How Bad Is Global Warming?

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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Jul 14, 2015 3:52 pm

I was wondering, "this shit seems so familiar" - aside from 70s-era advocates of global cooling. Looks like a similar story came down the pike in 2011:

News about an imminent ‘mini ice age’ is trending — but it’s not true

By Sarah Kaplan July 14 at 3:29 AM

ImageMontage of images of solar activity between August 1991 and September 2001. New research says the sun is about to enter a quiet period, but that doesn’t mean the Earth is going to cool off. (Yohkoh/ISAS/Lockheed-Martin/NAOJ/U. Tokyo/NASA)

“Scientists warn the sun will ‘go to sleep’ in 2030 and could cause temperatures to plummet,” blared one headline from this weekend.

“Earth heading for ‘mini ice age’ within 15 years,” warned another.

By Sunday evening, news that the Earth could be headed for period of bitter cold was trending on Facebook and whizzing across Twitter. The story — which has been reported everywhere from conservative blogs to the British press to the Weather Channel to the Huffington Post — was based on a recent presentation at the Royal Astronomical Society’s national meeting. Researchers studying sunspots found that solar activity is due to decline dramatically in the next few decades, reaching levels not seen since the 17th century, during a period known as the Maunder minimum. Back then, the decline coincided with what’s called the “Little Ice Age,” when Europe’s winters turned brutally cold, crops failed and rivers froze over. Could another one be on its way?

Not quite.

Though University of Northumbria mathematics professor Valentina Zharkova, who led the sunspot research, did find that the magnetic waves that produce sunspots (which are associated with high levels of solar activity) are expected to counteract one another in an unusual way in the coming years, the press release about her research mentions nothing about how that will affect the Earth’s climate. Zharkova never even used the phrase “mini ice age.” Meanwhile, several other recent studies of a possible solar minimum have concluded that whatever climate effects the phenomenon may have will be dwarfed by the warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

Besides, that “Little Ice Age” that occurred during the Maunder minimum, it wasn’t so much a global ice age as a cold spell in Europe, and it may have been caused more by clouds of ash from volcanic eruptions than by fluctuations in solar activity.

(It’s also worth mentioning that Zharkova’s findings have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, so her conclusions haven’t been vetted and refined.)

But those nuances were totally lost as stories about Zharkova’s research made the rounds on social media and in the press. Instead, we got 300-year-old engravings of Londoners cavorting on the frozen River Thames accompanied by predictions of food shortages and brutal cold — plus snarky tweets about not worrying about global warming anymore.

Mark R. Levin✔ @marklevinshow

Coming mini ice age? Don't tell global warming fanatics. http://fb.me/4mf2TDmfy
1:30 PM - 13 Jul 2015


This isn’t the first time that a story about sunspots has turned into a story about climate change skepticism. John Casey, president of the Orlando-based Space and Science Research Corporation, which denies that global temperatures are rising, has written two books on the threat of impending “solar hibernation.” In 2011, when a series of studies concluded that the sun was heading into a cycle of unusually low activity, one headline cheered “Global Warming Be Damned, We Might Be Headed for a Mini Ice Age.” (emphasis added)

For decades, scientists have known that solar activity fluctuates according to a roughly 11-year cycle. Sunspots — (relatively) cool, dark blotches on the sun’s surface — indicate areas of intense magnetic activity. But recently sunspots have been weakening, as has the sun’s magnetic field, leading scientists to conclude that the sun is heading into an especially quiet cycle termed the “grand solar minimum”

The new research from Zharkova argues that the solar cycles are regulated by not one but two magnetic waves fluctuating at slightly different frequencies, and that the unusually low activity can be explained by the waves getting far enough out of sync that they effectively cancel one another out.

Even if the upcoming decline in solar activity turns out to be as Zharkova’s suggests, scientists who study the sun say we can’t be sure how it will affect Earth’s climate.

“We have some interesting hints that solar activity is associated with climate, but we don’t understand the association,” Dean Pesnell, a NASA scientist who worked on one of the 2011 studies about the grand minimum, told National Geographic at the time.

Those studies that have found a correlation between solar activity and global temperatures predict that the drop in temperatures associated with a grand minimum will be much smaller than the warming that’s predicted to occur due to greenhouse gas emissions: A 2010 study in the journal Geophysical Letters predicted it could cause a global temperature decrease of about 0.3 degrees Celsius by 2100 — not nearly enough to offset the 1 to 5 degree increase anticipated from human-caused global warming.

As for that image of Londoners frolicking at “frost fairs” on the frozen-over Thames? Those had less to do with the activity of the sun than the activities of humans. Historical climatologist George Adamson told the BBC last year that the river used to freeze because of the architecture of the old London Bridge, whose arches prevented salty sea water from passing upriver and lowering its freezing point. The construction of a new bridge in the 19th century, and other landscape changes that made the river flow faster, brought an end to those festivals — less so than the end of the Maunder minimum.

“I’d be surprised if it froze again to the extent where we’d be able to allow large numbers of people on the Thames,” he said.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby justdrew » Wed Jul 15, 2015 1:42 am

well, turns out, it's just like I was telling ben...

New study finds heat is being stored beneath the ocean surface
July 10, 2015
For much of the past decade, a puzzle has been confounding the climate science community. Nearly all of the measurable indicators of global climate change—such as sea level, ice cover on land and sea, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations—show a world changing on short, medium, and long time scales. But for the better part of a decade, global surface temperatures appeared to level off. The overall, long-term trend was upward, but the climb was less steep from 2003–2012. Some scientists, the media, and climate contrarians began referring to it as "the hiatus."

If greenhouse gases are still increasing and all other indicators show warming-related change, why wouldn't surface temperatures keep climbing steadily, year after year? One of the leading explanations offered by scientists was that extra heat was being stored in the ocean.

Now a new analysis by three ocean scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory not only confirms that the extra heat has been going into the ocean, but it shows where. According to research by Veronica Nieves, Josh Willis, and Bill Patzert, the waters of the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean warmed significantly from 2003 to 2012. But the warming did not occur at the surface; it showed up below 10 meters (32 feet) in depth, and mostly between 100 to 300 meters (300 to 1,000 feet) below the sea surface. They published their results on July 9, 2015, in the journal Science.

"Overall, the ocean is still absorbing extra heat," said Willis, an oceanographer at JPL. "But the top couple of layers of the ocean exchange heat easily and can keep it away from the surface for ten years or so because of natural cycles. In the long run, the planet is still warming."
New study finds heat is being stored beneath the ocean surface
acquired 1993 - 2012

To understand the slowdown in global surface warming, Nieves and colleagues dove into two decades of ocean temperature records; specifically, they examined data sets compiled from underwater floats and other instruments by the Argo team at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, by the World Ocean Atlas (WOA), and by Japanese scientist Masao Ishii and colleagues. The JPL team found that for most of the decade from 2003–2012, waters near the surface (0–10 meters) of the Pacific Ocean cooled across much of the basin. However, the water in lower layers—10–100 meters, 100–200 meters, and 200–300 meters—warmed.

The animated map at the top of this page shows the trends in water temperatures in various depth layers of the ocean as measured between 2003 and 2012. Areas in red depict warming trends in degrees Celsius per year, while blues depict cooling trends. Warming is most acute between 100–200 meters in the western Pacific and the eastern Indian Ocean. Some areas of the Pacific appear to cool—particularly near the surface and in the eastern half, which correlates well with the cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which has been underway for much of the past 15 to 20 years.

Note that the Atlantic Ocean does not show significant trends at any depth, with warming temperatures in one place counter-balanced by cooling in others. The Atlantic basin is also relatively small compared to the Pacific and does not have as much impact on global temperatures. The JPL team also noted that the temperature signal was neutral or inconclusive at depths below 300 meters, where measurements are relatively sparse.

The figure below depicts the trends in a different way. It represents a cross-section of the top 300 meters of the global ocean and how temperatures changed from 1993 to 2012. Note how there are cooler waters near the surface in several years in the 2000s, but that waters at depth grow much warmer. Note, too, how the overall trend in 20 years goes from a cooling ocean to a significantly warmer ocean.

