Category: Climate science

Time of the season

Climate change involves more than straightfoward warming, it also affects the patterns of weather and the seasons, as John Parker discovers in an excellent feature — What’s happened to the seasons? — in the Spring issue of The Economist’s Intelligent Lifemagazine. Parker’s done his homework, and his article is the best overview of recent changes in seasonal weather around the world, and the knock on impacts on agriculture and ecosystems that I’ve read. Here’s a sample:

Some seasons have vanished altogether. In Kashmir there used to be a brief rainy season between winter and spring, called tsonth -— three or four weeks of torrential downpours, bright sunshine and snow on the ground. But, says Rais Akhtar of the University of Kashmir, the state has not seen a tsonth for ten years. The first rainy season seems to have dried up in Uganda. In Ntchenachena, in northern Malawi, villagers used to describe four episodes of rain, each with their proper name and association with particular farming events. Since 2001, they say, the pattern can no longer be discerned.

Parker points to increasing unpredictability in “traditional” seasons posing a challenge to agriculture as well as dislocations in ecosystem linkages. We may even have seen an example of that in the last year in New Zealand. 2009 was a remarkable switchback between hot and cold weather. May was very cold, but August was the warmest in the 155 year record. And temperatures then flatlined through until the end of October, which was the coldest for 64 years. Check out the NIWA summary of the year, or MetService Weather Ambassador Bob McDavitt’s round up at Sciblogs. Perhaps global warming really is turning out to be global weirding.

[Zombies (I used to play for the same cricket team as Colin Blunstone, but never at the same time, unfortunately)]

You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone

Biodiversity continues its steady decline. A team of scientists have this week published a study in Science confirming that fact.  Governments in 2002 at a summit on the Convention on Biological Diversity agreed to aim to halt biodiversity loss by the year 2010. When experts meet in Nairobi on May 10 it will be to face the news that they have failed.  For example, since 1970  the world’s animal population has decreased by 30%, mangroves and sea grasses have shrunk in area by 20%, and live-coral coverage has fallen by 40%. “The state of biodiversity is definitely showing a rapid decline,” says Matt Foster, one of the lead authors on the Sciencepaper. “And the pressure just keeps increasing.”

It’s not that governments have made no efforts. The amount of protected land has steadily increased around the world, as has the area of sustainably managed forests. Increased money is being spent on biodiversity aid. But we’re still shouldering other species out of our way. And in doing so we’re attacking our own well-being. “We all benefit from biodiversity and we all hurt when it’s lost,” says Foster.

Climate change is only one of the ways in which humankind is contributing to biodiversity loss.  But it’s worth reminding ourselves that it is seriously exacerbating the process. I’ve been re-reading a fine book by Michael Novacek, Terra, published in 2007. He’s a distinguished paleontologist, Provost of Science at the American Museum of Natural History.  He was involved in the splendid Darwin exhibition put together by the Museum of Natural History which I was fortunate to be able to see when it was brought to the Auckland Museum in 2007.  That’s when I bought his book.  It’s subtitled Our 100-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem –- and the Threats That Now Put It at Risk. I think some points from his chapter on how the current warming is contributing to biodiversity loss are worth recounting here.

He notes changes in the activity of 694 species whose life history data between 1951 and 2001 has been studied.  A 2003 review found on average the species were either breeding, blooming, or doing other seasonally related activities 5.3 days earlier each decade.

The warming trend has also set species in motion. Some move poleward. Other species have moved upslope. Some have simply contracted and their surviving, marginalised populations have been reduced to precariously low levels.

Novacek is interesting on the evolutionary processes at work in the organisms affected by rapid alteration of range. The hardy colonisers which often establish at the leading edge of the shift may have a very low level of gene diversity, leaving them susceptible to further environmental changes. The populations at the trailing edge of the migration may have more genetic diversity, but they will start to fragment as the environmental conditions break up their preferred habitats.  The rate of environmental challenge may determine how a population’s genetic makeup and evolution are transformed. Slow change may be easier for the species to maintain genetic diversity at levels that allow it to persist. Drastic and rapid change make it more vulnerable. Simply moving to a cooler habitat does not guarantee that the genetic composition of the migrating populations will be robust enough to sustain them.

