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Massive government report says climate is warming and humans are the cause
It is "extremely likely" that human activities are the "dominant cause" of global warming, according to the the most comprehensive study ever of climate science by U.S. government researchers.
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Overflow crowd opposes state’s proposed science standards
Hundreds of New Mexicans waited in Santa Fe outside the Jerry Apodaca Building on Monday morning. They were there to share their thoughts about the statewide science standards proposed by the Public Education Department's (PED) acting Secretary Christopher Ruszkowski.
Worrying new research finds that the ocean is cutting through a key Antarctic ice shelf.
The Dotson ice shelf holds back two large glaciers and connects to the larger West Antarctic ice sheet.
A new scientific study published Tuesday has found that warm ocean water is carving an enormous channel into the underside of one of the key floating ice shelves of West Antarctica, the most vulnerable sector of the enormous ice continent.
The Dotson ice shelf, which holds back two separate large glaciers, is about 1,350 square miles in area and between 1,000 and 1,600 feet thick. But on its western side, it is now only about half that thickness, said Noel Gourmelen, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and the lead author of the research, which was just published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The reason is the same one that is believed to be shrinking glaciers and pouring ice into the ocean across West Antarctica — warm ocean water located offshore is now reaching the ice from below.
In Dotson’s case, it appears the water is first flowing into the deep cavity beneath the shelf far below it, but then being turned by the Earth’s rotation and streaming upward toward the floating ice as it mixes with buoyant meltwater. The result is that the warm water continually melts one part of the shelf in particular, creating the channel.
“We think that this channel is actually being carved for the last 25 years,” said Gourmelen, whose research team detected the channel using satellite observations. “It’s been thinning and melting at the base for at least 25 years, and that’s where we are now.”
The work was conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh along with colleagues at other institutions in France, Norway, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
The newly discovered channel is three miles wide and 37 miles long, and the scalloped region at the base of the floating ice shelf is mirrored by a long depression on its surface.
Dotson ice shelf as a whole has been thinning at an average rate of more than eight feet per year since 1994, even as the speed of ice flowing outward through the shelf has increased by 180 percent. But the thinning in the channel has been far greater. The research calculates that 45 feet of ice thickness is being subtracted annually from the channel.
The new study calculates that as a result of this highly uneven melting, the Dotson ice shelf could be melted all the way through in 40 years, rather than 170 years, which would be the time it would take if the melt were occurring evenly. And it speculates that as the thinning continues, the shelf may not go quietly or steadily any longer — something dramatic could occur, such as a breakup.
“Any carpenter knows: you’re going to cut through a block of wood a lot faster with a saw than with a sander,” said Ted Scambos, an Antarctic expert with the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who commented on the study by email (he was not involved in the research). “What they’ve shown is that warm ocean water reaching the Antarctic coastline beneath the ice does not just remove the ice uniformly, it cuts deep gouges in the ice from below. The channels are weak spots in the floating ice (ice shelves).”
Meltwater from this process streams outward into the Amundsen Sea in front of the Dotson ice shelf and the channel, which has large downstream consequences. The water carries nutrients, such as iron, that have also spurred sharp growth of marine microorganisms in the region — another sign of the major changes in the region.
“This study reveals the complexity with which the ocean interacts with Antarctic ice shelves, and will be of value in assessing the future of the ice-ocean-biology system of the Antarctic coastline, and its sensitivity to changes in climate,” said Dan Goldberg of the University of Edinburgh, another of the study’s authors.
Helen Fricker, a glaciologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said the new research highlights the importance of a European Space Agency satellite called CryoSat-2, which she said is “currently the only satellite monitoring Antarctica’s ice shelf thickness.”
“It gives us data at incredibly dense coverage, which is allowing us to map small-scale features like basal channels,” Fricker said. “These are regions of higher basal melt, and could cause the ice shelf to weaken much sooner than the average melt rates imply. It is vital that we keep monitoring these ice shelves.”
There could be numerous other such channels across the Antarctic continent, Gourmelen said.
