March 29, 2009 United Nations Report Will Make You Want To Jump Off A Cliff The 2009 United Nations Environment Program Yearbook 2009 confirms some astonishing things that happened in climate science last year.  The following is straight from the report:

The changing climate is pushing many Earth systems towards critical thresholds that will alter regional and global environmental balances and threaten stability at multiple scales. Alarmingly, we may have already passed tipping points that are irreversible within the time span of our current civilization...

The news to date is bad and getting worse. Ice loss from glaciers and ice sheets has continued, leading to the second straight year with an ice-free passage through Canada’s Arctic islands and accelerating rates of ice-loss from ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Combined with thermal expansion—warm water occupies more volume than cold—the melting of glaciers and ice sheets from the equator to the poles is contributing to rates and an ultimate extent of sea-level rise that could far outstrip those anticipated in the most recent global scientific assessment (IPCC 2007). There is alarming evidence that important tipping points, leading to irreversible changes in major Earth systems and ecosystems, may already have been reached or passed...

Climate feedback systems and environmental cumulative effects are building across Earth systems, demonstrating behaviors we cannot anticipate.

The potential for runaway greenhouse warming is real and has never been more clear.

For the second year in a row, there was an ice free channel in the Northwest Passage through the islands of northern Canada. But this year also saw the opening of the Northern Sea Route along the Arctic Siberian coast. The two passages have probably not been open simultaneously since before the last ice age, some 100 000 years ago (NERSC 2008).

The largest mass of ice in the Arctic covers the island of Greenland. In places, the ice sheet is three kilometres thick. If it melts, it will raise sea levels by an estimated six metres. Until recently, glaciologists presumed that the ice would thaw slowly over millennia, as warming at the surface of the ice sheet permeates downward and gradually melts the ice. That thinking is reflected in the IPCC fourth assessment report (IPCC 2007). But the ice sheet is currently losing mass much faster than would be expected if melting alone was to blame. Current losses are more than 100 cubic kilometres a year. New findings in 2008 revealed that the flow into the ocean of the Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier in western Greenland, one of the most important routes for ice loss, has doubled since 1997 (Holland and others 2008)... A new analysis of historical data on the extent of the Greenland ice sheet shows that total meltdown is quite possible as a result of warming on the scale that is being forecast for the next few decades (Charbit and others 2008).

Researchers estimated in 2008 that loss of ice from the West Antarctic ice sheet increased by 60 per cent in the decade to 2006 (Rignot and others 2008). Ice loss from the Antarctic Peninsula, which extends from West Antarctica towards South America, increased by 140 per cent.

The last IPCC assessment forecast that global sea levels would rise by between 18 and 59 centimeters in the coming century - just from the thermal expansion of warmer oceans and the melting of mountain glaciers (IPCC 2007). But since the report was completed, many researchers involved in that assessment have predicted that a much larger rise is possible, indeed probable. The new prediction originates in part from reassessments of the potential for physical breakup of the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. For instance, a study presented at a conference of the European Geosciences Union at Vienna in April suggested that a rise of between 0.8 and 1.5 meters was most likely (Schiermeier 2008). Another study on the dynamics of ice-sheet loss argued that sea levels could rise by as much as two meters in the coming century as a result of outflows of ice from Greenland alone (Pfeffer and others 2008).

But whatever the detailed modeling may reveal, research in 2008 indicates that sea level rise - from thermal expansion, mountain glacier retreat, and ice sheet melt - is likely to be much greater and to arrive much sooner than believed even two years ago. No matter how quickly climate change is mitigated, sea level will rise.

For now, the evidence suggests that we may be within a few years of crossing tipping points with potential to disrupt seasonal weather patterns that support the agricultural activities of half the human population, diminish carbon sinks in the oceans and on land, and destabilize major ice sheets that could introduce unanticipated rates of sea level rise within the 21st century (Lenton and others 2008, Schellnhuber 2008).

United Nations Environment Program Yearbook 2009, Chapter 23, February 2009. http://www.unep.org/geo/yearbook/yb2009/PDF/3-Climate_Change_ UNEP_YearBook_09_low.pdf

March 26, 2009 GLOBAL WARMING HAS ENDED! (again...) The Contrarians are Bonkers over Swanson and Tsonis How many times can global warming end? Swanson and Tsonis are reporting what's happening with global ocean dynamics. Yep, temperature has flattened out since the turn of the century. the top 10 hottest years ever recorded have all occurred since 1997. 2008 was the 9th or tenth hottest year depending on whehter or not you look at GISS or UK Met records. The reasons why temps have flattened? Fewer El Ninos, The Pacific Decadal Oscillation, The North Atlantic Oscillation, the Arctic Oscillation - they have all combined at one time to exert a negative forcing on the Earth's temperatures.  (Swanson and Tsonis don't mention solar specifically, cause their research only looked at Earth's dynamic systems. Hansen was the keynote speaker at the conference where this paper was submitted - you bet he mentioned solar forcing.)

Swanson and Tsonis were very forward in interviews saying that their study just means that planetary warming is stalled for an indeterminate period (Hansen says one more year).  Swanson and Tsonis also say that the contrarians are misinterpreting their work and using it for the wrong purposes.

The reality is that greenhouse gasses are building faster and faster. The coincidence of these massive earth systems aligning as they have done has only happened twice before in the last century. The point of the research - this is a temporary thing that happens very rarely. When the forcing systems realign themselves in a more normal pattern, the hidden warming will all suddenly reappear.  We aren't missing out. None of the warming that we are not experiencing will disappear. It wall all appear when the alignment goes away.

In the meantime, ocean acidification continues. The fuse to primary productivity extinction has been lit and it is much shorter than we thought. I have been talking with Dr. Will Howard at the University of Tasmania. He is one who has been studying such in the Great Southern Ocean.  He traps foraminifera (hard shelled salt water algae) and measures their shell thicknesses. "Traps" is a fun term for catching forams as the researchers call them. Forams have no means of self propulsion - they are floaters. When they die, they no longer float and they sink to the bottom of the sea. Catching them involves a box without a lid that the forams fall in to. Nonetheless, it takes a great ocean voyage to set and tend the traps. The great harmonic alignment of earth weather systems has no effect on ocean acidification because of increased carbon dioxide.

Swanson and Tsonis Has the climate recently shifted?, Geophysical Research Letters, March 2009.

March 24, 2009 EPA Finally Acts on CO2, Two Degrees in the Bag Conservatively, Greenland Melts, Sea Level Rise 8 Feet Per Century  Two degrees are in the bag. Now the EPA acts... We don't get those two degrees back back even if we stopped emitting all greenhouse gases today. We should have acted when Kyoto said. The scientist new what they were up too, even though it seems that everything they do these days is conservative.

Three degrees of warming will melt Greenland, the old school says. They say it will take 1,000 years result in two feet of sea level rise per century. (This is approximately the beach and coastal wetland regeneration threshold). If Greenland crosses its melt threshold, we lose our beaches even if there were no other source of sea level rise.

How can Greenland melt?  It's an 11,000 foot thick piece of ice...  All it has to do is get warm enough, and the scientists think that appropriate warming is 3 degrees. However, these are the guys who thought that it would be the end of the century before the Arctic sea ice melted or Antarctica even started melting, or the inhabitants of the Earth started emitting greenhouse gases at the rate they are emitting them today. The scientists thought these three things would not happen for 60 or 70 or a hundred years Virtually every single one of them thought this until just a few years ago, certainly since the turn of the century.

Now here's the crazy part.  When one melts an ice cube, one has to put 8 times the heat into that ice cube to melt it, to change its temperature from 32 to 33 degrees, as it would take to change the temperature of water from 33 to 34 degrees, or of ice from 30 to 31 degrees.  At all other temperatures (except the boiling point) a one to one ratio is needed for heat exchange except at the freezing and boiling points. The scientists call this the heat of fusion.  So what this means is that we have to put a boatload of extra energy into the ice to melt it. Once it starts melting, the process is irreversible and unstoppable.

There are two reasons why I say unstoppable and irreversible. 1) We could certainly stop the thawing process if we cooled the ice sheet of enough. Ah, but this is not going to happen. Just three degrees of heating will put the ice cap over its melt threshold. 2) The Greenland ice sheet should not be there right now, it is too warm. It is a relic of the last ice age. It is so big and cold that it creates its own weather and keeps itself cool. It is its own refrigerator. As we travel up into the sky, the temperature cools one degree every 200 or 300 feet vertically. Most of Greenland is in the frozen zone because it is so high. That frozen zone keeps the ice sheet from melting. If we had to start from scratch today, the ice sheet would not form because it would not be in the frozen zone all of the time like it is now (ore was just a few years ago).

