Category: Climate science

Something (early) for the weekend: grim forecast for oceans and the roots of denial

Something of a miscellany today, coupled with an open thread, to keep you going during a brief pause in posting. First up: a study published this week in PLOS Biology looks at changes in ocean chemistry, temperature and primary productivity over the next century under two emissions scenarios, and finds that no corner of the ocean escapes untouched. From Science Daily:

“When you look at the world ocean, there are few places that will be free of changes; most will suffer the simultaneous effects of warming, acidification, and reductions in oxygen and productivity,” said lead author Camilo Mora, assistant professor at the Department of Geography in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. “The consequences of these co-occurring changes are massive — everything from species survival, to abundance, to range size, to body size, to species richness, to ecosystem functioning are affected by changes in ocean biogeochemistry.”

It’s been a productive few weeks for Mora: he was lead author on a recent study ((Full text, free!)) published in Nature that estimated when climate in different parts of the world would move beyond anything experienced in the last 150 years — have a play with this interactive map to find out when your part of the world will move into the unknown. See also Climate Central, Science Daily, and a huge amount of press coverage.

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TDB Today: The Inconvenient Neighbours

Over at The Daily Blog today, in a post headlined The Inconvenient Neighbours, I consider the case of the Kiribati man who is claiming refugee status in New Zealand because of the impact of sea level rise on his home island. With the IPCC report suggesting that sea level could rise by as much as a metre this century, it’s surely a sign of things to come…

Salinger’s warmer world book tour

Jim Salinger’s latest book on climate change — Living in a warmer world — was launched last night in Auckland. Jim’s pulled together contributions from some of the world’s leading researchers to illustrate what climate change really means for the way we will live in the future, including Ove Hoegh-Guldberg on coral reefs, John Church on sea level rise, Greg Jones on viticulture, Glenn McGregor on heatwaves, Jan Sinclair on media framing of climate, and Jonathan Boston on ethical issues. Jim and Trevor Chinn have penned the chapter on glaciers response to warming, and it’s packed full of interesting news about NZ’s ice loss (of which more later). It promises to be a fascinating and informative look at what’s coming down the track, and a useful companion to the IPCC’s new report. I’ll have a full review of the book up at Hot Topic in due course.

Over the next couple of months, Jim will be touring New Zealand, presenting key points from the book. His first gigs will be in Nelson on Sunday. Full details below the fold…

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Stocker in Wellington: RSNZ to stream AR5 science workshop

Swiss climate scientist Thomas Stocker, joint chairman of the IPCC’s Working Group One, is in New Zealand for a few days, and the NZ Climate Change Centre and the Royal Society of NZ have taken the opportunity to put together a stakeholder workshop to allow Stocker and NZ lead authors to present the key findings of the recently published AR5 WG1 report. The workshop is being held tomorrow, Friday 11th, from 9am to 1pm at the RSNZ in Wellington, and is open to the public (spaces limited, register here). For the geographically challenged, the event will be web-cast live.

The workshop will open with an introduction by Richard Bedford, a council member of the RSNZ, and an overview of the IPCC process by WG1 vice-chair David Wratt. Stocker will present the key Working Group I report findings from about 9-10am. NZ’s coterie of lead authors — Dave Frame, Tim Naish, and Jim Renwick — will provide snapshots of the parts of the report they were involved with. From midday on, the Science Media Centre’s Peter Griffin will chair a “stakeholder panel” including Rod Oram, Federated Farmers vice-chair William Rolleston and Frances Sullivan from Local Government NZ to discuss how the report has been received and what it means for New Zealand.

Stocker is also being interviewed by Radio NZ National’s science correspondent Veronika Meduna, and that should be broadcast in her show next week.

We did it and it’s going to get worse, but it’s not (yet) too late: IPCC AR5 science report summary released

Aafter all the leaks and attempted spin, the final version of the IPCC’s Summary For Policymakers of the Working Group One report on the physical science basis for our current understanding of climate change has just been released. Download the PDF from the IPCC site here. The full report will follow on Monday — a massive 3,000 page tome that summarises 9,200 scientific papers published since AR4 was released in 2007. The bottom line is clear enough:

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.

The Science Media Centre asked Professor Dave Frame, Director of the NZ Climate Change Research Institute at VUW to explain the key points:

  • It is extremely likely that human activities caused more than half of the observed increase in global mean surface temperature since 1950;
  • It is virtually certain that natural variability alone cannot account for the observed global warming since 1950;
  • Global mean temperatures will continue to rise over the 21st century if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated;
  • The principal driver of long term warming is the total cumulative emission of CO2 over time;
  • To limit warming caused by CO2 emissions alone to be likely less than 2°C, total CO2 emissions from all anthropogenic sources would need to be limited to a cumulative budget of about one trillion tonnes of carbon, emitted as CO2, over the entire industrial era, about half of which have been emitted by 2011.

The emphasis on carbon budgets is new for this report, and makes the emissions reduction challenge we face only too clear. Here’s Fig 10 from the SPM:

The black dots on the bottom left represent historical carbon emissions up to 2010. The various coloured lines show what various emissions pathways — new for AR5 (see Skeptical Science’s explanation) — mean for global temperatures by 2100. Only the most aggressive emissions pathway — RCP 2.6, the purple line — gives us a chance of staying under a 2ºC target, but assumes that we are actually reducing atmospheric CO2 by the end of the century. It remains an uphill struggle, in other words, and the hill gets steeper the longer we leave starting out on the climb.