In the particular case of Dotson, the ultimate fear is that the undermining of the shelf will increase the flow of ice outward from the glaciers behind it, named Smith and Kohler, which contributes to sea level rise. If the ice shelf collapsed, that would speed up even further.
To see why that matters, consider this map of what the overall region looks like, where “DIS” refers to Dotson ice shelf:
In the long term, the greatest fear perhaps is that Smith glacier ultimately connects to Thwaites glacier, the largest in West Antarctica, as you can see above. Thwaites runs backward all the way into the heart of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains about 10 feet of potential sea level rise.
“The nature of the impact is not really known” if Dotson is lost, Gourmelen said. “But they are essentially part of the same large basin.”
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Now even climate-change believers count as ‘deniers.'
Even if an opinion is wrong, debating it will teach more people what is right. And if the opinion is right, it offers an opportunity to exchange error for truth. Instead, we’re left with just one “right” way of thinking.
Al Gore recently had a telling altercation with a journalist. The Spectator’s Ross Clark wanted to ask him about Miami sea-level rises suggested in the new film, “An Inconvenient Sequel.” The reporter started to explain that he had consulted Florida International University sea-level-rise expert Shimon Wdowinski. Gore’s response: “Never heard of him — is he a denier?” Then he asked the journalist, “Are you a denier?”
When Clark responded that he was sure climate change is a problem but didn’t know how big, Gore declared, “You are a denier.”
I was recently on the receiving end of a similar rebuff from Chile’s environment minister. I’d written an op-ed for a Chilean newspaper that, among other things, quoted UN findings on how little the Paris climate treaty would achieve and argued that vast investment in green energy research and development is a better policy. Marcelo Mena proclaimed, “There is no room for your climate-denying rhetoric in Chile.”
Something odd — and dangerous — is happening when even people who accept the reality of man-made climate change are labeled “deniers.” The unwillingness to discuss which policies work best means we end up with worse choices.
Consider the case of Roger Pielke, Jr, a political scientist who worked extensively on climate change. He believes that climate change is real, human emissions of greenhouse gases justify action and there should be a carbon tax.
But he drew the ire of climate campaigners because his research has shown that the increasing costs from hurricane damage is not caused by storms made more intense by climate-change but by more and pricier property built in vulnerable areas. He took issue with the UN’s influential International Panel for Climate Change over a chart in its 2007 report that seemed to imply causation when there was only circumstantial evidence.
Pielke was proven right, and the IPCC’s subsequent outputs mostly accepted his arguments. Yet, he was the target of a years-long campaign, including a massive but baseless takedown that later turned out to have been coordinated by a climate-campaigning think tank funded by a green billionaire, alongside an investigation launched by a congressman.
Pielke left climate change for other fields where “no one is trying to get me fired.” And sidelining him has made it easier for climate-campaigners to use hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria to argue for carbon-cut policies, even though these will do very little to prevent future hurricane damage.
Pielke finds that we should make relatively cheap investments to reduce vulnerability, like limiting floodplain construction and increasing porous surfaces. Ignoring this means more harm.
“Ten years ago we did ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ Its predictions...
Leaving out dissention echoes the worst of the leaked “ClimateGate” e-mails. In 2004, the head of a leading climate-research organization wrote about two inconvenient papers: “Kevin and I will keep them out [of the IPCC report] somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Journalists also ensure debate “purity.” In Scientific American, climate writer and former CNN producer Peter Dykstra stated baldly that “climate denial extends beyond rejecting climate science,” comparing policy questioners to Holocaust deniers and dismissing my own decade of advocacy for a green energy R&D; fund as “minimization.”
This intolerance for discussion is alarming. Believe in climate change but wonder how bad it will be? You’re a “denier,” says Gore. Believe, but argue that today’s policies aren’t the best response? You’re a denier, says Chile’s environment minister. Believe, but point out problematic findings or media reporting? There’s no room for you, say the self-appointed gatekeepers of debate.
The expanding definition of “denial” is an attempt to ensure that public and policy-makers hear from an ever-smaller clique. John Stuart Mill calls this “the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion.”