Nieves, Willis, and Patzert were provoked to launch the study because they wanted a more detailed, nuanced picture of ocean temperatures than is possible with most models. On a broad scale, models can replicate broad and long-term trends in the sea; but on smaller scales of space and time, a lot of the models cannot match real-world conditions. The new findings should help improve models of ocean heat storage and climate impacts on regional scales.

The Pacific Ocean covers nearly one-third of Earth's surface, so it has an outsized impact on the global thermostat. "As the top 100 meters of the Pacific goes, so goes the surface temperatures of the planet," said Patzert, a climatologist at JPL. With the surface layer of the ocean being cooler for much of the study period, those waters had a moderating effect on air masses and weather systems on the continents. However, ocean and air temperatures have started to rise swiftly in the past two to three years, which suggests that the cool phase of the PDO and the warming hiatus is over.

"Natural, decadal variability has been with us for centuries, and it continues to have big regional impacts on society," said Nieves, a JPL scientist with a joint appointment at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We can expect to have more hiatuses in the future, but unless future hiatuses are stronger than usual, they will be less visible due to fast rising greenhouse gases. Right now, the combined effect of the human-caused warming and the Pacific changing to a warm phase can play together and produce warming acceleration."
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Luther Blissett » Thu Jul 16, 2015 1:34 pm

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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Jul 16, 2015 3:39 pm

Halfway to 2 C — According to NASA, We Just Blew Past an Ominous Milestone

2 C.

It’s the amount of warming past pre-industrial times that the IPCC says we should try to avoid this Century in order to prevent the worst consequences of human-caused climate change. It’s the so-called safe limit, even though there’s nothing really safe about it and we should probably be aiming more for a below 1.5 C target.

1 C.

It’s the amount of warming between pre-industrial times and, according to the latest data from NASA, the first half of 2015. In other words, temperatures during the first six months of 2015 are now at least halfway toward freeing some of the nastiest climate monsters in the closet.

* * * * *

According to NASA GISS, June of 2015 was tied with 1998 as the hottest of any June in the entire 135 year global climate record. Coming in at +0.76 C above NASA’s 20th Century average, June follows May at +0.73 C (4th hottest), April at +0.71 C (tied for 3rd hottest), March at +0.91 C (second hottest), February at + 0.89 C (hottest), and January at +0.81 C (2nd hottest).

Combined, these average out for a +0.80 C departure from the 20th Century in the NASA measure. That’s an extraordinary amount of heat — +0.18 C above 1998 levels and +0.05 C above 2014, which was the previous hottest year on record.

But, perhaps most importantly, this reading is the first consistent break at 1 C above 1880s levels. An ominous benchmark and halfway to the catastrophic 2 C warming we really, really want to avoid.

June Takes On El Nino-Type Temperature Pattern
Image

(NASA’s geographic temperature anomalies for a record hot June in 2015. Image source: NASA GISS.)

Looking at the June temperature anomaly map, we find very large zones of 2-4 C above average readings running up toward the Northern Hemisphere Pole. The first of these zones rides up over Western Asia. Covering most of the region from the Caspian Sea on northward, this area features two anomalously hot zones ranging to as high as a +4.7 C anomaly in intensity. The second of these zones issues from the developing El Nino in the Eastern Pacific, rides up over the hot ‘Blob’ of ocean water in the Northeastern Pacific, invades Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, and then enters the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. This zone also features large expanses of +2 to +4 C above average temperatures.

Overall, most of the globe saw above average readings with only the region just south of Greenland, a small zone just west of the hot ‘Blob,’ and an area of somewhat cooler readings over West Antarctic showing below average readings.

Image

(Zonal anomalies began to pick up the El Nino signal during June. Note that equatorial heat gain nearly matches that of the Northern Hemisphere pole. Image source: NASA GISS.)

Under El Nino — a climate condition the globe is steadily transitioning toward — we would expect to see relative warming near the Equator and relative cooling near the poles. During June, we begin to see this signature with the Equator warming up to a substantial +1.2 C positive anomaly. Antarctica also followed this trend as that polar zone dipped into the -0.4 to -1.2 C negative anomaly range (60 to 90 South). Meanwhile, the Northern Hemisphere Polar zone (60 to 90 North) showed significant hot readings in the range of +0.9 to +1.4 C anomalies.

Overall, the entire globe from 50 South on northward experienced above average to much hotter than average temperatures in the zonal measure. A clear and powerful heat signal for June of 2015.

Building El Nino Likely Means More Heat to Come

With the first six months of 2015 finished and with El Nino still strengthening in the Pacific, it appears that a record hot year may already be a lock. In addition, further warming may be in store.

The current El Nino appears to be roughly on a similar development track, as far as timing and possible intensity, to the 1997-1998 El Nino. Given this rough allegory, we are approximately at the same place, climatologically speaking, as July of 1997. During that event, global temperatures didn’t really start taking off into severe record high ranges until Fall of 1997 through Summer of 1998. If the ocean to atmosphere heat loading for the current event proceeds in similar fashion, we could expect to see even more extreme temperatures than we are currently experiencing by Fall and running on through at least the first season or two of 2016.

Image

(Record-breaking El Nino by October? NOAA CFSv2 models have been spitting out some pretty extreme results. If we see anywhere near this level of sea surface warming the Central Pacific, the heat records thus far for months during 2014 and 2015 may soon be left in the dust. Image source: NOAA CPC.)

Looking toward July’s forecast, there is a bit of a caveat. That month is typically cooler globally due to a lessed impact of the greenhouse gas heat forcing. This is due to the fact that greenhouse gasses are concentrated most heavily in the Northern Hemisphere and such greenhouse gasses are most efficient at heat trapping during night time and winter. As such, we may see a bit of a dip in the July readings below June. But if this current El Nino gets involved as the models predict, it’s likely to be record-breaking heat that pushes some very ominous global temperature thresholds all the way through from August 2015 to at least early 2016.

Let’s just hope we don’t close too much more of the gap to 2 C. It’s really starting to get scary out there.

Links:

NASA GISS

GISTEMP

NOAA CPC

Hat tip to Wili

(Please support public, non-special interest based, science like the fantastic work written about here and conducted by the experts at NASA and NOAA.)
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Jul 21, 2015 6:03 pm

World's Ocean Could Rise Higher, Sooner, Faster Than Most Thought Possible

New research shows that consensus estimates of sea level increases may be underestimating threat; new predictions would see major coastal cities left uninhabitable by next century

by Jon Queally, staff writer

Published on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 by Common Dreams

Image'Roughly 10 feet of sea level rise—well beyond previous estimates—would render coastal cities such as New York, London, and Shanghai uninhabitable.' (Image: Woodbine)

If a new scientific paper is proven accurate, the international target of limiting global temperatures to a 2°C rise this century will not be nearly enough to prevent catastrophic melting of ice sheets that would raise sea levels much higher and much faster than previously thought possible.

According to the new study—which has not yet been peer-reviewed, but was written by former NASA scientist James Hansen and 16 other prominent climate researchers—current predictions about the catastrophic impacts of global warming, the melting of vast ice sheets, and sea level rise do not take into account the feedback loop implications of what will occur if large sections of Greenland and the Antarctic are consumed by the world's oceans.

A summarized draft of the full report was released to journalists on Monday, with the shocking warning that such glacial melting will "likely" occur this century and could cause as much as a ten foot sea-level rise in as little as fifty years. Such a prediction is much more severe than current estimates contained in reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the UN-sponsored body that represents the official global consensus of the scientific community.

"If the ocean continues to accumulate heat and increase melting of marine-terminating ice shelves of Antarctica and Greenland, a point will be reached at which it is impossible to avoid large scale ice sheet disintegration with sea level rise of at least several meters," the paper states.

Separately, the researchers conclude that "continued high emissions will make multi-meter sea level rise practically unavoidable and likely to occur this century. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization."

The Daily Beast's Mark Hertsgaard, who attended a press call with Dr. Hansen on Monday, reports that the work presented by the researchers is

warning that humanity could confront "sea level rise of several meters" before the end of the century unless greenhouse gas emissions are slashed much faster than currently contemplated.

