North America goes thru periodic droughts and cooling
ATHENS, Ohio (Aug. 19, 2008) – A stalagmite in a West Virginia cave has yielded the most detailed geological record to date on climate cycles in eastern North America over the past 7,000 years. The new study confirms that during periods when Earth received less solar radiation, the Atlantic Ocean cooled, icebergs increased and precipitation fell, creating a series of century-long droughts.
A research team led by Ohio University geologist Gregory Springer examined the trace metal strontium and carbon and oxygen isotopes in the stalagmite, which preserved climate conditions averaged over periods as brief as a few years. The scientists found evidence of at least seven major drought periods during the Holocene era, according to an article published online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
“This really nails down the idea of solar influence on continental drought,” said Springer, an assistant professor of geological sciences.
The sun is not a reliable supplier of light radiation. You can't trust the sun. It gets all bent out of shape by magnetic field fluctuations.
Geologist Gerald Bond suggested that every 1,500 years, weak solar activity caused by fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic fields cools the North Atlantic Ocean and creates more icebergs and ice rafting, or the movement of sediment to ocean floors. Other scientists have sought more evidence of these so-called “Bond events” and have studied their possible impact on droughts and precipitation. But studies to date have been hampered by incomplete, less detailed records, Springer said.
But we hopefully have hundreds of years to prepare for the next megadrought.
The climate record suggests that North America could face a major drought event again in 500 to 1,000 years, though Springer said that manmade global warming could offset the cycle.
If humans survive for the next 500 years and I'm still alive in a rejuvenated body I'm looking forward to the opportunity to do climate engineering to prevent a massive drought.
BOZEMAN -- The sun has been laying low for the past couple of years, producing no sunspots and giving a break to satellites.
That's good news for people who scramble when space weather interferes with their technology, but it became a point of discussion for the scientists who attended an international solar conference at Montana State University. Approximately 100 scientists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and North America gathered June 1-6 to talk about "Solar Variability, Earth's Climate and the Space Environment."
The scientists said periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, but this period has gone on longer than usual.
The climate always changes. Natural forces will cause big climate changes even if humans do not interfere.
The 11 year sun spot cycle reminds me of women who fear pregnancy and wait for their late menstrual cycle. We are late on the warming part of the solar cycle. Have you started to worry yet?
The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. Today's sun, however, is as inactive as it was two years ago, and scientists aren't sure why.
"It's a dead face," Tsuneta said of the sun's appearance.
Tsuneta said solar physicists aren't like weather forecasters; They can't predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700.
Cold weather would shorten growing seasons and therefore reduce crop yields. Cold weather would also raise heating costs and other costs associated with winter such as plowing. All this would happen while the world oil production declines.
But I'm not talking about the late start of the next sun cycle to alarm you. Oh no. Why get alarmed about something that would make for an exciting science fiction adventure movie?
The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years.
The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years.
The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1,000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in 2027.
By then, most of the advanced nations would have ceased to exist, vanishing under the ice, and the rest of the world would be faced with a catastrophe beyond imagining.
Suppose another ice age started. Think about all the massive desperate large scale engineering efforts that would be undertaken in order to prevent the enormous disaster that would befall us.
But how to heat the planet? Cooling it is a lot easier. How to prevent a new ice age? Anyone come across some good proposals on this? A massive release of methane into the atmosphere perhaps?
What, me worry? Anthony Watts summarizes the latest data on planetary cooling.
Confirming what many of us have already noted from the anecdotal evidence coming in of a much cooler than normal May, such as late spring snows as far south as Arizona, extended skiing in Colorado, and delays in snow cover melting, (here and here), the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) published their satellite derived Advanced Microwave Sounder Unit data set of the Lower Troposphere for May 2008.
It is significantly colder globally, colder even than the significant drop to -0.046°C seen in January 2008.
The global ∆T from April to May 2008 was -.195°C
UAH
2008 1 -0.046
2008 2 0.020
2008 3 0.094
2008 4 0.015
2008 5 -0.180Compared to the May 2007 value of 0.199°C we find a 12 month ∆T is -.379°C.
I like being able to walk to work in June without working up a major sweat. So far it doesn't seem like a problem to me.
Many climate models show a steadily hotter century because of atmospheric carbon dioxide build-up. But Dr. Noel S. Keenlyside and colleagues at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany and at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg predict in a paper in Nature that global temperatures might stay flat or decline in the next decade.
One of the first attempts to look ahead a decade, using computer simulations and measurements of ocean temperatures, predicts a slight cooling of Europe and North America, probably related to shifting currents and patterns in the oceans.
The team that generated the forecast, whose members come from two German ocean and climate research centers, acknowledged that it was a preliminary effort. But in a short paper published in the May 1 issue of the journal Nature, they said their modeling method was able to reasonably replicate climate patterns in those regions in recent decades, providing some confidence in their prediction for the next one.
This model might not be correct. But suppose this model is correct. Then the climate models which predict warming due to CO2 emissions are inaccurate at least for the next decade. These models might be accurate in their longer term predictions. But we might not know that based on what happens in the next decade.
If Keenlyside is correct then we'll see warming in 15 to 20 years.
It may partly explain why temperatures rose in the early years of the last century before beginning to cool in the 1940s.
"One message from our study is that in the short term, you can see changes in the global mean temperature that you might not expect given the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)," said Noel Keenlyside from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University.
His group's projection diverges from other computer models only for about 15-20 years; after that, the curves come back together and temperatures rise.
On the bright side, in 15 to 20 years we'll have much better climate models and also better climate engineering technology.
Roger Pielke Jr. points to the basic unfalsifiability of current climate models. If a lack of warming doesn't falsify predictions then what does that say about how we should treat the predictions?
I am sure that this is an excellent paper by world class scientists. But when I look at the broader significance of the paper what I see is that there is in fact nothing that can be observed in the climate system that would be inconsistent with climate model predictions. If global cooling over the next few decades is consistent with model predictions, then so too is pretty much anything and everything under the sun.
This means that from a practical standpoint climate models are of no practical use beyond providing some intellectual authority in the promotional battle over global climate policy. I am sure that some model somewhere has foretold how the next 20 years will evolve (and please ask me in 20 years which one!). And if none get it right, it won't mean that any were actually wrong. If there is no future over the next few decades that models rule out, then anything is possible. And of course, no one needed a model to know that.
Global warming might well be a big real problem coming up on us. But science is about predicting behavior. If we can understand a system well enough in theory our model of that system ought to allow us to make accurate predictions about it. Well, climate models can't do that.
The development of climate models is a very worthwhile human endeavor. But we can't use climate models to decide what to do about global warming because those models are highly inaccurate and unverifiable.
Update: A Some months back a highly accomplished planetary scientist of my acquaintance (whose aversion to politicized science debates is strong enough that he doesn't want to be quoted by name unfortunately) explained to me that he sees science as the ability to predict. He thinks the sources of error remaining in existing climate models are so large that these models aren't predictive.
The models are going to get better. But unless you happen to have a Ph.D. in atmospheric physics (or, far better, a time machine) it is going to be hard to know when the models cross over into high accuracy. Even once the models get really good we won't know until some time has gone by so that we can see that they really predict. Even then their results will still need to be stated with qualifiers such as "assuming total solar radiation doesn't change much" unless we develop the ability to accurately forecast future output of the sun.
I see the climate change models as having problems similar to the Reagan era Star Wars (Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI) program when computer scientist David Parnas opined that there was no way to verify the correctness of the software that would control the anti-missile defense system. How to prove the correctness of the models? This is a very serious question. Verification and validation of software is hard. For climate models it is especially hard because the systems that the models seek to simulate are not sufficiently well understood, the systems have chaotic effects, and our computers do not have enough capacity. Plus, we can't know what correct outputs look like without using a time machine.
