Showing posts with label global warming. Show all posts

Tuesday, 6 December 2016

Global Warming in the Arctic: A Sensitive Climate Gone Off the Rails

Graphic: Climate Change Institute

It is polar night in the Arctic—a darkness that lasts from early October to early March. Temperatures rarely escape freezing in that darkness, averaging -30° F until the light begins to return in spring. Right now, however, temperatures across much of the Arctic are 36 degrees F above normal. Large areas are well above freezing. And instead of rapidly expanding, sea ice extent is in decline.

Taken together, this is not unusual. It’s unheard of.

The degree to which current Arctic conditions are straying from the norm may prove to be the greatest change yet measured there—the latest signal from the Arctic that all is not well.

And while the frozen top of the world may seem remote and unimportant at the moment, what happens there matters greatly to both our immediate and long-term future.

2016 temperatures (Kelvin) above Latitude 80. The green line shows daily mean historic average temperatures from 1958-2002. The red line shows the daily mean average from 2010 to present. The blue line is 32 degrees F, or freezing. Recent days have seen departures from the long-term average of up to 36 degrees F. At and above this latitude, roughly days 1-45 and days 300-365 are spent in darkness. Source: Danish Meteorological Institute

Breaking down the Arctic breakdown

The Arctic plays an important role in moderating global climate. When heat from the tropics is delivered north to the Arctic by winds and ocean currents, the region exerts a cooling effect on both. Without this distribution of energy, the lower latitudes would overheat. Sea ice and snow- and ice-covered land (known as the “cryosphere”) help the Arctic to stay cool by reflecting most of the incoming solar energy back to space.

But the Arctic, like the rest of the planet, is warming, and unlike the rest of the planet, warming in the Arctic can feed rapidly on itself.

To describe one of the feedbacks: Warmer temperatures drive greater melt of sea ice, which exposes open ocean, and exposed water absorbs heat from sun that was previously reflected. Ocean temperatures rise as a result, and when winter comes, the sea ice has a harder time rebounding amidst warmer air and water temperatures. The following year, the melt season begins with sea ice cover that is thinner and smaller in extent.

There are other feedbacks, and all are complex. For a closer look at these reinforcing cycles, see my colleague’s blog on Why the Arctic Matters. As the National Snow and Ice Data Center puts it:

A small temperature increase at the poles leads to still greater warming over time, making the poles the most sensitive regions to climate change on Earth. According to scientific measurements, both the thickness and extent of summer sea ice in the Arctic have shown a dramatic decline over the past thirty years. […] The loss of sea ice also has the potential to accelerate global warming trends and to change climate patterns.

Okay. With this in mind, let’s look at the state of the Arctic at this time.

Sea ice extent

In the polar night, Arctic sea ice historically rebounds from summer melt as both the water and air cool. In recent decades, the ice has been declining in both extent and volume.

This year, with warm ocean temperatures and continued delivery of warm air from the lower latitudes, the ice is struggling to rebound. October saw new record lows for Arctic sea ice extent.

Global sea ice extent began 2016 (thick red line) at low levels. Just in recent days , the Arctic has lost more than a million square kilometers of sea ice, reaching a new record low and contributing to a steep decline in November’s total global sea ice extent. Antarctic sea ice extent is also at record low levels. Source: Arctic News

In November, Arctic sea ice extent remains well below average for this time of year. In each of the last three days, a time of year when sea ice is normally growing, it has shrunk instead (see figure below). Arctic sea ice is melting up there in the polar darkness.

According to experts following this closely, as of Sunday, November 20, Arctic sea ice is now ~1.1 million square kilometers below the previous record low.

Okay, maybe time to let the #Arctic know what season it is -> another drop in #seaice extent from the last 24-hours (3rd day in a row, JAXA) pic.twitter.com/2Fl1pQUsD4

— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) November 20, 2016

Sea surface temperatures

With larger areas of the Arctic ice-free each year, and for longer periods of time, the Arctic Ocean is absorbing more heat.

This fall, sea surface temperatures are well above average, with anomalous warmth persisting into November as seen in the figure below. Scientists have reported ocean temperatures 25° F above average in some locations.

Sea surface temperatures are unusually high and well above freezing in some areas of the Arctic, contributing to ice melt. Credit: Climate Change Institute

Air temperatures

The chart below looks at this warmth by a different measure: “freezing degree days.” By many available measures, the oncoming Arctic winter is in a nose dive unprecedented in recent record keeping.