This roughly 10 feet of sea level rise—well beyond previous estimates—would render coastal cities such as New York, London, and Shanghai uninhabitable. "Parts of [our coastal cities] would still be sticking above the water," Hansen said, "but you couldn’t live there."

This apocalyptic scenario illustrates why the goal of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius is not the safe "guardrail" most politicians and media coverage imply it is, argue Hansen and 16 colleagues in a blockbuster study they are publishing this week in the peer-reviewed journal Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry. On the contrary, a 2C future would be "highly dangerous."

If Hansen is right—and he has been right, sooner, about the big issues in climate science longer than anyone—the implications are vast and profound.


In the call with reporters, Hansen explained that time is of the essence, given the upcoming climate talks in Paris this year and the grave consequences the world faces if bold, collective action is not taken immediately. "We have a global crisis that calls for international cooperation to reduce emissions as rapidly as practical," the paper states.

Hansen said he has long believed that many of the existing models were under-estimating the potential impacts of ice sheet melting, and told the Daily Beast: "Now we have evidence to make that statement based on much more than suspicion."

Though he acknowledged the publication of the paper was unorthodox, Hansen told reporters that the research itself is "substantially more persuasive than anything previously published."

For his part, Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist who writes about weather and climate for Slate, said the "bombshell" findings are both credible and terrifying. Holthaus writes:

To come to their findings, the authors used a mixture of paleoclimate records, computer models, and observations of current rates of sea level rise, but "the real world is moving somewhat faster than the model," Hansen says.

[...] The implications are mindboggling: In the study’s likely scenario, New York City—and every other coastal city on the planet—may only have a few more decades of habitability left. That dire prediction, in Hansen’s view, requires "emergency cooperation among nations."


In response to the paper, climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University affirmed: "If we cook the planet long enough at about two degrees warming, there is likely to be a staggering amount of sea level rise. Key questions are when would greenhouse-gas emissions lock in this sea level rise and how fast would it happen? The latter point is critical to understanding whether and how we would be able to deal with such a threat."

The new research, Oppenheimer added, "takes a stab at answering the 'how soon?' question but we remain largely in the dark. Giving the state of uncertainty and the high risk, humanity better get its collective foot off the accelerator."

And as the Daily Beast's Hertsgaard notes, Hansen's track record on making climate predictions should command respect from people around the world. The larger question, however, is whether humanity has the capacity to act.

"The climate challenge has long amounted to a race between the imperatives of science and the contingencies of politics," Hertsgaard concludes. "With Hansen’s paper, the science has gotten harsher, even as the Nature Climate Change study affirms that humanity can still choose life, if it will. The question now is how the politics will respond—now, at Paris in December, and beyond."
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Luther Blissett » Wed Jul 22, 2015 10:29 am

I really think Hansen et. al. are more right than even they know.

Some good graphics at the link:
How the ongoing El Nino compares to the mother of all El Nino events

El Niño conditions are intensifying in the tropical Pacific Ocean, potentially leading to a record event that would reshape world weather patterns from Africa to Asia to North America.

That could be a boon to drought-plagued California, by steering more rainstorms there. But it could also increase the odds of drought in other parts of the world.

In addition, a record strong event would virtually guarantee that 2015 will beat 2014 as the warmest year this planet has seen since records began in the late 19th century. It would probably propel 2016 into record territory too, since El Niño events tend to have a time lag for their maximum effects on global average surface temperatures.

The hallmark of El Niño is a strip of much above average sea surface temperatures across the equatorial tropical Pacific, appearing like a gash in the ocean surface from the west coast of South America to the central Pacific. That is clearly present now, as it was in 1997.

The strongest El Niño on record occurred in 1997-98, and brought devastating flooding and mudslides to southern California, droughts and wildfire to Mexico, Indonesia and Brazil, and widespread coral bleaching from high water temperatures off the coast of Africa, Central America and in Australia's iconic Great Barrier Reef.

On Tuesday, NOAA released a side-by-side comparison of sea surface temperature anomalies during one week in November 1997, when that El Niño was near its peak intensity, and a recent week in July 2015. Typically, El Niño events reach peak intensity during the fall and winter, and this summer's event is extremely unusual in its intensity so early in the year. It may continue to intensify as fall approaches, as indicated by many of the computer models forecasters use to make El Niño outlooks.

Using NOAA's online data tools, Mashable created this side-by-side view of June 2015 sea surface temperature anomalies, when compared to conditions in June of 1997. (Monthly data is used here since it's a more reliable indicator of El Niño intensity, since conditions can vary significantly from week-to-week.)

It's clear from this that sea surface temperatures are running close to that of June 1997 in some parts of the Pacific. However, this is far from a guarantee that this event is on course to be stronger that the 1997-98 event was.

The latest forecasts from the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) in Maryland calls for a strong El Niño event to occur between now and the coming northern hemisphere winter, which is when El Niño conditions tend to peak, as well as when they have their greatest influence on global weather patterns. The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University is also forecasting near 100% odds of El Niño conditions through at least the winter, and forecasters there also say it is likely to be on the strong side.

No forecast agency is currently predicting a record El Niño this year, since there is still too much forecast uncertainty at this point.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Jul 28, 2015 12:45 pm

The world is already committed to a six meter sea level rise
Pete Dolack / Systemic Disorder

24th July 2015

The climate change discourse rarely looks beyond 2100, writes Pete Dolack. Maybe that's because even at current levels of CO2, we are committed to thousands of years of warming and polar ice melt that will raise sea levels by at least six meters. However the implacable imperatives of capitalism mean there's little prospect of change for a long time to come.

Even if humanity were to stop throwing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere today, a catastrophic rise in sea levels of six meters may be inevitable.

Two previous prehistoric interglacial periods, in which the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was believed to be about what it is today, resulted in dramatic rising of the oceans.

High-latitude ice sheets are melting, and given that global warming is most pronounced in the Arctic, it may already be too late stop a rise in sea levels that would flood out hundreds of millions around the world.

Two new papers, the latest in a series of scientific studies, paint a picture considerably less rosy than conventional ideas that major damage can still be avoided.

One of these papers, a nine-scientist report led by geologist Andrea Dutton at the University of Florida published in the journal Science, found that modest rises in global temperatures of 1-2C in the past led to sea levels rising at least six meters, ranging up to 13 meters (see figure).

For the ice, there's nothing 'safe' about a 2C temperature rise

Referencing the widely held belief that catastrophic damage can be avoided if global warming is held to no more than 2C from pre-industrial levels, she summarized the findings to Climate Central:

"Even if we meet that 2°C target, in the past with those types of temperatures, we may be committing ourselves to this level of sea level rise in the long term. The decisions we make now about where we want to be in 2100 commit us on a pathway where we can't go back. Once these ice sheets start to melt, the changes become irreversible."

The 'permissible' level may be less than that, however. More sophisticated sea-level reconstructions through interdisciplinary studies of geological evidence and better understanding of the behavior of ice sheets enabled the paper's authors to infer that temperatures only slightly higher than what we are experiencing today upset the climatic balance. A summary of the paper concludes:

"[D]uring the last interglacial - a warm period between ice ages 125,000 years ago - the global average temperature was similar to the present and this was linked to a sea-level rise of 6-9 meters, caused by melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica. Around 400,000 years ago, when global average temperatures were estimated to be between 1 to 2°C higher than preindustrial levels, sea levels reached 6-13 meters [higher.]"

More alarming, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere then was lower than it is today. Although geological forces pushing and pulling Earth's surface can't be precisely calculated, and thus introduce uncertainty in the actual level of the oceans in the geologic record, the greater uncertainty lies at the higher level of estimates. The paper's summary said:

"Noticeably, during these two periods, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere remained around 280 parts per million (ppm). The scientists also looked at sea level during the Pliocene, three million years ago, when carbon dioxide levels reached around 400 ppm - similar to today's levels.

"They hypothesized that sea level was at least 6 metres higher than today and potentially substantially higher. ... While the global average temperature rises of 1 to 3°C seem small, they were, like today, linked with magnified temperature increases in the polar regions which sustained over many thousands of years."