We end up needing to just decide that since CO2 causes more heat to be retained that higher CO2 means a substantial probability of warming which melts Antartica and Greenland ice and floods lots of land. We ought to do something to be on the safe side not because we can prove a future disaster but rather because it is just some unknown but probably substantial probability. That's a harder sell than the absolute certainty that you'll hear from the likes of Al Gore.
In a way the debate between elites in Europe and the United States on global warming is irrelevant. China has sailed past the United States in CO2 emissions and that gap is only going to grow larger in future years. The Chinese aren't going to restrain their CO2 emissions. They want economic growth. Even in Western Europe the voting publics have shown an aversion to severe sacrifice to cut back on CO2 emissions. 50 coal electric plants are coming on line in Europe in the next 5 years even as Germany maintains its commitment to phase out nuclear electric power.
Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50 percent.
And Italy is not alone in its return to coal. Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are expected to put into operation about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades.
In the United States, fewer new coal plants are likely to begin operations, in part because it is becoming harder to get regulatory permits and in part because nuclear power remains an alternative.
Before you cry out that Euroes do far more than ugly polluting Americans (who are more opposed to coal pollution than are Europeans probably because Americans have higher living standards) keep in mind that European nations have still done far less than needed if we accept some of the more pessimistic IPCC forecasts and arguments about the resulting deleterious effects. Also, looks to me that they've reached the political limits of how much they'll sacrifice.
In a nutshell, people aren't going to sacrifice very much and the number of people who are consuming fossil fuels goes up every year and the average amount of fossil fuels consumed per person goes up every year. Asian industrialization swamps all other effects.
Since a lack of willingness to sacrifice and the difficulty in proving what CO2 build-up will do to temperatures I think we need to approach the problem differently. Admit there is a risk of warming and resulting risks of flooding, crop failures, and other problems. But also admit that humans aren't going to inflict major sacrifices on themselves to do much about it. The big surge in Prius sales is coming mostly from high oil prices, not due to concern about the Greenland ice mass. Though you can expect many Prius buyers to try to claim higher status due to their supposed environmental consciousness.
So what to do? Accelerate the development of technologies for getting energy from non-fossil fuels sources. Also, develop technologies for climate engineering.
Former BBC science journalist and astrophysicist Dr. David Whitehouse says in spite of rising atmospheric CO2 the average temperate on planet Earth is not rising.
With only few days remaining in 2007, the indications are the global temperature for this year is the same as that for 2006 – there has been no warming over the 12 months.
But is this just a blip in the ever upward trend you may ask? No.
The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming – the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly.
Whitehouse is not making a radical claim. He's just not putting the same spin on the facts that you'll find in most media reports about temperature trends. A recent BBC report (not by Whitehouse) has a chart showing 1998 was warmer than any year since and 6 years in that period were slightly warmer than 2007. Their spin is that the 2007 temperature shows that global warming is a confirmed trend. Um, well, on one hand 2007 didn't return the world to cooler temperature levels from earlier decades. But on the other hand the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has gone up a lot since 1998. So why hasn't the average global temperature for 2007 easily beat the 1998 number? (not trying to imply an answer btw - I'm just full of questions)
Dr. Whitehouse says the world might be cooling due to reduced solar energy output.
Something is happening to our Sun. It has to do with sunspots, or rather the activity cycle their coming and going signifies. After a period of exceptionally high activity in the 20th century, our Sun has suddenly gone exceptionally quiet. Months have passed with no spots visible on its disc. We are at the end of one cycle of activity and astronomers are waiting for the sunspots to return and mark the start of the next, the so-called cycle 24. They have been waiting for a while now with no sign it's on its way any time soon.
So maybe atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) buildup really has a warming effect. But that warming effect is getting offset by a cooling effect caused by less solar radiation.
But recently the Sun's internal circulation has been failing. In May 2006 this conveyor belt had slowed to a crawl – a record low. Nasa scientist David Hathaway said: "It's off the bottom of the charts... this has important repercussions for future solar activity." What's more, it's not the only indicator that the Sun is up to something.
Back during the Little Ice Age era (starting perhaps as early as the 13th century and ending in the 19th century) the Earth experienced periods of reduced sunspot activity including during the Sporer Minimum (1450–1540) and Maunder Minimum (1645-1715). That period featured a Thames River that froze over in winters and lots of hunger and death from food shortages in Europe. Another Little Ice Age would cause problems on a scale rivaling or exceeding some of the problems predicted from global warming.
Reduced sunspot activity isn't necessarily a reason for complaisance about atmospheric CO2 buildup. Even if our pollution is buffering the effects of reduced solar output at some point the sun will probably kick back up again and the CO2 will still be there. Though if the Sun causes huge climate changes (and that appears to be the case) then we need to develop the means to rapidly dial up and down the greenhouse effect in order to reduce the size of climate swings caused by solar output fluctuations.
Another possibility: Maybe increased sulfur aerosol pollution from China burning more coal is generating a cooling effect that is partially canceling the warming effect of CO2 buildup. This seems plausible at least. China's rate of expansion has caused a huge increase in a wide range of emissions and not just CO2 emissions.
Along with aluminum and cement, steel is the biggest reason China added 90 gigawatts of power generation capacity this year, the third year in a row in which it will increase its power output by more than the total capacity of Britain. About 85 percent of those new power plants burn coal.
The International Energy Agency, an energy policy and research group in Paris, had predicted as recently as a few years ago that China's carbon emissions would not reach those of the United States until 2020. But industrial production and coal use have grown so much faster than estimated that the agency now thinks China took the lead this year.
Production which has been shifted from the West to China (many economists call this "free trade") is cheaper in China in part because China tolerates far more pollution per unit of production.
A study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that if all the goods that the United States imported between 1997 and 2004 had been produced domestically, America's carbon emissions would have been 30 percent higher.
A separate study for the European Parliament examined the transfer of steel production to China from Germany. It found that China's less efficient steel mills, and its greater reliance on coal, meant that it emitted three times as much carbon dioxide per ton of steel as German steel producers.
Pollution has not only shifted to China, in other words, but intensified even faster than the country's rapidly expanding output.
So types of pollutants that reflect away the sun's energy are another possible explanation for the seeming end of the warming trend in Earth average temperature. Aside: Britain is also in the ranks of countries that have basically exported a lot of their pollution to China.
Update: What I want to know: How noisy is the data for measuring the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere? Could noise in the data make a real warming trend seem to stop? Given that temperature over a period of centuries varies a great deal naturally one should expect natural trends to sometimes work with and work against human-caused trends and therefore make human-caused trends harder to detect and confirm. There are real limits on our ability to know what is going on.
Update II: See the comments section for a comment about how volcanic eruptions make the temperature data noisy. Also, Peak Coal might end the whole fossil fuels emissions debate in a couple of decades. Peak Oil and Peak Natural Gas will probably happen sooner. For more on Peak Coal see here and here and here and here.
Some phenomena of nature are too complex to predict?
It now appears that the estimates will never get much better. The reason lies with feedbacks in the climate system. For example, as the temperature increases, less snow will be present at the poles. Less snow means less sunlight reflected back into space, which means more warming.
These positive feedbacks accelerate global warming and also introduce uncertainty into estimates of climate sensitivity, say Gerard Roe and Marcia Baker of the University of Washington in Seattle.
Lucky (or unlucky) for us, I think we are going to run out of oil before we can melt the polar ice caps. The (not very accurate) models that assume big atmospheric carbon dioxide increases in the 21st century are making an unrealistic assumption. The big run-up in oil prices is signalling the coming end of the oil era. We should move past the oil era debates and start focusing on how to move more easily into the post-fossil fuels era.