But even if an opinion is wrong, debating it will teach more people what is right. And if the opinion is right, it offers an opportunity to exchange error for truth. Instead, we’re left with just one “right” way of thinking.
With dissidence on the Paris Treaty not allowed, we are on track to lose $1 trillion to $2 trillion annually to achieve what the United Nations finds will be 1 percent of the carbon cuts needed to keep temperature rises under 2°C.
That’s not the right way to solve climate change. Saying so denies nothing but economic illiteracy.
Bjorn Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
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University's 'digital sandbox' shows how climate change effects human life.
A team at the University of Bradford has mixed the latest computer technology with an old-fashioned sandpit to create a tool that can predict how climate change can transform civilisations.
A TEAM at the University of Bradford has mixed the latest computer technology with an old-fashioned sandpit to create a tool that can predict how climate change can transform civilisations.
The Digital Sandpit allows archaeologists at the University to create their own 3D environments, onto which are projected vegetation, animals and humans, whose movements and actions are run by a computer algorithm. The team can then use the computer to raise or lower the temperature of the virtual landscape, leading to swathes of land being covered in snow or drowned by rising water levels.
They can use this to see how these changes affect vegetation, animal populations, and the impact on the food chain.
Despite the impressive technology behind the piece of kit, it is quite low fi. A wooden sandpit and bag of B&Q; sand is the backdrop for the projections, made by a device from an XBOX 360 games system, hooked up to an everyday desktop.
The computer programme means archaeologists can develop physical environments to visualise the impact of complex equations, and it was on show at a recent open day to inspire future students.
It will be used as part of a major university project, to discover the secrets of Doggerland - a lost area of land that was once part of Britain but now lies beneath the North Sea. The team has spent years studying the site, and the former human settlements there. The sandbox will be used to re-create that site, and look at different theories on how life there changed with the changing climate.
The projections in the Digital Sandbox even show the diet of the virtual humans, reflecting whether they eat vegetables and fruit, deer or fish, meaning the team can see how the environmental changes can lead to major changes in the lifestyles of people living in those areas - with hunters becoming fishermen when animal populations fall due to rising water levels.
Although other similar bits of kit exist at other institutions, the Bradford team is one of the few to use it in this way.
Dr Philip Murgatroyd, Project and Modelling Manager at the School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences, said: “It helps us to visualise complex simulations. A lot of time in this field you don’t have something graphically you can show people. We hope that when people see this they realise just how closely humans and their environment interact, and how a small change can really alter environments.”
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Trump nominates AccuWeather CEO to lead key climate agency.
President Donald Trump has nominated the CEO of AccuWeather to run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a key agency in conducting climate research and assessing climate change.
By HENRY C. JACKSON 10/11/2017 10:42 PM EDT
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President Donald Trump has nominated the CEO of AccuWeather to run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a key agency in conducting climate research and assessing climate change.
Barry Myers has served since 2007 as CEO of AccuWeather, a media company in State College, Pennsylvania, that provides worldwide weather predictions. He graduated from Penn State with a degree in business and received a law degree from Boston University, but has no science training.
In a news release, the White House called him “one of the world’s leading authorities on the use of weather information.” Trump has nominated him to serve as the Commerce Department’s under secretary for oceans and atmosphere, which oversees NOAA.
At AccuWeather, Myers has led a global expansion of the company. His significant private-sector experience fits with many of the other high-profile Trump administration appointees.
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NOAA has a vast portfolio that includes the nation's weather forecasts and projecting climate change. The agency oversees the National Weather Service and a vast array of research. It also has responsibility for protecting coastal areas and oceans.
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The Napa fire is a perfectly normal apocalypse.
It has already been a fire season and a hurricane season that are, as researchers say, consistent with models of a changing climate.
BLAME THE WIND, if you want. In Southern California they call it the Santa Ana; in the north, the Diablos. Every autumn, from 4,000 feet up in the Great Basin deserts of Nevada and Utah, air drops down over the mountains and through the canyons. By the time it gets near the coast it’s hot, dry, and can gust as fast as a hurricane.
