Breaking News Archive

December 11, 2008 What a Difference an Administration Makes Barack Obama has appointed a Nobel Laurate in Physics to head his Energy Team, Steve Chu, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

November 25, 2008 More Good News For Climate!  WORLD MANDATE ON CLIMATE CHANGE ACTION!  So pronounced by Lord Nicholas Stern, Chief economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank, UK Economic Advisor And Chair at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

(From the BBC) "Despite the looming prospect of a deep global recession, 43% of the 12,000 respondents of the survey chose climate change ahead of the global economy when asked about their current concerns. Worldwide, 77% of respondents wanted to see their governments cutting carbon by their fair share or more, in order to allow developing countries to grow their economies. The survey was carried out for the HSBC Climate Partnership, a collaboration between the international bank and climate NGOs including WWF, the Climate Group, Earthwatch Institute and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute."

 The findings broadly agree with a survey commissioned by the BBC last year, which found that two-thirds of people polled in 21 countries backed urgent action on climate change.

November 20, 2008 Bush's Last Days: Raping Climate, the Environment and Public Healthstrong>&n   (From the Guardian - one of Great Britain's two national newspapers, founded in 1821) President Bush is decimating America's environmental law.  Two million acres of land in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado will be opened to development of oil shales, the dirtiest fuel on Earth. Coal-fired power plants will no longer be required to install pollution controls or clean up soot and smog pollution. The have cut short the timeframe for public comment. In one instance, officials claimed to have reviewed 300,000 comments about changes to wildlife protection within the space of a week. The interior department can approve development such as mining or logging without consulting wildlife managers about their impact. The new regulations include a provision that would free industrial-scale pig and cattle farms from complying with the Clean Water Act so long as they declare they are not dumping animal waste in lakes and rivers. Mountain-top mine operators could dump waste into rivers and streams. They would weaken regulation of perchlorate, a toxin in rocket fuel that can affect brain development in children, in drinking water.

Bush plans to change the Endangered Species Act to ensure that federal agencies do not have to take global warming into consideration when assessing risks to endangered species.

50,000 acres within site of Utah's Arches National Monument are up for oil lease. In the latest such move this week, Bush opened up some 800,000 hectares (2million acres) of land in Rocky Mountain states for the development of oil shale, one of the dirtiest fuels on the planet. Restrictions will be eased so power plants can operate near national parks and wilderness areas and pollution controls on new power plants will be downgraded.

The Washington Post adds: the rules changes would allow current emissions at a power plant to match the highest levels produced by that plant, overturning a rule that more strictly limits such emission increases.

Discover Magazine adds: One of the rules would relax requirements that road- and pipeline-builders consider the impact of their projects on endangered species.

The Sierra Club adds: Bush  plans for Oregon's forests are an "unprecedented and unsustainable increase in clearcut logging".  Bush Administration's plan will:

1. Remove BLM forests from the scientific framework of the Northwest Forest Plan.
2. Ramp up clearcut logging across hundreds of thousands of acres and get over 70% of the timber volume from clearcuts.
3. Reduce streamside buffers that protect clean water and fish by 50%.
4. Log some of the last remaining older forests in western Oregon.
5. Increase logging by nearly 400% compared to current logging levels.
6. Add 180 million tons more carbon to the atmosphere compared to no logging. (equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions from 1 million cars driven for 132 years).
7. Result in 1,300 miles of new logging roads.

November 19, 2008 Greenhouse Gas Emissions Continue to Soar The planet is supposed to be reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, they have risen by 2.3 for the period 2000 to 2006. The UNFCCC cautions that emissions may be even worse now, noting that the statistics in the study are already nearly three years old. "UNFCCC expert review teams need two years to verify the data, partly by traveling to the countries concerned," says UNFCCC spokesman John Hay. "This makes the UNFCCC data not the freshest, but the most reliable on the market."

November 26, 2008 Arctic Sea Ice Decline 70 years Ahead of Schedule: The left image shows Stroeve’s analysis of Arctic sea ice coverage through 2008. (2009 was a bit greater than 2008, but still 20% below average. (The last five years have seen the five lowest average ice extent years on record.) The image on the right is the IPCC 2007 model summary of Arctic sea ice coverage for the different emissions scenarios through the year 2100. The A2 and the B1B (red and green lines) are the IPCC model scenarios with lower mitigation and higher greenhouse gas emissions. What this image shows is that sea ice extent today, or in 2007 was at 4.25 million square kilometers. The green and red lines depicting the IPCC climate models low mitigation/high emission scenarios predict sea ice to be at 4.25 million square kilometers in 2080 - 70 years from now.