“About 1/3 of the CO2 from fossil-fuel burning is absorbed by the world’s oceans,” explained lead author Ken Caldeira from the Carnegie Institution Department of Global Ecology. “When CO2 gas dissolves in the ocean it makes carbonic acid which can damage coral reefs and also hurt other calcifying organisms, such as phytoplankton and zooplankton, some of the most critical players at the bottom of the world’s food chain. In sufficient concentration, the acidity can corrode shellfish shells, disrupt coral formation, and interfere with oxygen supply. ”
Most of the research today points to a future where, in the absence of a major effort to curtail carbon dioxide emissions, there will be double the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (760 parts per million, or ppm) by century’s end. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations could reach 500 ppm by mid-century. Pre-industrial concentrations, by comparison, were 280 ppm and today's concentration is about 380 ppm.
The acidity from CO2 dissolved in ocean water is measured by the pH scale (potential of Hydrogen). Declines in pH indicate that a solution is more acidic. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [1976] Quality Criteria for Water state: “For open ocean waters where the depth is substantially greater than the euphotic zone, the pH should not be changed more than 0.2 units outside the range of naturally occurring variation …” The euphotic zone goes to a depth of about 650 feet (200 meters), where light can still reach and photosynthesis can occur.
“Atmospheric CO2 concentrations need to remain at less than 500 ppm for the ocean pH decrease to stay within the 0.2 limit set forth by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [1976],” remarked Caldeira. “If atmospheric CO2 goes above 500 ppm, the surface of the entire ocean will be out of compliance with EPA pH guidelines for the open ocean. We need to start thinking about carbon dioxide as an ocean pollutant. That is, when we release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, we are dumping industrial waste in the ocean.”
I have previously argued that since we can easily cool the Earth (even cause an Ice Age for less than $1 billion per year) using either silicon dioxide or dimethyl sulfide (DMS) that the main problem with atmospheric CO2 build-up the dissolving of atmospheric CO2 into the oceans making them too acidic. I've yet to come across any proposed methods for preventing ocean acidification. Also, it is not clear how much harm to marine life will come from a shift of pH down by 0.2.
Atmospheric CO2 might never reach 500 ppm. The rising cost of oil extraction will combine with future declines in the costs of nuclear and solar power to cause a shift away from fossil fuels and toward energy sources which are not net producers of carbon dioxide emissions.
Farm land suppresses cloud formation above it?
The rabbit-proof fence — or bunny fence — in Western Australia was completed in 1907 and stretches about 2,000 miles. It acts as a boundary separating native vegetation from farmland. Within the fence area, scientists have observed a strange phenomenon: above the native vegetation, the sky is rich in rain-producing clouds. But the sky on the farmland side is clear.
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Within the last few decades, about 32 million acres of native vegetation have been converted to croplands west of the bunny fence. On the agricultural side of the fence, rainfall has been reduced by 20 percent since the 1970s.
The article lists a few hypotheses for why this has happened. But the real interesting thing about this is what it portends for the future. As population growth and rising affluence increase the demand for food more land will get worked by farmers. Will this cause droughts? Will increased farming of land reduce rain enough to cause a reduction in total production in areas which become the most heavily farmed?
The human footprint on the Earth grows larger every year. Think about it.
Space scientist James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, fears a runaway glacier melting scenario where sea levels will rise 5 meters.
The current rate of sea level change is not without consequences. However, the primary issue is whether global warming will reach a level such that ice sheets begin to disintegrate in a rapid, non-linear fashion on West Antarctica, Greenland or both. Once well under way, such a collapse might be impossible to stop, because there are multiple positive feedbacks. In that event, a sea level rise of several metres at least would be expected.
As an example, let us say that ice sheet melting adds 1 centimetre to sea level for the decade 2005 to 2015, and that this doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. This would yield a rise in sea level of more than 5 metres by 2095.
Of course, I cannot prove that my choice of a 10-year doubling time is accurate but I'd bet $1000 to a doughnut that it provides a far better estimate of the ice sheet's contribution to sea level rise than a linear response. In my opinion, if the world warms by 2 °C to 3 °C, such massive sea level rise is inevitable, and a substantial fraction of the rise would occur within a century. Business-as-usual global warming would almost surely send the planet beyond a tipping point, guaranteeing a disastrous degree of sea level rise.
I see this outcome as unlikely for a few reasons:
I'm not worried about global warming. I am worried about Peak Oil. Our future must be driven by electric power (and we can generate that electric with nukes, solar panels or wind turbines). But we aren't far enough along in the development of the batteries we need to replace most liquid fuel used in transportation. The transition period off of fossil fuels could therefore feature some really deep wrenching global recessions as economies reorder to deal with declining oil production. At the risk of boring long time readers, batteries are the key technology of our energy future.
Update: For more on climate engineering see here and here and here.
A team of international researchers has collected the oldest ever recovered DNA samples and used them to show that Greenland was much warmer at some point during the last Ice Age than most people have believed.
The ancient DNA was discovered at the bottom of a two kilometer thick ice sheet and came from the trees, plants and insects of a boreal forest estimated to be between 450,000 and 900,000 years-old. Previously, the youngest evidence of a boreal forest in Greenland was from 2.4 million years ago.
Natural trends will some day make Greenland much warmer than it is today.
Southern Greenland used to really be green.
The DNA samples suggest the temperature of the southern Greenland boreal forests 450,000 to 900,000 years-ago was probably between 10C in summer and -17C in winter. Also, the reduced glacier cover in that region means the global ocean was probably between one and two metres higher during that time compared to current levels.
Researchers analysed ice cores from a number of locations in Greenland, including Dye 3 in the south of the country. From the base of the 2km deep Dye 3 core, they were able to extract what they believe is likely to be the oldest authenticated DNA obtained to date.
By analysing these DNA samples, the researchers identified a surprising variety of plant and insect life, including species of trees such as alder, spruce, pine and members of the yew family, as well as invertebrates related to beetles, flies, spiders, butterflies and moths. The researchers believe that the samples date back to between 450,000 and 800,000 years ago.
Suppose humanity still exists the next time natural trends cause a major warming of the planet. Should humans seek to prevent the natural warming? Suppose the natural warming will be greater than the human-caused warming that some climate models predict as a result of human burning of fossil fuels. Should we intervene to stop a natural trend that will cause rising ocean levels and expansion and contraction of many ecological niches? Should we seek to save the polar bear from extinction due to natural climate change?
Dirty snow makes for melted ice.
The global warming debate has focused on carbon dioxide emissions, but scientists at UC Irvine have determined that a lesser-known mechanism – dirty snow – can explain one-third or more of the Arctic warming primarily attributed to greenhouse gases.
If this is true it suggests we can greatly reduce ice melting by cutting back on particulates pollution from burning coal and other fossil fuels. Cutting back on the particulates would also reduce health harm from particulates. One of my recurring arguments on energy and environmental policy is that we should cut back on conventional air pollutants as a higher priority than reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. Here's evidence that cleaner burning of fossil fuels will reduce temperatures in the Arctic.
Snow becomes dirty when soot from tailpipes, smoke stacks and forest fires enters the atmosphere and falls to the ground. Soot-infused snow is darker than natural snow. Dark surfaces absorb sunlight and cause warming, while bright surfaces reflect heat back into space and cause cooling.
“When we inject dirty particles into the atmosphere and they fall onto snow, the net effect is we warm the polar latitudes,” said Charlie Zender, associate professor of Earth system science at UCI and co-author of the study. “Dark soot can heat up quickly. It’s like placing tiny toaster ovens into the snow pack.”
The study appears this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
The rapid rate at which China is building coal-fired electric power plants (1-2 per week) suggests the snow is going to get even more soot-infused in coming years.
Our snow is too dirty.
In the past two centuries, the Arctic has warmed about 1.6 degrees. Dirty snow caused .5 to 1.5 degrees of warming, or up to 94 percent of the observed change, the scientists determined.
