Tag: Topic

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…]

Like takin’ candy from a baby

CTarctic110608.jpg Another day, another bet on sea ice. A few days ago, a regular reader of HT emailed to ask me if I could provide some support in a long series of comments to a post at Poneke! about the showing of Swindle. So I did (my contributions start here). And now I have another bet on this northern hemisphere summer’s sea ice minimum, with a commenter calling himself “malcolm” taking the Stoat position (cold side = more ice than last year, not something out of the Kama Sutra). So here’s an update on events up North. Consider it a form guide, if you will.

Continue reading “Like takin’ candy from a baby”

Home thoughts from abroad

BBC.gif Aunty Beeb has taken a look at New Zealand’s carbon ambitions. A report headlined “Attempting to ‘kick the carbon habit” gives a pretty good overview of the special problems – and advantages – that NZ has. There’s a decent plug for Grove Mill wines and their carbon zero status, plenty of room for the PM to tout her carbon ambitions, and a chance for the Greens to point out how our imported cheap cars pose a problem for transport emissions. It also gives National’s Nick Smith a chance to act all pessimistic about the prospects for agricultural emission reductions.

“The truth is that we are only just starting to nail the science of how to measure the amount of methane and nitrous oxide from agricultural production. I think it is a matter of decades rather than years before there’ll be the sort of breakthroughs that enable us to bring those emissions down.”

Decades? Has Dr Smith never heard of nitrification inhibitors, or about breakthrough research on methanogens? Or – perish the thought – land use change to low emissions crops? If he has his hands on National’s carbon policy, then I am extremely concerned about what might happen after the election if National form the core of the next government.

Luckily, there’s not one word in the BBC story about the ETS and its difficulties. That was a narrow escape. If the world gets to hear that emissions trading scheme is in trouble and that our low carbon talk is just hot air, then all our image building will be wasted. Nick Smith would do well to reflect on that.

Friday on my mind (once more)

coccolith.jpg Before you ask, the picture shows the shell of a coccolithophore, and it’s in trouble. We’ve been adding a lot of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and a good chunk of it has ended up in the oceans. The water is getting more acidic, and some sea creatures are finding it harder to build their shells – which has the potential to disrupt the entire oceanic food web. We know it’s a problem, we know it’s happening, but we didn’t expect it be happening as fast as a recent research programme has found [Herald, Telegraph]. According to one of the scientists involved, “the coastal ocean acidification train has left the station, and there’s not much we can do to derail it.” Another excellent reason to cut carbon emissions, if one was needed.

More on methane: research on a rapid release of methane hydrates 635 million years ago hints that modern warming could trigger a similar cascade of gas release, with catastrophic results for the planet’s climate [Science Daily News, Wired]. Wired also has an excellent backgrounder on methane hydrates, discussing how they might be turned into a source of energy, while the BBC reports that the recent rise in methane in the atmosphere looks as though it is coming from thawing wetlands in the Arctic. In better news, NZ scientists have completed deciphering the genome of one of the methanogens that live in the rumens of cattle and sheep (Stuff, Yahoo/xtra). With luck and a lot of hard work, this might lead to methods of cutting methane emissions from livestock, and eventually play a key role in reducing agricultural emissions around the world.

Some light reading for the weekend: Yale’s environment360 is a new web site from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, launched this month with some interesting and challenging articles from writers like Elizabeth Kolbert, Bill McKibben, and Fred Pearce amongst others. Worth checking out.

For those with more than a few minutes to spare, I can recommend The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity review [PDF] released this week. It’s an attempt to put a rational value on the services nature provides, to allow a Stern Review-type of cost benefit analysis of losing or retaining biodiversity [Herald, BBC, Guardian]. Climate change is only one contributor to biodiversity loss, but it could rapidly become the most important, and it’s the world’s poor that will suffer most.

As they sow…

NZETS.jpg Two good bits of analysis of the current and future prospects for the emissions trading scheme from Rod Oram over the last few days. In the Sunday Star Times he dissects the lobbying by Tiwai Point owner Rio Tinto, and finds a strange dichotomy between the statements to the parliamentary select committee and its actions elsewhere:

It’s a great shame for the sake of its credibility that Rio Tinto failed to tell MPs that the government’s ETS and renewable energy strategy would give Tiwai Point a significant competitive advantage. The smelter could offset its minimal emissions with New Zealand forest credits. It would become Rio Tinto’s world source of the highest purity, greenest and highest priced aluminium.

And in his regular business commentary slot on Kathryn Ryan’s Nine To Noon show on Radio NZ National this morning, he explores the prospects for the ETS in this election year (stream, podcast). Well worth a listen.