9 November 2015, Science News, The past shows how abrupt climate shifts affect Earth. New research shows how past abrupt climatic changes in the North Atlantic propagated globally. The study, led by researchers from Centre for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, shows how interaction between heat transport in the ocean and the atmosphere caused the climatic changes to be expressed in different ways across the Southern Hemisphere. The results shows how forcing the climate system into a different state can trigger climate variations that spread globally and have very different impacts in different regions of Earth. This is important now, where rising atmospheric CO2 levels lead to global warming and may trigger abrupt climatic changes. The results have been published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience. The history of climate on Earth is stored in tiny variations in kilometer-thick ice cores, sediments from lakes and oceans, and other natural archives that are layered down over thousands of years and works as archives of past temperatures. By recovering and deciphering these archives, researchers can reveal how and why the climate changed in the past, and in this way learn how the climate system may react in the future as the planet warms and the ice sheets melt. Read more here
Category Archives: The Science
9 November 2015, Carbon Brief, Global temperature rise set to hit 1C of warming this year, Met Office says. Scientists expect 2015 to be the first year where global annual average temperature passes 1C above pre-industrial levels. As of the end of September, global temperature is sitting at 1.02C above the 1850-1900 average, and is “expected to hold” for the rest of the year, a short Met Office report says. This is another piece of evidence of “systematic warming” of the Earth’s climate, saysDr Peter Stott, head of the climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office Hadley Centre. The news generated some media interest, including headlines in the BBC and Guardian. It comes on the same day as the World Meteorological Organisation announced that the global average concentration of carbon dioxide surpassed 400 parts per million in spring 2015, notes the Independent. ‘Important marker’ Each year, major meteorological organisations around the world calculate the global average surface temperature. It’s just one measure of how the world is changing in response to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. These provisional figures for 2015 come from HadCRUT4, a dataset of observed global temperatures jointly put together by the UK Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. The data suggests that 2015 will reach, and surpass, 1C above pre-industrial temperatures for the first time in human history. The cross in the top right-hand corner of the chart below shows where the 2015 temperature currently sits compared to the last 150 years. Read more here
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
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