Sea level rise from ocean expansion, mountain glacier melt and existing ice sheet melt and ice discharge was supposed to be 7 to 23 inches by the year 2100 according to the IPCC in November 2007.  The IPCC research is widely recognized to be conservative however and the research that they reference stopped about 2005. Since then, scientists have been on overtime trying to understand the true nature of the climate crisis.  What they have found is that indeed, the IPCC models are quite conservative. The ocean expansion, mountain glacier existing ice sheet melt contribution to sea level is now 48 inches, and this does not include dynamical ice sheet disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) or the East Antarctic Ice Sheet or Greenland either, but they are much less of a risk than the WAIS. This is the best case scenario. It is five times worse than the IPCC 2007 best case scenario and twice as bad as the 2007 worst case scenario.

So now we are up to six feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. New work from Antarctica - these boys and girls have outdone themselves this time - shows the cycles of disintegration of the WAIS. They drilled through 600 feet of the Ross Ice Shelf and 3,000 feet of the Ross Sea to core the sediments beneath the Ross Ice Shelf - a buttress of the WAIS. (The Ross Ice Shelf drifts 30 feet per day and they made 2,000 feet of core). The WAIS regularly disintegrated on 42,000 years cycles over the last 5 million years coinciding with Earth's tilt - the solar cycles responsible for the ice ages. The Earth's axis tilts 21 to 24 degrees every 21,000 years and back. This represents a tiny increase and decrease in heat energy from the sun (less than a degree - because more land is in the northern hemisphere. When the north is tilted towards the sun, the Earth is warmer). The Earth' amplification feedback processes make up the other 9 degrees of temperature change between ice age cold and interglacial warmth. The warming oceans melt the WAIS from beneath, destabilizing the buttressing ice shelves and the Mexico sized piece of ice two miles thick slides off into the ocean over a 1,000 year period.  This is what the conservative scientists call a collapse. It equal about 20 feet of sea level rise in a millennium. Their resolution is poor however. Partial collapses that happen much faster are very likely. Earth processes do not generally tend to happen as slowly and consistently as a 1,000 year collapse would indicate.

So we get another 2 feet of sea level rise from West Antarctica per century. Now we are up to 8 feet per century.  All of this is coming from the conservative scientists who's predictions of future climate are decades, generations and even centuries conservative almost across the board.

We a changing the rate of carbon emission on this planet 20,000 times faster than at any time in the last 65 million years. The WAIS is thinning rapidly from underneath because of warming ocean currents and the currents are changing rapidly bringing warmer waters beneath the buttressing portion of the WAIS. The currents are changing, not because of the warming effect of global warming - they are doing that too - but climate change is fundamentally changing the wind patterns across the world, and they are likely changing the most at the poles, like everything else.  The wind patterns are what drive the ocean currents. New wind patterns are bring water that is far warmer from a totally different place to parts of Antarctica, like the underside of the buttressing ice shelf of that 10,000 foot tall Mexico sized piece of ice called the WAIS. The ice rivers in the WAIS have increased their speeds by 60% and 100% too.

But 8 feet of sea level rise still doesn't sound like much - barely a Cat 2 storm surge.  yet, this storm surge will into recede. The U.S. Geologic Survey says half the population of the planet is vulnerable to sea level rise. The United Nations says half a billion people will be displaced by sea level rise of just three feet. The IPCC says that three feet per century of rise is all that the Earth's society can adapt to, beyond that and societal devastation will occur because of infrastructure destruction alone.

More from NOAA - climate change is officially worse than predicted, faster than predicted, and will continue to warm much much longer than predicted . Climate changes are virtually unstoppable and irreversible and will last 1,000 years and will continue to change, because of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere right now, for centuries, not decades as we once understood.

So now, finally, EPA is going to make CO2 a hazard to humans. And the big thing that so very few scientists have said beans about: There is no known stable climate state warmer than the one we are in right now.  CO2 emissions are changing - 20,000 times faster than at any time since the Dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cenozoic Era. Guess why the Dinosaurs went extinct?  Yes it was triggered by the great asteroid collision, but that wasn't enough. That was like the Earth tilting 3 degrees. It started the feedbacks - the Earth amplifies these little changes naturally.  mankind is now providing the amplification about a gazillion times faster than Earth can provide.

March 23, 2009 Ocean Twice as Acidic as Before Industrial Revolution Just a little known fact here to make your life a little more accurate. Recent studies have found that the ocean's pH has changed from 8.16 to 8.05 since the Industrial revolution. This is 100 times faster than normal, but it just doesn't look like much until one understands the significance of logarithmic numbers.  You see, pH is measured on a logarithmic table. A pH of 8 is 10 times more acidic than a pH of 9 and 100 times more acidic than a pH of 10.  So, a pH of 8.05 is one times more acidic than a pH of 8.16 (ok, 1.1 times more). One times more is 100% more, which is twice as much.

Moy, Howard , Bray and Trull, Reduced calcification in modern Southern Ocean planktonic foraminifera, Nature Geoscience, March 2009.

March 22, 2009 Claims of coldest winter in 100 years? These reports should be criminal. They influence people who do not know better. Yep, the last time a global average winter was as cold as this one was in a different century all right, I guess to some people that means 100 years ago. These contrarians Blogs are frustrating, because I know a lot of people believe them, and it doesn't matter how stupid - people are influenced unfairly. La Nina and the biggest sunspot minimum in 60 years have come together to create the coldest winter in 10 years, not 100.  Here's the GISS ands UK Met Ranks:

March 21, 2009 Great Lakes Ice Thickness down 30% Since the 70s, U.S. Winter Temps Above Average, Precip Below Average Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Michigan research has shown. Even with the significant ice coverage this year. Lake Michigan is near normal to a bit above average this year, Superior has more ice than in the last six years. The U.S. December - Feb temp was 0.58 degrees above normal even though parts of the Midwest were quite cool, the rest of the country was not. January-February 2009 was the driest, first two month-period in the 1895-2009 period of record.

March 19, 2009 West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Collapse Record Over the Last 5 Million Years The West Antarctic ice sheet is the single most remote and inhospitable region on the surface of Earth. Because of its remoteness and hostility, research there is scarce. On our rapidly warming world today, and considering the possible climate threshold we have just crossed, collapse of the WAIS is a very important thing to understand. Has it ever occurred before? How often and how fast? How much of the ice sheet collapses? How does it start?

Two studies in Nature this week show the West Antarctic ice sheet collapses regularly on a 42,000 year schedule following the Earth's tilt cycle (obliquity). Earth's axis tilt changes from 22.1 to 24.5 degrees like a wobbling top, about every 42,000 years instead of in just seconds like a spinning top. The slight changes in this tilt change the amount of sun hitting each hemisphere on the planet. Because the northern hemisphere has more land, an increase (or decrease) in the tilt changes the Earth's temperature slightly. This slight change in temperature is magnified by feedback mechanisms and creates much exaggerated temperature changes across the planet.

Modeling shows that the Ross, Wedell and Amundsen sectors of the WAIS all behave similarly, so the whole of the WAIS is involved with 23 feet of sea level rise. The modeling also shows the loss of an additional 10 feet of ice from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet for a total of 33 feet of sea level rise. These sea level rise amounts are in good agreement with ancient shorelines from 400,000 top 500,000 years ago when the best correlations of increased temperature, WAIS collapse and sea level rise occured.

These natural "collapses" take 1,000 years to complete (averaging 3.3 feet per century), it is unknown if there are "events" during these "collapses" that are greater than the average 1,000 year trend of collapse of 3.3 feet per century (But they are quite likely says Bruce - our Earth more often than not responds in lurches and leaps rather than the traditional slow and steady glacial time frames we assumed when I was growing up).  These 1,000 year cycles are driven by "natural" climate change. (Also, 2.3 feet per century is enough to destroy our beaches and keep them from reforming - see here.)

Definitive findings in an ocean sediment core taken beneath the floating portion of the WAIS echo the recent modeling results for that specific point beneath the Ross Ice Shelf.

During the periods of WAIS collapse, average planetary temps were up to 3 degrees C warmer than today. Three degrees is the middle of the road climate projection of the IPCC supercomputer models.  But that ain't gonna happen.

Our climate is on an atmospheric CO2 concentration trajectory that is worse than the worse case scenario and if anything, even the new projections are conservative. There have certainly not been any aggressive climate model projections in the last decade.

