see how quickly some things disappear altogether."

Scientific studies published in recent weeks have used projections and computer models to predict the kind of effects on coral reefs that Dove can see in the tanks on Heron Island.

One study published in the journal Nature Climate Change looked at how often coral reefs might bleach in the future. The study found that under all but the most optimistic scenarios for cutting CO₂ emissions, bleaching would be an annual event for 95 per cent of the world's coral reefs by the year 2075

Some reefs in northwestern Australia were even more susceptible to bleaching, the study predicted, with annual bleaching taking place in less than 14 years from now if emissions go unchecked.

A recent study from Western Australia found that a severely disturbed reef may take as long as 12 years to recover from a bleaching.

Meanwhile a study led by the University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre found that reefs in shallow waters could be subjected to even higher levels of acidification than was previously thought.

Yet far from climate change being a problem for the future, Dove says the healthy coral in her 'pre-industrial' tanks suggests "the world's already been running a big experiment on the reef over the last 100 years".

She plans to keep her own experiment running to get at least a full year of observations and will soon start to write up results to submit to scientific journals.

When she moves off the subjects of statistics, measurement, "calcification rates" and "symbionts" and onto reefs as amazing places to visit, a whimsical smile breaks.

She has spent the last 30 years or so exploring the wonders of coral reefs. If she's not studying them, she's holidaying on them.

"Some places are just magic," she says. "It's beautiful. There is still some hope but we have to put in a bit of effort. I would hate for it not to be there for people to see."

http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2013/04/15/3730941.htm

maybe once all the coral's dead we can stuff australia's politicians in there

edit: actually if they really wanted to mimic the reef conditions they would have poured a litre of industrial waste in each of the tanks.

Edited April 15, 2013 by qualia

[qualia]

Three new studies were published today, each looking at a different aspect of the human impact on climate, each carrying a sobering message on the consequences of human activities on our environment. The first says recent warming is unprecedented in 2,000 years. A second reports climate zones are shifting faster due to warming temperatures. The third argues impacts from greenhouse gas emissions are not caused solely by warming temperatures.

The one that will likely attract the most attention is a reconstruction of global temperature over the last 2,000 years. This was a mammoth collaboration, involving 78 scientists from 60 scientific institutions, all part of the PAGES network (Past Global Changes). This network enabled researchers to use ice cores, tree-rings, lake sediments and other forms of data from all over the globe. The result – the PAGES 2k Paper – is a robust reconstruction of temperature across seven continents over 2,000 years.

They found that over the last 2,000 years, the planet had been gradually cooling. This cooling trend reversed around the time that humans started emitting heat trapping gases into the atmosphere. Since then, global temperatures have been rising, with the last few decades the warmest in 1,400 years.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because this research is the latest in a long line of papers published over the past 14 years that have consistently found recent warming is unprecedented over the past 1,000 or so years. The seminal paper on global temperature reconstruction was published in 1999 and has attracted much criticism from those averse to the notion of human intervention on climate. However, since that seminal research, a string of papers using different datasets and statistical methods have confirmed the results.

The PAGES 2K paper also found that while the planet as a whole is experiencing unprecedented temperatures in recent decades, some pre-industrial regions were warmer than now. For example, Europe was possibly warmer during the Roman Warm Period. However, different regions warmed at different times. The modern period is the only time that all regions warmed simultaneously.

Another paper published today in Nature Climate Change examined the shifting of climate zones due to warming temperatures. They found that due to warming, climate zones are moving at an increasing pace. If humans continue to emit greenhouse gases at the current rate, the speed with which climate zones are shifting will double by the end of the century. This means about 20% of all land area will undergo a change.

Shifting climate zones are already causing thousands of animal species to shift towards the poles or higher altitudes in order to remain within a tolerable temperature range. The shift will also affect agriculture as precipitation patterns will change with the shifting climate zones.

One suggested magic bullet to minimise the impacts of human-caused global warming is geoengineering. For example, putting tiny sulphate particles into the atmosphere could reflect incoming sunlight. However, a third study published today, in Nature Geoscience, found some impacts from greenhouse gas emissions cannot be fully mitigated by geoengineering. A simulation of business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions over the 21st century found that much of the changes in regional rainfall weren’t related to surface warming. Instead, the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was causing shifts in atmospheric vertical motions, which led to changes in tropical rainfall.

This means that even if geoengineering managed to cancel out surface warming, rainfall patterns would still change because of the extra carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere. There are other consequences of the increased carbon dioxide, beyond surface warming. For example, the oceans are absorbing around half of our carbon emissions, which is having a negative impact on coral reefs due to ocean acidification.

Research into the impacts of human-caused global warming continues to mount. A Web of Science search for papers matching the terms “global climate change” or “global warming” finds an accelerating amount of climate research.

Number of papers per year matching the Web of Science search ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’.

The increasing body of evidence only serves to strengthen the scientific consensusthat was established in the early 1990s. Why then, is the general public still confused about climate change, lagging behind the scientific community by two decades?

The consensus gap: the divergence between public perception of scientific consensus and the 97% reality

Click to enlarge

Despite the steady accumulation of studies documenting the human impact on climate change, misinformation disseminated by a small number of climate misinformers has had an impact on how the public think about climate change. In my own research, I measured the public perception of scientific consensus by asking a representative US sample how many scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. The average answer was a shade under 50%. This is in stark contrast to two recentstudies that independently found a 97% consensus.