Forest fires also generate soot that lowers albedo and heats up snow in the Arctic.
The Chinese aren't going to shift away from coal toward cleaner energy sources until the alternatives drop in price. However, as their living standards increase we can expect they will try harder to reduce emissions from their coal burning industries as their higher affluence causes them to see cleaner air as a higher priority. But their living standards have a long way to rise before they'll want to treat emissions controls as a high priority.
Will rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and consequent warming cause massive droughts and famine? Maybe not.
What goes up, must come down. This basic rule of gravity on Earth's surface also applies to water vapor in the atmosphere. And as the air, earth and sea warms with climate change the atmospheric water vapor load increases by as much as 6.5 percent per degree Celsius, according to satellite data from the past 20 years. As the water vapor increases, so, too, will rainfall, argues physicist Frank Wentz, director of Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) in Santa Rosa, Calif., a provider of climate data records contracted by NASA.
While global climate models predict less wind due to global warming Wentz and colleagues found that surface winds increased with recent warming. Winds will blow evaporated water from the oceans over land and hence winds create the potential for increased precipitation if the planet warms further.
But climate models project that global warming will also bring weaker winds, leading to less water evaporating from the ocean and counteracting the effect of warming. Models predict that worldwide precipitation — which must match the amount of evaporation — will increase by only 1-3% for each degree of future global warming.
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They report in Science that the amount of water in the atmosphere, evaporation and precipitation all increased at the same rate, by about 1.3% per decade1 — or about 6.5% for every degree of warming. Surface winds increased, not decreased, with warming.
Why is this important: The "Apocalypse Soon" global warming doomsters predict global warming will lead to reduced precipitation and therefore crop failures and massive hunger. The official view of all Correct Thinking people is that global warming means massive droughts.
In February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) cited studies showing "extreme drought increasing from 1% of present-day land area to 30% by the end of the century."
The new study suggests models are flawed, underestimating how increased humidity in a warmer climate produces more rain clouds, Wentz said by e-mail.
Some climatologists are skeptical of these results.
Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute points out that the 20 years studied were dominated by a couple of El Niño events, which increased precipitation during that time. "The trends are not really significant," he says. "I think some more work would be necessary to really pin their argument down."
But if the warming brings more rain then more land might become usable for crops - especially lands closer to the north and south poles. Areas closer to the poles will gain longer growing seasons as nights get warmer in fall and spring and frost stops sooner and starts later. Massive farms in Siberia, Alaska, and northern Canada anyone?
Of course, that doesn't mean that a large increase in world temperatures will deliver net benefits. If Antarctica mostly melts then land areas will shrink due to rising ocean levels. Though we could build dikes to hold back the water ala Holland. Not sure that is feasible for Florida though. A cheaper solution for that problem: cool the poles with climate engineering to keep all the snow and ice frozen.
What worries me most about rising atmospheric CO2: Acidification of the ocean. That seems like a much tougher problem to prevent. Any ideas on that?
Alexander Ruzmaikin and Joan Feynman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., together with Dr. Yuk Yung of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., have analyzed Egyptian records of annual Nile water levels collected between 622 and 1470 A.D. at Rawdah Island in Cairo. These records were then compared to another well-documented human record from the same time period: observations of the number of auroras reported per decade in the Northern Hemisphere. Auroras are bright glows in the night sky that happen when mass is rapidly ejected from the sun's corona, or following solar flares. They are an excellent means of tracking variations in the sun's activity.
If these cycles really are linked to climate variation it raises the obvious question of where we are right now in both those cycles.
The researchers found some clear links between the sun's activity and climate variations. The Nile water levels and aurora records had two somewhat regularly occurring variations in common - one with a period of about 88 years and the second with a period of about 200 years.
The researchers said the findings have climate implications that extend far beyond the Nile River basin.
We could engage in activities that are counter-cyclical. For example, emit more greenhouse gases when the sun's output is going down and take measures to reflect away sunlight when the sun's output is increasing. Are our CO2 emissions working countercyclically right now? Or are they reinforcing a trend of increasing solar output?
What'd I'd do if it was up to me to make climate engineering decisions for the Earth: Make Antarctica as cold as possible and direct moist clouds toward it. Try to tie up as much water as possible in Antarctica while simultaneously letting the northern hemisphere warm up. That way more total land mass would become usable for humans, plants, and animals while water levels in the ocean could be kept down or even lowered so that even more land becomes available. Some big ocean boosters will object to this strategy. I'm a land chauvinist. I stand in opposition to the ocean chauvinists. The oceans are hogging too much of the Earth's surface.
More than three-quarters of the particulate pollution known as black carbon transported at high altitudes over the West Coast during spring is from Asian sources, according to a research team led by Professor V. Ramanathan at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.
With the Chinese putting 1 to 2 new coal burning electric plants online per week this problem is going to get much worse before it gets better. To repeat an argument I've made before: We need to accelerate the rate of advance of non-fossil fuels energy sources (primarily nuclear, solar, and wind). Only technological advances can make those energy sources become cheap enough that the Asians will want to switch to them and away from dirty fossil fuels. Populaces with lower living standards in less developed countries are less interested in the environment than they are in making more money. We can not expect them to take the same level of interest in reducing conventional pollutants as more affluent populations have.
Though the transported black carbon, most of which is soot, is an extremely small component of air pollution at land surface levels, the phenomenon has a significant heating effect on the atmosphere at altitudes above two kilometers (6,562 feet).
As the soot heats the atmosphere, however, it also dims the surface of the ocean by absorbing solar radiation, said Ramanathan, a climate scientist at Scripps, and Odelle Hadley, a graduate student at the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at Scripps. The two are lead authors of a research paper appearing in the March 14 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.
...
The researchers found that transported black carbon from Asian sources is equal to 77 percent of North American black carbon emissions in the troposphere during the spring.
The dimming at the ocean surface will reduce the rate of photosynthesis by algae. That'll reduce carbon dioxide uptake by plant photosyntheis and therefore reduce fish food supplies and fish stocks.
The soot is heating up the Pacific.
On a regional level, that amount of heating, or positive radiative forcing, the black carbon causes in the skies over the Pacific is about 40 percent of the forcing that has been attributed to the carbon dioxide increase of the last century, said Ramanathan. It likely has measurable effects on a variety of other physical and biological conditions in the areas of the Pacific over which the particulate pollution passes.
Also see my previous post about Asian air pollution's effects on cloud cover over the Pacific Ocean: Asian Air Pollution Changing Clouds. Plus, see my post China CO2 Emissions To Surpass US In 2009. The Kyoto Accord and similar climate change agreements will not accomplish much as long as the fossil fuels are cheaper than non-fossil fuel energy sources. The Asian economic juggernaut is radically reshaping the old world order where the United States and Europe were the two biggest users of energy and emitters of pollution.
Once living standards in a country get high enough people in that country start wanting to reduce pollution. The environmental movement did not take off in the United States in the 1960s because college students were taking LSD and mushrooms. The US reached a point where people had enough possessions that other desires and needs became important. Our problem with China, India, and other Asian countries is that they've rising emissions of pollutants from a few billion people with too many years to go before they reach living standards high enough to care about pollution control.
To put it another way: When the United States and Europe went through industrialization they had a lot fewer people doing the industrializing. First off, the US and Europe had a much smaller populations 100 years ago than they do today. Second, even today the US has a population less than a quarter of China's. India's population will reach 1.4 billion in 2025 and 1.6 billion by 2050 or more than 5 times America's population today. While elites in First World fully industrialized countries are worried about carbon dioxide emissions the Chinese and Indians haven't even graduated to the level of caring much about particulates and oxides of sulfur and nitrogen and the like. The quality of air in Chinese cities is getting worse as coal burning power plants get built at a frenetic pace.