On the map below, AND-1B is the WAIS drilling project. The sediment core was taken near the edge of the WAIS beneath the Ross Ice Shelf where it is about 300 feet thick and through 3,000 feet of underlying ocean water.

Our planet today, our CO2 concentrations, are changing 20,000 times faster than anything in the last 65 million years (See here). These two projects show the effects of normal planetary warming on the WAIS. The resolution of the sediment cores is very rough. Analysis on time scales that matter to us is not possible. Sediment accumulation rates are very slow and biopurturbation, (great word) where aquatic worms and such stir up the top of the ocean sediments, prevents any finely tuned understanding of the more rapid collapse segments that may have occurred during the WAIS 1,000 year collapse events.

Pollared and DeConto Modelling, West Antarctic ice sheet growth and collapse through the past five million years nature, March 19, 2009.

Naish et. al., Obliquity-paced Pliocene West Antarctic ice sheet oscillations, Nature, March 19, 2009.

March 16, 2009 More Ocean Productivity Decline  A study in Science on the 13th shows a 12% average decline in ocean productivity along the western Antarctic Peninsula in the last 30 years. Temperatures have increased here 4.6 times the global average. In the last few years of the study (beginning about the time the Big Melt began in Greenland - about 2004) very significant decreases in productivity, sea ice extent and changes in wind patterns patterns.  The last few years of the study could of course be anomalies not reflected in the average trend.  Or they could be signs of a climate threshold - More circumstantial evidence that can not be confirmed by science until???

Martin Montes Hugo, et. al., Recent Changes in Phytoplankton Communities Associated with Rapid Regional Climate Change Along the Western Antarctic Peninsula, Science, March 2009.

March 15, 2009 Sea Level Rise Five Times Greater Than the IPCC Report from November 2007 The IPCC said 7 to 23 inches of sea level rise by 2100. The specifically and repeatedly excluded dynamical ice sheet disintegration.  The latest reports, based on data since the IPCC stopped taking papers in about 2005, says 35.4 to 51.2 inches (Grinsted). The minimum, best case scenario is five times higher.

March 14, 2009 Key Statements from the Copenhagen Summit

1. Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized...

2. The research community is providing much more information to support discussions on "dangerous climate change". Recent observations show that societies are highly vulnerable to even modest levels of climate change, with poor nations and communities particularly at risk...

3. Rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation based on coordinated global and regional action is required to avoid ?dangerous climate change? regardless of how it is defined. Weaker targets for 2020 increase the risk of crossing tipping points and make the task of meeting 2050 targets more difficult. Delay in initiating effective mitigation actions increases significantly the long-term social and economic costs of both adaptation and mitigation.

4. Climate change is having, and will have, strongly differential effects on people within and between countries and regions, on this generation and future generations, and on human societies and the natural world...

5. There is no excuse for inaction...

6. To achieve the societal transformation required to meet the climate change challenge, we must overcome a number of significant constraints and seize critical opportunities. These include reducing inertia in social and economic systems; building on a growing public desire for governments to act on climate change; removing implicit and explicit subsidies; reducing the influence of vested interests that increase emissions and reduce resilience; enabling the shifts from ineffective governance and weak institutions to innovative leadership in government, the private sector and civil society; and engaging society in the transition to norms and practices that foster sustainability.

http://climatecongress.ku.dk/

March 13, 2009 Statement from the Copenhagen Climate Summit

"The climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and thrived. These parameters include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events. There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts."

Quotes from the summit (Guardian)

Kevin Anderson, research director at the UK Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, said: "The scientists have lost patience with our carefully constructed messages being lost in the political noise. And we are now prepared to stand up and say enough is enough."

Peter Cox, a climate expert at Exeter University, said: "People have been saying this individually for a long time. This is just a much louder and concerted shout from our community."

Rob Bailey, senior climate adviser for Oxfam said: "The verdict of the world's top scientists is clear. The big question now is whether the worlds richest countries, who created the climate crisis, will act before it's too late. Our climate is changing fast and if left unchecked its impacts, particularly on the world's poorest people, will be devastating."

March 14, 2009 Copenhagen Lord Stern Makes Stunning Revisions to His Report of October 2006 Oh my...  The stern report was the second most important report after the IPCC 3rd Assessment in 2001 and likely the most important political report on climate change ever written.  It was commissioned by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and was published in the middle of the Bush reign It could not have made less difference in the U.S.

More than 2,000 climate experts from 70 countries met at the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen where Sterns spoke. He said there is "no excuse" for government leaders failing to act on the climate crisis. He threatened that a failure to develop strong carbon reduction targets in December could bring "abrupt or irreversible" shifts in climate that "will be very difficult for contemporary societies to cope with."

Lord Stern was the Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 2000 to 2003, permanent secretary at Her Majesty's Treasury and head of the the umbrella group for British Government Economic, the Government Economic Service. He was a Professor of Economics Oxford University, University of Warwick, London School of Economics, and the Chief Economist and Special Counsellor to the President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (and more...)

He spoke at the Copenhagen conference yesterday and told the assembled scientists and dignitaries that the situation was worse than he had thought when he completed his review two-and-a-half years ago, and politicians do not yet grasp the scale of the dangers now becoming apparent.

"A rise of 5C (9 degrees Fahrenheit) would be a temperature the world has not seen for 30 to 50 million years. We've been around only 100,000 years as human beings. We don't know what that's like... Do politicians understand just how difficult it could be, just how devastating rises of 4C, 5C or 6C (7.2 to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) could be? I think, not yet."

Lord Stern said that the most recent discoveries show "severe risks" if Earth's temperature rise by the predicted 4C to 7C (12.6 F) by 2100. Agriculture would be destroyed and life would be impossible over much of the planet, the former World Bank chief economist said. 

"Much of southern Europe would look like the Sahara. Many of the major rivers of the world, serving billions of people, would dry up in the dry seasons or re-route. Billions of people would have to relocate as a result... What would be the implication of that? Extended conflict, social disruption, war essentially, over much of the world, for many decades... This is the kind of implication that follows from temperature increases of that magnitude. I think it's vital that people understand the magnitude of the risks, but also that they understand that [by cutting emissions] we can reduce the probability of going there very dramatically..."  

Changes from 2006:

Temperature rise by 2100: Old Report 3.6 to 5.4 F New Report 7.2 to 12.6 F.

Cost if we do nothing: Old Report 20% of World GDP, New - 30% of World GDP.

March 11, 2009 CLIMATE CHANGE: GLOBAL RISKS, CHALLENGES AND DECISIONS 10–12 March 2009, Copenhagen, Denmark  Over 1,400 submissions.

http://www.iop.org/EJ/volume/1755-1315/6

March 11, 2009 Copenhagen: NOAA CLIVAR Program - Antarctic Deep Water Warming, Southern Ocean Freshening  Deep waters in the Antarctic account for twice as much deep water formation in the oceans compared to North Atlantic deep waters. The temperature of Antarctic deep water is warming and the surface waters of the Antarctic ocean are freshening. Both of these things are likely caused by increased Antarctic melt and a slowing of deep water formation. Both of which also slow ocean currents. This combined with a significant slowing of North Atlantic currents significantly reduces ocean current speed, deep water burial of CO2 and heat and could be one of the greatest positive feedback mechanism yet identified. Of course the scientists can not say this yet, their has not been enough research, there are not enough data, the statistical f tests can not be conclusive with so little data. If this were a murder trial however, climate would be guilty. In a murder trial, a guilty verdict can be rendered based on evidence  beyond a reasonable doubt. The dictionary says that "beyond a reasonable doubt "is a difficult thing to define, but it also says that this is sometimes referred to as a "moral truth".

Knowing what we know today about climate, it is a sin to NOT immediately connect climate warming to many of the yet "unprovable" climate events on the planet. This is one of the great dilemmas of the understanding of climate science and the trust that the public has concerning climate science. The level of truth that the industry of science requires of its scientists is higher than that required to send a person accused of murder to the electric chair.

March 10, 2009 Rising Sea Levels: A Least Twice What the IPCC Said Just 15 Months Ago More News From Copenhagen. 600,000 million people at risk. Likely sea level rise is now over four feet excluding dynamical ice sheet changes. To get to four feet (1.2 meters) of sea level rise in 2100 from where we are today, we must see on average of 13 mm of sea level rise per year for 91 years (about).  At 7 mm sea level rise per year, our beaches and coastal marshes will no longer be able to keep up and will disappear. (see here)

University of Copenhagen  http://climatecongress.ku.dk/newsroom/rising_sealevels/

March 9, 2009 Climate Scientists Set to Confront the World about Climate Change at UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen this Week.  New research shows even greater increases in CO2, ocean acidification, diminishment of ocean productivity, sea level rise and future increases in temperature. The research will be released this week at the Copenhagen Climate conference (1,600 papers are being presented.)