This “consensus gap” has policy implications. When the general public correctly perceive the scientific consensus, they are more likely to support policies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

As more research like today’s slew of new papers are published, we can expect climate misinformers to continue to deny the full body of evidence. Inconvenient studies will be attacked and data will be cherry picked. The public need to understand that on a fundamental topic such as human-caused global warming, the attacks don’t come from genuine scientific debate but an attempt to generate false controversy.

The scientific consensus on human-caused global warming was established 20 years ago. It has only strengthened as the evidence continues to accumulate.

http://theconversation.com/evidence-adds-up-three-studies-of-human-impact-on-climate-13627

[woof woof woof]

The Increased Risk of Drought under Global Warming
Drought is the greatest threat civilization faces from climate change, because drought affects the two things we need to live--food and water. Drought expert Dr. Aiguo Dai of SUNY Albany reviews the latest drought predictions from climate models and their "dire projection of increased risk of severe droughts," in his piece, "The Increased Risk of Drought under Global Warming".

The Changing Face of Mother Nature
It seem as though the weather gods have gone berserk in recent years, as nearly every day the headlines report unusual droughts, floods, prolonged cold and snow, heat waves, or unusual weather events happening somewhere around the globe. Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers explains how the unprecedented melting of sea ice and snow in the Arctic may be contributing to this onslaught in her contribution, "The Changing Face of Mother Nature."

My Climate Change
"I used to be very skeptical about global warming, unconvinced that humans had anything to do with it or that it was affecting the weather," writes Stu Ostro, Senior Meteorologist for The Weather Channel. "But then that changed." Find out why he changed his mind in his piece, "My Climate Change."

Closing the Consensus Gap on Climate Change
The general public think less than half of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. The reality is 97%. Dr. John Cook, Climate Change Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, explains the challenges of climate science communication in his contribution, "Closing the Consensus Gap on Climate Change."

The Arctic's Shrinking Sea Ice Cover
The emerging view is that the Arctic will lose essentially all of its summer sea ice cover by the end of this century, perhaps as early as 2030-2040. Dr. Mark Serreze, Director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, discusses the implications in his post, "The Arctic's Shrinking Sea Ice Cover."

How Do We Know Humans are Responsible for Global Warming?
We know Earth is warming, but how do we know that human activities are primarily responsible? Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State explains the evidence in his contribution, "How Do We Know Humans are Responsible for Global Warming?"

Is This Global Warming?
Lately, whenever there is a severe weather or climate event that causes a lot of damage - like a severe heatwave, drought, hurricane or tornado - scientists are asked some version of the question, "Is this global warming?" Dr. Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford University explains what climate science can and cannot say about the answer to this question in his piece, "Is This Global Warming?"

Other Earth Day contributions
Wunderground Community member Skyepony has contributed a piece called "Earth Day 2013: Waiting to Get Fracked."

A new documentary called Thin Ice follows scientists at work in the Arctic, Antarctic, Southern Ocean, New Zealand, Europe and the USA. They talk about their work, and their hopes and fears, with a rare candor and directness. This creates an intimate portrait of the global community of researchers racing to understand our planet's changing climate. Over 100 college campuses and art theaters are hosting screenings this week.

Jeff Masters

[qualia]

Coal and gas fail the test when it comes to environmental impact

There has been an acceleration in the number of coal seam gas and mining proposals approved in Australia.

Since 2010, eight projects have been given the green light in Queensland alone. All projects have been through a state environmental approval process and some through the Commonwealth process as well. But now the application of science and a recent appeal have have found the process wanting.

An expert scientific committee has been looking at how mines will affect Australia’s water resources, and their findings are not reassuring. Meanwhile, local communities are mounting appeals against approved mines and a recent court ruling found the community right: the mine’s impacts are indeed unacceptable.

An independent committee looks at water impacts

The Independent Expert Scientific Committee (IESC) on Coal Seam Gas and Large Coal Mining Developments provides expert scientific advice on proposals referred to it by federal, state and territory government regulators. The Australian Government can seek the committee’s advice on projects being assessed under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999. And the Queensland, New South Wales, South Australian and Victorian governments can seek the committee’s advice through a National Partnership Agreement.

Most of the environmental impact assessments the expert committee has given advice on were found to have major deficiencies. Most commonly, those assessments failed to take account of the cumulative impacts of projects on water, specifying volume and rates of discharge and recharge.

Unless cumulative impacts are considered, there is no way to gauge a project’s effects on ground and surface waters at regional and national scales. The table below shows that 14 of the 17 environmental assessments the expert committee reviewed were deficient because they did not take proper account of the cumulative impacts the project would have on water.

The table also shows that of the 17 environmental impact statements the expert committee has advised on, 12 were also deficient in analysing how interference with ground and surface water would affect swamps, wetlands (including Ramsar sites), ecological communities and threatened species.

Table 1: Advice provided by the IESC on deficiencies in the environmental impact statements of coal seam gas and large coal projectshttp://www.environment.gov.au/coal-seam-gas-mining/interim-committee/project-advice.html; http://www.environment.gov.au/coal-seam-gas-mining/project-advice/index.html, accessed April 20 2013.

Click to enlarge

Two proposed developments the expert committee looked at were Arrow Energy’sSurat Basin project and its Bowen Basin project. The Committee said of Surat Basin:

"The proponent’s modelling predicts a cumulative drawdown in the Condamine Alluvium of approximately 2.5m … There is limited information provided to determine the project’s contribution to cumulative impacts, including impacts to Matters of National Environmental Significance from changes to hydrology and water quality."

 

And in relation to the Bowen Basin project, the committee notes:

"that the project consists of approximately 7,000 coal seam gas wells and associated infrastructure. The regional scale of the project will result in interactions with other coal seam gas and coal mine proposals in the area. The committee considers that information relating to the potential impacts of this project should be commensurate with its scale."

