Antarctic ice shelves continue retreat

Global warming brings more bad news from the Antarctic: Several ice shelves are collapsing, breaking up, or floating away.

2009: Wilkins
2009: Wordie
2009: Northern Larsen
2003: Ward Hunt
2003: West Antarctic
2002: Larsen B

Recent Reuters story.

Other news stories.

California Climate Risk and Response

The costs of currently predicted climate changes in California over the next century could be as low as $7.3 billion per year, or as high as $46.6 billion per year, according to a new report by two University of California-Berkeley agricultural and resource economics professors. The 127-page report was funded by the nonprofit Next 10 foundation that studies California's future and the intersection of the economy and the environment.

From the most general perspective, our review of the evidence on climate risk and response supports four overarching findings:

1. Our estimates indicate that climate risk — damages if no action is taken — would include tens of billions per year in direct costs, even higher indirect costs, and expose trillions of dollars of assets to collateral risk.
2. Climate response — mitigation to prevent the worst impacts and adaptation to climate change that is unavoidable — on the other hand, can be executed for a fraction of these net costs by strategic deployment of existing resources for infrastructure renewal/replacement and significant private investments that would enhance both employment and productivity.
3. At the sector level, there will be some very significant adjustment challenges, requiring as much foresight and policy discipline as the state can mobilize. In this context, the political challenges may be much greater than the economic ones. The state’s adaptation capacity depends upon flexibility, but divergence between public and private interests may limit this flexibility. As in the current financial dilemma, resolving this will require determined leadership.
4. Despite the extent and high quality of existing climate research reviewed in this document, the degree of uncertainty regarding many important adjustment challenges remains very high. This uncertainly is costly, increasing the risk of both public and private mistakes and the deferral of necessary adaptation decisions. The process of improving research and understanding of climate effects may itself be costly and difficult, but policymakers must have better visibility regarding climate risk and response options.

Ice-free Arctic: Have we reached the tipping point?

Good BBC News story by Richard Black.

Nothing to worry about for the next five years, as long as you don't depend on anything or anyone located less than 22 feet above sea level.

A few years ago, scientists were predicting ice-free Arctic summers by about 2080. Then computer models started projecting earlier dates, around 2030 to 2050.

Then came the 2007 summer that saw Arctic sea ice shrink to the smallest extent ever recorded, down to 4.2 million sq km from 7.8 million sq km in 1980.

By the end of last year, one research group was forecasting ice-free summers by 2013

"I think we're going to beat last year's record melt, though I'd love to be wrong," said Dr Stroeve.

"If we do, then I don't think 2013 is far off anymore. If what we think is going to happen does happen, then it'll be within a decade anyway." ...

"This is a positive feedback process," commented Dr Ian Willis, from the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.

"Sea ice has a higher albedo (reflectivity) than ocean water; so as the ice melts, the water absorbs more of the Sun's energy and warms up more, and that in turn warms the atmosphere more - including the atmosphere over the Greenland ice sheet."

Greenland is already losing ice to the oceans, contributing to the gradual rise in sea levels. The ice cap holds enough water to lift sea levels globally by about 7m (22ft) if it all melted.

Virtual Water

Close on the heels of the carbon footprint comes the concept of virtual water, as explained by Fred Pearce in an article in NewScientist.

... The term was the invention of water scientist Tony Allan from King's College London [winner of the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize] and, I think, it goes a long way to explaining why the world is currently in the grips of a food crisis.

Most crops take extraordinary amounts of water to grow: a thousand tonnes for a tonne of wheat, for instance. In fact, two-thirds of all the water abstracted from the world's rivers and underground reserves goes for crop irrigation. Unsurprisingly, dry countries, like most of the Middle East, don't have enough water to feed their growing populations.

So they import water. They import virtual water. This trade is huge, the equivalent of 20 times the flow of the world's longest river, the Nile...

Meanwhile global demand for virtual water is soaring, especially from China, where water is the main constraint on food production. China has effectively run out of water in its traditional breadbasket region in the north of the country, where the Yellow River now rarely reaches the sea in any volume. China can't feed itself any more...

In another article, NewScientist has one of those graphics that are worth a thousand words.

More Antarctic melting

Now it's the Wilkins Ice Shelf. Good New Scientist article by Catherine Brahic.

A thin strip of ice, just 6 kilometres wide, is all that is holding back the collapse of a huge ice shelf in Antarctica, according to glaciologists.