Stroeve, et. al., Arctic Sea Ice Decline Faster than Expected Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 34, 2007. IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Technical Basis, Chapter 10 Global Climate Projections, November 2007, page 771.

Our climate has not been this happy in nearly a decade. President elect Obama said some pretty nice things today at Governor Schwarzenegger's climate summit:

"My presidency will mark a new chapter in America's leadership on climate change"

"Once I take office, you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously in these negotiations [Kyoto], and help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change."

The president-elect said delay and denial were no longer acceptable responses to global warming - "The stakes are too high. The consequences, too serious"

"When I am president, any governor who's willing to promote clean energy will have a partner in the White House. Any company that's willing to invest in clean energy will have an ally in Washington. And any nation that's willing to join the cause of combating climate change will have an ally in the United States of America."

"Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all."

Sequestration technology in a rock called periodotite in one area in Oman alone could sequester (bury CO2 in the ground) 10% of annual global CO2 emissions and, the EPA has denied their first coal fired power plant permit for a 110mw facility in Utah - because they proposed for no mitigation of CO2 emissions. The EPA appeals panel ruled that the Denver office of the EPA, that issued the permit, would have to reconsider why they did not require the applicant to have the best available controls for CO2 emissions.

Our climate now has a chance. All of those issues.  Climate is the only issue...

Geophysical Research Letters had a busy and scary Halloween edition.  As discussed below on October 2, satellite analysis of 2008 Arctic sea ice thickness has revealed the lowest volume of Arctic sea ice ever recorded. Smedsrud, et. al., Recent and future changes of the Arctic sea-ice cover has a new model based on the latest satellite Arctic sea ice data that says that, yes we will run out of sea ice by 2050.  However, their model predicts a rebound between now and then.  The authors even went as far as this quote: "The low June 2008 export ... may have a significant effect on the September 2008 minimum."  Our climate has an uncanny ability to surprise scientists. The low June 2008 export may have had an effect on 2008 sea ice coverage, but it does not appear as if it was the effect that Smedsrud, et. al, had envisioned.  The 2008 sea ice extent was almost as low as the record smashing 2007 year. Whereas 2007 saw sea ice coverage that was 39% below the 1979 to 2000 average, 2008 saw 34% below. The third lowest year on record was 2005 where sea ice coverage was 20% below the 1979 to 2000 average.

Rignot, et. al., Mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet 1958 to 2007. Rignot and the band have found that Greenland is losing 71% more ice through melt, evaporation and iceberg discharge in 2007 than was being lost in 2000, and 175% greater than 1996. So Greenland ice discharge is getting sort of close to doubling since the turn of the century, and fairly close to tripling since 1996.

GRACE is a new gravimetric satellite technology that is 100 times more powerful than the previous gravimetric satellite technology. (For more about Grace see the essay Antarctic Paradox on this site http://www.meltonengineering.com/Mythbusters/Antarctic%20Paradox.pdf) Wouters and his team of scientists (Wouters, et. al., GRACE observes small-scale mass loss in Greenland ) found almost exactly the same ice loss at Rignot in their analysis of Greenland with the GRACE satellites. The study also points out that the 2007 summer ice loss in Greenland was 21% greater than the previous record set in 2005.

Methane levels in the atmosphere are increasing again after 9 years of no increase. Decreasing agricultural methane releases over the last decade have resulted in flat methane concentrations in the atmosphere.  But it is suspected that increasing industrialization in Asia and recent melting of permafrost releasing frozen methane has caused these emissions to begin rising again. 

Methane is 23 times more powerful of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.  But there is good news: Methane only last about dozen years in our atmosphere, then it breaks down in to carbon dioxide.

The opening sentence of the report: "Scientific research on climate change and its impacts published since the deadline for the latest assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is revealing that global warming is accelerating, at times far beyond IPCC 2007 forecasts."

The mega report is a compilation of 37 publications and sources since 2006, not used in the 2007 IPCC report. It has a startling list of examples of how the most recent research into climate change is showing that climate is changing faster, stronger and sooner. (The IPCC Report was the fourth in a series, took six years to prepare, included 3,800 scientists from over 150 countries and 1600 pages.)