Another way of looking at Arctic:
"Freezing degree days" (# of degrees below freezing x # of days) = open water where there's normally ice. pic.twitter.com/hczBWuvun9

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) November 20, 2016

A weakened polar vortex and wobbly jet stream have been identified as factors in recent anomalous winters, both colder and warmer, and indeed, meandering winds are currently delivering warm air far northward to the Arctic, and a deep, snowy freeze in Eurasia.

The combination of factors driving Arctic air temperatures today has resulted in a stunning temperature anomaly—persistent, vast areas of 36° F above normal, shown in the map below.

The exceptional Arctic temperature anomaly. Source: Climate Change Institute

Wild cards, like the unusual cyclone that struck the Arctic last winter, driving temperatures 50 degrees above normal, may compound and accelerate ice loss, according to a recent NASA study.

It’s as if the Arctic is trying to be heard. It’s hard to imagine stronger signals to send.

Meanwhile, in la-la land

Meanwhile, around Latitude 39, Myron Ebell—one of the world’s most prominent and vocal climate change deniers—has been tasked with overseeing the transition of the nation’s Environmental Protection Agency. The very agency tasked with implementing the nation’s leading plan for curbing global warming pollution—the Clean Power Plan.

And Stephen Bannon—a man who oversaw, as chief of Breitbart News Agency, the disparaging of climate scientists and their overwhelming body of science—has assumed the role of chief strategist for the new administration. A role in which he can advise the new president on whether the US continues to reduce its global warming emissions or reverses course—matters vital to the future of everyone.

And today [November 21], Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation was named to lead president-elect Trump’s State Department transition. Groves penned, just last week, an article advocating a speedy withdrawal from the the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, to which we’ve been a party since its ratification in 1992. It’s a move that would scrap our commitments under the landmark Paris Climate Agreement—you know, that thing that stands between us and catastrophic warming.

File this under irony. No, madness.

From The Union of Concerned Scientists @ http://blog.ucsusa.org/erika-spanger-siegfried/global-warming-in-the-arctic-a-sensitive-climate-gone-off-the-rails

For more information about climate change see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/climate%20change

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Thursday, 28 July 2016

Shattered records show climate change is an emergency today, scientists warn

Seven climate records set so far in 2016

Flooding in Straiton, Scotland, in December. Scientists say it will increase in future. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

by Damian Carrington

Unprecedented temperature levels mean more heatwaves, flooding, wildfires and hurricanes as experts say global warming is here and affecting us now

May was the 13th month in a row to break temperature records according to figures that are the latest in 2016’s string of incredible climate records which scientists have described as a bombshell and an emergency.

The series of smashed global records, particularly the extraordinary heat in February and March, has provoked a stunned reaction from climate scientists, who are warning that climate change has reached unprecedented levels and is no longer only a threat for the future.

Alongside the soaring temperatures, other records have tumbled around the world, from vanishing Arctic sea ice to a searing drought in India and the vast bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. The UK has experienced record flooding that has devastated communities across the country and scientists predict that the flash floods seen by parts of the country in recent days will increase in future.

Aftermath of coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef, which has seen an estimated 22% of the reef’s corals die. Photograph: Xl Catlin Seaview Survey/EPA

“The impacts of human-caused climate change are no longer subtle – they are playing out, in real time, before us,” says Prof Michael Mann, at Penn State University in the US. “They serve as a constant reminder now of how critical it is that we engage in the actions necessary to avert ever-more dangerous and potentially irreversible warming of the planet.”

It was just last December when the world’s nations sealed a deal in Paris to defeat global warming but Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, says: “These [records] are very worrying signs and I think it shows we are on a crash course with the Paris targets unless we change course very, very fast. I hope people realise that global warming is not something down the road, but it is here now and it affecting us now.”

“What is happening right now is we are catapulting ourselves out of the Holocene, which is the geological epoch that human civilisation has been able to develop in, because of the relatively stable climate,” says Rahmstorf. “It allowed us to invent agriculture, rather than living as nomads. It allowed a big population growth, it allowed the foundation of cities, all of which required a stable climate.”

Smoke and flames from the wildfires erupt behind a car on the highway near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Photograph: Mark Blinch/Reuters

But the spikes in global surface temperatures in recent months have been anything but stable. They did not just break the records, they obliterated them. “The numbers are completely unprecedented,” says Adam Scaife, at the Met Office in the UK. “They really stick out like a sore thumb.”

