Category: Climate science

Seven feet high and rising

Plan for two metres sea level rise this century. That’s the message from Rob Young and Orrin Pilkey in a Yale Environment article published today.

“This number is not a prediction. But we believe that seven feet is the most prudent, conservative long-term planning guideline for coastal cities and communities, especially for the siting of major infrastructure; a number of academic studies examining recent ice sheet dynamics have suggested that an increase of seven feet or more is not only possible, but likely. Certainly, no one should be expecting less than a three-foot rise in sea level this century.”

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Oops, he did it again

It pays to beware of leaving hostages to fortune: saying or doing something that might cause you some embarrassment in the future. There’s a very fine example in this recent blog post by Ian Wishart, titled “Top 10 global warming myths exposed“. It takes the form of a piece Wishart has submitted to the Coromandel Chronicle, taking exception to a column by Thomas Everth [PDF]. He begins:

In a blatant effort to mislead and scare your readers, Green blogger Thomas Everth makes more errors in the first 200 words of his recent global warming diatribe than I have made in my last three books totalling around 400,000 words.

As hostages go, that’s pretty impressive. Wishart proceeds to find fault with ten of Everth’s opening points, but does he make a few mistakes of his own in the process? I’m going to take a long, hard look: is that hostage feeling lucky?

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Siberian Shelf methane increased in 2009

arcticmethane.jpgMethane release from the permafrost and hydrates under the East Siberian Shelf in autumn 2009 was the highest ever recorded, the leader of the International Siberian Shelf Study (ISSS), Igor Semiletov, has told the BBC. The results of last autumn’s research cruises are being prepared for publication in the near future. The BBC also quotes Semiletov’s colleague Prof Orjan Gustafsson from Stockholm University:

He said that methane measured in the atmosphere around the region is 100 times higher than normal background levels, and in some cases 1,000 times higher.

Gustaffson went on to say that “so far” there was no cause for alarm, and stressed the need for further study. Sounds like a scientist… For background, check out last year’s WWF Arctic report (I discussed the chapter on Arctic methane here), and my posts on the 2008 ISSS expeditions (one, two). Looks like the methane release is confirmed as chronic, but not yet (if we’re lucky) acute.

Wade in the water

Estimates of the sea level rise that will result from continued global warming continue to increase, with two recent papers adding more evidence that the IPCC AR4 projections were unrealistically low. The rise this century could be as high as 1.9 metres, and the long term response to a warming limited to 2ºC could be 6 – 9 metres the studies suggest. There are also signs that New Zealand planners are beginning to take the issue seriously, with Nelson and Wellington both considering the impacts of sea level rises of over a metre.

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The Wizard turns on…

Catching up with some of the stuff that got lost in the Copenhagen hubbub, this morning I stumbled on a major new effort to provide interactive climate data and visualisations — the Climate Wizard. This amazing tool is the web front end to a collection of temperature and precipitation data and model projections, and allows the user to create custom maps of climate change over the last fifty years, and projections for the 2050s and 2080s for three IPCC scenarios across 16 models. It provides state-level detail for the USA, but coarser regional and global maps for the rest of the world. It can also create ensembles of model projections on the fly:

[Lead author] Girvetz recommends using one of the newest features added to the program, the ability to create an ensemble of some or all of the 16 models. Want to average the temperatures of, say, the 12 climate models that forecast the largest temperature increases? Climate Wizard can do so almost instantaneously. [Source]

The background to the Wizard (a joint effort of the University of Washington, University of Southern Mississippi and The Nature Conservancy) is described in this PLoS One paper.

Apart from being a very interesting way of looking into temperature data and projections, it is also a tool set that can be extended by the addition of extra data: the authors suggest they could include “simulations of global vegetation, fire, water runoff, species range shifts, agriculture, sea level rise, heat stroke, disease, and food security.” They also suggest that the Climate Wizard could provide a basis for web “mash-ups” with services like Google Earth/Maps to help with public education on climate change. Highly recommended.

[Flaming Lips]