Category: Climate science

NIWA’s new NZ temperature series: plus ça change…

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Earlier this afternoon NIWA released its recalculated NZ temperature record [full report], and as expected the changes from the “old” seven station series are more or less negligible. The trend over the last 100 years is identical, 0.91ºC per century, as the graph above shows. There are minor differences in some years, and larger ones at some stations, but the net effect to is confirm what we already knew: New Zealand warmed significantly over the last century. Commenting on the new report, NIWA CEO John Morgan said:

“I am not surprised that this internationally peer reviewed 2010 report of the seven station temperature series has confirmed that NIWA’s science was sound. It adds to the scientific knowledge that shows that New Zealand’s temperature has risen by about 0.9 degrees over the past 100 years”.

I’m not surprised either. But I confidently predict that the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition and Richard Treadgold will still find something to whinge about. After all, they’re trying to sue NIWA to have the original seven station series declared invalid. Now it’s been replaced — by something that looks rather similar. Which just confirms how shonky their original complaint and their subsequent silly suit really were. (More on this later, when I’ve had a chance to read the report in detail).

New developments for two companies.

We’ve frequently reported on the progress of NZ company Carbonscape (follow the Carbonscape tag) which makes charcoal using a microwave process. They’ve just announced what they describe as a world first in the production of the highly porous charcoal known as Activated Carbon (AC).

“Using its patented continuous-flow microwave technology, Carbonscape™ has produced high-grade and highly-valuable AC in a single processing step using waste pine sawdust.”

What makes it special is the fact that the normal method of production involves many stages of processing and uses relatively exotic materials to open up the tiny pores between carbon atoms. Director and CEO Tim Langley says:

“We have replaced a slow and complex process using exotic materials with a fast, single process using pine sawdust and created a 60% improvement in quality. We have applied for patents. The potential world market for this technology is vast. Each year demand is rising by about 5%. It’s a whole new world.”

Activated Carbon has many uses, but of particular interest in relation to climate change is its potential to massively reduce the emissions from large, single sources of carbon dioxide, such as power stations. AC placed in flue gases can absorb carbon dioxide before it is released into the atmosphere.

Professor Chris Turney is a director of Carbonscape. He says of the announcement:

“This is just the start. We’re now exploring the potential of other waste types for producing Activated Carbon to identify whether they are best for absorbing carbon dioxide or for other applications. It’s an incredibly exciting time.”

Incidentally, Chris Turney, author of Ice, Mud and Blood (reviewed here), and co-author of a recent paper on temperatures and sea level in the last inter-glacial reported here on Hot Topic, is going to be working with fellow scientist Dr Chris Fogwill on the Atlantic-facing part of West Antarctic Ice Sheet during January 2011 investigating how West Antarctica has responded to temperature changes in the recent geological past. He has an interesting account on his blog. We’ll try to keep in touch with any findings.

On the same day as the Carbonscape news another New Zealand company Aquaflow, whose development we have also frequently reported on Hot Topic (follow the Aquaflow tag), made an announcement of a significant advance in their algal technology. They have developed twenty high value chemicals from wild algae. Director Nick Gerritson says the breakthrough shows once again the equivalence of Aquaflow green crude to fossil crude and its diversity of products. He says their technology can now be demonstrated to not only create clean, renewable fuels and to remediate wastewater but also produce high value chemicals.

Both algal and charcoal technologies are the subject of considerable debate and their future is not clear. But it is obviously important that any technologies which could assist the transition away from fossil fuels are thoroughly explored. We may take pleasure in the thought that these two small New Zealand companies are ploughing on with their ventures and wish them well in their respective breakthroughs.

Bloomin’ marvellous

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A stunning image of a massive bloom of phytoplankton off the Chatham Islands (to the east of NZ — that’s Wellington and the Wairarapa in the top left corner), snapped by NASA’s Aqua satellite on December 5th and featured this week at NASA’s excellent Earth Observatory. Click on the image to see the full (4MB) image with lots more detail. NASA describes the region as a carbon sink, because the mixing of cold but nutrient rich deep water from Antarctica, with warm nutrient-poor (but iron-rich) sub tropical water provides the perfect recipe for large phytoplankton blooms — especially in spring and autumn. A major constituent of these blooms is usually huge numbers of coccolithophores, an important component in the oceanic carbon cycle, as I pointed out the last time the Chathams featured on the Earth Observatory.