A solution to water may be on the way

The minister can’t currently impose conditions directly relating to impacts on a water resource. However, The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment Bill 2013, which passed the House of Representatives on March 21, 2013, will,confer those powers if passed by the Senate.

The Bill is designed to protect water resources from CSG and large coal mining developments as a matter of national environmental significance.

This amendment thus adds water as a trigger in its own right. The minister can then set appropriate conditions as part of the project approval process so any significant impacts on a water resource are acceptable.

The Commonwealth has been imposing a long list of conditions on some contentious development projects when approving them. It is expected that many of the approvals for the coal and gas projects will, likewise, be replete with conditions – as the recent approval by Minister Burke of the Boggabri/Mules creek mine in NSW shows. Experience suggests, however, that monitoring a large number of conditions to ensure compliance will be challenging.

But what about impacts on communities?

Water has been the Commonwealth’s main focus for research and triggers. But there is no such “trigger” to let the Commonwealth intervene when there are negative economic and social impacts, including on local human communities. In fact in most environmental impact statements for coal and gas proposals there is little hard information on the economic and social costs of projects.

The Warkworth coal mine extension in the Hunter Valley provides a landmark case study. In February 2012, the mine was given conditional approval by the NSW Government. But on April 15, 2013, the decision was made to refuse that extension.

Chief Justice Preston of the NSW Land and Environment Court considered a wide range of environmental social and economic impacts. He was not satisfied that Warkworth’s economic analyses supported the conclusion, urged by Warkworth and the NSW Minister, that the economic benefits of the project outweigh the environmental, social and economic costs.

The case demonstrates two important elements in the comprehensive assessment of resource projects. First, the coverage must be wide: it needs to take in environmental, social and economic issues. Second, communities and civil society can provide and organise crucial evidence that countervails that of resource companies and governments.

The judgement, together with the Independent Expert Scientific Committee’s advice, highlights the deficiencies of environmental impact statements. Both will heighten the public’s awareness of the impacts of CSG and coal mining projects.

They will also encourage community groups to, where possible, contest approvals of projects in the courts; the opinions of communities do matter.

http://theconversation.com/coal-and-gas-fail-the-test-when-it-comes-to-environmental-impact-13746

[waterboy 2.0]

Rain Will Get More Extreme Thanks to Global Warming, Says NASA Study

The forecast for the future of rainfall on Earth is in: over the next hundred years, areas that receive lots of precipitation right now are only going to get wetter, and dry areas will go for longer periods without seeing a drop, according to a new NASA-led study on global warming. "We looked at rainfall of different types," said William Lau, NASA's deputy director of atmospheric studies and the lead author of the study, in a phone interview with The Verge. "The extreme heavy rain end the prolonged drought side both increase drastically and are also connected physically."

The NASA rainfall study study, which is due to be published in an upcoming edition of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, examined data from 14 different leading global climate models. Although each one previously predicted rainfall increases in rain-prone areas such as the tropics, and droughts in drier regions including the American Southwest, the study by Lau and his colleagues is said to be the first to look at rainfall from a global perspective, including over unpopulated areas like the middle of the oceans. "The new part is looking at the entire global rainfall system from a basic science perspective, and what we're finding is amazing" Lau said.

 

NASA animation showing rainfall projections over a 140 year period. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.

Specifically, the new study found that although the 14 climate models differ when it comes to the amount of rainfall in individual locations such as cities, over larger areas, they all point to the same average picture. That is, for every single degree Fahrenheit the global average temperature climbs, heavy rainfall will increase in wet areas by 3.9 percent, while dry areas will experience a 2.6 percent increase in time periods without any rainfall.

The projected Mediterranean and southwestern US droughts forced by CO2 [carbon dioxide] increases alone exceed Dust Bowl levels by the end of the century," said Dargan Frierson, associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the study. The reason for the shift is thought to be due to the fact that as the globe warms, the atmosphere is able to hold more water vapor as moisture, but this moisture clusters in the already wet areas, depriving the dry areas of moisture and exacerbating their droughts. Just how quickly the change happens depends on how much CO2 gets pumped into the atmosphere, but Lau said his study was applicable to the next century.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/4/4298250/rain-will-more-extreme-global-warming-study

[waterboy 2.0]

24 April 2013, 2.56pm EST Explainer: what is happening to Antarctica’s ice?

Author

1. Joel Pedro

   Honorary Research Fellow, Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems CRC at University of Tasmania

Disclosure Statement

Joel Pedro does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

Provides funding as a Member of The Conversation.

utas.edu.au

Antarctica’s ice is melting in different ways in different places: what’s the connection? AAP Image/British Antarctic Survey

Two papers released last week in the journal Nature Geoscience provide evidence that warming and melt in West Antarctica are occurring at levels that are highly unusual compared to natural variability.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains about 2.2 million cubic kilometers of ice; enough to raise global sea levels by 3 to 4m. What’s making glaciologists nervous is that the ice rests on bedrock which is below sea level; this makes it vulnerable to attack from below by a warming ocean as well as attack from above by increasing air temperatures. Whether basal and surface melt are currently exceeding natural levels, and the extent and speed at which they could destabilise the entire ice sheet are the subjects of intense research.

Warming up, melting

We already know that West Antarctica is feeling the heat. A study released late last year found that annual temperatures rose by 2.4 ± 1.2°C between 1958 and 2010. It is now ranked as one of the fastest-warming places on earth.