• The Arctic Ocean is losing sea ice 30 or more years ahead of the projections. There is near consensus in the Arctic scientific community that significant aspects of this hastened loss of sea ice are caused by feedback mechanisms, the effects of which had been severely underestimated in the report.

• It is currently forecast that summer sea ice could completely disappear  somewhere between 2013 and 2040 – a state not seen on planet Earth for more than a million years.

• New studies have projected global sea level rise by the end of the century to reach up to more than double the maximum estimate of 0.59m presented in the Fourth Assessment Report. More than 1.2m (four feet) sea level rise would put vast coastal areas at risk, in Europe and around the world.

• Floating tide-water glaciers in the Antarctic Peninsula are losing ice faster and are making a greater contribution to global sea level rise than reported in the Fourth Assessment Report.

• The actual CO2 emissions growth rate since 2000 was greater than any of the scenarios used by the IPCC (this is worse than the worse case scenario)

• The capability of ocean CO2 ‘sinks’ to absorb CO2 is declining at a greater rate than forecast in earlier studies.

• ...early signs of change suggest that the less than 1°C of global warming that the world has experienced to date may have already triggered the first tipping point of the Earth’s climate system – the disappearance of summer Arctic sea ice. This process could open the gates to rapid and abrupt climate change, rather than the gradual changes that have been forecast so far.

October 2, 2008 Arctic Sea Ice Enters a New Era of Warmth

Arctic Sea ice had the second lowest recorded extents this season, but alarmingly, volume was the lowest ever recorded. The lowest volume record was set because much of the remaining ice in the Arctic is only first year ice. Normally the majority of ice at the top of the globe is multi-year ice, which is six to fifteen feet thick.  This

Loss of Arctic sea ice sooner than anticipated, some 60 years sooner than the IPCC suggests, will significantly affect the heat balance of the planet and the ultimate reality of the predictions of the climate models.  Without that extra ice at the north pole reflecting 90% of incoming solar heat (remember, water absorbs 90% of solar heat) something in climate will change.

There will obviously be a lot of extra heat running around, the implications of which are unknown.  last winter season, after that huge Arctic sea ice loss in 2007, we saw one of the snowiest winters in the northern hemisphere in a long time. Temperatures were not all that cool, but they were not particularly warm either - globally only the 31st warmest and in North America, the 49th coolest (out of 127). Does this mean that the extra open water in the Arctic has a counter intuitive affect on climate?

We don't know, and it will likely be some years before we do know.  What we do know however is that or climate has changed and the additional heat input into the climate because of the sea ice crash in the north will significantly compound the climate changes that we are seeing.

Summer temperatures over the Arctic Ocean were not as warm as last year, but still significantly above average. Land temperatures this summer were warmer still than those over the Arctic Ocean.  Permafrost melt raged out of control, or at least well beyond anything that scientists have been able to suggest so far.

Possibly the most amazing thing about this melt season was that it was so much cooler and cloudier than the 2007 season. coming as close as it came to beating the record shows that it is very likely that the Arctic has indeed crossed the threshold and entered a new ice state.

National Snow and Ice Data Center:                                http://nsidc.org/news/press/20081002_seaice_pressrelease.html

September 10

UK Protesters Cleared of Charges

The environmental protesters that painted Gordon (i.e. Prime minister) on the coal fired power plant smokestack in England were cleared of charges of damage to the power plant. The ruling declares that the protesters were "legally justified because they were trying to prevent climate change causing greater damage to property around the world." This is the first time where preventing property damage caused by climate change was used as a defense in court. The judge told the jury that accepting this defense proved that the action was due to an immediate need to protect property belonging to others. (See also the news note below.)

Complete Moratorium on New Coal Fired Power Plants Needed

Dr. James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the premier US climate modeling agency, Testified before a British court on Friday that no new coal fired power plants should be constructed that do not capture and store carbon dioxide, and that all non carbon dioxide capturing power plants should be closed within twenty years.  Hansen was giving evidence in a trial in England for six Greenpeace protestor who painted the name of the British Prime Minister "Gordon" in giant letters on a 650 foot tall stack of a coal fired power plant.  Hansen's quote "The activists drawing attention to the issue seems to me as justified. You should try to do things through the democratic process, but we really are getting to an emergency situation. We can’t continue to build more coal-fired power plants that do not capture CO2 if we hope to solve the problem. "

September 3

Natural Warming VP Candidate

John McCain's choice for Vice President, 2-year governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, previous experience was as Mayor of Wasilla, AK, population 8,000.  Palin is for offshore drilling, for drilling in ANWR and believes that Arctic warming is natural.  She has sued the Secretary of the Interior to reverse the listing of the polar bear as endangered ignoring recommendations from the director of the Alaska State Marine Mammals Program, and supports aerial hunting of wolves as pests. She opposes windfall tax profits on oil and chairs the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission.