March 9, 2009 Worst Case CO2 Emissions Scenario 10 to 13 Degrees of Warming, Best Case 3.6 to 5 Degrees of Warming Preliminary release of information from Copenhagen shows that with the best case scenario of CO2 emissions reductions, where CO2 emission decline by 3% per year by 2015 (this is a very aggressive reduction rate), there is still a 50% chance that the earth will warm 3.6 to 5 degrees F by 2100. A 3.6 degree rise  is an amount that is widely acknowledged to create major disruptions to society. CO2 levels on the planet today are increasing at 3% per year and this rate is increasing rapidly, barring a slight slowing of the rate because of the economic crisis.

If reductions of CO2 emission of 3% per year are delayed or otherwise do not occur until 2025, temperatures will become increasingly difficult to control and increases will be at least another 1.8 degrees F. If they are delayed until 2035, another 1.8 degrees increase can be expected.

If CO2 emission reductions are sluggish or 0%, temperature increases by 2100 will increase by 10 to 13 degrees F. This amount of warming is an increase that will make much of life on Earth impossible.

These calculations are also done based on increases above pre Industrial Revolution temperatures. Since the Industrial Revolution began we have already seen half, or 1.8 degrees F. of warming out of our allowable 3.6 degrees.

March 9, 2009 Oceans Acidifying Faster than Any Time in the Last 65 Million Years Ocean acidity increases with atmospheric CO2 concentration. Since the turn of the 21st century, ocean acidity has caused a decrease of carbon concentration in the exoskeletons of the primary productivity organisms of the oceans. This means, not only are this fundamentally important part of the ocean system at risk, but the oceans are not absorbing as much CO2 as they should be.

In the last 100 years, the exoskeletons of the primary productivity creatures have decreased in thickness by 30 to 35%. Scientists in Tasmania "trapped"  these one celled primary productivity organisms and compared their weights to those that died and sank to the ocean floor over the last 50,000 years - how do you trap an algae?! :)  The bodies of these little creatures are made out of limestone basically (calcium carbonate), which is a carbon product created from the dissolved carbon dioxide in ocean waters.

The problem is, more CO2 dissolved in the oceans makes the oceans more acidic. The more acidic waters start to dissolve the limestone shells, or don't let the shells grow as much, or as thick as they would otherwise. Primary productivity is a major player on our planet's environment. Worldwide it is responsible for maybe up to half of our planet's natural carbon dioxide sequestration and about the same amount of production of oxygen.

As the oceans become more acidic, these little creatures will start to become extinct, decades to generations ahead of schedule  (see here). The scientist see in their research that the algae with the smallest and thinnest of shells are becoming less abundant in their traps. They also see a worsening trend in recent (last 7 years) shell thicknesses. But the trends, as they say in academia, are not robust. They are not clear enough to say with absolute certainty "that they are occurring", with absolute certainty.  So like in the 80s, we wait until their is enough data, for the industry of science to be satisfied.  In the meantime, thresholds are passed. There is no know technique for increasing the ocean's acidity other than by decreasing atmospheric CO2, then - it'll take generations to centuries to fill in this huge hole we have dug ourselves with our "innocent" CO2 emissions.

The bottom line is that these little one celled animals of the ocean are the most important of the mega abundant life forms on the planet (bacteria, viruses, nematodes and other microbes) of the food chain. Losing their participation in our environment could turn out to be the single most important aspect of climate change.  It's all about the little guy. Nothing happens without the little guy.

And of course, this reduction of CO2 sequestration was also not taken into consideration in climate models. It wasn't even forecast to begin occurring for another 40 to 70 years (here).

Another astonishing discovery - The rate of ocean acidification today is unparalleled in the last 65 million years. Since the great extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous Period - the end of the age of the dinosaurs, there has not been an increase in ocean acidity that is comparable to what is happening today because of increasing carbon dioxide emissions.

Moy, Howard, et. al., Reduced calcification in modern Southern Ocean planktonic foraminifera, Nature Geoscience, March 2009.

 http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo460.html

March 3, 2009 Glacierless National Park - Estimate of Glacierlessness Halved Because West's Temperatures Have Doubled Over 1992 Estimates One of the most often repeated impacts of climate change is the disappearance of the glaciers from Glacier National Park.  The science has been that the year 2030 would see the melting of the last glacier.  The glaciers of Glacier National Park have melted by 67 percent in the past hundred years. Unfortunately, temperatures in the West are more than double what they were estimated to be in 1992 when the 2030 date was projected. So the new estimation of the day that Glacier National Park will become Glacierless National Park is 2020, ten years ahead of schedule.

And in case you weren't paying attention earlier, since 1992, temperatures at Glacier (which pretty well represent temperatures across a large part of the Mountain West) have increased more than twice what the estimate was in 1992.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/03/090302-glaciers-melting.html

March 2, 2009 Happy Texas Independence Day: the Dutch say 55 to 110 cm of sea level rise by 2100  This is 21 to 43 inches and it does not include dynamical ice sheet disintegration. Very important to note also in the Dutch study, sea level rise in the 22nd century will be 1.5 to 3.5 meters - that's 11.5 feet.  Most of the worlds major cities  will be affected by eleven feet of sea level rise. The US Geological Survey says that nearly one-half of the 6.7 billion people around the world live near the coast and are highly vulnerable to storms and sea-level rise. See here.

Stefan Rahmstorf is a climate scientist and oceanographer at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/mar/03/sea-levels-rising

US Geological Survey http://climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap4-1/final-report/default.htm

February 27, 2009 "World's last chance to stop climate change before it passes the point of no return." I keep telling all my friends, I don't make this stuff up.  It has deadly serious implications for global society and the continuance of Earth's environment, and lately, it seems to be coming at us from all sides - just as the popular media has seemingly lost nearly 100% of its attention span.

The above quote was made today by the European Union Environmental Commissioner Stavros Dimas. He was speaking to a climate change conference in Budapest about The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December whose purpose is to agree upon a replacement framework for the Kyoto Protocol.

More and more of our leaders are beginning to understand the immense gravity of the situation we find ourselves in. We are already experiencing unstoppable and irreversible effects of climate change. Because of the climate lag, the longer we wait to make a move, the harder it will be to keep from progressing past additional thresholds. Most of these thresholds are irreversible and unstoppable in time frames that matter. The only way to keep from experiencing them is to keep from passing through them.

With a climate lag that measures decades (30 years is a good average for the "warming already in the pipeline") we will not know which thresholds we will pass through for years or decades yet. This makes the problem exceedingly hard to manage.

Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE51Q22X20090227

February 27, 2009 Wilkins Ice Sheet Collapses - The Size of Connecticut: Implications for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet The disintegration of the largest ice shelf ever known to collapse started in February 2008 during the Antarctic summer. Signs of the breakup continued during the deep polar winter, something else that has never been seen before. The European Space Agency has now announced that the breakup amounts to 14,000 square kilometers, or over 5,000 square miles - an area large than the state of Connecticut. This is the latest and largest of about a dozen such collapses along the Antarctic Peninsula over the last dozen years.

As time goes on and the Antarctic continues to warm, the collapses are getting bigger, and progressing further south towards the main body of Antarctica. Now the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is awakening. The WAIS is the area between the Antarctic Penisula and the Ross ice Shelf. The ice rivers of the WAIS have sped up by nearly half again to almost double.  Its buttressing ice sheets are rapidly thinning from beneath by warming ocean waters. This mass of ice is the only remaining relic of its kind from the last ice age. It is called a marine ice sheet and it is inherently unstable.

Its foot is grounded on the ocean floor but its main mass of ice towers above sea level. There is as much ice in the WAIS, above sea level, as there is in Greenland. it is unknown how fast it might disintegrate, but scientists have given this disintegration its own name. It is called dynamical ice sheet disintegration. The IPCC specifically excludes sea level rise from this type of ice sheet discharge, and did so five separate times in their 2007 Climate Impacts Assessment.