Thanks to satellite monitoring we also know that the ice sheet is losing mass. The weak points are the floating “ice shelves” which fringe the coastline and act like dam walls holding back the flow of ice from further inland. Collapse or thinning of ice shelves causes ice flow from inland to increase, speeding up the discharge of ice into the ocean.

On the Antarctic Peninsula, the northern-most part of Antarctica, widespread thinning and collapse of ice shelves (including “Larsen B”) appears to be driven mainly by melt at the ice surface in summer, causing decay from the top down.

Further south, temperatures remain for the most part too cold to cause significant surface melt. Here, instruments deployed beneath the ice (for example, on the Amundsen Sea coast) indicate that ice shelves are being melted from below by warming ocean waters.

Map showing locations of the James Ross Island (JRI) ice core used by Nerlie Abram’s group and the West Antarctic Ice Core Divide (WAIS) core used by Eric Steig’s group. NASA

Anthropogenic climate change or natural variability?

Determining the extent to which the rapid changes in West Antarctica are being driven by anthropogenic or natural causes requires a longer term view than the few decades of instrumental observations can provide. This brings us to the two new papers: the first led by Nerilie Abram of Australian National University and the second by Eric Steig of the University of Washington.

Abram and colleagues focus on a 360-meter ice core from James Ross Island on the Antarctic Peninsula (see map). In one of the first examples of this kind of study in Antarctica they use visible melt layers in the core to reconstruct the history of surface snow melt at the site (see Figure 1, bottom panel). They then compare this record to mean annual temperatures determined using the water isotopes from the core (See Figure 1, top panel).

Their results demonstrate that surface summer melting at James Ross Island is now occurring “at a level that is unprecedented in the past 1,000 years”; indeed, there has been “a nearly-tenfold increase in melt intensity since the late 1400s”.

A concerning aspect of their finding is that the melt rate appears to respond non-linearly to temperature increase. Abram and colleagues explain: “as average summer temperature increases and positive temperature days [days above 0°C] become warmer and more frequent, the amount of melt produced exhibits an exponential increase”. Their conclusion is that ice on the Antarctic Peninsula appears to be crossing a threshold where it is particularly susceptible to rapid increases in melt caused by warming summer temperatures. This could translate to a “poleward extension of areas where glaciers and ice shelves are undergoing decay by atmospheric-driven melting”.

Figure: An ice core record of temperature and surface melt over the past 1,000 years at James Ross Island (JRI), Antarctic Peninsula. Upper panel, the thin green line represents average temperature at the site expressed relative to the average between 1981 and 2001. Lower panel, the thin red represents snow melt at the surface, expressed in per cent of annual snowfall. Thick lines are smoothed versions of the annual data. Dashed lines show the 1981—2001 averages. Figure adapted from Abram et al.

There are similarities and also important differences between these changes on the Antarctic Peninsula and those occurring further south. Eric Steig and colleagues assembled data from a network of 16 ice cores on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet spanning the past 200 years, along with a new record from the central ice divide (the WAIS divide – see map) spanning the past 2,000 years.

The paper argues that water isotopes in these cores (namely δ¹⁸O – the level of oxygen-18 in the ice with respect to standard ocean water) provides a record of changes in atmospheric circulation that are linked to West Antarctic warming, sea ice retreat and ocean driven melt.

The researchers report that δ¹⁸O in the cores increased to levels “probably higher during the 1990s [1991—2000] than at any other time during the past 200 years”, suggesting current warming and melt are equally anomalous. Looking even further back (and accounting for longer term changes linked to ice flow and orbital variations) they conclude that the elevated δ¹⁸O of recent decades is not unprecedented “but is near the upper limit of the range of natural variability”; specifically, conditions similar to those of recent decades “occur about 1% of the time over the past 2,000 years”.

Ice cores let us look back in time at Antarctic warming and melting. Joel Pedro Long-distance connections

Some popular media reports have narrowed in on the apparent discrepancy between the two studies: unusual but not unprecedented warming and ocean-driven melt suggested by the cores from central West Antarctica, compared to outright unprecedented surface melt further north on the Antarctic Peninsula. But we would rarely expect climate change in locations separated by more than 2300km (the distance between James Ross Island and the WAIS divide) to unfold identically.

What’s been less reported is that good progress has been made toward explaining why we should in fact expect to see some differences in climate trends between the two locations.

The University of Washington study argues that the warming and circulation changes in West Antarctica are can be traced all the way back to changes in the tropical Pacific Ocean: warming in the Pacific triggers a chain of pressure changes in the upper atmosphere (Rossby waves) that ultimately increases the flow of warm air over West Antarctica.

By contrast, the record melt at James Ross Island appears to be mainly driven by a pronounced southward shift in the strong westerly wind belt that circles Antarctica. This contraction (technically a positive change in the Southern Annular Mode) has a clear human fingerprint. It is linked to the combined influence of increasing greenhouse concentrations and ozone depletion.

To conclude, ice core records now place current warming and melt in West Antarctica at or above the upper bounds of natural variability. The dramatic increase in summer melt on the Peninsula is especially worrying.

Ironically, to better project climate and ice sheet change in West Antarctica we need also improve understanding and projections of climate change in the tropics.

http://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-happening-to-antarcticas-ice-13684

[waterboy 2.0]

EDIT - double post...