I see this as a big and underappreciated problem for the future. Asian industrialization in such large populations pushes billions of people up into the ranks of polluters many years before they reach the ranks of yuppie environmentalists. Here's some new research on the effects that Asian air pollution is having on northern Pacific Ocean weather.
COLLEGE STATION – Severe pollution from the Far East is almost certainly affecting the weather near you, says a Texas A&M University researcher who has studied the problem and has published a landmark paper on the topic in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Renyi Zhang, professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M and lead author of the paper, says the study is the first of its kind that provides indisputable evidence that man-made pollution is adversely affecting the storm track over the Pacific Ocean, a major weather event in the northern hemisphere during winter. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA.
Zhang says the culprit is easy to detect: pollution from industrial and power plants in China and India. Both countries have seen huge increases in their economies, which means more large factories and power plants to sustain such growth. All of these emit immense quantities of pollution – much of it soot and sulfate aerosols – into the atmosphere, which is carried by the prevailing winds over the Pacific Ocean and eventually worldwide.
Using satellite imagery and computer models, Zhang says that in roughly the last 20 years or so, the amount of deep convective clouds in this area increased from 20 to 50 percent, suggesting an intensified storm track in the Pacific.
Dr. Zhang is also concerned that soot could deposit on northern ice and snow, cause more sunlight absorption, and melting of the ice.
"The general air flow is from west to east, but there is also some serious concern that the polar regions could be affected by this pollution. That could have potentially catastrophic results."
Soot, in the form of black carbon, can collect on ice packs and attract more heat from the sun, meaning a potential acceleration of melting of the polar ice caps, he believes.
"It possibly means the polar ice caps could melt quicker than we had believed, which of course, results in rising sea level rates," he adds.
The speed of Chinese economic development and growth in energy consumption is breathtaking.
In November, the International Energy Agency projected that China will become the world's largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in 2009, overtaking the United States nearly a decade earlier than previously anticipated. Coal is expected to be responsible for three-quarters of that carbon dioxide.
And the problem will get worse. Between now and 2020, China's energy consumption will more than double, according to expert estimates.
China has hundreds of new coal electric plants planned.
China's emissions regulations that exist are widely ignored.
The problem is that IGCC plants still cost about 10 percent to 20 percent more per megawatt than pulverized-coal-fired power plants. (And that's without carbon dioxide capture.) China's power producers--much like their counterparts in the United States and Europe--are waiting for a financial or political reason to make the switch. In part, what's been missing is regulation that penalizes conventional coal plants. And China's environmental agencies lack the resources and power to make companies comply even with regulations already on the books. Top officials in Beijing admit that their edicts are widely ignored, as new power plants are erected without environmental assessments and, according to some sources, without required equipment for pollution control.
I find the Western emphasis on Kyoto CO2 emissions reductions somehow quaint. It assumes we've moved on from worrying about already conquered problems with conventional ground level pollutants that directly harm health. But the environmental impact of Asian industrialization does not fit with that view.
Technologies that allow emissions reduction have already been developed in the West and those technologies keep getting better due to tightening environmental regulations in Western countries. So in theory China and India could adopt those technologies. But since those technologies raise costs use of them requires a willingness to pay a price. That price is obviously higher than they are willing to pay.
The Asian pollution problem highlights another reason why we'd benefit from the development of ways to cheaply generate energy without use of fossil fuels. If nuclear, solar, wind, and other energy technologies become cheaper than fossil fuels then the industrializing Asian countries would switch to these technologies without first achieving levels of per capita GDP high enough to trigger the development of large scale environmental movements.
Update: Other recent research finds less rain in China's mountains due to pollution.
Jerusalem, March 7, 2007 -- Manmade climate change due to pollution seriously inhibits precipitation over hills in semi-arid regions, a phenomenon with dire consequences for water resources in the Middle east and many other parts of the world, a study by a Chinese-Israeli research team, led by Prof. Daniel Rosenfeld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has shown.
The Chinese and Israeli researchers showed that the average precipitation on Mount Hua near Xian in central China has decreased by 20 percent along with increasing levels of manmade air pollution during the last 50 years. The precipitation loss was doubled on days that had the poorest visibility due to pollution particles in the air. This explains the widely observed trends of decrease in mountain precipitation relative to the rainfall in nearby densely populated lowlands, which until now had not been directly ascribed to air pollution.
Industrialization in countries holding a few billion people creates environment problems on a scale which we have not seen previously. This comes on top of Western pollution.
Update II: An article from the June 11, 2006 New York Times illustrates the scale of China's pollution problems.
In early April, a dense cloud of pollutants over Northern China sailed to nearby Seoul, sweeping along dust and desert sand before wafting across the Pacific. An American satellite spotted the cloud as it crossed the West Coast.
Researchers in California, Oregon and Washington noticed specks of sulfur compounds, carbon and other byproducts of coal combustion coating the silvery surfaces of their mountaintop detectors. These microscopic particles can work their way deep into the lungs, contributing to respiratory damage, heart disease and cancer.
Filters near Lake Tahoe in the mountains of eastern California "are the darkest that we've seen" outside smoggy urban areas, said Steven S. Cliff, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California at Davis.
The same double digit percentage increase becomes a larger absolute increase each year. Then there's India.
Already, China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. And it has increased coal consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years in the broadest industrialization ever. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.
To make matters worse, India is right behind China in stepping up its construction of coal-fired power plants — and has a population expected to outstrip China's by 2030.
When China reaches the same total GDP as the United States the Chinese will pollute far more than Americans because China will have much lower living standards per person. At that point China will have less than a quarter the per capita GDP and far less accumulated assets in the form of houses, cars, and gadgets. So Chinese people will be more interested in accumulating assets than in pollution reduction.
The positive correlation between living standards and interest in pollution reduction means we need to accelerate the development of energy technologies that are both cheaper and less polluting. Uptake of technologies that are both cleaner and cheaper does not require development of a big mass environmental protection movement in China and India. Market forces alone will drive the shift away from dirtier technologies.
Global warming would be much worse if the world had not put a halt to the destruction of the ozone hole above Antarctica, say researchers.
They say the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which restricts the use of CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals, will cut warming by five or six times more than the Kyoto Protocol.
The CFCs have made the ozone hole over the Antarctic much larger. Rapid economic growth in India and other Asian countries has slowed the decline in CFC emissions
Atmospheric scientist Guus Velders in the Netherlands
For example, says atmospheric scientist Guus Velders of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in Bilthoven, the class of compounds known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) traps 5000 to 14,000 times more heat, pound for pound, than carbon dioxide, and 400 times more heat than methane.
DuPont advocates an accelerated phaseout of HCFCs, actions to minimize emissions of refrigerants and adoption of low global warming potential (GWP) alternatives, where possible. Last year, the company announced the identification of a low GWP refrigerant for auto air conditioning applications and is currently working on leveraging this low GWP technology to other refrigerant applications.
This reminds me of a recent story on how rapid economic growth in India, China, and other Asian countries is delaying the recovery of the ozone layer by a quarter of a century.
Scientists mostly blame chlorofluorocarbons, a chemical used in an early form of refrigerant that they now realize was released into the atmosphere in larger quantities than forecast. As a result, the international agencies now say that injury to the Earth's ozone layer could take a quarter of a century longer to heal than previously expected.
The fastest-growing offending gas that scientists say can be better managed is HCFC-22. Nearly 200 diplomats will gather in September in Montreal to determine how to speed up the timetable for the elimination of certain gases that threaten the ozone layer, in particular how to manage HCFC-22. A deadline for proposals is March 15.
The cheapest way to reduce global warming is to accelerate the phaseout of CFCs and HCFCs. The Bush Administration is proposing a more accelerated phaseout of HCFCs. Sounds like a good idea.