In the prehistoric past, it is theorized that marine ice sheets like the WAIS have collapsed  and resulted in sea level rises of 15 feet or more in 100 years or less. The minimum time frame on the studies was 100 years, so the sea level rise could have been much faster.  Evidence of the prehistoric marine ice sheet collapses is found spread across the entire North Atlantic seafloor in the form of layers of sand and gravel carried their by massive iceberg armadas resulting from the dynamical disintegrations. The layers range from an inch or two in the eastern North Atlantic to two feet in the western North Atlantic.

In 2003, a Rhode Island piece of ice called the Larson B Ice shelf, on the other side of Antarctic, completely disintegrated in 28 days.

European Space Agency Wilkins Ice Shelf Page

 http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMWZS5DHNF_index_0.html

West Antarctic Ice Sheet, Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas

http://geology.com/research/west-antarctic-ice-sheet.shtml

February 26, 2009 International Geophysical Year (IPY): $1.2 billion in research says climate change is worse than previously understood and will likely get worse before it gets worse. (Preliminary Report)

IPY is the largest internationally coordinated planetary research effort in the past 50 years. More than 160 endorsed science projects are included in this report from researchers in more than 60 countries from the period March 2007 to March 2009 to allow for observations during the alternate seasons in both polar regions. The IPY is a joint project of the World Meteorological Organization and the International Council for Science. So far, and the IPY work period is not even over yet, that will happen this march, Some astounding discoveries have been made.  many things that have been rumored, or that have made the "buzz" at conferences can now be said to be scientifically valid.  The following are quotes from the press release:

"IPY has provided a critical boost to polar research during a time in which the global environment is changing faster than ever in human history. It now appears clear that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass contributing to sea level rise.  Warming in the Antarctic is much more widespread than it was thought prior to the IPY, and it now appears that the rate of ice loss from Greenland is increasing. "

"Snow and ice are declining in both polar regions, affecting human livelihoods , local plant and animal life in the Arctic, as well as global ocean and atmospheric circulation and sea level. "

"Researchers also found that in the Arctic, during the summers of 2007 and 2008, the minimum extent of year-round sea ice decreased to its lowest level since satellite records began 30 years ago. IPY expeditions recorded an unprecedented rate of sea-ice drift in the Arctic as well. Due to global warming, the types and extent of vegetation in the Arctic shifted, affecting grazing animals and hunting."

"IPY research vessels that have confirmed above-global-average warming in the Southern Ocean. A freshening of the bottom water near Antarctica is consistent with increased ice melt from Antarctica and could affect ocean circulation. Global warming is thus affecting Antarctica in ways not previously identified."

"IPY research has identified large pools of carbon stored as methane in permafrost. Thawing permafrost threatens to destabilize the stored methane -a greenhouse gas- and send it into the atmosphere. Indeed, IPY researchers along the Siberian coast observed substantial emissions of methane from ocean sediments."

"The increased threats posed by climate change make polar research a special priority."

International Polar Year http://www.ipy.org/index.php?/ipy/detail/state_of_polar_research/

February 24, 2009 The good news is that we know it is going to be much worse than previously predicted: MIT Updates their climate projections - The bad news is that the media has now begun to completely ignore the environment MIT projections are almost double the IPCCs. Very scary stuff, and this makes four major publications in as many weeks that the media has not  acknowledged. And it is great climate change art too. The "no policy scenario" is business as usual. The policy scenario is the middle scenario of several likely alternatives used by the IPCC in their analysis - only run through the MIT model. This New MIT model takes into consideration greater impacts from feedback mechanisms than the IPCC models understood.

Greenland melts at a 2 to 3 degrees F. increase in average planet wide temp. Once the melting of Greenland was projected to take take thousands of years. Then came the late 1990s and scientists learned more and it was discovered that Greenland could melt in just a thousand years.  Today? Greenland has tripled its discharge in the last decade - that's why the scientists are calling it the Big Melt. The estimates today? I have read hundreds of years.  There are the catastrophists that talk about giant melt water lakes under the ice that cause dynamical disintegration when significant chunks of the ice sheet slide into the sea as the massive under-ice lakes burst.

Pretty far out stuff until you have read about the Barbados coral reefs that show 16 feet of sea level rise in 100 years. The rises seem to coincide with Hienrich events where great iceberg armadas scattered sand and gravel across the North Atlantic when the Laurentide Ice sheet across North America experienced periodic disintegration events, the cause of which are still unknown. The thickness of the sand and gravel layers from these Heinrich Events range from several centimeters in the Eastern Atlantic two feet close to Canada and New England. And again the scariness factor increases when one realizes that 100 years is the smallest time slice observable in the Barbados coral study.

But the real threat is of course the only remaining remnant ice age marine ice sheet - the West Antarctic (WAIS). It's the size of Mexico, has enough ice above sea level to raise sea level 21 feet and showing significant sings of instability.  There is also a reason why the WAIS is the only remaining remnant ice age marine ice sheet. They are incredibly sensitive. And they are one likely source of the Heinrich events from long gone Laurentide marine ice sheets.

Oh and what was the other crazy stupid thing that I needed to say. Oh yes -Antarctica. Just 4 years ago Antarctica was thought of, universally among scientists across the world, as a place where the ice was stable; where there may have even been a bit of an increase in the mass of ice over time. Antarctica was then thought to be a place where global warming had not yet reached.

The along came GRACE - new gravimetric satellites 100 times more powerful than their predecessors. They were launched in 2003, and by 2006 they were able to tell our scientist that Antarctica was not only losing ice, but it had been doing so for a decade.  HUH?  They were able to better calibrate the data from the other satellites and found that Antarctica was now (2006) losing as much ice (through melt and iceberg discharge) as Greenland, and that this ice loss had actually started a decade before.

So the more responsible estimates of sea level rise are now looking at two meters plus in the next 100 years - excluding dynamical ice sheet disintegration. And now we have global temperature estimates of a median scenario at over 9.2 degrees F. 

Does the reader realize that the average global temperature difference between the depths of an ice age and the warmest the temperature has ever been on a planet configuration that matters is 9 degrees?  Or that the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies - the US Governments foremost climate modeling agency and likely the worlds foremost climate modeling agency, says our planet would likely peel off into a Venus Syndrome with a temperature change of 20 to 40 degrees? And MIT is using an average scenario warming outcome?

We have to keep telling ourselves - it is good that we know these things. Otherwise, the 30-year climate lag would eat us alive.

http://globalchange.mit.edu/

Policy vs. No-Policy: Updated Estimates http://globalchange.mit.edu/resources/gamble/

February 21, 2009 Sterns makes dire statements (AP Press)Eminent British economist Lord Nicholas Sterns made some dire statements while visiting Antarctica with an team of key international climate leaders:  "... if negotiators falter, if emissions reductions are not made soon and deep, the severe climate shifts and sea-level rises projected by scientists would be "disastrous."  If we don't deal with climate change decisively, "what we're talking about then is extended world war."

Methane time bomb Dr. Katey Walter, from the University of Fairbanks, sees methane like many climate scientists these days. The warming across the planet is concentrated at the poles because of what is called polar amplification. This means that the Arctic is warming even more than the rest of the Earth.  In many places the Arctic has already warmed from 6 to 9 degrees in the last 20 years. This warming is driving permafrost melting unlike any seen in thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of years. Permafrost is made up of ice and partially decomposed organic matter - namely, tundra, buried in the ice for possibly hundreds of thousands of years. Permafrost can be thousands of feet thick and it can melt catastrophically in huge areas, all at once.  Once melted, the partially decomposed organic material continues with it's decaying process and releases immense amounts of methane and carbon dioxide.

It is believed that melting permafrost is the main cause of the return of rising methane levels in our atmosphere that stabilized about a decade ago because of better agricultural practices. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than CO2.  Scientists estimate that there is 2,000 times the methane in permafrost than there is in our atmosphere, or about 1,000,000,000,000 tons (One trillion tons). (Dr. Walter says 50 billion in her interview with the LA Times - those numbers are dated see Fields below). The link below shows Dr. Walter setting a methane jet aflame on a frozen lake in Alaska.  There is also a link to several of Dr. Walter's personal videos from her website on the my home page here - Extreme Climate Change Montage

LA Times story and video of Dr. Walters

See also Fields below

Ocean acidification ten times faster than predicted by climate models Not in the Great Southern Ocean, but from an eight year study off the coast of Washington State. The seas around Antarctica are proceeding 60 years ahead of schedule. The implication so ocean acidification are grave. Primary productivity is one of really important things on this planet. The oceans are really big and primary productivity plays a really big part in the oceans.  We can keep ocean acidity from significantly affecting primary productivity if we start spending a lot more money than Obama has laid out so far.  Otherwise, all bets are off. (see Dec. 11 report)

Wootton, et. al., Dynamic patterns and ecological impacts of declining ocean pH in a high-resolution multi-year dataset, Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, October 2008.