Edited May 7, 2013 by waterboy

[woof woof woof]

Posted by: Dr. Jeff Masters, 4:14 PM GMT on May 07, 2013 +16

Two studies done in 2009 and 2010 found that 97% of actively publishing climate scientists agree that humans cause global warming. But what would a larger sample of the scientific literature show, extended all the way up to 2011? You're invited to help find out, by participating in an anonymous 10-minute survey where you will be reading the abstracts (summaries) of ten randomly selected technical papers on Earth's climate published between 1991 and 2011. The survey was created by Dr. John Cook of The Global Change Institute at Australia's University of Queensland. Dr. Cook is the creator of one of my favorite climate change websites, skepticalscience.com. He authored one of our special Earth Day 2013 essays, Closing the Consensus Gap on Climate Change, from which I have pulled Figure 1 below. Dr. Cook is lead author on a new paper called "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature," to be published in the next month or so in Environmental Research Letters. The paper analyzes the same papers included in the survey you're asked to participate in, and the researchers plan to compare the results. Each of these 11,944 papers written by 29,083 authors and published in 1,980 journals included the keywords "global warming" or "global climate change" in their listing in the ISI Web of Science database. After reading each abstract, you will be asked to rate the level of endorsement within the abstract for the proposition that human activity (i.e., anthropogenic greenhouse gases) is causing global warming. There will be these choices available on a drop-down menu for you to choose from:

1. Explicit Endorsement with Quantification: abstract explicitly states that humans are causing more than half of global warming.

2. Explicit Endorsement without Quantification: abstract explicitly states humans are causing global warming or refers to anthropogenic global warming/climate change as a given fact.

3. Implicit Endorsement: abstract implies humans are causing global warming. E.g., research assumes greenhouse gases cause warming without explicitly stating humans are the cause.

4. Neutral: abstract doesn't address or mention issue of what's causing global warming.

5. Implicit Rejection: abstract implies humans have had a minimal impact on global warming without saying so explicitly. E.g., proposing a natural mechanism is the main cause of global warming.

6. Explicit Rejection without Quantification: abstract explicitly minimizes or rejects that humans are causing global warming.

7. Explicit Rejection with Quantification: abstract explicitly states that humans are causing less than half of global warming.

8. Don't know.

When you are all done, the survey will let you know how your average score for the ten papers compares to the rating given by the authors. The survey took me about 8 minutes to complete, and it was interesting to see the tremendous diversity of research being done on global warming in my random sample. I'll post about Dr. Cook's results when his paper is published in the next few months.

Figure 1. Two recent studies have sought to measure the level of agreement in the scientific community in different ways and arrived at strikingly consistent results. A 2009 study led by Peter Doran surveyed over 3,000 Earth scientists and found that as the scientists' expertise in climate change grew, so did the level of agreement about human-caused global warming. For the most qualified experts, climate scientists actively publishing peer-reviewed research, there was 97% agreement. Alternatively, a 2010 analysis led by William Anderegg compiled a database of scientists from public declarations on climate change, both supporting and rejecting the consensus. Among scientists who had published peer-reviewed climate research, there was 97% agreement. However, it is worth pointing out that science is not decided by majority vote. This is articulated concisely by John Reisman who says: "Science is not a democracy. It is a dictatorship. It is evidence that does the dictating." Figure and text taken from Dr. John Cook's special Earth Day essay, Closing the Consensus Gap on Climate Change.

Thanks for participating!

Jeff Masters

[qualia]

New mechanism converts natural gas to energy faster, captures CO2

(Phys.org) —North Carolina State University researchers have identified a new mechanism to convert natural gas into energy up to 70 times faster, while effectively capturing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO₂).

"This could make power generation from natural gas both cleaner and more efficient," says Fanxing Li, co-author of a paper on the research and an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State.

At issue is a process called chemical looping, in which a solid, oxygen-laden material – called an "oxygen carrier" – is put in contact with natural gas. The oxygen atoms in the oxygen carrier interact with the natural gas, causing combustion that produces energy.

Previous state-of-the-art oxygen carriers were made from a composite of inert ceramic material and metal oxides. But Li's team has developed a new type of oxygen carrier that include a "mixed ionic-electronic conductor," which effectively shuttles oxygen atoms into the natural gas very efficiently – making the chemical looping combustion process as much as 70 times faster. This mixed conductor material is held in a nanoscale matrix with an iron oxide – otherwise known as rust. The rust serves as a source of oxygen for the mixed conductor to shuttle out into the natural gas.

NC State University researchers have developed a new type of oxygen carrier that include a "mixed ionic-electronic conductor," which effectively shuttles oxygen atoms into natural gas very efficiently -- making the chemical looping combustion process as much as 70 times faster. Credit: Fanxing Li, North Carolina State University

In addition to energy, the combustion process produces water vapor and CO₂. By condensing out the water vapor, researchers are able to create a stream of concentrated CO₂ to be capture for sequestration.

Because the new oxygen carrier combusts natural gas so much more quickly than previous chemical looping technologies, it makes smaller chemical looping reactors more economically feasible – since they would allow users to create the same amount of energy with a smaller system.

"Improving this process hopefully moves us closer to commercial applications that use chemical looping, which would help us limit greenhouse gas emissions," Li says.