Clear and present danger: Lonnie Thompson on the message in the ice

Paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson, distinguished university professor in the School of Earth Sciences at The Ohio State University, is well known and widely respected for his decades of work on ice caps and glaciers, especially in tropical and sub-tropical regions. In the past Thompson has let his research data and conclusions speak for him but he has this week caused something of a stir by voicing in a journal for social scientists and behaviour experts his concern at the grave risks we run in ignoring the evidence of climate change. Climate Change: The Evidence and Our Options is the title of his paper (available here) and it’s published in a special climate-change edition of The Behavior Analyst.

One hopes the paper has many readers. Its eighteen pages, a model of clarity, are highly accessible for the lay person.

Thompson opens by acknowledging that climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group.

“We are not given to theatrical rantings about falling skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or gathering data in the field than we are giving interviews to journalists or speaking before Congressional committees.”

Why then, he asks, are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? Because virtually all of them are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilisation.

“There’s a clear pattern in the scientific evidence documenting that the earth is warming, that warming is due largely to human activity, that warming is causing important changes in climate, and that rapid and potentially catastrophic changes in the near future are very possible. This pattern emerges not, as is so often suggested, simply from computer simulations, but from the weight and balance of the empirical evidence as well.”

He explains the evidence from diverse data sources that points to relative stability in temperatures over the past 1000 years until the late twentieth century. Acknowledging that regional, seasonal and altitudinal variability can nevertheless make it difficult to convince the public and even scientists in other fields that global warming is occurring, he adds from his own area of expertise the evidence of melting ice.

The retreat of mountain glaciers is an early warning of climate change. He details the ice fields on the highest crater of Kilimanjaro which have lost 85% of their coverage since 1812. The Quelccaya ice cap in Peru, the largest tropical ice field on Earth, has lost 25% of its cover since 1978. Ice fields in the Himalayas that have long shown traces of the radioactive bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s have since lost that signal as surface melting has removed the upper layers and thereby reduced the thickness of these glaciers. All of the glaciers in Alaska’s vast Brooks Range are retreating, as are 98 percent of those in southeastern Alaska.  And 99 percent of glaciers in the Alps, 100 percent of those in Peru and 92 percent in the Andes of Chile are likewise retreating. Some telling photographic sequences illustrate the findings. It’s a pattern repeated around the world. To glacier retreat Thompson adds the loss of polar ice and sees global warming as the only plausible explanation.

From there he moves to consideration of the natural forcers of climate change and the consensus among climatologists that the warming trend we have been experiencing for the past 100 years or so cannot be accounted for by any of the known natural forcers.

“The evidence is overwhelming that human activity is responsible for the rise in CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gas levels, and that the increase in these gases is fueling the rise in mean global temperature.”

The effects include sea level rise. He points out that if the Earth were to lose just 8% of its ice, the consequences for some coastal regions would be dramatic. The lower part of the Florida peninsula and much of Louisiana, including New Orleans, would be submerged, and low-lying cities, including London, New York, and Shanghai, would be endangered. Low-lying continental countries such as the Netherlands and Bangladesh are already battling flooding as never before and several small island states are facing imminent destruction. Other effects of warming Thompson touches on include the threats to glacier-fed fresh water sources on which populations in parts of the world depend and the increase in arid regions as the Hadley Cell expands.

Many of the models predicting future rises in temperature assume a linear rise in temperature. But in fact the rate of global temperature rise is accelerating, which is reflected in increases in the rate of ice melt, and in turn an increase in the rate of sea level rise.

“This [acceleration] means that our future may not be a steady, gradual change in the world’s climate, but an abrupt and devastating deterioration from which we cannot recover.”

At this point he discusses positive feedbacks, instancing forest fires, more dark areas opened through ice melt, and the release of CO2 and methane from melting tundra permafrost. He explains the possibility of tipping points as a result, with their ominous implications. But tipping points apart, if, as predicted, global temperature rises by another 3 degrees by the end of the century, the earth will be warmer than it has been in about 3 million years. Oceans were then about 25 metres higher than they are today.

What are our options for dealing with the crisis?  Not prevention, for global warming is already with us. We are left with three: mitigate, adapt, suffer. Mitigation is the best option, but so far the US and other large emitters have done little more than talk about its importance. Many Americans don’t even accept the reality of global warming. Disinformation campaigns have been amazingly successful. Unless appropriate steps are taken we will be left with only adaptation and suffering. And the longer the delay the more unpleasant the adaptation and the greater the suffering will be. Those with the fewest resources for adaptation will suffer most.

