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Most Powerful Image Yet Showing Huge Arctic Sea Ice Volume Loss
Note from Dorothy: ClimateProgress.org has just published an important article on the rapidly thinning Arctic Sea Ice, fascinating and important reading. Click on the title to read the entire article.
Arctic Sea Ice Volume Heads Toward New Record Low as Northwest Passage Melts Free Fourth Year in a Row
Masters rebukes disinformers: “Diminishing the importance of Arctic sea ice loss by calling attention to Antarctic sea ice gain is like telling someone to ignore the fire smoldering in their attic, and instead go appreciate the coolness of the basement, because there is no fire there. Planet Earth’s attic is on fire.”
As Global Temperature Rises, So Do Food Prices
Note from Dorothy: See also the comprehensive post at ClimateProgress.org on August 10:
Must-hear podcast :Lester Brown on Rising Temperatures and Rising Food Prices
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Analysis: Extreme weather plagues farming, talks flounder
By Timothy Gardner, August 12, 2010
Cross-posted from The Schwartz Report, August 16, 2010
WASHINGTON — Global wheat markets reeling from Russian droughts, thousands of cattle killed by heat in Kansas, and countless crop acres wiped out by floods in Pakistan are glimpses of what can be expected as the world struggles to battle climate change. But as concerns mount over extreme weather hitting global food systems this year, governments are no closer to forging a pact to fight climate change.
When temperatures rise as a result of smokestack and tailpipe emissions, droughts, heat waves, and floods become more frequent and more intense. The temperatures create “more and more hot extremes and worse unprecedented extremes and that’s what we’re seeing,” said Neville Nicholls, a climate scientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
As the number of extreme weather events mount, they will likely create havoc in agricultural markets and could lead to food riots in poor countries like those in 2007 and 2008 when prices hit records on rabid market speculation. Yet global talks to battle emissions are grinding to a near halt after the U.S. Senate failed to pass a climate bill and the administration of President Barack Obama also failed to push for one. As the United States, the top major emitter per capita, fails to forge a plan, the divide grows between rich and poor countries on sharing the burden of acting on climate change. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said this week “we may not be able to have that comprehensive binding agreement in Cancun,” referring to global talks set for November in Mexico.
Climate change skepticism rose after last year’s U.N. talks in Copenhagen fell short. It was also stoked by a dispute over e-mails at a British University climate center in which leading scientists were accused, and later cleared, of exaggerating the effects of global warming, and doubts about a U.N. climate science panel report after it had included an exaggerated prediction of Himalayan glacier melts.
Meanwhile world temperatures continue to rise unchecked. The U.S. National Climatic Data Center said last month the first half of this year was the hottest on record globally.
Until the risks are understood by U.S. farmers, who have mostly lobbied hard against climate legislation because of fuel price concerns, an important base of voters will push American senators to oppose legislation for years to come.
RIPPLES
Wheat prices have risen by nearly 70 percent since June after Russia was hit with its worst drought in 130 years. It pushed Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to ban exports of the grain, setting off alarm bells in Egypt, the world’s biggest wheat importer, and other hungry nations. Agriculture is projected to be just one victim of extreme weather events related to climate change. But the fact that the world’s billions depend on reliable, affordable access to agricultural products increases the chances that extreme weather could rapidly become a source of strife.
Already the Russian wheat crisis risks stirring unrest in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.
“Over the whole globe all of these changes in climate … are going to cause some real ripples in our capabilities of producing food,” Jerry Hatfield, a laboratory director at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture Research Service. He said the heat and humidity in the Midwest, where more than 2,000 cattle died in Kansas this month, may hurt yields in corn and other crops.
Nick Robins, an analyst at London-based HSBC, said in a note this week that climate change could reduce grain production in the G20 countries by up to 8.7 percent by 2020 if no significant action is taken to adapt to extreme weather and high temperatures. When combined with population growth, per capita grain production in the G20 could fall between 11.9 and 16.1 percent by 2020, he wrote.