Explore further: A milestone for new carbon-dioxide capture/clean coal technology

More information: The paper, "Iron Oxide with Facilitated O2 – Transport for Facile Fuel Oxidation and CO2 Capture in a Chemical Looping Scheme," was chosen as part of the cover page story in the March issue of ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/sc300177j

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-mechanism-natural-gas-energy-faster.html#jCp

Edited May 7, 2013 by qualia

[qualia]

 

[woof woof woof]

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2407

Does not compute! That must be what residents of Iowa and the Midwest have have been saying to themselves on Tuesday as a ferocious heat wave unprecedented in intensity for so early in the year sent temperatures soaring as high as 108°. Just two weeks ago, the deepest snowfall ever measured during any May of record buried a wide swath from Arkansas to Minnesota, with Iowa breaking its all-time snowfall record for May (13” accumulation at Osage on May 1 - 3.) And how's this for a definition of "Weather Whiplash": Sioux City, Iowa had their first-ever snowfall on record in the month of May on May 1 (1.4"), but hit an astonishing 106° yesterday. Not only was this their hottest temperature ever measured in the month of May, but only two June days in recorded history have been hotter (June, 10, 1933: 107° and June 21, 1988: 108°.) On May 12th they registered 29°, and thus had a 77° rise over 56 hours (from 6 a.m. May 12 to 1:30 p.m May 14.)

Much more on the link's page.

[qualia]

fantastic, fuck shit up,

anarchristah

[woof woof woof]

Specially for Dolos

Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog

Study: 97% Agreement on Manmade Global Warming

Posted by: Angela Fritz, 7:36 PM GMT on May 16, 2013 +31

The scientific agreement that climate change is happening, and that it's caused by human activity, is significant and growing, according to a new study published Thursday. The research, which is the most comprehensive analysis of climate research to date, found that 97.1% of the studies published between 1991 to 2011 that expressed a position on manmade climate change agreed that it was happening, and that it was due to human activity.

The study looked at peer reviewed research that mentioned climate change or global warming. Peer review is the way that scientific journals approve research papers that are submitted. In peer review, group of scientists that weren't involved in the study, but who are experts in the field, look at the research being submitted and have approved that it meets scientific process standards, and the standards of that journal.

In 2011, 521 of those peer reviewed papers agreed that climate change is real, and that human activity is the cause. Nine papers in 2011 disagreed.

John Cook, founder of skepticalscience.com and the lead author on the study, said the motivation for the analysis was the importance of scientific consensus in shaping public opinion, and therefore policy. "When people understand that climate scientists agree on human-caused global warming, they're more likely to support climate policy," Cook said. "But when the public are asked how many climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming, the average answer is around 50%."

This "consensus gap" is what Cook and the research team is trying to close. "Raising awareness of the scientific consensus is a key step towards meaningful climate action," Cook said.

This study is not the first to examine the overwhelming agreement among climate scientists. Surveys of actively publishing climate scientists as well as analyses of climate change papers have shown similar results.

In 2004 Naomi Oreskes, Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego, published what many scientists consider the seminal study on climate change consensus. She also co-authored the book Merchants of Doubt, which identifies and examines the similarities between today's climate change conversation and previous controversies over tobacco smoking, acid rain, and the hole in the ozone layer.

Oreskes believes that the public isn't aware of the consensus because of deliberate efforts to cause confusion. "There has been a systematic attempt to create the impression that scientists did not have a consensus, as part of a broader strategy to prevent federal government action," Oreskes said. "The public have been confused because people have been trying to confuse us."

The study published Thursday is the first to take so many papers and authors into account. Doing a search on the popular science article website Web of Science for "climate change" or "global warming" produces over 12,000 results. Of these, 4,014 papers were identified to state a position on climate change. Among those, 3,896, or 97.1% endorsed the consensus that climate change was happening and that it was caused by human activity.

In an interesting result, Cook and his team found that over time, scientists tend to express a position on climate change less and less in their research papers. This is likely a result of consensus -- that if a scientific conclusion has been reached, there's no need to continue to state that conclusion in new research. "Scientists tend to take the consensus for granted," says Cook, "perhaps not realizing that the public still think it's a 50:50 debate."

[qualia]

World has entered new CO2 'danger zone', UN says

The world has entered a "new danger zone" with levels of Earth-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere never experienced by humankind, the UN's climate chief warned Monday.

When it breached the CO2 threshold of 400 parts per million (ppm) last week, the world "crossed an historic threshold and entered a new danger zone," Christiana Figueres said in a statement urging policy action.

The level measured by US monitors has not existed on Earth in three to five million years—a time when temperatures were several degrees warmer and the sea level was 20 to 40 meters (22 to 44 yards) higher than today, experts say.

Before the Industrial Revolution, when man first started pumping carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, CO2 levels were about 280 ppm—rising steadily since records began in the 1950s.

The 400 ppm symbolic threshold had been expected to be breached for some time, but campaigners say it should nevertheless serve as a wake-up call in efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions through fossil fuel use.

"The world must wake up and take note of what this means for human security, human welfare and economic development," said Figueres, who oversees global negotiations aimed at limiting warming-induced climate change.

"In the face of clear and present danger, we need a policy response which truly rises to the challenge."

Negotiators under the auspices of the United Nations are seeking by 2015 to develop a new, global climate treaty to take effect by 2020.

Nations are simultaneously attempting to find short-term solutions pre-2020 to closing the growing gap between agreed carbon emission targets and the actual curbs required to contain warming.

The UN is targeting a maximum temperature rise of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) on pre-industrial levels for what scientists believe would be manageable climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which informs policy makers, has said atmospheric CO2 must be limited to 400 ppm for a temperature rise of 2-2.4 deg C (3.6 and 4.3 deg F).

Last Friday, however, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's monitoring centre in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, released data showing the daily average CO2 over the Pacific Ocean was 400.03 ppm as of May 9.

A separate monitor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, measured 400.08 ppm.

"We still have a chance to stave off the worst effects of climate change, but this will require a greatly stepped-up response," Figueres said Monday.