Even at current CO2 levels, we are committed to centuries of warming

A second paper, State of the Climate in 2014, reports that Arctic sea-surface temperatures are rising faster than overall global temperatures, ice caps across the Northern Hemisphere continue to shrink, record high permafrost temperatures are being recorded in northern Alaska and melting of the Greenland ice cap is accelerating.

The paper, a collaboration of 413 scientists from 58 countries, reports that, even if greenhouse gases were frozen at current levels, the oceans would continue to warm for centuries and thus lead to rising sea levels.

Carbon dioxide thrown into the air stays in the atmosphere for a long time and warming oceans will retain added heat and transfer that back to the atmosphere. This is already leading to warming oceans, State of the Climate reports:

"Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases are preventing heat radiated from Earth's surface from escaping into space as freely as it used to; most of the excess heat is being stored in the upper ocean. As a result, upper ocean heat content has increased significantly over the past two decades."

The Science and State of the Climate papers back previous studies that conclude "there is no going back" - the excess heat stored in oceans will be released back into the atmosphere for centuries to come - and that Earth is crossing multiple points of no return.

What would a 6 meter sea level rise look like?

Two worrisome trends are that the eight lowest Arctic Ocean sea ice extents have all occurred in the past eight years, and that the extent of the melting of the Greenland ice sheet during summer 2014 was faster than the 1981-2000 average 90% of the time.

Antarctic ice is not yet showing accelerated melting, State of the Climate reports, but the paper does note that short-term extremes in temperatures have become more frequent on the continent. Also two scientific papers published in 2014 suggest the West Antarctic ice sheet has become dangerously weakened.

One finds that a "large sector of the West Antarctic ice sheet ... has passed the point of no return" and the other finds that the ice sheet has become sufficiently unstable to possibly collapse in as few as 200 years. That is a long time by ordinary human standards, but very brief in geological terms, and would add greatly to rising sea levels.

So what would a six-meter increase in ocean levels mean? More than 440,000 square miles (1.14 million square kilometers), where 375 million people, would go under water, according to Climate Central.

The current path humanity is walking is to throw more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Current plans by political leaders to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 and completely by 2100 are woefully inadequate, but even those goals will be difficult to achieve.

Capitalism against the planet

The metabolism of capitalism, and all its incentives, is for more growth and thus more anthropogenic warming. Reversing global warming is impossible without reducing consumption, but that, too, is impossible under capitalism because a typical advanced capitalist country 60% to 70% of the economy is accounted for by household spending.

Because of the growth imperative of capitalism - the need to grow or die forces enterprises into never-ending innovations to cut costs - economic growth of 2.5% is necessary to maintain the unemployment rate where it is and "substantially stronger growth than that" is necessary for a rapid decrease, according to a former White House Council of Economic Advisers chair, Christina Romer.

Capitalism will not guarantee new jobs for those made unemployed by closing down polluting industries, adding incentives to maintain them. 'Free trade' agreements accelerate global warming because supply lines are stretched around the world and production is moved to the places with the lowest wages and weakest regulations.

And as conventional sources of energy are depleted, more extreme measures are taken, including the exploitation of tar sands, adding still more greenhouse gases.

Our descendants are not likely to believe that short-term corporate profits and unsustainable consumption were a fair tradeoff for a world left much less habitable.

Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet and photographer, and writes on Systemic Disorder. His forthcoming book 'It's Not Over: Lessons from the Socialist Experiment', a study of attempts to create societies on a basis other than capitalism, will be published by Zero Books in late 2015.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Luther Blissett » Wed Jul 29, 2015 10:17 am

Climate change 'triple threat' increases severe flooding risk in biggest US cities
Trio of sea-level rise, storm surge and heavy rainfall exposes coastal cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Boston to potentially catastrophic flooding in future

America’s biggest cities are at far greater risk of serious flooding in the coming decades than was previously thought, because of a “triple threat” produced under climate change, researchers said on Monday.

A combination of sea-level rise, storm surge and heavy rainfall – all functions of climate change – exposes New York, Los Angeles, Houston, San Francisco, San Diego and Boston to a much greater degree, research published on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change found.

“Call it a triple threat,” said Steven Meyers, a scientist at the University of South Florida and one of the authors. “What this shows is that there is an increasing risk of compound flooding, from storm surge and rainfall at the same time.”

About 40% of the US population lives in coastal cities – where flooding in the wake of storms is already proving increasingly costly in built-up areas, swamping subway lines and electricity stations.

But the Nature study was among the first to explore the combined risks under climate change of sea-level rise, heavy rainfall and storm surges over broad stretches of the US coast.

In the case of New York City, the risks of flooding – because of that combination of factors – has doubled over the past 60 years, the researchers found. A 4ft storm surge, combined with 5in of rainfall, could be heading New York City’s way once every 42 years, compared to about once in a century in the 1940s.

The increased risk was due to the combination of storm surge, rainfall and flooding.

“They are all somehow interconnected,” said Thomas Wahl, the University of South Florida researcher who led the study. “If sea levels continued to rise, this would certainly have an effect on storm surges, and storm surges have an effect on compound flooding.”

What that means is that it would not necessarily take a huge amount of rainfall to put New York or other cities underwater – a storm surge could do that on its own, Wahl said.

However, the exact nature of the connections between sea-level rise, storm surge and heavy rainfall were still not fully understood, he said. It was too early to say whether the heightened risks were due entirely to climate change.

The researchers drew on weather records and tide gauges to estimate the risks of future flooding.

Many of the cities along the east coast were also at high risk of storm surges and heavy rain, while the west coast cities were expected to get off relatively lightly.

But the researchers said they were in the early days of establishing which cities were most at risk from the combination of sea-level rise and extreme weather.

The United Nations science panel has projected a global sea-level rise of about 4ft – but many scientists believe that is an underestimate because it does not take into account the melting of ice sheets in western Antarctica.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby justdrew » Thu Jul 30, 2015 10:44 pm

surely it's time for even the sceptics to take Pascal's Wager into account with regard to climate change?

Also, full-on CO2 sequestration projects and orbital polar sun shields are the only meaningful remaining actions that can be taken.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby brainpanhandler » Fri Jul 31, 2015 4:06 am

justdrew » Thu Jul 30, 2015 9:44 pm wrote: full-on CO2 sequestration projects and orbital polar sun shields are the only meaningful remaining actions that can be taken.


Gasp. But Drew, those things might cost tens of billions, maybe even hundreds of billions. We can't afford to save the planet. Whatever shall we do?

How come the very people that carry on the loudest about how global warming science is a scam to raid the public coffers never seem to raise a peep over the trillions spent on "defense"? Why is that?
Besides. This is a disaster movie we're in here. :popcorn: You want to ruin the plot?
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King Jr.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Aug 04, 2015 4:26 pm

Original link has more embedded links.

Dahr Jamail | The New Climate "Normal": Abrupt Sea Level Rise and Predictions of Civilization Collapse
Monday, 03 August 2015

Image
Helicopters drop water on the Blue Creek wildfire as it burns near Walla Walla, Washington, July 22, 2015. Officials warn about the potential for even more catastrophe in the months ahead, as drought, heat and climate change leave the landscape ever thirstier. (Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)

We know things are a bit "off" when a rainforest is on fire.

Over 400 acres of the Queets Rainforest, located in Olympic National Park in Washington State, nearby where I live, have burned recently, and it is continuing to burn as I type this. Fires in these rainforests have historically been rare, as the area typically receives in excess of 200 inches of rain annually.

But this is all changing now.

The new normal is that there is no longer any "normal."

The new normal regarding climate disruption is that, for the planet, today is better than tomorrow.

Another perfect example of this is a crucial recent study led by James Hansen, the former director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The study, authored by Hansen and more than a dozen other scientists and published online, warns that even staying within the internationally agreed goal of keeping the planet within the 2-degree Celsius temperature warming limit has already caused unstoppable melting in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. The study shows that this will raise global sea levels by as much as 10 feet by the year 2050, inundating numerous major coastal cities with seawater.