It’s made more complex by the bewildering diversity of examples in nature. Some species, especially in tropical and mountainous regions, may be buffered by the amount of genetic variation already resident in their populations. Other genetic studies suggest that climate change has easily outrun the rate at which a given population can adjust.

Novacek  sees contemporary evidence that climate change in combination with other factors is killing off certain species.  It seems to be the coup de grace for some coral species.  Increasing ocean acidification also plays a part in the demise of coral and threatens the most abundant and ecologically important sea organisms, the coccolithophorids, foraminifera and pteropods which are vitally important food for many fish.

On land, organisms that live in lakes, streams, rivers, and other bodies of freshwater are highly endangered and are especially susceptible to climate change because they cannot escape its effects, being captive in their habitat.

Most threatened are the habitats and species at high latitudes, the northern tundra and polar deserts such as those on the Arctic islands and Antarctica as well as species inhabiting high Alpine or montane habitats at middle to low latitudes.

I liked the last sentence of his chapter. In the preceding sentences he noted what he regarded as encouraging signs of acceptance of the science of global warming.  He recorded, however, still encountering individuals normally open to the discoveries of science who find it beyond belief that humans could disrupt the balance of the planet in such an enormous way. The final sentence: “But science has eventually convinced us before of the unbelievable.”

Feel floes (gone by 2016)

The usual suspects have been making much of the fact that over the last few weeks Arctic sea ice extent (NSIDC daily graph here) has been bumping around the 30 year average for this time of year. John Cook at Skeptical Science posted on the subject last weekend, making the important point that what matters most is not extent or area, but the total volume of ice that’s present — and that’s showing no signs of “recovery”. John’s post is well worth reading, but it set me off on a very interesting trawl through the references he provided — and drew my attention to a most useful graph of ice volume and trend. It also pointed me to research that suggests the Arctic could be effectively ice-free in summer within ten years — possibly as soon as 2013.

Continue reading “Feel floes (gone by 2016)”

Garth goes off the deep end

Another week, another load of tripe from Garth George in the Herald. He emerges from his sulphurous lair stirred by stories of volcanoes in Iceland to lend his weight to calls for the suspension of the Emissions Trading Scheme. He makes so many egregious errors that he not only makes himself look foolish, but also calls into question the editorial standards of the Herald. Opinion is opinion (and Garth is entitled to his) but facts are facts, and the nation’s leading newspaper should not allow him to simply invent his own.

Let’s take a closer look…

 

Here’s his opening error:

…more and more evidence is available that gases such as carbon dioxide and methane have absolutely no effect on global temperatures.

What evidence would that be, one wonders, because Garth provides no clue. I haven’t heard of any major revisions in basic physics that would allow greenhouse gases not to warm the planet. I suspect Garth is just making stuff up, interviewing his typewriter (which, for all I know, may be about to win a Nobel prize for rewriting quantum physics).

I suspect that the eruption of Mt Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland shot more gases into the atmosphere in five minutes than New Zealand would in five years.

No need for suspicion. The figures are available, and even Garth could have Googled an answer to his rhetorical question. Leo Hickman at the Guardian has done the digging: Eyjafjallajökull has been emitting somewhere in the range of 150-300,000 tonnes of CO2 per day. New Zealand, on the other hand, emitted 74.7 million tonnes of CO2e in 2008 according to the latest MfE report. Garth could have argued that Eyjafjallajökull’s peak daily emissions were about the same as New Zealand’s, but they were also being more than offset by the cancellation of so many long distance flights.

The increasing scepticism over global warming throughout the world is not surprising after the shocking sub-zero weather which created chaos all over Britain, throughout Europe and in the United States in the depth of their winter.