More generally: Rapid Asian economic growth means that Western efforts to reduce CO2 emissions are going to get swamped by larger Asian increases in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions. We need to accelerate the development of solar, nuclear, and other non-fossil fuels energy technologies to lower their costs below the costs of fossil fuels. The Asians will shift toward non-fossil fuel energy sources if these sources are cheaper. Otherwise, expect more CO2 emissions.
A new report from FAO says livestock production contributes to the world's most pressing environmental problems, including global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Using a methodology that considers the entire commodity chain, it estimates that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport. However, the report says, the livestock sector's potential contribution to solving environmental problems is equally large, and major improvements could be achieved at reasonable cost.
Based on the most recent data available, Livestock's long shadow takes into account the livestock sector's direct impacts, plus the environmental effects of related land use changes and production of the feed crops animals consume. It finds that expanding population and incomes worldwide, along with changing food preferences, are stimulating a rapid increase in demand for meat, milk and eggs, while globalization is boosting trade in both inputs and outputs.
Grazing uses a quarter of the land surface of the Earth. Think about what that means as populations increase and humans all over the world use rising affluence to move out into newly created suburbs. Land supplies are inadequate. The human race has gotten too big.
Deforestation, greenhouse gases. The livestock sector is by far the single largest anthropogenic user of land. Grazing occupies 26 percent of the Earth's terrestrial surface, while feed crop production requires about a third of all arable land. Expansion of grazing land for livestock is a key factor in deforestation, especially in Latin America: some 70 percent of previously forested land in the Amazon is used as pasture, and feed crops cover a large part of the reminder. About 70 percent of all grazing land in dry areas is considered degraded, mostly because of overgrazing, compaction and erosion attributable to livestock activity.
To the fans of biomass energy: Hasn't enough of the Amazon already been lost to pasture land? Do we need to make it worse by promoting the destruction of the rain forests in the name of biomass energy environmentalism?
Livestock are responsible for 37% of anthropogenic methane (i.e. methane produced as a result of human activities).
FAO estimated that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport. It accounts for nine percent of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, most of it due to expansion of pastures and arable land for feed crops. It generates even bigger shares of emissions of other gases with greater potential to warm the atmosphere: as much as 37 percent of anthropogenic methane, mostly from enteric fermentation by ruminants, and 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide, mostly from manure.
Methane is probably the biggest greenhouse gas problem with livestock. As a greenhouse gas methane is about 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide by weight. Rising world affluence translates into rising demand for meat and that means more cows, sheep, and other methane producers.
But methane from livestock strikes me as (at least in theory) a much more tractable problem than carbon dioxide from fossil fuels burning. The potential exists to capture dairy cow methane when they are in buildings. Also, feeds greatly differ in their effects on methane production and cow bacteria balances could be manipulated to lower methane production. Biotechnology could drastically cut back on livestock methane production.
The use of fossil fuels in agriculture is more problematic for the same reason that the use of fossil fuels is so intractable in other human activities. Until other energy sources become cheaper than fossil fuels the rising demand for livestock and fancier food in general is going to cause a rising demand for fossil fuels.
Livestock compete with wild animals for land area. As the human race becomes more affluent the amount of animal biomass that will be wild is going to decline. This'll drive more species to extinction. (So will medical treatments that allow humans to live in high disease areas.)The sheer quantity of animals being raised for human consumption also poses a threat of the Earth's biodiversity. Livestock account for about 20 percent of the total terrestrial animal biomass, and the land area they now occupy was once habitat for wildlife. In 306 of the 825 terrestrial eco-regions identified by the Worldwide Fund for Nature, livestock are identified as "a current threat", while 23 of Conservation International's 35 "global hotspots for biodiversity" - characterized by serious levels of habitat loss - are affected by livestock production.
The full text of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization report Livestock's long shadow is downloadable as a PDF file.
Elizabeth Economy, director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, says China will surpass the United States in carbon dioxide emissions and China is embarked on an internal propaganda campaign to blame the rest of the world.
Last month the International Energy Agency announced that China would probably surpass the United States as the world's largest contributor of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide by 2009, more than a full decade earlier than anticipated. This forecast could spur China to adopt tough new energy and environmental standards, but it probably won't. China has already embarked on a very different strategy to manage its environmental reputation: launching a political campaign that lays much of the blame for the country's mounting environmental problems squarely on the shoulders of foreigners and, in particular, multinational companies.
While still in its initial stages, the campaign has gained steam over the past month. Senior Chinese officials, the media and even some environmental activists have charged multinational firms and other countries with exporting pollution, lowering their environmental manufacturing standards and willfully ignoring China's environmental regulations. Faced with growing international and popular discontent over the country's environmental crisis, China's leaders are tapping into anti-foreign and nationalist sentiments to deflect attention from their own failures.
First off, China's not going to help. Second, if they are going to surpass the United States in 2009 then where are they going to be in 2019 or 2029?
Consider the sheer cheekiness of this claim:
In late October a top environmental official, Pan Yue, accused the developed countries of "environmental colonialism": of transferring resource-intensive, polluting industries to China and bearing as little environmental responsibility as possible.
The Chinese government is buying massive amounts of American debt in order to keep the Chinese yuan currency undervalued. This boosts Chinese exports and decreases production in other countries of steel and other energy-intensive products. As the US dollar has dropped against other currencies in response to a US trade deficit that East Asian countries created with US debt purchases it has made the Chinese currency even more undervalued against the Euro, the English Pound, and other currencies.
Benny Peiser points out the above article and this one below by Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent for the Financial Times as indications for why the current unilateral regulatory approach in Europe faces an increasingly difficult reception. Some of Europe's reduction in CO2 emissions has just shifted to other countries which levy fewer taxes on energy usage. Fiona Harvey says that countries are afraid to put higher costs on carbon dioxide emissions because they fear loss of international competitiveness.
Japan refused to hurry moves to commit to reductions in emissions beyond 2012, when the current provisions of the Kyoto protocol expire, because of fears that it would hand China a competitive advantage in manufacturing industries. Canada faced a similar dilemma, resisting pressure to push for greater emissions cuts as the US was refusing to take on reduction targets. The US and Australia have already rejected the protocol, which obliges developed countries to cut their emissions by an average of 5 per cent compared with 1990 levels by 2012.
More worrying for proponents of the treaty, however, are rifts on the issue that are beginning to become apparent within Europe. The European Union has long been the most steadfast supporter of the Kyoto protocol, in the face of backsliding from Canada and Japan. The EU was credited with enticing Russia to agree to the protocol two years ago, which was the decisive factor in ensuring the long-delayed agreement finally came into effect. The EU’s greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme is the only mandatory scheme in the world to impose constraints on business emissions of carbon dioxide and to allow companies to trade their emissions allowances with one another in order to reduce carbon output at the lowest possible price.
Governments aren't just worried about reduced competitiveness. Their publics do not want to pay more for energy and for products and services made from energy.
The Kyoto Accord to cut green house gas emissions wasn't honored by some of its signatories. Now the percentage of emissions by non-Kyoto countries is skyrocketing. An international agreement isn't going to cut total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions or even slow CO2 emissions growth by much.
Worried about the potential for global warming? There's only one way to stop CO2 emissions growth: Development of energy technologies that are cleaner and cheaper than fossil fuels is the only way guaranteed to CO2 emissions.
Not only is the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) getting pumped into the atmosphere increasing but the rate at which it is increasing is itself increasing. In the last 5 years the rate of growth in CO2 emissions was 5 times faster than it was in the 1990s.
The global growth in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels was 4 times greater in the period between 2000 to 2005 than in the preceding 10 years, say scientists gathering in Beijing today for an international conference on global environmental change.
Despite efforts to reduce carbon emissions, the global growth rate in CO2 was 3.2% in the five years to 2005 compared to 0.8% in the period 1990 to 1999, according to data soon to be published by the Global Carbon Project (www.globalcarbonproject.org), a component of the Earth System Science Partnership (www.essp.org).
