Tag Archives: climate change

October 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

  • The U.S. electric grid is being systematically probed by hackers working for foreign governments.
  • According to James Hansen, the world needs “negative” greenhouse gas emissions right away, meaning an end to fossil fuel burning and improvements to agriculture, forestry, and soil conservation practices to absorb carbon. Part of the current problem is unexpected and unexplained increases in methane concentrations in the atmosphere.
  • The epidemics that devastated native Americans after European arrival were truly some of the most horrific events in history, and a cautionary tale for the future.

3 most hopeful stories

  • New technology can read your heartbeat by bouncing a wireless signal off you. Mark Zuckerberg has decided to end disease.
  • While he still has people’s attention, Obama has been talking about Mars and zoning. Elon Musk wants to be the one to take you and your stuff to Mars.
  • Maine is taking a look at ranked choice voting. Ironically, the referendum will require approval by a simple majority of voters. Which makes you wonder if there are multiple voting options that could be considered and, I don’t know, perhaps ranked somehow? What is the fairest system of voting on what is the fairest system of voting?

3 most interesting stories

the latest from James Hansen

James Hansen and an enormous number of co-authors have a new paper in Earth System Dynamics.

Young People’s Burden: Requirement of Negative CO2 Emissions

The rapid rise of global temperature that began about 1975 continues at a mean rate of about 0.18 °C/decade, with the current annual temperature exceeding +1.25 °C relative to 1880–1920. Global temperature has just reached a level similar to the mean level in the prior interglacial (Eemian) period, when sea level was several meters higher than today, and, if it long remains at this level, slow amplifying feedbacks will lead to greater climate change and consequences. The growth rate of climate forcing due to human-caused greenhouse gases (GHGs) increased over 20 % in the past decade mainly due to resurging growth of atmospheric CH4, thus making it increasingly difficult to achieve targets such as limiting global warming to 1.5 °C or reducing atmospheric CO2 below 350 ppm. Such targets now require “negative emissions”, i.e., extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere. If rapid phasedown of fossil fuel emissions begins soon, most of the necessary CO2 extraction can take place via improved agricultural and forestry practices, including reforestation and steps to improve soil fertility and increase its carbon content. In this case, the magnitude and duration of global temperature excursion above the natural range of the current interglacial (Holocene) could be limited and irreversible climate impacts could be minimized. In contrast, continued high fossil fuel emissions by the current generation would place a burden on young people to undertake massive technological CO2 extraction, if they are to limit climate change. Proposed methods of extraction such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) or air capture of CO2 imply minimal estimated costs of 104–570 trillion dollars this century, with large risks and uncertain feasibility. Continued high fossil fuel emissions unarguably sentences young people to either a massive, possibly implausible cleanup or growing deleterious climate impacts or both, scenarios that should provide both incentive and obligation for governments to alter energy policies without further delay.

Lake Powell

from the Arizona Daily Star:

a new study warns that the lake [Lake Powell] could virtually dry up in as few as six years if the region gets a repeat of the dry spell it experienced from 2000 to 2005…

During the 2000-2005 drought, Lake Powell lost 13 million acre-feet of water and dropped almost 100 feet.

Today, the lake has about 13 million acre-feet left, said Eric Kuhn, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, which is helping to oversee the study.

August 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • Bokashi is a system that essentially pickles your compost.
  • There is an unlikely but plausible scenario where Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, could become President of the United States this fall. Speaking of implausible scenarios, I learned that RIchard Nixon made a serious attempt to pass a basic income bill in 1969.
  • Here is a short video explaining the Fermi Paradox, which asks why there are no aliens. Meanwhile Russian astronomers are saying there might be aliens.

State of the Climate 2015

The American Meterological Society has released State of the Climate 2015. I would love to take a week and scrutinize each and every map and figure, but alas…

One thing that caught my eye was by far the coolest cover art I have ever seen on a scientific report! Seriously, have a look if you look at nothing else!

