A cracking issue (#93) of New Zealand Geographic has just hit the streets – a climate change special, complete with free map of both poles. Dave Hansford looks at impacts on NZ flora and fauna, Alan Knowles examines the energy alternatives being developed here, plus there’s a range of features from around the world – including an excellent article on climate change and winemaking. I’ve got a piece in there on the long-range forecast for NZ, but the knees are not mine. I’m biased by taking the NZGeo shilling, but even so the magazine is clearly an essential part of the intellectual landscape of this country and deserves support. Well worth $14.95 of anyone’s money.
Category: Climate science
Dragging the river
In an update to my last post on Arctic methane, I linked to a Swedish team blogging their research on the Yakov Smirnitsky, a Russian vessel currently cruising the seas to the north of Siberia. The most recent post there is fascinating, but the Google translation rather difficult to follow, so I asked Magnus Westerstrand, who first drew my attention to the blog at Eli’s place, if he could tidy up the translation. And he did, overnight. Thanks Magnus, have a schnapps on me. Here are some extracts [full text at Magnus’ blog]:
At around 110 degrees easterly longitude, when we where wrestling with drift ice in western Laptev Sea, we discovered two new areas where methane concentrations in both the water and in the air above clearly exceeded the normal methane concentration in Arctic.
The blogger, Örjan Gustafsson, then goes on to describe how the methane deposits were formed, and how the gas might now be escaping.
Barabajagal (Lovelock is hot)
Morning Report is full of surprises. Last week it was Sean Plunket extemporising a ruthless skewering of Winston Peters, this week it’s Sean completely missing the point in an interview with James Lovelock (stream, podcast – 8:20am). The programme apparently noticed that Lovelock doesn’t think much of emissions trading as an answer to climate change, and decided to let him air his views. What role should NZ play in addressing the problem, Plunket asked?:
I think the role of New Zealand […] is to be a lifeboat. The world may get almost intolerable during the coming century.
Sean however is on-topic with the big emitters’ view of the ETS, keen to emphasise the “billions of dollars” the scheme will cost, but Loveock’s main point seems to whizz over his head. The man who thought up the concept of Gaia is saying that it’s too late to do anything to stop catastrophic change and that’s why an ETS of any kind is a waste of time. I was somewhat surprised to find that the NZ C”S”C have had a sudden rush of blood to the head and think that Lovelock’s interview somehow supports their position, linking approvingly to the interview – as have some fellow travellers.
Just in case there’s any confusion, read and inwardly digest this Guardian extract from a recent piece by Lovelock in a special edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A devoted to geoengineering (all articles available free). Lovelock doesn’t mince his words:
Whatever we do is likely to lead to death on a scale that makes all previous wars, famines and disasters small. To continue business as usual will probably kill most of us during the century. Is there any reason to believe that fully implementing Bali, with sustainable development and the full use of renewable energy, would kill less? We have to consider seriously that as with nineteenth century medicine, the best option is often kind words and pain killers but otherwise do nothing and let Nature take its course.
The usual response to such bitter realism is: then there is no hope for us, and we can do nothing to avoid our plight. This is far from true. We can adapt to climate change and this will allow us to make the best use of the refuge areas of the world that escape the worst heat and drought. We have to marshal our resources soon and if a safe form of geoengineering buys us a little time then we must use it.
Parts of the world such as oceanic islands, the Arctic basin and oases on the continents will still be habitable in a hot world. We need to regard them as lifeboats and see that there are sufficient sources of food and energy to sustain us as a species. Physicians have the Hippocratic Oath; perhaps we need something similar for our practice of planetary medicine.
Lovelock describes himself as a “geophysiologist” in the title of the full article. Nice job description. From a New Zealand perspective, you might want to ponder how we respond when the world starts trying to get into our lifeboat – and how long it might be before it starts to happen. Pity Sean didn’t think to ask…
[Update: small hat-tip to myself. “Lifeboat New Zealand” is a phrase I use in the book (and #12 here). The Herald picked up on it at the time of the launch last year. Nice to know someone agrees…]
Hit somebody! (The hockey song)
Expect a renewed interest in the shape of hockey sticks, as a new paper in the Proceedings of National Academy Of Sciences (PNAS) by Michael Mann (et al) finds that the last decade was the warmest for at least 1,300 years. The BBC headlines the story “Climate “hockey stick” is revived”, which rather stretches the facts about the controversy (nicely covered in the piece). More coverage at Mongabay, which notes:
The results confirm that temperatures today in the Northern Hemisphere are higher than those of the Medieval warm period, a time when the Vikings colonized Greenland are are believed to have become the first Europeans to visit North America.
Sounds like a red rag to sceptic bulls to me. Expect much nit-picking and fulmination. The rest of us will get on with trying to sort out the problem.
Mann et al. (2008). Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia. PNAS September 9, 2008 vol. 105 no. 36 (PDF available here)
You ain’t seen nothing yet
This year’s Arctic sea ice minimum is now officially the second lowest in the record according to the National Snow & Ice Data Center in the US. On August 26, the ice extent stood at 5.26m km2, dropping below 2005’s 5.32m km2. The melt season still has several weeks left to run, and there are now suggestions that this year’s final minimum could be close to – perhaps even beat – last year’s record.
The NSIDC announcement has attracted a flurry of attention, and the media has been out trawling the usual suspects for quotes. The BBC reports:
Researchers say the Arctic is now at a climatic “tipping point”. “We could very well be in that quick slide downwards in terms of passing a tipping point,” said Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the Colorado-based NSIDC. “It’s tipping now. We’re seeing it happen now,” he told the Associated Press news agency.
Adding to the interest, the European Space Agency released some interesting Envisat images of the state of the sea ice, and warned:
Following last summer’s record minimum ice cover in the Arctic, current observations from ESA’s Envisat satellite suggest that the extent of polar sea-ice may again shrink to a level very close to that of last year.
Meanwhile, Scientific American notes that the northwest passage is now open, and the Environment News Service does an admirable job of pulling all the info together – including recent work on possible rapid climate change around the Arctic. Earlier this month I was prepared to accept that I was going to lose my two bets on a new record minimum this year, so what’s been going on up north to change the outlook so dramatically?