The industrialization of some high population countries is behind the acceleration in the rate of growth of CO2 emissions. China has now surpassed Japan and is the second largest fossil fuels user and CO2 emitter after the United States
China might surpass the United States as the largest CO2 emitter by 2030.
One likely contributor is China, whose emissions slowed at end of the 1990s before rising again. China is now the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US. On Tuesday, the International Energy Agency released a report predicting that it would become the world’s top emitter by 2030 (see World faces 'dirty, insecure' energy future).
Other growing developing countries, such as India and Brazil, are also fast becoming large emitters.
Rapidly growing less developed countries aren't going to hold back their growth in order to stop the rise in CO2 emissions. Only the development of cheaper cleaner energy technologies can stop the rise of CO2 emissions.
To repeat: CO2 emissions will continue to rise rapidly until cheap technologies are developed that that produce energy without emitting CO2.
Some argue that CO2 fluctuations over the Phanerozoic follow climate trends fairly well, supporting a causal relationship between high gas levels and high temperatures. “The geologic record over the past 550 million years indicates a good correlation,” said Robert A. Berner, a Yale geologist and pioneer of paleoclimate analysis. “There are other factors at work here. But in general, global warming is due to CO2. It was in the past and is now.”
Other experts say that is an oversimplification of a complex picture of natural variation. The fluctuations in the gas levels, they say, often fall out of step with the planet’s hot and cold cycles, undermining the claimed supremacy of carbon dioxide.
“It’s too simplistic to say low CO2 was the only cause of the glacial periods” on time scales of millions of years, said Robert Giegengack, a geologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies past atmospheres. “The record violates that one-to-one correspondence.”
He and other doubters say the planet is clearly warming today, as it has repeatedly done, but insist that no one knows exactly why. Other possible causes, they say, include changes in sea currents, Sun cycles and cosmic rays that bombard the planet.
“More and more data,” Jan Veizer, an expert on Phanerozoic climates at the University of Ottawa, said, “point to the Sun and stars as the dominant driver.”
Paleoclimatology should get larger chunks of research money. We need to find out how much costs we should foist upon ourselves in order to reduce or perhaps even reverse the build up of atmospheric CO2 from fossil fuels burning. I'd hate to slow worldwide economic growth to solve a problem that might turn out to be much smaller than the gloomier forecasts make it out to be. But at the same time, I'd hate to underspend in solving a problem that is going to be far more expensive and disruptive than the optimists expect. Better information leads to better decisions.
We should also put more government research dollars into developing cleaner energy sources. That money will get paid back in the form of cheaper energy, cleaner environment down at ground level where we breathe and eat, and faster economic growth.
One of my disappointments with the pro-Kyoto Accord forces is that they do not push either increased climate history research spending or energy research spending anywhere near as hard as they push restriction of CO2 emissions now. It is like they want to choose the most painful path. But the opponents of the Kyoto Accord aren't, for the most part, trying to accelerate the development of greater knowledge about climate history or pushing for a big scale-up of energy research either. The deniers of the problem want to do nothing. The believers in the problem want to go down a path that is most punishing. How about a more rational middle?
The biggest potential problem with global warming would come if large amounts of water bound up in ice in Greenland and Antarctica melted and raised the seas. A pair of satellites show that the total amount of water locked up in Antarctica is shrinking.
University of Colorado at Boulder researchers have used data from a pair of NASA satellites orbiting Earth in tandem to determine that the Antarctic ice sheet, which harbors 90 percent of Earth's ice, has lost significant mass in recent years.
The team used measurements taken with the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, to conclude the Antarctic ice sheet is losing up to 36 cubic miles of ice, or 152 cubic kilometers, annually. By comparison, the city of Los Angeles uses about 1 cubic mile of fresh water annually.
"This is the first study to indicate the total mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet is in significant decline," said Isabella Velicogna of CU-Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, chief author of the new study that appears in the March 2 online issue of Science Express. The study was co-authored by CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr of CIRES, a joint campus institute of CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
At the measured rate of melting it would take about 6 years for the oceans to rise an inch or 72 years to rise a foot.
The estimated ice mass in Antarctica is equivalent to 0.4 millimeters of global sea rise annually, with a margin of error of 0.2 millimeters, according to the study. There are about 25 millimeters in an inch.
The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment, completed in 2001, predicted the Antarctic ice sheet would gain mass in the 21st century due to increased precipitation in a warming climate. But the new study signals a reduction in the continent's total ice mass, with the bulk of loss occurring in the West Antarctic ice sheet, said Velicogna.
Researchers used GRACE data to calculate the total ice mass in Antarctica between April 2002 and August 2005 for the study, said Velicogna, who also is affiliated with the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
"The overall balance of the Antarctic ice is dependent on regional changes in the interior and those in the coastal areas," said Velicogna. "The changes we are seeing are probably a good indicator of the changing climatic conditions there."
Launched in 2002 by NASA and Germany, the two GRACE satellites whip around Earth 16 times a day at an altitude of 310 miles, sensing subtle variations in Earth's mass and gravitational pull. Separated by 137 miles at all times, the satellites measure changes in Earth's gravity field caused by regional changes in the planet's mass, including such things as ice sheets, oceans and water stored in the soil and in underground aquifers.
A change in gravity due to a pass over a portion of the Antarctic ice sheet, for example, imperceptibly tugs the lead satellite away from the trailing satellite, said Velicogna. A sensitive ranging system allows researchers to measure the distance of the two satellites down to as small as 1 micron -- about 1/50 the width of a human hair -- and to then calculate the ice mass in particular regions of the continent.
The satellites enabled collection of data across the entire Antarctic.
"The strength of GRACE is that we were able to assess the entire Antarctic region in one fell swoop to determine whether it was gaining or losing mass," said Wahr. While the CU researchers were able to differentiate between the East Antarctic ice sheet and West Antarctic ice sheet with GRACE, smaller, subtler changes occurring in coastal areas and even on individual glaciers are better measured with instruments like radar and altimeters, he said.
A study spearheaded by CIRES researchers at CU-Boulder and published in September 2004 concluded that glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula - which juts north from the West Antarctic ice sheet toward South America -- sped up dramatically following the collapse of Larsen B ice shelf in 2002. Ice shelves on the peninsula -- which has warmed by an average of 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 60 years -- have decreased by more than 5,200 square miles in the past three decades.
The thickness of the Antarctic ice averages well over a mile for the entire Antarctic. That's massive.
As Earth's fifth largest continent, Antarctica is twice as large as Australia and contains 70 percent of Earth's fresh water resources. The ice sheet, which covers about 98 percent of the continent, has an average thickness of about 6,500 feet. Floating ice shelves constitute about 11 percent of the continent.
The melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet alone - which is about eight times smaller in volume than the East Antarctic ice sheet -- would raise global sea levels by more than 20 feet, according to researchers from the British Antarctic Survey.
You can look at pretty pictures on the web.
Animation of the GRACE mission is available on the Web at http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/gallery/animations/. Images of Antarctic ice shelves are available from CU-Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center at: http://nsidc.org/data/iceshelves_images/.
What is most important about this study is that it used satellites to build a much more comprehensive picture of what is happening with the ice. The problem is that the satellites were launched only in 2002.
Richard Alley points out the biggest problem with this study: it covers only 3 years.
Richard Alley, a Pennsylvania State University glaciologist who has studied the Antarctic ice sheet but was not involved in the new research, said more research is needed to determine if the shrinkage is a long-term trend, because the new report is based on just three years of data. "One person's trend is another person's fluctuation," he said.
But Alley called the study significant and "a bit surprising" because a major international scientific panel predicted five years ago that the Antarctic ice sheet would gain mass this century as higher temperatures led to increased snowfall.