Monaco Declaration Press Release: Urgent action is needed to limit damages to marine ecosystems, including coral reefs and fisheries, due to increasing ocean acidity, according to 155 of the world’s scientific experts who will release the Monaco Declaration this Friday. The Declaration is based on results from the Second International Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World, held at the Oceanography Museum in Monaco last October and organised by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

February 20, 2009 One month of Obama and no cap and trade, no carbon tax, nothing but a stimulus plan worth nearly $720 billion in carbon dioxide Sorry, but I am a bit angry today. If you don't think this is serious, go here: Climate Ark This is a climate news portal from Australia. Remember Australia? They were the last of two nations on the entire Earth to sign Kyoto. The just signed last year. Remember who the last nation on Earth yet to sign Kyoto is??? Read a few of the news stories about how the Aussie's are reacting to climate change. Then look at what the good old US of A is doing.  BTW, I took off $80 billion from the Stimulus Plan for the paltry 10% that was dedicated to alternative energy.  We can save the world economy and the world at the same time by dedicating ourselves to saving the world.

$800 billion would make a dent in cutting back on carbon, but we need to be removing some of the carbon already in our atmosphere AND not putting any more in. Climate is the only issue. It's all in the academic journals. I have read the secrets in the climate scientists writings. I can decipher their language. The big picture is frightening. The scientists in the field and in their offices are frightened. This is for real and this is for keeps. Not only do we not get a second change, but it gets worse before it gets worse.

The most insidious thing about climate change is the thirty year time lag. This is that "built-in warming" that most have heard about.  The thirty-year climate lag means that today, we are experiencing climate that was generated by greenhouse gas concentrations from the 1970s.  Our planet's population has almost doubled since then and our per capita carbon dioxide emissions have increased by five times. Today, our gross carbon emissions are ten times more than they were in the 1970s and our climate is just now reacting to the greenhouse gas concentrations from then.

Building more roads, fixing up our schools, how many hundred billions in tax breaks? All that stuff in the stimulus plan does nothing except emit more carbon. And now, Ken Salazar, Obama's Secretary of the interior says that oil shale is not out of the question.  The only thing worse than oil shale, no wait - oil shale is the worst. Oil shale is worse than tar sands and tar sands are worse than coal, and Obama's Secretary of the Interior is thinking about supporting oil shale. That ain't right.

February 18, 2009 Tropical Forests: Increased Carbon Storage in a High CO2 World?  A study in Nature last month confirmed ongoing increased CO2 storage in tropical forests - on the gigaton scale - that's a lot. So the CO2 fertilization effect is confirmed?  Yes of course, we new this all along, CO2 is a fertilizer. But in reality the benefits of the CO2 effect have already been surpassed in northern forests.  Another study in the Journal Science last month found that tree death from climate change had doubled in the western North America in the last decade from 1.5% to 3% per year. This might sound minimal, but because trees are relatively long lived, the researchers found that this increase in mortality would, within several decades, decrease the average tree size substantially, maybe by half or more. Tree size is what natural forest sequestration is all about. Bigger trees mean more storage - Thus the CO2 fertilization effect makes larger trees and sequesters more carbon.  But if warmer temperatures are increasing tree mortality enough to decrease tree size, things start to offset. 

The tree death study was done in northern forests; the CO2 fertilization effect in tropical forests.  As important to the environmentalist agenda as tropical forests are, the northern forests store 22 percent of the total carbon on the earth’s land surface, and almost twice as much carbon per unit area as tropical forests. Northern forests cover nearly 17% of the Earth's surface whereas today, tropical forests only cover about 5% of the Earth's surface. This makes the carbon content of the northern forests about 7 times greater than the carbon content of tropical forests. The bottom line is that the northern forests are the driver in world forest carbon storage and their capacity to continue to store carbon could be easily and quickly reduced by 75%, conservatively.

More importantly though is the math concerning a halving of tree diameter.  A two foot diameter tree has four times the amount of wood in it than does a one foot diameter tree. When a tree's diameter is doubled, its volume increases four times, it doesn't double, so when a trees diameter is halved, it only has 25% of the volume. Before long at all, diminishing CO2 storage in northern forests will outpace increased storage in tropical forests, unless fires increase in tropical forests, which they are projected to do, and unless tree death in northern forests increases further because of insect infestations which were not taken into account in the northern tree death study.  Both of these scenarios are likely and both decrease the efficiency of the worlds forest storage of carbon.

Forest browning, in the words of NASA Earth Observatory scientists, "faster than any scientists thought possible", is occurring today as a sign that the CO2 fertilization effect has been surpassed in our forests of the north.

Lewis, et. al., et al Increasing carbon storage in intact African tropical forests Nature February 2009. 

Luyssaert et al Old-growth forests as global carbon sinks Nature July 2008.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BorealThreshold/boreal_threshold.php

Metzl, et.al., Decadal Increase of Oceanic Carbon Dioxide in the Southern Indian Ocean Surface waters (1991-2007), Deep-Sea Research II, special issue, published online 8 February 2009.

Takahashi, et. al., Climatological Mean and Decadal Change in Surface Ocean pCO2, and Net Sea-air CO2 Flux over the Global Oceans, Deep-Sea Research II, special issue, published online 8 February 2009.

Watson, et. al., Trends in North Atlantic sea surface pCO2 from 1990 to 2006, Deep-Sea Research II, special issue, published online 8 February 2009.

Mantgem, et. al. Widespread Increase of Tree Mortality Rates in the Western United States Science Jan 2009.

February 15, 2009 More from Fields Below - Astonishing news about Permafrost Catastrophic permafrost melt is one of the likely abrupt climate change feedback scenarios.  Major permafrost melt has already happened and the melt rate is increasing rapidly.  Hundreds of thousands of years of frozen, partially decomposed tundra is at risk of thawing.  Scientists aren't sure yet how rapidly the thaw will take place, but they know that the rate will likely increase over what it is now and it could increase very dramatically. 

The new estimate of the total amount of carbon frozen in permafrost soils was about 1000 billion tons. The amount of CO2 released through burning fossil fuels since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution more than 200 years ago is about 350 billion tons.

Future (as well as current) forest fires may also play a leading role  in CO2 feedbacks.  The Equatorial rainforests are of most concern.  As the climate warms, jungles dry out. At some point they get dry enough to burn. 

February 14, 2009 Co Chair of Climate Impacts Panel at IPCC says 2007 Assessment Report was Significantly Conservative - Warns of Eminent Abrupt Changes Chris Field, Coordinating Chair of the Climate Impacts Working Group for the IPCC says:

"We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected... In the fourth assessment, we looked at a very conservative range of climate outcomes, the fifth assessment should include futures with a lot more warming."

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously in climate policy..."  Greenhouse gas emissions have grown by an average of 3.5 per cent a year from 2000 to 2007. Fields said this was "far more rapid than we expected" and more than three times the 0.9 per cent growth rate in the 1990.

The IPCC average warming from the 2007 report was about 6 to 7 degrees F. over the next century.  One of the few irreversible feedbacks that we have been able to determine so far is that Greenland will cross the meltdown threshold at 2 to 3 degrees of warming - well within the built in warming already in the pipeline. Modeling efforts at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies led by James Hansen show that there is a real risk of the Venus Syndrome occurring on Earth if we see 15 to 30 degrees of warming.  Fields' warning of "a lot more warming" comes dangerously close to this ultimate Venus Syndrome scenario outlined by Hansen (see December 22, 2008 entry below).

The range of warming in all IPCC 2007 scenarios was 2 to 11.5 degrees F. What is happening with all of these reports that the IPCC 4th Assessment is conservative is obvious. We have crossed the threshold, climate is changing much faster than expected.  The reason that the scientist can not say this  with certainty is that science generally works on known events, not circumstantial evidence. The IPCC stopped taking papers in 2005. The papers published in 2005 collected their data, typically, no later than about 2003, much was collected no later than 2000 or 2001.

Science doesn't happen overnight, but climate change does. Ice records show average worldwide temperature changes of 9 to 10 degrees F. occurring in as little as a year or two. These changes, or similar abrupt changes, have happened 25 to 30 times in the last 100,000 years, and in the nine previous 100,000 year periods, similar abrupt changes took place.

