Tag: temperature

Love is hot, truth is molten

Tuatara.jpg It’s a bleak outlook for sexual equality in tuatara refuges in the Cook Strait. By the end of the century, their nesting sites could have warmed up enough to make all hatchlings male. Nature News reports on new, detailed modelling of how tuatara’s island homes will respond to climate warming:

With the aid of computer software, the researchers combined the physics of heat transfer with terrain data for the four-hectare North Brother Island in New Zealand’s Cook Strait. Using the exact coordinates of 52 known nesting sites of the rarest species of tuatara (Sphenodon guntheri), along with a database of current soil properties and their constant temperature equivalent, the researchers simulated climate change and then monitored its effect on specific points across the island. They found that based on maximum warming predictions, tuatara, which hatch as males when nest temperature during development moves above 21.5°C, will be incapable of producing females.

Fortunately there’s a solution: tuatara tents, and camping holidays in cool places.

“We can put shade cloth over their nesting sites to effectively change their sex ratio back to a 1-to-1 ratio even if the planet warms — or start translocating them to other places that would be more suitable, ” [research leader Nicola] Mitchell [of the University of Western Australia in Perth] adds. “Translocations are already occurring to the mainland and we now have a tool to identify which locations would produce favourable sex ratios.”

[Mitchell, N. J. , Kearney, M. R. , Nelson, N. J. & Porter, W. P. Proc. R. Soc. B doi:10.1098/rspb.2008.0438 (2008).]

It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I don’t feel fine)

CTarctic110608.jpg For REM, it “starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane“, for us, it looks like diminishing Arctic sea ice is the sign. Over at Open Mind, the blogger formerly known as Tamino looks in some detail at the sea ice/rapid warming paper I linked to yesterday. His post makes for sober reading. David Lawrence and his team at NCAR and the NSIDC examined runs of the NCAR-based CCSM climate model that included episodes of rapid sea ice loss, and looked at what happened to climate of the Arctic during those periods. They found that the rate of warming increased 3.5 times faster than the average rate models project over the coming century. From the press release:

While this warming is largest over the ocean, the simulations suggest that it can penetrate as far as 900 miles inland. The simulations also indicate that the warming acceleration during such events is especially pronounced in autumn. The decade during which a rapid sea-ice loss event occurs could see autumn temperatures warm by as much as 9 degrees F (5 degrees C) along the Arctic coasts of Russia, Alaska, and Canada.

This is what it looks like in their nifty graphic:

permafrost.jpg

This is what we saw last winter.

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Looks as though the process the paper describes is already under way. Canada’s a bit cooler, but then it still has some ice left at the moment…

And the end of the world? Go and re-read my recent post on methane hydrates in the shallow seas north of Siberia. Consider what Lawrence et al have to say about permafrost. Then ponder the meaning of “positive feedbacks in the carbon cycle”. What’s happening up North could make any efforts to reduce global emissions irrelevant, or at best, mean that reaching a relatively low stabilisation target (450ppm?) suddenly a lot harder. Just to make things even harder, we have 30 years of warming to go, even if we could stabilise atmospheric greenhouse gases today.

I’m going to enlarge my veggie garden, and re-examine my thoughts on resilience as a response to climate change.

[Update: Joe Romm at Climate Progress has good coverage.]

[Update 2: Nature‘s In The Field blog reports reactions to the Lawrence et al paper from aboard a ship cruising the Arctic, and in passing confirms some of my thoughts…]

Look out, here comes tomorrow

prsum2090_hs2.png Hot off the presses: NIWA’s latest projections for the climate of New Zealand over the coming century were released this morning as part of a new MfE guidance manual (here, PDF) for local government. Based on IPCC modelling for AR3 and AR4 downscaled to local climate, plus early work with NIWA’s new regional climate model, the picture is broadly similar to earlier results: modest warming everywhere, a reduction in frosts and more hot days, increased frequency of droughts and heavy rainfall events, and steady sea level rise. NIWA’s press release is available at Scoop (link to full .doc here). At the same time the Ministry of Agriculture has released its latest EcoClimate report, which takes the new projections and assesses their impact on key agricultural sectors. I’ll be picking through these reports, and the associated coastal hazards guidance over the next few days, but here are a few of the headlines:

Continue reading “Look out, here comes tomorrow”

Swell maps, and other stories

GoogleBAS.jpg Time for another round up of climate-related news. Hot on the web today (for cartophiles, at least) is that Google Earth has gained a swag of new climate change related information, the result of collaboration between Google, the UK Government, the Met Office Hadley Centre and the British Antarctic Survey. The Climate Change in Our World project, launched at the Google Zeitgeist conference by UK PM Gordon Brown offers two new layers based on Hadley Centre predictions, BAS research in Antarctica, and impacts worldwide. You can animate global temperature changes, visit crumbling ice shelves, and view climate change impacts around the world. Google Earth blog here, download .kmz files here. Hours of geographical fun are guaranteed.