ALL BETS ARE OFF
In India and other countries that rely more on rice there’s concern high temperatures will lead to yield losses. “That could start showing up in the next decade or so, because we’re getting these heating peaks already,” said Peter Timmer, nonresident fellow at the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit research group based in Washington.
In the near term, droughts and heat waves induced by climate change require farmers to improve management practices. “In the longer term, all bets are off which crops can and can’t grow,” said Jay Gulledge, the senior scientist at the Pew Center for Global Climate Change in Washington.
The effects of extreme weather on crops are only beginning to be understood. (See the August 15 Reuters article, New systems needed to measure extreme weather: WMO) Many scientists had projected that climate change’s rising global temperatures would help countries in the North produce more food.
For decades scientists studied the effect of global warming on crops by simply raising temperatures and carbon dioxide levels in greenhouses. They did not take into account the effects of floods and droughts, or reduced yields that result from higher temperatures.
“There’s been a severe failing of the scientific community. on that,” said Gulledge. “Climate science proceeded amazingly over that period, but this topic was handled poorly.”
(Additional reporting by Emma Ashburn, Alister Doyle in Oslo, Gerard Wynn in London, David Fogarty in Singapore; editing by Russell Blinch and Mohammad Zargham)
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE67B3W320100812
James Hansen: What Global Warming Looks Like
Note from Dorothy: Don’t miss reading the summary of this paper for some strong statements and useful information:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/paper/gistemp2010_summary.pdf
In their summary, Dr. Hansen and his colleagues make it clear that they will provide monthly updates and make the process as transparent as possible.
What Global Warming Looks Like
The July 2010 global map of surface temperature anomalies (Figure 1), relative to the average July in the 1951-1980 period of climatology, provides a useful picture of current climate. It was more than 5°C (about 10°F) warmer than climatology in the eastern European region including Moscow.
There was an area in eastern Asia that was similarly unusually hot. The eastern part of the United States was unusually warm, although not to the degree of the hot spots in Eurasia.
There were also substantial areas cooler than climatology, including a region in central Asia and the southern part of South America. The emerging La Nina is now moderately strong, as evidenced by the region cooler than climatology along the equator in the eastern and central Pacific Ocean.
The global average July 2010 temperature was 0.55°C warmer than climatology in the GISS analysis, which puts 2010 in practically a three way tie for third warmest July. July 1998 was the warmest in the GISS analysis, at 0.68°C.
The 12-month running mean of global temperature (Figure 2) achieved a record high level during the past few months. Because the current La Nina will continue at least several months, and likely strengthen somewhat, the 12-month running mean temperature is expected to decline during the second half of 2010.
Will calendar year 2010 be the warmest in the period of instrumental data? Figure 3 shows that through the first seven months 2010 is warmer than prior warm years. The difference of +0.08°C compared with 2005, the prior warmest year, is large enough that 2010 is likely, but not certain, to be the warmest year in the GISS record. However, because of the cooling effect of La Nina in the remainder of the year, there is a strong possibility that the 2005 and 2010 global temperatures will be sufficiently close that they will be practically indistinguishable.
Climate anomalies in the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2010, including the heat in Eastern Europe and unusually heavy rainfall and floods in several regions, have received much attention. Are these climate anomalies an example of what we can expect global warming to look like? Maps of temperature anomalies, such as Figure 1, are useful for helping people understand the role of global warming in extreme events.
The location of extreme events in any particular month depends on specific weather patterns, which are unpredictable except on short time scales. The weather patterns next summer will be different than this year. It could be a cooler than average summer in Moscow in 2011.
But note in Figure 1, and similar maps for other months, that the area warmer than climatology already (with global warming of 0.55°C relative to 1951-1980) is noticeably larger than the area cooler than climatology. Also the magnitude of warm anomalies now usually exceeds the magnitude of cool anomalies.