More Heat in the Arctic

Five of the last ice shelves along the Arctic coast of Ellesmere island in northern Canada have shrunk by 23% this summer.  Scientists say that the impact of warm temperatures this year is staggering. Ten times more ice was lost this year than was forecasted. The high temperature reached 67.5 degrees, 21.5 degrees warmer than the average high.

August 24, 2008

Arctic Sea Ice:  The trend is ominous.  The albedo feedback is strong (Ice reflects 90% of the sun's heat, water absorbs 90% - water absorbs nine times more heat than ice). Last year's huge record allowed only first year sea ice to form last winter.  This year's ice is now rapidly melting. The graph below shows the melt being even faster than it was last year, and we have another month of melt yet to come. The trend is obviously much more like last year's trend and not the average. Many, and maybe most of the projections see the coverage this year at least getting very close to last years record, if not breaking it.  The reason is the strong effects of the albedo feedback. These feedback mechanisms are very strong and once started tend to act like avalanches - increasing very dramatically in speed and size until the bottom of the mountain is encountered. In this case, the bottom of the mountain will be when there is no more ice to melt.

Sea Surface Temperature in the Arctic (Anomaly Analysis): First: The anomaly is the difference from normal. Normal is the average - in this case the average between 1960 and 1989 - a standard weather average used in most assumptions of weather and climate around the globe. A one degree anomaly would be a one degree above or below normal.  In this case it's degrees C, so a one degree anomaly would be 1.8 degrees F.  Nine degrees C is 16.2 degrees F.

Two amazing things stick out of this interesting piece of science art (below):  The perilous looking red blobs of course - north of Alaska/Canada and west of Greenland (east of Svalbard, not shown on the map). There are similar red blobs on the eastern hemisphere view.  If the water temperature was as much above normal here on the central Texas coast, at Padre Island - the water temperature would be  a sizzling 105 F.  The US Consumer Product Safety Commission recommends that you NEVER allow your hot tub temperature to rise above 104 degrees.  Equally impressive is the blue colored - cold water anomaly surrounding the southern half of Greenland.  This is melt water from the big melt going at the Ice Cap.


The meltwater pulse around Greenland is obviously enormous.  One of the neat things about anomaly analysis - you don't have to look back at previous data to see the variation.  It's right there.  The anomaly would not be apparent, or would be much smaller if the area of the extra meltwater runoff was smaller. Yes the peaks are not visible without looking back, but the size of the current variation is certainly clear.

The image below is from NOAAs CIRES (Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences).  Last year's Big Melt in Greenland - what the scientists are calling the goings on in the Arctic these days, beat the previous record in 2005 by 13 percent. That's not quite as Olympic in scale as the 23 percent record smash by arctic sea ice coverage in 2007, but very large nonetheless.  This is why we are seeing this enormous meltwater pulse around the southern edge of Greenland this year - the melt is continuing.  The melt will continue to increase in a similar feedback loop.  Wet snow absorbs about four times more of the suns heat than dry snow, so there is a very large albedo feedback on the ice cap too.

August 15, 2008

California announces 800 megawatts of PV installed by 2012. This will double the US total. The largest in the US is 14 megawatts, in Spain it is 23 megawatts. Worldwide, 250 megawatts were installed in 2007.

Melting glacier causes flash flooding in Nunavut - The Land that Never Melts - In Kangerlussuaq too - I saw an image surfing recently, but didn't bookmark it.  Kangerlussuaq is where I filmed much of my documentary footage.

Arctic sea ice unexpectedly catches up to last year The National Snow and Ice Data Center says that over the last 30 days, Arctic sea ice coverage has dramatically disappeared - et an even faster rate than the extreme record breaking rate seen last year.  Just a month ago, things were looking not so bad for Arctic sea ice, after last years "normally cold" winter.  However, because of all of the extra warmth absorbed by the Arctic Ocean last summer after that extreme record low ice coverage, last winter's sea ice was only three feet thick instead of six feet thick, compoundingthe3 melt caused by warm temperatures over the last 30 days - unexpectedly.