The Wilkins ice shelf – previously some 16,000 square kilometres in area – has been disintegrating fast. On 28 February, an iceberg 41 km long and 2.5 km wide broke off the ice shelf. This triggered the runaway disintegration of a further 570 square kilometres of ice.
"I would be very surprised if it survives more than a couple more melt seasons," says Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado, US.

Other researchers, including David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey, believe it could be gone within weeks. "The ice shelf is hanging by a thread – we'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be," he says.

More news of Wilkins.

You can't cook a frog gradually, but maybe a civilization can cook itself?

You can't be serious, Ralph.

Excellent editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle. I couldn't have said it better myself:

Ralph Nader sure knows how to marginalize his candidacy for president: He picked a brooding, far-left running mate who couldn't get elected mayor of San Francisco.

Perhaps Nader sees a younger version of himself in 42-year-old Matt Gonzalez. Each wields a keen intellect, a certitude about his standing in the political struggle between good and evil, and a certain obliviousness to how his ego can get in the way of the cause.

Nader expresses not the least bit of remorse that his 2000 run on the Green Party ticket helped tilt Florida, and thus the presidency, to George W. Bush, in an excruciatingly close race. And he is undeterred by the prospect that he could be a spoiler again. If Democrats can't win by a landslide in 2008, Nader has suggested, they might as well "wrap up, close down, emerge in a different form."

"Wrap up, close down" is a pretty fair description of what happened to the progressive movement that Gonzalez energized in his 2003 race against Gavin Newsom...

It's Ralph Nader who really needs to wrap up and close down.

Mitigating climate change isn't simple.

Jim Morris has an interesting new wiki, The Temperate Zone, that attempts a comprehensive and balanced synthesis of current knowledge, opinions, and options for dealing with global climate change. He solicits your feedback.

Comments on "Devaluing Science."

A colleague pointed me to Jonathan H. Adler's review of Roger A. Pielke, Jr.'s book, The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics, published in The New Alantis.

Here is my response:

Interesting, but written in such a way that I was often not sure whether I was arguing with flaws in Pielke's arguments, or with Adler's presentation of those arguments. (But not so uncertain that I'm going to invest in the book.)

The last paragraph of the review finally gets to the crux of the matter: the era when science and politics were separate is almost completely mythical. Science has always been politicized; all that has changed is that some aspects of public policy have become more "scientized."

Since 'twas ever thus, I'm not quite sure why P/A thinks that we/they/someone/scientists/politicians are "devaluing science," and I didn't see the evidence in the review. Maybe he means "not making science as valuable as it could be (but has never yet been) to society"?

The size of the ozone hole is a matter of fact, not of policy, as are its causes and consequences. The shrinking of the Arctic summer ice pack, Antarctic ice shelves, and Greenland ice sheet are matters of fact, not of policy, as are their causes and consequences. There are no Republican, or Democratic, or Libertarian, or Green policy positions that affect the measurement of their growth and shrinking.

A 20-meter rise in the level of the oceans will be a matter of fact, not policy. What was policy was the choice that allowing such a rise was preferable to effective restraints on coal and oil consumption.

Risks may be unknown (that is why they are risky), but that lack of knowledge does not change them from matters of fact to matters of policy, which is why we have insurance. Insurance premiums are the same, regardless of your politics or your public policy preferences (not to be confused with insurance policy choices).

“The basis for opposition for most of these folks has nothing to do with scientific uncertainty and everything to do with their valuation of the costs and benefits of taking action.” Just so. As someone observed in the New York Times yesterday, we seem to be completely unwilling to take actions that will benefit the larger group if they inconvenience us personally. They were talking about cellphones and cellphone jammers, but it could have been anything.

I'm surprised that P/A thinks that stealth issue advocates “are critically important and necessary in a functioning democracy.” They may be inevitable, but that does not make them necessary or useful. Hidden agendas benefit neither the scientific debate nor the policy debate.

But what honest person could be against having honest brokers?

The high-water millenium

A Reuters story by Alison Doyle previews an about-to-be-released report on a study by a panel of 2,500 scientists who advise the United Nations on climate. It estimates that sea levels will keep rising for more than 1,000 years even if governments manage to slow a projected surge in temperatures this century blamed on greenhouse gases.

"Twenty-first century anthropogenic (human) carbon dioxide emissions will contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium, due to the timescales required for removal of this gas," the sources quoted the report as saying.

The "good news" is that the rise is likely to be only 11 to 17 inches in this century. Still, rising seas would threaten low-lying Pacific islands, coasts from Bangladesh to Florida and cities from Shanghai to Buenos Aires.