As if that's not enough, Hansen's study comes on the heels of another study published in Science, which shows that global sea levels could rise by at least 20 feet, even if governments manage to keep global temperature increases to within the agreed upon "safe" limit of 2 degrees Celsius. The study warns that it is quite possible that 75 feet of sea level rise could well already be unstoppable given current carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and recent studies that show how rapidly Greenland and several Antarctic ice sheets are melting.

Disconcertingly, another new "normal" this month comes in the form of huge plumes of wildfire smoke over the Arctic. At the time of this writing, well over 12 million acres of forest and tundra in Canada and Alaska have burned in wildfires, and the smoke covering the Arctic sea ice is yet another anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) amplifying feedback loop that will accelerate melting there. The additional smoke further warms the atmosphere that quickens the melting of the Arctic ice pack.

As if that's not enough to keep you up at night, a recently published study by a team from Anglia Ruskin University's Global Sustainability Institute has shown that society will likely collapse within 30 years, due to catastrophic food shortages resulting from the ever-worsening impacts of ACD.

"The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots," the Institute's director, Dr. Aled Jones, told Insurge Intelligence. "In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption."

Another shocking study, this one published in The Anthropocene Review, shows how humans are causing catastrophic shifts in planetary ecosystems that have been unprecedented for 500 million years. The study outlines how human actions have led to extinctions of plants and animals, and added that while "species extinctions and other changes are far more advanced" already, "[g]lobal warming as a phenomenon is just beginning."

Bad news from scientific studies flowed abundantly this last month when it comes to the oceans, as well.

Another major report, this one published in Science, warns that the oceans and all marine life will be "irreversibly changed" unless there are immediate and dramatic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions - a scenario from the realm of fantasy, given the current political climate. The report states clearly that even the 2-degree Celsius "maximum allowable temperature" rise from ACD agreed upon by world governments "will not prevent dramatic impacts on global ocean systems."

As if all this isn't enough to impress upon you how rapidly ACD is progressing, 2014 was also confirmed as the hottest year ever recorded, both on land and in the oceans. That report was followed by another from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that showed that the first half of 2015 was, by far, the hottest ever recorded on the planet.

As this dispatch dives into greater detail about how the world is being changed dramatically, buckle up. The news does not get any easier to take in.

Earth

The impacts from ACD continue to take dramatic tolls on the earth's species.

Researchers recently reported that warmer temperatures across both North America and Europe are leading to loss of habitat for bumblebees, which in turn is threatening their very survival.

In the UK, several species of birds are now under threat because temperature shifts are pushing several of the species further north, even all the way to Scandinavia. Once there, the birds encounter habitat they are not adapted to, and likely won't survive.

Scientists in the United States with the US Geological Survey released a report that shows that polar bears will have a steep decline in their populations in most places in the Arctic as the sea ice melts away. This isn't news, but the report shows how closely scientists are monitoring the situation, due to the speed at which the melting of the polar ice cap is occurring.

Another study published in Science shows that polar bears' metabolism will not be able to adapt quickly enough to their dramatically changing habitat as the Arctic warms and melts. This, coupled with a dramatic decline in their sources of food, again confirmed that the iconic bears are most likely en route to extinction.

Of course, humans are not immune to the growing impacts of ACD.

A report produced by the University College of London's commission on health and climate change along with the Lancet revealed that ACD threatens to erode five decades of overall progress in global human health.

Professor Anthony Costello, director of the UCL Institute of Global Health and co-chair of the commission, told the Guardian that on our current trajectory of warming, we are going to see "very serious and potentially catastrophic effects for human health and human survival.

"We see that as a medical emergency because the action we need to do to stop that in its tracks and get us back onto a 2C trajectory or less requires action now - and action in the next 10 years - otherwise the game could be over," he added.

For the earth itself, ACD is even leading to geo-structural changes.

In Greenland, massive earthquakes are resulting from melting glaciers, and icebergs calving from tidal glaciers collapsing into the ocean are causing consistent quakes of magnitude 4-5.2, with most of them closer to 5, according to a recent study published in Science. The calving glaciers are also causing tsunamis.

Water

As usual, the impacts of ACD are most dramatic on the waterfront.

A recent report revealed that all of the world's sea turtles are at risk, due to rising sea levels. Higher sea levels mean their rookery sites, where their babies hatch, are becoming submerged.

Equally distressing, the entire pink salmon population in the Pacific Ocean is at risk, as they are being subjected to a double impact: the acidification of their ocean habitats, coupled with the acidification of rivers, slowing their growth and killing them off there as well.

Speaking of salmon, in Oregon, salmon must be trucked north hundreds of miles to a hatchery in Washington State, in a desperate effort to save fish that have been dying off in the tens of thousands due to increasingly warming river waters.

We know there is trouble when we are having to truck fish north in an effort to keep them alive; needless to say, this is not a sustainable activity.

A group of scientists from the Marine Conservation Institute recently announced that deep-sea coral reefs off the coast of Australia could be dead within 50 years due to warming temperatures and ocean acidification.

A series of recent studies has recently confirmed that ACD's impacts on the oceans, including warming temperatures and acidification of the waters, is causing global seafood supplies to diminish drastically.

More bad news for the planets' oceans comes from a recent study that shows that plankton, the basis of the entire food chain, are threatened by ocean acidification. Some species of plankton will die out, while others will flourish, creating an imbalance that the report's authors say will be "a big problem," given that plankton produce half the total oxygen supply for the planet.

Pause for a moment before reading further and ponder the implications of that: The source of half the world's oxygen is in major peril.

Droughts around the planet continue to abound.

Chile is facing its driest year to date, since record keeping began. There has been little to no snow on any of its famous ski slopes, and the lack of rainfall has worsened the already bad pollution problem in the country's capital city.

In Canada, several counties in the province of Alberta announced in July that they were seriously considering declaring themselves in a state of agricultural disaster due to severe drought. It's one of the worst drought's in Alberta's history, and one farmer said, "It's almost get¬ting at the point rain wouldn't help much."

In addition to the important report on sea level rise mentioned at the beginning of this article, the Guardian recently posted a video that investigates the question of whether Filipinos will have to abandon Manila due to rising sea levels. Manila has a population of roughly 2 million people.

Needless to say, glaciers and ice sheets around the world continue to melt at breakneck speeds.

NASA recently released a report showing that in Turkey, more than half of the ice cover in the mountainous regions has vanished since the 1970s. A map in the NASA report shows five areas in Turkey's mountains where 100 percent of the glaciers have disappeared, and three areas where 75 percent of them are gone.

Another study released in July revealed another factor that is causing the Arctic to melt at a pace far faster than believed possible: Warm, tropical air masses are speeding up Greenland's melting by warming Arctic air, as well as causing warmer rains to fall over the ice sheets.

Another NASA study found that the melting of Alaskan glaciers is now estimated to be one of the current largest contributors to global sea level increases. Maps in the study show dramatic changes to Alaska's glaciers between 1994 and 2013, revealing a precipitous decline in their total mass. NASA estimates that the region lost approximately 75 billion tons of ice per year over that 19-year period, which is equivalent to around 30 percent of the amount of ice lost each year from the Greenland ice sheet.

Lastly, climate scientists affiliated with the US government announced recently that the warming of the oceans due to ACD is now unstoppable, and will continue to bring additional sea level rise, acidification and increasing global temperatures. Their report added that the impacts of the warmer ocean temperatures "will be felt for centuries to come" - even if immediate efforts are made to cut global carbon dioxide emissions.

Fire

In Canada, wildfires that have been described as "unprecedented" have forced more than 13,000 residents of Saskatchewan from their homes (a record evacuation), with wildfire-driven evacuations happening across other provinces as well.

The town of Whistler, Canada, famous for its world-class ski resort, is dealing with horrible air quality as smoke from wildfires is polluting the air across British Columbia.

NASA recently released disturbing images of smoke from the Alaskan and Canadian wildfires that is blowing out over the Greenland Sea.

Wildfires are ravaging parts of Southern California where the megadrought is cutting deep. The fire season started earlier than "normal" this year, and was helped along by massive numbers of dead trees brought to their demise by the increasing bark beetle infestation. That infestation was fueled by warmer temperatures as well as the drought itself. Hence several runaway feedback loops are feeding off one another.