Storminess is increasing faster than the models predict: 20 years of satellite observations analyzed. Allan and Soden, Atmospheric Warming and the Amplification of Precipitation Extremes, Science Express, August 2008  http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/rapidpdf/1160787.pdf

Breakthrough in cloud dynamic understanding: Clouds have been one of the major wildcards in climate analysis. This study provides robust conclusions that increased aerosols from man caused activities decrease cloud cover.  This is a significant step towards more accurate climate models.

August 1, 2008

100 months to stop climate change before unstoppable irreversible impacts: This is a very disturbing report. (I don't normally link to think tanks, but there is a technical discussion of methods here to justify this post.) The analysis uses IPCC data, now commonly understood as quite conservative, to make this 100 month statement. This is all too eerily similar to the previous post here (June 19) about James Hansen's letter to Prime Minister Fukada

July 19, 2008  James Hansen's latest Letter - We have definitely passed the climate safe point http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20080703_DearPrimeMinisterFukuda.pdf

James Hansen - Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and George Bush's Chief Climate modeler - has determined that the safe level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is 350 ppm (today's atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is 385 ppm). Dr. Hansen bases his analysis on the risk of catastrophic sea level rise during this century of greater than two feet (among other things). Dr. Hansen says, by the year 2020, we must stop generating all electricity form coal without 100% carbon sequestration to be able to prevent runaway ice cap disintegration (again, among other things).  If this can be accomplished we might be able to limit carbon dioxide concentration to 425 ppm and limit climate change to only a couple of degrees C warming.  Hansen also notes that the last time temperatures on Earth were a couple of degrees C warmer than today (as is projected for this century by the IPCC), sea level was 80 feet higher.

July 16, 2008

The Latest Climate Cover-up from the White House:

http://www.statesman.com/green/content/news/stories/nation/07/09/0709cheneyclimate.html

July 13, 2008

The Wilkins Ice Shelf is going: After a significant  breakup in March, the Arctic summer, The Wilkins is now disintegrating - in the dead of the Antarctic winter. This is the first breakup ever recorded in winter, and will very likely be the largest breakup of a single ice shelf ever recorded.  Scientist speculating that this breakup would happen next summer were completely surprised by this aggressive reaction to what they believe is melting of the ice shelf from beneath by warming ocean waters.

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM2U5THKHF_index_0.html

July 12, 2008

Northern Colorado Forests are Dead, Virtually all of them:  Climate change is playing a significant role in the death of a very significant portion of all of the trees in Northern Colorado.  I have just returned from a scouting trip for the documentary.  This is a huge catastrophe unlike anything ever experienced in the lower 48, and soon, even greater than the 3 million acre spruce bark beetle epidemic on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska.  I will have a complete report in the days to come.

June 19, 2008 (Happy Juneteenth!)

The Greatest Climate Scientist Alive: A tribute to James Hansen

  http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5790

Austin Heat Wave Day 32: 16 daily records, 14 days at 100 degrees plus. An average summer sees 11 days at 100 degrees plus - Summer starts Friday the 20th...  It's like that old joke about being a hundred degrees in the shade... The Farmer out in his field says: "Good thing were are not in the shade!"

June 8, 2008

Arctic Sea-ice Poised for a New Record

Arctic sea-ice coverage anomaly was nearly 50% greater than it was last winter, but despite this sea-ice extents are way down as of early June.  The sea ice area is just about the same as it was last year when the extreme low sea-ice extents record was set.  Only this year the coverage decline has been markedly greater than last year as shown in the National Snow and Ice Data Center graph below:

Last year's record minimal sea ice extent allowed more warming in the Arctic Ocean than in many millennia, maybe a lot longer.  Thinner sea ice forms over warmer water because the ice insulates the water from the cold air above. The last time these sea-ice extents were thought to have occurred was during the last thermal maximum, or hypsithermal.  This was about 6,000 years ago and represents the warmest temperatures reached after the last ice age.

The increased rate of sea ice loss relative to last year, given the colder than normal winter and significantly greater sea ice coverage than normal shows that the Arctic sea-ice feedback is in full force.  We have indeed crossed the threshold.  Below are three charts showing January through May average surface temperatures for 2005, 2007 and 2008.  The rank of these years temperatures for the period is shown in parenthesis, the temperature anomaly in the upper right corner in degrees C.

May 27, 2008

The New Climate Discourse: Alarmist or Alarming?

