Category Archives: The Science

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5 November 2015, Renew Economy, 50 years after warning, no debate in Paris on the science. Diplomats steeling themselves for a historic round of United Nations climate negotiations remain divided by a handful of stubborn disputes. Discord persists over financial and procedural issues, for example, and over how pollution from farming and deforestation should be addressed alongside energy generation. The fundamentals of climate science, however, are not among the issues being debated. The 50-year anniversary of the first detailed climate change warning issued to a U.S. president is Thursday, less than a month before a historic two-week climate negotiating session begins in Paris. The golden anniversary is coinciding with a rich embrace of climate science in global negotiations. “There are plenty of challenging issues for the negotiators, but the basic science of climate change is not one of them,” said Harvard University economics professor Robert Stavins, an expert on the talks. “So-called climate skepticism is essentially irrelevant to the outcome.” Countries that have been “trying to undercut international climate action,” including Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, often “play the bad guys,” said Jake Schmidt, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s international program, but “not by denying that climate change exists.” The carbon dioxide chapter of the 1965 Restoring the Quality of Our Environment report, produced by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s science advisory committee, cited climate change research dating back to 1899. The science in the chapter was “basically right,” said Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric science professor at Stanford University. It warned loosely of ice caps melting, seas rising, temperatures warming, and water bodies acidifying. In the five decades since, a frenzy of multidisciplinary scientific endeavours has helped humanity pinpoint and project, with increasing and worrying precision, the consequences of rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, those impacts have shifted from being hypothetical to being real. Read More here

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5 November 2015, Washington Post, A controversial NASA study says Antarctica is gaining ice. Here’s why you should be skeptical. Late last week, a study published by NASA scientists in the Journal of Glaciology made the surprising claim that the gigantic continent of Antarctica is actually gaining ice, rather than losing it, to the tune of 82 gigatons (or billion metric tons) per year from 2003 to 2008. The study has drawn massive amounts of media attention — and no wonder. It contradicts numerous prior scientific claims, including a 2012 study in Science by a small army of polar scientists, a study from earlier this year in Earth and Planetary Science Letters (which found 92 gigatons of net losses per year) and this 2014 study in Geophysical Research Letters (160 gigatons of net losses per year). It also contradicts assertions by the leading consensus body of climate science, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which stated in 2013 that Antarctica is “losing mass” and that this process is accelerating. That statement was itself based on multiple studies showing Antarctic ice loss. Not only does the new research fly in the face of all of this — if true, it also raises serious questions about our current understanding of sea level rise. If Antarctica is actually gaining ice, that means that a significant percentage of the current rise of the seas, estimated at roughly 3.22 millimeters per year by NASA itself, must be coming from elsewhere. (It takes 360 gigatons of ice to raise seas by 1 millimeter). No wonder, then, that a number of researchers have been quoted expressing skepticism about the new research, even as climate change doubters have had a field day — adding the study to an argumentative arsenal that previously included misleading claims about growing Antarctic sea ice. Read More here

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4 November 2015, The Guardian, Most Coalition voters do not believe in human-induced climate change – CSIRO. Five years of surveys show 52% of Liberal voters believe in climate change but don’t think human activity is causing it, and 13% do not believe it is happening. Four out of five Australians believe that climate change is happening, but those who do not are much more likely to vote for the Coalition, new analysis of existing CSIRO data has found. The peak scientific research body analysed data from its past five climate change surveys to give a comprehensive look at how the public’s attitudes have changed over time. The survey was axed this year, so the figures cover the period 2010 to 2014. The research found that 78% of Australians believed that climate change was happening. In 2014, less than two in five – 39% – thought that climate change was happening but was naturally induced. Another 46% nominated humans as the main cause of environmental changes. In 2010, 50% said they believed that climate change was human-induced. Greens and Labor voters were the most likely to believe that climate change was human induced – 76% and 59% respectively. Coalition supporters were much less likely to believe that climate change existed, with 13% of Liberal voters and 18% of Nationals voters saying that they did not think climate change was happening. Most Liberal voters (52%) said they believed that climate change was happening but was naturally-occurring – 28% said they thought it was human-induced. By contrast, 31% of Labor supporters said climate change was naturally-occurring, and 59% said it was human-induced. Read More here

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4 November 2015, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Tipping points: A new landscape of global crises. Recent crises are increasingly global and follow new kinds of patterns in the past crises were often local and isolated. They left surrounding ecosystems and societies largely unaffected. This made aid and governance work easier.Today, crises are becoming more global in reach affecting more people and systems at the same time. In a recent study lead by Thomas Homer-Dixon and Brian Walker published in Ecology and Society with Centre researchers Oonsie Biggs, Anne-Sophie Crépin, Carl Folke, Garry Peterson, Johan Rockström, Will Steffen and Max Troell a framework to identify the causes, processes and outcomes of multiple interconnected crises which they term “synchronous failure” is proposed. A guide for understanding globally interconnected crises The framework shows how several stressors together can cause a crisis which can rapidly spread to become global in reach. “We have developed a framework for understanding how global crises may emerge,” says Biggs. “Our framework could be used as an initial guide for systematic analyses and identifying early-warning signals and measures for building social-ecological resilience. It can also support establishment of appropriate governance structures that can navigate the danger of synchronous failure,” she says. Causes of crises The authors argue that future crises will increasingly result from three long-term global trends: the dramatic increase in human economic activity in relation to Earth’s environment, the rapidly increasing connections across the globe, and the decreasing diversity of human cultures, institutions, practices and technologies. These three trends create several stresses and reduce the capacity of systems to deal with disturbances. Case studies from the 2008 financial-energy and food-energy crises illustrate this. In the food-energy crises four stresses seemed to have affected the systems simultaneously, sometimes enhancing the impacts on one another:

1. diminishing supply of new agricultural land of good quality
2. declining returns on intensifying agriculture through more extensive inputs
3. climate change related extreme weather such as droughts
4. consistent high demand for food in a world with a growing population. Read More here