Climate stuff from the fortnight 13-26/8/12

Warming climate has long been expected to cause an increase in the variability of weather - atmospheric events - and this includes the biggest rain band in the southern hemisphere, which occurs over the Pacific, east of Indonesia.
These bands of weather wiggle around, like vibrating strings, as can be seen from satellite images, and climatic warming is exacerbating these wiggles, resulting in increased variability of rain, as perceived by any fixed, ground-based observer.
This is expected to happen in conjunction with El Nino events. Modelling the changes in weather will be a lot harder than modelling the change in climate, however, because weather is short-change fluctuations.
"During extreme El Niño events, such as 1982/83 and 1997/98, the band moved northward by up to 1000 kilometres. The shift brings more severe extremes, including cyclones to regions such as French Polynesia that are not accustomed to such events," said Dr Cai, a scientist at the Wealth from Oceans Flagship.
http://phys.org/news/2012-08-extreme-shifts-southern-hemisphere-largest.html

I'm now pretty sure that the surface melt mentioned in recent weeks, has contributed to some major melting.
'Greenland melting breaks record four weeks before season's end'
"Professor Tedesco noted that these changes jibe with what most of the models predict – the difference is how quickly this seems to be happening."
http://phys.org/news/2012-08-greenland-weeks-season.html

Going, going... almost gone. Arctic ice is expected to completely clear during summers, by 2030. The last record for low ice was set in 2007. New records will probably be set every few years, until 2030.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528783.200-arctic-sea-ice-heads-for-record-low.html

"By popular demand, a thread devoted to the continuing decline of Arctic sea ice, and a potential new record minimum this year. As before, the figures are hot-linked and will update day-by-day."
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/08/arctic-sea-ice-minimum-2012/

'Changeable climate makes frogs vulnerable to disease'
Frogs exposed to chytrid fungus have worse prospects if they live in climates that change according to a regular pattern, and worst if they live in climates that change according to irregular patterns.
This could be a mechanism contributing to the demise of many frog species, around the world, as the climate warms, and the weather exhibits more and greater extremities.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22166-changeable-climate-makes-frogs-vulnerable-to-disease.html

Sea-level rise on Virginia's coast is expected to be from 2.3 to 5.2 feet (70 to 158 cm ) into the coming century, which will cause Virginia's largest city to shrink by 45000 acres.
http://phys.org/news/2012-08-uva-virginians-sea-level.html

'New satellite data on melting of Himalayan glaciers'
Like the melt from Greenland and Antarctica's ice sheets, we know the ice of the Himalayas' glaciers is melting, but we don't know how fast.
"researchers concluded the glaciers were losing around 50 billion tonnes of ice each year, but the same data was interpreted earlier [as] around five billion tonnes."
A whole order of magnitude - those are big error bars!
http://phys.org/news/2012-08-satellite-himalayan-glaciers.html

Extreme metrics -- Hansen et al's data for decadal average global temperatures, which shows a trend toward greater variance in climatic conditions.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/08/extreme-metrics/

'Antarctic Peninsula warming: natural variability or “global warming”?'
It is a real signal.
The trend is strong and unambiguous.
The warming almost certainly caused the ice sheet melt observed over recent decades.
And when considered in conjunction with global analyses, we can say that this is evidence of anthropogenic global warming.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/08/antarctic-peninsula-warming-natural-variability-of-global-warming/

A correction about last week's US-emissions article:
The emissions for the US have merely been exported to other countries - while using more fossil gas themselves, they have exported the coal, meaning no overall decrease in emissions. Thanks, guys!
"Gas is less bad than coal," says Anderson, "but only if you keep the coal in the ground."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528794.200-lowest-us-carbon-emissions-wont-slow-climate-change.html