Or blame lightning, or carelessness, or downed power lines. No one yet knows the cause of the more than a dozen fires ablaze around California, but fires start where humans meet the wild forests, where people build for solitude or space or beauty. Things go wrong in those liminal spaces, at the interface between the wilds and the built.
So blame sprawl, or civilization’s cycling of wilderness into rural into exurban into suburban—urban agglomerations with an ever-expanding wavefront.
Blame all of it. There’s a reason the great Californian writer Raymond Chandler called it the Red Wind—winds “that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.” The Santa Anas blast down from the mountains and fan small fires into infernos, and sometimes those infernos maim or kill a city. In 1991 it was in the hills of Oakland. And this past weekend it was Napa and Sonoma, and the town of Santa Rosa. At least 15 people are dead. More than 1,500 houses are gone. The skies of the West are full of dust and ash.
Pushed by the wind, fires can throw burning embers a mile and a half ahead. The fire front starts moving faster than anyone can respond, jumping from ridgeline to ridgeline.
A fire’s progress through the forests and wildlands of North America isn’t exactly formulaic, but scientists understand it reasonably well. In the city, though? “Most wildland firefighters are not trained in structural protection, but the urban fire departments are not trained to deal with dozens or hundreds of houses burning at the same time,” says Volker Radeloff, a forestry researcher at the University of Wisconsin. “When these areas with lots of houses burn, the fires become very unpredictable.”
Buildings, the material bits of cities, don’t burn like woodlands. “A wildfire typically doesn’t last in one spot more than a minute or two. In grass it can be like 10 seconds,” says Mark Finney, a US Forest Service researcher at the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory. “But structures can burn for a long time. That means they have a long time to be able to spread the fire, to be able to ignite adjacent structures.” They throw off embers as they decompose, and those wide walls emit and transfer heat.
In Southern California, Santa Ana fires push into populated areas more frequently. They kill more people and destroy more buildings. Diablo-powered fires aren't as common in the state's northern half, but they're not unknown.
Fires happen without Santa Anas too, of course, but “they typically don’t grow bigger,” says Yufang Jin, an ecosystem dynamics researcher at UC Davis and lead author on a 2015 paper about the difference. “During summertime in southern California, the typical wind pattern blows from the ocean to inland. The wind speed is usually not that strong, and the relative humidity is usually high.” That can tamp a fire down.
During Santa Ana season, conditions are the opposite. And the particularly bad Diablo winds in the north this year come after the end of a drought that left plenty of fuel. Fire researchers sometimes fight about whether meteorology or fuel conditions are more important to wildfires; this past weekend had both—the perfect firestorm. Cal Fire, the agency responsible for wildfires in the state, has issued another Red Flag Warning for the same conditions later this week. According to a spokesperson, roughly 4,000 firefighters are already deployed.
California housing policies are more likely to push single-family houses out into the edges of communities than encourage the construction of dense city centers. Climate change makes wet seasons wetter and hot seasons hotter—which builds fuel. “Based on analysis using climate model projections, the frequency of Santa Ana events is uncertain,” Jin says. “But all the models agree that the intensity of Santa Ana events is going to be much stronger.”
Models say the same thing about sea level rise and hurricanes. A continent away from the fires in California, cities along the Gulf of Mexico and in the Caribbean have been battered by tropical cyclones, one after the other. This year, ocean water heated by a warming climate, unusually wet weather, and a lack of the vertical wind shear that can tame a big storm combined to produce an anomalous season. It has already been a fire season and a hurricane season that are, as researchers say, consistent with models of a changing climate.
Cities are not immortal. Economics and wars can kill them, but so can storms and fires. That’s especially true if cities aren’t built to resist—if cities are built in ways that make the change worse instead of fighting it.
So keep thinking about blame as northern California rebuilds—if regulations get brave enough to insist on denser cities, less flammable materials, different ornamental vegetation, underground power lines. The risk of fire will never be zero, but everyone knows what would knock a few points off. Whether anyone will make those changes—well, the red wind makes people do crazy things.
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