Another thing that caught my eye is the idea of an “accelerating hydrologic cycle”. I hadn’t heard that before, but I suppose it makes sense if there is more energy/heat being added to the Earth on balance.

Overlaying a general increase in the hydrologic cycle, the strong El Niño enhanced precipitation variability around the world. An above-normal rainy season led to major floods in Paraguay, Bolivia, and southern Brazil. In May, the United States recorded its all-time wettest month in its 121-year national record. Denmark and Norway reported their second and third wettest year on record, respectively, but globally soil moisture was below average, terrestrial groundwater storage was the lowest in the 14-year record, and areas in “severe” drought rose from 8% in 2014 to 14% in 2015. Drought conditions prevailed across many Caribbean island nations, Colombia, Venezuela, and northeast Brazil for most of the year. Several South Pacific countries also experienced drought. Lack of rainfall across Ethiopia led to its worst drought in decades and affected millions of people, while prolonged drought in South Africa severely affected agricultural production. Indian summer monsoon rainfall was just 86% of average. Extremely dry conditions in Indonesia resulted in intense and widespread fires during August–November that produced abundant carbonaceous aerosols, carbon monoxide, and ozone. Overall, emissions from tropical Asian biomass burning in 2015 were almost three times the 2001–14 average…

Records of observation-based global evaporation only span the satellite era. This has not prevented a handful of studies from attempting to disentangle the impact of climate change on trends in evaporation. Jung et al. (2010) suggested a reversal in the rise of evaporation since the late 1990s, which was later shown to be a temporary anomaly caused by ENSO (Miralles et al. 2014b). Nonetheless, these studies, together with more recent contributions (Zhang et al. 2015, 2016), have indicated the existence of a slight positive trend over the last few decades, in agreement with expectations derived from temperature trends and global greening, and the theory of an accelerating hydrological cycle…

The discussion of “biomass burning in Indonesia” caught my eye because it is one thing to read about it, and another to get a lungfull of it as my family did when living in Singapore in 2013. It was shocking – you looked out the window and could barely see the next high rise maybe 50 feet away. We had a newborn baby at the time and decided to go to the trouble of traveling interanationally with him to get him out of there. And it sounds like this year’s pollution was worse than what we experienced.

The tendency for increased drought in the tropics during El Niño leads to increased release of CO2 from increased tropical wildfires. In 2015, out-of-control agricultural biomass burning was exacerbated in Indonesia (see Sidebar 2.2) by ignition of the subsurface peat. These changes in terrestrial carbon storage likely contributed to the record 3.1 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa Observatory from 1 January 2015 to 1 January 2016. The previous highest annual increase of 2.9 ppm occurred in 1998. Biomass burning in Indonesia also led to regional increases in atmospheric carbon monoxide, aerosols, and tropospheric ozone in 2015 (Sidebar 2.2). Huijnen et al. 2016 suggest that the 2015 carbon emissions from the Indonesian fires were the largest since those during the El Niño year of 1997 (section 2g7; Fig. 2.60), although still only 25% of the 1997 emissions…

The 2015 Indonesia fire season began in August, and by September much of Sumatra, Kalimantan, Singapore, and parts of Malaysia and Thailand were covered in thick smoke, affecting the respiratory health of millions of people. Visibility was also reduced to less than 10% of normal over Borneo, and large parts of the region could not be seen from space, as was documented for previous fire events in that region (Marlier et al. 2013; Wang et al. 2004). Preliminary estimates suggest that greenhouse gas emissions from the burning (in CO2 equivalent) exceeded Japan’s 2013 emissions from fossil fuel combustion (Van der Werf 2015). Even after the worst of the 2015 Indonesian fires were no longer burning, the remaining pollution stretched halfway around the globe.

Comparing the emissions to those from a major industrial economy like Japan puts the staggering scale in perspective. Beyond the effect on human health and the climate, this is also a loss of diverse tropical ecosystems and fertile soils.

forests as a carbon source?