Climate stuff from the fortnight 30/7 - 12/8/12

Salmon are staying out at sea for another year, to fatten up their gonads, before swimming inland to breed.
This means smaller populations to fish, but bigger adults, which is what the fishers want.
These changes have been driven by temperature changes, augmenting the food web, meaning the salmon are going hungry, in the autumn - the critical time for gonad maturation.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528774.300-salmon-sex-delayed-by-global-warming.html
And on the other coast, grizzlies are getting more and more stressed from hunger.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528774.100-salmon-shortages-leave-grizzly-bears-stressed.html

About 40,000 shovelnose sturgeons have died in Iowa, because of temperatures up to 38 degrees Celsius.
The US has been suffering, this year, with terrible drought conditions, which climatologists say has been exacerbated by the climatic effects of fossil-fuel combustant pollution.
"The fish are victims of one of the driest and warmest summers in history. The federal U.S. Drought Monitor shows nearly two-thirds of the lower 48 states are experiencing some form of drought, and the Department of Agriculture has declared more than half of the nation's counties — nearly 1,600 in 32 states — as natural disaster areas. More than 3,000 heat records were broken over the last month."
http://phys.org/news/2012-08-thousands-fish-die-streams.html
[video] 2012 Drought Update:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AKb-piXctw
'New NASA study links current extreme summer events to climate change'
http://phys.org/news/2012-08-climate-blame-extreme-nasa-scientist.html

'Greenland loses ice in fits and starts'
There's a lot of ice on Greenland; and there's even more on Antarctica; but because we know so little about how they behave, we can't formulate useful predictions about how they're goignt o melt, as temperatures increase.
We know they're going to contribute to sea-level rises, but we don't know by how much, and when - liek the title says, the melting occurs in fits and starts - caused by fluctuations in ambient water temperature.
Because of this, the meltwater from Greenland and Antarctica was completely left out of the IPCC's 2007 predictions, so all we know is that sea-level rise will be at lest as much as the IPCC predicted.
More research. We need it.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22131-greenland-loses-ice-in-fits-and-starts.html


By the way, here's a follow-up from the Greenland surface-melt story:
"On top of the approximately 3 km thick ice sheet in Greenland the temperature is normally around minus 10-15 degrees C in the summer and about minus 60 degrees in the winter. This year, researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute observed temperatures above zero and a significant warming and melting of the upper 1 1/2 meter layer of snow at the NEEM ice core drilling project in northwestern Greenland."
That gives us some idea of quantity -- quite a lot.
http://phys.org/news/2012-08-greenland-ice-sheet.html

52 million years ago, 10 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct, and when atmospheric CO2 concentrations were more than twice as high as they are now (400 ppm), Antarctica was populated by... get this... palm trees!
http://phys.org/news/2012-08-tropical-climate-antarctic-palm-trees.html
I remember Walking With Dinosaurs did an episode situated in the Jurassic Antarctic
http://www.abc.net.au/dinosaurs/chronology/106/makingof.htm

Climate stuff from the week 23-29/7/12

[video] Potholer54: 'Medieval Warm Period -- fact vs. fiction'
http://youtu.be/CY4Yecsx_-s

'Rise in temperatures and CO2 follow each other closely in climate change'

An analysis of ice cores, from various locations across Antarctica, and contain tiny bubbles - samples of ancient air - have provided evidence that past temperature fluctuations are succeeded by CO2 release/absorption not in the thousands of years after, but in a few centuries.
Milankowitch cycles are variations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun, the Earth's tilt and the orientation of the Earth's axis, and are responsible for tens of thousands year long cycles, so cause the Earth's climate to shift between long ice ages of approximately 100,000 years and warm interglacial periods, typically 10,000 – 15,000 years.
These periods are far too long to explain the well-above-baseline fluctuations observed in the last century and a half; solar cycles (fluctuations in the Sun's output) have a period of 11 years, and so are too short to explain the last century and a half's trend.
"What we are observing in the present day is the mankind has caused the CO2 content in the atmosphere to rise as much in just 150 years as it rose over 8,000 years during the transition from the last ice age to the current interglacial period"
http://phys.org/news/2012-07-temperatures-co2-climate.html

'Fools' gold found to regulate oxygen'
"Pyrite is an iron-sulfur mineral (also known as fools' gold), which forms when microbes in seafloor sediments use the sulfur dissolved in seawater to digest organic matter. The microbes take up sulfur in the form of sulfate (bound to four oxygen atoms) and release it as sulfide (with no oxygen). Oxygen is released during this process, thus making it a source of oxygen in the air. But because this part of the sulfur cycle was thought be minor in comparison to sulfate evaporite burial, (which does not release oxygen) its effect on oxygen levels was also thought to be unimportant."