A recently released study shows, again, how ACD has caused wildfire seasons around the globe to begin earlier and last later, shifting what "normal" means in the realm of fire.

Air

Heat records on three continents fell this last month, as brutally hot conditions in early July baked parts of Europe, Asia and South America. Dozens of heat records were broken: Maastricht, the Netherlands, saw 100.8 degrees Fahrenheit, an all-time July heat record for that nation, along with several other heat records throughout the country. London's Heathrow Airport saw 98.1 degrees Fahrenheit, an all-time heat record for the UK.

In Thailand, Kamalasai saw 105.8 degrees, the hottest temperature ever recorded for that country, while other heat records across the nation were set as well. In Pakistan, morgues literally ran out of space as a heat wave there killed more than 1,000 people.

In South America, Urumita, Colombia, reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit, setting an all-time high for that country.

Heat records across the United States continue to be broken as well, including in Seattle, which has seen several record temperatures this summer, with possibly more to come.

A recent study has linked Hurricane Sandy and other extreme weather events around the globe to ACD. The study, published in Nature Climate Change, shows how ACD is ramping up extreme weather events, both in frequency and intensity, to never-before-seen levels.

Denial and Reality

Regarding ACD, news on the denial front never runs dry.

It emerged recently that Exxon was aware of ACD as far back as 1981, but continued to deliberately fund climate change deniers nonetheless ... and has gone on to spend millions of dollars since then to continue to do so, to this day.

The US House of Representatives, in another stroke of genius, passed a bill that allows state governors to refuse to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan, developed to lower carbon dioxide emissions from currently active power plants.

Elected politicians acting on behalf of Big Oil and Gas are functioning as little more than lobbyists for said industries, despite what's at stake (the planet and human existence).

On the reality front, to counter these amazing acts of denial, Pope Francis continues to fight the good fight as far as ACD goes. Thousands of religious leaders recently marched in Rome in support of his call to world leaders to take a stand and work to mitigate the impacts of ACD.

On that note, more than a dozen Catholic organizations have launched a campaign that is asking Catholics around the world to change their lives in order to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions and lower their consumption.

A recent study has shown, again, that ACD has made deadly floods and record heat waves over the last month even worse, and will continue to make other extreme weather events more intense, as well as more frequent.

Lastly, an excellent article in Esquire about Dr. Jason Box provides a glimpse into the dilemma climate scientists face in regards to the intensely troubling information their research is producing and the emotions elicited by it, coupled with the pressures they face politically. Box, a world-renowned glaciologist whose focus is the Greenland ice sheet, has not been shy about expressing his opinions, and sometimes emotions, about what he is seeing.

Box has said things like: "If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're fucked," and concluded that a 70-foot rise in sea levels over the next few centuries was probably already "baked into the system." After these and other similar statements, he has come under intense fire from both the scientific community and - of course - the deniers.

Box, a US citizen, had already taken his family and moved to Denmark, where he works while continuing his cutting-edge studies on the Greenland ice sheet, largely due to the ongoing attacks he withstood from the oil-and-gas-funded deniers in the United States.

"We need the deniers to get out of the way. They are risking everyone's future," Box told Esquire. "The Koch brothers are criminals.... They should be charged with criminal activity because they're putting the profits of their business ahead of the livelihoods of millions of people, and even life on earth."

Box thinks there is at least a 50 percent probability that the world is already on track to go well over the 2-degree Celsius politically accepted maximum limit of global warming, and agrees with most climate scientists that we are on a trajectory toward more like 4-5-degree Celsius warming in the near to mid-term future.

When asked what amount of warming would throw Greenland into irreversible ice loss, Box answered "between two and three degrees."

When Greenland goes, that is enough sea level rise to destroy every coastal city on the planet. Speaking of Antarctica, Box said: "Abrupt sea level rise is upon us."

"The forests are dying, and they will not return," he told Esquire about his home state of Colorado. "The trees won't return to a warming climate. We're going to see megafires even more, that'll be the new one - megafires until those forests are cleared."

Meanwhile, he has adjusted his life to minimize his carbon footprint, and continues his work in Greenland, but is worried about his daughter's future. Box's view of the disrupted climactic future is scary enough; he is thinking about survival.

"In Denmark, we have the resilience, so I'm not that worried about my daughter's livelihood going forward," he said. "But that doesn't stop me from strategizing about how to safeguard her future - I've been looking at property in Greenland. As a possible bug-out scenario."
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby Luther Blissett » Thu Aug 06, 2015 1:37 pm

The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here

The worst predicted impacts of climate change are starting to happen — and much faster than climate scientists expected


By Eric Holthaus August 5, 2015

Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state's Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide.

On July 20th, James Hansen, the former NASA climatologist who brought climate change to the public's attention in the summer of 1988, issued a bombshell: He and a team of climate scientists had identified a newly important feedback mechanism off the coast of Antarctica that suggests mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065. The authors included this chilling warning: If emissions aren't cut, "We conclude that multi-meter sea-level rise would become practically unavoidable. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea-level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization."

Eric Rignot, a climate scientist at NASA and the University of California-Irvine and a co-author on Hansen's study, said their new research doesn't necessarily change the worst-case scenario on sea-level rise, it just makes it much more pressing to think about and discuss, especially among world leaders. In particular, says Rignot, the new research shows a two-degree Celsius rise in global temperature — the previously agreed upon "safe" level of climate change — "would be a catastrophe for sea-level rise."

Hansen's new study also shows how complicated and unpredictable climate change can be. Even as global ocean temperatures rise to their highest levels in recorded history, some parts of the ocean, near where ice is melting exceptionally fast, are actually cooling, slowing ocean circulation currents and sending weather patterns into a frenzy. Sure enough, a persistently cold patch of ocean is starting to show up just south of Greenland, exactly where previous experimental predictions of a sudden surge of freshwater from melting ice expected it to be. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist, recently said of the unexpectedly sudden Atlantic slowdown, "This is yet another example of where observations suggest that climate model predictions may be too conservative when it comes to the pace at which certain aspects of climate change are proceeding."

Since storm systems and jet streams in the United States and Europe partially draw their energy from the difference in ocean temperatures, the implication of one patch of ocean cooling while the rest of the ocean warms is profound. Storms will get stronger, and sea-level rise will accelerate. Scientists like Hansen only expect extreme weather to get worse in the years to come, though Mann said it was still "unclear" whether recent severe winters on the East Coast are connected to the phenomenon.

And yet, these aren't even the most disturbing changes happening to the Earth's biosphere that climate scientists are discovering this year. For that, you have to look not at the rising sea levels but to what is actually happening within the oceans themselves.

Water temperatures this year in the North Pacific have never been this high for this long over such a large area — and it is already having a profound effect on marine life.

Eighty-year-old Roger Thomas runs whale-watching trips out of San Francisco. On an excursion earlier this year, Thomas spotted 25 humpbacks and three blue whales. During a survey on July 4th, federal officials spotted 115 whales in a single hour near the Farallon Islands — enough to issue a boating warning. Humpbacks are occasionally seen offshore in California, but rarely so close to the coast or in such numbers. Why are they coming so close to shore? Exceptionally warm water has concentrated the krill and anchovies they feed on into a narrow band of relatively cool coastal water. The whales are having a heyday. "It's unbelievable," Thomas told a local paper. "Whales are all over
the place."

Last fall, in northern Alaska, in the same part of the Arctic where Shell is planning to drill for oil, federal scientists discovered 35,000 walruses congregating on a single beach. It was the largest-ever documented "haul out" of walruses, and a sign that sea ice, their favored habitat, is becoming harder and harder to find.

Marine life is moving north, adapting in real time to the warming ocean. Great white sharks have been sighted breeding near Monterey Bay, California, the farthest north that's ever been known to occur. A blue marlin was caught last summer near Catalina Island — 1,000 miles north of its typical range. Across California, there have been sightings of non-native animals moving north, such as Mexican red crabs.