This journal article talks about the possibility of a disturbing situation where climate change starts to kill trees, which are then no longer able to absorb carbon dioxide, which causes more climate change, and so on in an accelerating feedback loop.

Trees Can Limit Climate Change—Unless It Kills Them First

Scientists have considered forests a potential barrier to climate change, since plants on land take up about 25 percent of our carbon dioxide emissions. As trees in colder areas are exposed to warmer temperatures and more CO2 emissions, they will grow faster and absorb more emissions, helping to mitigate the effects of a primary greenhouse gas, the theory goes.
But, in an alarming twist, global warming is likelier to limit forests’ capacity for absorbing emissions in many parts of the continent, a study released today in the journal Ecology Letters finds. After combining climate projections with the tree records, researchers found no evidence for the boreal greening hypothesis. In fact, they found a risk of a negative feedback loop, as trees in their model reacted poorly to warmer temperatures due to drought and other disturbances.
That means as trees die faster than they can take up CO2 emissions, releasing trapped carbon, forests could become a net source of carbon, accelerating climate change. The study found that we could reach such a tipping point as early as 2050.

new book on soil

Here’s a review on a new book on soil.

Soils had not excited many ecologists until, two decades ago, soil ecologists started emphasizing that many aboveground phenomena are under belowground control. Richard Bardgett is one of the most eloquent and knowledgeable of the soil scientists who have contributed to the current enthusiasm about soils. In his recent book Earth Matters: How Soil Underlies Civilization he explains how much human societies depend on soil. He writes about how soils are formed, how they influence biodiversity and food quality, and what role they play in cities and in war, and introduces us to the interplay of soils and climate change.

June 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

  • Coral reefs are in pretty sad shape, perhaps the first natural ecosystem type to be devastated beyond repair by climate change.
  • Echoes of the Cold War are rearing their ugly heads in Western Europe.
  • Trump may very well have organized crime links. And Moody’s says that if he gets elected and manages to do the things he says, it could crash the economy.

3 most hopeful stories

  • China has a new(ish) sustainability plan called “ecological civilization” that weaves together urban and regional planning, environmental quality, sustainable agriculture, habitat and biodiversity concepts. This is good because a rapidly developing country the size of China has the ability to sink the rest of civilization if they let their ecological footprint explode, regardless of what the rest of us do. Maybe they can set a good example for the rest of the developing world to follow.
  • Genetic technology is appearing to provide some hope of real breakthroughs in cancer treatment.
  • There is still some hope for a technology-driven pick-up in productivity growth.

3 most interesting stories

Moore

Here is an interesting article about Moore, Oklahoma, which has been hit by four incredibly powerful tornadoes in sixteen years, which is statistically all but impossible. Beyond the sheer spectacle of it, and the fact that I’ve spent some time in central Oklahoma, the statistical side of it is interesting to me, as I sometimes find myself asked whether some system should be designed to withstand a storm that happens 10 times a year on average, 4 times a year on average, once every 10 years on average, once every 25 years on average, etc. We don’t have a million years of data to base these things on, and even if we did the climate seems to be changing, and even if it were not there is ultimately a judgment call involved about how much risk is too much given our finite resources we have to divide up among so many things.

…tornadoes are pretty rare. One thousand a year, scattered across the continent, does not produce many data points at the scale of an individual city. Most days, there aren’t tornadoes anywhere. That problem is exacerbated by the third issue: Scientists really only have about 50 years of really good tornado documentation. Essentially, Brooks told me, scientists can’t tell us whether what’s happened in Moore is abnormal because they don’t know what a “normal” amount of violent tornadoes is. With all of that, Brooks said, there’s not a good way to clearly tell the difference between patterns and pareidolia. After all, the human brain is primed to find significance in the random. In the creaky corners of our neural pathways, a jumble of rocks can become an old man, a coat hanger can become a drunk octopus, a bunch of craters on the moon give us a friendly smile. It’s so easy for a few random events to make one small town look like a tornado magnet. It would be harder not to see it.