 This will give you a little pause to think:  Australia's national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) has released a report in the journal Global Environmental Change titled:  The new climate discourse: Alarmist or Alarming?

This paper attempts to determine if scientists are using appropriate terms to describe their findings.  For decades, there has been debate that claims that scientists are basically exaggerating.  This study analyzes the definitions of the terms used by scientists, how they are applied to the studies that are using the terms and the relative accuracy of that application.  This quote from the abstract for the study reveals the outcome of the analysis:

"The discourse on climate change is in part divided between a sense of alarm and a sense of alarmism in assessments of the magnitude and urgency of the problem. The divide in the discourse among climatologists relates to tensions in the use of key phrases to describe climate change. This article reviews evidence to support claims that climate change can be viewed as ‘catastrophic’, ‘rapid’, ‘urgent’, ‘irreversible’, ‘chaotic’, and ‘worse than previously thought’. Each of these terms are imprecise and may convey a range of meaning. The method used here is to assess whether the conventional understandings of these terms are broadly consistent or inconsistent with the science, or else ambiguous. On balance, these terms are judged to be consistent with the science. Factors which divide climatologists on this discourse are also reviewed. The divide over a sense of urgency relates to disagreement on the manner and rate at which ice sheets breakdown in response to sustained warming. Whether this rate is fast or slow, the amount of time available to reduce emissions sufficient to prevent ice sheet breakdown is relatively short, given the moderate levels of warming required and the inertia of the climate and energy systems. A new discourse is emerging which underscores the scope of the problem and the scope and feasibility of solutions. This discourse differentiates itself from existing discourses which view the magnitudes of the problem or of solutions as prohibitive."

Reference: Risbey, James, The new climate discourse: Alarmist or Alarming? CSIRO Marine Atmospheric Research, Global Environmental Change, Volume 18, 2008.

May 23rd, 2008

CO2 at Highest Levels in 800,000 Years

New highly detailed ice core analysis from Antarctica has pushed back the robust assumptions of past greenhouse gas concentrations.  The new analysis shows looks at 800,000 years of ice cores up to 3,000 meters in depth.  Their findings compliment widely help assumptions by the IPCC and other major scientific authorities that carbon dioxide and methane concentrations are far higher now than at any time in the past that we have highly detailed and highly accurate information. 

This new information, published in the May 15 volume of Nature, show carbon dioxide to be 28% higher and methane to be 140% higher than at any time in the last 800,000 years, or the last nine ice ages.

May 10, 2008

Global Dimming and China’s New Socio-economic Revolution: 

China has vowed to ramp up its socio-economic fabric to 21st century western standards.  Their main thrust will be to convert their country from the world’s source of cheap goods to a more sustaining economy.  One of their main goals to accomplish this is to manufacture all of parts and pieces of the goods they assemble.  To date, they have generally just been the assemblers - putting together components designed and manufactured elsewhere. To compliment this fundamental change of productivity, China has vowed to not only enforce existing environmental laws, but to increase environmental standards as well.  Both of these major concepts bode poorly for world climate.  As China grows in affluence, so does their carbon consumption.  They are already far outpacing predictions of consumption and carbon emissions.  Accelerated growth will enhance these emissions, unless of course the new environmentalism decreases the emissions.  This is very likely to happen: aye mate – there’s the rub!

China is in a similar socio-economic and environmental situation as the U.S was in the 1960s.  The use of the automobile has become a normal part of life.  Superhighways are proliferating, their manufacturing industries are undergoing rapid changes, and their pollution levels are frightening.  This is quite similar to the U.S. in the 1960s.  Then, in the U.S., surface waters were poisoned, our skies were an ash tray and waste was dumped wanton on the ground and in our seas and waterways.  In the early 1970s the environmental revolution hit the U.S.  The Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the Pesticide Reform Act were brought into law.  On a global climatological scale, what happened next was astounding.  In just a few years, our global climate changed - obviously and robustly! 

Looking at the global thermometer records from the turn of the 20th century, two things stand out.  One is that the average temperature of the globe is steadily rising.  The other thing that stands out is a blip in that steadily rising temperature trend between the mid 1940s and the mid 1970s.  During these years, Earth's temperature flattened out - that is it quit rising.  The reason for this cessation of the rising trend was pollution caused by industrialization after World War II.  Our industrial machine was in such a hyper state at the end of the war that it was easy to transition to a completely new way of life - where consumerism and the American way dominated.  The massive amount of industrialization created a literal fog in our atmosphere.  This fog is called particulate pollution.  It is this particulate pollution that was so readily observed as smog in the 1960s as our country became more and more polluted, and this was one of the main reasons for the environmental revolution.