  • A major new study finds strong links between recent climate change and large scale changes in the planet’s natural systems. It’s our fault, in other words [Nature (behind a paywall), BBC, Science Daily News, Guardian]. Lead author Cynthia Rosenzweig from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York told the BBC “…look at all the effects this relatively low amount of warming has had. It reveals the sensitivity to relatively low amounts of warming in many physical and biological systems.” A key point for anyone who thinks that “only a few degrees” won’t make much difference.
  • The growing number of humans on the planet is having a dramatic impact on wildlife populations, according to the Living Planet Index compiled by WWF and the Zoological Society of London. Populations of land-based species have fallen by 25%, marine by 28% and freshwater by 29% since 1970. We’re losing about 1% of all other species every year, and one of the “great extinction episodes” in the Earth’s history is under way, the index finds. [BBC, Independent, Guardian, Telegraph].
  • More bad wildlife news: the 2008 Bird Red List “warns that long-term droughts and extreme weather puts additional stress on key habitats,” according to the BBC. “The assessment lists 1,226 species as threatened with extinction – one-in-eight of all bird species.“
  • RNZ National’s science programme Our Changing World is always worth a listen, but last week’s (15/5/08) was a cracker. Ice core expert Richard Alley on Antarctica’s future, an update on the University of Waikato’s UltraCommuter EV, and one of the most cogent overviews of biofuel options I’ve ever heard from Doug Cameron, Chief Scientific Officer of Khosla Ventures, the Californian clean tech company. If those streaming links expire, podcast versions are available here, and the programme’s archive is here.
  • Wired reports on Renault’s plans to make EVs for Israel, and then the world, and EcoGeek discovers that Audi intends to have EVs in production in ten years. They might have to hurry… (my son announced yesterday that “one day’ he intends to own a Porsche. I’m willing to bet that by the time he can afford one (if ever) it’ll be a hybrid or EV).
  • #35 with a bullet! Tim Selwyn’s latest NZ blogosphere survey (at Tumeke!) finds that Hot Topic has moved up from #68 in February to #35 in March/April. I’d like to thank The Listener for making it all possible… 😉

Never mind the bollocks…

RRSwindle.jpg Occasionally my rural postie (hi Jenny!) brings me something more interesting than bills. Last week, I received a package from Sky TV. Packed in a brown paper bag that looks remarkably like an airline sick bag, sealed with a “Warning: content may offend” sticker, was a DVD copy of The Great Global Warming Swindle, the sceptic “documentary” that caused a furore* when first shown on Channel 4 in the UK last year, and which Prime plan to show here in the next few weeks. Full marks for creative PR, but a definite fail for factual inaccuracies in the promotional leaflet they sent out (copy here). Apparently “the theory that man-made emissions of CO2 have a discernable (sic) effect on climate lacks robust scientific evidence”, “there’s overwhelming evidence indicating that it’s solar activity that determines temperature”, and “everything you’ve ever been told about Global Warming is probably untrue”. Sorry Prime, none of those statements are true, and the Advertising Standards Authority might have a thing or two to say about that…

The Great Global Warming Swindle is not a documentary, it’s a one-sided piece of propaganda made on behalf of climate sceptics that alleges that the world’s climate scientists are lying about global warming. It contains glaring inaccuracies, distortions of fact, and misrepresentations of the real state of climate science (and yes, I have watched it). It’s been the subject of 250 complaints in the UK (a ruling is expected from OFCOM, the UK broadcasting standards body, any day now), and the version being shown here still contains factual errors and distortions that were drawn to the film-maker’s attention at the time TGGWS was shown in Australia (July last year). It’s worth taking a moment to watch ABC’s science correspondent Tony Jones’ interview with Martin Durkin, the film’s producer (here and here). Neither of the two graphs Jones mentions have been corrected in the version Prime apparently plans to show in NZ. Nor have any of the serious scientific errors pointed out by Aussie scientists last year (Jones, D., Watkins, A., Braganza, K., and Coughlan, M. (2007), “The Great Global Warming Swindle”: a critique. Bull. Aust. Meteor. Ocean. Soc., 20(3) 63-72 – available as html, or PDF), or summarised nicely by Bob Ward at Climate of Denial. The Australian Science Media Centre also has a good resource page on the film. It remains a fundamentally flawed work that fails to meet any reasonable standard of accuracy.

Prime are clearly hoping to stir up a bit of controversy and boost their audience. They plan to show a “debate” following the screening, pitting cranks against scientists. By doing that they’re playing straight out of the sceptic playbook. They’re “teaching the debate”, when the debate has long since moved on to more interesting and relevant stuff. And they’re poisoning the well of public debate by showing material that’s been repeatedly demonstrated to be wrong. Prime should insist that Durkin corrects all the errors before the film is shown here, and identify it clearly as one man’s opinion, not a factual documentary. To provide some semblance of balance, they should drop the idea of a debate and replace it with a counterpoint from NZ’s climate scientists.

Freedom of speech should not extend to freedom to lie. The climate cranks want to make a political argument about climate policy – do nothing, or not very much, and then only slowly – but that is a political not a scientific argument. I’m happy to defend their right to hold their political opinions, but making up evidence in support of their arguments is simply wrong.

* Good summary of the row, and comprehensive links, at medialens.