It’s a grim picture. The information is not new.  But it gains impetus when a leading scientist steps into the public arena and weaves his specialist contribution into the overall account in a way which leaves the reader with absolutely no doubt that the writer is convinced by the science and deeply alarmed at what it means for humanity. Like John Veron, whom I wrote about earlier this week, Thompson doesn’t allow scientific reticence to mute his message.

“Sooner or later, we will all deal with global warming. The only question is how much we will mitigate, adapt, and suffer.”

Every little bit hurts

“Coral reefs… once survived in a world where CO2 from volcanoes and methane was much higher than anything predicted today.”  That sounds like good news from John Veron, a world authority on coral. Not if you read on: “But that was over 40 million years ago, and the increase took place over millions of years, not just a few decades, time enough for ocean equilibration to take place and marine life to adapt.”

Veron is writing in an article recently published at Yale Environment 360.  He is deeply alarmed at the prospect for coral reefs and wants to communicate why as clearly and accurately as he can. He begins by acknowledging that warnings of dire threats to coral reefs have been common over past decades; in his 40 years of working on reefs he has often been concerned at the impacts of sediments, nutrients and habitat loss. But the devastation which global warming threatens is of a different order.

 

Veron is frank about the depth of his anxiety. He writes of the “long period of deep personal anguish” he felt when he realised the big picture that was emerging from his widespread research into the effect of global temperature changes on reefs. He speaks of turning in his dismay to specialists in many different fields of science to find “anything that might suggest a fault” in his conclusions. But without success.  The bottom line remains that coral reefs can be utterly trashed in the lifetime of today’s children.

He realises that such a conclusion will be treated as an exaggeration by many. People may think that while there may be something to worry about it won’t be as bad as doomsayers like him are predicting.

“This view is understandable given that only a few decades ago I, myself, would have thought it ridiculous to imagine that reefs might have a limited lifespan on Earth as a consequence of human actions. It would have seemed preposterous that, for example, the Great Barrier Reef — the biggest structure ever made by life on Earth — could be mortally threatened by any present or foreseeable environmental change.

“Yet here I am today, humbled to have spent the most productive scientific years of my life around the rich wonders of the underwater world, and utterly convinced that they will not be there for our children’s children to enjoy unless we drastically change our priorities and the way we live.”

He goes on to explain the issues with helpful clarity. Single-celled algae live in coral cells and provide the photosynthetic fuel for them to grow and reefs to form. High light conditions at the same time as above-normal water temperatures cause the algae to produce toxic levels of oxygen.

“Under these conditions, corals must expel the zooxanthellae, bleach, and probably die or succumb to the toxin and definitely die. A tough choice, one they have not had to make at any time in their long genetic history.”

They can recover from bleaching, but not if further events continue to occur while the ecosystem is re-establishing. Increasing ocean heat, which affects surface layers most, will mean increasing severity and frequency of bleaching events.

“Scientists don’t need a pocket calculator to conclude that compressing the time periods between events in this way will prevent recovery: If we do not take action, the only corals not affected by mass bleaching by 2050 will be those hiding in refuges away from strong sunlight.”

However, serious though bleaching is, the effects of ocean acidification will be much more serious, affecting coral reefs badly and also impacting on all marine ecosystems. He considers that ocean acidification has played a major part in each of the five major extinctions in Earth’s history. In the last four extinctions reefs disappeared for millions of years. Reversal of acidification is a long process which can take place only through the immensely slow weathering and dissolution processes of geological time, processes that take hundreds of thousands to millions of years.

Veron asks his readers to consider two facts:

“The atmospheric levels of CO2 we are already committed to reach, no matter what mitigation is now implemented, have no equal over the entire longevity of the Great Barrier Reef, perhaps 25 million years. And most significantly, the rate of CO2 increase we are now experiencing has no precedent in all known geological history.”

He concludes with a solemn reminder:

“Reefs are the ocean’s canaries and we must hear their call. This call is not just for themselves, for the other great ecosystems of the ocean stand behind reefs like a row of dominoes. If coral reefs fail, the rest will follow in rapid succession, and the Sixth Mass Extinction will be upon us — and will be of our making.”

I realise it’s only a week since I last wrote on the effect of global warming on corals. Veron is not saying anything that others aren’t also pointing to, or that he hasn’t himself said before. But he’s saying it with great lucidity and there’s an urgency and poignancy to the article which impressed me and made me want to draw attention to it. Scientific reticence is not permitted to mute the expression of his profound concern. The issue is too fundamental for that.

“We cannot afford to wait until the predictions of science can be totally verified, because by that time it will be too late.”

[Brenda Holloway]