What we can say is that global warming has an effect on the probability and intensity of extreme events. This is true for precipitation as well as temperature, because the amount of water vapor that the air carries is a strong function of temperature. So the frequency of extremely heavy rain and floods increases as global warming increases. But at times and places of drought, global warming can increase the extremity of temperature and associated events such as forest fires.
The paper describing the GISS analysis of global temperature has been revised in response to reviewer suggestions and submitted to Reviews of Geophysics. The biggest change in the paper is inclusion of an additional analysis is which global temperature change is based only on stations located in “pitch dark” regions, i.e., regions with satellite-observed brightness below the satellite’s detection limit (1 µW/m2/sr/µm). Our standard analysis uses stations with satellite-observed brightness below 32 µW/m2/sr/µm. This more strict brightness limitation has no significant effect on analyzed global temperature change, providing additional confirmation that any urban effect on the GISS analysis of global temperature change is small.
The summary section of the revised paper is available at
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/paper/gistemp2010_summary.pdf
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/paper/gistemp2010_draft0803.pdf
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Entire Ice Mass of Greenland Will Melt at Two Degrees Celsius Temperature Increase
Note from Dorothy: The upper limit of two degrees Celsius global warming picked by climate negotiators is a political number, grabbed out of the air because it appeared to them global warming might possibly be kept below this level. In light of increasing evidence that a 2 C increase is too high for much of life on our earth to survive, a reexamination of this approach is necessary.
- I know of no credible climate scientist who actually believes a 2 C level increase is safe. Even at the present warming level of warming, the sea level is rising, and catastrophic weather events are taking place. Witness the unprecedented heat waves, wildfires and flooding described in current news reports.
- There’s probably no way now we can prevent the planet from heating up above 2 C. In spite of a weak world economy, carbon dioxide emissions are continuing to rise and could pass 400 parts per million in as little a three years.
- The only hope is for us to reduce CO2 emissions to zero a quickly as possible and then work to safely remove the excess carbon from the atmosphere. We can’t wait for natural processes to do this for us; it will take far to long. See Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?, by James Hansen et al, 2008
Greenland ice sheet faces ‘tipping point in 10 years’
Scientists warn that temperature rise of between 2C and 7C would cause ice to melt, resulting in 23ft rise in sea level
By Suzanne Goldenberg, US Environment Correspondent
The Guardian, August 10, 2010.
An enormous chunk of ice, roughly 97 square miles in size, has broken off the Petermann Glacier along the northwest coast of Greenland. Photograph: Aqua/Modis/Nasa
The entire ice mass of Greenland will disappear from the world map if temperatures rise by as little as 2C, with severe consequences for the rest of the world, a panel of scientists told Congress today.
Greenland shed its largest chunk of ice in nearly half a century last week, and faces an even grimmer future, according to Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University
“Sometime in the next decade we may pass that tipping point which would put us warmer than temperatures that Greenland can survive,” Alley told a briefing in Congress, adding that a rise in the range of 2C to 7C would mean the obliteration of Greenland’s ice sheet.
The fall-out would be felt thousands of miles away from the Arctic, unleashing a global sea level rise of 23ft (7 metres), Alley warned. Low-lying cities such as New Orleans would vanish.
“What is going on in the Arctic now is the biggest and fastest thing that nature has ever done,” he said.
Speaking by phone, Alley was addressing a briefing held by the House of Representatives committee on energy independence and global warming.
Greenland is losing ice mass at an increasing rate, dumping more icebergs into the ocean because of warming temperatures, he said.
The stark warning was underlined by the momentous break-up of one of Greenland’s largest glaciers last week, which set a 100 sq mile chunk of ice (four times the size of New York’s Manhattan Island) drifting into the North Strait between Greenland and Canada.
The briefing also noted that the last six months had set new temperature records.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/10/greenland-ice-sheet-tipping-point
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