25 March 2016, Climate News Network, Past emissions cause mounting climate havoc. Despite signs that the world will cut its future fossil fuel use, greenhouse gases already emitted are still driving accelerating climate change.Climate change has reached the point where it may outstrip the quickening efforts to slow it by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, scientists say. They say humans are now releasing CO2 into the atmosphere 10 times faster than natural processes have ever done in the last 66 million years, before the extinction of the dinosaurs. The disclosure comes in the World Meteorological Organisation’s State of the Climate report, published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The lead author, Professor Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii, said: “Our carbon release rate is unprecedented over such a long time period [and] means that we have effectively entered a ‘no-analogue’ state. “The present and future rate of climate change and ocean acidification is too fast for many species to adapt, which is likely to result in widespread future extinctions.” “The window of opportunity for limiting global temperature rise to well below 2°C . . . is narrow and rapidly shrinking. The effects of a warming planet will be felt by all” The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, said: “Climate change is accelerating at an alarming rate. The window of opportunity for limiting global temperature rise to well below 2°C – the threshold agreed by world governments in Paris in December last year – is narrow and rapidly shrinking. The effects of a warming planet will be felt by all.” The WMO secretary-general, Petteri Taalas, said the present “alarming” rate of climate change as a result of greenhouse gas emissions was “unprecedented in modern records”. “The future is now”, he said. Yet less than a week ago the International Energy Agency announced that global energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide had shown no increase for the second year in a row. The announcement was widely hailed as significant good news, with the IEA’s executive director, Fatih Birol, describing it as “yet another boost to the global fight against climate change”.Read More here
Category Archives: The Science
18 March 2016, The Guardian, Welcome to the climate emergency: you’re about 20 years late February 2016 saw global warming records tumble with new data suggesting more Australians think humans are the cause. Everywhere you look right now, the Earth’s climate system seems to be breaking records. To choose the most inappropriate metaphor possible, February 2016 would have been enough to bring a lot of climate watchers out in a cold sweat. Figures from Nasa using thermometers and ocean temperature readings showed February was the hottest month on record, by quite a margin. According to satellite data, the amount of Arctic sea ice also hit an all-time low for this time of year since measurements began in 1979. Scientists also use satellite data to calculate air temperatures. Climate science contrarians and denialists like these readings because they have not shown as much warming as the more reliable readings on the surface. But February also set a new record for global temperatures from satellites. As Joe Romm at Climate Progress noted, “climate science deniers need a new meme”. These heat records have been variously described as “terrifying”, “jawdropping” and “shocking”. One climate scientist in particular, Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, appeared to capture the mood with a quote repeated in stories around the world, including here on the Guardian. “We are in a kind of climate emergency now,” said Rahmstorf, of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. But here’s the rub. Global warming is proceeding pretty much exactly as predicted. Professor Stefan Rahmstorf. To climate scientists like Rahmstorf, the temperature records being broken right now are not a surprise and, at least according to Rahmstorf, they shouldn’t be seen as an entry point to some terrifying new era (at least not as terrifying as things already are). “The media’s view is too short-term,” he told me. “As scientists we want to keep an overview of all the data and the knowledge of how the whole system works.” Read More here
16 March 2016, The Conversation ,Droughts and flooding rains: it takes three oceans to explain Australia’s wild 21st-century weather. Australia is a land of extremes, and famously of “droughts and flooding rains”. That’s been truer than ever in the 21st century; since 1999 the country has see-sawed from drought to deluge with surprising speed. There was the millennium drought, which lasted more than a decade and culminated in disasters such as Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires in 2009. Then, in 2011, Cyclone Yasi struck Queensland and a large swathe of Australia exploded under a green carpet of grasses, shrubs and trees. Filming of the movie Mad Max: Fury Road was moved from outback Australia to Namibia after the big wet of 2010-11, because Australia’s luxurious growth of wildflowers and metre-high grasses didn’t quite match the post-apocalyptic landscape the movie’s producers had in mind. In Alice Springs, the Henley-on-Todd Regatta was almost cancelled in 2011 because there was water in the normally dry river. Globally, the big wet on land caused a 5 mm drop in sea levels as large amounts of rain were deposited on Australia, South America and Africa. This coincided with an unprecedented increase in carbon stored in vegetation, especially in arid and semi-arid regions of the southern hemisphere. The greening of Australia in particular had a globally significant impact. Meteorologists have struggled to explain these wild variations in Australia’s weather. Dry years with disappointing crops have been linked to the Pacific Ocean’s El Niño phase (part of a cycle called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)). But despite its huge influence, not even ENSO can fully account for Australia’s extreme rainfall patterns. Our research, published this week in Nature’s Scientific Reports, offers an explanation. We found that conditions in the three oceans that surround Australia – the Pacific, Indian and Southern Oceans – combine to amplify each other’s influences on Australian weather. Read More here
14 March 2016, The Guardian, February breaks global temperature records by ‘shocking’ amount Warnings of climate emergency after surface temperatures 1.35C warmer than average temperature for the month. February smashed a century of global temperature records by “stunning” margin, according to data released by NASA. The unprecedented leap led scientists, usually wary of highlighting a single month’s temperature, to label the new record a “shocker” and warn of a “climate emergency”. The NASA data shows the average global surface temperature in February was 1.35C warmer than the average temperature for the month between 1951-1980, a far bigger margin than ever seen before. The previous record, set just one month earlier in January, was 1.15C above the long-term average for that month. “Nasa dropped a bombshell of a climate report,” said Jeff Masters and Bob Henson, who analysed the data on the Weather Underground website. “February dispensed with the one-month-old record by a full 0.21C – an extraordinary margin to beat a monthly world temperature record by.” “This result is a true shocker, and yet another reminder of the incessant long-term rise in global temperature resulting from human-produced greenhouse gases,” said Masters and Henson. “We are now hurtling at a frightening pace toward the globally agreed maximum of 2C warming over pre-industrial levels.” Read More here