In New Delhi, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said he hoped the report would shock governments into action.

"I hope this report will shock people, governments into taking more serious action as you really can't get a more authentic and a more credible piece of scientific work," he told Reuters.

Coal Mining Causing Earthquakes

A National Geographic article by Richard A. Lovett reports on "more than 200 human-caused temblors, mostly in the past 60 years," the majority from coal mining.

The most damaging earthquake in Australia's history was caused by humans, new research says.

The magnitude-5.6 quake that struck Newcastle, in New South Wales, on December 28, 1989, killed 13 people, injured 160, and caused 3.5 billion U.S. dollars worth of damage.

That quake was triggered by changes in tectonic forces caused by 200 years of underground coal mining, according to a study by Christian D. Klose of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.

The quake wasn't enormous, but Australia isn't generally considered to be seismically active and the city's buildings weren't designed to withstand a temblor of that magnitude, Klose said.

All told, he added, the monetary damage done by the earthquake exceeded the total value of the coal extracted in the area... [emphasis mine]

Three of the biggest human-caused earthquakes of all time, he pointed out, were a trio that occurred in Uzbekistan's Gazli natural gas field between 1976 and 1984. Each of the three had a magnitude greater than 6.8, and the largest had a magnitude of 7.3...

But as far as he knows, mining engineers aren't examining this, because they are currently unaware of the earthquake risk.

The danger is also relevant to proposals to sequester carbon dioxide by injecting it into geologic formations deep underground where the gas cannot escape and contribute to global warming.

"That alters stress in the crust [too]," Klose said, adding that the risk of earthquakes should be taken into account in planning the locations of such facilities...

A carbon-sequestration plan could reduce the risk of some types of damage (such as from hurricanes, which some scientists say are being strengthened by global warming), while increasing the risk of others, like earthquakes.

Canadian Ice Shelf Breaks Loose

A CNN story from AP reports that a 41-square-mile ice shelf broke free from Ellesmere Island in the course of an hour on August 13, 2005. Nobody was there to notice, but it was detected from satellite photos, and later found in seismographic records.

Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, traveled to the newly formed ice island and could not believe what he saw.

"This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead," Vincent said Thursday.

In 10 years of working in the region he has never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice, he said...

Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in Canada in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor.

"It is consistent with climate change," Vincent said, adding that the remaining ice shelves are 90 percent smaller than when they were first discovered in 1906...

"What surprised us was how quickly it happened," Copland said. "It's pretty alarming.

"Even 10 years ago scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly, but the big surprise is that for one they are going, but secondly that when they do go, they just go suddenly, it's all at once, in a span of an hour." ...

"Over the next few years this ice island could drift into populated shipping routes," Weir said. "There's significant oil and gas development in this region as well, so we'll have to keep monitoring its location over the next few years."

An answer to global warming?

An article by Keay Davidson in the San Francisco Chronicle suggests that man-made global warming isn't the only climate effect we need to worry about:

A regional nuclear war between Third World nations could trigger planetwide cooling that would likely ravage agriculture and kill millions of people, scientists reported Monday.

For many years, Western military scientists and strategists have assumed that the damage from small-scale regional nuclear wars would be limited to continents on which they occurred. Now, in a revamping of the "nuclear winter" debate of the 1980s, new and far more sophisticated computer models show that even these little nuclear wars could create global devastation.

Global Warming Could Devastate Economy

The San Jose Mercury News has an AP article by Thomas Wagner on a new British report.

Unchecked global warming will devastate the world economy on the scale of the world wars and the Great Depression, a British government report said Monday, as the country launched a bid to convince doubters that environmentalism and economic growth can coincide...

Blair, President Bush's top ally in the Iraq war, said unabated climate change would eventually cost the world between 5 percent and 20 percent of global gross domestic product each year. He called for "bold and decisive action" to cut carbon emissions and stem the worst of the temperature rise.

"It is not in doubt that, if the science is right, the consequences for our planet are literally disastrous," he said. "This disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future many years ahead, but in our lifetime." ...

"Our actions over the coming decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century," he said.

The report said at current trends average global temperatures will rise by 3.6 to 5.4 degrees within the next 50 years or so, and the earth will experience several degrees more of warming if emissions continue to grow.

We will all fry together...

A press release from the British Antarctic Survey discusses evidence from an 800,000-year Antarctic ice core record shows unprecedented atmospheric change due to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Ice cores reveal the Earth's natural climate rhythm over the last 800,000 years. When carbon dioxide changed there was always an accompanying climate change. Over the last 200 years human activity has increased carbon dioxide to well outside the natural range and we have no analogue for what will happen next.