No species may be as uniquely endangered as the one most associated with the Pacific Northwest, the salmon. Every two weeks, Bill Peterson, an oceanographer and senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Oregon, takes to the sea to collect data he uses to forecast the return of salmon. What he's been seeing this year is deeply troubling.

Salmon are crucial to their coastal ecosystem like perhaps few other species on the planet. A significant portion of the nitrogen in West Coast forests has been traced back to salmon, which can travel hundreds of miles upstream to lay their eggs. The largest trees on Earth simply wouldn't exist without salmon.

But their situation is precarious. This year, officials in California are bringing salmon downstream in convoys of trucks, because river levels are too low and the temperatures too warm for them to have a reasonable chance of surviving. One species, the winter-run Chinook salmon, is at a particularly increased risk of decline in the next few years, should the warm water persist offshore.

"You talk to fishermen, and they all say: 'We've never seen anything like this before,' " says Peterson. "So when you have no experience with something like this, it gets like, 'What the hell's going on?' "

Atmospheric scientists increasingly believe that the exceptionally warm waters over the past months are the early indications of a phase shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a cyclical warming of the North Pacific that happens a few times each century. Positive phases of the PDO have been known to last for 15 to 20 years, during which global warming can increase at double the rate as during negative phases of the PDO. It also makes big El Niños, like this year's, more likely. The nature of PDO phase shifts is unpredictable — climate scientists simply haven't yet figured out precisely what's behind them and why they happen when they do. It's not a permanent change — the ocean's temperature will likely drop from these record highs, at least temporarily, some time over the next few years — but the impact on marine species will be lasting, and scientists have pointed to the PDO as a global-warming preview.

"The climate [change] models predict this gentle, slow increase in temperature," says Peterson, "but the main problem we've had for the last few years is the variability is so high. As scientists, we can't keep up with it, and neither can the animals." Peterson likens it to a boxer getting pummeled round after round: "At some point, you knock them down, and the fight is over."

Attendant with this weird wildlife behavior is a stunning drop in the number of plankton — the basis of the ocean's food chain. In July, another major study concluded that acidifying oceans are likely to have a "quite traumatic" impact on plankton diversity, with some species dying out while others flourish. As the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it's converted into carbonic acid — and the pH of seawater declines. According to lead author Stephanie Dutkiewicz of MIT, that trend means "the whole food chain is going to be different."

The Hansen study may have gotten more attention, but the Dutkiewicz study, and others like it, could have even more dire implications for our future. The rapid changes Dutkiewicz and her colleagues are observing have shocked some of their fellow scientists into thinking that yes, actually, we're heading toward the worst-case scenario. Unlike a prediction of massive sea-level rise just decades away, the warming and acidifying oceans represent a problem that seems to have kick-started a mass extinction on the same time scale.

Jacquelyn Gill is a paleoecologist at the University of Maine. She knows a lot about extinction, and her work is more relevant than ever. Essentially, she's trying to save the species that are alive right now by learning more about what killed off the ones that aren't. The ancient data she studies shows "really compelling evidence that there can be events of abrupt climate change that can happen well within human life spans. We're talking less than a decade."

For the past year or two, a persistent change in winds over the North Pacific has given rise to what meteorologists and oceanographers are calling "the blob" — a highly anomalous patch of warm water between Hawaii, Alaska and Baja California that's thrown the marine ecosystem into a tailspin. Amid warmer temperatures, plankton numbers have plummeted, and the myriad species that depend on them have migrated or seen their own numbers dwindle.

Significant northward surges of warm water have happened before, even frequently. El Niño, for example, does this on a predictable basis. But what's happening this year appears to be something new. Some climate scientists think that the wind shift is linked to the rapid decline in Arctic sea ice over the past few years, which separate research has shown makes weather patterns more likely to get stuck.

A similar shift in the behavior of the jet stream has also contributed to the California drought and severe polar vortex winters in the Northeast over the past two years. An amplified jet-stream pattern has produced an unusual doldrum off the West Coast that's persisted for most of the past 18 months. Daniel Swain, a Stanford University meteorologist, has called it the "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge" — weather patterns just aren't supposed to last this long.

What's increasingly uncontroversial among scientists is that in many ecosystems, the impacts of the current off-the-charts temperatures in the North Pacific will linger for years, or longer. The largest ocean on Earth, the Pacific is exhibiting cyclical variability to greater extremes than other ocean basins. While the North Pacific is currently the most dramatic area of change in the world's oceans, it's not alone: Globally, 2014 was a record-setting year for ocean temperatures, and 2015 is on pace to beat it soundly, boosted by the El Niño in the Pacific. Six percent of the world's reefs could disappear before the end of the decade, perhaps permanently, thanks to warming waters.

Since warmer oceans expand in volume, it's also leading to a surge in sea-level rise. One recent study showed a slowdown in Atlantic Ocean currents, perhaps linked to glacial melt from Greenland, that caused a four-inch rise in sea levels along the Northeast coast in just two years, from 2009 to 2010. To be sure, it seems like this sudden and unpredicted surge was only temporary, but scientists who studied the surge estimated it to be a 1-in-850-year event, and it's been blamed on accelerated beach erosion "almost as significant as some hurricane events."

Possibly worse than rising ocean temperatures is the acidification of the waters. Acidification has a direct effect on mollusks and other marine animals with hard outer bodies: A striking study last year showed that, along the West Coast, the shells of tiny snails are already dissolving, with as-yet-unknown consequences on the ecosystem. One of the study's authors, Nina Bednaršek, told Science magazine that the snails' shells, pitted by the acidifying ocean, resembled "cauliflower" or "sandpaper." A similarly striking study by more than a dozen of the world's top ocean scientists this July said that the current pace of increasing carbon emissions would force an "effectively irreversible" change on ocean ecosystems during this century. In as little as a decade, the study suggested, chemical changes will rise significantly above background levels in nearly half of the world's oceans.

"I used to think it was kind of hard to make things in the ocean go extinct," James Barry of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California told the Seattle Times in 2013. "But this change we're seeing is happening so fast it's almost instantaneous."

Thanks to the pressure we're putting on the planet's ecosystem — warming, acidification and good old-fashioned pollution — the oceans are set up for several decades of rapid change. Here's what could happen next.

The combination of excessive nutrients from agricultural runoff, abnormal wind patterns and the warming oceans is already creating seasonal dead zones in coastal regions when algae blooms suck up most of the available oxygen. The appearance of low-oxygen regions has doubled in frequency every 10 years since 1960 and should continue to grow over the coming decades at an even greater rate.

So far, dead zones have remained mostly close to the coasts, but in the 21st century, deep-ocean dead zones could become common. These low-oxygen regions could gradually expand in size — potentially thousands of miles across — which would force fish, whales, pretty much everything upward. If this were to occur, large sections of the temperate deep oceans would suffer should the oxygen-free layer grow so pronounced that it stratifies, pushing surface ocean warming into overdrive and hindering upwelling of cooler, nutrient-rich deeper water.

Enhanced evaporation from the warmer oceans will create heavier downpours, perhaps destabilizing the root systems of forests, and accelerated runoff will pour more excess nutrients into coastal areas, further enhancing dead zones. In the past year, downpours have broken records in Long Island, Phoenix, Detroit, Baltimore, Houston and Pensacola, Florida.

Evidence for the above scenario comes in large part from our best understanding of what happened 250 million years ago, during the "Great Dying," when more than 90 percent of all oceanic species perished after a pulse of carbon dioxide and methane from land-based sources began a period of profound climate change. The conditions that triggered "Great Dying" took hundreds of thousands of years to develop. But humans have been emitting carbon dioxide at a much quicker rate, so the current mass extinction only took 100 years or so to kick-start.

With all these stressors working against it, a hypoxic feedback loop could wind up destroying some of the oceans' most species-rich ecosystems within our lifetime. A recent study by Sarah Moffitt of the University of California-Davis said it could take the ocean thousands of years to recover. "Looking forward for my kid, people in the future are not going to have the same ocean that I have today," Moffitt said.

As you might expect, having tickets to the front row of a global environmental catastrophe is taking an increasingly emotional toll on scientists, and in some cases pushing them toward advocacy. Of the two dozen or so scientists I interviewed for this piece, virtually all drifted into apocalyptic language at some point.