Global climate negotiations have been making poor progress and the yearly rise in emissions has led many scientists to conclude that warming of 3 or 4 C (5.4-7.2 F) is probable by century's end.

The next round of high-level talks are to take place in Warsaw, Poland in December, with a stock-taking session scheduled for Bonn, Germany in June.

Last year's meeting in Doha, Qatar, saw the 27-nation European Union, Australia, Switzerland and eight other industrialised nations sign up for binding emission cuts until 2020 under an extension of the Kyoto Protocol.

Together, the countries represent only 15 percent of global emissions.

The United States, China and India, the world's biggest emitters of CO2, have no binding targets.

On Sunday, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change said more than half of common plant species and a third of animal species are likely to see their living space halved within seven decades on current CO2 emission trends.

Output of man-made greenhouse gases is putting Earth on track for warming of 4 deg C (7.2 deg F) by 2100, it said.

http://phys.org/news/2013-05-world-co2-danger-zone.html

[Halcyon Daze]

Here's one to go with your last post Qualia

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-10/hawaii-carbon-dioxide-measurement-for-may-9-passed-400-ppm.html

Greenhouse Gases Hit Threshold Unseen in 3 Million Years

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surpassed a threshold not seen for 3 million years, exceeding 400 parts per million for the first time since researchers began tracking the data.

The main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming averaged 400.03 parts per million at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa monitoring station in Hawaiion May 9, the agency said yesterday.

The level is considered a landmark by scientists and environmentalists, who say carbon emissions caused by burning fossil fuels are warming the planet and must be reined in before they cause irreversible changes to weather, sea levels and Arctic ice cover. NOAA’s data stretches back to 1958.

“We are in the process of creating a prehistoric climate that humans have no evolutionary experience of,” Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said in a telephone interview.

The last time CO2 levels were this high was at least 3 million years ago, he said. Then, “temperatures were 2 to 3 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial times, the polar ice caps were much smaller, and sea levels were about 20 meters (66 feet) higher than today.”

Carbon Market

The atmospheric reading comes three weeks after the European Parliament rejected a plan to shore up prices in the Emissions Trading System, the world’s biggest effort to ratchet back greenhouse-gas pollution. The system attaches a cost to CO2 released by burning fossil fuels, giving manufacturers and utilities an incentive to reduce emissions.

Carbon permits traded on the EUETS fell 41 euro cents to 3.38 euros ($4.38) a ton yesterday. Analysts such as David King, former chief science adviser to the U.K. government, have said industry won’t eliminate carbon for less than 100 euros a ton. The price has fallen almost 90 percent since peaking at about 31 euros in 2006.

Carbon dioxide can stay in the atmosphere for as much as a century, so levels now may cause warming for decades. The concentration has now increased by more than 40 percent from the pre-industrial mark of 280 parts per million, which is abbreviated to ppm.

Data Series

The Mauna Loa data is important because it represents the longest set of continuous measurements of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. Charles David Keeling, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, began taking readings there in 1958.

Keeling’s measurements provided the first physical evidence of the steady rise in CO2 in the atmosphere as a result of burning fossil fuels, confirming part of Swedish chemist Svante August Arrhenius’s theory from 1896 that burning fossil fuels may cause global warming.

The United Nations in 2007 said stabilizing the gas at 400 ppm to 440 ppm may lead to a temperature gain of as much as 2.8 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit). That’s at odds with the goal set out by climate treaty negotiators from more than 190 nations, who have agreed to shoot for limiting the temperature increase to 2 degrees. The global average has already risen by about 0.8 of a degree since pre-industrial times.

‘Wrong Direction’

“We are heading in the wrong direction in terms of dealing with climate change,” David Nussbaum, chief executive officer of the environmental group WWF’s U.K. arm, said in an e-mailed statement. “There is limited time for governments to achieve the goal they have set themselves for agreeing a global deal that effectively tackles climate change.”

Negotiators at the UN talks are working toward agreeing on a global climate treaty in 2015 that would come into force from 2020. They’ll meet in Warsaw in November to lay the groundwork for those discussions.

The surfeit of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere already threatens the 2-degree target. At best, pledges by countries from the U.S. and China to the Maldives will cut predicted emissions in 2020 to 52 gigatons (52 billion tons) from 58 gigatons, the UN Environment Program said in November. It said the level consistent with 2 degrees of warming is 44 gigatons.

The UN’s 2007 report also said that atmospheric CO2 in the range of 400 to 440 ppm could lead to sea level rise of as much as 1.7 meters. That would threaten coastal cities from New York toLondon and Bangkok.

Nobel Prize

The world body’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, will publish its latest comprehensive report on climate science in four parts between this September and October 2014.

“There is no doubt that the average global temperature will continue to increase,” Joanna Haigh, a professor of atmospheric physics at Imperial College London, said in an e-mailed statement. “Unless swift action is taken to reduce CO2 emissions, the planet will warm by more than 2 degrees.”

Skeptics of man’s influence on warming temperatures note that while CO2 levels in the atmosphere have continued to rise since the 1990s, no year has been statistically warmer on average than 1998, with higher levels for 2005 and 2010 falling within the margin of error for that year, according to data compiled by the U.K. Met Office.

Happy Plants

“The Earth has had many-times-higher levels of CO2 in the past,” said Marc Morano, former spokesman for Republican Senator James Inhofe and executive editor of Climate Depot, a blog that posts articles skeptical of climate change. “Americans should welcome the 400 parts-per-million threshold. This means that plants are going to be happy, and this means that global-warming fearmongers are going to be proven wrong.”