The big problem is, that we have never seen, on a planet that is similar to ours tectonically, an abrupt change that started at the average temperature that our planet is experiencing today.  Today's temperature is within just one or two degrees of being as warm as it has been in likely the last three million years - that period, tectonically, where we can compare different CO2 concentrations.

Of the 750 to 1,000 or so abrupt climate changes that have occurred in the last 3 million years, none have started with temperatures as warm as they are today, with prospects of becoming as warm as they possibly could.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7890988.stm

February 11, 2009 Another Top Scientists Warns that We Might Lose the Planet The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world's largest general scientific society, with nearly 120,000 individual and institutional members. They publish one of the top academic journals in the world: Science.

Prof James McCarthy, president of the AAAS,  stated on the eve of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): that President Obama has just four years to save the planet and that if major policy changes do not happen within President Obama's term of office, they will not happen at all. He said "We have a moment right now of extraordinary opportunity, with a new president, positioned with scientific leadership that has known no equal in recent times... If in his first term, in the next four years, we don't make significant progress in these areas, then I think the planet is in huge trouble."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7885036.stm

February 10, 2009 Effects of Hillsope Thermokarst in Northern Alaska This is a classic example of a scientist, or in this case, a team of scientists, understating the obvious.  It is a product of the industry of science, a product of the ultra conservative scientists themselves. What they have "discovered" are dramatic affects of melting permafrost in the Arctic. It appears that permafrost melt on slopes creates a unique set of reactions compared to permafrost melt in flat areas. These scientists have documented three relatively small areas in northern Alaska where about a thousand of these thermokarst melt events, up to nearly a thousand yards long each are occurring.

Permafrost that has built up on the slopes of mountain ranges for hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of years, thousands of feet deep, is now melting. When the ice melts, the soil structure loses its strength and the soil begins moving down the mountainside.  It happens first in shallow layers close to the surface, then in deeper and deeper layers as warming continues. It happens in slumps and sheets and slides and gulleys and is called "mass wasting". The scientists say that the rate of this thawing has doubled and then doubled again in about the last 20 years.

In geologic history, that we can tell, this has never happened. But the scientists who authored this paper do not say this. They also do not say that this is happening completely across the north of the entire planet, or that this is an irreversible and unstoppable process. They do not say that the melting of the permanent ice that is just a foot or two from the surface leads to changes in the environmental which, like the ice, has been unchanged for hundreds of thousands to millions of years. They do not say that the methane released from this partially decomposed vegetation that has been trapped in the ice for these 100s of thousands, or millions of years is likely responsible for the rapidly increasing methane concentrations in our atmosphere.

The scientist is responsible for discussing only a very small piece of the puzzle in their work.  They can not and do not make the connections because their data, their statistics, the ways that they can say something is just and valid, does not look at anything but the very narrow focus of their research.

I saw this happening in Alaska.  The southern slope of the Alaska Range, where the Alaska Highway runs, is riddled with these slumps. They range from 100 to 1,000 yards long, are much narrower than they are long, and they all seemed to have slid down the side of the mountain 10 to 100 feet.  This area traversed the length of the Alaska Range for as far as I traveled the Alaska Highway - about 80 miles. There were literally thousands of them, maybe tens of throusands. I could not be for sure that these were caused by a warming planet - I still can not; science is just that way. This is one of the great reasons why understanding climate change is so difficult.

The title of this article too, is another reason why climate change is so difficult to understand.  It's not that the science is so difficult. It is the language that is used by the scientists to describe their discoveries.  In this case, not only is thermokarst an unknown quantity, but the title "Effects of Hillslope Thermokarst in Northern Alaska" gives absolutely no clue that this article discusses proof of one of the major affects of man caused warming on the planet, that is happening now in a frightening way, that is unstoppable and irreversible, that is creating significant feedback that causes even more warming which in turn causes more melt that is creating never before seen environmental changes, that are also responsible for feedbacks that will only add to the warming more.

So now it is probably obvious that the definition of thermokarst is: land-surface configuration that results from the melting of ground ice in a region underlain by permafrost.

http://www.agu.org/journals/eo/eo0904/2009EO040001.pdf

NOAA Scientist Says Unstoppable, Irreversible, Worse Than We Thought, Happening Now: Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science by Solomon et. al. The paper warns that we have already started to see accelerating impacts, and that even if we were to stop emitting all greenhouse gasses today, changes would continue for 1,000 years. The authors made certain to make it clear that we can still reduce the impacts. Their important message however was that if we do not take the most aggressive means possible, impacts will become progressively worse. The way our climate works, the longer the delay and the greater the forcing, the higher the chance of the most extreme impacts to occur.

Note from Bruce: Scientist today are beginning to get the real answers to the questions that they think they have known the answers to for some time now.  They now have the data to allow the statistics to tell the story. What they can't publish yet follows: If we are not as aggressive as we can possibly get in our treatment of climate change, if we don't immediately stop to emitting all CO2 and start removing some of the CO2 that we have already placed in the atmosphere, we lose the planet.

Antarctica Warms 100 Years Ahead of Schedule (again):

Another article about Antarctica warming a century ahead of the climate models predictions has been published.  Red is significant warming, pink is slight warming. Even in East Antarctica, where the climate models said the heat would be slow to come even at the end of the century, there is now warming. In West Antarctica, its 0.1 C per decade, or about 0.6 degrees - nearly as much as the global average. The new study uses new techniques with greater accuracy to estimate temperatures in the vast areas of Antarctica where there are no weather stations.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7228/full/nature07669.html

Four Years to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change: James Hansen Warns Incoming President Obama. Among the things Hansen says must be done - moratorium on all coal fired power plants that do not sequester 100% of CO2, A complete analysis of the polar ice caps, a carbon tax instead of cap and trade. Hansen says: "Before the end of Obama's first term, we will be seeing new record temperatures. I can promise the president that."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hansen-obama

US Geological Survey Report - U.S. Climate Change Science Program. Thresholds of Climate Change in Ecosystems (170 pages) Ecological thresholds occur when external factors, positive feedbacks, or nonlinear instabilities in a system cause changes to propagate in a domino-like fashion that is potentially irreversible.  Atmospheric carbon dioxide has reached levels unprecedented in possibly the last 24 million years. CO2 concentrations have risen by 34%, mostly in the last several decades. Global temperature is higher than at any time in the last 160,000 years. One of the ways that a rapidly changing climate may affect ecosystems is by causing sudden, irreversible effects that fundamentally change the function and structure of the ecosystem with potentially huge impacts to human society. Thresholds pose perhaps the greatest challenge currently facing climate change scientists. There is clear evidence that climate change has the potential to increase threshold changes in a wide range of ecosystems, but the basic and practical science necessary to predict and manage these changes is not well developed. A sense of urgency regarding thresholds exists because of the increasing pace of change. These challenges include the potential for major disruption of ecosystem services and the possibility of social upheaval that might occur.

The report has found non linear (domino-effect abrupt changes) ecosystem reactions occurring in the North Atlantic, North Pacific and Bering Seas, in the California Ocean Current, Alaskan spruce forests and semi-arid forests, scrublands and grasslands of the Great Basin of the American West and around the world. These abrupt changes are happening now and are well established. Impacts consist of the collapse of species populations, unprecedented insect infestations, unprecedented fire outbreaks.

Projected abrupt ecosystem changes that are showing signs of beginning include the Rapid reduction of Arctic sea ice coverage, drying of prairie pothole environments across significant areas of the upper Great Plains that are primary habitat for major waterfowl populations in North America, sub-Arctic tundra are changing to a shrub land forest ecosystems, rapid loss of wetlands / permafrost ecosystems across the sub arctic and Arctic happening as catastrophic drainage of melted permafrost occurs, rapid changes in forested permafrost areas to wetlands areas as permafrost melts, killing the original forest habitat in wide areas is beginning to occur, multiple rapid ecosystem changes in the Bering Sea including marine mammals, birds, fish and primary productivity organisms.