"the production and burial of pyrite has been much more significant than previously thought, accounting for more than 80% of all sulfur removed from the ocean (rather than the 30-40% in prior estimates). As opposed to the variability they saw for sulfate evaporite burial, pyrite burial has been relatively stable throughout the period. The analysis also revealed that most of the sulfur entering the ocean washed in from the weathering of pyrite exposed on land. In other words, there is a balance between pyrite formation and burial, which releases oxygen, and the weathering of pyrite on land, which consumes it. The implication of these findings is that the sulfur cycle regulates the atmospheric concentration of oxygen more strongly than previously appreciated."
http://phys.org/news/2012-07-gold-oxygen.html

Surface water on Greenland has, this summer, thawed out in areas never-before-seen in 30 years of satellite monitoring. The last record of it happening dates to 1889.
"Measurements from three satellites showed that on July 8, about 40 percent of the ice sheet had undergone thawing at or near the surface. In just a few days, the melting had dramatically accelerated and an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed by July 12"
"On average in the summer, about half of the surface of Greenland's ice sheet naturally melts. At high elevations, most of that melt water quickly refreezes in place. Near the coast, some of the melt water is retained by the ice sheet and the rest is lost to the ocean. But this year the extent of ice melting at or near the surface jumped dramatically."
Hopefully, this year's data will provide an anomalously high peak -- area is not equal to volume, though, so we should not infer volume of meltwater from thawed area -- other data suggests that most melting will happen around the edges of the ice sheet.
"Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time"
As industry-driven climatic change continues, we should expect them to become more frequent, but *how* frequent is what will make the difference to people and other animals living in Greenland.
http://phys.org/news/2012-07-satellites-unprecedented-greenland-ice-sheet.html

'US 'extreme drought' zones triple in size'
"Things have really developed over the last two months and conditions have worsened just that quick and that is really unprecedented"
Because of this: "President Barack Obama's administration has opened up protected US land to help farmers and ranchers hit by the drought and encouraged crop insurance companies to forgo charging interest for a month."
"Officials have said the drought will drive up food prices since 78 percent of US corn and 11 percent of soybean crops have been hit and the United States is the world's biggest producer of those crops."
Climatology predicts that droughts such as these will increase in frequency and intensity, as the atmosphere warms and dries.
http://phys.org/news/2012-07-extreme-drought-zones-triple-size.html

'Seven countries join anti-soot and methane campaign'
"A coalition of countries and agencies seeking to curb Earth-warming pollutants like soot released by wood-fired ovens and methane from oil extraction, on Tuesday welcomed seven new members to its fold."
"At a meeting in Paris, the Clean Air and Climate Coalition, launched by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in February, said Britain, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy and Jordan were its latest members. They joined the United States, Bangladesh, Canada, Colombia, the European Commission, Ghana, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Sweden, the World Bank, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Stockholm Environment Institute -- bringing to 21 the number of members of the voluntary coalition."
"Short-lived pollutants like black carbon or soot, methane and fluorinated gases called HFCs can potentially be eliminated from the atmosphere in a much shorter period of time than CO2, which is the main target of international efforts to curb global warming"
"It is a matter of public health. Over two million people in the world, perhaps even four million according to the latest estimates from scientists, are dying every year from outdoor air pollution... Another two million die annually from indoor pollution from cooking stoves."
http://phys.org/news/2012-07-countries-anti-soot-methane-campaign.html