That position is disputed by many researchers, said Melanie Fitzpatrick, climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“This needs to be a wake-up call,” she said in a statement. “Reaching 400 parts per million represents a dire experiment with the climate system. As long as humans have walked the Earth, we’ve never seen carbon dioxide levels this high.”

[Halcyon Daze]

Here's one to go with your last post Qualia

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-10/hawaii-carbon-dioxide-measurement-for-may-9-passed-400-ppm.html

Greenhouse Gases Hit Threshold Unseen in 3 Million Years

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surpassed a threshold not seen for 3 million years, exceeding 400 parts per million for the first time since researchers began tracking the data.

The main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming averaged 400.03 parts per million at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa monitoring station in Hawaiion May 9, the agency said yesterday.

The level is considered a landmark by scientists and environmentalists, who say carbon emissions caused by burning fossil fuels are warming the planet and must be reined in before they cause irreversible changes to weather, sea levels and Arctic ice cover. NOAA’s data stretches back to 1958.

“We are in the process of creating a prehistoric climate that humans have no evolutionary experience of,” Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said in a telephone interview.

The last time CO2 levels were this high was at least 3 million years ago, he said. Then, “temperatures were 2 to 3 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial times, the polar ice caps were much smaller, and sea levels were about 20 meters (66 feet) higher than today.”

Carbon Market

The atmospheric reading comes three weeks after the European Parliament rejected a plan to shore up prices in the Emissions Trading System, the world’s biggest effort to ratchet back greenhouse-gas pollution. The system attaches a cost to CO2 released by burning fossil fuels, giving manufacturers and utilities an incentive to reduce emissions.

Carbon permits traded on the EUETS fell 41 euro cents to 3.38 euros ($4.38) a ton yesterday. Analysts such as David King, former chief science adviser to the U.K. government, have said industry won’t eliminate carbon for less than 100 euros a ton. The price has fallen almost 90 percent since peaking at about 31 euros in 2006.

Carbon dioxide can stay in the atmosphere for as much as a century, so levels now may cause warming for decades. The concentration has now increased by more than 40 percent from the pre-industrial mark of 280 parts per million, which is abbreviated to ppm.

Data Series

The Mauna Loa data is important because it represents the longest set of continuous measurements of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. Charles David Keeling, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, began taking readings there in 1958.

Keeling’s measurements provided the first physical evidence of the steady rise in CO2 in the atmosphere as a result of burning fossil fuels, confirming part of Swedish chemist Svante August Arrhenius’s theory from 1896 that burning fossil fuels may cause global warming.

The United Nations in 2007 said stabilizing the gas at 400 ppm to 440 ppm may lead to a temperature gain of as much as 2.8 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit). That’s at odds with the goal set out by climate treaty negotiators from more than 190 nations, who have agreed to shoot for limiting the temperature increase to 2 degrees. The global average has already risen by about 0.8 of a degree since pre-industrial times.

‘Wrong Direction’

“We are heading in the wrong direction in terms of dealing with climate change,” David Nussbaum, chief executive officer of the environmental group WWF’s U.K. arm, said in an e-mailed statement. “There is limited time for governments to achieve the goal they have set themselves for agreeing a global deal that effectively tackles climate change.”

Negotiators at the UN talks are working toward agreeing on a global climate treaty in 2015 that would come into force from 2020. They’ll meet in Warsaw in November to lay the groundwork for those discussions.

The surfeit of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere already threatens the 2-degree target. At best, pledges by countries from the U.S. and China to the Maldives will cut predicted emissions in 2020 to 52 gigatons (52 billion tons) from 58 gigatons, the UN Environment Program said in November. It said the level consistent with 2 degrees of warming is 44 gigatons.

The UN’s 2007 report also said that atmospheric CO2 in the range of 400 to 440 ppm could lead to sea level rise of as much as 1.7 meters. That would threaten coastal cities from New York toLondon and Bangkok.

Nobel Prize

The world body’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, will publish its latest comprehensive report on climate science in four parts between this September and October 2014.

“There is no doubt that the average global temperature will continue to increase,” Joanna Haigh, a professor of atmospheric physics at Imperial College London, said in an e-mailed statement. “Unless swift action is taken to reduce CO2 emissions, the planet will warm by more than 2 degrees.”

Skeptics of man’s influence on warming temperatures note that while CO2 levels in the atmosphere have continued to rise since the 1990s, no year has been statistically warmer on average than 1998, with higher levels for 2005 and 2010 falling within the margin of error for that year, according to data compiled by the U.K. Met Office.

Happy Plants

“The Earth has had many-times-higher levels of CO2 in the past,” said Marc Morano, former spokesman for Republican Senator James Inhofe and executive editor of Climate Depot, a blog that posts articles skeptical of climate change. “Americans should welcome the 400 parts-per-million threshold. This means that plants are going to be happy, and this means that global-warming fearmongers are going to be proven wrong.”

That position is disputed by many researchers, said Melanie Fitzpatrick, climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“This needs to be a wake-up call,” she said in a statement. “Reaching 400 parts per million represents a dire experiment with the climate system. As long as humans have walked the Earth, we’ve never seen carbon dioxide levels this high.”

[whitewind]

It looks like the Deniers have won then. They'll be happy. Our governments have failed and once again reason has lost out to vested interest. In the meantime, Tony Abbott tries to eliminate important environmental protections like marine parks so that we can continue to trade fossil fuels in ever-increasing amounts.

How do we stop the madness? I think ever-increasing methods of our own might be our only choice. We are being forced into action we might otherwise wish to avoid. Otherwise what's left for our children won't be worth having