The astounding part of the environmental story is:  The Clean Air Act of 1970 changed our Earth's climate.  It allowed the steady warming prior to the end of World War II to continue.  What the Clean Air act did was to curb the worst part of air pollution that U.S. industries had been creating.  It did this by addressing the easiest and most obvious part of the problem - the smog inducing particulates.  Technology to remove particulates is relatively efficient and the law was quickly enforced.  Industry, in just a few years cleaned up their emissions.  Then we had this huge burden of particulate pollution in the atmosphere to deal with.  Because this type of pollution is relatively easy to remove, Mother Nature can quickly cleanse our atmosphere.  Particulates are just that - particles of stuff, a lot of black soot, oxidized elements form combustion processes and the like - all relatively heavy and large particles.  These relatively large particles can be quickly washed out of the atmosphere by rainfall, and even those that get mixed high into the upper atmosphere where there is no rain, settle out because of gravity in just a few years.  Volcanic eruptions are a good example. Volcanoes eject their ash clouds high into the atmosphere above the highest of clouds.  This ash, quite similar to particulate pollution, must there for rely on gravity to be cleansed from the skies.  It is falls to lower elevations where rainfall can remove it in just a few years.  This is one of the main reasons that volcanic eruption have no significant long term affect on our climate – their effects do not last long enough, Mother Nature cleans them up relatively quickly.

So the Clean Air Act allowed our climate to continue warming because it removed the particulate pollution from industrial emissions. The pollution was keeping a portion of the suns energy from reaching the surface of the Earth.  This prevented warming.  When the pollution was removed, the warming continued.

References:

 Ramanthan and Carmichael, Global and regional climate changes due to black carbon Nature Geoscience, March 2008.

Ramanthan et. al., Warming trends in Asia amplified by brown cloud solar absorption, Nature, August, 2007.

Wild, Ohmura, and Makowski, Impact of global dimming and brightening on global warming, Geophysical Research Letters, volume 34, 2007.

Cohen Liepert and Stanhill, Global warming comes of age, EOS, September 2004.

Liepert et. Al., Can aerosols spin down the water cycle in a warmer and moister world? Geophysical Research Letters,Vol., 31, 2004.

Roderick and Farquhar, The cause of decreased pan evaporation over the last 50 years, Science, November, 2002.

May 4, 2008

Epidemic Outbreaks of Bark Beetle Changing Massive Forests Into Carbon Sources Worldwide:
A warming planet is killing our forests at an extraordinary rate.  In Colorado alone the pine bark beetle epidemic last year grew from 1 million to 1.5 million acres. A new analysis of the climate of the American West, released in February, projects that the lodgepole and ponderosa pine forests of the American West are at risk of a near complete destruction within 3 to 5 years.  Obviously this epidemic is unprecedented.  It's cause is directly related to climate warming and enhanced by forestry practices.  48 million trees have been killed in Colorado.  Alaska has lost 3.3 million acres of trees. British Colombia has seen the largest outbreak with 33 million acres being destroyed in an outbreak that is 10 times larger than any ever recorded.  Research from the Canadian Forest Service shows that these dead forests are now emitting carbon to the atmosphere rather than being a sink for absorbing carbon dioxide.  The computer modeling from the study shows that the forests in the southwestern British Columbia outbreak changed from a small net sink of about 2 to 3 megatons per year (as forests are normally considered), to a large source of carbon of nearly 1,000 megatons over the 21 year modeling period.  These carbon emissions are equal to about 5 years worth of carbon emissions from all of Canada's automobiles combined.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7190/full/nature06777.html

April 24, 2008

China's Record Snows Melt in Record Heat:

From NOAA "The global land surface temperature was the warmest on record for March, 3.3°F above the 20th century mean of 40.8°F. Temperatures more than 8°F above average covered much of the Asian continent. Two months after the greatest January snow cover extent on record on the Eurasian continent, the unusually warm temperatures led to rapid snow melt, and March snow cover extent on the Eurasian continent was the lowest on record."
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20080417_marchstats.html