Scientists can't prove that human activities are causing global warming. However, humans are changing the atmosphere on a large enough scale that the possibility exists that we are changing the climate. In much of the world I do not see warming as a problem. In fact, for people living in such places as northern Russia, Finland, Alaska, Alberta, North Dakota, or Minnesota winter warming strikes me as pretty beneficial. But melting of the Antarctic ice would produce huge costs all over the world. Coastal lands are valuable. Large low lying areas would be lost. We'd simply have a lot less land and the fishies would have a lot more water to swim in if a substantial portion of Antarctica's ice melted.
The biggest problem we have with the climate debate is that the big mathematical models can't predict what'll really happen since the models contain simplifications that are probably wrong in important ways. We end up having to guess what will happen. Nature continually makes the climate change even without humans getting involved. So even once a change has happened it is still impossible to figure out how much of the change was caused by humans.
It seems to me we ought to approach this problem by first realizing we need greater capabilities. and that we need greater capabilities in several areas:
Aerosols cause much greater cooling than previously estimated.
Writing in the journal Nature today, scientists at the Meteorological Office and the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report that climate models used to predict future global warming have badly underestimated the cooling effect of aerosols.
"We found that aerosols actually have twice the cooling effect we thought," said Nicolas Bellouin, a climate modeller at the Met Office. The consequence is that as air quality improves and aerosol levels drop, future warming may be greater than we currently think."
Pollutants are a source of aerosols that have been decreased by environmental regulations - at least in the more industrialized countries. A decline in pollutant aerosols might cause a much higher level of global warming.
The group has produced the most precise estimates yet of how tiny particles, known as aerosols, could affect the world's climate. Aerosols, which include pollutants, have a cooling effect on the atmosphere, and the team's work suggests that the cooling effect is strong - nearly as strong as the top estimates of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Thus, the dwindling presence of aerosols means that global average temperatures could rise faster than previously estimated and reach toward the high end of projections for the end of the century.
Those estimates currently range from 2.7 to 7.9 degrees F., depending on how emissions of greenhouse gases and other factors play out in coming years.
The second article says some of the effects of aerosols still haven't been puzzled out. So the story could change. But suppose the aerosol effect turns out to be as these researchers say. Would it be possible to come up with an artificial aerosol that would have no negative health impacts yet which could lower the Earth's temperature? If such an aerosol was discovered would environmentalists oppose its widespread release?
There's an interesting angle to this report that I haven't seen reported: Rapid economic growth in China is greatly boosting particulate emissions from coal burning. But when living standards in China rise far enough the population will start demanding cleaner air. At that point a decline in Chinese aerosol emissions would happen under much higher atmospheric CO2 conditions. This could cause a temperature spike at that point.
You can read the Nature abstract here.
Another 210,000 years have just been added to the ice core climate record.
Two new studies of gases trapped in Antarctic ice cores have extended the record of Earth’s past climate almost 50 percent further, adding another 210,000 years of definitive data about the makeup of the Earth’s atmosphere and providing more evidence of current atmospheric change.
The research is being published in the journal Science by participants in the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica. It’s "an amazing accomplishment we would not have thought possible" as recently as 10 years ago, said Ed Brook, a professor of geosciences at Oregon State University, who analyzed the studies in the same issue of this professional journal.
"Not long ago we thought that previous ice studies which go back about 500,000 years might be the best we could obtain," said Brook, who is also the co-chair of the International Partnerships in Ice Coring Sciences, a group that’s helping to plan future ice core research efforts around the world.
650,000 years is a long time to have such a history of the Earth's' atmosphere's constituents. But the scientists now think they can go back further than 1 million years.
"Now we have a glimpse into the past of up to 650,000 years, and we believe it may be possible to go as much as one million years or more," Brook said. "This will give us a fuller picture of Earth’s past climates, the way they changed and fluctuated, and the forces that caused the changes. We’ll be studying this new data for years."
As the data become more solid about the atmospheric conditions of the past, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the current conditions of the past 200 years are a distinct anomaly, Brook said.
"The levels of primary greenhouse gases such as methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide are up dramatically since the Industrial Revolution, at a speed and magnitude that the Earth has not seen in hundreds of thousands of years," Brook said. "There is now no question this is due to human influence."
Humans have created atmospheric conditions unlike any seen in the last 650,000 years. That ought to give anyone pause. We should be concerned about what this portends for the future. It could be good. Or it could be bad. It will certainly be different. Shouldn't we at least be trying a lot harder to develop energy technologies that do not use fossil fuels?
Last night I was watching an excellent History Channel TV show about climate changes on the Earth from the early Middle Ages to today. The warming period that preceded the 14th century cooling was an amazing period. Food production surged. Fish populations surged near Europe. Grapes for wine were grown in Britain 300 miles north of where grapes are grown in France today. Europe's population surged by 50%. Swamps dried out and this led to a big decrease in malaria. Climate change is not necessarily automatically bad in its effects.
However, that warming might have triggered a flow of melting glacial water into the North Atlantic that then caused the Atlantic Conveyor to stop bringing warm water up from the south and that might have triggered the cooling that started in the 14 century (said cooling had the River Thames freezing solid every winter in England). But then again, that cooling might have been caused by volcanic eruptions, lower solar output, and other natural phenomena. The take-home lesson I got from the show was that if you have had fairly stable climate for a few centuries then best you start expecting a big shift. The climate is just not stable for many centuries running.
EPICA is the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica. The new ice core, initially described in 2004, is from a site in East Antarctica known as EPICA Dome C. This work represents a long-term European research collaboration and appears in two studies and an accompanying “Perspective” article in the 25 November 2005 issue of the journal Science, published by AAAS the nonprofit science society.
One study chronicles the stable relationship between climate and the carbon cycle during the Pleistocene (390,000 to 650,000 years before the present). The second one documents atmospheric methane and nitrous oxide levels over the same period.
The analysis highlights the fact that today’s rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, at 380 parts per million by volume, is already 27 percent higher than its highest recorded level during the last 650,000 years, said Science author Thomas Stocker of the Physics Institute of the University of Bern, in Bern, Switzerland, who serves as the corresponding author for both papers.
I do not favor immediate regulations on CO2 emissions that would put a big damper on global economic growth. However, the continued rise in CO2 emissions really ought to be reason for serious concern by all prudent and rational people. We do not know what this rise in CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gassess is going to do to the global climate system. We really ought to make a very large push to develop technologies that would allow us to generate large amounts of cheap energy from non-fossil fuels energy sources.
The human-caused changes in the atmosphere have been made in a short period of time as compared to the length of most natural climate cycles.
“We have added another piece of information showing that the timescales on which humans have changed the composition of the atmosphere are extremely short compared to the natural time cycles of the climate system,” Stocker explained.
Though the recorded record made by humans does contain incidents of large climate changes that came on within the space of a single year. So the climate does sometimes shift very rapidly.
A half million years ago the interglacials were warmer and longer lasting.
The new work confirms the stable relationship between Antarctic climate and the greenhouse gasses carbon dioxide and methane during the last four glacial cycles. The new ice core analysis also extends this relationship back another two glacial cycles, to a time when the warm “interglacial” periods were milder and longer than more recent warm periods, according to the European researchers.
The fact that carbon dioxide and methane levels were lower during the relatively mild warm periods of the two additional cycles, compared to the warmer warm periods of the last 400,000 years, is especially interesting for the study of climate sensitivity, which is a measure of how the climate system reacts when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations double, explained Science author Dominique Raynaud from LGGE in Grenoble, France.
The new atmospheric and climate records from the EPICA Dome C ice core also indicate that the response of the natural carbon cycle to climate warming remains the same over time – in terms of the mechanism involved and the degree to which greenhouse gasses further amplify climate change, explained Science author Jean Jouzel from LSCE and Institut Pierre Simon