The Sunday Times has published a second extract from James Lovelock’s new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, covering his distrust of renewable energy, and his promotion of nuclear power as a key part of adapting to climate change. It’s an interesting read, worth it because it forces us to confront the received wisdom — but I think it’s where Lovelock is at his weakest. ST columnist Camilla Cavendish has an extended review of the book in her column this week, and tends to agree.
Category: Climate science
Re-Make/Re-Model
According to Carbon News (also at Scoop), the extension of the deadline for submissions to the ETS Review committee last week came at the request of major emitters who feared that committee chair Peter Dunne’s refusal to listen to arguments about climate science would mean their views would be ignored.
Sources say that the Greenhouse Policy Coalition – whose members include New Zealand Aluminium Smelters, New Zealand Steel, Fonterra, the Coal Association, Carter Holt Harvey, Norske Skog Tasman, Winstone Pulp, Pan Pacific Forest Products, SCA Hygiene, Business New Zealand, Solid Energy and Methanex – realised that it was in danger of not being heard because its submission failed to meet Dunne’s criteria.
The organisation asked for more time to come up with an acceptable submission, and it is understood that several members of the coalition then also asked for extensions. (Business New Zealand chief executive Phil O’Reilly has confirmed to Carbon News that his organisation asked for more time).
The clear inference is that the GPC and its members had prepared submissions that included attempts to call the basic science of global warming into doubt — or would at the very least fall foul of Dunne’s insistence that he would not hear arguments from “groups wanting to re-litigate the science of climate change”. Some of New Zealand’s largest corporates were prepared to stand up in front of the review committee and argue — what? That the world’s cooling? That the risks are overstated? That CO2 is not a greenhouse gas? The intellectual dishonesty of a group apparently prepared to line up with the cranks and argue black is white in order to defend its narrow economic interests beggars belief.
Meanwhile, lest the Greenhouse Policy Coalition forget the reason why emissions reductions are important and urgent, a prominent climate scientist not called Hansen has warned that climate change is proceeding faster than projected in the IPCC’s Fourth Report [BBC, Reuters]. Chris Field, a professor of biology and of earth system science at Stanford, and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference last week that recent studies showed that:
…in a business-as-usual world, higher temperatures could ignite tropical forests and melt the Arctic tundra, releasing billions of tons of greenhouse gas that could raise global temperatures even more—a vicious cycle that could spiral out of control by the end of the century.
Field also considers that aggressive action to reduce emissions brings multiple benefits:
“What have we learned since the fourth assessment? We now know that, without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought. If you look at the set of things that we can do as a society, taking aggressive action on climate seems like one that has the best possibility of a win-win. It can stimulate the economy, allow us to address critical environmental problems, and insure that we leave a sustainable world for our children and grandchildren. Somehow we have to find a way to kick the process into high gear. We really have very little time.”
That should be required reading for the CEOs of the companies that fund the Greenhouse Policy Coalition. Unless, of course, they define their economic interests as more important than the survival of our civilisation.
Five feet high and rising!
Yesterday, while dissembling, I had what I might loosely describe as a “bugger” moment. Yale’s Enviroment360 web site (which I plugged on its introduction last June) currently features an interview with Robert Bindschadler, a NASA ice expert who is working on the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers in West Antarctica. The “bugger” moment?
e360: And in the theoretical case that Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers completely dump into the ocean – obviously it’s not going to happen in the near-future – what kind of sea level rise would they contribute to?
Bindschadler: That portion of West Antarctica, that third that flows northward primarily through those two glaciers, has the potential to raise sea level 1½ meters. That’s sort of an upper bound, a worst case. But the time scale is what really matters. Some say that we won’t see these ice shelves disappear in our lifetime – I’m not so sure. I think we might well.
e360: Are you kidding?
Bindschadler: No, no at all.
Bindschadler looks to be about my age. He reports that the ice shelf is melting from the underneath at a rate of about 50 metres per year at the grounding line. And then, a little later, just to make me spill my tea on the keyboard:
e360: I know that the IPCC was saying maybe 1 ½ feet or a half-meter of sea level rise in the 21st century. Is it your opinion that we could be looking at significantly larger sea level rise?
Bindschadler: Yeah, I think there’s sort of an unspoken consensus in my community that if you want to look at the very largest number in the IPCC report, they said 58 centimeters, so almost two feet by the end of the century. That’s way low, and it’s going to be well over a meter. We may see a meter by the middle of the century.
e360: Oh my gosh.
Bindschadler: And if this behavior that we’re seeing in Pine Island, and even Greenland continues – and we don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t continue – well, over a meter by the end of the century, I think is almost certain.
How notably prim the interviewer is. I think I might have managed something a little more Anglo Saxon. A “meter by the middle of the century” is a very long way above most people’s worst case (though not, perhaps, Hansen’s), but it makes our vulnerability to sea level rise much more of a near-term danger than a comfortable reading of AR4 might suggest. It’s a fascinating article — goes into more detail about the WA ice sheet and PIG (yes, that’s what they call it) than anything else I’ve seen in the last few years. Recommended, but not if you have beachfront property.
Meanwhile, a workshop being held at VUW in Wellington is looking at Andrill results, and finding that the WA ice sheet shows signs of repeated meltbacks over the last five million years [Stuff]:
Professor Tim Naish, director of Victoria University’s Antarctic Research Centre […] is co-science leader of the $30 million Andrill project on the ice, with Professor Ross Powell from Northern Illinois University in the United States.
“Antarctica’s ice sheets have grown and collapsed at least 40 times over the past five million years,” Prof Naish said.
“The story we are telling is around the history and behaviour of the ice sheet … as an analogue for the future,” he said.
Not good news, it seems. Expect a rush of papers covering Andrill work over the next few months.
Smoke on the water
On Monday there was a haze over the Canterbury plains. It looked like someone was burning scrub to the west. Today’s MODIS Image Of The Day shows the source. The image captured on Feb 8th shows that smoke travelled from the Victorian fires (red dots top left — click image to see larger version) across the Tasman and over the South Island. Last weekend was also notably warm on the east coast, as air already warmed by Australia’s heatwave reached NZ and experienced additional heating due to the fohn effect when crossing the Southern Alps. The smoke followed along…
PS: For those not familiar with the local geography, the distance from Melbourne to Christchurch is roughly the same as London to Moscow, or Houston to New York.[Hat tip: MH]
Fires (which burn brightly)
The sheer scale of the Victorian bushfire tragedy (over 170 dead at the time of writing: BBC coverage here) is apparent in this false colour satellite image from NASA’s Earth Observatory, captured on Feb 9th. Melbourne is at the top of the bay bottom left, and two large brown areas are the extensive burnt areas centred round Kinglake (left) and Marysville (right) in the Barry Mountains. Red boxes mark active fires, and in some of those boxes bright orange colours show intense heat, probably flames. To be visible from satellite, those fires must be enormous.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has updated its statement on the heatwave [PDF], prompting further commentary by Barry Brooks. For me, the money quote is this:
[…] a colleague at BOM pointed out just how exceptional this event was:
“Given that this was the hottest day on record on top of the driest start to a year on record on top of the longest driest drought on record on top of the hottest drought on record the implications are clear… It is clear to me that climate change is now becoming such a strong contributor to these hitherto unimaginable events that the language starts to change from one of “climate change increased the chances of an event†to “without climate change this event could not have occuredâ€.
Jeff Masters at Weather Underground also adds his thoughts. The Herald has details on how to make donations to support fire victims.