According to the Environmental News Service report

The 3.2 kilometer East Antarctica ice core is the deepest ever removed... The core shows that there have been eight cycles of atmospheric change in that time frame when levels of carbon dioxide and methane, another greenhouse gas, peaked - and each has been accompanied by warming in the climate.

But the current peak levels are far above anything seen in past cycle and the rate of change is alarming, the scientists said...

Levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have jumped 35 percent in the past two centuries and are rising at an unprecedented rate.

Carbon dioxide levels have risen 30 ppm in the past 17 years - an increase that used to take 1,000 years.

Furthermore, methane had never tipped 750 parts per billion (ppb), but is now 1,780 ppb...

Global Warming isfaster than predicted

BBC News has an article by Roger Harrabin based on a broadcast interview with Prof. John Holdren, the new president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which is scarcely a radical or alarmist organization).

"The climate [is] changing much faster than predicted.

"We are not talking anymore about what climate models say might happen in the future.

"We are experiencing dangerous human disruption of the global climate and we're going to experience more...

"We are not starting to address climate change with the technology we have in hand, and we are not accelerating our investment in energy technology research and development..."

In order to make any progress, funding for climate technology need[s] to multiply by three or four times...

If the US administration agreed that there was a need to limit CO2, this would inevitably lead to mandatory caps. President Bush has already rejected that option.

For more than a year, the BBC has invited the US government to give its view on safe levels of CO2. Our request is repeatedly passed between the White House office of the Council on Environmental Quality and the office of the US chief scientist.

To date, we have received no response to questions on this issue that Tony Blair calls the most important in the world. Professor Holdren called on the US Government to back the UK position.

"What, me worry?"

Gas prices: Response to a chain letter

I received a chain letter from a good friend that made two not-so-good suggestions:
1) Mail a copy of this letter to 10 friends, and
2) Bring gas prices down by boycotting EXXON and MOBIL for the rest of the year.

Here's the idea: For the rest of this year, DON'T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies (which now are one), EXXON and MOBIL. If they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit. But to have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of Exxon and Mobil gas buyers.

My response:

I've generally stopped responding to chain letters of any sort, but this one actually needs a response.

Yes, gas at $3.00/gallon is ridiculous. In Europe, you'd pay about double that. If you adjust for inflation, $3.00 is actually less than we were paying for gas 30 years ago.

What is needed--for all kinds of reasons, including global warming and the fact that we are within about a generation of using all the oil that can profitably be extracted and sold at $10/gallon--is to STOP USING SO MUCH GAS.

We can do it the same way most of the rest of the world does: Raise the gasoline tax. (I'm actually old enough to remember buying gas when more than half of what I paid went to Federal and California taxes; they just haven't kept pace with inflation.) If the tax were, say, $3.00/gallon, or 100% of the sales price, or some such, people actually would stop using so much of it soon enough to do some good--by insisting on more fuel-efficient cars, by driving less, by carpooling, by taking public transit, etc. And it would shave a noticeable bit off the national deficit at the same time.

It wouldn't hurt to tax the excess profits of the oil companies, either.

There are people who don't care what kind of world or national deficit their grandkids inherit. I don't have any grandkids, but I care about yours.

White House censored global warming warnings

A New York Times story by Andrew C. Revkin reports the White House interference.

A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved.

Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues. Before coming to the White House in 2001, he was the "climate team leader" and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training.

The documents were obtained by The New York Times from the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit legal-assistance group for government whistle-blowers...

Climate experts and representatives of environmental groups, when shown examples of the revisions, said they illustrated the significant if largely invisible influence of Mr. Cooney and other White House officials with ties to energy industries that have long fought greenhouse-gas restrictions.

"Uncertainties in the science," my ---!

Academies call for greenhouse gas reductions

According to an AP article on CNN, the top scientific groups of the top countries have denounced US inaction.

LONDON, England (AP) -- Science academies of the G-8 countries joined Tuesday in a call for prompt action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and warning that delays will be costly.

Lord May, president of Britain's Royal Society, said in releasing the statement that U.S. President George W. Bush's policy on climate change was "misguided" and ignored scientific evidence.

The statement published by the science academies of Britain, France, Russia, Germany, the U.S., Japan, Italy and Canada, along with those of Brazil, China and India, called on G-8 countries to "identify cost-effective steps that can be taken now to contribute to substantial and long-term reductions in net global greenhouse gas emissions."

