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9 December 2015, Climate News Network, Ice melt highlights Inuit plight. COP21: As Arctic peoples’ leaders appeal for unity to halt global warming, scientists report that Greenland’s glaciers are now melting at a speed not seen since the last Ice Age. The glaciers of Greenland are retreating two to three times faster now than at any time since the last Ice Age ended 9,500 years ago, according to new research. The news comes as indigenous peoples from the northern polar region staged anArctic Day at the COP21 climate change summit in Paris. Leaders of Greenland peoples, the Nunavut region of Canada and the Inuit Circumpolar Council appealed to the governments of the world to unite to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep global warming to between 1.5˚C and 2˚C. That is because the Arctic is now warming faster than almost anywhere else on Earth, and both human settlements and natural ecosystems are vulnerable. That the Greenland glaciers are in retreat is itself not news. Satellite data and measurements on the ground have repeatedly confirmed the retreat of the glaciers, the loss of ice and the acceleration of flow. The Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier has even reached a speed of 17 kilometres a year. Sediment cores But US scientists report in Climate of the Past journal that the present rate of loss is without precedent. Read More here

 

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9 December 2015, Climate News Network, Climate heads for irreversible change. COP21: With the UN climate conference still trying to agree an effective way to tackle global warming, a scientific group warns that policy is ignoring the reality of a melting world. PARIS, 9 December, 2015 – Some of the world’s coldest places, on land and sea, may be plunged into an unstoppable transition to a climate system most scientists believe has not existed for 35-50 million years. The almost immediate consequences would include the loss of reliable water resources for millions of people, and the start of a process leading to ultimate sea level rise of 4-10 metres or more. The warning comes in a report by the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative (ICCI), a group of scientists, diplomats and others who say climate change “is happening in the cryosphere faster and more dramatically than anywhere else on earth”. The report says that unless the negotiators at the COP21 climate change summit in Paris show far more ambition than they have so far, the verdict on this conference will be “too little, too late”. Cryosphere dynamics Pam Pearson, ICCI’s founder and director, introduced the report on the risks of irreversible climate change in the cryosphere − the scientific name for the parts of the world that are covered in ice and snow for part or all of the year – by saying: “We are worried by the disconnect between cryosphere dynamics and the policy response.” Read More here

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9 December 2015, Washington Post, How the Earth itself could undermine a Paris climate agreement. PARIS — With only three days left, tensions here are rising as countries race to resolve outstanding differences and forge an agreement that — hopefully — will set the planet on a path to avoiding the worst consequences of climate change. The goal is an agreement that would set the world on a path to limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius, or perhaps even 1.5 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial levels. But at a news conference here at the Le Bourget conference center Wednesday morning, scientists pointed out a factor that could make hitting these targets quite a lot harder. It’s called permafrost. As the planet warms, this frozen northern soil is going to continue to thaw — and as it thaws, it’s going to release carbon dioxide and methane into the air. A lot of it, it turns out. Potentially enough to really throw off the carbon budgets that have been calculated in order to determine the maximum emissions that we can release and still have a good chance of keeping warming to 2 C or below it. In particular, Susan Natali of the Woods Hole Research Center explained Wednesday that with a very high level of warming, permafrost emissions this century could be quite large indeed. Natali used numbers from the 2013 report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which found that humans can only emit about 275 more gigatons, or billion tons, of carbon (about 1,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide, which has a greater molecular weight) to have a greater than 66 percent chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees C. But out of that limited budget, she said, permafrost emissions could take up some 150 of those gigatons (or about 550 gigatons of carbon dioxide). Read More here

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8 December 2015, The Conversation, Removing CO2 from the atmosphere won’t save us: we have to cut emissions now. Over 190 countries are negotiating in Paris a global agreement to stabilise climate change at less than 2℃ above pre-industrial global average temperatures. For a reasonable chance of keeping warming under 2℃ we can emit a further 865 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2). The climate commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 2030 are a first step, but recent analyses show they are not enough. So what are the options if we cannot limit emissions to remain within our carbon budget? Emitting more than the allowance would mean we have to remove carbon from the atmosphere. The more carbon we emit over the coming years, the more we will need to remove in future. In fact, out of 116 scenarios consistent with 2℃ published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 101 scenarios require the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere during the second half of this century. That’s on top of the large emission reductions required. So how do we remove carbon from the atmosphere? Several technologies have been proposed to this effect. These are often referred to as “negative emissions technologies” because the carbon is being removed from the atmosphere (in the opposite direction to emissions). In a study published today in Nature Climate Change, which is part of a broader release by the Global Carbon Project, we investigate how big a role these technologies could play in halting global warming. We find that these technologies might play a role in climate mitigation. However, the large scales of deployment currently used in most pathways that limit warming to 2℃ will be severely constrained by environmental and socio-economic factors. This increases the pressure to raise the level of ambition in reducing fossil fuel emissions now. Read More here

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