The scorching temperatures mean 2016 is all but certain to be the hottest year ever recorded, beating the previous hottest year in 2015, which itself beat 2014. This run of three record years is also unprecedented and, without climate change, would be a one in a million chance. Scaife says: “Including this year so far, 16 of the 17 warmest years on record have been since 2000 – it’s a shocking statistic.”

Thermometer records go back to 1880, but ice cores, tree rings and corals show global warming driven by humanity’s burning of fossil fuels and forests has left the planet at its hottest for at least 5,000 years. “If we are not above this [temperature] already, we will be in 10 or 20 years’ time and then you have to go back 120,000 years to find higher temperatures than present,” says Rahmstorf.

Another shattered record is the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is on course to rise by a record amount this year, leaving the symbolic landmark of 400 parts per million to history. “We know from Antarctic ice cores that go back almost a million years that CO2 was never even remotely as high as this,” says Rahmstorf, and the rate at which humanity is emitting CO2 is the fastest for 66m years.

Fast-rising CO2 levels are almost entirely the reason for the record-busting year. But the natural climate phenomenon called El Niño has played a part. Cyclical changes in ocean temperatures over decades lead to El Niños during which stored heat is released from the oceans, impacting temperatures and weather around the globe.

Children look at their sheep affected by the El Nino-related drought at a temporary shelter in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Somaliland region. Photograph: Feisal Omar/Reuters

Scientists agree about a fifth of the temperature rise seen in recent months is due to El Niño. However Scaife says: “I suspect some of the months would have still been records, even without the El Niño”. He points out that 1998 saw an ever bigger El Niño, resulting in a record hot year, but that this has now been far surpassed: “It is not even in the running anymore, falling way down the list.”

El Niño is now waning into to its opposite phase, called La Niña. But that does not allay the scientists’ climate concerns: “The La Niña will not be as cool as the El Niño was warm. We are very, very sure of that,” says Scaife. “It probably means that 2017 will not be a record year, but compared to other La Niña years, it is likely to be much warmer than normal.”

Furthermore, there may be more to the record-breaking series than meets the eye. “There is something more going on than the usual global warming trend and El Niño, because in the past El Niño has led to single years breaking records, but it has not caused several years in a row to break records,” says Rahmstorf.

“There is some unexplained part to this and it is concerning, because we don’t understand it and it is hotter than expected,” he says. “I hope the data coming in the next six months or so will bring us some important clues.”

The heat so far has already had major impacts, including a record temperature of 51C in India amid a serious drought and a record warm autumn in Australia, as well as many in the US. “It is in my view highly unlikely that we would be seeing record drought, like we’re seeing in California, record flooding in Texas, unprecedented wildfires in western North America, and the strongest recorded hurricanes in both the northern and southern hemisphere were it not for the impact of human-caused global warming,” says Mann.

Killer heatwaves are increasing too, which is the clearest impact of global warming, says Rahmstorf: “Our analysis of monthly heat records around the globe shows they now occur five times as often. It is those monthly heat records that are representative of heatwaves that last for weeks on end and they are ones that take the highest death toll.”

Indian schoolchildren eat ice cream as the country suffers a severe heatwave. Photograph: Jaipal Singh/EPA

The UK has been affected too, with December breaking temperature and rainfall records.

“Climate change means more intense rainfall and therefore an increased risk of flooding,” says Bob Ward, policy director at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

“The government, which got caught out by two record wet winters in the last three, has suddenly woken up to the fact, which is why they have set up the National Flood Resilience Review. It is now something we are all going to have to come to terms with in the UK.”

Ward says seeing the records broken may mean more people make the connection between action on to cut emissions, such as support for green energy, and the impacts of global warming. He says the global climate deal agreed in December shows every government already knows this is a problem that needs urgent action, but that the high temperatures already occurring will increase the emphasis on adapting to extreme weather events in addition to cutting carbon emissions.

“The impacts we’re beginning to see are just the start and we know we are going to be facing a worsening situation for at least the next couple of decades even if we do cut emissions,” Ward says.

“What’s worrying [about the record-breaking 2016] is that we are in unprecedented territory and we don’t really know what the consequences will be,” he says. “There are likely to be plenty of surprises, some of which will be nasty.”

From The Guardian @ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/17/shattered-records-climate-change-emergency-today-scientists-warn

Top Climate Expert: Crisis is Worse Than We Think & Scientists Are Self-Censoring to Downplay Risk

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Climate Change Goes Past Point Of No Return

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For more information about catastrophic climate change see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/climate%20change