For Simone Alin, an oceanographer focusing on ocean acidification at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, the changes she's seeing hit close to home. The Puget Sound is a natural laboratory for the coming decades of rapid change because its waters are naturally more acidified than most of the world's marine ecosystems.

The local oyster industry here is already seeing serious impacts from acidifying waters and is going to great lengths to avoid a total collapse. Alin calls oysters, which are non-native, the canary in the coal mine for the Puget Sound: "A canary is also not native to a coal mine, but that doesn't mean it's not a good indicator of change."

Though she works on fundamental oceanic changes every day, the Dutkiewicz study on the impending large-scale changes to plankton caught her off-guard: "This was alarming to me because if the basis of the food web changes, then . . . everything could change, right?"

Alin's frank discussion of the looming oceanic apocalypse is perhaps a product of studying unfathomable change every day. But four years ago, the birth of her twins "heightened the whole issue," she says. "I was worried enough about these problems before having kids that I maybe wondered whether it was a good idea. Now, it just makes me feel crushed."

Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and evangelical Christian, moved from Canada to Texas with her husband, a pastor, precisely because of its vulnerability to climate change. There, she engages with the evangelical community on science — almost as a missionary would. But she's already planning her exit strategy: "If we continue on our current pathway, Canada will be home for us long term. But the majority of people don't have an exit strategy. . . . So that's who I'm here trying to help."

James Hansen, the dean of climate scientists, retired from NASA in 2013 to become a climate activist. But for all the gloom of the report he just put his name to, Hansen is actually somewhat hopeful. That's because he knows that climate change has a straightforward solution: End fossil-fuel use as quickly as possible. If tomorrow, the leaders of the United States and China would agree to a sufficiently strong, coordinated carbon tax that's also applied to imports, the rest of the world would have no choice but to sign up. This idea has already been pitched to Congress several times, with tepid bipartisan support. Even though a carbon tax is probably a long shot, for Hansen, even the slim possibility that bold action like this might happen is enough for him to devote the rest of his life to working to achieve it. On a conference call with reporters in July, Hansen said a potential joint U.S.-China carbon tax is more important than whatever happens at the United Nations climate talks in Paris.

One group Hansen is helping is Our Children's Trust, a legal advocacy organization that's filed a number of novel challenges on behalf of minors under the idea that climate change is a violation of intergenerational equity — children, the group argues, are lawfully entitled to inherit a healthy planet.

A separate challenge to U.S. law is being brought by a former EPA scientist arguing that carbon dioxide isn't just a pollutant (which, under the Clean Air Act, can dissipate on its own), it's also a toxic substance. In general, these substances have exceptionally long life spans in the environment, cause an unreasonable risk, and therefore require remediation. In this case, remediation may involve planting vast numbers of trees or restoring wetlands to bury excess carbon underground.


Even if these novel challenges succeed, it will take years before a bend in the curve is noticeable. But maybe that's enough. When all feels lost, saving a few species will feel like a triumph.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby smoking since 1879 » Thu Aug 06, 2015 6:01 pm

The warming in the Pacific may well be due to Fukushima.
Algae wont be using the sunlight for reproduction, so the water will heat up.
Less evaporation from algae respiration means less clouds, which means west coast drought.

I might be making all this up.. stop me if u heard it before.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby smoking since 1879 » Thu Aug 06, 2015 6:07 pm

Also...

One group Hansen is helping is Our Children's Trust, a legal advocacy organization that's filed a number of novel challenges on behalf of minors under the idea that climate change is a violation of intergenerational equity — children, the group argues, are lawfully entitled to inherit a healthy planet.


As laudable as this effort is, it rather begs the question - am I not legally entitled to live on a healthy planet?


Apparently not.
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Re: How Bad Is Global Warming?

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Fri Aug 07, 2015 6:26 pm

Reducing emissions alone won’t stop climate change: new research
August 3, 2015 4.06pm EDT

Based on current greenhouse gas emissions, the world is on track for 4C warming by 2100 - well beyond the internationally agreed guardrail of 2C. To keep warming below 2C, we need to either reduce our emissions, or take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Two papers published today investigate our ability to limit global warming and reverse the impacts of climate change. The first, published in Nature Communications, shows that to limit warming below 2C we will have to remove some carbon from the atmosphere, no matter how strongly we reduce emissions.

The second, in Nature Climate Change, shows that even if we can remove enough CO2 to keep warming below 2C, it would not restore the oceans to the state they were in before we began altering the atmosphere.

How we’re tracking

Currently, we’re at 400 parts per million - rising from 280 ppm before the industrial revolution.

To project future climate change the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses a range of emissions scenarios called Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), based on different economic and energy use assumptions.

In the high scenario, RCP8.5, emissions continue to grow from our present rate of 37 billion tonnes of CO2 per year to about 100 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2100, when atmospheric CO2 levels are projected to be 950 ppm. This scenario assumes little mitigation of our carbon emissions.

In the low scenario, RCP2.6, emissions rise slowly till the end of this decade to about 40 billion tonnes CO2 each year and then start to decline. Amongst the IPCC emission scenarios, only the RCP 2.6 appears capable of limiting warming to below 2C. With RCP 2.6 at the end of the century atmospheric concentrations is about 420 ppm, and only 20 ppm above the present value.

Present emissions are tracking close to the highest scenario (RCP8.5). If we want to keep warming below 2C it requires a substantial reduction in the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere.

What we have to do

We have two options by which to reduce emissions, the first through reducing the use of fossil fuel energy, and the second through Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR).

CDR refers to technologies that remove CO2, the primary greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere. Examples include Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), afforestation (planting trees), adding iron to the ocean, and directly capturing CO2 from the air.

For many CDR technologies the boundary between “climate intervention” (or “geoengineering”) and greenhouse gas mitigation is unclear. However, the goal is the same, enhancing the CO2 current taken up and sequestered by the land and ocean.

Can we just remove carbon?

The first study, led by Thomas Gasser, used results from 11 Earth System Models, in conjunction with a simple carbon-cycle models to simulate different emissions reductions scenarios associated with the low emissions pathway, RCP2.6.

They showed that under all emissions reductions scenarios, even slashing emissions to less than 4 billion tonnes CO2 each year, (greater than a 90% cut in current emissions) is insufficient to limit warming to 2C.

This means that some form of CDR will be required to keep warming at less than 2C. The exact level of CDR required depends very much on the emissions reduction achieved, from 2 billion to 10 billion tonnes of CO2 each year in the most optimistic scenario, to between 25-40 billion tonnes CO2 each year in the lowest emission reduction case. This is equivalent to current total global emissions.

The study also suggests that the requirements for CDR may indeed be even higher if unanticipated natural carbon cycle (positive) feedbacks were to occur. We may desire the ability to remove more carbon from the atmosphere to compensate for these.

The other study, led by Sabine Mathesius, explores whether CDR under high CO2 emissions can achieve a similar environmental outcome to a rapid transition to a low carbon energy use (RCP2.6).

It shows that aggressive CDR can only undo the effect of high emissions (RCP8.5) and return the marine environment to either pre-industrial values or the low emission scenario over thousands of years. The ability to undo the damage caused by high emissions reflects timescale of the ocean carbon cycle. While the upper ocean quickly reaches equilibrium with the atmosphere, the deeper ocean takes millennia to restabilise.

Such irreversibility of the system is an important consequence and the study provides valuable information to consider as we tackle rising CO2 levels. Both studies are theoretical but they provide an important perspective on the ability of mankind to engineer the climate system and undo the effects of high CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

No CDR or suite of CDR technologies exists capable of removing the levels of CO2 at the upper range of what maybe required. This means that, while CDR could aid in limiting global temperatures below 2C, in practice this is not even yet possible, and would not be without risks. This continues to be a very active area of research.

While the focus of both studies explore reversing the environmental changes of rising CO2, the climate system is complex and the possibility that mitigation options like CDR could produce unforeseen impacts is high. While reducing carbon emissions is the safest and preferred path for avoiding dangerous climate change and ocean acidification, it is likely that some CDR will be required to achieve this.
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