It was the fourth warmest winter since records began.

There is increasing scepticism here, too, after one of the coldest winters in decades, which started early and finished late, afflicted much of New Zealand.

Wrong. New Zealand’s winter started early, and was quite cold, but it also ended early and August was the warmest in the record.

But the deception continues among the global warming scaremongers.

The chutzpah is breathtaking. A Biblical phrase about logs and eyes springs to mind.

Climate has been in a constant state of flux since God created the heavens and the land and the sea and placed the sun and the moon in their orbits.

When was that, Garth?

And I am persuaded absolutely that it is the sun, not the harmless, essential trace gas carbon dioxide, that drives climate change. So our emissions trading scheme will not just be a colossal waste of time and effort but an unaffordable waste of money.

Garth’s absolute certainty is ridiculously unpersuasive, based as it is on shoddy research and made-up “facts”. The Herald, if it wishes to retain any vestige of credibility in its opinion section, should apologise for foisting such ignorant and ill-informed ramblings on its readers.

Beatin’ the heat

It was a happy experience to open the Waikato Times last week and see across from the editorial page the profile of scientist Jim Salinger under the headline Salinger doesn’t feel critics’ heat.  The articlewas based on an interview with Salinger, who was visiting Hamilton to speak to Forest and Bird’s AGM about research on climate change since the 2007 IPCC report.

It opened with the recognition that in recent months Salinger has had to stave off repeated criticism of his work by the likes of Rodney Hide and the Climate Science Coalition.  Even his decades-old PhD thesis has come under fire.

Salinger explains that when he did his thesis he simply wanted to work out what was happening with New Zealand climate.

“In those days we weren’t considering the greenhouse effect, and I thought ‘this is an interesting topic, see if New Zealand’s climate has changed’.”

He discovered the climate was warming slowly, and he’s confident that if Niwa rechecks his work using modern techniques they’ll come up with the same conclusions.

About the attacks, he chuckles slightly and says:

“Science is about facts, not beliefs. I like to look at the facts and see what they say – if people want to attack me as a person, that has nothing to do with my science. It doesn’t worry me.

“…This whole group are trying to accuse me, and my overseas scientific colleagues, of fraud.

“Well, there is going to have to be a hell of a lot of people involved in this “fraud’…They’re trying to say the International Panel on Climate Change is a fraudulent activity, and in fact it’s a very thorough process.”

The theft of the UEA emails he sees as a deliberate attempt to discredit the scientists and the science. After outlining the basics of the evidence of warming, and along the way defending the peer-review system, he summarises that his concern is whether the planet will be fit for survival by humans as a species.

I reflected when reading the article that it is sad that the mainstream science Salinger represents should have to be presented to Waikato Times readers as a response to the ignorant and despicable attacks mounted on New Zealand climate scientists by the ACT party and the Climate Science Coalition.  The interviewing journalist Jeff Neems did a good job of ensuring that the science showed through clearly, but as a society we are apparently not yet ready to regard it as news enough in itself that leading scientists are greatly alarmed at what they are discovering about the effect of greenhouse gases on the climate. Had the Times not recently reported the attacks of Hide and company I imagine it is likely that Salinger would have slipped in and out of Hamilton virtually unnoticed except by those attending the Forest and Bird AGM.

I don’t mean to attack the Waikato Times particularly.  It has a better record in these matters than many New Zealand papers. But the press as a whole should have been doing much more than it has in focusing public attention on the seriousness of the issue. The science Jim Salinger represents shouldn’t have to depend on the campaigning of Greenpeace to get media attention. He and others who work in the climate science field should be reported regularly and seriously. His wondering whether the planet will remain fit for human survival is not idle. It’s a serious science-based concern and the public should know that many leading scientists have such a level of concern. Hide and his companions strike at the foundations of intellectual regard on which the functioning of society depends. Our newspapers should be strengthening those foundations.