The statement called on the G-8 nations to "recognize that delayed action will increase the risk of adverse environmental effects and will likely incur a greater cost."

The Climate of Man

If you still have any doubts about the scientific consensus about man-made global warming, or what the US is (not) doing to stave it off, the New Yorker has published a three-part article by Elizabeth Kolbert in its ANNALS OF SCIENCE section. (The article is no longer available through the New Yorker site, but has been published as a book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe .)

In typical New Yorker style, it tells you more than you realized you wanted to know. Here's a small sample:

The National Academy of Sciences undertook its first rigorous study of global warming in 1979. At that point, climate modelling was still in its infancy, and only a few groups, one led by Syukuro Manabe, at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and another by James Hansen, at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, had considered in any detail the effects of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Still, the results of their work were alarming enough that President Jimmy Carter called on the Academy to investigate. A nine-member panel was appointed, led by the distinguished meteorologist Jule Charney, of M.I.T.

The Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate, or the Charney panel, as it became known, met for five days at the National Academy of Sciences’ summer study center, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Its conclusions were unequivocal. Panel members had looked for flaws in the modellers’ work but had been unable to find any. 'If carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible,' the scientists wrote. For a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels, they put the likely global temperature rise at between two and a half and eight degrees Fahrenheit. The panel members weren’t sure how long it would take for changes already set in motion to become manifest, mainly because the climate system has a built-in time delay. It could take 'several decades,' they noted. For this reason, what might seem like the most conservative approach—waiting for evidence of warming in order to assess the models’ accuracy—actually amounted to the riskiest possible strategy: 'We may not be given a warning until the CO2 loading is such that an appreciable climate change is inevitable.'

It is now twenty-five years since the Charney panel issued its report, and, in that period, Americans have been alerted to the dangers of global warming so many times that volumes have been written just on the history of efforts to draw attention to the problem. (The National Academy of Sciences alone has issued nearly two hundred reports on global warming; the most recent, 'Radiative Forcing of Climate Change,' was published just last month.) During this same period, worldwide carbon-dioxide emissions have continued to increase, from five billion metric tons a year to seven billion, and the earth’s temperature, much as predicted by Manabe’s and Hansen’s models, has steadily risen. The year 1990 was the warmest year on record until 1991, which was equally hot. Almost every subsequent year has been warmer still. The year 1998 ranks as the hottest year since the instrumental temperature record began, but it is closely followed by 2002 and 2003, which are tied for second; 2001, which is third; and 2004, which is fourth. Since climate is innately changeable, it’s difficult to say when, exactly, in this sequence natural variation could be ruled out as the sole cause. The American Geophysical Union, one of the nation’s largest and most respected scientific organizations, decided in 2003 that the matter had been settled. At the group’s annual meeting that year, it issued a consensus statement declaring, 'Natural influences cannot explain the rapid increase in global near-surface temperatures.' As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and, if current trends continue, by the end of the century it will likely be hotter than at any point in the last two million years.

In the same way that global warming has gradually ceased to be merely a theory, so, too, its impacts are no longer just hypothetical. Nearly every major glacier in the world is shrinking; those in Glacier National Park are retreating so quickly it has been estimated that they will vanish entirely by 2030. The oceans are becoming not just warmer but more acidic; the difference between day and nighttime temperatures is diminishing; animals are shifting their ranges poleward; and plants are blooming days, and in some cases weeks, earlier than they used to. These are the warning signs that the Charney panel cautioned against waiting for, and while in many parts of the globe they are still subtle enough to be overlooked, in others they can no longer be ignored. As it happens, the most dramatic changes are occurring in those places, like Shishmaref, where the fewest people tend to live. This disproportionate effect of global warming in the far north was also predicted by early climate models, which forecast, in column after column of FORTRAN-generated figures, what today can be measured and observed directly: the Arctic is melting.

Read it and weep.

Human damage to Earth worsening

A Reuters story, based on the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment report, indicates that we may be in even worse trouble than I thought.

"Humans are damaging the planet at an unprecedented rate and raising risks of abrupt collapses in nature that could spur disease, deforestation or 'dead zones' in the seas, an international report said on Wednesday. The study, by 1,360 experts in 95 nations, said a rising human population had polluted or over-exploited two thirds of the ecological systems on which life depends, ranging from clean air to fresh water, in the past 50 years. 'At the heart of this assessment is a stark warning,' said the 45-member board of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. 'Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted,' it said."