Three and half million acres of pinyon pine, two million acres of ponderosa pine and two million acres of Lodgepole pine have died.  Significant kill is beginning to occur in whitebark pine and quaking aspen.

http://downloads.climatescience.gov/sap/sap4-2/sap4-2-final-report-all.pdf

US Geological Survey Report - U.S. Climate Change Science Program. Coastal Sensitivity to Sea Level Rise: A Focus on the Mid-Atlantic Region (784 pages) The last time that the planet was as warm it is today, sea level was 13 to 20 feet higher.  The temperature of the planet will warm about another 2 degrees even if we were to stop emitting all CO2 tomorrow morning. It is likely that sea level will rise to these levels in several hundred years. (Note: climate models used for these predictions are proven conservative and they do not include abrupt sea level rise from dynamical ice sheet disintegration.) Nearly one-half of the 6.7 billion people around the world live near the coast and are highly vulnerable to storms and sea-level rise.  The average sea level rise for the last half of the 20th century was 1.2 to 1.5 mm per year. The last 10 year average sea level rise is 2.0 mm per year. Today's sea level rise is 3.3 mm per year.  Sea level rise above 7 mm per year will destroy most of the barrier islands on the East Coast and most of the wetlands as well.

http://climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap4-1/final-report/default.htm

January 8, 2009 UK Met Office Says Get Ready for Heat Waves  Heat waves as strong as 2003 when 30,000 died in Europe will occur every other year by the year 2030 says the Met UK Office, the United Kingdoms government climate modeling program. The Earth today is 0.2 degrees warmer than the 1990 to 1999 average and the warming will continue to accelerate.  Even if it were to only increase as fast as it has increased since the turn of the century, we are already in the worse case scenario estimates projected by the IPCC. And our climate today is operating on greenhouse gas concentrations from the 1970s because of the climate lag. Earth's population was about half of what it is today back then and our per capita CO2 emissions were five times less. This means that today, our society emits 10 times more CO2 than it did just a decade ago, and our climate is reacting to atmospheric gas concentrations from the 1970s.  This is just another example of the grossly conservative climate models projection for our future.  We will be extremely lucky to have our climate limited to the worse case scenario  of 6 degrees C increase in temperature.

CO2 Emissions today are astonish rising at 3.1% per year  having drastically increased in less than the last decade from the long standing 1.1% increase rate that we have seen from at least the late 1950s. This 3.1% rate is worse than the worse case scenario emission rate used in the IPCC models projected for the year 2100.

I just can't emphasize enough the extreme disconnect between climate science and actual climate change and the understanding of our leaders and the general public.  There is a reason why James Hansen used the Venus Syndrome as the centerpiece of his presentation to the AGU last month. That reason is that our climate is out of control and current mitigation efforts are likely insufficient to prevent dangerous changes to our climate. Those dangerous changes are on the order of magnitude of the loss of our Earth's habitable environment in a Venus Syndrome-like cascading series of events.

At the rate that actual climate change is beating the supercomputer model projections, this could happen in just a couple of centuries.  Which would obviously mean that life on Earth would be having huge problems much sooner than that.

UK Met - http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jan/08/summer-aid

CO2 increase - http://www.earthportal.org/forum/?p=229

Venus Syndrome, Hansen's AGU presentation -

December 20, 2008 Berknes Lecture http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/

January 5, 2009 Global Climate Review for the Year 2008 Last year was the 7th 8th or 9th warmest year ever recorded depending on whose data set you look at. 2008 was not the coolest year of the century, that was 2000. The last ten years by far represent the warmest decade in history and this period does not include 1998, the warmest year ever recorded (because of a large El Nino).  The southern oscillation was predominantly negative last year (La Nina) which has an effect on global temperature and 2008 was also the minimum for the 22 year solar sunspot cycle. This is the biggest solar cycle minimum seen in some time. There is a general consensus that we will break the 1998 record within a decade, likely within the first Obama administration. We could only hope that this year was a part of a global cooling trend. CO2 levels have increased to greater than predicted in the worse case scenarios of the IPCC. Enjoy the cool weather.

January 1, 2009 Inhofe Report - US Government Says Climate Change is Not Real Senator Inhofe's is still producing negative propaganda designed to obfuscate the public opinion on climate science. The Environment and Public Works Committee says 400 scientists say that climate change is not a problem.  Real Climate has an analysis of Inhofe's history here.

The misunderstanding of the few remaining skeptics astounding given the amount of science that supports the consensus opinion. My favorite response to folks who have just begun to try and understand why there are those "scientists" out there who disagree with the consensus position goes like this: Inhofe's new report has 650 scientists (as the following links show, many of these scientists have no business belonging to a report such as this in the first place, but that's not my point). The IPCC has 2,500 scientists.  Then I get the response about the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine Treatise containing 20,000 "scientists" signatures. To that I respond, there were 2,500 that worked on the latest IPCC analysis of all of discoveries made in all fields of science across the entire planet over the six years prior to the report. Before that  several thousand scientists reviewed all of the previous scientific discoveries in climate for the previous three IPCC reports produced since 1988. All together between 150,000 and 200,000 citations are listed in Google Scholar for the period. A safe estimate for the number of scientists that are represented by this body of work would be 100,000 and the number could be as high as 200,000 to 300,000 because most papers have more than two or three authors and generally more than five or six authors.

The bad news is that the consensus position, by definition is conservative. And when talking about 2,500 scientists (IPCC) coming up with a position that they all can agree on, the position is going to be very conservative. This means that in all likelihood, climate change is much worse than the statements in the IPCC reports.

Additional analyses of the Public Works Report are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

December 22, 2008 Climate Collapse is Real - The Venus Syndrome James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Space institute - the foremost US Government climate modeling agency - gave a presentation at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco last week (16,000 scientists attended the annual festivities). The rate of CO2 change today is 20,000 times higher than at any time in the last 65 million year, since the dinosaurs became extinct. The highest natural forcing of CO2 in the Cenozoic Era (the last 65 million years) was about 100 ppm per million years or 1/10,000 ppm per year. Today's CO2 change rate is 2 ppm per year - 20,000 times greater... (remember, we cannot directly compare our world today to that world when the dinosaurs were around. The geologic weathering rate, solar forcing and tectonics were entirely different then. That is why that period (Mesozoic) is a different geologic epoch than the one we are in today (Cenzoic).

So the argument that there have been larger changes than what are happening to day is pure fiction. Yes there have been larger changes, but they happened in hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Slow feedback processes like geologic weathering and ocean sequestration take thousands to hundreds of thousands of years to happen.

This is a quote from DR. Hansen's Bjerknes Presentation at the AGU in December that illustrates the Venus Syndrome analogy: "Given the solar constant that we have today, how large a forcing must be maintained to cause runaway global warming? Our model blows up before the oceans boil, but it suggests that perhaps runaway conditions could occur with added forcing as small as 10-20 W/m2 (Watts per square meter - a 60 watt light bulb provides 3 to 6 times more forcing per unit of area than is required to turn the Earth into a Venus)"

The conversion from W/m2 to degrees is 3/4 degree C per W/m2. Or 1.35 degrees F per W/m2. This is 13.5 to 27 degrees F of global warming. (Updated as per March 2009, the latest climate models show a likely warming of 10 to 13.5 degrees this century, with more in the 22nd century.)

The threat of the Venus syndrome is very real. Runaway, irreversible climate change is a very frightening and factual probability. When the Earth went into its snowball state, the runaway albedo feedback was to blame. Ice reflects 90% of the sun's heat harmlessly back into space. Earth, rock, vegetation and open water absorb up to 90% of the sun's heat and changes it into infrared radiation that is trapped on the planet by the greenhouse effect. As the planet warms, the water vapor effect works in the same way in the opposite direction.  The difference?  When the Earth goes into snowball, carbon dioxide slowly builds up in the atmosphere from volcanoes because there is no ocean, vegetation, earth or rocks to absorbed the CO2. This buildup eventual invokes the greenhouse effect, the planet warms enough to melt the ice.  In a runaway heating scenario where the water vapor feedback is invoked, the oceans simply evaporate into space. There is no return.  Here's a quote lifted from the notes of his PowerPoint presentation:

"There may have been times in the Earth’s history when CO2 was as high as 4000 ppm without causing a runaway greenhouse effect {the Mesozoic period - time of the dinosaurs}. But the solar irradiance was less at that time.  What is different about the human-made forcing is the rapidity at which we are increasing it, on the time scale of a century or a few centuries. It does not provide enough time for negative feedbacks, such as changes in the weathering rate, to be a major factor. There is also a danger that humans could cause the release of methane hydrates, perhaps more rapidly than in some of the cases in the geologic record. In my opinion, if we burn all the coal, there is a good chance that we will initiate the runaway greenhouse effect. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale (a.k.a. oil shale), I think it is a dead certainty."

The importance of the venue for these statements can not be under-stated. The AGU is the largest organized body of scientists on the planet and Dr. Hansen is likely the single most important climate modeler on the planet.

I highly recommend a review of Dr. Hansen's PowerPoint presentation below. This is one of the most concise and broad ranging summaries of the basic climate science concerning the climate crisis I have ever seen.