April 22, 2008

The true cost of fossil fuels to society is greater than is calculable.  If we are lucky, atmospheric carbon won't physically destroy our planet. If we are smart, we may be able to keep it from destroying our society.  I just can't tell you guys how extremely important this is.  As an engineer and a scientist - studying climate for a decade now, I have seen the most radical climate reactions that I have ever seen in the last couple of months.  Antarctica is not cooling, it is warming - new satellites and new calibration analysis;  The increase in Antarctic sea-ice is caused by atmospheric warming that enhances the stability of upper Antarctic ocean sea water, increasing the cooling and hence the sea ice.  Last winter's coolish temperatures were nothing abnormal; in the US it was the 47th coldest winter. Last winters average planetary warmth was something like 16th warmest. While China was having their coldest winter in 50 years, Australia was having its warmest summer ever. (Last year's average annual temperature tied for 2nd warmest of all time) Greenland ice ratcheted up another notch in discharge last summer.  The Wilkins ice sheet mini-disintegration  foretells of the the big event that will happen next next year very likely leading to the loss of 5,000 square miles of ice shelf, an event unprecedented in 10,000 years.  Large portions of the West Antarctic ice Sheet have speeded up by a factor of between 7 and 9 and although an under ice volcano was discovered under the WAI last year, it's eruption was 2000 years ago.  And the most alarming: Methane clathrates (frozen methane) on the floor of the largest, shallowest continental shelf in the world, off of Siberia, in the area of the world that is warming the most have started to melt. There are 1000 gigatons of methane there, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2.  One third of this gas is free gas trapped beneath the ice.  Natural and man caused process release only 3 gigatons of methane annually.  Worldwide, there is 100 times this amount of methane, much of it at risk of release in a warmer world.  The biggest extinction event ever was not the loss related to dinosaurs and an asteroid hitting the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago, but a methane gas release from the oceans that killed 90% of all species on Earth 250 million years ago.

1) Methane is starting to be released in very large quantities from the permafrost under the Laptev Sea in the Arctic. There are 1,000 gigatons of CO2 at risk on the Siberian continental shelf alone, approximately 1/3 of this methane is free gas trapped under the permafrost beneath the sea.  The Earth's normal production of methane (including mankind's contribution) is 3 gigatons a year.  Methane has 20 times the greenhouse gas potency of CO2. A very small fraction of the total methane released from the Siberian shelf will Earth's current emission emission seem like a pittance. Once started these emissions are irreversible and will likely increase in release rate exponentially.  These deposits are common throughout the world, even in temperate regions. The Laptev Sea on the north coast of Siberia, not only has the largest extent of shallow continental shelf waters on the planet, it also has the highest average annual temperature warming rate on the planet.  These methane deposits on the ocean floor within and overlain by permafrost were laid down during the last ice age (or more) between 10,000 and 100,000 years ago when ocean levels were 200 to 400 feet lower and this region was dry land.  This issue will be one of the major papers at the European Geophysical Union Annual Meeting this week. (Archer 2008)

2) Our carbon dioxide emissions rate is 35% greater than our scientist have projected it to be, the emission rate of increase is rising faster than projected and it's longevity in our atmosphere is not 100 to 200 years, but more like 30,000 years.   (Canadell et. al. 2007, Le Quere 2007, Schuster and Watson 2007)

3) The great Antarctic Ice Sheet, that was thought by a very large majority of scientist to be impermeable to climate change for at least a century from now, has gone to a negative mass balance - that means it has started to melt 100 years before it was supposed to. (Rignot et. al. 2008, Turner et. al. 2006, Scambos 2008)

4) Every large, mature lodgepole pine forest in Colorado and Wyoming will be dead within three to five years, killed in an unprecedented mountain pine beetle infestation .  This is from the Rocky Mountain Climate Group, and organization of 17 mountain state governments and lots of other folk.  Ponderosa pine is at risk with this outbreak as well. Together the lodgepole and ponderosa make up 55 million of the total 360 million forested acres in the West.  Most of this forest will be destroyed in this outbreak.  It's cause is natural, it is worsened by National Forest Service burn policy, however it's severity and breadth are most directly linked to climate change - long term drought is the most important aspect of this outbreak.  Many of the other tree species in the West (and the east) are at risk of insect infestation of this biblical magnitude.  There are dozens of insect pests, many of which are different species of bark beetles, which are capable of this sort of outbreak.  Many of the infestations are already at historic levels like the spruce bark beetle in Alaska and Canada, the aspen leaf miner across North America and the spruce bud worm in the central Rockies.